Vickie Vértiz
Vickie Vértiz is a writer and educator from Bell Gardens. Her writing can be found in the New York Times magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Her book "Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut" won the 2018 PEN America literary prize in poetry. A graduate of Williams College, the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of California Riverside, she teaches in the Writing Program at UC-Santa Barbara. Follow her work at vickievertiz.com.
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The Southeast Los Angeles Cultural Arts Center is a great idea on paper, but locals have well-grounded fear that bright and shiny developments like these would leave their best interests out in the cold.
You may not recognize it at all while driving on the road, but American Legion Hall Post #465 has been host to musical legends in its long history. It continues to bring the community together in Bell Gardens.
For the community of Southeast Los Angeles, this homegrown arts festival and all of the people involved are a reminder to never give up and do it ourselves.
Located 20 minutes from downtown, the southeast suffers from life-threatening pollution across the cities of Bell, Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Huntington Park, Lynwood, Maywood and Vernon.
![[Left] "Santa Barbara Brown Berets aka Moratorium in Maravilla" 1970. | Photo: Oscar Castillo || [Right] "Not One More (Girl with Beret)" 2016. | Photo: Rafael Cardenas](https://kcet.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/c292104/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1285x723+1+0/resize/1536x864!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fkcet-brightspot.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%2Flegacy%2Fsites%2Fkl%2Ffiles%2Fthumbnails%2Fimage%2Ffeatured_oscar_castillo_and_rafael_cardenas_photos_brown_be.jpg)
Protest photographs bridge Latino youth cultures across space and time. They remind us that Chicano youth continue to not only speak out about injustice but thrive despite it.
Though the extravagant casino stands in great contrast to the surrounding working class communities, its relationship to the city is complicated
"Just think: that baby that you covered when they were cold or fed when they were hungry, that is the same one that's telling you they're trans, or gay."
The first-ever rock camp in Huntington Park hosted over 26 children ages 8-17, for a week of band practice and workshops that focused on local social and environmental issues to build critical thinking skills.
El Monte has produced numerous writers, including Benita Morgan Bishop who documents 1970s El Monte through the wide-eyed perspective of her young narrator.
In his writings, the people and places of southeast Los Angeles -- his eternal backyard -- come through with heat and lyric: the bare truth of the everyday.