By Oscar Madrigal
Headline, 1965: “Watts erupts in flames in violent
riots.” Headline, 1985: “Gang violence at it’s
worst in Watts.” Headline: “Lots of colored folk living
in Watts.”
Watts, Los Angeles, Calif. I live there. I have for the past 20
years. And it’s a miracle that I make it out of there alive
every day.
On the way to school I manage to avoid a few bullets and trudge
through three different gang territories where I have to change my
banana to their preferred color. I’m home free once I hit the
freeway and make it into nice, safe Westwood. Ah, yes, Westwood,
where nice police officers stop me just to see how everything is
going.
But just wait one cotton pickin’ minute! Watts really
isn’t all that bad. You get used to it.
Gunshots sing lullabies to you as the endless sirens croon
melodic sounds with the beats of helicopters and endless
tonka-phonics of freight trains.
Yes, where decadence becomes beauty and violence becomes an art
form: Watts.
Humor aside, Watts is really not a bad town, as many would have
you believe. Watts is just Watts. Which really is an
understatement. What is Watts about? It’s about good people
who live good lives in a place that has a bad rap and a tremendous
amount of uncultivated possibility.
I’d love to take a poll some day and ask how many people
even know where Watts is on a map. The reality of the situation is
most students here at UCLA are either too scared, ignorant or just
plain busy to venture outside of Westwood and expose themselves to
any other part of Los Angeles, let alone one as real as Watts.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked when I announced
to my Shakespeare class that I lived across the street from the
Watts Towers and none of them had a clue what the Watts Towers are.
I got a kick out of it when one girl asked me if it was safe down
there. I happily told her no, then flashed her a gang sign.
Truth be told, I don’t want people coming to Watts who are
going to look at the residents like caged animals and poke and
point at us. So please, stay away.
Sometimes I have nightmares of white people taking tours of
Watts in Land Rovers with bulletproof glass, saying to their kids:
“Look Glen, look Molly, black people! And oh my, how quaint,
a Mexican.”
The fact is Watts has always been an extremely diverse place. In
the ’30s and ’40s, Watts was richly populated by
Italian, German, Mexican and Japanese Americans. At the moment,
Watts is about 60 percent Latino and 40 percent African
American.
Watts was the epicenter of jazz in Los Angeles in the ’40s
and ’50s.
Watts was home to Olympic gold medalist Florence Griffith Joyer
and UCLA alumnus Glen Seaborg, one of the people who discovered
plutonium.
The Watts Towers are on the registry of national landmarks
““ if you don’t know what they are, you really should
check them out.
The Watts Towers Arts Center has two annual festivals: the Watts
Towers Day of the Drum, which is about drums from all over the
world, and the Simon Rodia Jazz Festival. Both were the first of
their kind in Los Angeles.
It was this last fact that got my friend to come visit me.
He’s not so bad for a white guy. He came to the jazz festival
one year and I gave him the tour of Watts that included Soul Food
at Jordan’s Café. As he locked his car doors, he said to
me, “Watts isn’t such a bad place … during the
day.”