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The Chicano Moratorium

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On August 29, 1970, as many as 30,000 Chicano anti-war activists marched in East Los Angeles to protest the Vietnam War. The march, organized by the grassroots coalition the Chicano Moratorium (formally known as the National Chicano Moratorium Committee Against the Vietnam War), was the biggest anti-war demonstration undertaken by any ethnic group in the nation. Gathering in Laguna Park, marchers headed down Whittier Boulevard as L.A. county sheriff’s deputies, declaring the rally an unlawful assembly, attempted to break it up with tear gas and batons. Storefronts burned in the ensuing violence and four people were killed, among them the award-winning Los Angeles Times journalist Rubén Salazar. Salazar and others had sought refuge from the chaos in a local bar, the Silver Dollar Bar and Café. A sheriff’s deputy fired a tear gas canister into the establishment, which struck and killed Salazar. No charges were filed. The former Laguna Park is now Ruben F. Salazar Park.

Introductory Considerations

This subcommittee was chaired by William Deverell, professor of history at the University of Southern California, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, and author of numerous books, including Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (University of California Press, 2004); and Sharon Johnston, partner and cofounder of Johnston Marklee & Associates, an architecture firm based in Los Angeles. Its other members were Eric Avila, professor of history, Chicana/o studies, and urban planning at UCLA and author, among other books, of The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Christopher Hawthorne, chief design officer for the City of Los Angeles; Marissa López, professor of English and Chicana/o studies at UCLA; Kelly Lytle Hernández, professor of history, African American studies, and urban planning at UCLA and author of City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017); and Richard White, emeritus professor of history at Stanford University and author, most recently, of California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History (W. W. Norton, 2020).
Show Footnotes

Los Angeles has long been celebrated—and caricatured—as a “city of the future.” Does it follow that this sensibility invites or even requires minimal attention to the past? Given recent and ongoing upheavals across the United States regarding commemorative monuments, statues, and the like—underpinned by increasingly widespread and resonant cries for social justice—the conclusions of the Civic Memory Working Group and its subcommittees collected in this report may act as a corrective to metropolitan amnesia and a guide for public memorialization efforts moving forward. This report is a mere starting point in what the Mayor’s Office genuinely hopes will be a deeper, wider, and ongoing public conversation.

It begins with a simple provocation in the form of a question: What might it mean if the city of the future could simultaneously be lauded for its regard for the past? The many stages of a regionwide growth juggernaut of industrial, metropolitan, and suburban development in Southern California, from the 1880s forward, were accompanied at every step by campaigns and reflexes to elide and even destroy signs of the past. Relatively recent initiatives, including the SurveyLA work produced by the Department of City Planning’s Office of Historic Resources,01SurveyLA, the most comprehensive survey ever completed by an American city, identifies and evaluates L.A.’s rich historic resources. According to the Los Angeles Conservancy, before SurveyLA, only 15 percent of the city had been surveyed to identify historic resources. Starting in 2009 under the auspices of the Department of City Planning in cooperation with the J. Paul Getty Trust, SurveyLA took eight years to complete its work, which covered 880,000 land parcels and 500 square miles. See “SurveyLA: The Los Angeles Historic Resources Survey,” Los Angeles Conservancy website, undated, https://www.laconservancy.org/surveyla-los-angeles-historic-resources-survey; and “SurveyLA: Los Angeles Historic Resources Survey—Field Survey Results Master Report,” Office of Historic Resources, Department of City Planning, Aug. 2016, https://planning.lacity.org/odocument/c118f301-cc39-4ede-af5a-3e5ec901e7be/SurveyLA_Master_Report.pdf. suggest an encouraging turn toward cataloging and protecting architectural and cultural heritage. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the City of Los Angeles has traditionally given insufficient thought to the protection of older buildings and neighborhoods and the memories they embody.02 A material case in point: brick versus adobe buildings. The urban growth machine in the 50 years between 1880 and 1930 remade Los Angeles by way of brick. This recasting supplanted (and assured the destruction of) adobe, seen by the ascendant elite Protestant culture as backward, Catholic, primitive, and Mexican. Only when the 1933 Long Beach earthquake knocked the brick industry to its knees did the fervent attachment to brick dissipate. What has been lost in the top-down drive toward progress and modernity that accelerated in the middle decades of the last century? To begin with, a long list of sites and places and all that they meant to the people who knew and loved them. Interstate 10 bulldozed the historic Sugar Hill neighborhood. Dodger Stadium rises above what used to be the neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine. The Bunker Hill of novelists John Fante and Raymond Chandler is now a banking, residential, and high-culture enclave of elite Angelenos and formidable institutions.

A rush to the future seems also to have narrowed possibilities for commemorative reckoning. Triumphalism, leached of any acknowledgment of history’s crimes and wounds, has been a powerful tool and motivator of commemoration. But it is a blunt, insensitive instrument of historic acknowledgment. Grief and rage, along with attempts at atonement—as dozens of galvanizing nationwide actions in 2020 clearly demonstrated—have roles to play in how views of present and past intermingle. Erasing monuments might temper triumphalism, but could the acts also erase the memory of conflicts that the monuments themselves deliberately rendered flat, simple, or fathomable? What if Los Angeles acknowledged both regret and triumph in its past and, in so doing, in its present?

Modern Los Angeles has a record of efforts, many of them violent or otherwise brutal, to establish Anglo or European-American prerogatives by directly whitewashing not just Indigenous, African American, Asian, Latinx, and other communities but also successive periods of Spanish and Mexican rule. Los Angeles has been more resolute in its successive erasures—and perhaps had more historical layers of non-Anglo history to erase—than other major cities. In confronting this fact, as many members of this working group have pointed out, “amnesia” may be too passive a word, inadequate in grappling with these intentional, systematic, and sometimes violent acts of removal and displacement.

Acts of forgetting and erasure, meanwhile, have a counterpart in the reworked past so prevalent in Southern California: that imagined past epitomized by, for instance, public understanding of the missions, Olvera Street, adobes, even the “star tours” of Hollywood and Beverly Hills. That effacing impulse might be tempered or more broadly contemplated by renewed attention to civic memory and its power, starting with honest attempts to confront what the writer and urban theorist Mike Davis, quoted elsewhere in this volume, calls “bad history” and to remember those who have resisted it.

There is an important caveat or coda that we should add to that set of observations about erasure. In certain ways, it is precisely this amnesia—or freedom from the weight of history or community expectation—that has made Los Angeles so attractive to successive waves of newcomers from around the country and the world, especially those working in creative fields like Hollywood but also architecture, literature, music, and art. One unifying strand of Los Angeles history—which is perhaps even central to the city’s sense of itself—is the degree to which it has been an attractive destination exactly because it represents, for many, the idea of leaving behind, forgetting, and creating anew.

National upheavals and conversations over the last five years or so about the fate of Confederate monuments and memorials, and increasingly about others (the Junípero Serra statues and other commemorations are fundamental regional case examples) have prompted a painful, overdue reckoning with the ways in which American cities have chosen to mark and commemorate their own histories, and with what stories have been rendered invisible or buried in the process. This working group recognizes an opportunity to articulate some essential qualities that make Los Angeles what it is, and in turn to distinguish its history and culture from those of other places.

When viewed alongside such protests as those launched by Black Lives Matter activists, it becomes clear that history—and various attempts to bury or distort it—lies at the heart of much that is happening. Voices of protest and anger are right to say that this is not new, it is systematic: how we have had to live (and die) for far too long. In other words, whether rage is focused on the name of a U.S. military base or patterns of racialized killings, this historical moment is linked organically—and inseparably—to the past. Any attempt at energizing civic memory must listen to those voices that have been repeating the same chord for years: that our shared past is grim. A city’s healthy regard for civic memory cannot assume that such memory must soothe.

