Wear Your Heart On Your Sleeve ....

I've seen all kinds of things in my life, but never met a 16 year old girl like this one, and you'll learn a lot about the city you live in once you're ready to dig a little deeper.

Boyle Heights is a good place to start.






"All Roads lead to Boyle Heights"

Boyle Heights is a district just east of Downtown Los Angeles on the East Side and was once called 'Paradon Blanco' when California was part of Mexico.
Boyle Heights has long been a destination for newcomers to Los Angeles.

Unlike the middle- and lower-middle-class neighborhoods on the bluffs, "The Flats" was one of the most impoverished areas of the city, and by the 1930s was considered one of the last remaining slums in the United States.
Reformer Jacob Riis had visited The Flats in the early 1910s and declared them worse than anything in New York; a survey conducted by the city in the 1937 deemed 20% of the city's dwellings "unfit for human habitation," including most of The Flats.

Soon after the end the war, Aliso Village and Pico Gardens lost most of their non-Latino populations, and were increasingly populated by Mexican immigrants. With the river on one side and a massive rail yard on another, the construction of the East Los Angeles Interchange further isolated them from the rest of the city, and the closure of the Pacific Electric Railway dramatically reduced the mobility of many of the projects' residents.
By the 1970s, overcrowding had eliminated much of Aliso Village's once-vaunted green spaces, physical deterioration had become rampant, and gangs were an increasing problem.

As of the census of 2000, there are 86,734 people in the neighborhood.

The racial identification of the neighborhood is 93.73% Latino, 2.44% Asian, 2.18% White and 1.65% "Other races".