Robert Santilli: Helping Hands

   DRESSED IN  a perfectly ironed, striped American Eagle collared shirt, spotless dark blue jeans, with matching and immaculate shoes, Robert Santilli hands a bag of a weeks worth of groceries to an impoverished woman in a dress that she has probably worn three times that week. Though he may look  wildly out of place Santilli can be found at the Blessed Sacrament Church in Hollywood every Saturday morning helping the impoverished and homeless.

Santilli, a Senior Business Major at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, wasn’t always so hands-on or involved in giving to others, though he always had an “underlying passion to serve”. As a student “that passion become an active service”. He is now in love with helping others. Santilli praises the campus’ ability to make service accessible. “I always had a small desire to do service, but never had a great opportunity”. Now that Santilli lives within Los Angeles, there are plenty of opportunities, and several different neighboring communities that need his help, two of which he has dedicated his college years to. Not only did Santilli not have an opportunity before LMU, he was secretly scared to serve the homeless population.

photo via Blessed Sacrament Hollywood

Santilli grew up in a wealthy family in Valencia, and he feared that the homeless would be “angry with me for what I had or that they wouldn’t accept my service”. He feared their reaction and possible hostility towards someone from wealth trying to help them. Therefore he kept his contact with the homeless population very scarce and the thought of being immersed in their environment was overwhelming. He did have a desire to help, but his fear overcome that desire and kept him from fulfilling those needs. Santilli was and is all too familiar with the stereotypes that surround homeless people. They are thought of as drug or alcohol addicts, possibly crazed, dangerous, hostile and some believe that they are not worth helping. Those stereotypes are part of what kept Santilli away and fed his fears, but they are now what Santilli is fighting against when trying to get other people involved.

            Santilli started helping the homeless slowly with the “Feed the Hungry” program at LMU. He helped make bagged lunches for the people at a homeless shelter in Santa Monica every Tuesday. Though he helped make the lunches, it took him several months before he actually went to the homeless shelter. When he got there he felt even more rewarded for his hard work when seeing the gratefulness of the people receiving the lunches. He observed that at that shelter the people were “chronically homeless. You will see the same people there every week for months or even years at a time”. He even became fast friends with one of the regulars at the shelter, a man who served in the Vietnam, a population that seemed to overrun that particular shelter.           

            Santilli left “Feed the Hungry” due to a conflict of scheduling, but that did not stop his service. He found the Blessed Sacrament Church, and since it is located in Hollywood, it brings a very different clientele from his previous place of service. “Mostly European and not necessarily homeless, they have homes, they just don’t have a lot of money, it gets really crazy in there. People steal and barter…” If one drives by this church on a Saturday morning between ten and noon they will see a line around the block of people waiting for their bags of groceries. Santilli notes that the lines are longer in Hollywood and you do not always see the same amount of people. He attributes this to the area, “it’s further from the beach so there are not as many homeless”.  After working at both locations for two years, Santilli has decided he prefers Hollywood, “I love it and I hope to continue volunteering there after I graduate in May”. Seeing that he is close to the Church’s Program Director and that he currently goes there every Saturday, it is hard to imagine that he will not continue to go there.

            What Santilli likes most about volunteering in Hollywood as opposed to Santa Monica is that “with the chronically homeless it is easy to spot them, the clients at this location (Hollywood) look just like you or me”. To him this point is an important one. He knows that with living in Los Angeles there are thousands of people with different lives, different situations and that you cannot really know anyone just by the way they look. Los Angeles is an eclectic city and one that cannot be judged by the appearance only, and neither can the people. 

-- Mickala Jauegui 

Lorena Chavez: The Sentinel

AT A university overlooking a busy metropolis, the office of Lorena Chavez breaches the gap between the city and the bluff of Loyola Marymount. A cross, a framed poem, and pottery decorate the office, coloring otherwise bare white walls. Files rest neatly secure within cabinets, and a blank table sits at the ready for her next meeting. Inside, Chavez speaks with two students, filling the room with her contagious goodwill.

Here at LMU’s Center for Service and Action, Chavez serves as the assistant director of Community Engagement. The CSA office, located at the heart of campus, is the university’s powerhouse for student involvement in some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods. As a facilitator, Chavez’s work helps bridge the divide between LMU students and the Los Angeles community through service opportunities. Throughout the past eight years, she has helped create programs to connect nonprofits with volunteers. Students have the chance to explore realms outside of LMU, gaining greater understanding of social issues and cultural dynamics existing in the city.

