Growing Up in Los Angeles

Using my childhood and upbringing in Los Angeles, I’ve been able to connect to and reflect on the readings personally by using examples, thoughts, and stories from my life. However, living in Los Angeles and trying to connect to the readings has also helped me realize just how much I do and don't know about where I live and where I grew up.

Avila wrote that as a result of the segregation in Los Angeles, minorities fled to the outskirts of the Los Angeles to find homes- Boyle Heights being one of the more popular areas minorities went to. It was surprising at first to read about how the people of Boyle Heights tried to stop various freeway constructions due to an attempt to drown out minority neighborhoods throughout the area. It was surprising because I’d never thought of the freeways that way before, as a way to keep different races apart and away from each other. My hometown is not very far from Boyle Heights so I consider myself to be fairly familiar with it. After reading Avila, I began to visualize a map of the Boyle Heights including as much of its geography and street layout that I could remember and I realized that it really was a bunch of different freeways and interchanges to even more freeways that “just happened” to all meet in this one specific, low income, minority populated area. I’d never noticed it before.

As a child, I hated going on the freeways because I thought being on them would result in long car rides. They had not been symbolic, known, or even suspected of, as a source for racial tension or other issues (besides traffic) for me. However as I grew up, I marveled at the freeways for their means of making traveling by car faster. I just always thought the freeways helped make the trip from point A to point B faster and easier. Little did I know the freeways had a much bigger impact and meaning for others than just providing faster means of transportation. I realize that freeways matter more, not because of the benefits you get from using them, but because they symbolize freedom and independence for many people. If you want to explore the city, pay a visit, or even go to Disneyland, there’s always the freeway to get you to wherever you want to go.

My hometown was also mentioned as another city that, as a result of segregation and white flight, became much more populated with minorities. It dawned on me that I had been completely oblivious to the history of my hometown and the people who used to live in it. I remembered that during my junior year in high school, I was looking at the yearbooks from when the school first opened in the late 1940’s/ early 1950’s. The student body of the first graduating class was one hundred percent white. As the years passed more and more Latinos started appearing in the yearbooks photos up to the point where the school was (and still is) populated with a majority of Latino students. And as a result of the Latinos moving in, the white student population quickly made its way out into suburbia, leaving a very low percentage of white students at the school. The story of segregation and white flight had been right in front of me and I’d unknowingly known it the whole time.

So far, it has been interesting to learn more about Los Angeles. I’ve learned more about things that I usually just took for granted like the freeways or the Los Angeles River. It shows that there is more to the city and it's history that I initially thought.