A Place at the Nayarit by Natalia Molina

Author:Natalia Molina
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520385481
Publisher: University of California Press

Map 2. Immigrant entrepreneurs as place-takers: restaurants and businesses founded by former Nayarit workers.

During the 1950s and 1960s, police commonly raided bars where gays congregated, abusing and arresting the gay clientele. The openly gay environment at El Conquistador signaled the growing strength of the gay liberation movement. The restaurant was just two blocks from the Black Cat, a Silver Lake bar where in 1966, as patrons gathered to ring in the New Year, police arrested and beat fourteen men. Two men who were arrested for kissing each other were later convicted under state law and required to register as sex offenders. In February 1967, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the bar to decry the police and the ensuing legal actions, sparking new efforts to fight for gay rights. Two years later, in 1969, when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, patrons and communities fought back physically, launching protests that lasted for several nights. The Black Cat, like Stonewall, is now considered one of the homes of the gay liberation movement. It is an official historical-cultural monument in Los Angeles.52

Chavo and Jesse wanted to establish El Conquistador as a similarly central gay urban anchor, so they created a welcoming, festive environment.53 The restaurant would become a central site for gay and gay-friendly groups to congregate during the Sunset Junction Street Fair, becoming thronged with even more customers than usual during the fair, which cordoned off five city blocks for two days every August from 1980 through 2010. The festival, organized by the Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance, grew to attract tens of thousands of people before permit issues and a backlog of debts brought it to an end.54

Just off of Sunset Boulevard, on Echo Park Avenue, another Nayarit alumna, Evelia Pack, joined her husband, Ramón, and his family in launching a mom-and-pop neighborhood market in 1967, El Batey. The name, which refers to a one-stop grocery store where one can also obtain household goods, nodded to the pride Ramón Pack took in his Cuban roots. Their connections from the Nayarit followed them. According to Ramón, El Batey’s first customer was Ramón Barragan, who generously tried to place an order for hundred-pound sacks of rice and beans for his restaurant, which was just a few blocks away. But El Batey, Ramón Pack recounted with a laugh, only sold five-pound bags.

Evelia, Doña Natalia’s niece, had been a young cashier at the Nayarit when she caught Brando’s eye. Now she worked as the cashier at her own market, but as at the Nayarit, she did far more than make change: her warmth suffused the space and made El Batey a place people wanted to be. Seven days a week for almost fifty years, Evelia perched on a stool behind the cash register as a placemaker, greeting customers with a smile and connecting regulars with one another. Evelia extended credit to her Latinx customers, many of whom lived in the apartments upstairs in the building. Sometimes she even

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.