Final Blog Post

Coming into this class I had a very negative and monolithic perception of Los Angeles. Growing up in San Francisco as a Giants fan I was taught to hate the Dodgers (and also Los Angeles). I considered San Francisco to be more cultured, cosmopolitan, socially conscious, and hip in its aesthetic. As for Los Angeles, I associated the region with extreme excess, image-consciousness, materialism, and consumerism. Shows like Entourage and the OC encouraged this characterization (not that I watched them all too often!). I never really thought about how cultural representations of Los Angeles privileged a very narrow—often a white—subjectivity. Nor did I fully grasp the diversity of experiences contained within LA, especially the experiences of individuals and communities that are either negated or distorted in popular images and media.

Through this class my old issues with Los Angeles have given way to a new set of issues (and also some new appreciations). I am no longer merely repulsed by the superficiality of Los Angeles’ popular culture, so much as I am concerned with the condition of places within Los Angeles that are far less glamorous and superficial. I no longer spend my time thinking about the cars that people buy in Beverly Hills or in Orange County, because I realize that these examples of excess materialism never exist in isolation; they are part and parcel of a deep inequality that has been racialized and spatially entrenched through historical processes. LA’s enclaves of materialism reinforce LA’s enclaves of environmental degradation and immiseration.

Through this course I have come to understand the significance of racial formation; indeed the relationship between race and class is more concrete and graspable now. Los Angeles’ geographic and material inequality cannot be understood without grappling with the centrality of racial formation. Surbanization and decentralized urban expansion during the postwar period altered peoples’ social consciousness and sense of racial identity. The process by which certain people became white, and others racialized, took place alongside the regidification of materially unequal spaces.

Alongside my growing consciousness of Los Angeles’ inequalities, I have also come to appreciate the unique and powerful forms of activism and resistance that this region has harbored. More specifically, the ascendance of multiracial and multiethnic organizations around environmental justice—such as the Bus Riders Union and the South Central Farm—is encouraging because it addresses the reality of unequal geographies (spaces, regions, neighborhoods, that have been discriminated against, neglected, or exploited). Identity politics in Los Angeles has in some ways been reinforced by, and in other ways overcome by, the centrality of space. More so than any other factor, it seems opportunity in Los Angeles is circumscribed by where one lives or grows up (though race, class and gender are spatialized). Given that injustice in LA operates in very spatialized ways, I believe that environmental justice has emerged as the most successful form of resistance; it foregrounds geography and space to unite people in the fight for justice.

Final Reflection Post

Like Kate, When I decided to come to Claremont, I lamented that I would be living outside of Los Angeles. Other than the nice year-round weather, Los Angeles turned me off completely. It seemed like a sprawling poorly planned metropolis with an aging, inefficient transit system. Since I arrived, I had the opportunity to see a couple jazz shows in Hollywood and went into downtown Los Angeles once or twice. Then, last semester, I took a course called "Building Los Angeles" where we learned about the development of Southern California and its architecture. Every Saturday, we either rode Metrolink or took a bus to see various sites in Los Angeles, including buildings and infrastructure. We visited the LA River to understand how the river had shaped the development of the Los Angeles Basin, and how the residents had tried to control the river by encasing it in concrete. We also saw numerous examples of early modern architecture in the Los Angeles basin.

While I had a newfound respect for the architecture and history of Los Angeles development after last semester, I was left wanting to know more about the people who actually live in Los Angeles and especially the people whose neighborhoods we didn't visit because the architecture wasn't notable. This course was very illuminating in exposing how race has shaped LA and how specific events have had a lasting impact on the culture of Los Angeles, as well as individuals' lives. While I had always been critical of the freeway system for its environmental consequences, I had not realized the way its had torn largely minority communities apart in order to benefit the largely white upper class who dominated the roadways at the time. Although the public is much more aware of community issues than it once was, I think we need to be careful that we don't disrupt the way of life of communities who can't represent themselves in this time of enthusiasm for green infrastructure building.