“Sometimes I see myself like a window screen,” Chavez said. “[I’m] screening the opportunities, and letting [in] the ones that are gonna provide students with a good learning and service opportunity.”

Alongside her work at CSA, Chavez is also completing graduate studies in a public policy administration program at California Sate Long Beach. She received her undergraduate degree in psychology in 1999 at LMU, along with a minor in business and a second minor in alcohol and drug studies. Already familiar with the university’s focus on social justice and service for others, Chavez started working at CSA just a few years after graduation. It was a dynamic environment, she said, where she could combine her academic studies with her love of understanding others.

Many nonprofit organizations contact Chavez interested in building a volunteer program. When going through the selection process, Chavez says she looks for organizations that have a purpose similar to LMU’s mission statement. She spends time researching and visiting each placement to assess its role within its community and to ensure its safety for students. When she’s not in the office, an average day for Chavez might involve driving around Los Angeles, GPS navigation in hand, checking out a potential volunteer location.

But back at the Center for Service and Action, Chavez’s work consists of a lot of communication: on the phone, sending emails, or having meetings with students or nonprofit leaders. She monitors current programs and checks-in to make sure everything runs smoothly.

“It’s not something that just happens at LMU,” Chavez said. “You’re also having interactions with an external audience, so that requires even extra care [and] attention.”

One program Chavez has worked with specifically over the years is Underwings Praxis, a campus service club. She has served as the group’s moderator since its inception in 2003. The club members volunteer at four different sites, all located in the community of East Los Angeles: Homeboy Industries, Guadalupe Homeless Project, Dolores Mission Elementary after school program, and Base Communities. Each student’s experience while volunteering contributes toward opening windows of change, breaking down barriers of misunderstanding, and diminishing prejudice. Students interact with the underprivileged, the marginalized, or the homeless – people they would otherwise never meet – and learn the complex layers of social stratification.

“Even though [Underwings] was never the thing that was on my job description, it has become a very deep part of my life,” Chavez said. Although she was not required to assist the service club, she was willing to develop a framework for the program in its first year. The founding students then asked her to be the group’s permanent moderator.

Chavez mentioned, however, that guiding a program through development is only half of the process. A successful program can only survive with the endurance of love, she said. “You can teach them how to fill out a grant application – but you can’t teach them how to love,” Chavez said.

Love of Dolores Mission, a private Jesuit elementary school, came naturally to the founding members of Underwings Praxis. They connected with it in such a powerful way that Chavez herself struggled to describe. It felt like a home to the students, a place where they belonged, she explained. “There was this very deep rooted relationship between LMU and the community, that I had nothing to do with, you know. That was just the students,” Chavez said.

From that point, three other sites were developed in East Los Angeles, shaping a volunteer program that centered on one community and the social issues it faced. Each volunteer site related to a different issue: education, homelessness, ex-gang member rehabilitation and prevention, and social awareness through group dialogue. By linking these four placements, LMU students could achieve belonging and unity with the community through their weekly volunteer work.

“To this day, I cannot find – when I look at other models of other programs that are university supported – I cannot find another model that looks like Underwings,” Chavez said. She has presented the program’s model to other university programmers at citywide conferences. Few other organizations have implemented the innovative structure that shapes Underwings.

Chavez is still a source of guidance for the club’s executive board members through weekly meetings. She mentions how much she enjoys working with college-age students, although she has mentored youths of all ages in the past. For three years she worked for the Scott Newman Center, an organization that works to prevent drug abuse through the use of education.

Working for and with others is essential to Chavez. She is a “big picture” person, as she describes herself, and must lead a life that serves a greater purpose. “I’ve been doing community work ever since I have memory,” she said. “It was just a way of life, it was just what you did, because, that was what our duty was.”

Growing up in Lincoln Heights in the 80s, Chavez attended private Catholic schools from elementary to high school. Chavez’s parents stressed the importance of education as she and her sister grew up in Los Angeles. Before immigrating to the United States from Mexico, her mother and father were unable to complete schooling there, due to the need to financially support their parents and younger siblings.

