Review: East LA Interchange, by Betsy Kalin

Abstract

East LA Interchange Betsy Kalin, director Bluewater Media, Clearwater, Florida, 2015, 57 min. > The spirit in Boyle Heights cannot be broken by California planners. > > —tagline for East LA Interchange In her documentary film East LA Interchange , Betsy Kalin relates the litany of exclusionary federal laws and local planning decisions that over the past seventy-five years have had negative impacts on the people of Boyle Heights, a multiethnic working-class Los Angeles neighborhood just east of downtown. Told through archival images and interviews with current and previous residents and urban historians, the film in many ways presents a sweeping love story of a community that, before World War II, was considered the “Ellis Island of the West Coast” (Figure 1). Kalin positions Boyle Heights within the narrative of immigration and migration that fostered Los Angeles's complex social fabric. As the city witnessed remarkable population growth at the start of the twentieth century, Boyle Heights became a landing point for people from dozens of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. While some people found camaraderie with those most like themselves, others settled on city blocks in ways that were more likely to reflect multiplicity than homogeneity. Figure 1 Xavi Moreno in East LA Interchange (photo by Chris Chew/Bluewater Media © 2016). As the documentary makes clear, however, the community's historic integration was less a happenstance of American diversity than it was a direct result of racially restrictive covenants that barred members of most of the ethnic groups in Boyle Heights from buying or renting property in other parts of the city. These included African Americans and Latinos, often Asians, and sometimes Jewish, Italian, Armenian, Russian, and Polish populations, among others. With little choice regarding where to settle, these groups found their way to Boyle Heights. The result was in no way an example of “melting …