City of Angels 2018-19

This past week we have been exploring the founding of one of the most diverse cities in the world. I know New York boomed because of its geographic location, but I never quite understood why Los Angeles became the city it is today. The main question I had before this week was: What sets Los Angeles apart from any other major city? I think Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of Four Ecologies gave a good summarized answer. Reyner states that this city has been “produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics, and culture” (6). When I think of Los Angeles today, I think of its incredible variety of food, languages, backgrounds, and perspectives. However, I also think about the regions of greater Los Angeles, spanning from the beaches to the mountains, along with the demographics and stereotypes associated with these regions. I think about the wealthy Bel-Air area and the poorer Downtown. I think about Malibu Road and Skid Row. Referrin...

Yesterday, we as a class walked through the history of LA. I personally learned a lot about the Tongva, the Mexican Perspective, the vibrancy of LA, and film production. It is interesting how we related Hollywood to be the jumpstart of LA and how the walkthrough emphasized the film industry. Therefore, I surprisingly found many connections between our tourists' stereotypical view of LA and the Natural History Museum's LA section. I also find it interesting that many stereotypical ideas of LA from our perspective were not shown in the museum. Feel free to share what you found interesting and emphasize sections and topics that specifically relate to what we have been discussing in class.

September 5, 2018 In her one act comedy, Confessions of Women from East LA , Josefina López explores (among other things) the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in East Los Angeles.   I wonder what light her characters can shed on the role that these identities and fear play in our current political divide. Marisa “La Valentina” Chavez rallies the revolutionaries in the basement of Killer Tacos (in modern diction) to ‘get woke’: “Today I heard something very disturbing and wanted to cry, but tears don’t change things; action does. It’s 1996 gente, raza, but before we know it, with all the Republicans in office, it will be 1950 again! Women won’t be able to get safe and legal abortions, affirmative action will be gone, under-represented people like us won’t have equal access to jobs…All that was fought for and accomplished in the ’60s will be lost.” A few pages later she states: “This is no longer a “white America,” and that ...

In the introduction to our edition of  Twilight: Los Angeles , Anna Deavere Smith talks about the inadequacies of thinking about the violence in 1992 as a "riot" or "uprising" or "rebellion." She argues that "beneath this surface explanation is a sea of associated causes," and points to larger trends of a declining economy, urban poverty, a deterioration of public services and education, and decades-long racial animosities in the national and local contexts. I'm curious about whether--and how--the play and our text, which incorporates characters that did not make the performance version, serve to illustrate this "sea of associated causes." To what extent does it allow us a more complete view of local and national pressures that led to the tragedy? If associations are made, how are they made? How is this associative picture that the work provides us different than the picture that we get from the labels "L.A. Riots" or ...