It’s 4 p.m. in Boyle Heights. Cesar Chavez Avenue, which barely hummed with traffic minutes before, pulsates with the synthesized drums of reggaetón from cars leaving Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School. Students on foot, hunched under impossibly large backpacks, unburden themselves at bus stops; one group laughs loudly, jolting awake a dozing mariachi. Others duck into mom-and-pops like Guisados, where a man on a ladder slathers green paint onto paneling above the store’s facade. Holding her child’s hand in one of hers and a tray wrapped in tinfoil in the other, a woman saunters out, letting the buttery air of homemade tortillas escape into the streets. Vendors claim sidewalk corners, hawking fruit cups to the hungry teens.
Keeping an eye on the afternoon rush are people pictured in murals gracing the sides of restaurants, civic centers, gas stations, and apartment buildings. Their gazes are warm, exultant, understanding, like those of protective ancestors watching over the neighborhood: veteranos throwing out peace signs from black lowriders; the profiles of Aztec lovers adorned with green and pink headdresses; a woman in a red dress clutching her heart as she sings to the accompaniment of famed musicians Margarito Gutiérrez and El Piporro.
At the corner of North St. Louis Street and Cesar Chavez, in this storied neighborhood, there’s yet another mural, this one masking the side wall of El Norteño de Savy Store. It depicts the arms of a woman diving down from the sky into a ball of masa. Limes dance around her, and blue nopales shimmer against a yellow background. The painting seems to agree with the rest of the art in the neighborhood until you spot the conspicuous outline of a QR code pasted below the phrase “Somos Boyle Heights” (we are Boyle Heights) at the top of the wall.
