Photo by Robert Burroughs

Ida Street, Eden Gardens

"When I was a kid growing up here, during the war years, Eden Gardens was little more than a place to contain Mexican farm workers,” Frank Renteria said, folding his hands on his desk and looking out the window of his office on Ida Street. ‘‘La Colonia has gone through a lot of changes since then.” When he talks about his community, Frank Renteria’s rich, sonorous voice fluctuates between tenderness and anger. He’s an outspoken man, unafraid to say publicly what he thinks.

Frank Renteria at St. Leo's: "People would say, ‘Oh! You’re from Dogtown! Fleatown!’"

Photo by Robert Burroughs

‘‘We’ve lived through a period when we were segregated from the rest of Solana Beach. We went through a period of shame, when we didn’t like to tell people we were from Eden Gardens because they would say, ‘Oh! You’re from Dogtown! Fleatown!’ And now, all of a sudden, we’ve come to a period where Eden Gardens is very important. If you look at a map of Solana Beach, Eden Gardens is in the dead center. The property values here have skyrocketed, and it seems like everybody wants to own a piece of La Colonia now.”

“From here I can see my two grandmother’s houses, my uncles’, and my cousins’ houses."

Photo by Robert Burroughs

For a kid who was bom the son of a poor Mexican farmer, a kid who hated the drudgery of farm work and who used to ditch school so he wouldn’t have to learn how to speak English, Frank Renteria has done pretty well for himself. Over the years, Frank and his wife Angie have put together a profitable construction business, have built a fine home, and have raised a family. Now, by almost any standard of success, he’s become a successful man.

“I guess they’re not bad-looking places.”

What’s most remarkable, though, is the fact that Frank Renteria has done all this within a few blocks of the farmhouse where he was bom, forty-nine years ago. In an era when the average family in California packs up and moves away every five years, Frank Renteria has lived in this same neighborhood for nearly half a century. And he’s still a fairly young man who has every intention of spending the rest of his life here. The same tree in front of his house that he used to knock on wood for the good fortune of his children, he now knocks for the good fortune of his grandchildren, and someday he’ll probably be knocking on it for his great grandchildren.

Many of the families that bought their homes and land for a few hundred dollars fifty years ago have received offers from developers for as much as $300,000 per acre.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

There are many people in Eden Gardens who have lived there longer than Frank Renteria has. In his parents’ generation, there are many people who have lived there since the Twenties. But as Renteria points out, many of them were isolated, both culturally and geographically, from the Anglo community surrounding them, and they never participated much in the political affairs of the region. One example of this isolation is the very name of the community. Anglos have always called it Eden Gardens, and in conversation with Anglos, its inhabitants, perhaps out of courtesy, sometimes call it that. At home, though, it is still La Colonia, as it has always been.

Renteria speaks with great pride and respect for the older residents of La Colonia. But he believes it’s time for the people of the community to get involved in the politics of the new city of Solana Beach and to begin speaking out on the changes going on around them. When he looks out the window and across the street, Frank Renteria sees a newly constructed townhome that rents for $1120 a month. “Why would anybody want to pay that much money to live in Eden Gardens?” he asks, in a tone of amused irony. “Is it because they can be close to the ocean? Because it’s next to Del Mar? The racetrack? You tell me, because I don’t know.”

The new importance of Eden Gardens as a potential commercial, industrial, and civic center for Solana Beach — as well as an exclusive neighborhood for patrons of the Del Mar racetrack — has brought promise to some of the residents of Eden Gardens. Many of the families that bought their homes and land for a few hundred dollars fifty years ago have received offers from developers for as much as $300,000 per acre, leaving them at first surprised, then baffled, and finally just vaguely amused. There is, after all, a wonderful absurdity in seeing the weed-covered lot they’d passed by all their lives being transformed almost overnight into “Del Mar Downs — Luxury Townhomes.”

At the same time, though, people in Eden Gardens seem to feel a sense of loss as they watch the familiar traditions of their neighborhood changing — and being replaced with nothing more than the promise of success.