Civic memory is a slippery construction; it is tricky enough to define each word fully on its own before we expect “civic” to modify “memory.”03 Political theorist Richard Dagger defines civic memory as “a shared recollection of a city’s past, of its accomplishments and failures, which both reflects and generates a sense of civic identity.” Richard Dagger, “Metropolis, Memory, and Citizenship,” American Journal of Political Science 25, no. 4 (1981): 729. Essayist Margaret Renkl offers a concise observation on at least some of the inherent challenges: “The problem with civic memory is that it is both true and deeply false. Some layer of reality inevitably undergirds a public fairy tale. A myth always contains enough truth to make it seem like the final word. But there is no such thing as the final word—any history is a narrative construction, one that files off the roughest edges of the story. The past itself is shaggy, troubled, unruly.” Margaret Renkl, “Looking Our Racist History in the Eye,” New York Times, Sept. 10, 2018. Our aim in this report is to encourage the public installation of structures, performances, or other creative or material works that address this region’s past in ways and forms that actively challenge not just myths and languid triumphalism but also the mere comfort of forgetting. The moment is now. Los Angeles has an opportunity to broaden and enrich a national discussion by confronting its own peculiar and fraught relationship with civic memory. Our city finds itself with both significant anniversaries at hand (150 years since the Anti-Chinese Massacre of 1871, 30 since the civil unrest of 1992) and major civic events (the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics) on the horizon. The process of marking these milestones will be more equitable, more inclusive, and ultimately more productive if it is part of broader, unified efforts to grapple forthrightly with the city’s forgotten or erased histories.

One of the many challenges we face is in finding, through collective dialogue, a balance between immediate policy recommendations and broader reflections on how to enrich and encourage a culture of civic memory in Los Angeles. That process will entail engagement with both remembering and forgetting, all the while acknowledging that the two are inextricable.

The pitfalls and obstacles are many. To begin with, any commemorative effort can pose a trap. The danger of memorialization is its seductive and false clarity: it pretends to be only about the past, but the act of fixing memory in civic or personal form is undoubtedly also—perhaps primarily—a reflection or confirmation of the present moment. That is why, as we now recognize, statues and memorials are less about the person or event they commemorate than the moment in which a particular commemoration took or takes place.

Our city must guard against hubris, against any assumption that our moment’s perspective on the past is immutable, or that we have gained clarity or wisdom about history that earlier generations lacked. There are many reasons to be wary of any act of memorialization that seeks to give any one perspective some eternal power, that surrounds any given memorial with an aura of imagined permanence. The future deserves to find our era’s monuments—if they find them at all—malleable or elastic, able to be reimagined and rethought as perspectives of the past inevitably evolve. Might we embrace or invite or encourage ephemeral commemorations that do not have the “fixed” problem built in and that do not unduly fetishize permanence? Can our design of new commemorative installations reach across multiple and dynamic scales and meanings, functioning beyond any singular and didactic narrative? We think that such an approach might be particularly well-suited to Los Angeles, a polycentric, dynamic, and unfinished city that has tended to distrust tidy narratives about its origins or its contemporary meanings.

Public commemorations are political, and politics always change as the imagined future becomes the lived present. What we commemorate now will grow irrelevant or even offensive, sometimes quickly and sometimes gradually, as we have seen so clearly in 2020. In deeply divided moments like our own, the politics are going to be fraught. We must recognize this and understand that we cannot expect otherwise.

While there is no escaping these dilemmas, we might be able to mitigate them. Who speaks for any given community is not at all clear. We need to be careful not to have the City anoint one part of a community over another. So too, people might commemorate what is important to them or what they have been told ought to be important to them. All proposals should be open to some form of critique.

From the start, this working group has been careful to focus not on conclusions about what new monuments or memorials should look like, where they should be placed, or whom they should honor, but instead on underscoring the importance of thoughtful, equitable, and community-based processes for developing a broader civic base of historically minded initiatives. If there is one idea we have tried to knit into each section of our report, it is this one.

There has been a noticeable civic price to pay for our ongoing lack of attention in Los Angeles to some of these questions and themes. Certain institutions make that toll clear even as they represent an opportunity for new approaches. Consider the Los Angeles City Archives, a less-than-well-known trove of civic memory in the form of documents and images. Professionally curated and archived, its vast collections ought to be better known. How can the archives staff and holdings play a larger role in encouraging and supporting civic memory efforts and programs, and how might we assist in this process? How can the holdings and the expertise of those who care for them be imagined in more distributive ways across neighborhoods and communities? Creative engagement with artists drawn from multiple communities, for instance, could highlight the City Archives as a locus through which to enhance civic memory while paying dividends by developing new collection acquisitions. This rich archive is itself a kind of monument to Los Angeles history. Its importance to both scholars and a wider public could be amplified in a range of creative ways.04 A regional example is the /five initiative at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Launched in 2016, /five is a contemporary art initiative through which the Huntington collaborates with a variety of arts and cultural organizations. The program engages the institution’s rich historical, botanical, and art collections in new and thought-provoking ways by supporting artists in their encounters with the materials and in subsequent installations provoked by them.

In a related fashion, Los Angeles civic memory is served by continual and widespread encouragement to archive and otherwise collect (and interpret and distribute) stories and memories. Finding ways for the City to interact with grassroots efforts that celebrate individual narratives may lead to progress here, as might weaving together institutional partnerships with libraries, archive outposts, churches, and community centers. Perhaps efforts to enhance the Los Angeles content of the region’s K–12 education could be a larger (if ambitious) arc of a renewed commitment to civic memory. To be sure, a deep and diverse network of historical engagement can encourage the region’s residents to engage civic histories beyond statues and built memorials.

Not all civic memory enhancements need be new creations. Part of what this report intends is to determine what memorials and commemorative installations are already out there, why they came to be, and where they reside—or, for that matter, when and under what circumstances they disappeared. Cataloging and publicizing them might be followed by efforts to understand them anew. Might we refresh some or most of them, and in so doing ask them to teach us about matters that are not decided, about interpretations that have changed or must be challenged?

Sometimes it will be right to make something new. Sometimes it will be right to change, remove, or add to something old. Sometimes it will be right to foster partnerships between the City and community members or institutions. Sometimes it will be right for the City to do nothing, or to make a point of moving out of the way.

As to this last point, the “get out of the way” approach, this report questions in a number of ways how well the City and its structures of power and policy balance listening with action. Is the City of Los Angeles listening long and deeply enough to the needs coming from its communities, and understanding well enough the way those communities make use of civic memory? What good is accomplished if policy fights spontaneity or if centralized memorialization inhibits eruptions of grassroots emotion and power? Policies and procedures for initiating, revisiting, and taking down memorials are important. But so too is knowing that memorialization with no municipal oversight must always be encouraged. The recent and remarkable memorializations of Kobe Bryant and Nipsey Hussle offer powerful cases in point. We believe that it would be a mistake to overly bureaucratize memorialization protocols and approvals to the extent that the passion, spontaneity, grief, and ephemerality of a moment in history is lost, avoided, or otherwise diluted. Better to encourage or at least not stand in the way of such moments, and, once they have been enacted, to find ways to mark, remember, call attention to, and learn from them.05 The community response following rapper and activist Nipsey Hussle’s 2019 murder, which included a memorial at Staples Center and a 26-mile funeral procession through Los Angeles, and the similar memorial at the Staples Center for Kobe Bryant in 2020, where thousands of fans grieved the basketball legend’s loss for days, are both compelling examples of spontaneous, noninstitutional, and ephemeral public memorials.

