Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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One of the things you have to remember when you cover a story like the LA Riots is that 95% of the people in even the worst neighborhoods didn't riot, didn't loot, didn't do anything but keep their heads down.
Bianca Ramirez, one of KPCC's producers, was 6 when the riots broke out at Florence and Normandie, just a couple miles from her house, and they quickly spread to her neighborhood. She remembers coming home from school on April 29, 1992, and watching Reginald Denny being savagely beaten. She remembers the gunshots, the sirens, the helicopters, and the smell of smoke. She remembers her father riding his bicycle five miles to Huntington Park just to get groceries for the family.
She remembers that one set of neighbors were "gangsters," and that they looted the neighborhood furniture store and got themselves a brand new livingroom. Other neighbors were African-Americans who huddled together with her Mexican-American family to wait out the chaos and violence.
The riots are a significant part of her growing up. So why does she live today just a couple blocks from Florence and Normandie? "It's home," Bianca says.