“It used to be that if a family killed a pig or a beef in Eden Gardens, they would make a whole-day project out of butchering it,” Frank Renteria said, trying to explain what it is that’s being lost. “An animal can be killed and butchered in just a couple of hours, you see, but they had such a good time at it, it took all day, almost like a fiesta. They would shoot it, hang it, gut it, skin it — but each step would mean a few more beers and a few more stories. All the men had a competition over who could do each step the best, who knew the most about it — all in fun, of course. I grew up thinking it took all day to kill a beef and that everybody was as friendly as those people were then. I think we’ve lost that now. I think we’ve lost that closeness that was here.”

Renteria’s mother and father settled in Eden Gardens in 1925, after fleeing Mexico where, in his mother’s home state of Tampico, men were being shot for no other reason than that they belonged to the wrong political party. Like many other Mexican families, the Renterias settled in Eden Gardens because the winter cultivation of vegetable crops in the San Dieguito Valley and the citrus orchards in Rancho Santa Fe required a large number of farm workers. Later, greenhouses were established in the area, and they, too, required workers. Between 1912 and 1929, the community of Solana Beach, just to the west, was growing quite rapidly, but only whites were allowed to buy land there — by the subdivision charter, people of Mexican origin were excluded. Even in Eden Gardens, much of the land was owned by white farmers, and it was rare for a bank to make a loan to a Mexican.

For what was intended to be just a place to contain farm workers. La Colonia was blessed with many physical attributes: the southwestern aspect of the small valley offered an extra degree of winter sunshine; nestled between ridges on the east and west, it was partly protected from the prevailing winds; the climate was good for growing almost any kind of fruit or vegetable, and every family had its garden; being close to the ocean, there was an abundance of seafood — in the Twenties and Thirties, lobster was a common meal in La Colonia; and though there was no electricity or running water, there was an abundance of peace and solitude. At night, the old-timers say, not a single light bulb could be seen anywhere in Eden Gardens.

“What is now Solana Beach was my back yard,” Frank Renteria said, recalling the neighborhood he knew in the Forties. “There were a few homes down by the railroad tracks, but everything else was farms or open land. I used to hunt rabbits and quail where Solana Heights is today. It was scary out there because it was so wild. It wasn’t the kind of place a boy would want to go alone.”

The marshland on the San Dieguito River, just south and east of the Del Mar Fairgrounds, would flood in a wet year, and the lake came nearly to the southern boundary of Eden Gardens. Duck hunting there was said to be among the best in Southern California. Both ocean and freshwater fish became trapped in the marshes and were easy to catch barehanded. Renteria remembers going down there to club huge corvina with a baseball bat.

For thirty-six dollars a year, Renteria’s father, Frank Sr., rented several acres of land in Eden Gardens, where he farmed and raised cattle. When times were hard, he would sometimes go work in the citrus groves at Rancho Santa Fe, but unlike most of the farm workers, who migrated north every summer to follow the crops, Frank Sr. stayed in Eden Gardens year-round with his wife Ignacia and their three sons and five daughters.

At first Frank Sr. saw no point in buying land in Eden Gardens: “My father, when he looked at this community, used to say this land would never be worth anything,” Frank Renteria said. “He was what you might call a nonbeliever.” But in 1956, Frank Sr. finally bought a couple of acres on the hillside on the eastern edge of Eden Gardens. Today that land, besides being worth a small fortune, has provided a place for the homes of him and his three sons.

The land where Frank’s father once grew vegetables and raised cattle is now part of the Plaza West shopping center. The house where Frank was born has been torn down, and a discount tire store has been built in its place. Earl Warren Junior High School replaced the strawberry and vegetable fields on the northwestern boundary of Eden Gardens. In the mid-Sixties, the I-5 freeway displaced the community’s Catholic church of St. Leo’s and isolated the eastern half of La Colonia. Much of the western half of La Colonia has gradually gone to apartment buildings, rental storage facilities, and other commercial and industrial uses. What was once La Colonia has now been whittled down to just a few blocks. And the brush-covered countryside where Frank Renteria used to hunt rabbits has been developed into the posh residential neighborhood of Lomas Santa Fe. “I feel sorry for the kids nowadays.” Renteria said. “They don’t have any idea the kind of freedom we had then. Where have they got to play now? Just the streets.”