Our approach to memorials, new and older, might also include a broader embrace of places (plazas, parks, and open space), which invite reflection and may more subtly acknowledge people or moments from the past. As sites of gathering, such spaces can be embraced and engaged in the present, support everyday life in an ongoing manner, and intertwine with and scaffold the future while simultaneously inviting thoughts on the past. Similarly, marches, festivals, and performances and storytelling (or spontaneous displays of citywide grief) can also be valid markers of a historical event, person, or place. The cycle of rituals can tease out different aspects of memorialization over time. Protests, as noted above, are key moments of remembering—every bit as much as parades and festivals—and deserve to be recognized as such.

One way to escape the presentist tendencies of memorialization would be to layer memorialization across time in a single space. For each set of acknowledged community memories in a given Los Angeles neighborhood, for example, a second set of simple markers or a text could note the people who lived or worked there before the present community became established, reaching back to include Indigenous communities. As a palimpsest, then, it would be fairly straightforward to acknowledge the Native American past all across the Los Angeles Basin.06 Indeed, any Indigenous land acknowledgement policy of the type being considered by one of this working group’s subcommittees might be strengthened by an insistence that we recognize Native histories and placemaking not merely as part of public ceremonies but in the framing of public spaces and public and private landscapes.

But the recognition can go deeper in time and demography. The diversity of community in Los Angeles invites us to consider additional layers (the east side and Boyle Heights, for example). Consider the Breed Street Shul in Boyle Heights. After decades of abandonment, there is now a movement to rehabilitate the structure to preserve the memory of the largely and mostly forgotten Boyle Heights Jewish community. What one generation seeks to forget and leave behind, another is trying to rescue from amnesia’s oblivion. How can memorials be powerful reminders of the past and interpreters of it at once? To underscore an earlier point, Los Angeles is unusual among American cities in its embrace—a civic paradox, to be sure—of a certain tradition of productive forgetting, of a refusal to be weighed down by tradition or restricted by traditional ideas about patronage, lineage, influence, and the like. All of this relates to another challenge: how do we remember events that may have no constituency in the present? At the level of policy and staffing, could we imagine historical context and perspective being required at municipal, policy-level discussions, and factored into subsequent policy creation? What about at municipal speeches? Might the City have a municipal officer serving as historian, or some sort of term rotation for this role? Might we consider partnerships with local educational and cultural institutions (in part to sidestep possible politicization of the position) so that this position might be taken up in turn by curators, archivists, community leaders, artists, and historians?

Finally, the Civic Memory Working Group believes strongly that Los Angeles should create mechanisms for retiring as well as establishing sites of memory and memorialization. Creating memorials is a political act, as is taking them down. How might we retire monuments that have, for one reason or another, stood beyond their meaning, purpose, or appropriateness? We need a way to make sure that such decommissioning does not become a contest of force, a competition in defacement. On a related note, when decisions are made to remove a certain monument or memorial, should the City consider, for a variety of reasons, allowing for partial removal? Might memorial ruins become sites for a kind of contemplation distinct from the moment when this or that commemorative piece was erected or enacted?

Anything approved as a result or in the name of this effort will be analyzed and judged. We should hope as much. We ought to lay ourselves bare in our proposals and obligations, while at the same time giving room for our ideas and claims to evolve. The aim should be that this report, and the commemorations that follow, are discussed and debated widely: a new beginning to an ongoing dialogue in a city that has sometimes seemed to love its imagined future more than its complex present or contested past.

Whiteness and Civic Memory in Los Angeles

Members of this Roundtable: 
Natalia Molina (facilitator) is a professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California and author of How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (University of California Press, 2014) and Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1940 (University of California Press, 2006). 
Eric Avila is a professor of history, Chicana/o studies, and urban planning at UCLA and author of Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2004) and The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 
Wendy Cheng is an associate professor of American studies at Scripps College in Claremont, California, author of The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012). 
Jessica Kim is an 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). 
Brenda E. Stevenson is a professor of history and African American studies and the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History at UCLA, and author, among other books, of The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots (Oxford University Press, 2013). 
David Torres-Rouff is an associate professor and chair of history at UC Merced and author of Before L.A.: Race, Space, and Municipal Power in Los Angeles, 1781–1894 (Yale University Press, 2013).
Show Footnotes

This roundtable discussion took up a topic fundamental to L.A.’s understanding of its own history yet in many ways underscrutinized outside the academy: the ways that whiteness as a racial category and as a mark of privilege or elite status has been constructed, defined, reshaped, taken advantage of, and elided in Southern California as the region has grown. Multiracial since its founding in 1781, Los Angeles is a city where categories of racial privilege and oppression have arguably been more fluid than in other parts of the country, and where whiteness, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was sometimes one of several racial or ethnic categories that could confer status or privilege. This panel, featuring scholars who have devoted much of their careers to work in this area, sought to explore precisely this kind of complexity in defining the relationship between whiteness and civic memory in Los Angeles. Natalia Molina: The first question is about how we see the constructions and meanings of whiteness and how they’ve played out in L.A. history. Can you tell us a little bit about how whiteness has played out in your work specifically, and how these issues continue to reverberate into the present? And please note that while this panel is about whiteness, we invite you to discuss in your answers the people and places in Los Angeles that contest whiteness and white supremacy, both historically and in the present.

 Eric Avila: I’ll jump in by laying out a ground rule for discussing whiteness in Los Angeles. I think we all know from our work that L.A. has always been multiracial, multicultural, and multiethnic. Whenever whiteness comes into the conversation, I think there’s always the danger of taking it as a thing for granted, as if it’s this kind of ahistorical, a-geographical construct. I want to make sure that I avoid that trap. And for me, that means thinking about the many different groups from different parts of the world who have sought inclusion into this paradigm of whiteness. What is it about L.A., about the timing of L.A.’s development, about the spatial and geographic character of Southern California, that enabled certain groups to access privileges, spaces, and identities of whiteness, and at the same time excluded others? In my opinion, this puts African Americans in the typical position of being the other of all others—the group by which or against which other racial and ethnic groups have sought to define their whiteness.

Jessica Kim: We think a lot about race, and the construction of race, in Los Angeles in terms of the city’s immense diversity, created by many immigrant streams. And that’s incredibly important. But there’s also a need to think about the construction of whiteness as it relates to L.A.’s position in the Pacific world. Many L.A. historians talk a lot about boosters.01 The “booster” era of L.A. spanned roughly 40 years (1885–1925), during which “rough-hewn and optimistic pioneering city leaders worked with creative writers, real estate barons, and artists to bring new settlers and new businesses” to town, creating a narrative that “often rewrote the city’s history and present situation to suit their idealized, European-American values.” See Hadley Meares, “‘Sunkist Skies of Glory’: How City Leaders and Real Estate Barons Used Sunshine and Oranges to Sell Los Angeles,” Curbed Los Angeles, May 24, 2018.

They were key in the city’s growth, and they really thought of themselves as positioned within this broader Pacific world and within American imperial projects in Latin America and Asia. So these immigrant streams into Los Angeles make, in some ways, the construction of race and whiteness in L.A. unique. But the ways in which Angelenos constructed whiteness was also positioned in the broader Pacific world and in the relationship between American imperial exploits and race. Race-making was outward-looking and transnational. 

Brenda Stevenson: Being a person from the American South, what I’m always struck by with regard to Los Angeles and Los Angeles history is the way in which whiteness has been framed by the American South. While I look at L.A. as being part of the international world and part of the Pacific too, it is also a place that is parochially white. By that I mean, when I look at the ways in which whiteness is presented in the American South, particularly historically, it’s also presented that way in Los Angeles. Once the quote-unquote Americans gained control of California, African Americans who were migrating to Los Angeles and the American West at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries were quite aware of that—that this was the way whiteness was defined. As a more recent migrant to Los Angeles, I came at a moment when Los Angeles was being promoted nationally and around the world as “the most diverse city in the United States.” And that, to me, it really hid whiteness, hid the social and political and economic problems associated with whiteness vis-à-vis other groups of people. People would talk about how diverse L.A. was, as if that meant equitable, as if that meant inclusive. And it didn’t mean that. It absolutely did not mean that. 

