blueprints

66 | luis rodriguez
and boxes. They tore up books and CDs. Worse, they stole our most expensive
café items. Even though we had insurance, the company refused to
adequately compensate us.
We lost our precious coffee bar.
The Northeast Valley is a working-class area with large swaths of poor
people. There are gangs, housing projects, and crime. The economy was
worsening. Again, I could have given up—but didn’t. Instead, I worked on
obtaining a new space back in Sylmar. We found a newly constructed, sixunit
structure at a strip mall near Mission Community College, flanked by
Interstate 210 and a major thoroughfare. The rental market was suffering by
then—it was the autumn of 2008, when the stock market fell faster than at
any time since the Great Depression. For months, I saw that none of the
units had been leased. A supermarket in front of the structure was boarded
up. Units alongside the market included a few vacancies.
It took a while, but we finally persuaded the landlord to lease us a corner
space in the new structure. He wanted top dollar per square foot, which
explained why nobody was leasing. I got the landlord to go to half of what
he was asking by convincing him to give us part of the rent back every
month as a tax write-off. We took a five-year lease that included an option
to continue the same rent agreement if we wanted another five years—we
didn’t need to be caught as we had been with the first lease. The great thing
was access to a large parking lot. We could hold events there.
On the day of our grand opening in March of 2009, we set up a stage
for bands, poets, dancers, actors, and speakers. There were food stands,
including one featuring a restaurant in the strip mall that specialized in
Mexican and Salvadoran dishes. As many as seven hundred people came,
and the L.A. Daily News did a major piece.
We folded the café-bookstore business into the nonprofit. We are now
a full-fledged, community-based 501(c)(3). Today, more people than ever
attend our workshops, performances, open mics, and festivals. We’ve had
major media coverage, including NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams,
KABC-TV’s Vista L.A., CNN’s What Matters, and CNN’s Leaders with
Heart. In addition to city, county, state, and federal funds, we now have
grants from the California Community Foundation, the Thrill Hill Foundation,
the Annenberg Foundation, the Weingart Foundation, and the
James Irvine Foundation—and donations and other services from notables
such as John Densmore of the Doors, Cheech Marin, Dave Marsh, Lou
Adler, and Richard Foos of the Shout! Factory. In April of 2009, Bruce