I was also particularly fascinated by the two major LA riots: the Watts Riots of 1965 and the Rodney King Riots of 1992. Race issues are often studied academically and ignored by the general public as well as pushed aside by those involved. While the widespread violence and hostility of the riots is unforgivable, it is hard not to have sympathy for the rioters' anger. It seems that one of the most important tasks for communities is to provide a constructive avenue for their members to build something new. From what we heard in class and what I saw in The Garden, the South Central Farmers are doing just that. By providing a place for the community to engage in a constructive activity, they are not only directly benefitting the community by providing a place to grow food, they bring the community together, so that when tragedies happen, they can effectively address an issue. I hope that some of the insights I have gained in this course will not only give me a greater appreciate for Los Angeles, but will help me to understand the dynamics of whatever city I end up living in after school.

When I first heard this semester’s topic for AMST103 I was bit suspicious of how something as broad as an “Introduction to American Cultures,” could take place within the relatively narrow framework of Los Angeles. However, as the semester progressed I realized how the city encompassed, and often epitomized, many important trends and topics in the country’s history. Ultimately, I really enjoyed focusing on Los Angeles because it allowed us to observe broader themes in a smaller, more manageable context.

However, I found that the more we read about problems in Los Angeles the more unsatisfied I became. Like Christian, I also struggled with our distance from the people who’s stories we analyzed and picked apart. I spent a lot of time thinking about how privileged I was to be able to observe the problems in our country from the safety of a private liberal arts college and how this position of privilege played into the very issues we were discussing. I do believe that is incredibly important to critically study the past so we can better understand how to make effective change in the future and in this regard, the course was very helpful. It taught me how to piece together a variety of sources, from academic scholarship to popular music, to create an in depth picture of our culture and society. But I wish that we had more extensively explored the position from which we were surveying Los Angeles and if, or how, this affected our scholarship. The Los Angeles activity was definitely one of my favorite parts of the class because it encouraged involvement in the greater community. In this way I also found the Ruiz article that Kaitlin mentioned to be very interesting. Ruiz’s article offered an answer to my questions as to how a scholars can negotiate the space between themselves and what they “study” by arguing that “civic engagement should be an essential component of any American studies curriculum,”(17) and that the key ingredients for that engagement are “respect and collaboration”(13).

Looking back at the semester, I believe that one of the most valuable things that I will take away from the course are these questions because they are what will inspire me to continue investigating American studies and propel me to become more actively involved in the community. Equally important, this class gave me the tools to understand the importance of social justice work and explained the unique opportunity that American studies offers to combine academic scholarship with activism.

What I Have Gained from this Class

After taking this class I can definitely say that generally, I have gained a greater understanding of the race relations and development of minority culture within a specific community. Learning about the history of different racial groups within the Los Angeles community significantly expanded my knowledge of the details of defining racial and cultural status, interactions between minority groups over time, and how minority cultures were grew from, or in some cases, struggled with the complex relations they were involved in.

As the class has come towards the end I have considered the array of material we covered over the course of the semester, and remembered back to the first day when we all went around saying our individual perceptions of LA. Similar to what we briefly discussed in class today, I have thought about how I no longer perceive LA to be a beach scene with sprawling population, smog, traffic and celebrities. Although these are definitely characteristics of LA, there is a much broader description of LA encompassing much more of its history and growth that we have studied and discussed during American Studies. Studying the interactions between individuals, movements to improve minority status and rights, jobs and work life of minorities, public transportation, and housing distribution have all helped me gain an expanded understanding of the complexity of race relations and how they define the city outside of just popular culture.

Specifically I really enjoyed studying the South central gardeners and how the community came together to establish the garden, share it with many people, and fight for it as they learned they were losing it. Hearing the teenagers talk about their involvement was very interesting particularly because they were students, our age, who had found their passion in keeping this community together through an activity involving nature in a city I previously did not consider to be very natural and fertile. Overall, their story was fascinating in how they found the positive lights and moved forward with their passion.

I also enjoyed exploring the article about Compton and how it explained the growth of a community beyond its nationally known negative reputation. Previously, I had only known Compton to be the “ghetto” as many people explained it when talking about the neighborhood surrounding USC. However, the article broadened what I know about the neighborhood, from its history, to its reputation and associations, to what the direction it is moving in.

Last summer I worked with a nonprofit organization helping organize community volunteer events. With this internship I became very interested in community development and ways in which to bring a community together. Although these were a theme of our studies, the story of the South central gardeners and the article about Compton particularly interested me because I was able to look at common issues in communities everywhere, and how they were approached within the context of Los Angeles, whose history I now have a thorough understanding of.