David Torres-Rouff: As a person who studies early Los Angeles history, one interesting thing is that unlike other places in the United States, whiteness is one of many categories of racial supremacy in the early history of Los Angeles. For maybe 70 years, whiteness was not the most important racial category in Los Angeles. Being “an Español” or a “gente de razón” during the Spanish era, or Californio/Californiana during the Mexican period and into the 1870s, meant far more than being white. And one of the interesting things about Los Angeles is that whiteness as an idea was an immigrant, brought west across the United States. This gives slightly different contours to the history of whiteness in Los Angeles. 

Wendy Cheng: In terms of the past and the identity of the city, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “narrativization” of Los Angeles history. One ongoing narrative is of white racial innocence. This idea of multiculturalism that Brenda raised has been part of this idea of inclusion: that if we include more stories, therefore we will somehow have a better or fuller or more accurate understanding of the history of Los Angeles. But actually, we have to change the entire framework of that narrative to attack and deconstruct this idea of white racial innocence, or neutrality. That’s been something that’s on my mind a lot, because that’s often the surface that is not scratched. Those narratives of white racial innocence continue to be selected over and over. 

As a geographer, I’ve also been thinking a lot about how whiteness has been and continues to be spatialized in Los Angeles, and what effects that has. In the work my coauthors Laura Pulido and Laura Barraclough and I did for A People’s Guide to Los Angeles,02 Laura Pulido, Laura R. Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
 we learned how thoroughly white-dominated spaces continue to stand in for L.A. as a whole: gentrified downtown, Hollywood, the west side. There is careful and nuanced work that historians have done, of course, but in the popular representations of L.A., it’s still downtown to the west side standing in for Los Angeles as a whole. And maps literally stopping right before they get to South L.A. or East L.A. or any other part of what many of us would understand as greater L.A.—the real L.A. And yes, we understand L.A. in the present as a multicultural city, but the dominant narrative of L.A. history is still a blank slate, as a city with no history. And I think the violence of that as a settler-colonial narrative, as a white settler-colonial narrative—one that erases Mexican and Indigenous histories, spaces, and communities—still has yet to be really dealt with in any kind of mainstream way. 

BS: I just want to add that when we think about whiteness in Los Angeles, we also have to think about Hollywood. Because Hollywood really establishes for the world, and for the country as well, what whiteness is. It’s really interesting to be talking about whiteness in the place where the major image-maker of whiteness exists. Los Angeles has always come off globally as a kind of sparkling, celebrity-driven white society where everyone’s rich, where everyone’s golden, where everyone’s blonde. That has framed whiteness in Los Angeles in a particular way. Los Angeles produces the images of whiteness that persist throughout the world. 

EA: Whenever you talk about race—ideas about race, this race or that race—in my mind you are fundamentally talking about a cultural construct. You’re talking about an ideology. You’re not talking about something that can be measured and mapped empirically. So you have to adjust your thinking to grapple with that. When you’re talking about L.A.’s identity, you are talking about urban identity and how urban identity was racialized. The next question is how that identity is then put into practice—how it’s mapped onto space, grafted onto space, and whatnot. L.A.’s development as a modern, white, American city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincided with a revolution—a revolution in communications, a revolution in transportation—that enabled these representations of a white L.A. It began with lithographs. It began with postcards. It began with magazines and catalogs in the late nineteenth century. And Hollywood was the culmination of that cultural process that began earlier, through earlier modes of technological mass reproduction of images and texts. To me, “Birth of a Nation” is kind of the beginning of Hollywood’s intervention of constructing a regional variant of whiteness.03 The Birth of a Nation (original title: The Clansman), directed by D. W. Griffith (Hollywood, CA: David W. Griffith Corp., 1915).
 

The way I’ve thought about whiteness is as a balance between cultural ideologies, representations, images, texts, and narratives on the one hand, and then structural practices and policies and political economy on the other hand. And the relationship between the two. That’s how David Roediger talks about whiteness. That’s how George Lipsitz and Matthew Jacobson write about whiteness. I think in talking about urban identity, you have to kind of keep those factors in play always, in framing discussions of whiteness. 

JK: When we discuss more recent and contemporary identifications of Los Angeles as this multicultural place, that can completely erase people’s lived material realities. We’re still one of the most economically divided cities in the country, and the gap between the rich and the poor is absolutely related to race and racial construction and racial relations. That often gets erased by a celebratory rhetoric of Los Angeles being a multicultural place. Of course it is, and the city’s multicultural past and present are remarkable, but we have to pair celebrations of multiculturalism with critical discussions of the ways in which people of color have historically faced structural and institutionalized inequality. 

BS: What Hollywood does is really underscore this notion that if you can’t make it in the United States, it’s your fault. Because look how glittering and wonderful and beautiful all these people are and look at this enormous wealth. Look at all these stories of small-town actresses coming to L.A. and really making it and now living in these glorious mansions. And look at people on basketball teams who become enormously wealthy. So this image of Los Angeles as this place where dreams come true—come true multiracially, not just white dreams but dreams for other people too—it really does deepen the sense of L.A. as a place of adventure, of promise and prosperity. And if you and your racial group don’t find that, then that’s something that’s innately wrong with you and your racial group, because look how it plays out elsewhere in this landscape. 

EA: The other critical element is suburbanization, the abundance of undeveloped land to create enclaves of wealth—and enclaves of whiteness—across the class spectrum. And I think that’s where the structure really comes into play, because suburbanization afforded a space to create communities based on the fiction, purported by Hollywood and other agents, of that narrative. 

DTR: I have thought a lot about this external image of Los Angeles as a diverse and cosmopolitan space, and maybe even a Brown space. What is served, and what interests are served, by marketing it as such? And what are the ways in which that ideal of Los Angeles doesn’t filter back down? Just like the old version of the Spanish fantasy past never filtered down to the lives of Mexican people, this notion of Los Angeles as a global, shining example of cosmopolitanism and diversity is so much more surface than substance. It’s one more neoliberal fantasy. The disconnect between the image and the reality is borne out in the buildings where people live and work and spatialized in suburbia, in the spaces of inner-city Los Angeles, and behind the scenes in Hollywood. Think about all the people who work in craft services and the thousands of names you see rolling by in the credits, people who make $18 an hour or less and have no profit stake. If we want to think about Hollywood, it conceals a great deal of class and color differentiation even in the production of the movies that give us the Hollywood image.

WC: Absolutely. The two words I just wrote down as you were talking were “power” and “labor.” If you take a step back from those Hollywood productions, you see who’s working on those sets, who’s doing the heavy lifting, who’s doing the service work, who’s bringing the food. Whiteness, even though it is a cultural construct like any other racial idea, can be mapped. And you can see how extremely segregated white people are in Los Angeles. The director of my kids’ preschool, who was a longtime organizer for the Bus Riders Union, she taught me something important this summer: she said that anti-racism is not enough, because people will never fight for something or somebody until they learn to love it first. What that extreme ongoing segregation does is it allows people—particularly white people—to not see people of color. So, yes, L.A. is multicultural, but it’s also hierarchical, it’s also extremely sort of caste-driven. And so it’s not that there are not people of color in those spaces, it’s just that they’re in a particular hierarchy that allows them to not be seen by people in the dominant class. That’s an important way of thinking about how segregation and the socialization of race feed into these geographies, these dominating geographies of whiteness in Los Angeles that are exemplified by Hollywood. 

