During a recent Los Angeles Dodgers game, three people sprinted across the field waving banners with the names of former neighborhoods — Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde — that were razed on the land that is now home to the team’s stadium. The protest was an attempt to call attention to a piece of L.A. history known as the Battle of Chavez Ravine, when in the 1950s city officials displaced roughly 1,800 mostly Mexican American families from the area. Officials promised to build a new public housing complex where the families could live, but instead sold the land to the Dodgers to build a stadium. We talk about that history and Mexican Americans’ deep and complicated relationship with the team.
Why the History of Chavez Ravine Still Haunts Dodger Stadium
32:51
A welcome sign at the entrance to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. (iStock)
Guests:
Eric Avila, urban cultural historian and professor, University of California, Los Angeles
Eric Nusbaum, journalist and author or "Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between" that was published March, 2020<br />
Melissa Arechiga, board member for Buried Under the Blue, an organization that preserves the history of the former Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop communities in Los Angeles and descendent of a family forcibly removed from Palo Verde in 1959
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