Despite the prevalence of gang violence in her hometown, Chavez said she grew up generally unaware of the surrounding conflicts. She remembers exploring in the hills of Lincoln Heights, going to carnivals in Long Beach, and playing baseball with friends. Reflecting on her childhood, Chavez recognizes the effort her parents made to shield her and her sister from the prevalent influences of drug abuse and gang involvement. Their family moved frequently to different parts of Los Angeles, leaving certain neighborhoods if the environment worsened there.

“I realized what I do has been not only a reflection of where I come from,” Chavez said. “It’s been a life of service my entire life.”

Although her work is often indirectly involved, Chavez creates programs that lift up others to places of opportunity. The students, in turn, are able to impact the lives of others. “If I am able to help you, you can help somebody else, and it keeps on going forward. Although I may never be able to meet the individuals that you touch, all the world is going to be better for it,” Chavez said. As a true fulfillment of the name Underwings, Chavez is the gush of air beneath a student’s wings; she is the unseen support in the upward flight of human understanding and compassion.

--Jennifer Pellerito

Photo Credit: TK

Ani Phyo: Modern Day Warrior

ACROSS LOS ANGELES and Southern California a photo of Ani Phyo loomed over the cities on billboards and bus stops, establishing her as more than just a raw foods chef chef. This photo, in soft black and white, featured Phyo with a determined expression as a colorful feathered headdress sat atop her head. This was a part of Sambazon’s Warrior Up campaign, which drew attention to Warriors of Change: people like Phyo who are involved in positive changes in the world. In the everyday, Phyo is softer but no less determined than her photo would have you believe.

Phyo is a raw foods chef, which means that the only ingredients she uses are fruits, nuts, and vegetables: all of which are not cooked. At all. “There’s a lot of raw food in LA, but I give mine a high end presentation,” Phyo says without an ounce of vanity, though she describes the other raw foods found in LA as more “comfort-food” in their style. This is only part of the reason Phyo was given a billboard and a headdress. Her raw food lifestyle has led her to work with several organizations in Los Angeles.

“I just want to help people live life better,” Phyo says. She was involved with a group called the Pedal Patch Community, which works on building community gardens in what Phyo describes as “food deserts” - places with no grocery stores nearby. “I was able to bring in the component I was working with,” she says of her involvement. She worked with at risk youth and did food demos for them to show them how to create healthy and delicious raw food meals from the gardens.

The Pedal Patch community relocated to San Francisco, but Phyo decided to continue to put her talents to use here in Los Angeles. Going with the flow of things (she swears her raw diet has helped her relax and become more easygoing, but still focused) is one of Phyo’s strong points. She turned her attention to other organizations with similar initiatives. Community Services Unlimited is such an organization, working in the downtown area to build community gardens in community spaces. “They even have been able to build some in the schools,” Phyo says excitedly. “It’s really cool.”

This organization promotes healthier foods with the goal of helping communities become self-sustaining - something Phyo has a strong interest in seeing happen.

She’s lived in many big cities all over the world, but something is keeping her in Los Angeles for the time being, though even she may not be sure what it is. Her desire to spread the benefits of the lifestyle of raw foods began as a packaged foods company in Portland, Oregon and has translated into something much more, culminating in her time in this city.

Phyo leads a hectic life - currently she’s working on her fifth book in the midst of running a web show and fending off offers from the Food Network - but manages to make room for another organization: Project Angelfood.

“I work in the kitchen and help prepare the food,” says Phyo of the time she spends with the all volunteer organization, which makes food and delivers it to people suffering from HIV/AIDS. The giving and receiving of food is something this perpetually on-the-go woman understands as healing and deeply important. It is a way of forging human connections while at the same time providing nourishment for the body.

It is no wonder, then, that Phyo emphasizes that “I try to embody this lifestyle in everything I do.”

The one thing she won’t do is television. She prefers the internet, which can reach a global audience. “TV Networks keep coming to me,” she says, but she continues to say no. “They’ll see my food next to Mario Battalli or, what’s that southern chef’s name?” She pauses, a rare occurrence.

She finally thinks of the name. “Paula Dean.” And she’s off again.

“They’ll see me next to them and they won’t get my food, because its so different,” Phyo says. “Sure, sometime, if the time is right,” she may concede to do a television show.

Phyo began to understand the concept of a raw foods diet when she was young. She cites her dad as the source of her initiation into the lifestyle. “My dad taught me a lot,” she says of her father, who was terminally ill. “It kept him alive 10-15 years longer than expected.”

