The Madonnas of Echo Park
Brando Skyhorse
Chapter 1, Bienvenidos: Hector

Pg 1-2: "I measure the land not by what I have but by what I have lost, because the more you lose, the more American you can become..." Pg2 cont. "What I thought I could not lose was my place in this country. How can you lose something that never belonged to you?"
Pg 6-7: "The site is a teardown in Angelino Heights, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and overlooks Echo Park Lake. Rows of three- and four-story Victorian-era homes, restored to the turn-of-the-century condition, have been selling for a couple million dollars each, while those houses that are too far gone are torn down and rebuilt from scratch to resemble 'old' houses using a mix of new materials and relics salvaged from other gutted teardowns. Three historic Victorian mansions that could have fit thirty homeless families have been demolished for a new modern, Victorian-style house..."
Pg 7: "It's a bad sign, and one of them crosses his chest, saying either the Virgin Mary or the Devil must be looking out for me."
Pg13: "'Thank the Virgin Mary for me tonight before you go to bed.'"
Pg 8: "Stay here until 8:00 p.m. and you get a twenty-dollar bill. There's a rumor that as a bonus Tenant takes the occasional man out to may rounds of drinks followed by a hearty dinner in a sit-down 'American-style' restaurant where the plates are as big as hubcaps..."
Pg 9: "Her black bob and ivory mestizo skin..."
Pg 14: "Tenant runs a red light and almost collides with a fast-moving MTA bus that has to swerve out of our way."
Pg 15: "The Option was one of Hollywood's oldest and most prestigious eateries. I brought Aurora there on the bus every Christmas Day when she was a child. She hated that my hands smelled like offal and wasn't impressed with the grand, oak-and-glass-paneled front entrance where pen-and-ink caricatures of famous celebrities (my favorite was Rita Hayworth's) looked down at customers from either side of a long, haunted corridor that appeared to expand as you walked along it."
Pg 16: "I wanted Felicia to marvel at how my peers in the restaurant respected and admired me, yet she cared nothing for my job, thought nothing of me clearing drinks from the mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley's table, where he'd enjoy the house's signature martini..."
Pg 17: "Her life, in which she had always believed in the transcendence of fury, set an example for her daughter to turn against her father, excommunicating me to a region of the living dead, a place where the deceased form new families, creating and inventing new histories and biographies, while the ones left behind announce their demise with the ripping of mailbox labels and pictures in two."
Pg 20: "I have no heartbreaking story of the journey here; the heartbreaking story is here, in this small couple square miles of land called Echo Park. Running through the desert, trying to stay ahead of the border patrol or the Minutemen or the coyotes or the rats isn't the story. It isn't the getting here, its the staying here."
Pg 21: "Basking hin the light is a young woman feeling her way through the crowd, like a blind person searching for her mis-placed sight-- lost but determined. She's about my daughter's age and has a sweaty, radiant glow, the kind you get from spending your day in the sun or being in the sudden presence of the miraculous."
Pg 24: "Laid out in front of the dawn like a rug made of jigsaw pieces was Los Angeles. Through the wire-mesh window screens, endless fly strips of houses, homes, and the skeletons of those yet to be built; naked mounds of land that would soon be smothered by new homes, built with the hands, and on the bones, of the old landlords, homes in such a starry multitude that I was confident there was one for me, and in that home there'd be enough space for my small life, and the hopes I'd bring back with me."

