With their hands out to property owners within the Los Angeles Unified School District boundaries, school board members made impassioned pleas yesterday about the funding crisis in schools.

The comments came minutes before the board voted to place a parcel tax measure on the June ballot. The plan asks voters to approve a yearly $100 per parcel tax - for four years - to help plug some of the holes in the school district's budget deficit dam.

The oratory from the board of education chambers skewered the district's notorious inefficiency, made use of cultural metaphors, and referenced the Civil Rights movement. Board member Richard Vladovic, whose district includes the San Pedro area, said constituents have already complained to him about the possibility of a tax hike. "So be it." He said, as he urged support of the tax.

If the parcel tax drive is to be successful, board member Steve Zimmer argued, the division between parents and non-parents must dissolve. "Schools are not collections of positions, they are communities. They operate as a family and you cannot remove a member of that community, of that family, without affecting the entire family. This is part of our effort to keep our family whole."

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a speech last week that made board member Yolie Flores Aguilar, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, rethink an institution's reaction to tough times. "He said, 'In my family when there is financial crisis, we tighten our belt.' Well, in my family we go find another job. We find resources, even if that means selling oranges by the freeway because we still have to feed our kids and pay the rent."

What a vivid analogy. How often do we hear Southern California elected officials - OK, outside of L.A. County Sup. Zev Yaroslavsky - make public cultural references to their immigrant heritage? Which references are safe? Which are institutionalized? Which ones still raise an eyebrow? And does the eyebrow-raising come from the assimilated upper middle class grandchildren of immigrants? Back to the budget cuts: it's going to take a lot of orange and bagel selling and cotton picking to get classrooms out of the financial mess on the horizon.

The music of troubadors, political prisoners, and socialist revolutionaries of yesteryear attracted a spill-out crowd at an east Long Beach coffee house on Friday night.

For four years the Taller Sur group has organized regular trova nights at Viento y Agua Coffeehouse. They called on their friends to celebrate the birthday with an open mic, a palomazo. Far from a gathering of homogenous Latinos (an oxymoron?) the gathering reflected a cross section of the varied Latin American diaspora to the U.S.: middle aged Latin American expatriates who lived under 1970s military and authoritarian regimes and for whom trova was the soundtrack of resistance, the sons and daughters of those expatriates who refuse to abandon their parents' culture, monolingual U.S. Latinos who resent their parents for not teaching them Spanish and taking them to the home country.

Trova (otherwise known as nueva cancion) is the singer-songwriter genre exemplified by Cuban Silvio Rodriguez, Chilean Victor Jara, and Mexican Guadalupe Trigo (there are lots others, go ahead disagree or comment on your favorite). Trova songs are political, sensual, angry, and soothing. On this night 32 year-old Efren Luna presented a very traditional trova set. He ended with "Ojala" by Silvio Rodriguez, a song about a first love and unmeasured longing, with a cryptic last line that gives the song a political twist.

Luna told the packed coffeehouse that this kind of music doesn't and likely won't get mainstream radio airplay and urged the crowd to keep coming out to the shows. Since he moved to L.A. from Veracruz seven years ago Luna told me he's seen plenty of trova venues close, like Angeles Bohemios in Echo Park, and Café Maestro in South L.A. Nevertheless, the audience for trova is growing.

Trova is best known in large Latin American cities, such as Buenos Aires, Santiago, Mexico City. One of the reasons the trova audience is growing here, according to Tomas Cadena, is because more immigrants from large Spanish-speaking cities have arrived in L.A. in recent years. Cadena gives me his take on the state of trova as he contemplates the standing room-only crowd from the sidewalk on Fourth Street. He began playing trova in the L.A. area about 20 years ago. It was tough back then, he said, now he's teamed up with another trovador his age, Esteban Leon, to put on regular concerts at the Eagle Rock Center for the Performing Arts. A concert they put on almost two years ago may put them into the category of seminal L.A. songs. They called on trovadores to compose songs in tribute to the people who marched at the 2007 MacArthur Park rally that ended in a hail of LAPD rubber bullets. Cadena said they've recorded the songs and will put them out in CD form soon.

Proof that this theory has legs walked up the Fourth Street sidewalk in Buddy Holly specs, a skirt, and a denim jacket embroidered with a sequin Virgen de Guadalupe. That's Marisol Hernandez. She and several members of the L.A. band La Santa Cecilia showed up to celebrate the Taller Sur anniversary. The band's guitarist Gloria Estrada - a mariachi fanatic and graduate of USC's jazz guitar program - told me they are friends with the Taller Sur crew and other trova musicians because it's unlike any other scene in L.A. The musicians, she said, support each other, respect, and like each other. She agreed that the absence of a rock star mentality is refreshing.

