Carmela Morales has loved making paper flowers since she was a child, and now, many of her neighbors do too.
Morales is one of eight people who received a $500 grant from the City of Santa Monica last fall to design a project that would build community in the Pico neighborhood. She used the grant to teach dozens of residents how to make colorful tissue paper flowers, or flores de papel periódico, a craft she learned while growing up in Mexico.
Morales was nervous when she taught her first class, but when she saw her students smiling and chatting as they folded increasingly intricate flowers, she started thinking of herself as a teacher.
“I was proud of myself,” she said. “I started thinking about doing more classes for Valentine’s Day and Easter.”
The City is opening applications for another round of microgrants April 1 that will focus on creating more economic opportunities in Pico, said Julie Rusk, who leads the City’s Office of Civic Wellbeing, which is disbursing the microgrants as part of the Pico Wellbeing Project. The office will provide a first information session for people interested in applying April 6 at a financial independence workshop held at the Pico Branch Library between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Local leaders say the microgrants have allowed residents to contribute to their community and gain valuable skills and experience.
“It helped people like (Morales) expand their leadership skills and self-confidence, and it challenged them to use their gifts to connect people,” said Liz Cruz, a longtime Pico resident who co-chairs Virginia Avenue Park’s advisory board.
For many of the microgrant recipients, the program has also been an avenue to preserve the culture of the neighborhood as its demographics change – and help newer residents understand its history.
Japanese, Black and Latino communities settled in Pico during the 20th century, when it was one of the only parts of Santa Monica where racially restrictive housing covenants were not widespread. Historically a low-income pocket of the city, Pico has struggled with crime, gang violence and a lack of public services. Over the past decade, however, it has experienced rapid gentrification, pushing out the Latino community that has saturated the neighborhood since the 1970s.
Daniela Wiener and Chiara Arroyo used their microgrant to start Escuchamos para entender: Las caras de pico (We Listen to Understand: The Faces of Pico). Students at Edison Language Academy, a bilingual elementary school in Pico, interviewed Spanish-speaking seniors about their lives, compiling an oral history of the neighborhood. The project is ongoing and Wiener and Arroyo plan to launch a podcast of the recorded interviews in May.
Edison, now a sought-after magnet school, was underserved and racially segregated when the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District and community leaders decided its students should be taught in both Spanish and English. Wiener, an Edison parent, said the school has attracted more students from elsewhere in Santa Monica, many of whom were unfamiliar with Pico and its history.
“A lot of kids don’t know who built this neighborhood,” she said. “They get dropped off at Edison and don’t necessarily venture into the surrounding area.”
Learning about the lives of long-term residents helped the students understand what life in Pico was like throughout the 20th century, Wiener said. She hopes they feel more connected to the community in which they go to school, she added.
Janeen Jackson’s project, My Community Kitchen, and the Latinx/Ethiopian community workshops staged by Marco Marin and Mulugeta Tadele also sought to connect older and newer residents.
Marin said he frequently takes his children to Virginia Avenue Park and noticed they were often playing with the children of Ethiopian immigrants. He said he hadn’t realized that Pico had become home to a significant Ethiopian population.
“I didn’t know anything about Ethiopian culture,” he said. “I wanted to build trust between Latinos and Ethiopians and address the challenges we share.”
Marin said he is continuing to hold the workshops on a monthly basis and eventually hopes to host outdoor screenings of American and Ethiopian movies.
Jackson hosted a community gathering to gather recipes from the neighborhood’s different culinary traditions, creating a 25-page cookbook called “A Taste of Pico.” The cookbook includes a recipe from someone who has lived in the neighborhood for one year alongside recipes from families who have lived there for generations, she said.
Jackson, who moved to Pico 11 years ago, said she has immersed herself in the community that long-term residents have built and wants to see recent arrivals engage with it too.
“My project was really about saying, “Hey new neighbor, who’s lived here for five years and I’ve never seen around, come on out and get to know this amazing community”,” she said.
madeleine@smdp.com