But it wasn’t until Phyo began living a hectic and busy lifestyle that she began to truly feel the benefits herself and make the connections between food and life that led her to this moment; a moment focused on helping others realize these same connections for themselves.

“People need to understand the concept of the raw food in order to embrace it,” she says.

-- Allie Flinn

image Ani Phyo by Jennifer Pickens via Flickr Creative Commons

Isaac Olvera: I Just Wana Dance

A DECADE ago, you would have found Isaac Olvera trying to mimic the dance
moves he saw in music videos in the living room of his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park. Crosses and pictures of family
members  hung on the walls would watch as he moved up and down, left to right, and all over the
floor. After he was done with school, he would tirelessly come home and mimic
what he saw the professionals doing on television. Someday in the future, it will
be other children coming home from school and trying to imitate Isaac, and move
the way he does across the screen.

Ten years later, Isaac is studying dance at Loyola Marymount Unviersity in
Los Angeles. He hasn’t stopped practicing nearly every day, and still is always
smiling about something. He’s the leader of the school’s Hip Hop dance group,
Radix, and has choreographed a number of pieces for performances both for the
University and other audiences.

“It’s just what I love to do,” says Olvera. “Everyone has a passion, whether they
know it or not. I was just lucky enough to discover mine at an early age,” he says
with a grin. “Luckily for me, being from Los Angeles has given me opportunities that I think a lot of people in different areas don’t have.” Indeed, many of the other dancers in his programs came to the city from places like Texas, Wisconsin, and Florida among other states. The fact is dance, along with many other art forms, are more accessible in a city of Los Angeles’ size. Isaac was lucky in this regard, and used it to his advantage.

“I remember one of the first times I went to Venice with some friends in high school. I saw some guy on the Boardwalk ‘popping’ and I watched him for a few minutes. I asked him if he could show me how he was doing it, and I ended up getting a lesson from him right there. I can’t imagine something like that happening in the Midwest.” It is likely experiences of this nature crafted his perception of the city in a favorable manner. Experiences like this, indeed, are indicative of a Los Angeles experience. This would not be his only experience of the kind, however.


This aspiring young talent has taken many different elements from his life and
surroundings and incorporated them into his dance. The result is attention-
grabbing, creative, inspired dance that fuses many of its different forms including
Hip Hop, ballet and modern dance. After watching Isaac dance, it is clear
that he is from the city of Los Angeles. Much like the city in which he grew up
is composed of many different cultures, languages and areas, his dance is
composed of many different elements and styles, borrowing from movements in
everyday life.


“I draw inspiration from everything,” he states. “I try to set myself apart from other
dancers by trying to see the movement in everyday things, not just people, and
incorporate that into my pieces. Seeing the leaves of the palm trees undulate, or waves rippling into the beach, things where people normally wouldn't associate with human movement I try to imitate.” 


The most surprising thing about Isaac is that he did not have any formal training
in dance until he started college at Loyola Marymount. It was not until he became
friends with a few other dancers at the university that he decided to take things to
the next level.



"[Another time] after I had just joined the dance program at LMU, I didn't know too many people in the program and was feeling kind of discouraged after seeing how much better the other dancers in the program were. Well, after class one time, a few of the other dancers met up with me outside the classroom and invited me over to help me out with some technique work. We ended up dancing outside in the sun for a couple of hours. With people like this supporting me, it was no wonder I felt like I could succeed."


“Next level” is a tame way of expressing the hours of work and dedication Olvera
has put into his dancing. “Most of the other dancers in the program have been
taking lessons since they were like ten years old” he says. “I was only dancing in
my living room at that age, everyone else had a real leg up over me.”




That experience handicap didn’t discourage him though. In fact, it is the thing that
pushed him so hard to succeed. He would often dance for “eight, nine hours a
day,” until his body “felt like it was going to give out on me any minute.” Then the
next day he would do it over again.


His hard work did not go unnoticed, especially by his instructors. At the end of his
junior year of college, he was selected to attend the American Dance Festival at
Duke University in North Carolina.


“After I got accepted into [the American Dance Festival] I felt like I could make it
as a dancer. Some of the top upcoming dancers, not even from the U.S. but the
world go to ADF and I was going to be going too. It was surreal.”

Attending this program was the best thing he could have done. He
choreographed a piece that was viewed by hundreds of audience members, and
build connections that will propel him into the world of dance after he graduates. At the end of the program, he was told by a number of instructors to contact them
after he graduates for potential dance opportunities.

