L.A. Riots - Pico Union (Little Central America, Los Angeles 1992) El Salvador Corridor

Salvadorans and other Central Americans--many of whom escaped civil unrest and political upheaval to rebuild in the United States--face starting over yet again after riots destroyed much of Pico-Union and the adjacent MacArthur Park area, heart of this city’s huge, thriving Central American community. The pupuseria at 9th Street and Vermont Avenue; the Atlacatl Restaurant; La Barata, a discount appliance store frequented by Central Americans; La Curacao, a furniture store on Olympic Boulevard so popular among Salvadorans that it has a branch in El Salvador, is now a jumble of ruins.
To make matters worse, in the days following the riots, after many Central American immigrants lost their homes and businesses, they were pursued by federal immigration agents looking for looters. Some were deported.
And the only person killed by the National Guard was a Salvadoran, a former soldier in the U.S.-financed Salvadoran army.
The Central American community in Pico-Union is probably the hardest hit because it’s so concentrated, and there was so much damage in a concentrated area.
Emelina Montoya’s story is tragic not just for its sadness, but because it has become so common.
She left her 11 brothers and sisters in the Salvadoran village of Santa Teresa in 1984. Five cousins had been murdered after the army accused them of collaborating with leftist guerrillas; relatives were so scared they didn’t attend the funeral. Then the government threatened to seize her family’s corn and yucca farm.
Following three brothers who left before her, Montoya--20 at the time--paid a “coyote” and was smuggled into Pico-Union. For several years, she worked in sweatshops packaging cookies until she could put together $500 to buy a cart. The cart was for peddling tamales and fruit.
For the last two years, Montoya has earned her living, about $125 a week, as a street vendor.
On the second day of the riots, she lost the one-room apartment she shared with her husband and two brothers and all her possessions.
On the day her apartment building burned, Montoya had watched crowds loot, then set fire to, a furniture store next door. When smoke started to fill her room, she grabbed her purse and fled. The chaos in the streets, along with the curfew and armed troops patrolling urban neighborhoods, were a jarring reminder of the turmoil she had witnessed at home in El Salvador.
“There, you saw a lot of killing,” she said. “You saw the bodies of students alongside the roads. Sometimes they’d cut off their hands or their heads. The difference is that here, (the violence) is only for a short time. There, it is permanent.”
Montoya said that returning to El Salvador was not an option. She still remembers how two of her sisters were kidnaped and raped by armed strangers several years after she left Santa Teresa. In her long tale of misery, it is this memory that makes her tremble and cry.
Maria Cecilia Rivas last saw her brother the day before he died. He was asleep on a couch at their sister’s apartment in the Alvarado corridor of Pico-Union. The family was planning a trip back to El Salvador when the riots erupted.
- Marvin Rivas was fatally shot by National Guardsmen on May 3, after he allegedly ran his car through a police barricade. Guardsmen fired 14 rounds from their M-16 semiautomatic rifles. Two hit Rivas, one in the arm and one in the head.
- “I went to the morgue to see him,” Maria Cecilia Rivas said, “but they wouldn’t let me.”
- The Rivas family hails from Chaletenango, one of El Salvador’s most war-weary states. Marvin Rivas, who was 26, had spent nearly 10 years in the Salvadoran military before coming to Los Angeles three years ago.The area became the principal port of entry for Salvadorans and other Central Americans in the early 1980s. Especially in El Salvador, war between the U.S.-backed government and leftist guerrillas, as well as reprisals by right-wing death squads, intensified in 1979-80, driving tens of thousands of Salvadorans to the United States. Most ended up in Los Angeles. Millions of dollars in riot-related damage and losses to Latino-owned properties or businesses that served the Latino community have been reported in the Pico-Union and MacArthur Park areas.
Looking back at the 1992 Los Angeles riots, people often remember tensions between African-Americans, white law enforcement officers and Korean small business owners. That story gets even more complicated when you step into Pico-Union - a neighborhood that was, and still is, predominantly Latino.
In the wake of the Rodney King verdict, riots broke out around the city. The first day, they erupted in South Central; by the second, they had spread north to Pico-Union. And while people all over the city had to deal with looting, fires, and general chaos, many residents of Pico Union had to deal with an additional fear - the threat of deportation.