"¿Sabe?" Learning about South Broadway
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¿Sabe? Learning about South Broadway
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2015-06-29T11:56:02-07:00
Rafael Moreno has worked at record, video and now DVD stores on Broadway since the mid-1980s. He began working at a record shop next to the Million Dollar Theatre shortly after moving to the United States from Michoacán in 1983. He opened his own stall right before 2000 and called it Discoteca 2000 to commemorate this timing. We met in 2010, during a time when he shared his stall space in the Broadway-Spring Arcade with an especially gregarious woman named Samanta, who was fluent in English and Spanish. We continued to converse about movies and South Broadway even when Samanta moved to the Santee Alley area, and he eventually to the Broadway Trade Center. Here is the field note belonging to the above video clip, when he showed me where Million Dollar Theatre could be spotted in the film Yako.
Field note from Wednesday, February 27, 2013: Rafael and I started talking about Million Dollar Theatre and I mentioned the scene in México de mi corazón where Lola Beltran and Lucha Villa sing “Canción Mixteca.” He began reciting the first line, and we began to sing the song together for that line. Rafael shared that the song used to make him cry when he first arrived in Los Angeles. It made him think about how much he missed his ranch and his home in Michoacán. Then he remembered another movie that featured a scene at the Million Dollar, a movie called Yako. The DVD cover is not indicative of a film from the 1980s. Though it was released in 1986, the cover appears to make it look as though it was released more recently, with the main character’s head seemingly pasted over a more contemporary film poster, which also features a female character absent from the film altogether. Rafael had two customers while we talked, one was a man with a wife that would not enter the stall, staying in the arcade corridor. Why do the women never enter? Have I ever seen a woman in Rafa’s shop since Samanta moved out?
It is through Rafael that I met Francisco, who still works in the area he and Rafael at, at the Million Dollar Farmacia. The farmacia has been covered by the Los Angeles Times recently and Downtown News in the past. Francisco collects these stories and displays them in the store, his archives catalog the place history of Los Angeles and its diasporic nodes. He shows Adán (my partner in interviewing Rafael and Francisco) and me images of the ranch he aspires to return to in Mexico, mixed in with clippings of new stories promoting tourist destinations.