Boyle Heights’s Clarence Street has a long and troubled history of 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, journalist Gregory Rodriguez and filmmaker Elías Nahmías successfully lobbied City Council to rename part of Clarence in honor of Colombia’s 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. It was hoped that neighborhood kids would be inspired by seeing the great writer’s name on their addresses and street signs. García Márquez, who had recently published his memoir Living to Tell the Tale, warily gave the street his blessing.
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