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| Stephen Gutierrez |
Stephen Gutierrez writes about the facts of freeways and
being a troubled kid, the studious type derailed by sickness in the family. In
his latest book, "The Mexican in His Backyard," the people and places
of southeast Los Angeles -- his eternal backyard -- come through with heat and
lyric: the bare truth of the everyday.
A professor at Cal State East Bay, with an MFA from Cornell
and a trilogy of books, Gutierrez was born, raised, and educated in southeast
Los Angeles. His collections are replete with short stories and essays that
frequently feature portraits of life in Commerce, Bell Gardens, Montebello, and
East L.A.
In his first book, "Elements," Gutierrez writes
that City of Commerce was:
In close proximity to East Los Angeles which we were warned
to stay away from, suburbs which teased us with their influence, factories and
warehouses all around us which hired us [...] We were a working-class town.
If you have ever driven through Commerce on Interstate 5
(I-5), the main interstate highway on the West Coast of the United States, you
need to know Stephen Gutierrez's books. If you're lucky, you will meet him in
person and split some guava churros from the Lucero Bakery in Bell Gardens.
He wrote this about himself in "Elements":
"Grew up in the City of Commerce, six miles outside of Los Angeles, the
spires of downtown visible on smogless days. We never saw them." But
Gutierrez could see the stories of his home, his block, that metropolis that
surrounds Los Angeles.
He was "Born on the same day as Charles Bukowski [...]
only 39 years later," and the same grit and blemished truths can be found
in his stories as you might find in Bukowski's work. That's because Gutierrez
has spent the majority of his creative life right next door to the Santa Fe
Railroad train yard and the Citadel along the 5 Freeway.
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| The Citadel |
The Biggest Bow on
Earth
The day I met Stephen in person, it was in the
"fancy" section of Commerce: Rosewood Park. For some of us who grew
up in southeast L.A., Commerce was known for being a "rich" area,
meaning they had more money than we did; not exactly rich, but rich to us.
Stephen is a character from his books, with buen humor and easy going, quick to
smile and smirk; he shook my hand hard and we started the day.
"The thing about Commerce is that the city has
resources," he added. "But the people? Not necessarily." The
Rosewood area had been dubbed by its first inhabitants, mostly working class
whites and Mexican-Americans, "The Beverly Hills of Commerce." Some
things had changed since he'd last been around. The Citadel used to be the
Samson/Uniroyal Tire Factory, and it still bears the Assyrian castle facade
seen from the Five Freeway. Across the river of traffic sit the quaint houses
in Rosewood.
The morning I met Gutierrez for a drive around Commerce, the
Citadel was dressed up for the holidays -- multiple giant televisions
advertised designer goods; its roof tops adorned with over-sized trimmings.
"That's the biggest bow on earth!" Gutierrez
wasn't ready for so much consumer festivity. He was also not ready for the new
pool at Rosewood Park.
The Brenda Villa Aquatic Center is gorgeous and modern --
glass, concrete, and skylights. The old pool we swam in has been demolished.
The city has had a free bus and a free summer camp for its residents for several
decades. For Southeast cities like ours where many landowners have addresses in
Redondo Beach, tax dollars rarely reach public infrastructure and resources, so
a free bus and summer camp seemed like a dream for us. For people like Brenda
Villa, the gold (and multiple) medal-winning water polo player from Commerce,
an Olympic-sized pool and summer camps can be and were life-changing.
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| Stephen Gutierrez in front of the Brenda Villa |
Did graduate school change Gutierrez's life? Definitely. And
so did his first book. "Elements" won the Charles H. and N. Mildred
Nilon Excellence in Minority Fiction Award. He was at Cornell, however, long
before Helena Maria Viramontes began teaching there, her long line of work and
voices from places like where we grew up coming with her into the classroom of
the Ivy Leagues. One can only imagine the contents of this essay, "Bombing
Out...Memories from an M.F.A. Program." Gutierrez likely sat in workshops
where people recommended that his characters speak less Spanish, unable to
identify the Caló they thought was, at best, "Spanglish." But the
writer stayed focused on capturing the voices he heard growing up in southeast
L.A: the boys from Commerce with dark, neat hair and glasses, or the ones who
shot hoops under the Long Beach Freeway at Bandini Park.