Believe me I wanted to stay to see Marisol and the rest of the gang throw down a palomazo in the spirit of Silvio Rodriguez and Guadalupe Trigo. I talked to Jorge Vazquez who was wearing a beanie that held down limp-snake dreadlocks. His rock band, La Brutal Lulu, played a couple of songs at the beginning of the Taller Sur night. He's been in L.A. for six years and misses his native Mexico City. He couldn't really say what keeps him here. He's making a tenuous living off of music. His band's composing original work but is playing covers around Orange County.

I had to go. Maybe somebody can fill me in on how the rest of the night went and whether Marisol danced a make-believe norteño with Victor Jara.

It was 45 degrees at 3:30pm when I went for a walk in Sterling, Virginia today. The streets were unfamiliar but the names were not: Compton Circle, Wilmington Drive. I'd never been to this part of the country (about 45 minutes west of D.C.) in winter. The desolation of the landscape is unsettling. It reminds me of the desert north of Hermosillo in the summer. On one kind of tree the leaves remain brown and hanging like corpses on forked crosses. The wind tries to shake them out of their death but is only able to get a rustling that sounds like a nearly dried up waterfall. Branches grow on branches like a pile of old menorahs. The rustling is like a couple of Aztec dancers shaking their rattler leggings.

Unlike the previous two days the sun was out today. This does not feel like the holidays. This does not feel like December. It's all wrong. Where are the palm trees?

I don't think Arnold lives around here. He's the juggling, utensil-trick chef who served us at Benihana last night (he dropped a spatula and a pepper mill). As soon as he stepped in front of the grill I knew he was a compa. A quarter into an Asahi Dry, my wife asked him where he's from. El Salvador, he said. she wanted to talk to him in Spanish. Would he be offended, she asked me. Fifty - fifty, I told her. He could be insecure about his accent and his English, so he wouldn't want to call attention to it. He could be an extrovert, who couldn't care less about his accent and would be amused to find fellow Spanish speakers. Arnold did not speak Spanish the whole night.

A few couples are out walking their dogs. One of the couples smiled at me, the other didn't. If you take away the homes here it's easy to see the hills rolling like they do in El Sereno or like the hills between Chula Vista and Mt. San Miguel.

A sign that reads "End State Maintenance" is missing an exclamation point.

Protestors outside Fremont High School this week made sure their chants were heard through closed car windows on San Pedro Street: "Whose school? Our School!" "Save our school! Save our school!"

This protest is another part of the large scale tug-of-war at L.A. Unified over how to reform campuses that have been drop-out factories for decades. The week before L.A. Unified superintendent Ramon Cortines told the chronically underachieving school it had reached the end of the line. The district, Cortines said, had given the campus enough chances and resources to improve and it hadn't. When a public school doesn't improve test scores two years in a row it's put in a "Program Improvement" category that qualifies it for resources and other help. Fremont High School has been a Program Improvement school for 12 years.

Matt Taylor, a Fremont H.S. teacher for 25 years, rejected the Cortines evaluation of his campus. "We are not a failure, we are not a failing school. We are very much an improving school."

Some test scores appear to back up Taylor's claim. Fremont H.S.'s API score two years ago was a basement-low 492. This year it's up to 524, still light years away from the state goal of 800 (University H.S. in Irvine scored a 904 and Arcadia H.S. scored an 876).

Senior Mariela Martinez is one of them. Her older sister, a Fremont H.S. grad, is currently enrolled at Brown University. Mariela wants to attend Barnard College. Looking down through black horn-rimmed glasses at a prepared speech behind a small forest of broadcast station microphones, Mariela fired off a forceful "J'accuse!" against Superintendent Ramon Cortines. "As the students of John C. Fremont High School, we hereby take our right to petition against the reconstitution of our school, declaring that we cannot and will not stand for this overly dramatic act of reform."

No one said they spoke on behalf of the countless students who've dropped out from this campus or have graduated with a substandard education. Several young women, Fremont H.S. graduates now attending El Camino Community College, engaged me in a debate about what drives reform, the exception or the rule.

After the chants teachers and students didn't dispute the low test scores. They did talk about the daily struggles of poverty and thin civic support families wake up to each morning.

Day of the Dead's come and gone, one more year on its march toward becoming this country's newest holiday.

That's what Rutgers University professor Regina Marchi argues in her new book. You can find Dia de los Muertos/Day of the Dead celebrations across the U.S. because there are now significant populations of Latin American immigrants in most states. And the celebrations are attracting non-Latinos, who are picking up the tradition as their own.

We need to go back to the Chicano civil rights movement, 40 years ago, to trace the current growth of the observance. Mostly U.S.-born Mexican American artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s started these celebrations in California cultural centers after trips to Mexico, where it was purposefully forgotten in large cities.

