Land Over People: The Story of the Chavez Ravine

Background on the Chavez Ravine 

Growing up in Los Angeles, the Dodgers Stadium has always been a significant landmark and staple in the surrounding community/ throughout Los Angeles. In high school, when I learned about the heart-breaking backstory of the Ravine for the first time, I was absolutely taken aback. 

In May of 1959, all residents living in the Chavez Ravine and The Palo Verde were notified by city officials that they had to move out of their houses so that new low-income housing could be built in that area. The communities of these Mexican-Americans were full of life. Some residents even had farm land and kept animals. The Chavez Ravine was practically a small town, so when they were told to just leave and live somewhere else, the other side was met with anger. Any pushback that was received from the community to the city and the businessmen who bought the land they lived on was discredited and disregarded completely. 

After a long struggle and battle with the landowners and the city, the residents that remained were forcibly removed from their homes and received either no compensation or barely enough to buy a decent home in the area nearest to the ravine. After plans for low-income housing fell through, the land was not returned, but instead used for a baseball stadium; Dodgers Stadium. 

Let’s make amends? 

Today, there are so many people who know nothing about the history behind the ravine. 

The community held a reunion, invited the L.A. Dodgers, and  extended an olive branch to represent peace. Dodger Stadium accepted this and extended an olive branch back at them, claiming that at the time they were unaware of how much harm they had caused. That is bull sh*t. 

Acknowledgment is one thing, but extending an olive branch to try to reconcile the enemy and almost completely forgive them for the terrible things done to the community is in no way a path towards restitution. Nothing by the Dodgers Stadium has been done to make amends.

Plainly speaking, you cannot undo something that has been done and hurt, displaced, and torn apart so many communities. Ideally, the Dodgers Stadium would be torn down and all or a portion of the land would be returned to the remaining people and families that once lived there. Since that is highly unlikely to happen for a multitude of reasons, a less drastic or fair approach would need to be taken. Simple acknowledgment just appears as moral exhibitionism. In this situation, along with many others, acknowledgement should be a given. Every person that steps foot onto Dodgers Stadium should know about the history behind the land. That should be the bare minimum for amends; remembering. An act of remembrance and sharing the raw history and individual stories of the displaced people, although not a full solution, is a step in the direction for making amends. Providing some kind of aid to the displaced families and more compensation would also prove effective in this situation to try to make up for the losses in property.