Debutantes in da ’Hood

In Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer’s block-party drama Quinceañera, Echo Park plays a character full of contradiction, conflict and champurrado, coming of age with gentrification’s growing pains.
by Evan George

The two men’s neatly landscaped cactus garden stands out like a gorgeous, sun-kissed sore thumb. The rest of the houses on Waterloo Street sit bare and still; the residents are off at work. Except next door: An unsightly hole in the ground festers where a house once sat and the buzz of a saw announces the coming of condos.

Filmmakers Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer are sipping fizzy water in the living room of the house they’ve called home since 2001, when they moved from Melrose to Echo Park. Their wooly dogs Arthur and Paljoey nap under the dining room table.

In five years, they say they’ve charted the best dog walks in Elysian Park. They’ve also meticulously renovated their Craftsman house and befriended nearly every family on their block—all Latino, though that is changing.

Last year, they put those friendships to the ultimate test by enlisting everyone from the neighbors to their cleaning lady to help with the production of their indie film, Quinceañera. The heavy, coming-of-age drama casts Echo Park as itself—a neighborhood “coming up” and bubbling with class, racial and sexual conflict—and a gay, white couple as the gentrifying villains. Hovering somewhere between documentary and a well-scripted independent gem, the film tells the story of gentrification in a wholly unique voice: the neighborhood’s.

Their own house became that of the film’s gentrifying couple. Some of their neighbors moved out of their houses for weeks to allow the shooting of the movie, others became extras and played bit parts. “I think for most of them, they just thought, ‘Oh, Rich and Wash are nice and they have this little hobby, so we’ll accommodate them,’” says Glatzer.

Instead, Quinceañera—shot in three weeks for a measly $400,000—got scooped up by Sony Pictures Classics and swept both the Audience Award and the Dramatic Grand Jury Award at Sundance earlier this year. This week, as it hits American theaters, it will have already opened in 50 theaters across France and will soon reach Latvia, Iceland and even North Korea. The rest of the world will know Quinceañera as “Echo Park L.A..”—a marketing attempt to avoid mass international mispronunciation—so we’re entitled to feel a bit like the film belongs to us Angelenos.

After all, we know what the Latvians don’t: When a neighborhood “comes up” in Los Angeles, worlds collide, and fast. Soon enough, the media’s gentrification hounds are throwing around the phrase, “the next Silver Lake,” waxing sentimental about places they’ve never been and accusing the hipsters of eating too many tamales. Meanwhile, the Op-ed pages swell with suburban economics professors arguing the benefit of whitewashing the hood, of making it “safer.”

In Quinceañera it all comes up—the culture clashes of a threatened Latino community, the pros and cons of gentrification, the disruption of older values and the frustrating inability to stop change—and in it we find a story of Echo Park that hasn’t been told (by both sides of the street, so to speak). Westmoreland and Glatzer unapologetically declare their love for the neighborhood they know they’re helping change, and not always for the better.

“I think that a lot of people who move to Echo Park don’t want the neighborhood to change,” says Glatzer. “They love the fact that there are quinceañeras, or people selling fruit on the street and there’s more of a community, because that’s why they’re moving here. So it’s kind of unfortunate that that presence economically is one of the main factors that will start to flip the neighborhood over.”

It all began with a party.

In 2004, Lesley Campos asked her next-door neighbors, Wash and Richard, to attend the celebration of her 15th birthday as the official photographers. A birthday cake, a piñata, maybe a game of spin the bottle—easy, but why, they wondered, did Lesley ask them six months in advance?

At the time, everything they knew about a quinceañera came from the elaborate parties they’d glimpsed while driving past the park on Sundays—barbecues ablaze, trees decked out in pink streamers and neighborhood kids booty dancing in tuxedoes. Like most of the white people moving into the neighborhood, they didn’t get it.

Though many tie it to an Aztec coming-of-age ritual, the quinceañera is mostly a holdover from Spanish royalty, straight outta the duke’s court. Back then, when a girl reached the age of 15, she was ready to be married off. So, it was time to introduce her, and flaunt her purity. In Latin America, and for obvious reasons in places like Echo Park, the tradition holds strong—there’s just more Hummer limos involved nowadays.

