They celebrated in Highland Park and the San Fernando Valley, across Sunset Boulevard and Chavez Canyon, wherever there are Dodgers fans on the big blue marble we call Earth.
But in reality, East Los Angeles was the only place on the night the Blue Crew won its eighth World Series.
When the team advanced to the Fall Classic against the hated New York Yankees, I wanted to see the fans go wild in the Mexican-American heartland of the Southland. For decades, in the Atlantic Boulevard corridor between Whittier Boulevard and Olympic Boulevard, television news helicopters have been watching pachanga (shindigs), which spontaneously erupt every time the Dodgers, Lakers, or Mexico’s national men’s soccer team win a big game. I’ve been taking pictures.
Fans celebrate the Los Angeles Dodgers’ victory over the New York Yankees on Oct. 30, 2024, on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles.
(Jason Almond/Los Angeles Times)
After the Dodgers’ first three wins, the party was already so wild — street takeovers and cruising, loud bandas and loud fireworks — that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department ordered the fourth They sealed off the area for the duration of the war and announced that they would do the same for the fifth game.
How will fans react?
I showed up in the bottom of the first inning at Atlantic’s Paradise Sports Bar, just down the road from the Olympics. A mural of Vin Scully in a Lakers jersey and Kobe Bryant in a Dodgers jersey adorned the outside. Inside, a handmade cardboard circle with the Dodgers logo surrounded by crystals hung on the wall.
The audience was already depressed. The score was 3-0 Yankees.
My 73 year old father came as a special guest. He had claimed he was going “just to see” what would happen. When I suggested that perhaps it would be better to stay home in case things got out of hand, Papi laughed.
Fans celebrate the Los Angeles Dodgers’ victory over the New York Yankees on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles
(Jason Almond/Los Angeles Times)
“Mexicans will go crazy, but they won’t be stupid,” he said.
Paradise bartender Joanna Duque, 48, split me a Negra Modelo and my father a Coke. My father used to come here decades ago when he was a borracho (drunken man).
She asked where we were from and why we had come all the way from Anaheim. When I said I wanted to be in the East Los Angeles crowd after the Dodgers won, Duque laughed and shook his head.
“Oh, you want to see Desmadres,” the Guatemalan immigrant said in Spanish. “It’s going to be terrible.”
The Dodgers trailed 5-0 after three innings, and at first it seemed hopeless. To make matters worse, some pochos continued to select moody arena rock in English and Spanish, including Pink Floyd and the Doors, Enanitos Verdes, and Caifanes, from digital jukeboxes that drowned out baseball broadcasts. .
To distract from the noise, my father, wearing a Dodgers jersey and hat, rattled down a long-defunct bar he frequented on the East Side. El Regis and La India Bonita. Lisa’s place. Flamingo Inn.
(Jason Almond/Los Angeles Times)
“Hey, isn’t Steve Garvey running for something?” he asked suddenly. “I want to vote for him!”
More people poured in.
“Hope never dies, baby!” Duque shouted in Spanish to Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” As if on cue, the Dodgers scored five unearned runs in the top of the fifth inning, awakening the comatose Paradise crowd.
I put on Banda El Recodo’s “Por Una Mujer Casada” to lighten the mood and headed outside to see if law enforcement still had the Atlantic cordoned off.
still.
Back at the bar, Francisco Salas washes down a plate of chargrilled chicken with Dos Equis.
“Celebrating and vandalizing are two different things,” the Jalisco native said in Spanish. “If they sail calmly, that’s fine. But when they do this,” he twirled his finger in a circle, “then the police shut everything down.”
“What do you think?” Duque asked me. I said, like, block party, it would be great if the Security Department shut down Atlantic Island, but only if it allowed people to take over Atlantic Island.
She shook her head again.
“Have you ever been here? It’s not beautiful, because the problem is that people don’t respect authority. Les verts.” They didn’t care much about it.
East Los Angeles native Diana Parra was in Paradise with her friend Jorge Acosta, but she easily convinced him to come down from Palmdale for Game 5.
“We want to come here and see what I call a ‘parade,'” said Parra, 29. “It’s not official, it’s Whittier’s! You have to be with other Dodgers fans. It feels like home.”
Acosta, 42, said, “I couldn’t really celebrate the last championship game because of the coronavirus.” He was wearing a black and yellow Dodgers jersey with Kobe’s number 24 on it. “If we win, we deserve it.”
When the Dodgers scored two runs in the top of the eighth inning, the two, along with the rest of the team, cried out in joy.
