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Mike + Walt

Photograph by Susan Phillips

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Mike and Walt’s declaration was one of many messages in the east abutment of the Spring Street Bridge expressing queer identity. Constructed in 1926, the bridge abutments under the Spring Street Bridge were left open and soon covered with writing in pencil, chalk, and charcoal—before being sealed sometime in the 1940s. Restructuring of the Spring Street Bridge in 2013 re-opened the abutments, revealing preserved writings and images, some of which were documented before contemporary graffiti writers wrote over them. Judging from the signatures on its interior, which date from the late 1920s and early 1930s, the eastern bridge abutment seems to have acted as part queer space and a safe haven for people with non-normative sexual identities. ●

Sites and Themes

This subcommittee was chaired by Becky Nicolaides, historian and author of My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and Mark Wild, professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles, and author of Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2005). Its other members were William Deverell, professor of history at USC and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West; Laura Dominguez, a doctoral candidate in history at USC; Jessica Kim, associate professor of history at California State University, Northridge, and author of Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 (University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Caitlin Parker, a doctoral candidate in history at UCLA; Priscilla Leiva, assistant professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at Loyola Marymount University; Alex Ross, a music critic for the New Yorker and author, most recently, of Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); and Yuval Sharon, artistic director at The Industry, an independent opera production company in Los Angeles.

Show Footnotes

This group considered the ways in which civic memory might be cultivated and brought to material life in Los Angeles. Through synergistic and wide-ranging discussions, we came up with a set of key themes, modes of commemoration, and three “sites/histories” as case studies. The committee agreed that this is an especially potent moment for elevating the stories of both displaced and ordinary Angelenos to send the message that their histories matter in the city today—and will matter tomorrow. It is important to acknowledge and commemorate places that may look or seem ordinary and to take an expansive, inclusive view of historical significance. Commemoration reminds us that history is not a closed chapter, but a living dimension of our social fabric: it reflects our vision of the city’s future. We see this as an auspicious moment to ensure that an ethos of inclusion and social justice is embraced in that vision.

In the text that follows, we summarize the three main areas of our discussion: key historical themes, our ideas on modes of commemoration, and case studies of three sites—or more accurately, “histories,” since they were not all tied to place—that flesh out how these commemorations might take shape. The case studies are meant to serve not only as templates for other sites and stories, but also as conceptual jumping-off points.

Themes

Our group compiled a list of themes in L.A. history that are enduring, defining forces and have shaped Los Angeles. These themes can help create a larger conceptual framework for thinking through the City’s commemoration strategy. The criteria used in identifying them included chronological and geographical breadth and the inclusion of diverse sets of communities. Our list of themes included displacement and removal, migration and immigration, resistance and collective transformation, racial violence, social justice, labor and the people who built L.A., culture and cultural production, caretaking during crisis, Los Angeles as “born global,” and Indigeneity.

Displacement emerged as a particularly resonant theme. The displacement of people from neighborhoods, from land, and from privilege has been a constant throughout Los Angeles history, at least since the arrival of Europeans in the eighteenth century. Community displacement has reflected shifting power and racial hierarchies that could and did lead to racial turnover of spaces across Los Angeles—from ethnic enclaves like Chinatown to residential neighborhoods bulldozed for redevelopment and freeway construction. Displacement is an especially powerful theme because it lives on in the people who carry memories of displacement and who live out lives of resilience. They are part of our social fabric, and honoring their experience, memory, and acts of resilience should be a primary objective of commemoration.

Immigration and migration is a related theme, which can represent displacements not only from home countries but also in the community experiences that both groups confronted in Los Angeles. Immigrants neighborhoods were often targeted for redevelopment, gentrification, or punitive state policies (such as the repatriation of Mexicans during the 1930s or the internment of Japanese during World War II). The myriad ways that displacement appears and reappears throughout L.A. history pose challenges for place-based commemoration, because these are histories of movement, departures, and spatial erasures. They are often sites that no longer exist on the landscape. They comprise what UCLA cityLAB director Dana Cuff has termed “provisional spaces,” where once-vibrant sites might now be parking lots or vacant lots. These provisional sites compel innovative and creative ways of thinking about commemoration.01 Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Another theme our discussions foregrounded was resistance and collective transformation. Countless stories of struggle by marginalized groups to resist oppression and claim their right to the city recur throughout L.A.’s past (and present). This theme captures both the nature of that marginalization and how various groups have challenged the forces that marginalized them—racism, class exploitation, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and so on. This resistance can be collective or individual. L.A. history is replete with narratives of people challenging structures of oppression and creating alternative forms of power. These efforts have been waged by people of color, the poor, workers, immigrants, women, LGBTQ individuals, political radicals, environmental justice activists, and other marginalized groups. Their stories have often played out in everyday places—in people’s homes, in the streets, in nondescript buildings. As the writers of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles put it, these histories require “an appreciation for vernacular landscapes—landscapes of the ordinary and everyday” since those were often the spatial contexts of these efforts.02 Laura Pulido, Laura R. Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 7. These two themes—displacement and resistance—resonated with our group, and we used them as launch points for discussing how the City might imagine commemoration around their frameworks.

Modes

Our group also brainstormed ideas about modes of commemoration—how the City might recruit people’s interest in civic memory. These modes fell roughly into three categories: permanent installations, internet tools, and ephemeral installations and activities. The conceptual framework of a theme like displacement, for example, demands flexible, creative thinking about how to capture something that no longer exists in space. While our site examples flesh out these modes in more detail, we wanted to convey the substance of our discussion on modes since it touched on several ideas that might be deployed beyond our examples.

Permanent markers might include statues, murals, plaques along a sidewalk or in front of a building, patterned markings in a sidewalk to trace the trail of a historic space or event (such as a protest march), or other fixed markers. New statues could be commissioned that would bring to light important, little-known figures in L.A. history, or an unknown figure to stand in for a significant movement or moment. We also discussed existing statues that might be creatively recontextualized. The group agreed that permanent statues can be problematic, as we have witnessed in the tearing down of controversial statues (most recently Junípero Serra’s). Contextualization offers an alternative to removal.

