The typical Angelino is not Beverly De Angelo or Angelina Jolie but Antonio Villaraigosa. The typical Angelino is not one who shops in Beverly Hills but on downtown's Broadway Street, or in South Central and East Los Angeles. The typical Angelino is not rich but poor. It is a city of contrasts, not unlike other mega-metropolitan cities, such as New York. The difference is that New York has a root narrative--the city of immigrants--that the booster image of Los Angeles seems to want to avoid. All you need to do is check the tourism brochures and Web sites about Southern California. It's still primarily Hollywoodland, the Beach Boys's "Endless Summer," blond boys and girls, and happy people. The fact that the typical Angelino is non-white begs for a narrative and its own brochure.
The richness of Los Angeles is not located in the mansions of Brentwood, Beverly Hills, or Bel Air, where many out-of-towners migrate. The richness of Los Angeles is its people, its distinct neighborhoods, over eighty cities from Lakewood to Santa Monica, Eagle Rock to Inglewood, and Koreatown to Echo Park. This "L.A. International" is like its namesake airport: exciting to some, threatening to others. Even those who've lived here years longer than I still do not know all the places that define Los Angeles. My own community of Westchester is adjacent to Inglewood, a city of over 100,000 split evenly between blacks and Latinos. I live in a white minority apartment building, and on more than one occasion I've had Los Angeles friends openly comment about this fact, as if surprised that a white Southern woman would choose this location to live. The assumption is that one does not choose to live in an integrated community, but that circumstances necessitate it.
In 1922, Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion, his seminal work on the media's impact in shaping people's thoughts and actions. He said, "We do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see." Los Angeles is a place driven by a manufactured media narrative that is often not checked by reality. It is a place where you come to find yourself, re-invent yourself, or lose yourself. This is all true, but it's highly exaggerated through the lens of the media. Los Angeles is also a place where one comes to live among the people of the world and to build a sense of community and civic narrative. This is something that Los Angeles shares with any number of other cities where families wish to settle, raise their children, and build their dreams. We have a long way to go toward telling the complete story of that shared narrative. As long as Los Angeles remains the picture of extremes (Hollywood vs. Hood), it will be defined first and not really seen for what it really is--a place that defines our future.
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Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World By Nancy Snow | Seven Stories Press | 1998 Amazon.com |
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Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir By D.J. Waldie | St. Martin's Press | 1997 (reprint) Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com |
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City of Quartz : Excavating the Future in Los Angeles By Mike Davis | Verso | 1990 Amazon.com (paperback only) or Barnes & Noble.com (click here for paperback) |
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Ecology of Fear : Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster By Mike Davis | Vintage Books | 1999 (reprint) Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com |
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Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City By Mike Davis and Roman de la Campa | Verso | 2000 Amazon.com (paperback only) or Barnes & Noble.com (click here for paperback) |
Searching for the soul of Los Angeles
Define first, ask questions later