He went out in the bottom of the 9th inning. The Atlantic Ocean was completely blocked from Olympic to just north of Whittier. A group of CHP officers waited, looking down at their smartphones streaming the game.
Fireworks exploded as Walker Buehler struck out Alex Verdugo to win the series. “I Love LA” blared inside Paradise, and everyone hugged and ordered more kvetas (buckets of beer).
(Jason Almond/Los Angeles Times)
I grabbed my dad and headed north across the Atlantic toward Whittier. Pachanga was on.
People streamed in from businesses and homes to hug and high-five friends and strangers alike. The car drove down Whittier, honking its horn, to the blockade, then made a U-turn. The air was thick with white smoke as people got stuck in traffic and burned out tires, and people fired bottle rockets from the backs of trucks.
Hundreds turned into thousands within minutes. We all marched eastward, gripped by a sense of communal ecstasy, unsure of what to do but act together.
What lockdown?
“People are definitely going out of control,” Salvador Rodriguez said in Spanish on the corner of Amalia Street. He lives just down the street. “But people want to celebrate. This is the sport of Los Angeles.”
Nearby, Parra and Acosta waved at cars as Ernesto Montes and David Perales, both of Maywood, filmed the incident on their smartphones.
“I came here to witness greatness,” Montez, 26, said, before shouting “Dodgers!”
Perales, 23, added, “LA has been through a tough time. Let’s show the world how we run LA!”
People lined the streets waving Dodger flags purchased from vendors, all wearing Dodger gear, including shirts and ponchos. jacket and sombrero. pajamas and scarves. We also have costumes and handkerchiefs for dogs.
Gustavo Flores and his wife, Sandy, were standing in front of the Taco Bell on the corner of Whittier and Goodrich streets with their two young children. Three-year-old Katarina was sleeping on her father’s shoulder.
(Jason Almond/Los Angeles Times)
“We want to show them history,” said Gustavo, 28, with a grin as wide as the grille of his Chevrolet Impala.
“We’ve been watching matches all our lives. We’ve been stressed out all night. This makes us happy!” Sandy, 25, added:
Freddie Sanguino of Hacienda Heights walked down the middle of Whittier Boulevard wearing a Freddie Freeman jersey. He held up a miniature World Series trophy and allowed people in cars to take selfies with him.
“I can’t even explain how good this feels,” Sanguino said. “’24 is going to be twice what it was before!’ This is for all Latinos! This is for Vinny! This is for Fernando!”
My father and I ended up in front of the Commerce Center, where we ran into three sets of cousins from my father’s side.
Among them were my Tio Santos’ eldest and youngest children, Susana and Diego. They held banners that read “Happy Birthday in Heaven, Santos” with pictures of Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Quique Hernandez and Max Muncy.
My Tio Santos was an avid Dodgers fan who passed away from a heart attack in early September. At his funeral, my cousins displayed an Ohtani jersey near his casket. On Friday, the day of the Dodgers’ official parade and Fernando Valenzuela’s birthday, Mi Tio would have turned 77 years old.
“‘Excitement’ doesn’t describe it, Gus,” Susannah told me. “There are no words in the dictionary that can describe the joy my father must have felt today. But the Dodgers’ victory was exactly how it should have been.”
Dodgers fans set off fireworks to celebrate the Los Angeles Dodgers’ victory over the New York Yankees in Game 5 of the World Series on Wednesday.
(Michael Blacksher/Los Angeles Times)
Two hours after the final outing, the fireworks were still going off when my dad and I left the house. People were still arriving.
In other parts of Los Angeles, the scene was even uglier. Crowds robbed and vandalized downtown stores. In Echo Park, idiots tagged a Metrobus and then set it on fire, burning it to the ground. Incidents like this will lead to media coverage that will further annoy those who claim that LA is an incorrigible hellhole.
It will no longer be my memory. What my dad and I experienced on Whittier Boulevard was LA at its best. I have never seen people so happy, so relatively calm, so united. They were full of joy and no lockdown could stop them.
We walked down Amalia to Olympic where we parked. The Atlantic Ocean was eerily quiet. Almost everything was taped off, including the Shell station, which has been the center of celebrations in the past. My father enjoyed watching the banda perform there while people danced in front of the gas pumps.
“They took away the tradition!” he said in Spanish with disgust. “Where’s Vanda? That’s what La Raza needs to have fun.”
A rocket exploded above us.
“Sometimes it’s our fault,” Papi said with a shrug. “Sí hacemos escándalo demás”
we have gone too far.
Fireworks went off again. He smiled now.
“I have no choice!”