In the 1950s and 60s, Marchi said in an interview, Mexico's ruling class saw Dia de los Muertos as a backward tradition that had no place in large cities undergoing post-World War Two modernization. That changed in the 1970s when Day of the Dead was folded into national tourism campaigns, becoming one of many stops on an extensive cultural tourism trail carved out by the Mexican government.

Long established Chicano art galleries in California such as the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego, Self Help Graphics in East L.A. and Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco, have staged Day of the Dead altar making workshops, public altar viewings and parades for decades.

The decade-old Dia de Los Muertos festival at the Hollywood Forever cemetery attracted several thousand people, about half of them non-Latinos, said Adela Marquez, a native of Mexico who's lived in the U.S. most of her life. Marquez and her younger, U.S. born sister began the celebration, - which now includes Latin alternative bands, Aztec dancers and lots of thematic altars - to make sure their heritage didn't die out. "We started it because we wanted to bring the old traditions to the new generations here in the United States that have not had the opportunity to experience this incredible ceremonies that happen in Mexico and Latin America."

The holiday's growth and subsequent commercialization - Marchi includes in her book a picture of Starbucks Day of the Dead product shelves - doesn't signal a demise. Think about it, just because Christmas is the most commercialized holiday in the world doesn't mean there aren't people who don't observe it as a deeply transformative event.

This transformation makes me think of the first and second line funeral processions in New Orleans. They're somber and festive celebrations of the dead that take place in the city's public spaces. They've become part of the cultural patrimony of all New Orleans residents.

Some Chicanos are upset about the migration of Day of the Dead to communities outside the traditionally Latino neighborhoods. In conducting research for her book, Marchi said she interviewed Chicanos who have seen their worst nightmare come true: Day of the Dead Happy Hours. Non-Latinos are grateful, she said, that Chicano artists a generation ago began making altars at cultural centers. "It was a gift that they gave to the larger U.S. society in terms of offering a forum that people could adopt and identify with as a way to remember their loved ones and connect with their past and their histories in a very public way and in a very joyous, positive way."

Sunday, 2:00 p.m., San Pedro.

For about 30 minutes I've been sitting in my folding chair between palm trees at Point Fermin Park. Earlier, I took out my bicycle from the trunk of my car, rode left on the street that hems the coast, turned right on Western Avenue and felt like I coughed up a lung going up the steep, curvy road toward 25th Street. I returned 45 minutes later. I'd come to Pedro to have breakfast with R, my buddy from college.

I'm facing the ocean, looking at the chest-high concrete wall that divides treacherous cliffs from a long sidewalk and healthy green lawns. A continuous row of Arabic-style stars are cut out from the concrete wall and give ticker-tape peeks at the overcast ocean.

A few minutes ago I saw walk past an Asian couple, a man and a woman in their mid forties. Maybe they're Filipino. They walked with a deliberate aimlessness. The man wore shorts, a t-shirt, flip-flops, and smoked a cigarette. The woman wore a bomber jacket vest and walked a few yards behind the man, making sure he'd not missed anything. The man bowed his head into an oil drum trash can. He found nothing. He moved on to the other trash can, diagonally to his right, and found disappointment.

About 15 minutes before I'd seen a white woman in her early 50s, dressed very casually, clothes clean, shiny purse under her arm. She bowed her head above the trash can in similar adoration. She'd found three beer bottles, held them in her hand with a split-finger grip and spilled the remaining beer onto the grass.

And five minutes before that I'd seen a gray-haired man in a ponytail walk from his car and dump the bottles into the trash can. He shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose and walked back to his car.

To my left there's a woman with wide hips, faded blue jeans and an amethyst-colored shirt sitting on a concrete bench with her back to me, reading a book.

To her right a Spanish-speaking family of five has laid out their aluminum foil lunch on the concrete table. Their orange and lime green soda bottles keep the wrappers from flying away. The mother's pulling meat from bones, laying it on tortillas and dripping a dark red salsa on it. The daughter's about 16. She wears tight dark blue jeans, a sweatshirt, primped hair and very high heeled shoes. The grandma wears a black veil that doesn't cover all her gray hair. The father's wearing a frumpy, white button down Oxford. The boy, about 9 years old, wears a basketball tank top. The girl's black high heels bother me. The are totally out of place. They're inappropriate.

Much farther to the left of these picnic tables a woman and a man embrace at one of the concrete tables in the nook of the concrete wall. Their kid, maybe four years old, plays with something under the table, on the table and moves to the grass. They French kiss. The man's sitting on the edge of the table top, facing her. The woman's sitting a bit below on the bench puckering up to kiss him, hungry.