One compelling example comes from the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Germany. Outside that opera house sits a bust of Richard Wagner, created by the pro-Nazi sculptor Arno Breker in the 1950s. After years of discussion about whether to take down that sculpture, in 2012 an exhibition was installed surrounding the bust, consisting of panels that profiled the Jewish musicians who were forbidden to perform at the Festspielhaus during the Nazi regime (many of whom fled Germany or were killed in the death camps). What began as an almost accidental, temporary solution to the problem of the Wagner bust ended up creating a moving, powerful space for reflecting on these layers of history.03 See Vincent Vargas, “2012 Bayreuth exhibition: ‘Silenced Voices,’ YouTube, June 6, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMsRG44uvuE. A similar approach might lend itself to contextualizing controversial monuments in Los Angeles.

Internet tools are powerful instruments for working flexibly across L.A.’s vast geographic spaces and for their ability to create an augmented reality to help people experience their city in new ways. Apps offer the pragmatic advantage of circumventing property owners who might otherwise be reluctant to affix something permanent to their property. One idea that we discussed is a navigation-based “L.A. sites of memory” driving app: as the user drives around the city, a narrator could tell histories of the places being passed. Driving apps could also be structured as thematic tours, guiding users from one site to the next. Tours could be devised around topics like labor history, African American activism or culture, LGBTQ history in L.A., or environmental justice (the tours in A People’s Guide to Los Angeles are an excellent starting point).

There might also be an “LA sites of memory” app linked to light rail lines, where stories of places along the line routes would come up on a rider’s phone. Schools and community colleges along these routes might be recruited to help write these stories and provide content and ideas. Likewise, walking tour apps could focus on particular neighborhoods, protest march routes (such as the Chicano Moratorium or the 1994 marches protesting Prop 187), or other areas significant to L.A. history. An app could also act as a central hub, showing where all civic memory activities are located throughout Los Angeles—driving tours, light rail apps, walking tours to schedules of events, and so forth. In line with these tours, a “pilgrimage menu” might be developed for the 2028 Olympics, to guide visitors to L.A. to explore the hidden spaces and histories of the city. Community members might be enlisted to help identify these places and develop these histories, and tours could be created out of this work.

Models for these types of interactive app experiences exist. The Cleveland Historical app, for example, was developed collectively by historians, students, and community members through the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. The app, which is available on both the Apple and Android platforms, links places to archival images, oral histories, audio clips, and documents. Other examples abound, from Google Earth virtual tours to GyPSy Guide’s audio tour guides and more.04 Cleveland Historical app website, undated, https://clevelandhistorical.org; Shianne Edelmayer, “Google Earth Tour Guide: 14 Virtual Tours You'll Want to Check Out,” MakeUseOf, May 18, 2020; GyPSy Guide Audio Tour Guides website, undated, https://gypsyguide.com.

Ephemeral modes of commemoration are another medium. These might include temporary installations, performances, projections, bus tours, or other events. Intangible modes lend themselves well to themes like displacement, where physical structures no longer exist. “Intangible heritage” is, in fact, one of the most controversial, critical debates in heritage conservation at the moment, as practitioners debate whether the imperative is to preserve extant buildings that looked the way they did during their moment of historical significance, or to emphasize how people interacted with those places beyond the four walls of a building.05 Works that capture the debate on “intangible heritage” include Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa, eds., Intangible Heritage (London: Routledge, 2008); Mike Buhler, Desiree Smith, and Laura Dominguez, “Sustaining San Francisco’s Living History: Strategies for Conserving Cultural Heritage Assets,” San Francisco Heritage, September 2014, https://www.sfheritage.org/Cultural-Heritage-Assets-Final.pdf; Donna Graves, James Michael Buckley, and Gail Dubrow, “Emerging Strategies for Sustaining San Francisco’s Diverse Heritage,” Change Over Time 8, no. 2 (Fall 2018): 164–85. On intangible cultural heritage, see also the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) website, https://ich.unesco.org. San Antonio and San Francisco have been experimenting with “intangible heritage,” and this may be an auspicious moment for Los Angeles to consider doing the same. In San Francisco, for example, communities created cultural districts as “special use” districts to protect legacy businesses, nonprofits, and other cultural institutions in existence 30 years or more.06 “Process for Establishing Cultural Districts,” San Francisco Planning Department, Executive Summary, Administrative Code Text Amendment, June 6, 2018. These efforts protect the uses of these neighborhoods and their historic memory, while combatting displacement and gentrification.

Modes such as intangible commemoration and heritage can push us to find innovative ways to cultivate civic memory for Los Angeles. For instance, projections of images on a building create an augmented reality, prompting passersby to question their environment and its layered history. Bus tours allow people to experience history in a collective way—and without monuments. And of course digital apps, as discussed, could be a way to harness already ubiquitous mobile devices to serve these aims in our city.

Sites/Histories: Case Studies of Commemoration

Our group chose case study sites to explore how commemoration might materialize to move forward some of the abovementioned themes and ideas. We chose sites related to displacement and social justice, and sites/histories that would allow us to explore different modes of commemoration. They are meant to serve as examples or templates as well as potential sites for consideration. Our three case studies are Chavez Ravine, the German émigrés of Los Angeles, and Black activism.

Chavez Ravine

Among the stories of displacement in L.A. history, Chavez Ravine looms large. It is the steep canyon northwest of downtown that in the early twentieth century became home to a cluster of three semirural Mexican American communities—Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. The neighborhood had modest homes, a grocery, a church, and an elementary school. Some residents kept goats and chickens on the steep hillsides. These were poor yet cohesive communities. Many lived there because of residential exclusion from white neighborhoods. In the 1940s, the L.A. Planning Commission launched plans to build public housing throughout L.A. to deal with surging housing demand. Typical of urban redevelopment efforts of this era, it designated poor communities of color as “blighted” and targeted them for bulldozing to make way for redevelopment. Chavez Ravine was one of these communities. At first, the plan was to build a new, modernist public housing project designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. That plan was scrapped in the face of red-baiting by critics who charged creeping socialism.07 On the rise and fall of a public housing ethic in Los Angeles and its impact on the city’s built environment, see Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Though some families sold their homes to the City, others refused. By the late 1950s, a climactic battle between the City and the remaining residents led to their removal. The City ultimately sold the emptied land to Walter O’Malley, who built Dodger Stadium on the site. The former Palo Verde neighborhood is now covered by parking lots surrounding Dodger Stadium.