Chapter 2, The Blossoms of Los Feliz: Felicia

Pg 26: "The jacaranda trees gave them the most trouble. They felled the mightiest of bulldozers, which couldn't tear them down without themselves being damaged. I thought that if I grew a jacaranda tree in my room, it would anchor our home to the land and we wouldn't have to leave."
Pg 27: "Aurora Salazar, the last woman evicted from Chavez Ravine, learned this lesson when she was dragged by her wrists and ankles like a shackled butterfly off her land. And I would learn that lesson many years later working for Mrs. Calhoun. This is what women do, when they have an ocean of dreams but no water to put them in."
Pg 27: "Back then, my English was terrible and Skid Row was where, if you were a woman, needed work, and didn't speak English, you'd gather in a group for the gabachos to come and hire you."
Pg 29: "The papers painted Aurora and me as tragic near-martyrs, symbols of a community the city had forgotten."
Pg 31: "I understood this, and said, in English, 'It's okay. My English should be better. It's American, your country'.
'Oh, I thought you were born here,' she said.
'I was. But it's your country.'"
Pg 31: "No one was around except the borrachos swaggering back home to their wives' cold beds when the bars closed, or the crazy bag lady who wore winter coats year-round, prayed at my bus stop bench as if it were a pew, and talked about her 'friend,' the Virgin Mary, as if Our Lady of Guadalupe was going to show up on the Line 200 bus at five in the morning."
Pg 32: "Don't know what page of the rule book chatting up women passengers was on, but I knew what his game was."
Pg 40: "'What about your pool?' I asked.
'No, no,' she murmured. 'If I got in that pool, I'd never want to come out of it.' She paused."
Pg 42: "I laughed at most of them but would stop and watch whenever they played the video for a song called 'Borderline' by Madonna. I didn't understand what the words in the song meant, but the video was a little movie about a Mexican woman not forgetting where she came from. I liked that."
Pg 44: "The driver who flirted with me was working on that Saturday, and I asked if he could give Aurora a deal on the bus fare for twelve kids. He said they could ride for free if I went out on a date with him. Aurora overheard me refuse and called me a bitch as she dumped her piggy bank into the fare box."
Pg 44: "Aurora huddled with her best friend, Duchess, who wasn't swimming and didn't seem to enjoy the surroundings, while the other children took turns diving into the pool."
Pg 46: "This area belonged, at any one moment, to the street ganges White Fence, 18th Street, 13th Street, Diamond Street, Echo Park Locos, and perhaps the most terrifying gang in East Los Angeles, the Department of Urban Reclamation for the City of Los Angeles, which had marked off the land for a multimillion dollar super high school/shopping mall/ condominium complex that took years to construct and, a month after its inauguration, was condemned for being built atop a toxic stew of cancerous sludge that had steeped underground for years."
Pg 49: "Alma's mother ripped off the bottom half of Alma's shirt with Madonna's face and wrapped it around her neck to stop the bleeding."
Pg 50: "They left candles, rosaries, pictures of the Virgin Mary..."
Chapter 3, Our Lady of the Lost Angels: Beatriz

Pg 55-56: "I cringed under that bedspread at night, chewing the top of it until it was damp, terrified the Devil that possessed my uncle's toes, along with every body part below his waist, would steer him into my bed next."
Pg 57: "They drew a line in the desert and said, Your property belongs to us now... That land became Angelino Heights, the first suburb in the City of Angels. A Mexican created our first suburbia, a place built on the fundamental notion of keeping people you think aren't as good as you believe youself to be--out."
Pg 58-59: "Thanks to me they found their way. Within a year, my mother was living a happy life with my daughter, Felicia, in a tin shack in Chavez Ravine..."
Pg 60: "'How have you been m'hija? Did you hear about my son?' she asked. 'Arrested him in the thick of the night. Turned in by one of his best friends, ay. What am I going to do?" Pg 61 cont. "Your Son, Jesús?"
Pg 67: "A young girl named Alma Guerrero had been shot and killed on this street corner at an informal gathering of mothers and daughters. This happened on the very same day, I noted, that I saw the Virgin Mary..." Pg 67 cont. "In between them, in that small space, was the Virgin Mary, dressed in the same outfit, staring at me with a benevolent expression of happiness and joy. There was no mistaking her."
Pg 69: "They will give you something that means nothing to them but everything to you without question or expectation. Then I will come and find you."

