Rhiannon Evans Macfadyen on Precita Park
The location I picked was Precita Park. I have a long history on and of with Precita Park.
My family’s been in Carnaval, in almost every single one, since it first started. When I was still in my mommy’s belly, she was in the first Carnaval that was there. After Carnaval moved, we would do rehearsals for each year in that park before we would do the parade. I grew up just going there and thinking of it as the place where Carnaval happened.
I had always wanted to live there. Now we live somewhat nearby there and I am now taking my 2 year old daughter there almost every day—this whole new generation of memories that we’re starting to build. She can now walk us from home to that playground without us directing her.
I can tell where I am by the way it sounds. We always walk from the Folsom side down to the playground. We cross Folsom, and it’s all cars and buses. As you walk through, the sound of grass and the sound of dogs and the wind blowing and people’s little tiny radios playing as they’re having their picnic. And then, as you get further and further in towards the playground, there’s also a school right next to it, so all of a sudden, the sound of children playing gets louder and louder. Then, you get into the playground and it’s just children playing everywhere.
It has changed so much. I always really thought of Precita as working class—almost entirely people of color and super mixed. Everybody had families. It used to be like one big community.
Within the last three years, it’s been taken over by Bernal Heights, which has been coming down the hill like that movie The Fog, where it comes down the hill and takes things over. There’s still a lot of folks that go there, but it’s definitely more white, way more wealthy. A lot of nannies taking care of babies. The families don’t talk to each other that much.
There are days where it feels like there’s an afuence there that is very exclusive and not interested in talking. Sometimes, there are very few people there and it’s the well-of folks who have come down the hill and they just want to talk to each other and they don’t really want our kids to play with each other. To me, you go to a playground so that your kids can play with other kids. That gets really frustrating because I’ve been there for a long time.
There [have] been a couple of kids that she’s started to play with more regularly. I don’t know the parents. I just know the kids. The kids are all fantastic, especially the younger ones because the older ones—you have your friends and you want to keep playing with them, but when they’re under 3 years old, they all play together.
A parent—their body language changes. You walk into the park and they turn. Usually— not all the time, but usually—those are also the kids that don’t want to share their toys. They don’t want to play or get really uncomfortable when my little baby comes near them. They’ll get confused and walk away because they haven’t been forced to integrate with each other. It definitely trickles down to the kids. I hope that we can keep playing [at Precita].
I hope that the newer communities and the more white, affluent communities that are moving into that area start to open up to allow more culture to come back into the space. Every once in a while, they’ll be like a nice big party in the middle of the park, and you can hear them complaining.I really do see it’s possible, but I think it’s going to take a lot of work to get those two communities that are functioning in the same space to really start being together in the same space.