Boom, Bust, Shout, Laugh, Cry

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More About

• Paul Flores
• Herb Caen

“San Francisco ain't what it used to be ... and it never was.” Thus spake the late three-dot SF Chron columnist Herb Caen. While we certainly get his point, we also know he died before the dot-com boom really had its way with this place. With jaw-dropping rapidity, “undiscovered” and “affordable” turned into “the Next Big Thing” and “you've got to be kidding.” We'll never forget walking into places we'd frequented for 15 years that were suddenly overrun with overpaid nubile transplants who wondered what we were doing in their neighborhoods. That was followed by the real estate bubble, which kept the city a big game of Monopoly long after the venture capitalists had pulled the plug on the likes of Webvan. No S.F. locale took it harder than the Mission. In You're Gonna Cry, Paul Flores dramatizes the conflicts of the great demographic shift in this “new Bohemia,” as landlords, developers, and techno-yuppies rolled over and turned out generations of working-class Latinos without so much as wishing them good luck. “Who remembers them?” Flores asks. “What was left in their place?” You're Gonna Cry gives answers. Flores, cofounder of literacy and spoken-word program Youth Speaks, portrays numerous neighborhood characters of the 1990s, including Latino bohemians, techies, and immigrants. He mixes hard-line realism with humor to illustrate the human cost of gentrification. We believe Caen — ever the man of the people — would applaud Flores' assessment.
Feb. 11-12, 8 p.m., 2011