All the changes haven’t been bad, though. Most people in Eden Gardens, looking back on things, will say many of the changes going on around them have been good. They take satisfaction in seeing their community being upgraded. At the same time, though, they worry that their land will someday be reappraised, and taxed, at its present value, and if that happens, it could be disaster. “These are not wealthy people,” Renteria explained. “They live comfortably and simply; but if they [the county] starts taxing them heavily, they will have to move to someplace where they can afford to live.”

Many families in Eden Gardens have thought of selling their land to benefit from the increased values. But if they do that, they become alienated from the community they have known all their lives. Al Gonzales, one of Frank Renteria’s good friends and neighbors, comes from one of the largest and oldest families in Eden Gardens. “I asked my father one time, ‘Dad, have you ever thought about selling your place?’ ” Al Gonzales recalled. “He said, ‘Sure. But where would I go then? Where would I live?’ ”

Although he’s eleven years younger than Frank Renteria, Al Gonzales, a tall, soft-spoken man, shares Renteria’s deep-felt concern about the future of La Colonia; like Renteria, he has recently joined the Solana Beach citizens’ advisory committee, hoping to have some say in the decisions that affect their neighborhood. Since they live just down the street from one another and sometimes work on construction projects together, they often get together to discuss community issues. In anticipation of an upcoming community meeting to be held at the church, they recently decided to take a drive through Eden Gardens to discuss the things they felt needed to be brought out at the meeting.

As Renteria and Gonzales drove through their neighborhood in Renteria’s black pickup truck, stopping now and then to pass the time of day with friends and old folks, they pointed out local landmarks or places they had haunted when they were kids. “I used to play in that tree right there,” Renteria said, pointing to a pepper tree that still has a crude ladder leading to a tree house in its branches. “It’s still there,” he laughed.

‘‘Like a lot of guys, I think I took my first drag on a cigarette right over there,” Gonzales said, pointing to a lot on Genevieve Street, not far from the church. “That’s the thing about this neighborhood — everywhere I look, I see a memory.”

“That house there is Al’s grandmother’s house,” Renteria said, pointing from the window of his truck to a small house with a lush, well-kept yard. “That’s probably the oldest standing house in La Colonia.”

“My dad moved here in 1923, and that house was already standing then,” Gonzales said. “He bought that house and land for a hundred and twenty bucks. Can you believe that?”

Over the years, the Gonzales family has flourished in La Colonia to the point that it almost seems as though everybody there is either a Gonzales or married to a Gonzales. “I bet the Gonzales family has 2000 years of combined residency here,” Renteria said, as proudly as if the Gonzales family were his own. “I know my family has 850 years, and we’re a small family.”

Renteria stopped the truck in front of St. Leo’s Mission, a small white church with a red tile roof. He sucked in his breath and let out a long sigh as he looked over its familiar features, trying to assess his emotions about the place. Though he grew up attending church at St. Leo’s, he only goes now when, as he says, “I feel the need” — and lately he hasn’t been feeling much need.

Besides serving the religious needs of the Catholic community, the church has served as a town meeting hall for many years, and it has been the source of much local pride — as well as controversy. “This place was built with a lot of sweat and a little money,” Renteria said proudly.

“Everything you see on that church was built with the hands of local people,” Gonzales agreed.

The small church was built originally as a recreation center for the old St. Leo’s, which was torn down to make room for the I-5 freeway. It isn’t difficult to imagine the controversy that might arise if the government wanted to build a freeway through North County today. But in 1965, when the freeway was completed, there was almost no controversy at all — at least in Eden Gardens. “The people here in Eden Gardens never used to speak out against anything,” Renteria said. “Most of them just wanted to live and be left alone. Now we’ve learned that was a mistake. Now we’ve learned we need to take a look at what’s going on around us.”

Renteria returned his attention to the church. “A few years ago, we put on that new tile roof,” he recalled with a smile. “None of the people who worked on it had ever been on a roof before. I headed up the project, and the people in the community donated their labor. And look at that, isn’t that a beautiful job? That shows you what people can do if they want to get involved.”

