Alfred Zepeda (AZ): Sometimes on Saturday mornings the priest would bring out a loudspeaker and put on Mexican musics for the whole neighborhood.

Albert Elias (AE): At church it was all in Spanish because nobody understood English.
I was an altar boy and you were an altar boy too.

AZ: Yeah, that's the only way you could get wine without having to pay
for it. (Laughts)

AE: I think Padre Tomás knew that we were taking it.

AZ: Oh, even Padre José knew about it. (Laughs)

AE: Yeah. Everybody was barefooted, and during the hot summer we used to
go and make damns in the LA River. We used to put the boulders and make
like a little swimhole. And everybody was naked. We didn't have swimming
trunks.

AZ: I didn't think we were poor. To me, I thought that was normal all
over the country, the way we lived, and we were happy. You know, when we
moved from there, we moved to a predominantly white neighborhood. See,
over there in Chavez Ravine, in the evening most of the times, they
would come out in the evenings and water the gardens and talk to the
neighbor across from you. You know, my mother, my mother is the one that
did that a lot with the neighbors we had, and then all of a sudden,
she's moved to a place where a neighbor doesn't like us on one side, and
the other one is a white lady, maybe 80 years old that she couldn't
communicate with. So she's isolated, she has no one. No one to talk to.
So when I started driving I used to take her to visit a friend from the
neighborhood that lived close by. I used to borrow the car from my
brother and go to the neighborhood and visit Chavez Ravine, and it
looked like it had been through a war. A lot of houses broken down,
abandoned, and finally, finally it just faded away. And now
they're...you know, if you want to go back you go see a baseball game,
which I don't do.

AE: No. I've been to a Dodger game, but it didn't feel right.

AZ: I've been all.. a lot of places in the United States. I never have
found another neighborhood like that one. I miss that place
tremendously. I wish my kids would have experienced it.