“It was a mystery,” says Westmoreland. “I kept thinking ‘God, there’s a lot of weddings going on in the neighborhood,’ because to the untrained eye, it looks like someone’s getting married.”

Months before the party, the house next door was aflurry with activity. It quickly became obvious to Westmoreland and Glatzer that the quinceañera tradition reached far beyond any conception they had of a birthday; something more akin to a bat mitzvah mixed with a debutante’s ball—a sort of coming-of-age blowout—that at once celebrated the birthday girls’ virginity, and the impending loss thereof, that involved the entire extended family.

“We’d see kids rehearsing waltzes in the backyard over there, and it was really unlikely waltzes for these kinds of street kids to be taking seriously. We started realizing that this was beyond any idea of what we have for birthday parties,” says Glatzer.

One Sunday in June 2004, Lesley’s quinceañera finally arrived. Her family and friends spilled out of the storefront church they owned and operated on Sunset Boulevard. The chapel exploded with garlands of pink bouquets, the birthday girl’s friends looked the part of manic bridesmaids, and the older women broke out bottles of tequila. Wash and Richard found themselves behind a camera lens shooting pictures of a luminous beauty in a tiara and a silk dress who looked nothing like the little girl that walked their dogs when they were out of town.

“You know, someone’s going to make a movie about this someday,” Richard told Wash.

It wasn’t until six months later on New Year’s Day 2005 that they decided it would be them. The hangovers may have supplied the confidence, but it was the years they’d spent anxiously watching the neighborhood change that finally convinced them their voices could tell the story.

“We started talking about this neighborhood and how different two doors down someone’s life is from our lives, and having all these different cultures that live right next to each other. We just started getting really excited. That’s what felt like our way into the movie: to make a movie about a gentrifying neighborhood,” says Glatzer.

The pair originally intended to make Quinceañera a documentary, which is not surprising considering their backgrounds. Glatzer got his start in reality television, on shows like The Osbournes and Road Rules, and even co-created America’s Next Top Model. Westmoreland, on the other hand, honed his production chops in a different side of the industry that specializes in quasi-reality: adult films. In 2001, Westmoreland turned his observations of that industry into their first collaboration, The Fluffer. Then in 2004, he directed the award-winning documentary Gay Republicans.

Production of Quinceañera moved quickly. The script was written in February, casting was complete by March. The shoot, which ironically displaced a number of families on Waterloo Street so that the filmmakers could use their houses, took place over three weeks in April. And the finished product was ready by September 2005.

As fast as the process was, it barely stayed ahead of the lightening fast pace of the Echo Park real estate market.

Months after watching Lesley come of age in the quinceañera that left such a deep impression, Westmoreland and Glatzer watched their next-door neighbor suffer through another, more difficult coming-of-age ritual: Her family received an eviction notice requiring they vacate the backhouse that they’d rented for 28 years.

“They’d spent enough money to buy that house several times over. And then it changed hands,” says Glatzer.

For days Lesley camped out across the street with some of her friends, the couple says. “The little girl who was our quinceañera girl was so sad and didn’t want to leave,” says Glatzer. Lesley’s parents ended up pooling their resources with another family and bought a duplex elsewhere in Echo Park, but they weren’t the only ones to be forced off the block. And others weren’t as lucky.

Like many of the other neighbors on the block, the ones to the left of them—Juan and Candy Candaleria—opened their home to filming. In the movie their house was that of Quinceañera’s protagonist, Magdalena. Now, Westmoreland and Glatzer have no neighbors on that side. From their kitchen window they can hear only the sounds of construction.

“An old lady had it forever and she died and her heirs were really cruel in booting out the family—they’d been there for seven years—and they wrote them this letter that said, ‘You’ve been enjoying low rent all this time. Get out,’” explains Glatzer.

Westmoreland and Glatzer were part of a neighborhood contingent that fought the eviction and subsequent plans to build condos, but in the end the house came down.

