Edward Olmos : An Actor Works to Reclaim the City Streets

He seemed to be everywhere--on television, radio, in newspapers and on street corners. Almost as soon as rioting broke out in Los Angeles, native son Edward James Olmos was out agitating for peace. He became the front man for a spontaneous cleanup that attracted thousands of broom-toting citizens from all corners of the city. And as the community tries to put itself back together, Olmos has canceled other plans to focus on doing what he can to help.

Olmos, 45, is used to a hectic schedule. He makes roughly 150 public appearances a year, often addressing students and encouraging them to get a good education and take charge of their lives.

Olmos was born and raised in Boyle Heights, the son of immigrants from Mexico. He started college studying psychology, but switched to theater. He spent most of the ‘70s in experimental theater projects and occasional TV parts.

It was the role of El Pachuco in Luis Valdez’s 1978 play, “Zoot Suit,” that propelled Olmos to success. Critics were dazzled by the electricity of his performance as the mannered and strutting narrator, and the play, scheduled for just 10 performances at the Mark Taper Theater, ran a year and a half.

Olmos then appeared in such motion pictures as “Blade Runner,” but his greatest exposure came in 1984, when he took the role of Lt. Martin Castillo on “Miami Vice,” instilling the character with what is now his trademark, a sort of dark and moral intensity. His next project, “Stand and Deliver,” fit perfectly into his own social concerns and earned him an Academy Award nomination--it was the story of Jaime Escalante, the math teacher who came to an East Los Angeles school and turned gang members into mathematics wizards.

Olmos’ latest film and his directorial debut, “American Me,” also reflects the actor’s social conscience. The movie unfolds over 30 years, beginning with the Zoot Suit riots of 1943, when servicemen on leave attacked Latinos in Los Angeles. It is a brutal indictment of the urban culture of violence and death.

Olmos was saddened but not surprised by the level of violence set off by the Rodney G. King verdict. He confided that he has recently been getting by with three or four hours of sleep a night, yet he still buzzed with the intensity that makes him such a memorable screen performer.

Question: You’ve been all over the place recently, in all the media, and, throughout all this, you have been stressing how important it is to get through to the children, to help them understand the riots. Why so much emphasis on the child?

Answer: It is the child who produces the future, it is the child who produces the hope. So if the child is not put first, you have no dreams. But that isn’t what’s happening. If we did put the child first, every child would learn how to read and write. There would be no illiteracy. And then people say, “We give them the opportunity, but the families have broken down.” It’s true. But why? It’s because the dollar has become the single most powerful motivating factor in our society.

Q: How did you deal with your own children when they started seeing all the disturbing riot images on television?

A: We were together when it all started to come across. We were all just completely riveted and stunned. And we started to talk. And the only thing I could think was, “My lord, these images. It’s going to scare them out of their minds. This is their home, this is their city.” From that moment on, it was just a situation of trying to explain that this was a very small minority of angry people who were doing this.

Q: Tell me about your own childhood, growing up in East L.A. Did you have a sense of the cultural diversity of the city?

A: I was raised in what I consider to be not a melting pot, but a salad bowl. The onion stayed the onion, the tomato stayed the tomato, the lettuce stayed the lettuce, with maybe a little Russian or Italian dressing. And it tasted real good. No one lost their identity, and I thought that was what life was like.

But let me tell you about prejudice. It starts in the home, and that’s in all cultures, all races, all creeds. The only thing we can do, as educated people, is understand that we do have these feelings and say to ourselves, “Hey, that’s racist, I don’t have to think that way.” You have to learn to check your thought patterns, especially here in Los Angeles, because we are so racially diverse.

Q: It’s obvious that the root causes of this disturbance run long and deep. What are the problems we have to address if we are to begin repairing the damage?

A: These boys on the street, they have nothing, no one to look up to. When we have men who will help our young males make that rite of passage into manhood, they will feel like men--and they will feel good. They won’t have to search out for manhood among their peers who hand them guns.

Working with Youth Gang Services, you pick up on the pulse of the street. You could see that children were armed and dangerous, and starting to kill each other.

That’s what disturbed me most, how the society could be hearing us say this--that children are killing children for no reason--and simply not be able to grasp what that meant. They knew it was true, but no one seemed to understand it. We had 771 gang-related murders in 1991, and no one was paying attention.

Q: A lot of people in this city were upset by the verdict in the Rodney G. King case, and understood the urge to protest. But they didn’t understand the torching of buildings, and were stunned by the sight of whole families looting stores. How can you explain that kind of behavior?

A: Just look at the behavior they have been seeing by their leaders, the people who are in charge. The check-writing scandal by the Congress, the savings-and-loan mess--tell me that wasn’t looting! What did that say to our people? That it’s OK for them (the elite) and not for us. People are living in poverty and they see that, and then it’s compounded by the fact that a moral injustice was done, and they react. Negatively. It’s a failure of the leadership from the top on down. People of high influence, with megabucks, control the political structure and there’s nothing you can do about it when you are running a society that is built on economics being first.

