Brooklyn & Boyle

07/18/2025

Craft Mexican beer in Boyle Heights. Alé and his gently retooled upcycling of the old La Bufadora

07/10/2025

Launched in 2008, Brooklyn & Boyle, the little East Side arts and culture newspaper that could has since relied primarily on heart and ganas to stay afloat while showcasing the indelible artistry and creative brilliance of cultural expression rooted in L.A.'s Greater East Side for decades. We are, of course, proud to announce our forthcoming SOMOS RESISTENCIA issue--in solidarity with and defense of immigrants--but we need your help to make it happen. .

And so...in the spirit of "Way Back Wednesday" and the Buen Samaritano church fundraisers some of us remember, welcome to the once in a lifetime Brooklyn & Boyle vintage t-shirt raffle. From now until Sunday afternoon, each $10 sent on Venmo, CashApp or PayPal gets the sender's name entered in a drawing for the last remaining Día de Los Mu***os Boyle Heights 2011 commemorative t-shirt designed in collaboration with Leonard Martinez. A ###L, 100% cotton, never before worn, white crew neck, the t-shirt makes a comfortable knee to thigh-length women's night shirt or a men's super saggy conversation piece. Included: a soft-cloth genuine Coach drawstring tote. DM us here or text us, (213) 858-8252, for info/instructions on submitting individual or multiple raffle entries with Venmo, CashApp or PayPal. If our raffle winner is an L.A. County resident, she or he will be invited to pose for a photograph with the vintage promotional t-shirt to mark the moment people stood up against authoritarian tyranny in defense of democracy, truth, justice and equality.

If our raffle winner resides elsewehere, we hope they'll be kind enough to email us a photo when the prize is delivered. In the meantime, take good care and stay tuned for a celebratory shout out when we hit the streets with hot off the press coffee table-ready copies of the Greater East Side's own.

07/09/2025

Look for it early next week at Greater East Side spots from the L.A. River to Riverside. A celebration of immigrants and their contributions, it also features cover art by Boyle Heights community artist Josiah O'Balles. His painting, part of a quadriptych is a powerful indictment of politically motivated, selective and discriminatory enforcement to provoke civil unrest to justify further escalation.



lives matte

07/02/2025

I had just attended a family reception/graduation party for a sister's grandson held at the V.F.W. Post 8925 rental hall in Central Texas when the news of civil unrest in L.A. broke widely. The irony of celebrating my grandnephew's academic milestone, his peerless record as a high school wrestler and his acceptance of an invitation to attend West Point this fall then seeing footage of Reserves deploying on the City of Angels, was not lost on me. Got home to Boyle Heights just as a curfew was being rolled out and decided an urgent emergency edition calling for resistance to those Rambo-wannabe ICE vigilantes and the billionaire club that has force fed them a steady gruel of forked-tongue lies triggering fear, hate and racist violence that puts us in the crosshairs as a distraction from their balls-out, unrepentant, unholy budget bill represents and paves the way for a cold, calculated, premeditated assassination of democracy.

In sixteen years of publication we have never asked for personal donations or direct, individual contribtions to stay afloat and continue highlighting the beauty and power wrought by the creative impulse across a greater East Side where world caliber artistic and cultural expression has long been a defining quality. From the L.A. River to Riverside, and from Altadena to Long Beach among the makers and creators who have dedicated their lives to advancing the visual, performing and literary arts where they live, there have alway been and will continue to be true masters--many, by the way, from humble origins as immingrants from elsewhere or descendents thereof. This plucky upstart publication was launched so make them less invisibl. I am grateful for so many who beame readers and advertisers over the years. To all of you, as well as anyone whose artwork was positively featured in our pages, or whose events and projects or press releases were recieved coverage in BROOKLYN & BOYLE at one point up to now... if you had early work as a a writer polished up and published in our attractively designed newsprint edition or online, if your name or photo appeared here or in print at some point in association with a performance or event you were part, even if you had already been in the news or the paper or a magazine plenty before, If we wrote about or featured something in your barrio you didn't know before and it made you feel proud of or maybe just a little better about where you grew up...

