Virginia Ave.
By Long Lim
8 February 2008
My brothers and sisters had never paid attention to where we lived while we were growing up. For us, Virginia Ave. was just Virginia Ave. It was where home was, and not much else. It was a block of condominiums divided down the middle by a single street. It was subsidized government housing where close to seventy five percent of the families where on welfare or other forms of government aid.
Our neighborhood was at the heart of Story & King, an area of East San Jose that had become a center for Mexican gang violence. It was home to half of the citie's Lation gangs. People who live here call it the "East Side". Geraldo Rivera called it the "ghetto side of town".
In the 1930s, Caesar Chavez moved his family here. It was here that Caesar Chavez began organizing the local Mexican-American and registering voters. Down the street from Virginia Ave. is King Road where the first grocery stores that were targeted by the grape boycotts are.
At the end of Virginia Ave was where the school bus stop arrived in the morning. We would ride it for about six blocks to Arbuckle and Miller Elementary. There was King Supermarket where famillies went to exchange food stamps for cash. There was the highway overpass where the homeless and junkies spent their time.
Behind our backyard fence was the PAL football field which was run by the San Jose Sheriff's Department. To keep people from sneaking into games, they lined the top of our fence with barbwire. On Sunday and Monday nights, when they held their games, the field lights would shine into our home.
These days, my neighborhood is being redeveloped. There is a Starbucks at the street corner with a Jamba Juice on the other side. Where there use to be mounds of sand from a failed development plan, there is a laundrymat and convinece store. Our old condominium is still there. I had planned to knock on the door and see who lives there now, but an old man who remembered me told me that it had become home to a group of car thieves.
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