The boy looks at the gliding birds, tries to climb the wall, and walks away in a slow zigzag.

The woman's gotten up. The man sits on the bench, she turns around and sits on his lap and leans her shoulders forward while still on his lap. Their part of the park's nearly empty. A person walks by every 5 minutes. She rubs her hips counterclockwise on his lap. His hands are wide open along the top of her legs. She turns her head slowly from side to side. She can't see the boy. She gets up dutifully. He points down the sidewalk. "¡-ando!¡Vamonos!" The boy turns around and walks back.

The couple starts kissing again. She's now sitting on the narrow edge of the table and opens her legs. He moves forward to kiss her. A group of about 9 people, several adults led by 3 teenagers, leaves their minivan and walks toward the wall. They head toward the nook with the French-kissing couple. The lovers are surrounded by the family, jelly-fish tentacles. As the couple and the kid walk past me I realize they're much younger than I thought, maybe 20 and 21 years old.

The woman in the amethyst shirt gets up and carries her book like a server does a tray, and takes out her car keys from her pocket.

The assimilation of Gustavo Dudamel is playing well on the red carpet. Walking into Disney Hall Thursday night, Quincy Jones told me Dudamel reminds him of a young Leonard Bernstein. Andy Garcia said he's proud Dudamel's Hispanic but loves him for being a great conductor. Angela Bassett said she admires his humility and "of the earth" background. And Eli Broad gushed, "He's brought young people together, he's brought the Latino community together, he's brought us all together." And you know that Broad with his billions in philanthropy has as much power to anoint and legitimize as anyone in Los Angeles.

Gustavo Dudamel's Simon Bolivar- tinged declaration on Saturday opened the door even wider. Several on the red carpet repeated his words. Remember Dudamel said he's proud to be Venezuelan, Latino and American. And the echo of those words appears to be in a pinball machine bounce off the Hollywood Hills, the San Gabriel Mountains down to the Anaheim Hills.

But can we consider this list: Salma Hayek, Robert Graham, Gustavo Dudamel, Lupillo Rivera, George Lopez, Julieta Venegas. All are accomplished artists or performers, all either Latin American-born or Mexican American, and all at various stages of personal assimilation and mainstream acceptance. I suppose Lupillo Rivera is the one who sticks out the most. Is it because banda music remains on the fringes of American mainstream culture? When will it join zydeco? When do we wear our foreign nationalism proudly and when do we couch it in larger multi-ethnic terms? When is it OK to be Mexican first? How do the doors of mainstream acceptance open and close depending on how you express your national identity?

Millions of first and second generation immigrant students are grappling with that question right now. You're likely to get one answer from students attending Santee Learning Complex south of downtown L.A. Some of their teachers - members of the militant Association of Raza Educators - are trying out carve out a safe space for a Mexican identity in an American context. And how does this compare to the identity dilemma of immigrant students who attend schools in well off suburban schools?

On Thursday night Dudamel conducted a symphony by a European composer who likely grappled with similar issues but who's now in the mainstream classical music canon. Gustav Mahler was born Jewish in Bohemia, performed in Prague, and other European cities and at one point converted to Catholicism to get a plum conducting position in Vienna. In 1909 he became the New York Philharmonic's conductor. Talk about fluid ethnic identity!

The Dude clinched it! And he did it an hour before our boys in Chavez Ravine.

Really, Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic brought the house down Saturday night. He did it while conducting more than a hundred South L.A. students who'd feverishly rehearsed Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" this summer through the L.A. Phil's new youth orchestra program. The performance wasn't up to par to the discriminating classical music ear but it was a great achievement given the cards they were dealt. And it was a seed planted in the arid working-class flatlands.

Dudamel had us 18 thousand people in his pocket leading the white-tuxed L.A. Phil musicians in Beethoven's 9th Symphony. The composition is a plea to leave divisions and to embrace thy neighbor in brotherly love. It sounds to me like the composer's last gasp, knowing the end is near, and calling out what's important.

And did I tell you the Bowl's closest seats, the Pool Circle, the seats usually occupied by the crema y nata de la sociedad, nestled students' family members?

It was an unusual concert night at the Hollywood Bowl in several other respects, from the Mexican cowboy hats, yellow-blue-red Venezuelan shirts and hats, and a kaleidoscope of Spanish accents that joined French, Russian, and Armenian hovering toward the brush in the Hollywood Hills arm in arm.

The L.A. Phil played up the night's inherent biculturalism and bilingualism. The 9th's German lyrics were translated in subtitles on the Bowl's large video screens. So for this moment Spanish was given its due. "Joy, beautiful spark of the gods." Was followed by "Alegria, Hermosa Luz Divina." "This kiss for all the world." "Un beso para todo el mundo."