Neighborhood watch

Back in the 1930s, before Ventura had a highway overpass, there was a little neighborhood on the West side called Tortilla Flats, wedged between the Ventura River and the Pacific Ocean, defined by some of the streets we know now — Figueroa, Meta, Main, Garden — and others that no longer exist. Back when being a community meant knowing all your neighbors, when kids went fishing to eat, when the Green Mill Ballroom was the most happening place in town, a band of families called Tortilla Flats home. They smelled spillage every morning, as produce trucks tipped over on the Salad Bowl Curve — in fact, they gave that curve its name. Many of these neighbors were from the oldest families in Ventura, who laid the foundation for the city as we know it, who have witnessed the growth and expansion, and felt its loss.

The families of Tortilla Flats were a microcosm of the ethnic diversity that would later spread throughout Ventura; Mexican, Chumash, Chinese and African-American lived side-by-side, growing vegetables on the banks of the river, bathing in the river and working hard to make ends meet. Lupe Gonzalez, a former Tortilla Flats child, said, “I guess we were eating pretty good, even though we were so poor. We grew all our own food, so we were pretty much vegetarians — and all organic!”

The simpler life and memories of the innocence of childhood were in the air at the Bell Arts Factory the night of Aug. 17, as former residents of Tortilla Flats, along with their children and grandchildren, crowded into the building’s community room to share stories of old times and celebrate the rebirth of the artistic project that commemorates their neighborhood. A new mural will soon be installed on the Figueroa Street underpass, dedicated to the collective history of this vibrant community. The mural is itself a re-creation: a new version and interpretation of a 1995 project that, like Tortilla Flats, did not survive the passage of time.

Often, progress brings disruption, and never was that truer than in the 1950s, when the City of Ventura announced they would be building the Highway 101 overpass straight through Tortilla Flats. All remaining residents were forced to relocate, and the community was gradually built over. Most of what was once Tortilla Flats is now the parking lot at Seaside Park. But the people of Tortilla Flats knew that community meant more than a shared street address; though all this happened 50 years ago, the children of Tortilla Flats still know each other well, still laugh together about the youth they shared. And thanks to the collaborative team of MB Hanrahan and Moses Mora, we can all catch a glimpse of their past, too.

In 1995, Hanrahan, an accomplished muralist whose colorful work decorates much of Westside Ventura, and Mora, an activist and community artist, decided to tell the story of Tortilla Flats through art. Mora, who was born in Tortilla Flats, said the team wanted to “preserve the legacy of the first neighborhood of Ventura … and to inform the community.” The two drew up a proposal for a city grant and received $1,500 for the first mural. By that time, they had already begun interviewing families and were compelled by the richness of their memories.

Soon, Mora said, it became clear they needed to reunite the displaced residents of Tortilla Flats. They threw a reunion party at Nicholby’s to get the old-timers talking about old times, and soon the stories piled on top of each other. Hanrahan and Mora became amateur historians in their own right; Suzanne Lawrence, of the Ventura County Museum, really drilled the point home when she shared that no one had ever collected historical data on the Tortilla Flats neighborhood. Mora was able to get some of the older families to open up to him. He began recording interviews, which Lawrence is in the process of transcribing for the museum.

Eventually, the mural was born and installed, with Hanrahan and Mora leading and community members stopping by to contribute their own artistic flair to the project. Ironically, the mural itself could only be temporary: painted on wooden panels in order to be easily taken down, the paint couldn’t stand the pressures of time and weather. Just five years later, it was dismantled, with some of the panels distributed to the families they depicted. The Tortilla Flats mural project, much like the neighborhood itself, fell by the wayside.

But Hanrahan and Mora knew the momentous task they had undertaken deserved to be completed — permanently and successfully, for future and native Venturans, to understand the rich past of their city. With the power of words, memories and history on their side, they lobbied the City of Ventura, who recently gave the team a second grant to recreate the mural and install it permanently on the Figueroa Street overpass, part of the development that cut straight through the heart of Tortilla Flats.

Hanrahan drew inspiration for the mural from old photographs gathered during interviews, as well as from the stories themselves. The panels, which are on display at the Bell Arts Factory until their permanent installation, use lively colors and styles to capture the memories as vibrantly as possible. In addition, the new mural incorporates ceramic tiles inlaid with actual photographs of the original Ventura families. Some of the panels are in shades of blue and white, others all in shades of brown, to recapture the look of a weathered photograph; most are of real people who called Tortilla Flats home, though not all are identified. If there was no photograph to match the story, Hanrahan used her artistic license to portray the mood and magical tone of memory.

The mural pays tribute to people and places alike, with panels of the Flying A gas station, the Iglesia Mexicana and Shores Acres, the Dust Bowl refugee camp that blended into the vivacious fabric of Tortilla Flats. Some of the brightest characters of the old neighborhood are memorialized as well: Buddy Gibson, whose band the Customs were regional heartthrobs, and the late Bea Wyatt, known for her painted rock garden and driveway made of squares of multi-colored carpet. But perhaps the most poignant and relevant of the panels are those simple portraits that tell the story of the working class people who called Tortilla Flats home. One panel, done in soft blues, portrays a small boy strumming a guitar on a front porch with two men. The caption simply reads, “Rainy McDonald has a nephew who used to sit on the porch playing blues, we would sit around and learn from him.”

One panel of the old mural remains on display, in which an unnamed boy wearing suspenders and a mischievous smile waits on the train tracks, perhaps to play chicken, or meet his buddies. Men with moustaches and casual cigarettes stare out from another sepia-toned panel; the caption names them all, but their image is a universal snapshot, a frozen moment from a time and place that matters to modern-day Ventura.

To celebrate the completion of the new mural, the newly formed Tortilla Flats Reunion Committee invited the old families and the public to come together for an evening of storytelling. The atmosphere was electric; the constant hum of conversation buzzed in the room as the braver old-timers, their children and their grandchildren took the microphone to tell jokes, laugh and remember. Suzanne Lawrence was there to remind the audience of the historic significance of the mural, and of the memories: “A lot of the first families are gone now, and these stories would have gone with them if not for the mural.”

Whenever one person struggled to recall a street name, or the year he returned from the Marines, several audience members would jump in to remind him. The evening was, in fact, a family reunion, the joining of hearts and minds that still think of themselves as the Tortilla Flats community, and that still call those streets home, even if they no longer exist. Buddy Gibson spoke, recalling what bound the neighbors together: “We share the same stories; even though we moved out, we kept growing together, and sharing names. It’s up to us to keep those names alive, and honor them.”

We forget too often that history is not so distant from the present. History is the story of our parents’ births, and of our grandparents’ struggles; it is just behind us, waiting for us to turn and find it. We have a responsibility, as Hanrahan and Mora have so brilliantly done, to bring the photographs to life, to find the colors and ask the questions before they have slipped from our grasp.

Later that night, I drove down Figueroa Street to see the overpass where the mural will be installed, and to try and imagine what that area looked like when it was called Tortilla Flats. I stood, listening to the rushing of cars overhead, and I could almost hear Johnny Barrio’s uncles, as he told of them, driving their big old car with the top down and a jug of wine, feet up on the dashboard, singing old Mexican songs.