Saying the diversity of Oakland is dizzying is to re-utter a truism. More than a hundred — I’ve even heard more than 150 — languages are spoken here, in the Star Wars shadow of our container port. Ethnic cultural orgs form like crystal deposits and scintillate from storefronts in every population knot. There’s a there here, but the who is harder.
As if to layer silliness on overkill, everyone goes out of their way to say that East Oakland is PARTICULARLY diverse, which is like saying that someone is unusually pregnant. East Oakland is all the more confusing to an East Bay newcomer like me because it divides into seemingly random districts, which further subdivide into neighborhoods, some of which comprise only five square blocks.
Appropriately enough, right at the intersection of two of these districts — Fruitvale and San Antonio — in who knows what neighborhood, you’ll find an outcropping of that peculiar Bay Area idealism that thinks art, politics, and multi-ethnicity are the magic three.
That’s the Eastside Arts Alliance, a nine-year-old political arts collective that promenades the Bay Area’s best impulses along a short block of International Boulevard. Melded from four Oakland orgs that came together to plan what is now the annual Malcolm X JazzArts Festival, the ESAA is intent on bringing together the numberless small communities of this particular Oakland street corner.
It took nearly ten years, five different locations, and a lot of fundraising know-how, but on New Year’s Eve 2006 they opened the doors on the Eastside Cultural Center, a building they (oh, that San Francisco dream!) own and have renovated to a quirky state of the art.