St. Leo’s Church has been through much turmoil in recent years — another example of the community’s growing pains and of the desire on the part of the people of Eden Gardens to exercise control over their own fate. “For a long time, nobody but local people came to this church,” Gonzales explained. “Then we got this priest. Father Roberto, who was so popular that a lot of people from Rancho Santa Fe — I mean people with a lot of bucks — started coming here to hear him. We had one English Mass and one Spanish Mass, which worked out pretty well for everyone. Then, about a year ago, the church said we needed two Spanish Masses here, and they did away with the English Mass. What they did, more or less, was kick out all the English-speaking people.”

Many people in Eden Gardens, as well as Rancho Santa Fe, accused the church of drying to perpetuate the old segregationist mentality that had existed when Eden Gardens was still a farmworker community. Father O’Sullivan, of the St. James parish in Solana Beach (of which St. Leo’s is a part) argued in the church’s defense. He said St. Leo’s had been established to minister to the Spanish-speaking people, and the decision to eliminate the English Mass and add a second Spanish Mass was made because many of the Spanish-speaking people had been hearing Mass from the church’s patio because they couldn’t all fit inside.

“It was true they needed a second Spanish Mass,” Al Gonzales said, “but I don’t see why they had to eliminate the English Mass.”

“To this day, we don’t know why they did that,” Renteria said. “I was so disgusted, I haven’t set foot in that church since.”

“A lot of the English-speaking people thought it was the locals who were behind that,” Gonzales went on, “but we really weren’t. See, a lot of the younger people here don’t even speak Spanish, so they can’t even hear Mass in their own neighborhood church. When my kids go there, they might as well be in China.”

“They even wanted to close this church down,” Renteria said, “and we told them they couldn’t do that because this land was donated by Frank Garcia and the church was built by the local people. How can they take that land away from us and sell it?”

‘‘Eventually, they still want to do that,” Gonzales added.

‘‘And if we let them, they probably will,” Renteria shrugged.

Across the street from the church, Renteria pointed out the site of the grade school he attended. Though it’s become a parking lot now, in 1928 it was what the Solana Beach School District called the ‘‘Americanization School” — the place where the children of Mexican farm workers were taught English, so as not to detract from the education of children whose native language was English. In other words, the Solana Beach School District was segregated from 1928 until the Americanization School was abolished in 1949.

‘‘I didn’t even know then that I was going to a segregated school,” Renteria said. Nor did he understand at the time what was happening when the Americanization School was abolished: “When I was in third grade, all of a sudden I started going to school in Solana Beach. But I never knew why.”

Renteria said he bears no bitterness over those years. “I give the teachers a lot of credit. Imagine what it must have been like trying to teach English to a roomful of kids who went back to speaking Spanish every time the teacher turned her back. I used to climb out the window and run home, just so I wouldn’t have to speak English.”

Like a lot of people from La Colonia, Renteria either ignored much of the prejudice he experienced from the English-speaking community in those days, or he accepted it as a fact of life beyond his control. But some memories of those days still rankle him: “One time I went to the barber shop in Solana Beach, and the man there — he was very polite — said, ‘Son, we don’t cut your people’s hair here. You’ll have to go to your own barber shop.’

“When I was a kid, when we went to the Solana Beach Theater, or La Paloma in Encinitas, we had to sit in the section for Mexicans, way over on the side. If you didn’t, they would come and tell you, ‘You belong over there.’ I’ve gotten out of that habit now. But even today, you watch, when an older Mexican person walks into a theater, he’ll walk to the far side and sit.”

On Valley Avenue, where the smell of Mexican cooking wafted from the many kitchens along Eden Garden’s restaurant row, Renteria stopped the truck in front of Tony’s Jacal, a handsome, solid-looking building made of adobe brick. “There should be a statue somewhere for this man,” Renteria said proudly, pointing to the restaurant started by Tony Gonzales (no relation to Al Gonzales) in 1946. “He’s the man who opened the doors to Eden Gardens.” By joining the Solana Beach Chamber of Commerce, Tony Gonzales became the first businessman in Eden Gardens to pursue the patronage of non-locals. Because the location of his restaurant was just a few blocks from the Del Mar racetrack, and because the food at his place was well liked, Tony Gonzales enjoyed a great success.

But it was the Blue Bird Cafe, just down the street from Tony’s Jacal, that was the first eating establishment in Eden Garden. It started in 1937 as a pool hall where men would go after work to drink beer and carouse. “It was a pretty rough place,” Renteria recalled. “In fact, women wouldn't even go in there for a long time.” Later, the Blue Bird began offering food to its customers, and eventually, after the success of Tony’s Jacal, it was converted entirely to a restaurant. After that, two more Mexican-food restaurants sprang up, attracting people from all over San Diego, providing employment for many people from the local community and giving Eden Gardens its first chance to break out of the old, and widely despised, stereotype of a farm-worker ghetto.

A little farther down Valley Avenue, just past restaurant row, a pack of young men was loitering on the street outside an apartment building. An almost steady stream of expensive cars would pull up to the curb, and one of the men would lean in the car window to converse with the drivers. “This is the heart of the garbage in Eden Gardens,” Renteria said, cruising slowly past the horde of men. “You’re looking at it. Sometimes you can’t even walk by here because there’s so many of them.” One of the men waved at Renteria and Gonzales as they drove by, and the two returned the greeting — but without warmth. Gonzales turned to Renteria and commented how much it hurt him to see one of their old friends dealing drugs on the street like that.

“The drug problem is killing us,” Renteria said, slowly shaking his head. “Some of the older people are almost afraid to go out of their houses. The City of Solana Beach is talking about turning this area into some kind of ‘old town,’ but how can they do that when the biggest business here is selling dope?”

“Every house on every street in this community has been affected by this drug problem,” Gonzales said. “A friend, a daughter, a son. That’s the number-one issue in Eden Gardens now, to make a statement that we’re against drugs.”

“See, it’s really hard for us,” Renteria explained. “A ldt of these guys who are selling drugs here are our friends. But we can see that the drug problem is killing this town, and we’ve got to do something to draw the line.”

“For a long time, we didn’t do anything about the drug problem,” Gonzales said. “The way people in another neighborhood might talk to their neighbors about the weather, we’d talk about who got busted, or who was shooting up out in the street. I think the reason nothing’s been done about it up till now is that it’s real hard for somebody to call the cops when they know the guy selling the drugs, know his parents and his whole family, and know the hurt it will cause them. This is what has to change here, and I don’t know if we can do it.”

Renteria believes some of the older people are reluctant to speak out against the drug dealers because of fear of reprisals and out of fear that the police won’t be able to protect them. But he also believes that if they can get the whole community united, they can at least put an end to dealing drugs openly on the street. ‘‘We’ve had this drug problem here since the late Fifties, and we’re sick of it,” he said. “We want people from other communities to know they can’t come to our neighborhood to buy their drugs. We want our community back again.”

It infuriates Frank Renteria to see the media perpetuate the image of Eden Gardens as a place to score drugs — in effect, giving the drug dealers free advertisement. “We had this guy, Larry Himmel, come out here the other day and do a report for his TV show. And what’s he do? He takes pictures of wine bottles and drug dealers. It makes my blood boil! Why didn’t he come take pictures of my house, to show we’ve got pride too? Or go inside Tony’s Jacal and talk to somebody who’s lived here all his life and worked hard to make an honest living? I hope I see that guy, Himmel, someday so I can tell him what I think of him.”

At La Colonia Park, twenty or so illegal aliens were playing soccer or just sitting on the concrete benches, whiling away the day. To compound the drug-dealing problem along Valley Avenue is the fact that illegal aliens from Mexico tend to gravitate to Eden Gardens because it’s a Spanish-speaking neighborhood where they blend in and feel comfortable. Some of the illegals, lured by the promise of fast money, have been recruited by the drug dealers to smuggle and sell drugs.

Eden Gardens has had to agonize over the problem of illegal aliens even more than most communities in San Diego. Though its residents share a common heritage and language with the aliens and believe that most of the illegal aliens are honest and hardworking people, just the sheer number of illegals seeking refuge in Eden Gardens has caused resentment. “This may be an exaggeration ” Renteria said with a smile, “but one guy told me that in some of these apartments along Valley, the people sleep hanging by their feet from the ceiling so there’ll be enough room for everybody.”

