East Boston — love at first fight – The Boston Globe

Filmmaker Naomi Yang was scouting locations for a fashion video when she discovered Bartolo’s Boxing Club in Winthrop — a place, as she describes it, “a little out of time.” In a low warehouse across from the tidal flats and jet roar of Logan Airport, Sal Bartolo Jr. has trained people of all ages and backgrounds for more than 40 years. He was having none of Yang’s proposal to film in the gym, imagining scantily clad models in spike heels ruining his floors. But he offered her a free boxing lesson, and Yang, sensing an opening, accepted. “I was hoping Sal would trust me more and I could film the gym,” she said in an interview. “I had a totally separate agenda.”

Over the next six years, Yang embarked on an unlikely friendship with Bartolo, 72, a taciturn, second-generation pro boxer whose father, Sal Sr., was the world featherweight champion in the 1940s. After a shaky start, Yang discovered that she loved boxing, with its rules and rituals, and its emphasis on self-defense.

In between classes, Yang would wander the industrial edges of East Boston, filming the strangely beautiful margin between nature and machinery, and learning about another kind of fight: the decades-long battle between East Boston residents and the Massachusetts Port Authority, which destroyed homes and parks to expand Logan’s runways in the 1960s. The result is “Never Be A Punching Bag For Nobody,” Yang’s powerful, elegiac documentary, which won the special jury prize at Boston’s Independent Film Festival last month.

The film weaves together three themes: the fading glories of Bartolo’s gym; the determined struggle of East Boston’s residents — mostly women — to protect their community; and Yang’s own attempt to reconcile a childhood spent in fear of her sometimes violent father with her equally fierce love for him. Through it all Bartolo is a tough, stabilizing force, a mentor, and a metaphor. “In the end it’s about fighting back,” Yang said.

Also an indie rock musician who performed with the late 1980s band Galaxie 500, Yang composed the film’s evocative score. Fittingly, it will be shown June 24 as a benefit for Zumix, a youth development center in East Boston that helps neighborhood teens find expression through the creative arts. “The seeds of Zumix came from watching young people claim their turf through music and embrace their own power,” said executive director Madeleine Steczynski, who cofounded Zumix amid a period of desolating youth violence in 1991.

Yang’s film unfolds slowly, along with her awareness. Before Bartolo’s gym, all she knew about East Boston was a brief foray from Logan Airport when an airline sent her to a local luggage repair shop. Her discovery of the neighborhood’s activist history and her curiosity about the bulldozed 70-acre Wood Island Park — now just the name of a Blue Line stop — blossom in concert with her own lessons in standing up for herself.

Some of the most striking scenes depict the Maverick Street Mothers protest against the airport in 1968. Yang found some archival film of the demonstration and worked with the Boston Public Library to have it digitized. It shows tired but defiant women, some in housecoats and curlers, some with baby carriages, blocking the trucks that had been barreling through residential streets on their way to extend a runway. The police come and rough up the women; the television cameras come to record it all; then the politicians come, forcing the trucks to find an alternate route. It was a seminal victory for ordinary people against the power of uncaring institutions.

The film also features perhaps the last recorded words of Mary Ellen Welch, the beloved East Boston teacher and activist who died in 2019. Yang interviewed her from her hospital bed, and she narrates the footage of the Maverick Street Mothers. “In my opinion, the protests were vehicles to give people more integrity, and more power to control their own destinies,” Welch says. In the 1968 footage, Welch appears as a young woman in a navy coat, “watching with satisfaction as the trucks backed down Maverick Street.” It’s a goose bumps moment even for those who didn’t know this fearless defender of neighborhood rights.

Today East Boston is threatened by gentrification and climate change as much as the airport, though the same determined resistance is required. Near the McDonald’s in the neighborhood’s Central Square, a sea green mural reads: “Protect what you love.” Yang’s important documentary is a kind of memorial, preserving an urban way of life that is nearly out of time.

Renée Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe.