People live here?

Like Amy, I came into this class with an entirely different image of Los Angeles than what I now have. My one-dimensional notions about LA probably came mostly from the influence of the media and popular culture, too. I don’t even remember when that started, but I can remember that as early as 6th grade, I hated this place. Part of my hatred for LA also developed out of a few bad experiences I had when I came here for the first time, when my brother was visiting colleges. Wherever my bad feelings about LA came from, when I chose Pomona, I considered its location to be its biggest and, perhaps, only recognizable weakness (at the time). When people in my community asked where Pomona was, I was genuinely ashamed to say that it was in LA and that I had chosen to go to college in such an ugly, unnatural, polluted city that seemed to lack authenticity and human soul. I believed that I could not and would not be able to identify with LA or the people who live here.

Throughout this class, my feelings about LA have changed from disgust and repulsion to appreciation. Being saturated in the history of LA has given me the opportunity to actually find beauty in this landscape – sometimes when I am driving into LA, I see a hill and think that it is actually pretty, or I imagine the green hilly landscape described by Deverell. But beyond imagining the buried and distorted “natural” landscape, it has been particularly transformative for me to learn that LA is not defined by the social and cultural artificiality that seems to emanate from its name, or rather what I came to associate with it. Furthermore, it isn’t just a buried “natural” landscape, but there are buried human experiences and lives here too, built landscapes that have been buried through the apparatuses of racial injustice. Now, I think about what I’m driving through and over – real people and communities who are/were embedded in a history of injustice. However, this is not the extent of the history we have learned: it’s not that these injustices are the only thing at play – people have revolted against this system of racial exclusion and formed powerful coalitions that have done radical work with tangible results. Not only has it been important for me to learn about the production of race in LA in terms of structural and historical injustices but also about the people here who are active agents in and against these processes.