The Lights of El Milagro

THE GRAND OLE OPRY

If you listen closely you can hear the bulldozers coming. It won’t be long now. Gaylord Entertainment from Nashville, Tennessee, promised to build a convention center on the bay front that will completely transform this area of Chula Vista. There will be hotels and high-rises and condos and restaurants and retail businesses and multimillion dollar homes. It’s what they do. They have built resort hotels all over America. They are big business. They even own the Grand Ole Opry, for God’s sake.

The vast 550 acres across the freeway from El Milagro currently house a few small businesses, an RV park, a controversial power plant, and the marina. But it is mostly ghosts. It is empty. There are only the skeletal remains of the Convair plant that once provided jobs to former residents of Chula Vista. They built Cold War rockets and strategically aimed them to detonate over Moscow. But they never got to launch one. If they had, there might be a whole lot more than just the old Convair rocket factory sitting in spooky desolation.

And since the end of the Cold War meant less demand for rockets to detonate over Moscow, Convair was a goner. When the aerospace industries moved away, so did the engineers—and the first major demographic shift in western Chula Vista was on.

So this morning the wind howls through abandoned buildings. Litter and sagebrush are blown up against the fences. There is an emptiness. Silence.

But this is not some isolated desert. This is a bay front in one of America’s most rapidly growing cities. Whether Gaylord or Donald Trump or Disneyland send their bulldozers, it is only a matter of time. We can hear them now. They will dig up the foundations and raze what is left of the buildings. They will excavate the remains of a lost industry. They will haul away soil tainted by atomic fuel and the bad karma associated with a project whose sole purpose was to kill hundreds of thousands of people. They’ll build new fences. There will be no litter or sagebrush in what promises to be one of the largest waterfront development projects on the entire West Coast.

Gaylord and the Chula Vista City Council will have to solve their philosophical differences on who will provide the labor for their 8th Wonder of the World. They will also have to solve the traffic problem on Interstate 5. We can’t help them with that. They may not drive cars to the Grand Ole Opry back in Tennessee, but we get into our cars to drive to the corner ATM. Gaylord’s project could bring over 2,000 jobs to the area and the increased demand on infrastructure will rise proportionately.

But to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit about the Grand Ole Opry or Gaylord or their high-rise hotels. I don’t even listen to country music.

I am more concerned with looking westward over the freeway sound wall and seeing a 10,000-story convention center black out the sunset. I wonder…if they build it:

• What kind of jobs will there be on the other side of our freeway sound wall?

• What will happen to property values in this poor area of Chula Vista?

• What will happen to our families?

• How will the infrastructure and the traffic and the people and the immense success of a luxury resort change the face of El Milagro?

• Where will our children go?

• What will become of the De Leons and their far-flung apartment complex and the many other low-end homes and trailers that our   children currently live in?

There is an even greater sense of urgency in our work now. The business executives of Gaylord Entertainment in Nashville, Tennessee, have never even heard of El Milagro. They have no idea that we would exist, as neighbors, separated by only a freeway sound wall and eight lanes of breathless traffic running in opposite directions every minute of every day.

At Mueller Charter School we are about change. So we are not afraid. But don’t count on our students to grow up to be your hotel’s hired help. Victoria De Leon is coming. Her potential will be infinite. She will lead from the executive offices—someone else can pour the coffee and mow the lawn.

In Nashville, tourists come to the city and are drawn to the Grand Ole Opry to see their favorite country music legends. They will no doubt come to Chula Vista too. But they needn’t draw all their inspiration from the sunsets over the San Diego Bay. Look out the other way, across the parking lot, due east, and past the freeway to the schoolyard and El Milagro. If you listen, you can hear the sound of children playing. You can navigate by their sweet music.

--From "The Lights of El Milagro", Page 323