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Introduction
On 8 May 1959, the City of Los Angeles evicted the Aréchiga family from their Chavez Ravine home of 36 years. Once the family had been removed, a bulldozer reduced the home to a pile of rubble. Eminent domain proceedings had begun 8 years earlier, when the city planned to seize the land for a major public housing project. Long before the final evictions, however, the housing project had been canceled, and the Los Angeles City Council was in the process of transferring the land to the Los Angeles Dodgers, for the future site of Dodger Stadium. The 10-year debate over the use of the land leading up to the dramatic final evictions came to be known to the people of Los Angeles as the Battle of Chavez Ravine (Hines, 1982a).
This article examines the vocal, organized resistance of the people of Chavez Ravine to the destruction of their community, and the displacement of the residents for the construction of a public housing project that was never built. Largely women, they spoke out during public hearings, wrote letters, and made statements to the media in a gendered discourse of resistance to displacement. In a language of patriotic post-war motherhood, the women made direct references to husbands and sons in military service to underpin the moral legitimacy of their statements. And yet, they made it clear that their patriotism was conditional. They had worked hard, purchased property and sent their men to war despite the discrimination that they faced at home. If the Government could take their homes, the symbol of American belonging, it threatened the foundation upon which their patriotism was based, and suggested that the United States had failed to live up to its promise. The people of Chavez Ravine, moreover, challenged projects that were supported by the entire left, liberal, and labor community, projects that promised to help poor communities, including Mexican Americans, nationwide. In doing so, they opposed positions taken by Mexican American leaders, and allied themselves, if only briefly, with local conservatives.
Recently, significant new research on the history of Chavez Ravine has been published, but this work focuses on the role the residents played in the process, and the impact of these events on the residents of Chavez Ravine.