Chapter 4, Rules of the Road: Efren

Pg 72: "You're a Mexican, they say, trying to bond with me by speaking Spanish. How can you turn against your own kind? they say. But they aren't my kind. They're not Americans. They're illegals, and the benefits to law-abiding Americans like me outweigh whatever inconveniences these people face for breaking our laws."
Pg 73: "My father, Manny Sr., was in the street gang Echo Park Locos and got my spoiled older brother, Manny Jr., to drop out of sixth grade to join."
Pg 76: "I courted this cleaning lady when I started driving; I wasn't breaking the rules because she made the effort to befriend me."
Pg 77: "The American Dream is there for the taking if you aren't lazy and have no qualms about the kind of work you do."
Pg 82: "My eyes were on the road--that's my job--but in memory I can hear every Skittle pack hit the rubber floor."
Pg 83: "There's no footage of this, but I had the green light. I had the right of way. That truck, whose description I've given a hundred times and will give again here--late model GMC pickup truck, mushroom brown, white guy driving and a Mexican seated next to him in the cab--ran right through a red light, cutting me off."
Pg 87: "And nobody's been able to find this guy, this 'Freddy' I picked up, the last passenger of the night, and maybe of my career, but I'm telling you this did happen."

Chapter 5, Yo Soy El Army: Manny Jr.

Pg 93: "Juan nodded and lowered his eyes. If Ofelia had been here, she'd've been equal parts thrilled that Juan was marrying a Mexican and not an Oriental girl (he went through a phase) and furious he'd enlisted in the Army. 'Yo soy el Army?' she'd've screamed. If she'd been here, she'd have figured a way to make him stay.
'Mom would have loved Angie.' Juan smiled and took another sip from his cup."
Pg 94: "She spoiled Juan, read to him from the time he was a baby, and tried from an early age to indoctrinate him with that Mexican pride bullshit."
Pg 94: "She'd drag Juan to the Bank of America, lean over the counter to tell her favorite teller, a young, sassy gordita with mushroom-cloud hair named Duchess, about the new mini-malls destined to take over Echo Park."
Pg 95: "'No, this one's different. She does like me. She doesn't like the fact that I'm Mexican."
Pg 97: "'I sang this in Hainan, an island off the Chinese coast, growing up. It's about home, never seeing your home again.'"..."'But you have your own America, too. Inside, in here, it's Hainan. But out there, your home. Those people, Mexicans, like your home, Mexico.'"
Pg 99: "They made plans to elope, but for some reason that escapes me, the plans fell through and what at the time was seen as a temporary set-back became a permanent solution..."
Pg 101: "I unfolded the paper. 'It's a drawing Duchess did of Angie,' he said. 'She gave it to me when I started dating Angie'..."
Pg 102: "'I shot a baby girl,' he said an carefully stacked up the dominoes into a wooden box shaped like a coffin. 'Three years old. Dancing on a street corner. "Baby Madonna."'..."
Chapter 6, The Hustler: Freddy

Pg 106: "Before I go on, I want to make it clear to you that I speak inglés. Entiendes, mendes? This is America and I speak America's language."
Pg 109: "My woman Cristina knows that. We met at Pilgrim's Supermarket, where she was a checker." Pg 110 cont. "At her house, her teenage daughter, Angie, plugged into her Walkman..."
Pg 112: "It's the dark half of the morning before dawn when I get off the bus at the Greyhound station on Skid Row."
Pg 113: "Her daughter, Angie, would open the door, tell me to 'die in the gutter,' then slam the gate in my face."
Pg 119: "There's a weird ammonia smell in the bar I can't place and graffiti in English--who writes fucking graffiti in English in Echo Park?--covers teh walls of what was once a low-key jota bar."
Pg 123: "'I'm out of service,' he says. I've spent enough nights out on the street--including last night-- to know he'd slept in this bus. If he'd stolen it, he didn't seem too worried."
Pg 124: "I can't believe my luck. Isn't it amazing, the things people throw away? Isn't it amazing, the things people leave behind?"

