Mom could never understand why Dad refused to say he was from El Sereno. He lived in the projects in El Sereno when he was in the seventh grade. After his parents divorced, his mother moved him and his three sisters from house to house and city to city until junior high, when they landed in City Terrace. That was where Dad liked to say he was from. Every Sunday afternoon, my parents argued about which neighborhood was superior as we drove from West Covina to El Sereno to visit Mom’s parents. Like we did every time our parents bickered, my sister Candice and I would stay quiet in the backseat, where magazine shreds and candy crumbs were stuffed into the cracks and ground into the floor. I swore to Switzerland neutrality when my parents tried to rope me in. Candice had the excuse that she was autistic and couldn’t talk. Eventually, our parents would get too wrapped up in outdoing each other to pay attention to us.

“The girls are prettier in City Terrace,” Dad said.

Mom glared.

“You and your sisters were an anomaly,” he clarified.

El Sereno and City Terrace are only three miles apart on Google Maps. As far as Mom and Dad were concerned, those three miles may as well have been three oceans.

One day, we were rolling into the McDonald’s drive-thru at City Terrace, and we saw a large black banner with yellow print that said: “McDick 2 for $5.” It was supposed to say McPick, but someone had spray-painted the bottom of the ‘P.’

“Only in City Terrace could something like that happen,” Mom said.

“What?” Dad said. “Like that wouldn’t happen in El Sereno.”

Another time, Dad was tapping on the steering wheel as he looked out the window and told me how his friends Gilbert, Alex, and Michael pulled people out of a burning house on Eastern Avenue. They had missed the bus to school, and as they were walking, they saw smoke coming out of the building. Michael, the most impulsive of the group, picked up a cinder block and threw it through the window. Once inside, the boys crawled along the ground to avoid the smoke, and they dragged the people out with their skinny arms. The fire department told them they were heroes.

“If El Sereno people had been passing by, they would have kept on walking,” said Dad.

“If it was El Sereno, the house wouldn’t have caught fire in the first place,” replied Mom.

Needless to say, my parents were ready to talk when I asked what made their neighborhoods so great. Dad took us cruising in City Terrace, pointing out the Coin Wash where a dime would earn a glorious few minutes with the dryer on cold mornings, the dinky McDonald’s where his sister Dorine choked on the smell of French fries and where his friends got robbed, the hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Chano’s where Dad’s friends would cry out “Chano!” until one day a man shouted, “I’m Chano, what do you want?” People I had hardly or never heard of—Eddie, Ricardo, Sergio, Gilbert, Henry, David—became mythological figures, scraggly young men in JCPenney white undershirts and Levi’s jeans. They climbed over moving trains and ran from a helicopter spotlight that wasn’t even looking for them. Every year, they beat the spoiled El Sereno Little League team, whose members received new uniforms every year. Cousin Henry used to drag himself near the stadium—looking all pobre, as Dad would say—to get extra Dodgers tickets from people who pitied him. Then he would scalp the tickets. Ricardo would go into Eva’s Liquor Store to buy alcohol because he looked like a grown man.

City Terrace, Dad explained, inherited its name from the fact that all the houses were terraced on the hills, one level after another until you reached the bottom. Our family’s car squeezed between the houses that were packed like dented, peeling soup cans on a grocery store shelf. When we reached his old duplex, we could see the city below—tiny white squares, cars the size of beetles, and fist-shaped trees.

“You had a view of El Sereno!” Mom cried.

“We lived in the front, and other people lived in the back and the level below,” Dad said. “The place was not as nice as it is now.”

As Dad continued his City Terrace tour, I noticed a rusted white iron fence in front of one the houses.

“People took pride in their homes,” Dad said, as if he had seen my gaze. “Like that fence, they wouldn’t have the money to go to Home Depot and replace it, but they would send their kid out there to repaint it.”

Dad had a comment or a story for every corner store, closed building, or spruced up house that we drove by. Although he had a lot of admiration behind his stories, we never stepped out of the car.

“This is a hazard area,” Dad explained.

“Let’s not go there,” Mom said.  “Get us out of here.”

“C’mon, you’re with me.”

Mom had a more stable life than Dad, but she still didn’t live in a “nice” neighborhood. However, she was so sheltered in her home that this reality slipped by her when she was growing up.

