Insider/Outsider Perspectives

INSIDER PERSPECTIVE

At Hubert Humphrey Memorial Park in Pacoima, we met high school students from surrounding neighborhoods who shared their opinions and feelings about the changes that have been happening in the recent years. One of them shared about how she'd felt reluctant to participate in activities at the Humphrey Park Teen Center due the reputation in the 1990s. They realize the positive changes that have occurred.
These are programs that have been developed:

• Summer Nights Program
• Cultural Fairs
• Sporting Events such as Basketball, Soccer, Baseball..etc.
• Peace Makers

OUTSIDER PERSPECTIVE

When I tell friends and family that we're going to Panorama City and Pacoima, the reactions are notably the same: "Aren't you scared?" "Is that safe?" "What about gangs?" Knowing nothing of the area, I come with no preconceived notions of where we're going, the types of people we'll be meeting or the area we'll be exploring. When I first arrive in Panorama City, it seems like a "no-man's-land," just another exit on the highway. Arriving a little early, I drive around the area, which seems very quiet, with few people on the street. Besides the large shopping center at Nordhoff and Sepulveda, there appears to be little in the way of social capital. The area seems forgotten, a sort of ghost town.

Driving around Panorama City produces a sense of lurking danger. The image that sticks with me is iron bars and security gates surrounding apartment buildings, shops and schools. As our hosts from Comunities in Schools hustles us from the van to our next destination, it seems as if peril is looming and we're being watched.

The urban landscape in Pacoima, on the other hand, projects an appearance of normalcy. Residential streets lined with single-family homes and Section 8 apartment blocks, where laundry flaps on the line and clusters of canna lilies and oleander push against iron fences, give little indication of the violence that has wracked this community. On this hot August morning, youth enrolled in a summer program at Hubert Humphrey Memorial Park play video games at computer terminals, handball players charge a backstop of brightly painted murals and a few women relax with their children under shade umbrellas on park benches. It's difficult to imagine that up until six or seven years ago, as Coach Daniel Salazar tells us, this quiet park was considered too dangerous for recreational use by the community.

Pacoima Beautiful is a grassroots organization with programs that "provide environmental education, advocacy and local leadership in order to foster a healthy and safe environment." The irony of the name is not lost on the young women from PB's Youth Institute, who are well aware of their community's image as, in their words, "a poor, dirty ghetto." Their work is part of a texture of community organizing that, though perhaps still invisible to the outside eye, puts Pacoima well on its way to reversing the negative perspective outsiders have about its neighborhoods.