“We tried to stop this thing next door. We tried to organize people, and it’s hard to get people on a weekday—people who work very hard and can’t afford to take the day off when they feel like it—to go to City Hall and protest it. I was telling them, you need a lawyer, you need to fight this, but they didn’t have the money, they just moved,” says Glatzer. Candy and her husband Juan left Waterloo Street and bought a house in South Central.

It all begins with a party. The pink garlands, the march from Aida, the storefront church—all as it had been for the directors’ own introduction to the quinceañera.

We meet Magdalena (Emily Rios), daughter of a preacher and the younger cousin of that day’s quinceañera princess, in the back of a Hummer limo. She’s solemn, pining over her boyfriend Herman, and worrying about her own up-coming fifteenth birthday that will almost certainly be bare-bones compared to the lavish one her well-to-do cousin has been given.

By the second scene, the drama explodes like the teenage hormones (or worse) in an after-school special.

Magdalena’s older cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia), a recently out-of-the-closet cholo kid with “213” tattooed on the nape of his thick neck, shows up uninvited to his sister’s quinceañera reception and gets clobbered by his ashamed father and machismo uncles. He’s been kicked out the house, we learn, and taken in by the only forgiving soul in the extended clan, Tio Tomas, his great-great uncle (Chalo Gonzales).

The cluttered backhouse that Tomas has lived in for years changes owners and he begins writing his rent checks to an affluent, white, gay couple with a taste for Latin boys. Carlos befriends them and gets invited to their house warming party, where the couple seduces him with the help of some tequila shots.

“Chorizo?” the older man asks in innuendo as he traces a finger over one of Carlos’ abdomen tats. “Travieso, troublemaker,” Carlos corrects him.

Meanwhile Magdalena’s one-track mind forgets all about the Hummer limo when she finds out she’s pregnant after a misguided session of heavy petting with Herman. Unconvinced by her pleas that she is still a virgin (she can’t bring herself to explain that Herman only “came on her leg”) her father kicks her out of the house and Magdalena ends up on Tio Tomas’ crowded sofa with Carlos. The old man is famous around Echo Park for the champurrado he sells from a shopping cart. To the kids, he’s the only one who forgives them for their supposed transgressions.

“I’m glad you have a special friend,” he tells Carlos one night as he heads up to the main house for a discreet sleepover with the younger of the two gay landlords. But what Carlos sees as a legit relationship, turns out to be a fling to the (suspiciously British) white guy—as we learn when the couple has friends over and brag about their “8 inches un-cut” boy toy.

Magdalena’s pregnancy starts to show, Carlos’ relationship with the couple goes up in flames and the new economics of the neighborhood starts to rear their ugly head. What goes up, must come down.

The racial, class and sexual tensions of the story surpass anything you’ll find on Telemundo, taking its cue more from old storytelling from Westmoreland’s hometown of Leeds than from Echo Park.

Kitchen Sink realism, which originated in British cinema in the late 50s and 60s, tackled gritty and dramatic plots with political commentary and sardonic humor. Always set in North England, and always starring the embattled working class, they were flush with racial, class and sexual conflicts—even depicting gay characters in an open fashion.

Location, most of all, played an essential role: The towns became characters inextricably linked to the storyline. “There’s always a scene at some point in the film where people sit above the town and look down on it to get a view of this place that they’re interacting with,” explains Glatzer.

As they began writing a script for their then-documentary, the Kitchen Sink comparisons seemed too perfect to pass up. “The whole idea of making a movie about working class people—people whose voices really hadn’t been heard in films before—in a very specific setting…all of this seemed to fit with our idea of making a film about Echo Park,” says Glatzer.

Some of the movie’s most dramatic conversations happen high atop Elysian Park on a park bench that overlooks the downtown skyline, in what any Angeleno would recognize could only be a view from Echo Park. There, Magdelena and Herman discuss desires of leaving the neighborhood, their relationship and later the unwanted pregnancy, all the while placing it firmly in the context of Echo Park. It’s a spot Glatzer and Westmoreland found while walking their dogs. They joke about pinning a “Now A Major Motion Picture” sign to the bench.