Every year, the displaced families of Chavez Ravine hold an annual picnic reunion at the Elysian Park Recreation Center. The only permanent markers of their experience are a small plaque outside the building, marking where the picnic happens, and a ghostlike set of stairs leading to nowhere. In their interviews with Priscilla Leiva for the “Chavez Ravine: An Unfinished Story” project,08 “Chavez Ravine: An Unfinished Story” website, undated, https://www.chavezravinela.com/home. the families identify two priorities for commemoration: to convey this history to every individual who goes to a Dodger game, and to send the message that this should never happen again. Dr. Leiva shared that for some theirs is not a resentful narrative, but one that conveys “look at what we lost/sacrificed and look at what the city has because of us.” It is an affirmation of a displaced community that paid the ultimate price for the city we have today.

To commemorate the displaced Chavez Ravine community, our group devised a set of ideas that included ephemeral, internet-based, and permanent elements. One idea was to use the massive exterior walls of Dodger Stadium as screens onto which images of the Chavez Ravine community and its people could be projected. Fans entering or exiting the stadium would see images of the old neighborhoods (the Chavez Ravine elders have never-before-seen home movies and photos that they might be willing to share). The imagery might even reach deeper into the past when the land was home solely to Indigenous people. We agreed that the scale and spectacle of these projections would create a powerful space of civic memory, evoking an alternative sense of place by illuminating this layer of history.

Another commemorative tack might be to rename the streets and intersections around the stadium after the displaced communities. A plaque or wall located prominently inside or outside Dodger Stadium could explain the history of Chavez Ravine and list the last names of the displaced families. And another idea was to visually outline the Palo Verde neighborhood on the parking lot where it once stood, perhaps through a two-dimensional public art display. An app could even weave these elements together: it could tell a brief history of Chavez Ravine, identify the elements of memorialization (including the stairs to nowhere at Elysian Park Recreation Center), map out where the displaced families ended up settling, and highlight routes into Dodger Stadium through surrounding Latinx neighborhoods, all as ways to evoke the area’s Mexican American past. Fan sitting in the stands could open their phones and experience an augmented reality—a raised historical consciousness about the space around them.

The German Émigrés

Another case study on the theme of displacement and exile is the great influx of Central European émigrés in the 1930s and 1940s. Comprising Jews and leftists fleeing Nazi persecution, this group included important figures like Theodor W. Adorno, Vicki Baum, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Fritz Lang, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, Salka Viertel, and Franz Werfel. When Germany invaded France in 1940, many non-German-speaking figures, like Igor Stravinsky, ended up in Los Angeles as well. They joined other German-speaking émigrés like the architect Richard Neutra. Later, some of the leftists found the atmosphere of the Cold War and McCarthyism intolerable and ended up going into exile once again. Thomas Mann, having become an American citizen, died in Switzerland. Their stories remind us of the fragility of democracy and the challenges of refugee life, even for celebrated authors and musicians. Commemorating their lives can bring those themes to the forefront at a fraught moment in American history and honor experiences that have receded from memory for many Angelenos.

Émigré life took place mostly in private homes on the west side, which puts potential sites of memory in private hands and makes creating public spaces impractical. The German government owns two important locales: the Thomas Mann house and Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora, both in Pacific Palisades. Because of the surrounding residential neighborhoods and the lack of parking, neither is a public site, although they do hold small events. The Rudolph Schindler house in West Hollywood is open to the public (under the auspices of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture), as is the Neutra studio in Silver Lake. University campuses also house a couple of commemorative sites: the Feuchtwanger Library at USC and Schoenberg Hall at UCLA. The Schoenberg family still has a vigorous presence in L.A.: the composer’s sons Ronald and Lawrence remain in the area, as does Ronald’s son Randol, a lawyer who has been active in the restitution of artworks stolen by the Nazis. And the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), through Stephanie Barron, its senior curator and a major historian of the emigration, fosters a strong awareness of the émigré experience.

In our subcommittee’s discussions about ways to commemorate the émigrés, the idea came up to install a small, permanent memorial at the Brentwood Country Mart, where many of them shopped. (A famous story tells of Arnold Schoenberg meeting Marta Feuchtwanger, Lion’s wife, there after Thomas Mann published his novel Doctor Faustus—a work that caused a dispute between Mann and Schoenberg.) Names could be inscribed in the sidewalk, on a plaque, or in a small exhibit. A driving app with narration tied to location, as described above, could tell stories of the émigrés as users visited their former homes. A bus tour of the homes—à la “Émigré Home Tours” (a playful variation on the tourist-popular Star Homes Tours)—with an open-roofed bus decorated for the occasion, was another idea for either an occasional or regular event to bring attention to the émigré experience. We also imagined a festival put on by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a collaboration with LACMA in terms of an exhibition, or a collaboration on a conference or lecture series with the Thomas Mann House or Villa Aurora and one of the universities augmenting the group’s commemoration.

A final idea: there could be occasional displays of émigré faces, names, and quotations on billboards around the city, where one would expect to find a movie poster. This would have a certain ironic quality given the critiques of Hollywood commercialism that emanated from the likes of Brecht and Adorno. “The town of Hollywood has taught me this / Paradise and hell / can be one city. — Brecht.” “The whole is the false. — Adorno.” Such billboards would be mystifying to most people but could spark curiosity.