“I didn’t know how bleak it was,” she said.

Mom told me that once when she was very young and walking with her sisters to the park in the summertime, they saw blood on the wall. Vaguely, she thought she remembered a body in the ivy.

“We must have reported it to the office,” she said. “Then we went on our way to go swimming.”

I gasped, and she winced.

“Now that I think about it, it hits me,” she said. “But things don’t affect you when you’re little like they do when you’re older.”

I had a hard time imagining something like that not hitting me in the chest, no matter how little I was.

When we were still driving through City Terrace, Dad pointed to a house and said, “That was where David’s little brother was hit during a drive-by shooting. He was eating a bowl of cereal, watching the baseball game.”

“I wonder if the mom still lives there,” said Mom.

No one had an answer.

In West Covina suburbia, I could walk without fear by decorated green front yards and lace-trimmed houses with pebbles lining their walkways. The scariest thing was when a dog would bark at me. No one tempted me with drugs, despite what the D.A.R.E. program had me convinced would happen. The sight of blood made me sick. I had never seen guns except in action movies.

When we crossed the train tracks, my parents announced it as the dividing line between their neighborhoods.

“Now we’re in El Sereno!” Mom exclaimed. “Your dad was literally on the other side of the tracks.” Mom grinned, then continued. “I didn’t know what the projects were until I met your Dad. I saw the apartments in El Sereno, but I didn’t realize that’s what they were called until he explained it to me.”

When they started dating, Dad had also needed to explain that you only ate egg salad when money was tight, not for a special occasion like Mom thought growing up.

“We had to eat it all the time,” he said with a grimace. “All it has is hard-boiled egg and mayonnaise.”

“With salt!” Mom protested, as if that made it gourmet.

Later, Grandma Mimores, my mom’s mom, had to tell her that Dad was right. Thankfully, I never had to eat it.

Meanwhile, back on the neighborhood tour, we passed El Sereno Park.

“This is the park where I learned to swim,” Mom said. “I wasn’t out on the streets like your dad. All we did was walk to catechism or folklórico or guitar lessons. I was a good kid.”

“You beat up your neighbor when you were a kid!” cried Dad.

“What?” I said.

“Your Uncle Junior was fighting with the older brother, so April and I fought the little brother,” Mom said. “It was more wrestling, really.”

Finally, we stopped in front of my grandparents’ house. It had large front windows, but for as long as I could remember, the white curtains had always concealed the living room from the outside looking in. Two sets of steps, one made of concrete and the other made of brown brick, marched up to the house. Grandpa Felix had planted a terraced garden in front of the house with green and gray-green succulents, trimmed grass, birds of paradise, and broad-leafed trees. The cement sidewalk in the middle of the garden led to a grassy bank, which had circular stepping-stones that led to the gate. The stepping-stones had all the grandchildren’s handprints—except those of my sister Candice, whose shoes were used instead of her hands.

While Dad was parking the car on the street in front of my grandparents’ house, Mom pointed to her old bedroom window.

“Your dad one time passed by on his motorcycle, and I saw him through that window,” she said.

“Yeah, she was waiting to see if I would go by,” added Dad.

“No! You had to go out of your way to pass our house.”

The lighting inside my grandparents’ house was dismal. Whenever we visited, I would flick on the switch and blink when the room seemed to get darker. Wood panels lined the walls of the den. Kids’ and grandkids’ portraits—some painted by Mom—hung all over the place. The back of the den displayed awards and plaques accrued over two generations, including Uncle Junior’s soccer trophy:

PAN AMERICAN SOCCER CLUB

Fundado en 1945

Certificado en honor de

FELIX CHAVEZ

Gran Jugador Del Equipo

Julio de 1990

Someone—probably Grandpa—had put a sombrero and serape on the little gold statue kicking a soccer ball. Other awards were a tad more unexpected, like cousin Jennifer’s:

DIAPER OLYMPICS

JENNIFER APRIL MAREZ

OCT 2 1982

 Meanwhile, pictures showed grandkids wearing soccer jerseys or cheerleader uniforms or prom tuxedos, riding in plastic cars, and posing for holiday cards. I was looking at a picture of a four-year-old me with my mom on a school field trip to the fire station when someone knocked on the door and the rabble poured in.