JK: I think Eric mentioned the Spanish fantasy past, and David as well. That’s exactly what was happening in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Los Angeles was being sold as this idyllic place where racial tensions didn’t exist and where, according to the advertising, it was a white space. But all that was based on the work of nonwhite peoples, whether it was Chinese and Japanese immigrants or Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. That tension is centuries-long in California. 

BS: This erasure, when you look at Indigenous peoples, that’s also something that we can map or look at with regard to other imperial forces, as David said. And so when we think about California coming into being, or Los Angeles coming into being, we think about the Spanish Empire. We think about the Mexican Empire. We think about the United States. But there still tends to be, more than anything else, erasure of Indigenous peoples. I think that’s the most invisible group we have in our society. And so when we think about whiteness, and even multiculturalism, there seems to be very little place for these groups of people.

 NM: I just want to pause here to recap some of the important issues that you’ve brought up. We’ve talked about whiteness as a social construction, and how it’s been mapped and grafted onto space. And the ways in which these categories were exported to the world by Hollywood. I know for me, in terms of thinking about race as something that is a social construction but also structural, with the growth of the federal government in the 1930s (which could come in with so much money), there is an effort to institutionalize these categories of difference through mapping, through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps, through redlining. And through that we can see that the cultural is structural. And that continues to play out today. 

DTR: I just wanted to emphasize—not that it’s been deemphasized—the connection between race and space and the spatialization of racial identity. Brenda talks about the Spanish choosing to plop Los Angeles—as an idea, formed on paper—right into the middle of a Gabrielino-Tongva village. And we can think about all the ways in which the idea of white supremacy only takes on real meaning when it gets built into and mapped onto space. We can think about this in a really basic way. What would Jim Crow be without the segregated spaces it created, without colored restrooms, without separate drinking fountains and beaches, without the threat of violence along the color line? These ideas don’t actually take on meaning until they come to shape spaces that sort people­—in this example, by color. 

And I would just point out that we can also look to more recent events to illustrate the ways that we still see the spatial disparities in the city. When the Ballona Creek overflowed in the 1998 El Niño, there was a massive lawsuit about the damage done. And one of the things the City had to do was create a map of all the sewer and storm drain lines in the whole city and grade them. And in this survey, what you can also see is that if you follow the D- and F-graded sewer and storm drain lines and the ones that emit noxious chemicals, they also trace the outlines of every poor Black and Mexican and Southeast Asian neighborhood in the city. And all the ones that have been recently updated and that function well and don’t emit chemicals that risk the public health of the people who live on the ground above them trace really neatly to white neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley, on the west side and in Santa Monica. 

These are not only phenomena of the past. They are so literally, physically deep in the infrastructure of the city that getting away from them is not as simple as believing in anti-racism. It actually involves an excavation of the physical space and an effort to make change. 

EA: That’s a great point, David. L.A. freeways are monuments to whiteness. Urban renewal, Chavez Ravine—these were federal policies. They had armies of planners and transportation engineers working on this, but you can identify ideological or cultural underpinnings of these practices as they took shape during the post–World War II period. I’m also thinking about Genevieve Carpio’s work and the way that she looks at mobility. Mobility, particularly in a decentralized urban region like Los Angeles, is another venue for the construction of racial identity and racial hierarchy. Her work on police arrests of Mexican drivers, the research I’ve done on highway construction in Boyle Heights, the role of the automobile in shaping this—this brings in not just questions of infrastructure but questions of technology and mobility as well. 

JK: To David’s point about environmental racism and infrastructure and a hundred years of that being built into the very way that the city is constructed—how does gentrification layer on top of that? For example, there are dozens of uncapped oil wells across Echo Park, a deeply historically Latinx community. And it’s only now, with the construction of big condo complexes in a rapidly gentrified Echo Park, that this has become a more contentious issue. For a century, those wells just went uncapped. But now that white folks are moving into what were historically nonwhite neighborhoods, it’s an issue that people are paying attention to. 

WC: The people who get to be considered the public in L.A., it’s still mentally a white public. I found this a lot in the San Gabriel Valley. You have the city of San Gabriel, with the mission there and this deep attachment to the mission by white San Gabriel Valley residents, and also some Mexican American, Californio, and Tongva/Gabrielino residents as well. But overwhelmingly, that attachment to the mission and the Spanish fantasy past is claimed by white people. In a city that is 60 percent Asian American. 

EA: We should also acknowledge the role of the Spanish fantasy past in the regional construction of whiteness. When I teach the Spanish fantasy past in my courses, I often compare it to the minstrel show. I compare it to a regional version of racial appropriation, racial disguise, not necessarily on the stage of a theater but in architecture, in the built environment, in landscape design. As a cultural historian, I come back to questions of performance, of narrative. I think Wendy’s point is an excellent one about creating publics, creating audiences, creating readership. The L.A. Times—great example of white racial formation by creating a readership. I think you can talk about the Spanish fantasy past very much in a similar way.

NM: I feel like we’ve touched on the main historical topics. I’m going to ask that we move on to thinking about what this means in terms of civic memory. Clearly, it ties in very neatly; it does more than just dovetail. But let’s talk about that more explicitly. How does whiteness shape civic memory? What has its role been in the past? What will it be in the future? What is gained or lost by how we remember whiteness specifically when it comes to civic memory? And do civic memory projects provide a vehicle for unspooling whiteness and its central role in ways that other projects do not? 

EA: In my own work on whiteness, there’s always been this tension between the people who have said, “Why are you studying this? Don’t you realize that this a concept that needs to be abandoned and forgotten?” And, on the other hand, there are the scholars who say, “We need to explore the construction of—the active making of—whiteness so that we don’t take it for granted.” So when it comes to the issue of civic memory, the question is how is whiteness supposed to be remembered? Or is it supposed to be forgotten? Or is there a way of remembering whiteness that can remind us of its destructive power in American history? This has been an ongoing tension in the scholarly work on whiteness.

DTR: One thing that’s interestingly embedded in the question “How does whiteness shape civic memory?” is the degree to which whiteness and the civic have been largely synonymous in a popular understanding of Los Angeles for a really long period of time. Before the 1960s or ’70s, whiteness and civic memory were probably really closely aligned. And what the city would choose to remember would be these moments that could validate a narrative of the succession from Spain to the United States, and white supremacy in the United States, without acknowledging Indigenous or other Brown people, or Black people, who lived in the city and worked in the city. We have to dig into how we can untangle whiteness and white supremacy from the understanding of what civic is, and what the representation of Los Angeles is. And how do we smash through this barrier of both the commoditized diversity of L.A. that never really gets down to ordinary people, and the sheen and veneer of Hollywood, writ large, that we’ve talked about at length already. 

BS: When we talk about civic memory, we have to focus on public school education, or education in general—the curriculums that talk about Los Angeles history, California history, the history of the American West. As long as we continue to have the fourth-graders doing the mission project, and all these other kinds of things, it’s going to be very difficult to unmask whiteness—the privilege of whiteness. 

WC: I was looking at your book, Brenda, about Latasha Harlins [The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins], because I was thinking about the 1992 uprising, and how that idea of white people as neutral bystanders was really powerful in that case. This past summer, Black Lives Matter L.A. consciously tried to intervene in that by staging its protests in the Fairfax district, in Beverly Hills, in gentrified downtown. We have a lot to learn from the younger generation. For example, in Taiwan, the government has a “reverse mentorship” program where they invite a certain number of people under 35 to speak to them. This also came up in our Working Group’s earlier conversations about how the Staples Center was reinvented as a public memorial for Kobe Bryant. That’s a great example of a memorial or monument that expresses who L.A. really is and includes the real public of L.A. I’m trying to think about civic memory in ways that allow us to expand that notion of who the public is and bring different generations in to participate in that. Because I really feel a lot of hope for our younger generations and I feel that they would have a lot to contribute. 