“There were other dancers that were better technically than me, but I guess I did something right that impressed them. Maybe it’s the L.A. flair coming out. I always try to incorporate some 'swagger' into my dancing. I was definitely a bit louder and sillier than a lot of the other people there too, and a lot of them got a kick out of me speaking Spanish."

After graduating, he hopes to stay in Los Angeles and continue to use the city to his benefit.
“I thought about moving just for a change of pace, but to be honest I can’t picture myself living anywhere else. I’ve grown up here, made my connections here, I don’t want to uproot myself like that. Plus the dance community is thriving right now and I think it would be like shooting myself in the foot to leave.”



Isaac is a person that was meant to live in Los Angeles. He was lucky enough to be born and raised in a city of vibrant culture and rich experience, and tried to take advantage of that to the fullest extent.



Ten years from now, Isaac, “hope[s] to still be dancing. Hopefully still here in Los Angeles.”


--Derek Dellovo
image via lmu.edu

Chuck Rosenthal: Surfing the Elusive City

LIKE MANY writers who’ve come to Los Angeles, Chuck Rosenthal was drawn to L.A. because of its elusive quality - but not the typical “elusiveness” of L.A. that comes to mind. Beyond the never ending traffic, the intrigue of celebrity, the variety of neighborhoods, “L.A. has so many facets,” says Rosenthal. “It’s neither male nor female, it’s metrosexual.” And the exploration of that complex place in between has long been an element in Rosenthal's work.

Rosenthal, the author of seven books and a memoir, and a professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, has been a force in both the literary scene and has inspired and influenced students with courses he’s taught which deal directly with the city. Before the university nixed his RoadWrite class because of the higher budget it required, he took students all over Los Angeles and even up to Big Sur for a course inspired by Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” mentality.


The "metrosexual city" of Los Angeles, so dubbed by Rosenthal because of its eccentricities and materialistic nature, has been his playground ever since he moved here as a young writer in 1986. A native Pennsylvanian, he had high hopes that moving to sunny Los Angeles would fulfill his dreams of learning how to surf and riding his motorcycle every day. He inched his way from the East coast toward California with writing employment at several universities before he wound up in L.A., and aside from steady employment at the same university as his wife, he has remained ever since because he actually enjoys it. What he doesn’t like is the superficiality that L.A. has been branded with. Oh, and the city’s endless need for driving.


But Rosenthal has been able to find inspiration in its superficiality - in fact, L.A.’s superficial nature is a key element in his upcoming book, "West of Eden," that will be released in October. The book is a mixture of fictional stories and snippets from his own life, touching on everything from the entertainment industry to teaching at LMU to his daughter’s kooky decision to change her name to Jesus. “It’s funny,” Rosenthal said in his characteristically matter of fact tone. “I’m funny.”


He came up with the concept for "West of Eden" by pulling stories from his "Last Book of Everything," which was about 900 pages of work that he added to whenever he felt inspired. A few years ago, after he’d written a story chronicling his humorous battle to pawn off a live chicken to his celebrity neighbors - including Sting and Robert Downey Jr. - his wife told him “you love funny stories about L.A., you ought to write a book about it.” With that thought, he realized that there were about 7 or 8 stories woven throughout his Last Book of Everything to draw from.


Because of the interesting way the book came to be, some of its stories are from 10 years ago, but could also be made tomorrow. “If an animal died in 2004, it doesn’t matter if I say it died in 2012,” he said. “Those things don’t matter at all.” As the book is centered around his funny experiences living in Los Angeles, it makes sense that time is irrelevant - he will continue to have these experiences long after the book’s publication.


“You can do anything you want in L.A.,” Rosenthal said. “You just have to drive to do it.” One perk L.A. has on the literary front that other cities do not is the influence of the entertainment world. Although most writers in L.A. are screenwriters, the people Rosenthal hangs out with are some of the few that are not interested in writing for the movies. In fact, when HBO approached him about writing the screenplay for his memoir "Never Let Me Go," which deals with his six-year sexual abuse from a grade school coach, he told them to have someone else write it.