Q: You became the sort of ad-hoc leader of the cleanup campaign, which eventually involved thousands of people, who came from all over the city to sweep up the streets. How did that get started?

A: You know, when I picked up my broom, I asked no one to come out. On the second night of the riots, I went around to TV and radio stations, just trying to get people to calm down, to stay in their houses. And then, on Sunset Boulevard, a boy was shot right in front of our car. An African-American boy, shot for no reason. Finally, the police came and an ambulance, and we left and went to another TV station. I was frustrated, and I was hurt. I was talking to people who were already in their homes watching television--telling them to stay there--and the people in the street were the ones causing the problem. And they weren’t getting the message.

And I said to myself, “You know what, man, tomorrow I am going to grab my broom and I’m going to start to sweep.” So the next morning I got up and went to the AME church with my broom and a couple of friends, and we started sweeping. And then a truck pulled up from Community Youth Gang Services, and they brought six of their guys and a bunch of kids, and they started sweeping. Then a lady who lived across the street saw us, and she came out with her broom.

It just built. Within an hour, we were a hundred. And then the news media picked up on it. By the end of the day, we were over 500 strong. The next day, those people came back and thousands more.

People were afraid, but they overcame it--no police, no escorts. I didn’t tell people to come out, they did it themselves. They made that decision and that was the psychological key to that whole event.

Q: There was a great feeling of unity, with people from every ethnic group working together. How do you keep people feeling that sort of unity and purpose?

A: I’m keeping it going in me, because I loved the way it made me feel. I’m addicted to that feeling. And I think everybody who participated feels that way, too. It was a spontaneous thing--no organization. To keep it going, we have to be innovative enough to learn how to all be a part of that community’s resurgence. There’s a lot of people who are building friendships out of that situation. People from the valley will go to South-Central L.A. for a picnic with people they met during the cleanup.

And I’m telling you, if I was a principal in a school, I would make it mandatory that all children be put on buses and help in the cleanup. For the psychology of it. It would help them remember how they did their part to heal their city, and they would be healed. That is so basic, it’s not anything that people don’t understand--and that’s why people came from all over the city.

And it is going to keep going, because people bond. It’s like during the war. But this was not a war. This was our people. This was my cousins, my brothers and sisters--whether they be black, brown, white or red--doing things that they shouldn’t have done. They just got caught up in it, and we have to try and understand. When I looked at it, I saw what we were capable of doing--like going back to the Holocaust and looking at how bad man can be.

That makes you realize how important it is that people be the best they can be. What we learned was that a small group could make us feel so down, so ugly. And it wasn’t just one group, it was a minority of all of us. And those images (of the arson and looting) brought out the positive in thousands.

Q: Let me ask you about Peter Ueberroth, who’s heading up a commission to rebuild the city. What’s your impression of him?

A: Good intentions. That man has had his problems with the different cultures in the city. He’s going to have to get past that and prove himself. He’s already started off on the right foot. He put the responsibility back on the community--which is where I think it lies. He’s going to have to be sensitive, because there will be a lot of people coming up with great ideas. I think if Ueberroth was to get on talk radio for a few hours, he’d come away with some pretty interesting ideas.

Q: Are you going to help him?

A: Of course I’m going to help him! Everyone in this community should help that man understand and come to know what they feel and what the pulse of the city is. And they should not stop their own innovative thinking about ways to help. I’m doing it. I’ve been discussing ways of getting gang members involved in the rebuilding process, finding ways to get groups to employ them and train them in a trade. It’s going to take a lot of strong positives to overrun this big negative. And a lot of people are really interested in making sure something good comes out of all this.

Q: What do you say to someone whose business was looted? What do you say to someone who participated in looting?

A: For those who have been victimized, I pray that you will have the courage and strength to go on with your dream and know that, sometimes, the most negative thing that happens turns into the most positive. And if you can take on the responsibility of understanding what happened, maybe your business will flourish even more. Now I know this is something you don’t want to be hearing right now--there’s still too much anger. But try. Try to become friends with those who took you down.

To those who participated in the looting, and were victimizers: As you start to reevaluate and reassess, you may start to feel bad. If you find yourself at a point where you have had a change of mind and feel that your self-esteem has gone down, the simplest thing is to give back what you took. If it was food, and you’ve eaten it, you can still give of your time. If you took stereos, televisions--whatever--take it to any church. No questions asked. You might end up feeling good inside your heart.

Not everybody’s going to have that change of heart, but a lot of people are not going to feel good about what they’ve done. They got caught up in the moment. A lot of people went in and grabbed food with their families, and those are the ones who are now going to have to turn around and explain to their children that they shouldn’t have done that. Not try to make excuses for their behavior, but just say, “You know what, we made a mistake. And now we should try to heal ourselves. Let’s go help.”