Hi friend,
At the end of the record-breaking season, I had the honor of giving my book to Sr. Jaime Jarrín, Hall of Fame broadcast announcer for the Dodgers, who called the games for us in Spanish, and retired this year after 64 years of service to the Dodgers. I posted a picture of it, and one of the comments said yes, but given our history with Chavez Ravine, when it comes to the Dodgers, it's complicated. This is my response to that post:
As a kid growing up in Echo Park in the 1970s, I would walk to Dodger Stadium with my brother. For three dollars, we could purchase an upper deck seat and for an additional three dollars, we could get a Coke and hot dog. We often ran into food service workers we knew from my grandmother’s restaurant and other local establishments who took second jobs at Dodger Stadium. Some worked the fast food stands—they’d sneak my brother and me free snacks. Others were in more exclusive areas, where they extended the entrée to their friends, giving them complimentary tickets or letting a friend slip in the door when the manager was on a break.
Access to these spaces gave ethnic Mexican workers and their friends real and imaginative mobility, and at the center of it all, was our love for
Los Doyers.
But loving the Dodgers can also be complicated if you’re Latinx.
Dodger Stadium sits where there was once a close-knit, working-class, predominately Mexican and Mexican American residential community called Chavez Ravine. In 1959, to bring Major League Baseball to Los Angeles, the city
sold the land to Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, at a fraction of its worth. Ground broke for the construction of Dodger Stadium that year. Residents were evicted, some of them forcibly carried away before bulldozers razed their
home.
When I was growing up in Echo Park, I didn’t know this history. I don’t think most people know it today. It is yet another chapter in the history of Latinx disenfranchisement—and yet nowhere else in L.A. do I feel more like an Angeleno, Chicana, or part of the collective human experience than at Dodger Stadium. During a postseason game last year, my seatmate was an L.A.-born Chicano living in the Bay who drove down to be there with his cousins. His family and mine linked arms as the mariachi—playing from the bleachers, surrounded by some of the most loyal Dodgers fans—started playing “Volver, Volver,” and belted out the unofficial Mexican anthem.
Places are made not just by the people who tear down neighborhoods to build stadiums but the people who work in and around the stadium: who play baseball, who come for a sense of community, and who follow what goes on from their radios. History is complicated that way—a rich palimpsest with layers of joy, layers of sorrow, layers of connection, layers of estrangement.
You can read the entire essay
If you’re Latinx, Loving the Dodgers is Complicated published by Zocalo.