Black Activism

Black social justice activism has a deep, rich history in Los Angeles. To commemorate this history, we envisioned a multisite, multimode approach that would span the city, capturing the network of organizing. The Southern California Library could act as an anchor point for a series of explorations into this history. The library itself is rooted in the movement and could be woven into this commemorative project through exhibits, displays, and events. Murals could memorialize this history in a two-pronged approach—by commissioning new murals and by pointing people to existing murals. (An app like those mentioned above could facilitate this second goal.) One suggestion was to create murals on buildings located on former historic sites. For example, the site of the California Eagle newspaper is now an appliance and furniture store. A mural on that building might depict Charlotta Bass, the paper’s editor and publisher, sitting at her desk, glimpsed through a “window” into the interior. The former site of the Black Panther building on Central Avenue might also be a space for commissioned murals, public art, or a visual projection, depicting an organizing meeting or some other dimension of that organization’s history. People could also be directed to existing murals, such as the mosaic at Slauson and Crenshaw (now called Ermias “Nipsey Hussle” Asghedom Square) depicting Black history in L.A.

Another element of this commemoration could be reviving the Biddy Mason Park in downtown L.A. Born into slavery, Bridget “Biddy” Mason became a civic leader, entrepreneur, and philanthropist in the late nineteenth century. The park that commemorates her—which already features a timeline wall by artist Sheila de Bretteville and an assemblage by visual artist Betye Saar—might be updated to reflect new scholarship that more fully fleshes out Mason’s role in philanthropy and institution building in the city.09 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991, sculpture, concrete and other materials, Biddy Mason Park, Los Angeles; Betye Saar, Biddy Mason’s House of the Open Hand, 1990, multimedia, Biddy Mason Park, Los Angeles. Currently, the walk is not easy to find. This memorial is an example of an existing structure that could be updated and foregrounded more effectively—and ultimately woven into a larger Black history commemorative project.

Other ideas include walking tours in south L.A.; a plaque or other commemoration at the former Wrigley Field (42nd and Avalon), where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke and where the local War on Poverty program was headquartered; and a pattern of markers (such as plaques) marking other important sites. Once again, an app could identify and connect these various commemorations.

Flow

Lynell George

Adapted from an essay in After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, by Lynell George (Santa Monica, CA: Angel City Press, 2017).

We tell ourselves, from a young age, “don’t get too attached”—not to the Pepto Bismol–pink bungalows, not to the wild, empty lots, not to poky amusement parks, not to lush shade trees, not to our friends, often struck by wanderlust (or beholden to their parent’s whims). Everything keeps shifting, moving, blasting off. So really what made me a daughter of this place was a set of particular experiences: roads driven, neighborhoods claimed and cracked like a puzzle, slang acquired, recalled and embroidered stories that kept a feeling of home alive. “That used to be” and “That once was” became as much a part of daily discourse as grousing about traffic or home teams. Even if an absence stung, or seemed too abrupt, something inside of me prepared me for its departure. I was finally just beginning to understand what fluidity meant, and to study those who were better adapted to it.

“It’s hard not to be nostalgic,” an old high school friend mused recently upon hearing of another touchstone lost—another city block razed, in its entirety, “when they keep taking everything away.” But I have to wonder if what we’re feeling is really nostalgia, or rather if we’re simply adrift, lost at home. This fluidity and change are inevitable (and difficult to fight) in a place where so many have come to change, and change again. And so we should find our place in it, ride the wave, find our flow.

Most longtime Angelenos will tell you that there are many Los Angeleses—both physical and locations of the mind. Some—of both varieties—might fit you better than others. Finding your L.A. means giving yourself over to the city, its contours, and its riddles. When you do, you’ll feel it. There’s an aspect of L.A. that slips under your skin. Less attitude than predilection or frame of mind. It seeps in. Like the soot that drifts in, that finds its way through tiny gaps in your windows, the grit that powders your floors after even the mildest Santa Anas. You don’t see it drifting in, accumulating, but you note the traces later. Sometimes they startle you.

For all the blink-and-it’s-gone sleights of hand, here in Los Angeles, the deep past can catch you unawares. Throw you for a loop. I hadn’t seen my teen-years best friend Corrine in decades. She’d eased away in increments—first across town, then out of the country—Europe, the Middle East. Then who knew where. In the last stage, it was so sudden and complete, like an old-fashioned long-distance telephone line that went dead. She’d vanished in a way that’s difficult for people to now, with all the ways that social media tethers us.

About three years ago, we found our way back to one another. By chance. She had slipped back into town, quietly, and was once more trying on L.A. for fit. After an hours-long phone conversation, we made in-person plans and fell into a familiar back-and-forth. Talking, walking, and then aimless driving. Same but different. We’d daydreamed and schemed about getting here, to this stage where we alone mapped the next moves. Sometimes I’d feel the presence of those long-winded girls still in the backseat.

On a couple of these outings, feeding a sense of curiosity that was akin to sentimental, we tried to revisit old haunts. Impossible. All of them were gone or severely altered. One special spot in Venice was so recently shuttered that lights still glowed in the further recesses of the dining room. We scrambled excitedly out of the car only to read the handwritten “Thank you for all your years of patronage!” sign taped to the windowpane. We were too late, again—by mere moments, it seemed.

Gone too were my side roads and secret parking. Vanished were the wide vistas with hints of the not-too-distant ocean.

Some weeks later, I slogged through the traffic congesting our old territories. An early departure had left me with a little time to kill before a dinner meeting. I circled the old neighborhood in a stretch of Culver City that imperceptibly gives out into Venice. An invisible border, but when you grew up there, you knew instinctively when you went from one to the other. A feeling. Some scent on the breeze.

On a whim, I considered doing something I hadn’t done even since reconnecting with Corrine. I pulled a U-turn and headed, from memory, to her parents’ old house, the site of so much of our future dreaming. Closing in, I made the familiar right turn off the busy boulevard. Counted off the lots to my destination. The house was gone. What stood in its place was a construction site in limbo, wrapped in fencing. Perhaps contested. The skeleton of a condo unit was on its way up, its footprint bulging over its limit-lines, a hulking “You-Could-Be-Home-Now” cookie-cutter ad like all over Los Angeles.