“It’s not like I’m not good at it,” he explained. “I just wasn’t interested.” Truth be told, a screenplay Rosenthal wrote several years ago was nominated for the Sundance Film Festival. But screenwriting is not where his heart lies, and as a result, he does not feel influenced by Hollywood like he believes many of the writers in L.A. do. He also believes there is a pressure on L.A. writers from the big rig publishers in New York to conform to the expectations of the noir, mystery and Hollywood genres that often sell.


But don’t expect Rosenthal to conform any time soon. Even though the majority of the literary world is centered around New York City, Rosenthal is happy to be in Los Angeles. For one of his current projects he is taking lines from old sci-fi poems, mixing them up in a hat, and making poetry out of them. “I like to mix genres,” he said. With this defiance against what typically “sells,” Rosenthal displays his capability to live in a city like Los Angeles while still holding on to his own voice.


He spent his early years in L.A.'s Venice Beach where he did surf every day, but these days he and his wife reside of Topanga, where he has replaced daily surfing with riding his beloved horse, Nikki. There are aspects about city life - like being able to “pick up wine, a baguette and fish for dinner; bring it anywhere and call it a meal” - that he knows he is lacking by living in an L.A. surburb, but the pros of Los Angeles outweigh the cons. The city entertains him, and his work has been successful.

Rosenthal thinks maybe he will stay in L.A. forever, depending on whether he can afford to live in Topanga or to get a loft downtown once he retires. He wouldn’t  mind remaining here, although if L.A. were a person, he probably would not like to be its friend. L.A. is “superficial - self consciously invested of the presentation of itself. Always on display. A fashion model,” he said. Maybe its because of the amusement he gets as a writer out of observing people, but within that superficial fashion model likes a city Rosenthal calls home.

-- Jordan Younger
(image via lmu library's webpage)

Soccoro Cuadillo: 50 Years of Tradition

IT'S MINUTES before 6:00 AM.


The air outside feels like ice against the skin and the morning sky is painted gray with clouds that float lethargically above. Traffic on Echo Park Blvd. off the corner of Sunset is light, though by afternoon this will become a busy intersection. The fluorescent red, yellow, and greens, flicker on the stoplights emitting a bright flash of color in the grey dreary morning. Soccoro Cuadillo doesn’t let the drab morning ruin his cheery mood.  Today is a morning just like any other. You can call a man in his profession by many names, yet the way he performs his craft is much like that of an artist pursuing perfection. Instead of brushes and canvases, the tools Caudillo uses are found in the heated arena of the kitchen. Titanium steel ovens, bags of flour, and a staff of family-friendly Angelenos, have kept Caudillo’s business, Celaya Bakery, operating successfully for nearly 50 years. The clock strikes six and his store is open for business. 

   “It’s the warm smell of fresh baked bread. It reminds me of waking up early in Mexico, going to the kitchen, and finding my mom pulling a fresh batch out of the oven,” Caudillo tells me behind his thick Mexican accent and even scruffier beard. That is what keeps him going every day. Owning a successful business takes dedication, and it’s the dedication of “our family,” he says, that keeps this business owner waking up before dawn every morning.

Panaderias (as they’re commonly known), or “bakeries,” are plentiful in ethnic parts of downtown Los Angeles. Walking a few blocks, an individual may encounter five or six different types of Mexican eateries that all offer similar goods. Caudiallo and his staff's dedication  keeps the doors of Celaya Bakery open. The job calls for early hours in a cramped space, yet this small family business has left customers smiling for almost half a century.  Most innovators try to add twists and turns to the every day object. Caudillo is a man of rituals and customs:  “I’ve been using the same recipe for years,” he says. “Sure, maybe a few things have changed here and there but the idea is the same.” His bread and treats are traditional in every sense of the word, however time and practice has allowed Caudillo’s staff to produce a perfect product. The sugar coating on every piece of pan. Pan, the Spanish word for bread, is Caudillo's specialty.  His pan dulce, (candy bread), is is light and sweet and comes in an array of pastel colors.

Caudillo has brought an art to his food and service that only family can provide. Although Celaya Bakery is big in heart, its location in busy downtown Los Angeles offers only a tiny space inside a popular consumer district. The kitchen is small and Caudillo and his team developed their own body language to maneuver around one another when the days get busy.  Baking to these employees comes as simple as taking a breath; their rhythm makes their job seem simple.

