Through the years, Boyle Heights’s Clarence Street has often been associated with gang activity. After ten-year-old Stephanie Raygoza was killed during a drive-by shooting in October 2000, this neighborhood, preparing to upgrade its old Aliso Village housing projects into the more sophisticated Pueblo del Sol community, hoped to distance itself from its dark past. So in 2003, the City of L.A. allowed part of Clarence to be renamed in honor of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and other classics. García Márquez had recently published his memoir Living to Tell the Tale, but it’s not clear whether that influenced the naming of this street.
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