This street once had a little bit of this and that. Spanish stucco, bungalow, cottage. Kit house. It was an L.A. story—around-the-world tales. Now you could see just a smattering of evidence of what had been there. In fact, next to the condo sprouting from Corrine’s dad’s old lawn, a weathered postwar cottage still stood tough, though I was sure for not much longer.

What would it be to be the last man standing? The line in the sand? To hold what was left of the memory of a place? I wondered what stories of the old neighborhood remained behind that door.

“Neighborhoods aren’t supposed to be museums,” I’d read in a recent news story. Words from a developer defending the necessary evolution of place: how foolish it was, essentially, to try to trap neighborhoods in amber. Yes. But shouldn’t these places we call home, out of which we grow, harbor some sense of the story that came before—some acknowledgment of what is unique, sui generis?

More and more now, I understand and make peace with the fact that Los Angeles exists within us, vividly in fact: in those memories we made, those new thresholds we crossed, the chain-link we cut through, the different worlds we stepped into. That’s where I suppose it will exist for those who follow us; who mindfully create a sense of home; who invest in neighborhoods and deep friendships across so many lines that could divide; who insist that Los Angeles is more than just a backdrop.

As much as I want to keep pressing rewind, just one more time, this is a fast-forward city. It always has been. I know better. I tell myself, “Keep moving.”

Tennis with Schoenberg

Alex Ross

Adapted from “Exodus,” an essay published in the March 9, 2020, issue of The New Yorker, where Alex Ross, a member of the Civic Memory Working Group, is music critic.

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You can visit all the addresses in the course of a long day. Bertolt Brecht lived in a two-story clapboard house on 26th Street, in Santa Monica. The novelist Heinrich Mann resided a few blocks away, on Montana Avenue. The screenwriter Salka Viertel held gatherings on Mabery Road, near the Santa Monica beach. Alfred Döblin, the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, had a place on Citrus Avenue, in Hollywood. His colleague Lion Feuchtwanger occupied the Villa Aurora, a Spanish-style mansion overlooking the Pacific; among its amusements was a Hitler dartboard. Vicki Baum, whose novel Grand Hotel brought her a screenwriting career, had a house on Amalfi Drive, near the leftist composer Hanns Eisler. Alma Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav Mahler, lived with her third husband, the best-selling Austrian writer Franz Werfel, on North Bedford Drive, next door to the conductor Bruno Walter. Elisabeth Hauptmann, the co-author of The Threepenny Opera, lived in Mandeville Canyon, at the actor Peter Lorre’s ranch. The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno rented a duplex apartment on Kenter Avenue, meeting with Max Horkheimer, who lived nearby, to write the post-Marxist jeremiad Dialectic of Enlightenment. At a suitably lofty remove, on San Remo Drive, was Thomas Mann, Heinrich’s brother, the august author of The Magic Mountain.

In the 1940s, the West side of Los Angeles effectively became the capital of German literature in exile. It was as if the cafés of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna had disgorged their clientele onto Sunset Boulevard. The writers were at the core of a European émigré community that also included the film directors Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, and William Wyler; the theatre directors Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner; the actors Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr; the architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra; and the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Seldom in human history has one city hosted such a staggering convocation of talent.

The standard myth of this great emigration pits the elevated mentality of Central Europe against the supposed “wasteland” or “cultural desert” of Southern California. Indeed, a number of exiles fell to scowling under the palms. Brecht wrote, “The town of Hollywood has taught me this / Paradise and hell / can be one city.” The composer Eric Zeisl called California a “sunny blue grave.” Adorno could have had Muscle Beach in mind when he identified a social condition called the Health unto Death: “The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.”

Anecdotes of dyspeptic aloofness belie the richness and the complexity of the émigrés’ cultural role. As Ehrhard Bahr argues in his 2007 book, Weimar on the Pacific, many exiles were able to form bonds with progressive elements in mid-century L.A. Even before the refugees from Nazi Germany arrived, Schindler and Neutra had launched a wave of modernist residential architecture. When Schoenberg taught at USC and UCLA, he guided such native-born radical spirits as John Cage and Lou Harrison. Surprising alliances sprang up among the newcomers and adventurous members of the Hollywood set. Charlie Chaplin and George Gershwin played tennis with Schoenberg. Charles Laughton took the lead in a production of Brecht’s Galileo.

By 1941, the full company of exiles had arrived in Los Angeles, blinking in the sun. Their daily routines were often absurd. Several writers, including Heinrich Mann and Döblin, were granted one-year contracts at Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. These offers had little to do with active interest in their talent; rather, the motivation was to help them obtain visas. Required to play their part in this benevolent charade, Mann and Döblin reported for work each day, even though their English was poor and their ideas had no hope of being produced. Once the contracts ran out, the two struggled financially. Döblin wrote, “On the West Coast there are only two categories of writers: those who sit in clover and those who sit in dirt.”

Such doleful tales raise the question of why so many writers fled to L.A. Why not go to New York, where exiled visual artists gathered in droves? Ehrhard Bahr answers that the “lack of a cultural infrastructure” in L.A. was attractive: it allowed refugees to reconstitute the ideals of the Weimar Republic instead of competing with an extant literary scene. In addition, film work was an undeniable draw. Brecht’s anti-Hollywood invective hides the fact that he worked industriously to find a place as a screenwriter, and co-wrote Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! Even Thomas Mann flirted with Hollywood; there was talk of a film adaptation of The Magic Mountain, with Montgomery Clift as Hans Castorp and Greta Garbo as Clavdia Chauchat.

The real explanation for the German literary migration to L.A., though, has to do with the steady growth of a network of friendly connections, and at its center was Salka Viertel. Donna Rifkind pays tribute to this irresistibly dynamic figure in The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood (Other Press), and New York Review Books recently reissued Viertel’s addictive memoir, The Kindness of Strangers. Viertel worked tirelessly to obtain visas for endangered artists, and to help them find their footing when they arrived. Weimar on the Pacific might never have existed without her.

