The neighborhood of Beach Flats in Santa Cruz represents different things to different people. To some, it’s a blighted community; a place to be avoided or hurried through on the way to Main Beach and the Boardwalk. But to thousands of its residents, the nine-acre district East of Riverside Avenue in the shadow of the Big Dipper rollercoaster is home, a place filled with aunts, uncles, cousins and friends, where the smells of spicy menudo mixes with the salty ocean air, where people know their neighbors by name, and are never too far from a busy park, and never too late for a hot meal.
Beach Flats is also a community in transition. The older generations, having immigrated mostly from Mexico, South and Central America, have started new families. Through their children, they are both changing the way that they’ve lived for decades and changing the way that the rest of Santa Cruz lives today.
