The Los Angeles Dodgers were about to win the World Series.

"It was the ninth inning, Dodgers coming in there to close it out..."

Joseph had waited for this moment for a long time.

But his grandmother was another story.

"My mom was at my grandma's house. We called my mom:

The Dodgers are about to win the World Series! It's the first time in my life...

And you can hear her yelling in the background: I don't care about the Dodgers!

I don't want to watch that!"

This is Joseph's grandmother, Dolores:

"I said I don't care, I don't like the Dodgers."

When Dolores looks at Dodger Stadium,

what she sees is the place where she grew up.

"It was a beautiful, beautiful community.

Why did they pick that area?"

In the 1950s, liberal and conservative visions of the future

competed for control of Los Angeles.

It was a battle that caught Dolores and her neighbors in the middle,

and replaced their homes with a baseball stadium.

"It's kind of golden on the outside. But on the inside, at the root of it,

it's torn communities apart."

Before Dodger Stadium, this area of Los Angeles

was home to three largely Mexican-American neighborhoods:

Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop.

Together, they're now commonly referred to as "Chavez Ravine."

It encompassed about 300 acres of land, and was home to over 1,100 families.

"I was born there in 1937."

"I was born and raised in Chavez Ravine in 1943."

"It was, for me, as a child, it was almost a perfect time."

"I think of nature, hills, nice neighborhood, everybody knew each other."

"The street was lined with palm trees.

The area, in my point of view, was like the Garden of Eden."

Los Angeles was a deeply segregated city -- both because of "redlining,"

a government policy that kept non-whites from owning homes in certain areas;

and because of racially restrictive "covenants."

Covenants were clauses, like this one, that were added to property deeds.

They specifically barred land from being "sold, devised, used, or occupied"

by "any person other than one of the white or Caucasian race."

"There were very few places that people of color could live in Los Angeles.

So, because of that, Chavez Ravine was a really important site of home ownership."

By 1940, it was incredibly common for residents in Palo Verde, Bishop, and La Loma

to own their own homes.

Homeownership was a crucial part of the American dream;

it was a way to start building wealth.

And generations of Mexican-American families here were achieving it.

"We could actually buy property there, and we could thrive there, quietly, in the hills."

"My father had his own business, and my aunt had a bar across the street."

"Most of us owned property."

"I had a very comfortable life there as a child."

"There was a large portion of Chavez Ravine that had what was a real emerging middle class."

"Everybody was trying to look into the future to better themselves.

We had pride in what we had."

"That's when we got displaced."

In the 1940s, just after the Great Depression and the end of World War II,

LA's population exploded, and the city was facing a severe housing shortage.

Support was growing for the government to expand its role in providing public housing.

"Social reformers, activists, architects... different people actually starting to think about

what it means to build a better world, and build a better society."

In response, Los Angeles began designating certain neighborhoods as "blighted" or "slums,"

to be cleared out and replaced with public housing:

part of a national wave of what was called "urban renewal."

One of the places targeted for redevelopment was Chavez Ravine.

"There were kind of eyes on this place, that was on the edges of downtown Los Angeles,

but that was still pretty accessible and not too far off.

And they saw that this is a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American community,

and so didn't necessarily see them as an obstacle to building the vision that they wanted."

In 1948, Los Angeles designated Chavez Ravine as the first blighted area to be rebuilt.

To residents of Chavez Ravine, all this came as a shock.

"They tell the whole city that Chavez Ravine was nothing but shacks.

And that's the biggest lie."

"We were not slums. And we were a community on an upward trajectory,

and we were just Americans like everyone else."

The city of Los Angeles had a power called "eminent domain,"

which let them acquire anyone's land,

as long as they paid residents what the city deemed a fair price for it.

By July 1950, residents were notified that they'd have to move out and sell their homes.

The city had a plan to replace Chavez Ravine with a new community: "Elysian Park Heights."

It would include 13-story buildings, rows of landscaped townhouses, and stores.

It was presented to residents as a great opportunity.

"They would always say, well, you can move back, into this wonderful village.

Why would we want to move into a project,

when we already had a yard and home ownership?"

"Why would we want to go live in an apartment complex with 100 other people?"

"And that's what seems to have escaped everyone:

is that we were homeowners, and we had affordable housing."

Throughout the spring and summer of 1951, many families tried to fight the city.