“To do a Kitchen Sink drama in England now, I think, would be very problematic,” says Westmoreland. “The territory has been gone over so many times, the stereotypes are sort of very well defined. So we thought to do it in Echo Park would actually make it interesting and avoid any of that trouble…that’s how it became Reggaeton style.”

There are two Emily Rioses on the sixth floor of the Beverly Hills Regent Hotel on the day of the L.A. press junket for Quinceañera: the one posing on a cardboard promotional poster, pudgy, pregnant and entirely in pink; and the 16-year-old actress whose life has already erupted into small-scale celebrity after starring in her first major movie.

One suite on the hotel floor holds the cameras and flashbulbs for television interviews in both English and Spanish, another is reserved for radio, and at the end of the hall a gourmet taco bar sits steaming with fat-free refried beans and mango salsa in silver platters that have been wheeled up by room service, with little menus that boast the same pudgy-faced movie poster.

A journalist with a British accent asks Rios inane questions like, “Who would you most like to work with next?” and “What
do you hate the most about being an actress?” But she handles the situation with poise, like only a career-minded teenager could. “I would have done this for free,” says Rios, “just because the role that I had, it was a major leading role other than a gardener, a cook or a gangster, which is what Latinos are usually cast for.”

But like the tale of neighborhood transition that Quinceañera tells, Hollywood seems to be absorbing its own outlying suburbs—indie films. The annexation seems to be happening thanks to the recent success of small-budget flicks and documentaries made by independent filmmakers. Like Echo Park’s real estate, suddenly there is interest where there was none before—and the big studios are swallowing whole the work of independent films in post-production.

It’s why the mostly newcomer stars of Quinceañera are rotating suites to give interview after interview; it’s also why moviegoers in North Korea may soon be watching Westmoreland and Glatzer’s cleaning lady on the big screen.

There is an undeniable irony to Echo Park’s story being told by the gentrifying class; it’s also what makes the film’s voice so distinctive, so new. Being gay, white industry types also gave the couple artistic license to look critically at their own peer group in ways other filmmakers couldn’t, or wouldn’t, have be able to. Like how they unabashedly confront the coded racism in the gay community when fetishizing other races, and the not-so-coded racism implicit in displacing people of lower incomes from the neighborhoods they’ve lived in all their lives. There’s an anger in Quinceañera that is surprising, but understandable. More than anything, it is honest.

Like Westmoreland says, “No one hates gentrifiers more than other gentrifiers.”

The story they tell feels real, which is not to say that it’s the documentary they originally imagined, but that it sprang from the real experiences of Waterloo Street. It absolutely shows that this project sprouted from just a moment of inquiry—that hung-over New Year’s Day—when the couple stopped to consider how different the lives of their neighbors might be from their own, and to appreciate the awesomeness of diversity.

For all the drama they launch at viewers, Glatzer and Westmoreland admirably restrain themselves from giving us just another black and white sob story of exile where the narrator is removed from the action, laying blame on someone else: a faceless mob of artists, hipsters, or gay bohemians. This city’s seen enough Los Angeles Times’ staffers—who live in Silver Lake—bemoaning gentrification in any neighborhood but their own.

Instead, Westmoreland and Glatzer indict people like themselves, by laying much of the blame right at their very own doorstep, quite literally. They point critically to the fact that the gay, white couple in the film shows no interest in understanding the block that they’ve inhabited. They don’t care to know what champurrado is, or how long the residents in the backhouse have lived there, or even what a quinceañera means.

Most interestingly, this film imagines a simple solution to many of gentrification’s woes when politics fail. The most important thing, it says, may be just wanting to understand who lives next door and what their life is like. You can protest the demolition of each and every house and still get nowhere. Things change: that, you can’t fight. To think otherwise is to make the same mistake Magdalena’s virginity-obsessed father makes. You cannot keep a girl fourteen forever, and there’s only so much you can do to keep your neighborhood the same.

There is, however, one way to stem the tide of gentrification that the filmmaking couple admits they don’t mind doing.

“When we see people driving around who would ask, ‘Is it safe living here,’” says Glatzer, “I say ‘Oh no, it’s a really bad neighborhood.” LAA