Coming into this class, I knew Los Angeles was a divided city on a variety of levels. I, actually, imagined it as two cities. The first, a sprawling series of wealthy suburbs connected loosely by highways packed with luxury cars. In this Los Angeles, celebrities and rich mingled, shopped and made movies. The other is the one of poverty and crime, formed by images from hip-hop, the Rodney King riots and hyperbolic reporting. The second city mainly consisted of people excluded from the luxuries of the first city. While this class did further illustrate the divides of Los Angeles, it gave me a more dynamic perspective on them.

Through this class, I gained an understanding of how intentional structural forces shaped the current cultural divides of the city. The most illustrative institutional force is the housing policies discussed in Avila’s book. Seeing the way in which the FHA explicitly denied loans to people of color, helped me to understand the current dynamic of the city. I also found Deverell’s book enlightening on how intentional ethnic divides from the city’s early history shape today’s society. The work of Mexican immigrant laborers literally built and fueled the city, yet white American excluded them from the story of Los Angeles. The fact that their histories, and the histories of other communities we covered, are not part of the popular narrative of Los Angeles astounds me. This exclusion, I think, helped contribute to my formerly limited perspective of the city.

I also learned that simply because there are many communities and identities, does not mean that there will always be the violent division seen on cable news. The visit from the volunteers from South Central Farms gave Los Angeles genuinely helped change my perspective of this. They illustrated how grassroots movements can help people overcome the structural barriers that can limit intercultural dialog. A reading that reinforced this, for me, is Wild’s Street Meeting. Reading about the multiethnic child’s play of the early 1900s illustrated that the current cultural divisions are not natural and do not have to exist. They are, instead, the product of policies that manufactured them.