These residents, often led by women, organized at home, demonstrated at City Hall,

and became a force in public hearings attended by hundreds.

"The people that I grew up with were great patriots,

like many of the people in the United States were after the war.

They believed in America. They believed in the American dream."

But in the end, there were few good options.

Many families took the offer to leave, and received little to no compensation for their land.

By 1951, the city had pushed out two thirds of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop residents.

"They valued the houses like, worthless. They never gave us the right price.

So everybody that sold their property in Chavez Ravine had to go in debt when they moved out."

"I remember that knock on the door when the man came in,

and handed some papers to my aunt.

My aunt burst into tears, started crying uncontrollably."

"They put fear in the people. Because they put the tractors next to your house.

What more can people get scared if you put a gun to your head?"

"It was awful. It wasn't just, we're taking your home.

There was this big feeling that we were helpless, hopeless,

and could do absolutely nothing about it."

"After the evictions, they start tearing everything down.

No houses. Everything was just like the desert."

Some families managed to stay in their homes. But the community was gone.

But around the same time, a different group in Los Angeles

was also fighting against the city's public housing plans -- for very different reasons.

Private real estate groups didn't want the government building housing.

They began a public campaign against it, stoking fears of communism,

and branding public housing as un-American, and a socialist plot.

"They have an organization called the Citizens Against Socialist Housing, or CASH.

And they really end up kind of turning public opinion against public housing."

The campaign led to a dramatic backlash against the city's housing plan.

In October 1952, public housing officials were fired and blacklisted.

A congressman named Norris Poulson was drafted to run for mayor of Los Angeles,

on an anti-public housing platform. He won.

And within just a week of taking office, he canceled the Elysian Park Heights project altogether.

Thousands of people had vacated their homes seemingly for no reason at all.

For the next several years, Chavez Ravine, and the handful of residents still there, were in limbo.

And the next chapter of their story was playing out three thousand miles to the east.

The Brooklyn Dodgers played at a stadium that had been built in 1913.

By the 1950s, the team's owner, Walter O'Malley,

was frustrated that the stadium's location in a dense part of the city made it difficult to expand.

O'Malley had big plans for a massive new dome-shaped stadium elsewhere in Brooklyn.

But he needed financial help, and New York wouldn't give him public funds for the land.

So O'Malley looked for someone who would --

and within months, struck a deal with Los Angeles city officials.

He would bring Dodger Stadium to LA.

And LA offered him a prime plot of land to build it on: Chavez Ravine.

On May 8th, 1959, the remaining residents were ordered to abandon their homes.

One of the last holdouts, a resident named Abrana Arechiga, tried to hold off police.

Her daughter, Aurora Vargas, in images that made their way to people across the country,

was forcibly carried out of her home.

TV news viewers watched that night as the final families were violently evicted.

Afterwards, right in front of the residents, bulldozers destroyed the last of the community.

"It's, to this day, an episode that will never be able to be unseen,

and which really sent a message, about who the city was for, and who the city will protect."

At the stadium's groundbreaking,

newspapers photographed kids collecting dirt from the site in souvenir boxes,

and O'Malley holding a souvenir shovel signed "Chavez Ravine."

"As though that ground had never been broken before."

In 1962, Dodger Stadium officially opened for business.

"Change is part of the city, and part of the landscape.

But time and time again, the question that needs to be asked is,

who bears the costs of those changes?"

In 2020, just a few miles from Dodger Stadium, a new stadium opened.

Its construction had cost more than five billion dollars,

making it the most expensive stadium in the world.

The residents it displaced were mostly Latino and Black.

As for Dodger Stadium, its legacy is complicated.

It holds multiple histories.

"Chavez Ravine is one of the most egregious examples

of racist removal and displacement in US history.

But it's also the site of Latinx excellence.

Different Latinx communities over time have really created a space for themselves in it.

And those things will always have to coexist."

"On Bishop Road, that's the road you said you lived on, right?"

"It's a weird disconnect.

I'm still going to be a Dodger fan, I'm raising my son as a Dodger fan.

But at the same time, all of the history is rooted in the displacement of families

and the displacement of communities.

The Dodgers are here to stay. They're LA's team, they're Southern California's team.

But to disregard that piece of history,

it wouldn't be fair to the people who lived there before."