Inland: Minority residents recall how the freeway affected their communities
By Michelle DeArmond
Friday, November 21, 2003
BEAUMONT -- Traffic on Interstate 10 roars steadily behind Leslie Rios' weather-beaten pale-green house. Cement trucks lumber along worn streets as they make their way to the industrial businesses that now dominate his neighborhood.
Rios is proud of this neighborhood, even as urban noise, treacherous traffic and overwhelming fumes from a shutter-painting plant make life almost unbearable. He fears he'll eventually be forced from his home to make way for commerce, but is fighting to preserve his family's heritage by collecting photos and telling stories about the community's rich history.
Railroad workers, many of them from El Paso, Texas, and Mexico, settled in his neighborhood in the early 1910s and 1920s, he said. They created a close-knit community in what then was downtown Beaumont, he said, but now looks like a forgotten corner of western Beaumont where changes in zoning laws are squeezing out residential areas.
Rios, 39, lives in the same small house where his grandparents raised him; both are now dead. In the front window of his home, surrounded by a chain-link fence with faded strips of wood painted white, sits a street sign with his grandfather's name.
Rios heads the Luis Estrada Road Association, which recently got his street renamed in honor of his grandfather. He wore an association name tag pinned to his V-neck sweater Friday as he led a couple dozen people on a tour around his neighborhood.
" I'll try to continue to live here. Many of the families are proud to live here," Rios said in a soft voice, his dark hair woven in a braid. "This is our home. We have history here."
A dusty, corner lot
Gloria Bocanegra's family got out of the way before Interstate 10 ripped through their Redlands neighborhood, she said, crippling the sense of community Mexican-American and other minority families once enjoyed there.
Children played kick-the-can together, and Bocanegra roller-skated near her home.
Residents swam at a Redlands pool on Fridays -- the only day Hispanics were allowed there. Residents earned a living at a nearby packing plant, in the fruit orchards and on the railroad. Many of the men from the neighborhood, who worked the same jobs, died of cancer years ago, she said. Their families always suspected the men were exposed to some cancer-causing agent in their work, she said.
Bocanegra's childhood home is gone; a dusty vacant lot flanked by a tall wooden fence sits in its place. A dwindling number of old homes remain in the interstate's shadow as more businesses fill the neighborhood. The freeway sits over what once was one of the neighborhood's most beautiful streets, said Bocanegra, 69, who now would like to see some of the city's landmarks preserved. "I felt there were a lot of beautiful homes in that area that went with it," she said, dressed in a red blazer as she looked with nostalgia across her former neighborhood.
Many families she knew were displaced because of the interstate, although some took the opportunity to move to the more well-to-do neighborhoods on the city's south side, she said.
Like her parents and her grandparents, Bocanegra chose to live in Redlands as an adult and remains there on the Northside.
Reach Michelle DeArmond at (909) 368-9441 or mdearmond@pe.com
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