The array of personalities was formidable and eccentric. The Manns, scions of an old North German merchant family, were bourgeois to the core. Thomas had “the reserved politeness of a diplomat on official duty,” Viertel wrote; Heinrich, the “manners of a nineteenth-century grand seigneur.” Feuchtwanger was tan and fit, though he liked nothing more than to withdraw into his vast library and burrow into rare books. Döblin, of Pomeranian-Jewish background, had a cutting wit, which was often directed at Thomas Mann. Werfel, the son of German-speaking Jews in Prague, was the most politically conservative of the group, prone to outbursts against the Bolsheviks. Nonetheless, he was well liked—a mystic in a crowd of skeptics.

Thomas Mann, the uncrowned emperor of Germany in exile, lived in a spacious, white-walled aerie in Pacific Palisades, which the émigré architect J. R. Davidson had designed to his specifications. He saw Bambi at the Fox Theatre in Westwood; he ate Chinese food; he listened to Jack Benny on the radio; he furtively admired handsome men in uniform; he puzzled over the phenomenon of the “Baryton-Boy Frankie Sinatra,” to quote his diaries. Like almost all the émigrés, he never attempted to write fiction about America. He was completing his own historical epic, the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, which is vastly more entertaining than its enormous length might suggest. The Biblical Joseph is reinvented as a wily, seductive youth who escapes spectacularly from predicaments of his own making, and eventually emerges, in the service of the Pharaoh, as a masterly bureaucrat of social reform. It’s as if Tadzio from Death in Venice grew up to become Henry Wallace.

Mann’s comfortable existence depended on a canny marketing plan devised by his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. The scholar Tobias Boes, in Thomas Mann’s War (Cornell), describes how Knopf remade a difficult, quizzical author as the “Greatest Living Man of Letters,” an animate statue of European humanism. The supreme ironist became the high dean of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The florid and error-strewn translations of Helen Lowe-Porter added to this ponderous impression. (John E. Woods’s translations of the major novels, published between 1993 and 2005, are far superior.) Yet Knopf’s positioning enabled Mann to assume a new public role: that of spokesperson for the anti-Nazi cause. Boes writes, “Because he so manifestly stood above the partisan fray, Mann was able to speak out against Hitler and be perceived as a voice of reason rather than be dismissed as an agitator.”

Few obvious traces of the emigration persist in contemporary Los Angeles. A city that is flexing its power as an international arts capital ought to do more to honor this golden age of the not too distant past. But the evidence is there if you search for it. You can still hear stories about the principals from the composer Walter Arlen, aged ninety-nine, and the sublime actor and raconteur Norman Lloyd, aged a hundred and five. A modest tourist business has built up around the legacy of the émigré architects. The homes of Thomas Mann and Feuchtwanger are now under the purview of the German government, which offers residencies there to scholars and artists. The programmers at the Mann house, which has undergone a meticulous renovation, are soliciting video essays on the future of democracy—a topic as fraught today as it was when the author took it up in the nineteen-thirties.

The improbable idyll of Weimar on the Pacific dissipated quickly. Werfel and Bruno Frank both died in 1945. Nelly Mann, Heinrich’s wife, died the previous year, by suicide; Heinrich died in 1950. Döblin went to Germany to assist in the de-Nazification effort, meeting with considerable frustration. Those exiles who remained in America felt mounting insecurity as the Cold War took hold. McCarthyism made no exceptions for leftist writers who had been persecuted by the Nazis. Brecht left in 1947, the day after he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and later settled in East Germany. Feuchtwanger longed to return to Europe but, having never been granted U.S. citizenship, chose not to risk leaving.

Thomas Mann, who had become an American citizen in 1944, felt the dread of déjà vu. The likes of McCarthy, Hoover, and Nixon had crossed his line of sight before. In 1947, after the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten, he recorded a broadcast in which he warned of incipient Fascist tendencies: “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisition, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’: that is how it started in Germany.” Two years later, he found his face featured in a Life magazine spread titled “Dupes and Fellow Travelers.” In his diary, he commented that it looked like a Steckbrief: a “Wanted” poster.

To stand in Mann’s study today, with editions of Goethe and Schiller on the shelves, is to feel pride in the country that took him in and shame for the country that drove him out—not two Americas but one. In this room, the erstwhile “Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell prey to the clammy fear of the hunted. Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself? Would he be detained, interrogated, even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took a final walk through his house and made his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.

A Feeling for History

D. J. Waldie

Adapted by the author from the introduction to California Continuum, Volume 1: Migrations and Amalgamations, by Grant Hier and John Brantingham (Claremont, CA: Pelekinesis, 2019).

Show Footnotes

California has too often been misplaced within the “too wonderful” of El Dorado (triumph, health, liberation) and the “too terrible” of Donner Pass (displacement, loss, defilement).01 To be Californian has always required belief in a myth of blind luck. But the myth has a monstrous alternative: it is the story of the snowbound Donner Party and the cannibalism that followed. There have been times when just surviving California is a kind of success in its own right. The abstraction of these narratives—extravagant sales pitch on one side of the coin, dread on the other—leaves little room for local knowledges generated by the rhythms of daily life and the patterns in habit and ritual. Local knowledges are never more than tentative but never less than charged with barely contained intensities, pluripotent in effect, and lived. They are filtered, refined, and repurposed dialogically through generational narratives and communal remembrances (not without risk of inherited biases and phobias). In their attunements, textures, and atmospheres, local knowledges resist erasure. In place of the frictionless efficiency of the world’s regime of speed, local knowledges substitute rumination and speculation, particularity and partiality, fusions and confusions.

“To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory,” wrote Gaston Bachelard, the philosopher of recollection. “To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.”02 Gaston Bachelard, “A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Maker of Books,” Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, translated by Kenneth Haltman (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1990). Worlds unfold there for the subjective observer-participant, always felt but not apprehended uncritically. This sensibility is a kind of intelligence, emergent in interleavings, immanent in specifics, and poetic in expression. In its reluctance to give the obvious interpretation to events, it seeks to drag things into view that actually feel like something.03 “Worlds of all kinds that catch people up in some thing that feels like something.” Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). [4] Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture: The Dancy Lectures Alabama College 1941 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941; repr., 2007). Ordinary practices, so embodied, aim to activate a moral imagination—one capable of dwelling in someone else’s experience—that is in “constant contact and interchange between the local scene and the wide world that lies beyond it.”04 Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture: The Dancy Lectures Alabama College 1941 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941; repr., 2007).