Caudillo was born in Chapala, Mexico, just outside Guadalajara. After marrying his wife and deciding to settle down, the pair packed their bags and headed to the United States to ensure a better future for their would-be family. Starting a business in 1960s Los Angeles is no easy task. In a time where crime and freedom of speech roamed the streets, the city was changing rapidly with the construction of freeways, housing, and a vibrant nightlife. Southern California provided the perfect weather and Los Angeles lined it’s street with opportunity and trades. “I grew up around small towns and villages… the city was always a long drive,” he says, “It was hard to adapt [here] at first… but I learned the ways of the streets.”  Caudillo found a niche in the vast city and stuck to what he knew. “There wasn’t many options for me when I moved here. I had some money saved up and decided to use it for something I’m good at,” he explains. From sunrise to sunset, Caudillo provides a pledge to every customer walking in that they will leave satisfied.

Located only a mile from Dodger Stadium off Sunset Boulevard and Echo Park Avenue., Caudillo set up shop in a location that would draw hundreds in every day.  On game days Caudillo opens his doors to a rush of Dodger fans, hurrying to fill his tiny shop. Families come and load up on many of the sweet breads, fresh carnita burritos, chile reyenos, or homemade horchata. Customers are always smiling and pleasant as Caudillo’s atmosphere emits a slice of home. “The city has changed quite a bit. New suit shops come up every few years… one thing that won’t change is people’s hunger,” he laughs. “People like to eat food, good food. I want to make sure every customer leaves smiling.”

Caudillo and his family (along with a few extra helping hands) have run and operated the business for almost half a century,  surviving several of Los Angeles' recessions. While many neighboring businesses have come up and down, Celaya Bakery provides products that are always in demand. More recently, Celaya Bakery stood strong during the neighborhood's gentrification all the while keeping his business worth of a grade "A." While many businesses often relocate because of regional or societal dilemmas, Celaya Bakery has stayed put since it’s inception. “I like to keep things simple. It’s easier that way,” he says.
The changing city of Los Angeles has brought many different customers through the doors of Celaya Bakery. No matter what streets and parkways are under construction, native citizens always find their way to the bakery when the doors open to find a nice slice of home waiting for them.

-- Michael Flores

Photo Credit: Michael Flores

The Profile: Norman Klein

AS DISCUSSED, in class, I wanted to post some examples of the profile at work. Here is an example of a profile written by David L. Ulin about social critic Norman Klein. Pay close attention to the structure of the piece. How the lead/opening works, how Ulin handles quotes, the scene setting and how the city emerges in the piece . . .

Remember, you'll be most likely starting with a scene or an anecdote -- maybe even an idea or a question -- but you'll be trying to move your subject around a bit in a place. Also, you'll be tying them to L.A. in some way.  

(Also, you'll be reading some of Klein's work later in the semester, so here is a little introduction to him._

City of Ruins: By Excavating the Hidden Past, Norman Klein has Emerged as L.A.'s Most Innovative Social Critic
By David L. Ulin


One evening early this fall, Norman Klein sat behind a formica table, speaking softly but insistently to a small audience at REDCAT, CalArts’ performance space that occupies the rear end of Disney Hall. Beneath the table, his right leg tapped a mile a minute, like a metronome. Wearing unpressed khakis and a white button-down shirt, hair exploding in a wiry gray corona, he had the slightly disheveled look of an absent-minded professor, which, in some sense, is what he is. For 30 years Klein has been on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts; in addition, he teaches in the graduate program for media design at Art Center. But recently he has emerged as the most innovative Los Angeles social critic since Mike Davis—fast-talking, omnivorous, a bantam-like urban theorist with heavyweight ideas. His 1997 book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory put into language what many residents have long thought about L.A. — that this is a city where meaning has as much to do with what we don’t see as what we do. The notion also motivates his 2003 novella-cum-DVD-ROM Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986, which he had come to REDCAT to discuss.
Bleeding Through is one of those transformative works—Klein has described it as a “data/cinematic novel”—in which the form is as innovative as the content. Framed as the story of an old woman named Molly, it blends fiction, social commentary, and historical analysis in a multimedia pastiche of 20th-century L.A., constructed around a vast electronic archive of what Klein calls “traces”: photos, news clippings, interview footage, snippets of documentary and dramatic films. If this sounds compulsive, that’s the point precisely; “I’m obsessed,” Klein enthused at REDCAT, “with the idea that the evidence is almost as exciting as the story. I find it so interesting to locate bits and pieces, scars of how memory works.” For him, such a process seems particularly suited to Los Angeles, “a city,” he writes in The History of Forgetting, “that was imagined long before it was built.” Bleeding Through, then, reflects L.A.’s own unreliable memory, a notion Klein (and his electronic collaborators) highlights by weaving “forgetfulness” directly into the project’s software, which brings up different material from the database each time you load it, so the story never unfolds the same way twice.