La Gloria meets La Helen en la marqueta
"Helen, how you doing?" says an old friend to la
Helen. They bump into each other at a supermarket after many years of
separation in "La Gloria Meets La Helen en la Marqueta" in "Live
From Fresno y Los."
About to reconnect with an old friend as la Helen does, I
was with Gutierrez at Sergio's Tacos on Atlantic Boulevard and Harbor Street.
We stood patiently in the big ole line hungry for what people were carrying out
in white paper bags.
Inside, the air was spicy-smokey. The taqueros chopped up
buche meat with fierce strokes. The grill constantly served up tortillas
warmed, as they should be, over the meat drippings. Dark red chile was
perfectly smoked and proved hotter than expected.
Standing at the counter, I noticed two people in front of
me. A woman who looked familiar was ordering tacos for her and her man. It had
been twenty years since I'd seen her on the bench at a softball game at
Rosewood Park, but Tiny was a girl then, in high school. Though older, she was
relatively unchanged and still lived up to her name. Then we made eye contact
and beheld a taco miracle!
"How you been?" and "I know that house!"
were exchanged a few times, as I introduced Tiny and her husband to Stephen.
"He writes a lot about Commerce!" I said. I showed them his books as
proof. Stephen, Tiny, and her husband drew a verbal map of their homes'
locations and smiled with recognition.
We wiped our mouths of cilantro and said goodbye to Tiny and
her man, who, it turns out, knows Stephen's cousin. Everybody knows each other
in Commerce -- a small town of 13,000.
Once they were gone, in between bites of carne asada tacos,
I asked Stephen about his depiction of Bell Gardens in "Live From Fresno y
Los":
"...a dilapidated town on the edge of L.A., all Okie
then, with a smattering of Mexicans [...]. It was a lot of fun to go to school
there [...] with the other Commerce kids [...]. On the bus, we hooted and
hollered, protested our sentence to such a backward, hayseed place."
I wanted to know why my town had such a rough and tumble
reputation since my experience of it was as a bookworm -- I couldn't throw
those deadly punches, trancazos, to save my life.
"My brother-in-law was at a party in Bell Gardens in
his senior year, and some underlying tensions finally broke out into a fight
along racial lines. But that may have just been the caged uncertainty of
adolescence breaking out. I know warmth existed, too. "
I suppose fist fights happen everywhere, but especially in
places that struggle economically or otherwise; Bell Gardens has always been a
place of struggle. At the time Gutierrez was riding the bus to middle school,
Bell Gardens was changing from mostly Anglo and poor, to mostly Mexican and
working class. Demographic changes of that magnitude can get people together to
party and, occasionally, also to fight.
Gutierrez and I rode in his wife's hybrid to two of the four
major parks of Commerce: Bandini Park and Rosewood Park; Bristow Park and
Veteran's Park are the other two. We visited both his old houses. The first was
a one bedroom "cottage" and was tucked along the Long Beach freeway, the
crowded 710, right before the Washington Avenue exit. Down the street at
Bandini Park, you can see the tall trucks pass as they do every day on the busy
freeway -- the most dangerous freeway in the state with multiple crashes with
big rigs every week.
Driving past Bandini Elementary, Gutierrez called out the
names of his kindergarten and first grade teachers. His first neighborhood
boasted a Filipino family, and welcomed an Anglo lady from the Midwest shunned
by her family for marrying a Mexican-American. There were many Mexican-American
families who had just enough to buy a home, or some rented and lived next to
owners, dreaming it might be them one day.
Modest homes,
well-kept and maintained
In the Rosewood Park neighborhood on Senta Street, stood
Gutierrez' teenage house.
In "Elements," Gutierrez described people's homes
in Commerce as "Modest homes, well-kept and maintained, graced the square
neighborhoods partitioning our city into four sections. One section was the
barrio and not mine."
He got out of the car and looked at it more closely. Stucco
façade painted a safe beige.
"There it is. Man, it was sad in there." His last
family home had changed a little, but not too much, the lawn still neat and
trim. To get there, we'd passed Rosewood Elementary and Saint Marcellinus
Church where he'd done his First Holy Communion and confirmation.