JK: We need to think really creatively about memorials that are maybe not lasting but that represent how Angelenos think about civic memory and the history and significance of Los Angeles in the moment. We can create things that may not be there in 10 years. Or even 10 months.

EA: I think there’s a real paradox in this question of civic memory and whiteness. In my reading, whiteness has so much to do with forgetting: forgetting who you are, forgetting where you came from. Letting go of traditions and heritage and language, and perhaps even religion, to fit in or assimilate into this mainstream of whiteness and all the privileges that come with it. So, how do you memorialize the practice and processes of forgetting? I really like what Wendy and Jessica and Brenda have been saying. I also was really struck by the Kobe Bryant example as a kind of civic memorialization from the bottom up. Usually, the whole project of civic memory is driven by elites, by people in charge. So that memorial is something that just really kind of stuck with me.

 NM: This conversation is so interesting. It’s very different from the first half of our conversation, which seemed to be about trying to really make visible what has been invisible and show the way that it’s played out structurally, culturally—the way that it’s been mapped onto space. I’m interested in this idea about how we might think about alternate ways of producing civic memory, expanding publics, and anything else that you wanted to touch on that maybe has a different tenor. 

BS: Even though we’re looking at new ways of doing it, some of the old ways are good as well. I think people were able to reinvent the Staples Center as this memorial for Kobe Bryant—as Alicia Keys said, “This is the house that Kobe built”—because of what we see has been happening at the Smithsonian Institution and now this push toward a women’s museum. And the new slavery museums that have come up in the American South and the lynching memorial [the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama], and all of that. We’re at a time in which other voices are being supported, even nationally, in some ways after very long, long campaigns by everyday Americans to make this happen. In terms of civic memory, this is a moment where we can also charge those institutions that come out of taxpayers’ dollars to listen to the voices of the people who want to be represented, who should be represented, in these kinds of institutions. And I think that we have to see that some of these institutions like the Southwest Museum [of the American Indian in Los Angeles] for example, like CAAM [the California African American Museum] for example, have been starved in terms of receiving taxpayer monies to develop programming and exhibitions that broaden our sense of what our communities are. I’m glad to see that Tyree Boyd-Pates is at the Autry [Museum of the American West in L.A.]—he left CAAM and went to the Autry—and he’s doing some really interesting stuff on collecting around COVID-19 and also collecting around Black Lives Matter. [See the related essay in this volume by Boyd-Pates, “Glorifying the Lion: Telling the Other Side of L.A.’s History.”] We really do have to continue to push for supporting the institutions that historically have given access to other stories, to other histories, to defining our city in different kinds of ways outside of whiteness—not just creating new things but supporting and allowing those institutions to evolve.

NM: Maybe on that note, in terms of not just shaping new things but allowing what’s already there to evolve, what about memorials in L.A. that already exist? What about those memorials that enshrine and tell the story of whiteness? Are there ways to start a conversation about existing memorials with the work we’ve been doing in the Civic Memory Working Group? 

JK: In wrapping up my book project, which was about Los Angeles investors in Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I started looking at how many landmarks and places that tourists—and even Angelenos—like to visit because they’re considered beautiful, iconic parts of Los Angeles, and realizing just how many of those had material roots in extractive and imperial projects in Mexico. And so I started thinking about creative ways that we could contextualize Griffith Park, for example, and the fact that Griffith J. Griffith made his money in Mexico. The fact that we have this large urban green space is directly related to taking resources out of Mexico and centering them in Los Angeles. Are there creative ways that we can reflect on the infrastructure and design of early Los Angeles and provide context? Rather than just taking for granted that the city looks the way it does, are there ways to think about how whiteness and race created the spaces we live in? 

DTR: One axis in this conversation is about greater inclusivity—that is what Wendy and Brenda talked at length about. The other axis is about entities like the City of Los Angeles being willing to come to terms with the ravages of white supremacy, and to think about how to interrogate existing memorials or to create new memorials that actually begin to unspool these violent, supremacist legacies. Some things should be torn down, but I think there are ways we might productively leave old monuments in the landscape and consider ways to augment them to provoke education in another way. We can use old monument as objects that make us ask questions as opposed to just telling us prepackaged stories. One way is to think about how to start a conversation about existing things, opening up our understanding of civic memory. To go back to what Eric said earlier, if we think about the freeways as a monument to racial capitalism, to white supremacy, to the destruction of countless neighborhoods of people of color, then let’s think about how we can intervene in that. What can we put on every freeway on-ramp, where people sit while it’s metered in the morning on their commutes? People will read it. There are all kinds of opportunities for thinking about that as a new landscape for provoking questions. 

EA: It’s not like there isn’t existing signage on the road, but when you look at that signage, it reminds you who has the power to convey their messages and who doesn’t.

NM: I agree with David about some of these interventions, and about augmenting memorials that already exist. I think about the Huntington Library, since I’ve been working with them. You could have signage at the Huntington where you include the history of its workers. I love Jessica’s point about Griffith Park—even when there isn’t a specific memorial, just exploring the questions of how this land came to be. I moved back to Los Angeles two years ago and decided to explore the city by hiking it—the Santa Monica Mountains, Griffith Park. And yes, there are still plaques everywhere within the parks explaining who donated the land. But where did they get the capital to do it? Racial capitalism, that’s where! So I just love these different ideas about really making all that a part of the landscape. 

WC: I was thinking about the Mulholland Memorial Fountain. It’s a giant, phallic water fountain dedicated to William Mulholland.<04 Mulholland is credited with creating the infrastructure—in the form of the hugely controversial Los Angeles Aqueduct—that enabled L.A. to become the sprawling metropolis that is did, while rendering the Owens Valley a virtual desert.
 It’s such a great opportunity for thinking about technocratic whiteness, white male masculinity, and urban planning. There’s a great documentary that came out recently on the L.A. Aqueduct.05 The Longest Straw, directed by Samantha Bode (Los Angeles: Rainbow Escalator, 2017).
 It talks about how this water comes from Paiute land. And Paiute people are still feeling the ramifications of their water being taken from them. And then thinking about the relationship of L.A. to the Owens Valley—that this is L.A. City–owned land, on which Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II and put to work trying to make that land productive. I think that memorial fountain, that space, would make for a really interesting opportunity to try to articulate or enact different ideas about how the memorial is presenting history, versus this fuller and more accurate picture of L.A. history. 

BS: One of the things that I’ve thought about is how we can reclaim prison spaces. There’s been a lot of discussion about the prison population in Los Angeles and in California. But how has this land been transitioned over time? Thinking about the transition of Indigenous land to a space where Indigenous people and other people of color are overly represented as prisoners would be something that needs to be part of the civic memory conversation. 

WC: I think the memorials are important, but they’re actually just the tip of the iceberg, or whatever phrase we want to use. Any large parcel of land in Los Angeles, any powerful institution, has a history that goes back through those different colonial regimes, with connection between land and power. Think about Dodger Stadium and civic power. Are there ways to build awareness so that people understand how these large parcels of land came to be, and how they’ve been handed down to the elite power holders in each era?

NM: I’ll just add that a lot of this work has been done, it just isn’t prominently displayed. The narratives that we have of Chavez Ravine, the photos have been collected—put those on the freeway off-ramps! Or Rosten Woo’s work on Dodger Stadium and how that land continues to collect money through parking revenue. It goes back to Eric’s point about who has the power to put that story out there. 