That day, cousin Brittany was bringing her baby Richard, whom she called her “little monster” and who was the only great grandchild of the family at the time. His presence meant that all of Mom’s siblings and some of their grown-up kids would show up, which meant lots of expensive wine from my uncle and Tecate beer from my grandpa and loud conversations riddled with crude humor. When my mom asked if I wanted some wine, my uncle gasped and asked how old I was—not that it mattered much, but time always seemed to pass my relatives by.

As my extroverted relatives continued to talk (or shout) to each other, I slid out to the side yard of the house. Not much of a yard, per se. It was covered in concrete without a speck of grass. Bars crisscrossed the windows. I observed the greenery planted behind the short cement wall to my left while skidding my hand across the textured wall of the house on my right. When I arrived at the gate, I looked at the neighborhood outside. All the houses across the way were packed and stacked up the hill just like in Dad’s neighborhood. If an outsider rode around El Sereno and City Terrace the way I had, but without anyone to explain it to them, would they be able to even tell the difference?

“Did you ride your bike around the tree?” Dad asked from behind me.

I turned around and frowned at him.

“This place used to have grass,” he said. “When they were putting the plants with the cement wall, Grandpa was worried there wouldn’t be room left for you to ride your bike around the tree.”

Dad pointed to the small lemon tree in the corner and laughed.

We lived with my grandparents when I was around four years old. We moved from Nevada, where my sister and I were born, because our parents found it too hard to make ends meet there. I attended Farmdale Elementary down the street, continuing the legacy of the Chavez girls. I had the same preschool teacher as my mom. Every day, I passed walls covered with murals of children: a little boy lifting a model of a city building, another boy playing with an old-fashioned police car, and a girl with a pencil and DARE 2 DREAM BIG and IMAGINATION on either side of her. Aunt Renee was still teaching at Farmdale seventeen years after I left. At that point, the colors in the murals had washed out to the point that the boy holding up the building had lost most of his smile.

I only lived in El Sereno with my family for a year, like Dad did when he was a kid. But I lived in a house my grandparents had bought, the same house that Mom lived in when she was a kid—not in the projects. I had never seen City Terrace until I asked my dad to show it to me. Growing up, I heard East Los Angeles as a vague blanket statement and I assumed it equaled El Sereno—the scariest, baddest part of the city you could find.

When I was in middle school, we were talking about bad neighborhoods, and I piped up that my mom was from El Sereno and that we used to live there.

“That’s not a bad neighborhood,” said one kid.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “My mom’s car got shot there!”

It was true. I remember being in my grandparents’ kitchen, hearing the distant popping sounds, and thinking this is what people mean by drive-by as we threw ourselves on the ground. Thankfully, no one had been hurt. However, when we went to survey the scene below, we discovered that a bullet had gouged the hood of my mom’s white car before jumping up past the window. Even though Mom had it painted, you could still see the dip that the bullet left behind. That was enough proof for me to believe that Mom lived a dangerous, action-movie lifestyle as a kid. Violence was my imagination, not my reality.

Despite the chaos that found its way into El Sereno, Mom always looked with fondness at her house and the neighborhood she visited every single week.

“There are very beautiful green hills there,” Mom told me. “I used to think that I wanted to live there forever.”

Dad didn’t finish high school in City Terrace. Grandma Betty moved them to Monterey Park at the end of his junior year because it was a nicer neighborhood. When he grew up and had his family, he eventually moved us to the suburbs in West Covina, where I went to a nice public school and took AP classes with other nerdy kids, where I complained about how I was sick of Mom’s chicken taquitos, and where I lived in the same white house on the street corner until I left for college. I enjoyed the happy, quiet life that my parents made for me in West Covina, but I didn’t take up arms against someone from Azusa or Covina or Walnut if they dared show their city logo. Meanwhile, over thirty years after the fact, Dad was still defending his City Terrace against Mom’s El Sereno.

“People aren’t proud to be from El Sereno,” Dad told me. “They’d say, ‘I live in borderland Alhambra.’ What kind of community says that?” He shook his head. “City Terrace is just City Terrace.”

“Because you’re not near anything, just the freeway!” Mom protested.

“We were proud, that’s what it is.”

And so they were.