Finding the Right Path

Daniel Paredes recalls a childhood typical to Frogtown in the ‘90s — a tight knit community where everybody knew each other and neighborhood kids would hang out in the streets. 

“I was forbidden to go to the river when I was a kid. That didn’t stop me from going to the river. I used to go with the friends on my block, especially my now brother-in-law.”

“Some of my earliest memories are playing on the street with him and then sneaking into the river and just collecting crayfish.”

Part of what made the community so close is that like many other Frogtown families, Daniel’s parents came from a small town in México called San Martín Hidalgo. 

“I remember us also going to Mexico every once in a while. And then I would run into classmates from Frogtown, from Alessandro [Elementary School]. And then I would see them out there. And so for me, the world, ever since I was super young, was already interconnected.”

As Daniel grew up, boundaries and borders became much clearer. Living near the river, where his parents forbid him from going, meant he understood that being in the wrong place could be dangerous. Having undocumented parents meant he understood the stakes if his parents were caught crossing the border.

“It was dangerous to be an immigrant, really. Your family could get torn apart real easy and you wouldn’t know until it was happening and destroying your life.”

Later on, Daniel went to UC Berkeley for college, where he studied the issues that struck his suddenly transforming neighborhood so he could develop the literacy to combat it. 

“I already knew that my neighborhood was rapidly changing and was going to keep rapidly changing. So I wanted to study things like gentrification and displacement, income inequality, city politics. I wanted to understand those things so that I wasn’t just ignored by people that were making decisions for us. I wanted to be able to have articulate conversations about what they were saying and implying with their thoughts and ideas.”

After returning home, social justice became his career. He enrolled in a UCLA urban planning graduate program and joined the newly revived Elysian Valley Riverside Neighborhood Council. He now works for a major labor union and in his free time has remained involved with community efforts like LA Más’ pandemic food distribution program. 

“I’ve been helping them with a social housing project and using my mapping skills to help a group of students make maps so they can start doing this kind of decentralized community land trust idea and implement that. It’s such a small world that the first people they approached about this project are people that I actually know; those moments really make me feel like I’ve been on the right path.”

Daniel was born and raised in Frogtown. As a child, he would sneak off to the river to ride bikes or catch crayfish with friends. He remembers the gang violence that plagued the community and the struggles that his parents went through to provide for their family. As he got older and went off to UC Berkeley, he noticed the first waves of gentrification across Northeast LA.