April blog post

The two main aspects that I really liked about this class were the use of multi-media sources and the idea that events should be set against a backdrop of community and cross-community culture and relations to really understand how and why they happened. For the latter, a specific example would be the Lopez reading. Lopez places the Chicano movement within the context of the Biltmore Six and East Los Angeles Thirteen trials. Another example would be the Pulido reading in which the creation of the Third World Left movement is explained by discussing the history of and the interactions between the African American, Chicano, Asian American, and Native American movements during that time. The understanding that I received about the historical events that we studied in class was much more thorough than anything I would ever had gotten from my high school history text book. The readings offered a lot of new information with various viewpoints which was refreshing and set the readings apart from one another. This class was like a history class make-over. It was also interesting to see the way in which the films we saw and the fiction we read added to my understanding of the topics we were discussing. There is a different dynamic to learning when we are able to study sources other than analytical, research-based literature. Not knowing anything about Los Angeles before I came here to Claremont, I was able to learn a lot about the city and about the greater Los Angeles area through its centralized role and constant presence in our readings about ethnicity and race relations. I don’t think I ever really had any kind of expectation of what Los Angeles would be like before this class and certainly before college. I knew it was an important city but I had no
tlineidea as to the extent of its importance. To me, Los Angeles wasn’t so much a defined city with concrete buildings and people as more of a nebulous place that had a vague purpose in American society. I liked how this course grounded a topic as general as race relations with something more specific such as the history of Los Angeles. I suppose that is why I felt like I have a much better understanding of the history of race relations in Los Angeles because the readings were very focused and more specific than a regular history course. One idea that constantly caught me off guard was how closely connected the different racial groups in Los Angeles (or in any city, I suppose) are - not just in a physical sense (the ways in which races physically interact) but also in a conceptual and ideological way (race relations does not simply refer to interactions between minority groups and whites but also between different minority groups). In this class, I have been able to see how race is physically presented and formed in Los Angeles and understand more about the extent in which international and national cultures influence each other.