Alvin Taylor and his spouse, Delia Ruiz Taylor, look out over a vacant lot owned by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and let childhood reminiscences flood the empty house.
Within the late Fifties and early 60s, when the pair had been in grade faculty, the lot was a part of the square-mile tract often called Part 14. It was about the one place on the town the place staff of coloration, Indigenous Individuals and different marginalized folks may dwell in a desert playground that catered to the wealthy, glamorous and white.
Neighbors seemed out for each other in Part 14, the couple mentioned, and in contrast to in the remainder of the town, the place most of the tract’s residents labored as cooks, cleaners and building staff, no person appeared to care concerning the coloration of your pores and skin.
“We had been protected and cozy with it being Indian land as a result of white folks didn’t need us dwelling wherever else,” mentioned Alvin Taylor, now 71. “On the reservation, we had been all one large group.”
That spirit of fellowship prompted Taylor to hitch an experimental theater manufacturing that dramatizes the neighborhood’s distinct character and explores the complexities of its demise: “Displacement: Tales From Part 14.”
A Coachella Valley theater firm rehearses for a stage studying of “Displacement: Tales From Part 14,” which dramatizes the displacement of working-class residents from Part 14, the place the houses of tons of of residents had been razed within the Nineteen Sixties.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
Taylor needs audiences to know that an entire world was destroyed when his dwelling, Ruiz’s home and dozens of others in Part 14 had been both razed or burned to the bottom between 1959 and 1968 in acts that the state lawyer common’s workplace mentioned amounted to “a city-engineered holocaust.”
The sequence of staged readings by Inexperienced Room Theatre Co. is about to run June 22 and 23 at United Methodist Church of Palm Springs and June 28 to 30 on the Coachella Library’s Group Room.
The manufacturing comes as 350 survivors from Part 14 and greater than 1,000 descendants search restitution for the profound loss and trauma their households confronted. It additionally takes place throughout a statewide reckoning over slavery and racial injustice. A package deal of historic reparations payments is transferring by the state Legislature, and Indigenous Californians have made their very own strides in safeguarding, reclaiming and co-stewarding stolen ancestral lands.
Though some Palm Springs residents dispute that racial hostility led to the evictions, metropolis officers issued an apology in 2021 and just lately pledged to “proper that fallacious.” Town is engaged in settlement talks with the Palm Springs Part 14 Survivors group, which Taylor helped discovered earlier than stepping away just lately.
Alvin Taylor in Part 14, the place his household’s dwelling was seized.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
“Every thing was taken away from us,” Taylor mentioned of the harm households akin to his suffered.
However how do you calculate in {dollars} and cents — or seize in a group theater manufacturing — the lack of belonging and social concord that survivors say they found at Part 14? Additional complicating the story, the land was marked by trauma lengthy earlier than Black and brown transplants constructed their dwellings on it.
The tribe has been largely silent within the restitution debate, however on the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, video shows clarify how their land was seized and divided into parcels as newcomers flocked to the desert.
With few choices to lift income for the tribe, particular person Agua Caliente members had rented land to newcomers of coloration who had been barred by actual property covenants from dwelling elsewhere in Palm Springs.
By the late Fifties, although, Agua Caliente property homeowners had been compelled to pay for court-appointed conservators to manage the administration of their plots, together with terminating leases and dealing with the town to hold out evictions, in response to a 2019 article within the Smithsonian’s American Indian Journal concerning the tribe’s wrestle for sovereignty.
An undated picture of residential buildings on a parcel of land in downtown Palm Springs known as Part 14. Houses had been demolished within the early Nineteen Sixties, displacing as many as 1,000 folks, together with tons of of African Individuals.
(USC Library of Particular Assortment)
It’s a darkish and messy historical past. The staged studying isn’t meant to relitigate previous wrongs however to “uplift the voices, the reality and the humanity of the individuals who lived in that house” and assist audiences relate to their plight, mentioned Allison Scarlet Jaye, one of many playwrights.