EA: This is an old theme in L.A. history. L.A. is so fragmented by its own communities that the problem is how to get people on board to support implementing the memories of a different group of people. That’s the challenge in a city like L.A. that is so segmented and so enclaved, and so disparate in the geography of wealth and power. The history of civic memory has been each group in it for itself. And that means that doing really tough groundwork to build cross-community consensus. Okay, these groups have been remembered in some ways; these groups have not. How do you build those bridges to make sure that everyone is on board? That’s a unique challenge when you have a city shaped the way L.A. is shaped.

DTR: The other piece of this puzzle has to do with radically shifting the way that the City goes about recognizing places and the process for memorialization. The way it’s set up now, the City is a gatekeeper, a force that sometimes resists the efforts of people to have their spaces recognized. To have the kind of transformation that we have been talking about, the City really has to become a facilitator.

NM: That’s a very powerful note to end on. Thank you so much. Let’s do it again next Friday.

Architect Paul R. Williams

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Janna Ireland
Founder’s Church of Religious Science (3281 West Sixth Street), built in 1960. Photographed in 2017.

The Los Angeles artist Janna Ireland has in recent years produced a superb collection of photographs of the work of the prolific, pioneering, and supremely talented Southern California architect Paul Revere Williams (1894-1980), drawing renewed attention to the breadth of his residential and institutional designs while bringing certain details of his specific design and material approach into sharper focus. The images shared here suggest the continuing contradictions of historic preservation in Los Angeles: even as interest in Williams has surged recently, with the appearance of a documentary film on public television stations across the country and the announcement that the University of Southern California School of Architecture and Getty Research Institute had jointly acquired his archive, individual examples of his work, particularly his houses, continue to find themselves vulnerable to demolition. To accompany the recommendations from the Historic Preservation subcommittee of the Civic Memory Working Group that the City consider extending protection to whole bodies of work by significant architects, we present this look at buildings by Williams in states of both glory and distress. We are also grateful for the details provided later in this Portfolio by Laura Dominguez about the relationship between Williams and one of his most important clients, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company.●

First African Methodist Episcopal Church (2270 South Harvard Boulevard), built in 1965. Photographed in 2017.
First African Methodist Episcopal Church (2270 South Harvard Boulevard), built in 1965. Photographed in 2017.
Founder’s Church of Religious Science (3281 West Sixth Street), built in 1960. Photographed in 2017.
Founder’s Church of Religious Science (3281 West Sixth Street), built in 1960. Photographed in 2017.
Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building (1999 West Adams Boulevard), built in 1949. Photographed in 2017.

Born of the Great Migration, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company transformed the social and economic fortunes of African Americans in 20th-century Los Angeles. In 1925, founders William H. Nickerson, Norman O. Houston, and George Beavers, Jr. opened their first home office on Central Avenue with a mission to provide equitable life insurance policies, small business and home loans, and professional employment to Black Angelenos. Golden State Mutual (G.S.M.) exemplified the entrepreneurial spirit of westward Black settlers. The company advanced a long tradition of self-help and uplift as solutions to racial oppression. It harnessed the collective purchasing power of Black Angelenos to circulate capital among families, workers, and small business owners. It underwrote generational wealth. By 1945, G.S.M. became the largest African American-owned company in the American West by investing in the revolutionary idea that Black lives mattered. For decades, white-owned insurance companies denied coverage or sold duplicitous policies to African Americans, crystalizing racist views about Black bodies, families, and mortality. G.S.M. rewrote the industry rules. By its book, African Americans were a boon—not a risk—to capital and community.  In 1928, the company relocated to a custom Spanish Colonial Revival headquarters at 4261 S. Central Avenue, designed by African American architect James Garrott (Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, or H.C.M., #580). It remained in this location for two decades. In 1947, G.S.M. commissioned master architect Paul R. Williams to design a new home office building at 1999 W. Adams Boulevard. By moving west from the historical heart of Black L.A., the company inaugurated a new era of dismantling racial boundaries, reimagining the people it served, and imprinting African American achievement on the urban landscape. Though firmly committed to its Black clientele, G.S.M. looked to integrate its services in the postwar period. Williams was a natural fit for conceiving a modern monument to Black excellence and the possibilities of racial cooperation. Williams believed that individual success would conquer racial animus. Many of his projects were residences for middle- and upper-class white clients in racially exclusive neighborhoods of Los Angeles. By the time he earned the G.S.M. commission, he had more than two decades of experience crossing racial barriers in residential, commercial, and civic settings.  To complement Williams’s work, G.S.M. commissioned New York artists Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff to design a two-panel historical mural for the building’s lobby. The artists undertook an extensive research tour of California’s historic landmarks, archives, and museums. Historian Titus Alexander, librarian Miriam Matthews, and Williams guided their efforts. The artwork­—The Negro in California History­—unearthed stories about Black contributions to the state that had long been hidden from public view.  The building was completed in 1949. Williams’s sleek Moderne design envisioned a prosperous future, while the murals by Alston and Woodruff rooted the company in an illustrious past. G.S.M. closed its doors in 2009, and the building is protected as H.C.M. #1000.●

—Laura Dominguez

100 North Delfern Drive, built for Charles M. Weinberg in 1938, partially demolished in 2019. Photographed in 2019.
100 North Delfern Drive, built for Charles M. Weinberg in 1938, partially demolished in 2019. Photographed in 2019. NOTE: Telephone number digitially removed.

Tokio Florist

Catherine Gudis, Kristen Hayashi, and M. Rosalind Sagara

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Show Footnotes

For more than a century, a substantial Japanese American population has helped shape Los Angeles’s domestic, private, and public spaces as flower growers, gardeners, and proprietors of cut-flower businesses and nurseries. Yet the city’s built environment offers few visible reminders of this history. So in 2019, when the Little Tokyo Historical Society, with the support of the Los Angeles Conservancy, nominated the Sakai-Kozawa residence/Tokio Florist and its street-facing signpost at 2718 Hyperion Avenue as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM)—the ninth to represent Japanese Angelenos and one of the few documenting entrepreneurship by women of color—it did more than commemorate the site where Yuki Sakai, her daughter, and her son-in-law had lived and operated their florist shop in the Silver Lake neighborhood from 1960 to 2006.01 In December 2018, the property was listed for sale, leaving the future of the buildings, sign, and landscaping uncertain. In June 2019, the Little Tokyo Historical Society, with support from the Los Angeles Conservancy, nominated the site for local HCM recognition, which was also met with approval by Silver Lake Heritage Trust, the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council’s Urban Design and Preservation Committee, and other community stakeholders. Documentation of this process, including the HCM nomination form, Statement of Significance, and historical source citations on which this case study is based, is available through the Department of City Planning, case number CHC-2019-3774-HCM, and is available online at https://planning.lacity.org/odocument/bcd1b881-4756-469d-be52-0a8eb68d6a7c/CHC-2019-3774-HCM_%232.pdf. The acknowledgment offered a means of reckoning with long histories of racism and restrictions on citizenship, land use, and ownership while reinscribing Japanese Americans’ contributions onto the L.A. landscape.

In 1929, the recently widowed Yuki (Kawakami) Sakai, with five young children to support, opened the Tokio Florist on Los Feliz Boulevard. (The spelling harks back to an earlier era when “Tokio” was the colloquial spelling.) It was one of many flower farms, stands, and nurseries operated by Japanese immigrants that once dominated the landscape of northeastern Los Angeles’s Los Feliz and Atwater neighborhoods. In starting her flower stand on five acres that included a small house she leased, Yuki Sakai succeeded with help from her family, who operated a flower farm nearby and another in Sun Valley, and the Kuromi family, who in 1917 had started Flower View Gardens across the street.