Chapter 7, Cool Kids: Angie

Pg 127: "It's not so far-fetched to believe, except there's always a seed of a fatal flaw in someone who you think could be a famous person but isn't. (...) Thing is, Gwen acts like a badass chola, but you can tell she's a straight-up rule girl at heart; (...) I never believed you could live in two worlds at once."
Pg 132: "I had this one friend in elementary school, Aurora."
Pg 134: "It was an intricate drawing of a young woman in a dazzling off-the-shoulder dress. (...) She pulled out the mirror. 'They're a part of me now,' she said, looking at my fingertips. 'So are you.'"
Pg 141: "'God, I love jocks,' Debbie said. 'I'd so fuck-and-run him. You can go for the black guy.'
'I like the blond.'
'But he's...not black.'
'Neither am I.'
Pg 143: "In her hands was a photo of herself standing outside the Option restaurant in Hollywood."
Pg 147: "These new shops had so much beautiful, useless...stuff--handmade designer hand bags; overpriced 'folk' art paintings; hand-me-down T-shirts with iron-on decals of cereal boxes, cartoon raccoons smoking joints, and eighties icons like Michael Jackson or Madonna..."
Pg 149: "Her name will be Maria..."

Chapter 8, La Luz y La Tierra: Aurora

Pg 150: "My first name comes from the last woman evicted from the ground that would become Dodger Stadium."
Pg 152: "Put these names together. You get me."
Pg 153: "I haven't explored around here for years for a reason; Echo Park has a hard time letting you go."
Pg 155-156: "It's a fanciful yet unrealistic possibility; I've calculated the odds and thought abut ways to improve my chances of an 'accidental' encounter, but I place no faith in an actual meeting. Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day."
Pg 162: "'Wade into this ocean you floundered in with youthful strokes,' she said, 'and bring your wisdom of the currents with you.'"
Pg 163: "Hoping to thaw out the tension over Blackjack, I teased her about how she was softening in years; I couldn't remember a time, ever, when my mother asked me to take a coat."
Pg 169: "...Pilgrim's market, where I used to go after school and stare at my father's light-skinned mistress..."
Pg 174: "A blast of air from a passing bus, carrying one an sitting in the back, lifts the star off my hand. Follow me the star seems to say, as it corkscrew whips in the air..."
Pg 179: "And for a moment I saw them-- a beautiful but ragtag band of mixed children, struggling to find an identity between Mexican and American. I was trying to find a way to do it, and not feeling very successful. If their mother couldn't find a way to do it, what hope was there for them?"
Pg 181: "'My mother made me bring a coat. She's crazy... um, I mean, she worries too much.'
'She made you wear it this morning?'
'Mothers do that kind of thing.'
'Not all mothers,' she says and reaches out to brush my fur collar."
Pg 182: "'There's nothing common about hope.'"
Pg 188: "Wading through the crowd, I'm pushed aside by a mother and her young daughter walking in the opposite direction."
Pg 189: "' "No place like home," though right?' she asks."
Pg 190: "Angie's question--no pace like home, right?-- sticks in my head. Is this still my home? Do I even belong her anymore?
Pg 190: "A trabajador around my father's age wanders around in a circle carrying a large yellow mallet."
Pg 191: "'Aurora Esperanza,' she says. 'No crees en milagros?"
Pg 194: "He mouths the words, 'You belong.'"
Pg 195: "'His name's Jesús? That's why they call him the Lord? He's...real?' I ask"
Pg 197: "For years afterward I knew when we looked at that picture, my mother and I saw different things, though we never talked about it."
Pg 199: "This is the land we dream of, the land that belongs to us again."
Write the lyrics for a misc song made in 2014, titled "The Madonnas of Echo Park", by artist "Brando Skyhorse".