What memories and history are covered by Dodger Stadium?
Four years after the Dodgers baseball team moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958, Dodger Stadium was built on land known as Chavez Ravine, which had been inhabited by generations of close-knit people of Mexican descent. Chavez Ravine sat on a hill overlooking the City of Angels.
Instead of building public housing in the area the city originally proposed, city leaders claimed that public housing was a communist plot and building a stadium was a better, more capitalistic and American idea. The inhabitants of Chavez Ravine are cursed.
the film Chavez Ravin: A Los Angeles story This fascinating and well-known history of displacement, exploitation and neglect.
“In the early 1950s, the city of Los Angeles forcibly evicted 300 families in Chavez Ravine to make way for a low-income public housing project. Land was cleared and homes, schools, and churches were destroyed. But instead of building the promised housing, The city—in a move amid political controversy—sold the land to Brooklyn Dodgers baseball owner Walter O’Malley, who built Dodger Stadium on the site. Residents of Chavez Ravine, who were promised first pick. Apartments in the proposed housing project, were given no compensation for their destroyed property. Not reimbursed and forced to scramble for accommodation elsewhere
Fifty years later, filmmaker Jordan Mechner explores what happened, interviewing many former residents of Chavez Ravine as well as some of the officials who oversaw the community’s destruction. Narrated by Chech Marin and scored by Ry Cooder and Lalo Guerrero, Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story Combines contemporary interviews with archival footage and [John] Normark’s haunting black-and-white photographs to restore and celebrate a beloved community from the past.”