There have been good occasions combined in with the unhealthy, the Taylors mentioned.
Taylor, who’s Black American, and Ruiz Taylor, who’s Mexican American, smile when remembering how the filth roads in Part 14 had been so slender that vehicles needed to scoot over to cross one another. Youngsters would stroll to the close by Fosters Freeze for soft-serve ice cream.
Taylor fondly impersonates the roving candy potato vendor who shouted into his loudspeaker: “All you little kids enjoying within the sand, go inform your mama, ‘Right here’s the Candy Potato Man!’”
Ruiz Taylor fortunately recollects strolling alongside a relative of her cousin who traveled up from Tijuana to promote tamales from her little pink wagon.
When the evictions began, Taylor says, his household and others bunked within the houses of beneficiant neighbors in Part 14, solely to have to maneuver once more when these households’ homes had been slated for demolition too. Taylor was simply 8 on the time. He remembers feeling as if he and his neighbors had been being herded like animals.
“As we continued to maneuver from one home to the opposite home — coming dwelling and seeing the home burn and smelling the smoke, seeing the bulldozers tearing down the buildings — it was a horrifying ordeal,” Taylor mentioned. “Imagine it or not, I nonetheless have nightmares.”
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
Ruiz Taylor, 72, says she was about to enter the seventh grade when her household moved out. Banks refused to lend her household cash as a result of they had been Latino. After they discovered a spot on the dusty outskirts of city, white neighbors hurled racial insults and yelled for them to “return to Mexico.” One younger man shot her within the leg with a BB gun, she says.
“After they took us out of right here, oh, we hated it,” she mentioned. “I used to be deathly afraid. I didn’t find out about the rest however dwelling right here.”
Taylor suppressed his personal psychological anguish as he grew to become a famend drummer. Little Richard noticed him sit in with a band performing on the Palm Springs Biltmore Lodge when he was a 14-year-old busboy, and earlier than Taylor knew it, he was opening for Elvis Presley in Vegas. He performed with the likes of Tina Turner, Invoice Withers, Jimi Hendrix, Ron Wooden and Cher, recorded music at George Harrison’s home, partied on the Concorde with Elton John and constructed a citadel for himself within the Hollywood Hills.
Residing a lifetime of intercourse, medication and rock ‘n’ roll supplied a distraction, for some time.
Taylor says he lastly bought sober with assist from his good friend Eric Clapton. Years of remedy and transferring again to his hometown have helped Taylor totally perceive why he wanted to flee from himself so badly. He credit his continued restoration to Ruiz Taylor, his boyhood crush and a fellow survivor whom he married in 2012.
Alvin Taylor has a star on the Palm Springs Stroll of Stars.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
Whereas the rocker has a plaque on the Palm Springs Stroll of Stars, throughout the road from Presley’s, he says he nonetheless suffers from post-traumatic stress due to what his household endured just some minutes’ drive away.
He hopes the theater manufacturing — through which he serves as a artistic marketing consultant and a forged member — will assist audiences see the tragedy of Part 14 in a clearer mild.
Taylor just lately parted methods with the survivors group, which is helmed by his sister Pearl Devers and represented by the Los Angeles civil rights lawyer Areva Martin, due to inside conflicts over a technique that he believes focuses an excessive amount of on anti-Black racism as a reason for the evictions.
Taylor agrees that white supremacy runs by Palm Springs’s historical past and that white residents at this time have to be keen to come clean with that legacy. However he believes the story of Part 14 was extra concerning the erasure of a loving and inclusive working-class neighborhood that didn’t mesh with the town’s glamorous picture.
A avenue scene close to the El Patron restaurant in downtown Palm Springs.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Occasions)
Martin mentioned that whereas she’s not against a play about Part 14, she believes the timing is untimely and that it’s unwise for survivors to participate, on condition that the group is in delicate authorized talks with the town.