The idea that L.A. is inherently elusive — a fragmentary landscape of glimmers and glimpses — can get a little abstract, which may explain why Klein has taken so long to catch on. With the exception of the Los Angeles Times, his books have been largely ignored by the media. Partly, this has to do with how Los Angeles intellectuals are treated. “For some reason,” says Peter Lunenfeld, who teaches with Klein at Art Center, “L.A. only has room for one public intellectual at a time, and now it’s Norman. It’s like we can’t handle more than one conversation at once.” Partly, it is Klein’s professional status, the way he straddles several disciplines at once. If you ask, he’ll tell you he’s a writer, as opposed to a theorist or professor, then cite influences as diverse as Baudelaire and Balzac, Faulkner and Joyce. Certainly, his career can be hard to classify; untenured, he has been an adjunct at UCLA, Otis, Sci-Arc, and USC, moving from campus to campus like an itinerant, leading a patchwork academic life. His course descriptions read like outlines of his obsessions, with classes on the history of simulation, or the buying and selling of L.A. as fantasy. “You set up a problem you want to solve,” he says, his Brooklyn accent muted with resignation, “and it forces you to do research. Teaching at art schools, I don’t have the degree of support I’d get from a research institution, so I have to build it in.”

If Klein is difficult to pin down, the same could be said about Los Angeles, which reveals itself in the most unlikely spaces, spaces we might never think to look. “Did I ever tell you about the ugliest place in Los Angeles?” Klein asked me one afternoon in his office, a converted garage behind his house in Highland Park. Although we were sitting together, he peered into the middle distance, face growing animated and his voice rising slightly, as if he were a kid with a secret to impart. “I decided it was in Van Nuys, at the intersection of Fulton and Burbank. I selected it because it wasn’t poverty; it was just ugly, retinal eye burn of an extreme form. On one corner was a place called Father and Me, which repaired cars. It was surrounded by rolls of barbed wire like some old lady’s hair. Across the street was a very bad trompe l’oeil lumber yard that looked like it was going to fall over. Then, there was this strange Middle Eastern restaurant in a dumpy building with a faded image on top of a man holding a chicken. It was like that in every direction.” Eventually, Klein discovered that beneath this desolate veneer of blankness were overlapping populations of Lebanese and Palestinians and Israelis, until a map of the Middle East emerged. “Little by little,” he said, laughing at the memory, “this was not the ugliest place in Los Angeles, it was just the best erased example of urban complexity. And I thought, Wow, this is one crazy city to have that much happening with so little heat you can actually see.”

To talk to Norman Klein is an exercise in excavation. It informs not just his ideas but his way of speaking, in which he keeps returning to certain subjects: the layering he sees everywhere, his idea that L.A. is less an integrated city than “like the Holy Roman Empire, nine thousand microclimates” — another favorite word. It’s a fascinating process, not least because it reflects the structure of his writing, his tendency to circle a topic, gathering impressions, fragments, evidence. “The most important aspect of his work,” says Michael Dear, professor of geography at USC, “has to do with what it tells us about how we remember: repeating stories, always embroidering. It raises questions about the very nature of remembering.” In The History of Forgetting, Klein describes the early days of the motion picture business, which developed in Echo Park. “I learned that across the street from my apartment,” he writes, “on Glendale Boulevard, Tom Mix used to ride a horse to work from his ranch in Mixville (now a Hughes market shopping center). But no recognition could be found anywhere that the entire film industry had once been centered there.” Nearly a decade after he wrote those words, Klein and I spent a few hours looking at the former site of Mixville as well as Mack Sennett’s old studio, now a public storage space. “It’s incredible,” he said. “This is the center of our whole cultural memory. This is where the language of film evolved. If we were in Paris, and this was an atelier where Picasso had painted, it would probably be a museum.” Here, however, there was nothing, not even a commemorative sign. “All cultures,” he continued, “have some kind of erasure. But what’s curious about this erasure is that it’s done mentally. In other words, you don’t see it even if it’s right in front of you.”

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photo via usc interactive