Then now would be the best time ever to consider helping us continue focusing a spotlight on the things that make neighbohoods/cities all over the Greater East Side special. Now, when ICE is terrorizing grade school children and seniors everwhere are about to get stripped of medical care, among other issues which we will also need to begin reporting on, would be a pretty good time to consider sending $5 or $10 or maybe even $20 if you can so we can pull out all the stops and deliver 4,000 copes of a special edition which will prove how much stronger we are than the bounty hunters, mercenaries AND the billionaire suck up Republican who set them loose on us. Because, in the end, love, when we stand up and let it bring us togeher, immigrants and raza born here alike, will always overcome hate. We accept PayPal, Venmo, CashApp and we're working on getting Zelle. Send an email to [email protected] or DM me for details on how to pitch in.

03/23/2025

Recently, Highland Park's Avenue 50 Studio became one more among the many beloved, long standing East Side community-based non-profit cultural arts institutions shuttered as a result of gentrification. Fortunately, the venerable neighborhood arts hub regrouped quickly and marshaled enough support to reopen in a storefront just a mile and change from its original location. Director Kathy Gallegos describes the inaugural exhibit at the new space as a response to dislocation triggered by both the recent fires AND gentrification--as well as the fascist and racist tenor of the Trump administration. Invited to curate a corresponding poetry/performance event, I accepted with humble gratitude/righteous fire and was super-psyched when OG Bay Area truth-teller wordslanger Arnoldo Colibri agreed to co-host. Please join us on Sunday, March 30th for a powerful West Coast onda and contact me directly if you're at all inclined or interested in lending a hand as an official sponsor.

02/27/2025

Pleased and extremely proud to feature this amazingly well-written guest editorial/powerful call-to-arms by my youngest honorary ahijado, Extli Chávez, a middle school student and resident since birth of Lincoln Heights, a longtime bulwark Greater East Side neighborhood here in L.A. As a contributing writer, he joins the illustrious ranks of OG ahijado Max Katz and some incredibly cool, slightly more seasoned younger dudes that were around during the earlier stages of this publishing labor of love, vatos like Huerta , Daniel Morales Leon AKA "Chapulín" (RIPMB-Rest In Power My Brother) and Jonathan Gomez to name a few. Seems like only yesterday I was pushing him around in a stroller alongside his mom, attorney Brenda Chavez at the Natural History Museum and making frog "ribbit" sounds to entertain him. Thank you Extli, for once again proving to me that it will be your generation and the ones that respect/honor your visions and dreams of a better world for all humankind--as well as the four-legged, winged and scaled relatives we share it with--that make this country truly great.

Arts, Life & Culture in Boyle Heights y Beyond embraced and touted with panache in our print edition, our online platform and via social media!

02/25/2025

New here, an interview with artist Megha Jairaj, whose residency in Singapore and corresponding art performance illuminated the profoundly parallel--and equally disheartening--plights of Indian immigrants there and Mexican/Central American immigrants in Los Angeles. For both the ambulant Desi roasted peanut vendor--"cacahuatero"--on the streets of Singapore and the Paisa "elotero," "paletero"or "tamalera," life and the struggle to earn a subsistence wage as well as the ever-looming threat of deportation look very much the same...

Brooklyn & Boyle, the plucky little Greater East Side arts paper favored by artivistas, literalocxs and literavagxs from San Fernando to San Gabriel for 16 years and counting! Special thanks to Magallanes for this welcome contribution.

Arts, Life & Culture in Boyle Heights y Beyond embraced and touted with panache in our print edition, our online platform and via social media!

09/22/2024

Portrait of Juan Gabriel by AKA John Zender AKA big OG wallwriter and muralists maestro ZenderOne, one of 12 images celebrating "los/las grandes," icons in the pantheon of popular Mexican musical entertainers, now on exhibit as part of a group show celebrating Mexican Heritage at lLa Esquina bicycle shop, 2228 Whittier Blvd., Boyle Heights, CA 90033. Reception happening now to kick-off the Greater East Side's newest monthly artwalk. Who's down?!

