How Grassroots Activism and a Lifetime’s Worth of Vintage Are Helping a Beloved Los Angeles Local Stay Housed in Echo Park
A rack of vintage dresses flutters softly in the breeze as friends, neighbors, and members of the LA Tenants Union (LATU) pack the front yard of 1553 Ewing Street, a pale green Queen Anne Victorian with a cedar tree out front in Echo Park, Los Angeles.
That house is where 68-year-old Lupe Breard was raised, where she eventually raised her own three children, and where she has been fighting to remain since real estate investment company NELA Group bought the house in 2018, after Breard’s mother’s death, and attempted to evict her and her 73-year-old sister, Sarah Padilla, in 2022.
This past Sunday afternoon, the scene on Ewing Street could be mistaken for any of the many tchotchke-studded yard sales that Breard—a longtime collector of antique and retro items—has held over the years with the LATU to raise money both for her eviction case, and to have the Ewing Street house designated as a historic-cultural monument. The key difference is in the spirit of celebration in the air, thanks to a judge’s ruling that Breard could, indeed, stay in her longtime home.
“Things have been so crazy in LA, with the recent ICE raids and in our organizing, that we have to be really intentional about having days like today where we celebrate,” LATU member Lupita Limón Corrales tells me. “There’s so much work ahead, but it’s really sweet to see everyone together.” As we speak, children race by shouting for more carne asada and Jarritos in English and Spanish, while LATU volunteers silk-screen T-shirts and help to sell Lupe’s clothes. Nearby, a shrine to housing activist Benito Flores—who died last week while fighting eviction from his home in El Sereno—glows softly from Breard’s porch.
A self-described “autonomous housing movement” established in 2015, the LATU is committed to helping longtime Los Angeles residents like Breard remain in their homes amid the city’s rent hikes and mass evictions. On June 27, one of the many long days that made up Breard’s eviction trial at downtown Los Angeles’s Stanley Mosk Courthouse, Limón Corrales testified on behalf of the LATU. She explained to the jury that she’d first met Breard as a neighbor before they started organizing together and became close friends. When, in one tense moment, the attorney representing NELA Group’s co-CEO and chief financial officer, Marissa Solis, barked, “So you think housing is a human right?” Corrales replied, calmy and simply: “Yes.”
The strain of the court proceedings has undoubtedly taken a toll on Breard, who is known around Echo Park for her sociability and generosity. (Indeed, when I interviewed her for this story, I had to regretfully decline to take one of Breard’s many vintage purses home with me, despite her urging.) Living with a disability that makes her unable to find traditional work, she has been forced to constantly strategize merely to keep a roof over her head.
“My mom is not materially empowered to take control of her home or really have any kind of security in it, and it’s like she’s been under siege throughout this whole eviction process,” says Breard’s 32-year-old son Wesley, who was also called to testify during his mother’s trial last month. “It’s been so invasive and disempowering.”
Still, when I speak to Breard at the Ewing house, in a room upstairs lined wall-to-wall with trinkets she’s amassed over the years, she is joyful, walking me through narrow entryways crammed with a rainbow of books and pointing out special pieces—a ceramic poodle statue, a framed photograph of her family—in what she affectionately calls “the mess” of her children’s former rooms.
“We always had Italian, Mexicans and Japanese people in this area, especially during WWII, when there was so much displacement of Japanese-Americans,” she recalls, describing the community she’s long called home. “That’s what I like about this neighborhood; it’s really for everyone.” And yet, Echo Park’s demographics are changing by the year: Although Latinos still represent the largest ethnic group in the area, as its white population has grown, so too has the median income—creating an increasingly untenable situation for tenants like Breard and her sister.
But then again, even if Breard did have the money to pick up and move somewhere cheaper, she wouldn’t want to. Not only is the Ewing house full of 61 years’ worth of her personal and family history, but it also carries the painful distinction of being the former home of the Arechigas, the last family to be violently displaced in the racist 1959 demolition of Chavez Ravine to make way for what is, today, one of LA’s biggest and brightest tourist attractions: Dodger Stadium.
“Echo Park has been so affected by gentrification, and Lupe is someone who has a lot of relationships in the neighborhood and holds so many of the threads that connect us to an older version of Echo Park,” LATU volunteer Phoebe Unterman tells me. “In a way, what Lupe is dealing with is unfortunately pretty ordinary. I’ve been to this party 50 times, because there are houses like this all over LA where people are struggling and being supported by their communities.” Nationwide, only some 4% of people facing eviction manage to get the legal counsel they need to remain in their homes—making Breard one of the lucky ones.
Despite the stress of her housing battle, Breard remains a beacon of positivity, brightly sharing that her favorite decade to source vintage from at flea markets is the 1940s (“I’d watch old movies and really want those clothes”) and remembering getting to South LA rag houses at 5 a.m. to sort through their wares. “The things I liked, people used to call them ‘ippie’ clothes, because they couldn’t say ‘hippie,’” Breard says with a laugh.
Though Breard’s legal fight isn’t over yet, with any hope, her next chapter on Ewing Street, amid her carefully compiled treasures, will be as full and community-oriented as the 60-plus years she’s already spent making the house a home.