The much-handled things of the ordinary are touched and return a touch. Being touched and touching should have outcomes that are political (a sympathetic bond between neighbors) and cultural (a sense of place that maps an inner landscape of recollection on the external contours of the familiar). Californians—inheritors of El Dorado and Donner Pass—have to fall in love with their place at the same time they have to struggle to endure it. To quicken their desire, they “must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name”05 “Living is narrativizing. Stirring up or restoring this narrativizing is thus among the tasks of any renovation. One must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets.” Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Living and Cooking, translated by Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). To become native to their place, Californians need new stories and habits of being. They need a feeling for history and vulnerability to it. They need signposts that point them to habitats of memory. These waymarks will reveal themselves in the sharing of local knowledges and in handing them on to neighbors and to the future, where new Californians, in their myriad identities, wait to receive them.

Collective Healing

Guadalupe Rosales

Show Footnotes

When I started doing the archival work known as Veteranas and Rucas in 2015,01 The archive is on Instagram as @veteranas_and_rucas, https://www.instagram.com/veteranas_and_rucas/?hl=en. See also the Project Statement on Guadalupe Rosales’s website, undated, http://www.veteranasandrucas.com/about.

the idea that the words “marginalized” and “underrepresented” would be used to describe a community and neighborhood I grew up in was strange to me. I felt pride in Los Angeles, where Latinx communities are heavily represented. This was obvious in my home, out on the streets, and in my intimate circle of friends. It was in the air, in the way we spoke, and in our swag. The thought of being underrepresented never crossed my mind. My memories of growing up in L.A. form a spectrum. Or: I had multidimensional experiences living here (and continue to do so). I love this city even though it has its rough moments.

I left Los Angeles very abruptly in 2000 when I was about 19 years old. Since the age of 16, I had lost friends and family to gang and state violence. Violence was at its peak in the 1990s. And since violence had been around me since I was little, I normalized it. But when my cousin was murdered in 1996, two days before Christmas, something in me awakened, pain I had never felt before. Because I was only a teenager when he was murdered, I knew nothing about grief, nor had resources that could help me heal. Luckily, I had family and friends who gathered in my home every day. We sat quietly in the living room or on my porch and reminisced and shared stories about my cousin. When I think back about these gatherings, I realize that this was my first collective healing experience, although there were also many sleepless and drunken nights involved. If I slept at all, I’d wake up exhausted from crying most of the night.

So in 2000, I moved far away from home, family, and community. As I grew older, I began to feel the distance of time and place. When I left Los Angeles, I also stopped all communication with friends and family. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s, when I reached out to my sister (who is a year older than me) for the first time since leaving L.A., that I started to reconnect. I asked her questions about childhood friends and parties we went to as teenagers. I asked her about family as well. There were friends who were doing well (although doing “well” can be subjective), who had become professional artists, who now had office jobs, who had kids and families. There were also those who ended up in prison or dead, and some who were caught between those two worlds. I was also using the internet to stay “up-to-date” with L.A., to have a sense of what was going on there.

Sometimes I didn’t know what to type into Google search. All I had were my own memories. I typed street names into Google Maps and searched for people I grew up with. Occasionally I came across articles about those who had passed away. One example was a high school friend named 02 Instagram, @veteranas_and_rucas, https://www.instagram.com/p/CBi1jeGJ1C3/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.
I was shocked when I read his story in the L.A. Times.03 Times Staff Writer, “Claims Filed Against Police in Shooting Death of Boy, 17,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 10, 1998. Another was Javier Quezada Jr.04 Daniel Hernandez, “Claim Filed in Fatal Shooting by Officer,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 22, 2003. My friends were being murdered by the police. And if it wasn’t dehumanization of people of color, it was either criminalization or stereotypical clichés about growing up in Los Angeles.

My time in New York is a big part of my story. I spent 15 years there and it’s where I became an adult. It’s where I found a new community of friends, mentors, lovers, and artists. It’s also where I came out as queer and was able to embrace myself in this way. But while I was living there, I felt like another part of me was missing. When I moved to New York, I brought a stack of letters and photos with me—of friends, boyfriends, siblings, and relatives. I held on to these photos and letters as something sacred. I kept looking at them and wondering how we can tell our own story. And I knew that I wasn’t alone in this desire to tell a story—not just my own, but a collective story of community and interrelated experiential bonds and pain and love and growth. I wanted to connect with people who were like me and to create a community-generated archive; I wanted it to be authentic and self-generating, embodying a shared experience where one story could amplify another. So in 2015, I started Veteranas and Rucas on Instagram, and then, in 2016, Map Pointz.05 Instagram, @map_pointz, https://www.instagram.com/map_pointz/?hl=en.
I began to connect and share stories with strangers and with friends whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to since high school.

The work and the sharing of those stories also encouraged me to come back home, so I moved back to Los Angeles in 2016. In the last few years, I have dedicated my life to preserving this communal history, from tracking down people (strangers, friends, and family) to acquiring Chicano/Latinx ephemera (like photos, flyers, letters, and clothing) and taking on the responsibility of preserving them as part of this story. Veteranas and Rucas began as an open invitation to various communities to share personal images and memories that create visual narratives celebrating identities and historicizing subcultures.

What has grown out of it, and now Map Pointz too, is a collaborative archive through which we can explore ideas about how history and culture are framed—and who does the framing. This work celebrates, humanizes, and reflects our shared culture’s positive and honest attributes. It creates space for collective healing and storytelling and finds ways for new dialogue to emerge about youth culture in Southern California that would not exist otherwise. I knew that it was important to preserve these materials and stories—not just my own but those belonging to hundreds of others—to counteract what I now understood to be the underrepresentation, misrepresentation, and historical erasure of Latinx communities in Southern California.

