Plaza Roberto Maestas Credit: RAFAEL SOLDI

Plaza Roberto Maestas

Plaza Roberto Maestas RAFAEL SOLDI

This Saturday, June 17, hundreds of people will be in the new plaza across the street from Beacon Hill Station. They will be the crowd overflowing from the seventh annual Block Party at the Station, which happens on a small street, 16th Avenue South, on the west side of the historic building that houses El Centro de la Raza. The seventh party promises to be bigger and more def than the sixth, which was bigger and more def than the fifth. But the crowds who come for the party should come back when the event is over. Every day at Plaza Roberto Maestas is a block party, the kind that can happen only in an urban center.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...