‘Remembering Boyle Heights’

What: Boyle Heights has long stood out among Los Angeles neighborhoods for its cultural diversity and artistic richness. A tour through time reminds us how this came to be.

Why this? “Remembering Boyle Heights” was collectively developed at the theater space Casa 0101 by “Real Women Have Curves” playwright Josefina Lopez, director Corky Dominguez and an 11-person acting ensemble chosen to reflect the neighborhood’s diversity. Calling Boyle Heights “the Ellis Island of the West,” Lopez, who is Casa’s founding artistic director, puts particular emphasis on it as a place of openness in a past of housing covenants, when Latinos, Asians, blacks, Jews and others congregated there because they were barred elsewhere. “It put everyone together and made everyone equal, because they were being equally discriminated against, and that created this incredible tolerance and bonding,” she says. Lopez, who grew up there, worries that the neighborhood’s unique bonds are being undone as gentrification prices out its historic communities. It is, she says, “an erasure of a very colorful neighborhood.” Casa 0101, a community resource since 2002, faces its own struggle for existence, but with support from an ongoing fundraising campaign, programming is scheduled into July, Lopez says.

Details: Casa 0101, 2102 E. 1st St., Boyle Heights. 7:45 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 4:45 p.m. Sundays (dark Nov. 23); ends Dec. 16. $15$20. (323) 263-7684, casa0101.org