08/31/2024

BROOKLYN & BOYLE... covering arts, culture y comunidad on LA's Greater East Side w/ pluck and 'stilo for 15 years.

08/15/2024

New issue in celebration of 15 years goes into the hopper this week and honors the East Los Streetscapers founding duo David Botello and Wayne Healy. The cover features a detail from "Hacia al Norte," a 65-ft. long mural on canvas created with fellow Streetscaper Rich Raya in 1991. The project was commissioned for installation in a commercial building but rolled up and placed in storage for safekeeping when the company relocated. After going unseen for 25 years, the epic work of art was exhibited at the downtown L.A. Library's Getty Gallery and drew a record number of visitors during the several weeks it was available for public view. Send your well wishes and props to "los Dos Streescapers" in BROOKLYN & BOYLE's upcoming print edition and help us continue spotlighting the vibrant and history-making cultural contributions artists and creative folks from the REAL East Side have long made to and still offer L.A., the country and the world. Ad space available until Friday morning. Space paid for in advance goes for almost half off the regular rates.

08/10/2024

This essay ran originally in our March/April 2017 print edition. Despite its obvious promise and the author's natural instinct for storytelling, it will remain his first and only published work. Earlier this summer, we were saddened to hear from wife and widow, Dr. Patty Godinez, "Patty Fine" in this touching piece of creative non-fiction, who informed us that her husband Isaac had recently passed suddenly and unexpectedly. We again extend our sincerest condolences to his family, friends and colleagues. The news of his untimely death has strengthened our resolve to develop a Brooklyn & Boyle Digital Archive which would provide permanent, free, online access to original content previously only available in our print edition. Photo by Louis Jacinto.

Arts, Life & Culture in Boyle Heights y Beyond embraced and touted with panache in our print edition, our online platform and via social media!

08/07/2024

Now in its 15th consecutive year of circulation as a print edition arts publication serving L.A. County's Greater East Side, BROOKLYN & BOYLE has surpassed, by far, the nine issues and/or three years a well-meaning but irredeemably cynical poet I used to know once predicted. Paper was dead, everyone said. A product of 1990s Austin, I knew this, but I also knew holding a masterful work of art, albeit just a reproduction on newsprint, in my hands would always beat scrolling over an image of it on a cell phone touch screen.

Along the way, we received praise in THE NEW YORK TIMES from award-winning indie filmmaker and best-selling novelist Miranda July, who described BROOKLN & BOYLE as "... a paper just for the arts in the Eastside... very Latino, historical, and radical in a community-minded way." Even as the pandemic made it all that much harder on an already shoe-string, bootstrap labor of love, we somehow still managed to win a National Association of Hispanic Publications "José Marti Gold Award for Outstanding Cover Design" (artwork by Pola Lopez) and a "Silver Award" for a best culturally-based feature article (a powerful, moving piece by UCLA's Dr. Lalo Valdez based on his COVID-era visit to Navajo Country.

Due out in 11 days (Aug. 16), our "Quinceñera Issue" celebrates the 49-year public art legacy of Wayne Healy and David Botello, founders and core members of the legendary East Los Streetscapers mural collective. We will also highlight an original, new biographically-based play inspired by late L.A. County Supervisor and lifelong East Side Chicana/o arts advocate Gloria Molina, written by REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES playwright/screenwriter Josefina López and slated to open on Aug. 29th.

If you care to support community arts coverage and neighborhood media by taking out a congratulatory ad on the occasion of our "quinceañera," an ad in salute of Los Dos Streetscapers, or you would like to offer a shout out in honor of Supervisor Molina, please DM me for details and prices, as well as a range of cool new discounts (up to 40% off published rates).

We could never have gotten this far without constant help, encouragement and sponsorships from so many of you, artists, readers and friends as well as leaders and staff at small businesses or community-based cultural as well as service organizations. Help us turn the page and begin a brand new 15-year chapter as a reinvigorated, plucky little arts paper. And stay tuned for news about the official "quince" festivities, por supuesto (of course)!