Whole Life Times: Tia Chucha’s Café Cultural

November 2005 | Feature

Tia Chucha’s Café Cultural

by Margaret Wappler

On a breezy Saturday afternoon in the sun-baked flats of Sylmar, a crowd spills out into a dusty lot haphazardly jammed with cars. All ages and types are represented: Teenaged girls in black eyeliner and studded belts slurp drippy popsicles, old white hippies with patchy beards stand in clusters and a squat Latino couple chases after their rambunctious son. In this quiet, mostly Latino San Fernando Valley neighborhood, with rows of modest houses, children’s bicycles abandoned on porches and crests of bald mountains in nearly every direction, such a mixed crowd is unusual but makes sense considering the host: Tia Chucha’s Café Cultural, the bookstore-cum-gallery-cum-meeting space, a colorful bastion of literary life in an otherwise dumpy strip mall.

Founded in 2001 as a way to draw together community—not only from the Northern Valley, but from LA’s dispersed literary family—Tia Chucha’s is a spirited mix of books, coffee, workshops and anything else the community could dream up. Those who balk at LA’s literary prowess—we’re supposedly too busy getting peddies and counting carbs to pick up a book—would only have to stop by Tia Chucha’s to know the city’s bookworms are many and live all over the place, not just where the corporate chains are concentrated.

Today’s event is especially remarkable because Tia Chucha’s is hosting a book-release party for one of its founders, Luis Rodriguez, the celebrated author of several books of poetry, nonfiction, children’s literature and, most notably, a poetically harrowing memoir, Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in LA, about his involvement in various gangs and subsequent jail time.

Rodriguez, an old hand at readings, isn’t plagued by the stiff delivery and furtive eye contact of the typical author at a book event. His delivery is fresh and off-the-cuff as he pages through his first novel, Music of the Mill (Harper Collins), reading in fits, then stopping to speak languidly, with no notes, on his experiences at Bethlehem Steel. Fictionalized as Nazareth Steel in his novel, Rodriguez says the giant industrial complex, “is both a good and bad character. [Steel] is devastating work. It can rip apart your body, but also your soul. The mill can take everything, but at the same time, nobody believed the mills could die.” The first year Bethlehem Steel closed, Rodriguez reports, eight people committed suicide and the union had to start a food bank.

“There’s a direct correlation between gang activity in cities like LA and Chicago and the deindustrialization of the US,” Rodriguez tells the hushed crowd. Pushing up a pair of glasses reminiscent of the goggles worn by welders, the author explains that Latinos and African Americans, the bulk of the industry’s lower rung workers, have been left poor and disillusioned, still catching up with today’s tech-heavy economy.

It is exactly this population, the underserved and regularly pushed aside, that Tia Chucha’s founders hope to benefit with their bookstore, earnestly described on their website as “a dream of community empowerment.” After living in Chicago for 20 years, Rodriguez and Maria Trinidad Rodriguez, his wife, were disappointed to return to Trinidad’s home area and see, she says, “a lot of neglect, not much in the way of cultural spaces or celebrations.” The dearth immediately inspired her to start a place similar to some she’d seen in Chicago, like the acclaimed Mexican Fine Arts Center, the first of its kind and the largest in the nation, but with one notable difference: “We wanted a place where people would come together, meet other people, discuss things, share. There are a lot of institutions that can do that, but we wanted it to be a place that would draw from the community, not [be] set aside from the community.” After a year of planning, they opened Tia Chucha’s with Enrique Sanchez, Trinidad’s brother-in-law.

From the beginning, the founders were impressed with the community’s response. Starved of bookstores, galleries or even a movie theater, the North San Fernando Valley has supported Tia Chucha’s simply by spreading the word. “People just keep coming in for the first time,” Trinidad says. “Some of them are so unused to seeing a bookstore in their area that they think it’s a public library.”

The not-for-profit segment of Tia Chucha’s, the Centro Cultural, is the most exciting development of this kinetically growing institution. Workshops have spawned in everything from Aztec Dance to the Womyn’s Indigenous Healing Circle, which focuses on organic cooking, holistic medicine and other healthy lifestyle alternatives. Rodriguez says that the Womyn’s Group is indicative of Tia Chucha’s mission at large: “I think everything we’re doing is healing, balancing. When people express themselves through the arts and they have community, it’s part of a holistic healing approach.”

The Centro Cultural especially attracts high school and college kids, who pack the house on open-mic nights. “That’s where a lot of young people are finding their voices,” Trinidad says. “They get to realize they have something to say, that their voices are welcome here.”

Trinidad and Rodriguez are reluctant to pinpoint what exact difference Tia Chucha’s might make in a young person’s life, but it’s likely that their center has saved, or steered, more than one life. It may sound implausible until you consider all the small decisions made daily that amount to a life lived to its fullest potential. Couldn’t picking up a book be one of them?

“We don’t know yet how some of these kids will be saved by books or aided by the arts,” Rodriguez says, and then falls silent. “When I went to the library, I don’t think anyone paid attention to the fact that I may have been saved by books the library had. Sometimes you don’t realize the impact of these things for years down the road.”

Tia Chucha’s, tiachucha.com, 12737 Glenoaks Blvd., #22, Sylmar 91342. 818.362.7060.

Margaret Wappler lives in Silver Lake with her husband and two cats and contributes regularly to LA Weekly, The Believer, Nerve and many other publications. She enjoys yoga and ginger tea.

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