life
CITY
HEIGHTS
AZALEA PARK•FAIRMOUNT VILLAGE•HOLLYWOOD PARK•SWAN CANYON•CHEROKEE POINT•RIDGEVIEW•CHOLLAS CREEK
LIVES in City Heights By David Ogul
Above: Members of Youth Empowerment playing basketball at Teralta Park on a recent Sunday afternoon. Arriba: Miembros de Youth Empowerment juegan deportes en el Parque Teralta durante una reciente tarde de domingo. Photo: Youth Empowerment
City Heights Life
I
nstead of dodging bullets on the street, they’re dodging paintball pellets in a park. Instead of marking their turf with graffiti on public property, they’re cleaning up taggers’ work from swing sets and basketball courts. Instead of focusing on all the wrongs in their community, they’re focusing on how to make things right. Welcome to Youth Empowerment, a burgeoning grassroots effort that began serendipitously just five months ago when Arturo Soriano and his wife, Gabby, strolled over to Teralta Park in City Heights looking for a teen they had promised to help mentor. When they found the youth with a group of others, Arturo joined in for a few pickup games of basketball. Then they talked. For hours. About life. About their challenges.
About their dreams. “We were just hanging out,” Arturo Soriano said. “We brought over some pizza and talked. Then when we got ready to leave, the kids are like, ‘Hey, when are we going to do this again?’ So we said, ‘Hey, how about next Sunday?’ ” That was in December. They’ve been back every Sunday since. And word is spreading on the street. More than 100 youths, many of whom associate with gangs and almost all of whom fall into the category of being at-risk, have joined the spontaneous movement that now includes park clean-ups, fundraising drives for families in need, and paintball battles in Escondido. The effort has drawn notice from police officers and Juvenile Court judges, city officials and neighborhood activists. And a whole lot of families. “This is the epitome of grassroots, community organizing,”
• FREE •
LA VIDA
Volume 4 • Issue 12
CORRIDOR•FAIRMOUNT PARK•COLINA PARK•CASTLE•FOX CANYON•ISLENAIR•BAYRIDGE•TERALTA EAST•TERALTA WEST
Transforming
By David Ogul
May 2015
said Dana Brown, a member of San Diego’s Commission on Gang Prevention and Intervention who works on a number of related projects in City Heights. “Arturo and Gabby are on the ground floor of a phenomenal movement that I really believe can become a national model of an exemplary, replicable program to serve youth who were on a pipeline to prison.” Robert Ontiveros grew up in City Heights and has been working with the Sorianos since the beginning. “We’re giving them an opportunity to do something different, to see something different, to help them set goals, to look at their future,” he said. The key is the leadership. Soriano and Ontiveros say they were anything but choirboys in their youth. Soriano, 39, found more than his share of trouble while growing up in City Heights.
Transformando
VIDAS en
City Heights Por David Ogul City Heights Life
E
n lugar de esquivar balas en la calles, esquivan bolitas de paintball en un parque. En lugar de marcar con grafiti la propiedad pública, están limpiando grafiti de los columpios y canchas de baloncesto. En lugar de concentrarse en todo lo que está mal en su comunidad, se concentran en cómo mejorar las cosas. Bienvenido a Youth Empowerment (Empoderamiento Juvenil), una próspera iniciativa de base que comenzó por casualidad hace solo cinco meses cuando Arturo Soriano y su esposa Gabby caminaban por el Parque Teralta en City Heights buscando a un adolescente al que habían prometido ayudar. Cuando encontraron al joven en compañía de otros, Arturo se les unió para jugar baloncesto. Hablaron. Por horas. De la vida. De desafíos. De sueños. “Estábamos pasando el tiempo”, dijo Arturo Soriano.
[ EMPOWER, P2]
[ FORTALECIMIENTO, P2]
A thriving underground Una próspera economía economy in City Heights subterránea en City Heights By David Ogul City Heights Life
City Heights has become a critical cog in a wide-ranging, UC San Diego-led study because of what researchers call its “informal economy” that encompasses street vendors, yard sales and other underthe-radar ways of earning or supplementing a living. Some 87 percent of those surveyed use the cash-based informal economy to buy food, researchers found. And residents noted a strong interest in expanding and growing their informal businesses.
“The informal economy in City Heights is vibrant,” states a preliminary overview that was presented to the University of California Office of the President in March. “It is used by a variety of immigrant populations as well as longtime residents.” Such findings may be of no surprise to residents of City Heights, but the community’s informal economy has drawn interest as part of a larger UC San Diego Global Food Initiative. The Food Initiative is headed by researchers working with
[ ECONOMY, P3]
Por David Ogul City Heights Life
City Heights se ha convertido en importante engranaje de un amplio estudio que lleva a cabo UC San Diego debido a lo que los investigadores se refieren como su “economía informal”, la que incluye vendedores callejeros, ventas de patio y otras formas no habituales de generar o complementar sus ingresos. De acuerdo con los investigadores, el 87% de los encuestados usan efectivo para comprar comida dentro de la economía informal. Los residentes
también expresaron un gran interés por expandir y aumentar sus negocios informales. De acuerdo con el resumen preliminar presentado a la Oficina del Presidente de la Universidad de California en marzo, “City Heights cuenta con una pujante economía informal”. “Es usada por una variedad de poblaciones inmigrantes y residentes establecidos.” Puede que estos hallazgos no sorprendan a los residentes de City Heights, pero la economía informal de la comunidad
[ ECONOMÍA, P3]