It all manifested through grief, memories, and urgency because of the ways in which my community and I were seen from an outsider’s perspective. The more engaged and serious this work became, the more I discovered. My aim was also to find potent revivals of my culture as well as generate unexpected connections between seemingly irreconcilable institutions and communities. These projects provide a reflective surface to see oneself—not through an act of vanity but through affirmation and validation.

Collectively, we have cracked a code. We’ve figured out a new approach to representation and memory through this sharing and sifting of images. My culture is so beautiful and complex that it’s almost impossible to share stories in a linear way.

Glorifying the Lion: Telling the Other Side of L.A.’s History

Tyree Boyd-Pates

“Until the lion tells his side of the story, the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

This African proverb, which I first encountered in the work of the esteemed Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic Chinua Achebe, is central to my approach as a historian and museum curator. I particularly try to keep it in mind whenever I am excavating, reclaiming, and recentering the local community’s perspectives and narratives about the history of Los Angeles and the American West.

As a public historian and scholar, I have spent a great deal of time spotlighting historical examples of the “lion” narrative. This is especially true when it comes to the methodological approach known as community curation. There are two notable examples from my own curatorial career. The first is “No Justice, No Peace: L.A. 1992,” a 2017 exhibition at the California African American Museum marking the 25th anniversary of the 1992 uprising. More recent is the “Collecting Community History Initiative: The West During COVID-19,” an initiative I led in 2020 at the Autry Museum of the American West.

The “No Justice, No Peace” exhibition looked not just at 1992 but revisited crucial episodes in Los Angeles and American history stretching back a full century. These pivotal moments included the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 as well as the Civil Rights Movement’s legislative achievements, which shaped African American expectations for equality in the 1960s only to be blunted by the reality of unequal housing practices and discrimination in the post-war decades. The exhibition also highlighted the unjust treatment and oppressive conditions created by law enforcement’s overwhelming presence in Black communities. These conditions set the stage for the worst civil rebellion the country had seen to date: the Watts Rebellion of 1965.

The exhibition looked closely at the legacy of Tom Bradley, who served from 1973 to 1993 as L.A.’s first Black mayor. During the middle years of Bradley’s tenure, communities of color in Los Angeles negotiated a tense relationship with law enforcement during the so-called War on Drugs overseen by the Reagan Administration. That tension, over time, became a compounding animosity towards law enforcement that seeped into the 1990s. The ultimate result, following the acquittal of the four officers who brutalized Rodney King, was the 1992 uprising.

Also displayed were powerful photographs, videos, historical documents, posters, flyers, and other ephemera. The most significant of these materials, rich in context and educational value, were drawn from the collections of the Los Angeles Public Library, the library at Cal State University Dominguez Hills, and the City Archives and Records Center in downtown Los Angeles.

Most important of all, the exhibition grew from consultations with community members alive during many of the historical periods in question, incorporating their oral histories and artifacts. We heard from the Reverend Chip Murray of First African Methodist Episcopal Church and the families of Latasha Harlins and Rodney King, among many others. This approach was specifically designed to reclaim the valuable historical narratives of African American community history in Los Angeles.

This is the kind of exhibition-making that we are referring to when we talk about community curation, a methodological approach that attempts to make museums and their collections more responsive to and inclusive of the diverse communities that surround them. It begins with the participation of communities of color seldom involved in the decision-making process in museums. It also works to center voices and perspectives that are traditionally not heard because of historical erasure.

In 2020, after joining the Autry Museum of the American West as the Associate Curator of Western History, I applied a similarly community-centered approach in working preserve a record of the COVID-19 pandemic, in what became the Collecting Community History Initiative (CCHI): The West During COVID-19. Early in the pandemic, my Autry colleagues and I noticed how quickly, and profoundly, COVID-19 was changing the daily lives of American citizens. Along with isolation came newfound resilience: we noted that despite being physically apart, communities persisted and flourished through creative forms of sharing, from oral histories online to family recipes and the creation of masks designed not just to keep their wearers safe but to reflect individual and community culture.

Since launching the CCHI, we have digitally collected hundreds of submissions spanning communities across the American West. We also broadened the initiative to include the Black Lives Matter Protests and electoral campaigns as they played out across the region in 2020. This allowed us to capture the momentum of the racial justice movement of the past year – led by activists on the ground after the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others—and the historical significance of California’s first Black Senator, Kamala Harris, joining Joseph R. Biden’s ticket and ultimately becoming the nation’s first female, and first Black and South Asian, vice president. Incorporating these materials has allowed us to tell a more diverse and inclusive story of the American West.

These efforts have reminded me of one important lesson above all: that centering community history is a way of revealing the breadth of our democracy—and the glory of our community’s resilience and survival. Thus the lion may live to hear the story told from his point of view after all. ●

Wrestling with Memory and History

William Deverell

From Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Yet a future foretold is not a future come true. Optimistic forecasts about ethnic and racial common ground, about a common future for the city of destiny, evince worthy aims. But as a historian, I am obliged to suggest that the city of the past deserves concentrated study before that leap to the city of the future is possible. It is imperative to continue digging into the soil of the Los Angeles past. What we find is a city that, even in its expressions of institutional and infrastructural growth, adhered to patterns of racial privilege and ethnocentrism. Pronouncements about a multicultural future that works may only be so many naive words and empty phrases. Or they may be lies, deliberate ones at that. We should be suspicious of the elasticity of language to defy the concrete reality of social problems. In other words, it was not at all that long ago that similar language and optimism promised a very different Los Angeles of the future. Los Angeles was once to be the world’s urban beacon because racial supremacy worked here, because Anglo Saxons in charge worked so diligently to maintain particular lines of racial and ethnic privilege. If latter-day suggestions of racial and ethnic harmony in the future are to prove at all feasible, it seems to me important that we better understand the former expression of racial singularity and supremacist triumphalism. Wrestling with memory and history in this way just might be socially therapeutic. It certainly is overdue.