John Laslett, emeritus professor in the UCLA Department of History, has published a new book, “Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine” (University of Arizona Press, 2015).
The book discusses the eviction of Mexican-American residents from their homes in the Los Angeles community of Chavez Ravine to make way for the Dodgers’ ballpark in the 1950s. Laslett places the events in a broad historical and cultural context and argues that the evictions had an impact on civil rights and urban reform movements in Los Angeles in the 1960s through the 1990s. He also discusses how the evictions have influenced Chicano/a popular music, drama and literature to the present day.
Laslett’s research drew in part from the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center’s Michelle Kholos Brooks Collection of Manazar Gamboa Papers. Gamboa, born in Chavez Ravine in 1934, was a writer and community activist who wrote dozens of poems, plays, and short stories about the tight-knit barrio community in Elysian Park. His papers provided Laslett with information about the artistic and literary scene in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s.
