(Nonesuch/WEA) 4 stars
More a music documentary than conventional album, Ry Cooder’s `Chavez Ravine’ revisits a forgotten Mexican-American district of Los Angeles, bulldozed in 1950 through political chicanery, to provide a stadium-home on the west coast for New York’s Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team.
Inspired by period photos, Cooder explores, through 15 songs in Spanish and English, the people, the place, the issues and the corrupt system that swept aside a Hispanic community in the name of progress and silenced protests with bullying, McCarthyist tactics.