The streets were quiet that Saturday morning, just a few
people working on their cars or tending to yards. A soap factory churned out
smoke at the end of Senta. On Washington Avenue was Stephen's favorite corner
market, a changed place. The older Asian clerk sat at the register, friendly
but protected by tall bullet proof glass topped with barbed wire.
"Now that's too much; no one wants cigarettes that
badly," I said and pointed at the wire. "Stand here and look at the
candy," I told Stephen. I took a photo of him to capture how silly the
wire looked next to us and the bright red and green wrappers. When he was a
kid, the market had fresh produce and a butcher shop; now it is just a
convenience store.
Gutierrez's family ties to the southeast and the surrounding
region reach far back. His uncle, University of California at Irvine Professor
Alejandro Morales, wrote "The Brick People" based on his parents'
experiences living in Simons, a tiny factory town tucked inside Montebello. It
was part of Simons Brick Yard Number Three at the turn of the twentieth
century. The town was owned by the Simons Family and was full of
Mexican-American and immigrant worker families who literally built Los Angeles.
Gutierrez and I drove into that neighborhood, which was right around the corner
from Vail High School, a continuation school.
We wound back on to the street past the school. "Vail
Jail they called it," said Gutierrez, laughingly. "The guys who went
there had a sense of humor."
The school is literally surrounded by warehouses -- eighteen
wheelers detached from their loads and standing upright in rows with UPS logos
and paint jobs.
"The school faces their futures," I said.
"That might have been a put down back in the day, but so many people would
kill for a job like that."
"Those stable jobs are mostly gone, huh?" Stephen
said.
We know the worth of a good job, and so did our parents.
His father worked at the Sante Fe Railroad Hobart Yard for
many years before succumbing to early-onset Alzheimer's disease. His mother
worked as a teacher's aide at Rosewood Elementary and in the main library.
"The Mexican Man in His Backyard" is the title of
his new book. Fittingly, we had to explore his larger "backyard" of
southeast L.A., and hit one last important neighborhood to Gutierrez and his
writing: my own Bell Gardens for the famous Lucero Bakery to get fresh churros
and to reminisce. At the corner of Jaboneria Street and Gage Avenue, we parked
just in sight of the Bell Gardens High School auditorium. A lancer re-painted
years back is tall and proud as ever.
"Every once in a while, newspapers write a profile of
the high school and all they have to say is how poor we are," I said.
"This school has the highest number of advanced placement classes in the
school district, what about that?"
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| The Mexican Man in his Backyard by Stephen D. Gutierrez |
"They don't see the good stuff like we do," he
said. "I didn't come to school here. But my brother and sister did, so I
have good memories of the football games out here."
Once we got our pastries, we sat at a metal patio table
outside Lucero.
"These are the best!" he exclaimed.
"Told you," I said.
We each bought a bouquet of churros for our families and
friends to share the sweetness of our homegrown food.
Four years ago, I emailed Gutierrez to thank him for writing
about our neighborhoods, especially the short story, "Freddy Fender in
Commerce." I'd never seen an entire book dedicated to people from the
southeast. Through his writing, Gutierrez introduced our neighborhoods to those
who don't know we exist. He has constructed a heartfelt literature honoring the
difficulties of not being good enough for some and too different for others,
unclassifiable -- many of us know this feeling all too well, if we're from Los
Angeles or not. His work sets a high bar of storytelling, and any stories I now
write will re-shape and cultivate this legacy, not about what other people think
if they think of us at all, but instead, what we have to say about ourselves.
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| Vickie Vertiz and Stephen Gutierrez in front of Bell Gardens High School photo by Kenji Liu |
Vickie Vértiz was the
Lucille Clifton Scholar at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley in 2015 and a finalist for the Gabriela Mistral Poetry Prize in
2014. Her writing
can be found in the Los Angeles Review of
Books, The Offing, the James Franco Review, and in Open the Door from McSweeney’s and the
Poetry Foundation. Her
first collection of poetry, Swallows,
was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. She lives in Los Angeles.
*****
If you are celebrating next week, Merry Christmas. I have the first post of the New Year. Cheers! And get well soon Francisco! --Melinda
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