A recent migrant to the City of Angels reflects on her new home
published May 20, 2002
written by Nancy Snow / Los Angeles
I moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 2000 to accept a position at UCLA. I have spent the last two years falling in love with the city of Los Angeles and its riches in ethnicity and racial diversity. When I first moved here from southern New Hampshire where I was teaching at a small liberal arts college, my friends and concerned family members back east expressed bewilderment that I was giving up such a tranquil and quiet life for Los Angeles. New Hampshire connotes trees and lakes, great skiing, presidential primaries, and healthy rural living. It's the picture of stability and a place where you want to retire or raise a family. Los Angeles conjures up fires, earthquakes, excessive wealth, breast augmentation, gang-bangers, gangsta rap, and broken dreams. It's the place to live and die, go for broke, hustle, pitch an idea, or seek revenge--like Michael Douglas's laid-off character in Falling Down, who is having a very bad day. Los Angeles, to so many who stand on the outside looking in, is a place at war with itself.
The image doesn't quite fit the reality. Los Angeles is a place that many who live here want to resist liking. There is a palpable reluctance to being loyal to this place we call Los Angeles, in part because there is no consistent narrative about just what Los Angeles is. Is it the Hollywood sign that defines or the Watts Towers? The base narrative about Los Angeles is propaganda central, a place that subsists on boosterism and the sales pitch. D.J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, says that Los Angeles is one of the most privatized places on the planet. It has the fewest parks of any city of comparable size, and many people congregate in private rather than public spaces. The civic dialogue occurs in isolated pockets. Mike Davis, the radical guru of Los Angeles who has wrapped his arms around the good and the bad of this region in works like City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and Magical Urbanism, is convinced that Los Angeles after the riots of 1992 is in need of nothing short of political revolution.
Searching for the soul of Los Angeles