Next to La Colonia Park, he pointed out one apartment that is owned by an absentee landlord who allows many more residents to occupy each apartment than the law allows. “That guy has been turned in to the health department I don’t know how many times,” Renteria said, disgusted just by the sight of the place. “But he’s raking in the bucks, so he’ll probably keep doing it as long as he can get away with it.” Though Al Gonzales agrees there’s a problem with too many illegal aliens in Eden Gardens, he believes the illegals are sometimes used as scapegoats. “When people tell me we have to do something about the illegal aliens, I say they’re no different than our parents and grandparents who came to this country looking for a better way of life,” he said. “Even the English-speaking people came here for the same reasons. Some of them might have been legal immigrants, and some might not.”

After holding a community meeting at the church recently, the people of Eden Gardens decided that one way to solve the problems of drug dealers and illegal aliens who congregate along Valley Avenue would be a no-loitering ordinance. They requested that the City of Solana Beach implement such an ordinance.

Just south of La Colonia Park is an area of Eden Gardens that has been growing rapidly — mostly in the form of high-density apartments and condominiums. “I guess they’re not bad-looking places,” Renteria considered as he looked over one of the newer developments. “We don’t have any complaint about their appearance. It’s just that they’re too dense. A lot of this area along Valley and Stevens is zoned for twenty-nine units to the acre! Can you imagine what this place would look like with that many people living here? When you put that many units per acre, you’re stacking people, and when you stack people, you’re gonna have problems. Nobody wants that sort of thing except the guy who’s building it and making all the money from it.”

Renteria says he’s optimistic and hopeful that the newly incorporated city of Solana Beach will have the best interests of Eden Gardens in mind. But at the same time, he sees a lot of dangers. If Eden Gardens becomes the city’s district for building low-rent housing, or if it becomes almost entirely a civic or industrial center — as it already has along the northern end of Stevens Avenue — the families who have lived there since the 1920s and who now have as many as five generations still living there could be forced to leave. “On the other hand,” he said, “if the city doesn’t allow us to build at all, our children won’t have any place to live.”

Many neighborhoods in San Diego might gladly trade their problems for those of Eden Gardens. And while the Spanish saying salsipuedes (“leave if you can”) has long been the challenge for many young Mexican-Americans trapped in areas of economic depression, in Eden Gardens, the challenge is just the opposite — stay if you can. “My own son just moved to La Costa because he couldn’t find any place reasonable to rent in Eden Gardens,” Renteria said.

We turned left off Valley Avenue and started back up the hill toward his house. But halfway up the hill, Gonzales asked him to pull over. “This is my favorite view of Eden Gardens,” Gonzales said. “From here I can see my two grandmother’s houses, my uncles’, and my cousins’ houses. Even though I might not see those people every day, it makes me feel good every day to know they’re all right here, all around me.”

Like some other young people from Eden Gardens, Al Gonzales had to move away to discover just what it was he left behind. “I moved my family to Hawaii for a year once. My wife has relatives there, and we thought we’d give it a try,” he said. “But after just three months, I told my wife, ‘Hey, we’re going back home.’ She says now, ‘Ah, you just couldn’t break out of EG.’ But I think she understands. My whole extended family is right here. That’s really rare, and I feel lucky to have that.

“That move to Hawaii cost us a lot of money — we’re still paying for it — and a lot of people said, ‘Man, that was really a mistake, wasn’t it?’ But it wasn’t, to me, because I came to see how much I love my home and my neighborhood.”

One thing is certain: If the people of Eden Gardens want to keep their neighborhood, they’ll have to fight for it. And that’s why Frank Renteria and Al Gonzales decided to get involved in their community’s affairs in the first place. “My parents came from a different system in Mexico,” Renteria said. “They didn’t get involved much in local issues. But I’m an American. I want to be part of my country and to better my community in any way I can. I don’t just want to live here. If there are changes taking place, I want to know what they are and to speak my mind. If nobody listens to me, at least I can say I spoke up.”