Wood porch houses line the hillside streets above the river, with Mariachi Plaza's tiled bandstand and the Metro line below.
What Boyle Heights looks like
Boyle Heights sits on a hillside above the Los Angeles River, mostly small houses with wood porches on the side streets. , with its tiled bandstand and a Metro E Line station underneath, sits at First Street and Boyle Avenue. The Boyle Hotel's corner tower and downtown Los Angeles stand behind it. has the neighborhood's main storefronts, most signs in Spanish, brick corner buildings holding a bike shop and a storefront church. sits toward the eastern edge. 's lake sits below a freeway ramp on the same side of the neighborhood, and 's marble monuments stand among palm trees nearby. The East LA Interchange, up to 27 lanes wide and about three times the size of an average freeway interchange, forms the edge beyond that.
It is a working class, largely Latino neighborhood today. A Jewish community once centered on Brooklyn Avenue, with its own union halls and synagogues. The is what's left of it, a former synagogue that's been a historic monument since 1988.
Films shot in Boyle Heights
Chicano and Mexican American films have used Boyle Heights since the 1980s. Cheech Marin's Born in East L.A. came first. A few years later, Blood In Blood Out opened with a scene shot at Los Cinco Puntos, the five way intersection where the neighborhood meets East Los Angeles. The film also used El Pino, a bunya pine tree a few blocks east at Indiana and Folsom Streets on the same boundary, as a recurring meeting point for its characters. The Starz series Vida and the Netflix series Gentefied are set here too.
Born in East L.A., 1987
Cheech Marin wrote and directed the film, and also stars in it as Rudy. It opens with a Frenchwoman crossing the old Sixth Street Bridge on foot into Boyle Heights. Rudy spots her at Chavez Avenue and Fickett Street. He chases the sighting through , then the corner of Evergreen Avenue and Wabash Avenue, then a house on Dundas Street. Rudy's own house, a five bedroom home built in 1890, still stands at 122 North Chicago Street. It sits next to a Victorian church built five years earlier.
American Me, 1992
Most of American Me's violence takes place inside real prisons, including Folsom State Prison. and the nearby Our Lady of Guadalupe Sanctuary also appear in the film. Blood In Blood Out used the cemetery again the following year.
Vida, 2018
The Starz series is set in Boyle Heights, and appears through a car window in the first few minutes of the pilot. While shooting on location, creator Tanya Saracho was called white-tina by a community member who saw her as an outsider. She wrote the term into the show's dialogue. The group Defend Boyle Heights then accused the production of appropriating its anti-gentrification movement. Most exterior filming for later seasons moved to the neighboring Pico-Union neighborhood, though the show stayed set in Boyle Heights. The Netflix series Gentefied also used for some of its own location scenes.
What Boyle Heights can double for
Boyle Heights can stand in for a Mexican American neighborhood in a gang and prison drama and a working class Latino immigrant neighborhood.
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