She rejected the notion that the group has develop into too targeted on Black survivors, noting that the group has known as for establishing a racial and cultural therapeutic heart the place survivors of all backgrounds can share their tales. Martin mentioned that the group has made efforts to acknowledge and rejoice the Latino survivors and that it has welcomed assist from the town’s massive LGBTQ+ group.
In response to an L.A. Occasions request for remark about Taylor’s issues and his participation within the manufacturing, the Palm Springs Part 14 group emailed an announcement from its governing board, which incorporates Devers.
“We all know that in each combat for justice, there are forces that can search to divide us and distract us from the mission at hand,” the assertion reads. “As we all the time have, we stay singularly targeted on reaching a decision in partnership with the Metropolis of Palm Springs. That — and solely that — will stay our high precedence till there’s restitution.”
Taylor says he needs solely to verify the staged studying precisely captures the experiences of all who known as Part 14 dwelling.
“It’s my feeling that as a Part 14 survivor and a founding member of the survivors group that if somebody was to go and do a play, they’ve bought to speak to somebody who was there,” he mentioned.
Alvin Taylor, left, laughs with forged member Eddie Stephens throughout a rehearsal for “Displacement: Tales From Part 14,” concerning the compelled removing of residents from Part 14.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
Throughout one current rehearsal, forged members from completely different racial backgrounds learn items of narration and dialogue that they’ve written and that Jaye and fellow playwright Jerome Joseph Gentes will form right into a remaining script.
Taylor, his slim body draped in a button-down shirt with a jazzy geometric print, presents historic particulars to information the group dialogue.
All through the rehearsal, the actors painting Part 14 as a bubble — geographically hooked up to Palm Springs, but socially sealed off from it. Till the mid-Nineteen Sixties, a lot of the metropolis’s resorts, nightspots and nation golf equipment had been off-limits to patrons of coloration and Jews. Taylor says his mom crossed forwards and backwards between these worlds as a result of she labored as a housekeeper for Lucille Ball.
Director and theater firm Government Creative Director David Catanzarite says his focus as an artist with a combined background is to light up the neglected tales of Black and brown folks within the Coachella Valley. Whereas the Part 14 tragedy is well-documented, these historic information include many layers that make for wealthy materials on which to base a fictional account, he mentioned.
Above all, Catanzarite needs the manufacturing to assist Palm Springs reckon with its previous and transfer towards collective therapeutic.
“It is a fact and reconciliation challenge,” he mentioned.
Gentes, a current transplant to Palm Springs who’s descended from the Gros Ventre and Standing Rock tribes, says he hopes that Part 14 survivors get justice. However he wonders: Is there ever an ideal second to have interaction artistically with a trauma that sweeps up so many lives and divulges a lot a couple of metropolis’s social cloth?
“Theater can at the very least jump-start the dialog,” Gentes mentioned.
For Taylor, who’s about to publish a memoir documenting his life and profession, truth-telling stays an agonizing endeavor.
“I may begin crying any minute,” he mentioned by cellphone earlier than revisiting Part 14 along with his spouse.
Joe Abner along with his spouse, Vera, stroll by lots that was as soon as part of Part 14 the place he grew up in Palm Springs.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Occasions)
Taylor says he has buddies from the previous Part 14 who’re nonetheless misplaced and dwelling with drug and alcohol issues that he believes stem from the traumas they endured as survivors. He needs his foray into theater to indicate them that it’s wholesome to look at the foundation causes of your life crises.
On the web site with Ruiz Taylor, Taylor’s voice cracks as he displays on what his neighborhood meant to him. Overgrown grass yellows within the scorching desert solar. Just a few concrete foundations stay the place houses as soon as stood.
Mt. San Jacinto rises greater than 10,000 ft above a skyline of glistening palms.
It’s a bittersweet alternative for Taylor to ponder the which means of dwelling and the worth of reclaiming — at the very least on an emotional stage — the place you got here from.
