​ Our new year here at Brooklyn & Boyle , the small, grass-roots art, culture and community paper with a big heart, has started off with some very noteworthy reasons to celebrate. Firstly, award-winning filmmaker, writer and director Miranda July enthusiastically mentioned Brooklyn & Boyle in January's first New York Times Sunday Review of Books when she was asked during an interview about what she was going to read next. While we don't know the artist personally, we are pleased and grateful that she would take time to check out the little paper that cares about local artists and preserving neighborhood integrity, even as many of our neighborhoods are changing and many struggling, long-time residents are, unfortunately, being displaced. Of course, just two short weeks later, Brooklyn & Boyle was mentioned in a lecture at the prestigious 2015 L.A. Art Show held at the downtown LA Convention Center by an important curator at the Long Beach Museum of Latin American ...

Father Richard Estrada and long time friend Eddie Bautista. By Thomas Varela NO SAFE PLACE TO CALL HOME On any given night in Boyle Heights in 2010, 1000 youth were homeless, according to a study. Citywide, almost 5,000 youth are sleeping outdoors under freeway ramps, in parks, abandoned-buildings, empty-lots, or nestled in foliage adjacent to the Metro Line or the Los Angeles River. They blend in at bus stops, boulevards or neighborhood streets hanging out aimless because they lack the basic necessities of life. (Some of them are high school students who live in cars or vans without their classmates or teachers’ knowledge.). Their dire circumstances make moving forward an almost insurmountable task. Lacking skills, often depressed, scrounging for food in dumpsters, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol just to make it through the night, they wander among us craving the warmth of human contact; their desire to connect with family is thwarted by obstacles not of ...

by Abel Salas Linda Caballero Sotelo has been tapped to help the New Americans Museum. Linda Caballero Sotelo never expected be running a museum, especially a museum dedicated to the newest Americans. The brain-child of 91-year-old visionary founder Deborah Szekely, the New Americans Museum at Liberty Station in Point Loma near San Diego is undergoing a rebirth under the stewardship of Caballero Sotelo, a former President and CEO at the San Diego Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “I met Deborah about 15 years ago at a dinner she hosted in her home when she was a board member at the National Council of La Raza,” says Caballero Sotelo. Szekely, she says, is a former director of the Inter-American Foundation in Washington D.C. Caballero Sotelo is no stranger  to the art world. Her work in the arts encompasses high level involvement as senior staff at INSITE ’97, the internationally acclaimed US/Mexico public art initiative where she organized and collaborated in the devel...

by Pancho Lipschitz Mary Becky Cortez and Dewey Tafoya make up Social Machine The definition of a social machine is an environment comprising humans and technology interacting and producing outputs or action which would not be possible without both parties present. A more playful and personal definition is being created by Dewey Tafoya and Mary Becky Cortez with their cultural shape shifting project they call Social Machine. It starts with them hanging out and having fun and then moves out into the community and involves art and kids and radio and poetry and t-shirts and music; always a wide variety of music. We sat down over quesadillas down the street from Espacio 1839 where Becky had just finished the Social Machine radio show and Dewey had just come back from doing a pop-up art workshop outside the L.A. opera. And as we talked about all the things they were doing, it occurred to me that there are political artists who make didactic images that are more about how clever the...