They all flourished against the odds. Excluded from citizenship, Japanese immigrants were also prohibited from purchasing property under California’s 1913 Alien Land Law. prohibited issei immigrants from gaining citizenship or holding property. When the law was revised in 1920 to bar leasing land as well, many Issei and Nisei instead went into gardening, while others operated small businesses precariously with month-to-month leases, often facing hostility from neighbors who wanted to keep places like Los Feliz homogeneously white, and added racially restrictive covenants to do so.02 The term Issei refers to a first-generation Japanese immigrant to America; Nisei refers to a child of Issei parents who was U.S.-born and educated. For more details about the Alien Land Laws and other discriminatory measures aimed at Japanese immigrants in California, see Brian Niiya, “The Last Alien Land Law,” Densho Blog, Feb. 7, 2018, https://densho.org/last-alien-land-law; and Cherstin M. Lyon, “Alien Land Laws,” Densho Encyclopedia, Oct. 8, 2020, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Alien_land_laws. A Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) blog post describes racially restrictive covenants, or contracts, that white property owners or developers placed in the deeds of homes barring purchasers from selling or renting to ethnic and religious minorities. Steven Kilgore, “Los Angeles Land Covenants, Redlining: Creation and Effects,” LAPL Blog, June 22, 2020, https://lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/los-angeles-land-covenants-redlining-creation-and-effects. Yuki’s status as a single woman with children surely added to a layer of pressure, although all the children helped with daily operations, cultivating poinsettias, carnations, gladiolas, and ranunculus, pulling bulbs, and keeping the store open seven days a week. Forced removal and incarceration of West Coast residents of Japanese descent during World War II meant that the Sakai family, along with other Japanese Angelenos, had to quickly sort out their business and personal affairs. For many, that meant their life’s work plundered and lost. The Sakais eventually reopened Tokio Florist, and it remained open until 1960, when they received one month’s notice to leave, displaced by an apartment tower development on Los Feliz Boulevard.

Yuki Sakai, with her daughter Sumi (Sakai) Kozawa, son-in-law Frank Kozawa, and granddaughter Susie Kozawa relocated nearby, to 2718 Hyperion Boulevard, where they constructed a greenhouse, converted a garage to a potting shed, and reinstalled shop equipment under the port cochere and on the porch of their new home, a stately 1911 Tudor Craftsman. Customers could now meander up the long driveway and through the Japanese garden designed by Sumi and Frank. A flat expanse in the rear grew Iceland poppies, sweet peas, coxcombs, and seasonal flowers, and all available space was used for plantings. Despite an increasingly globalized cut-flower industry and the growing dominance of chain florists and supermarkets, the multigenerational, female-headed family business thrived for another 46 years.

Tokio Florist closed in 2006, a dozen years after Yuki died at 100 years old. In 2016, Sumi passed away, also at 100 years old. Sumi and Frank never expected their daughter Susie, a sound artist based in Seattle, to take over the family business. Susie did, however, take on legacy-building—with fervor—as a means of both mourning and creation. As people visited the estate sale in 2018, she recorded their connections to the family and the business, whether they were family friends, classmates of Sumi’s from John Marshall High School, or longtime customers. She donated key artifacts to the collections of the Japanese American National Museum and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, while photographs and papers went to the Huntington Library (where the Kuromis’ Flower View Gardens business records also reside). Susie also teamed up with filmmakers and radio producers to make art from the site, “playing” the house through musical instruments crafted from the artifacts of her family’s business, recording a historical soundscape and score.03 See, for instance, Yuka Murakami, Tokio Story, video, 8 min., 2018, https://vimeo.com/283074021; and Giovanni Jance, On a Visit to Tokio Florist, 27 min., 1999–2019, https://www.giovannijance.org/6114387-2019-i#1.

In addition to Susie’s efforts to capture the essence of her family’s longtime residence and business, neighbors and former customers shared fond memories in support of the HCM designation—and, thereafter, in opposition to the proposed demolition of vernacular structures built by the family, due in part to building and fire code restrictions. Ernest and Elaine Nagamatsu, residents of Silver Lake since 1975, described the significance of the Sakai/Kozawa property and Tokio Florist as more than a mere physical site, but rather an “emotional, historical talisman for the generations. … Tokio Florist made us all so proud as Japanese Americans. It has been a small beam of success, following the tangled, tortuous emotional challenge following World War II. From physical and monetary huge losses, Tokio Florist, the J-A Flower Market, legions of J-A Gardeners, and J-A flower growers emerged from a devastated landscape of broken dreams to make us all proud once again.”07 This letter and others were submitted to the Cultural Heritage Commission Review held on June 18, 2020. They are available online at https://tinyurl.com/CHCMeeting06-18-20. The new owner, Redcar Properties, has sought to address these community concerns and to balance a variety of competing interests in preserving remaining buildings, abiding by municipal codes, and ensuring that the site is viable for adaptive reuse.

The structural additions that the Sakai-Kozawa family made to the property at 2718 Hyperion Boulevard to support the operations of Tokio Florist, along with their preserved home and the various other forms of memorialization remain as touchstones to a time when flowers blanketed the nearby fields and Yuki and Sumi honed their floral artistry. They also signify the economic contributions of Japanese Americans over multiple generations, as well as the entrepreneurial might of women—two groups that have significantly shaped the Los Angeles landscape and inspired subsequent generations.

Monuments, Markers, and Layers of Space

This subcommittee was chaired by Frank Escher, cofounder and principal at Escher GuneWardena Architecture in Los Angeles, and Leila Hamidi, arts organizer and writer and previously assistant project director for Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980. Its other members were Fred Fisher, principal at Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects; Andrew Kovacs, architectural designer and founder of Office Kovacs in Los Angeles; Sharon Johnston, partner and cofounder of Johnston Marklee & Associates in Los Angeles; Marisa Kurtzman, partner at Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects; Kimberli Meyer, architect and curator and former director of the University Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in L.A.; Chon Noriega, professor in the UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media and director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center; and Megan Steinman, director of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles.
Show Footnotes

Our subcommittee’s charge was to provide guidance of two types: about the most effective ways to imagine, commission, and produce monuments and memorials appropriate to contemporary Los Angeles, and about issues for artists, architects, and designers to keep in mind when taking on work of this kind. While another subcommittee focused specifically on issues of process, we view process as inexorably linked to our work as well, insofar as for many new art forms since the 1960s the process is often the greater part of the work. Likewise, we believe that certain components of projects, such as materiality and tone, should develop as part of a working process between artists, the public, and civic leaders, and are therefore beyond the specific purview of our subcommittee and its recommendations.

We typically think of the built form of civic memory in terms of statues, cannons, mausoleums, plaques, and the like, but what exists today covers a much wider set of artistic practices. The list that follows is a first pass at gesturing toward all the ways that we experience civic memory in our urban landscape, providing a more expansive definition for memory at a civic scale. The categories included are meant not as finite or conclusive but as openings to further investigation.

Government and Institutional Projects

Government and institutional projects comprise a wide range of mostly familiar forms of memorialization and commemoration. The first category we considered—gestures and acts—entails actions that do not result in a physical object, such as the following: · Land acknowledgments. According to the Native American Inclusion Initiative at Northwestern University, “a Land Acknowledgement is a formal statement that recognizes and respects Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards of this land and the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories.” The Minneapolis-based Native Governance Center frames the importance of Indigenous land acknowledgment like this: “It is important to understand the longstanding history that has brought you to reside on the land, and to seek to understand your place within that history. Land acknowledgements do not exist in a past tense, or historical context: colonialism is a current ongoing process, and we need to build our mindfulness of our present participation.”01 Northwestern University Native American and Indigenous Initiatives website, undated, https://www.northwestern.edu/native-american-and-indigenous-peoples/about/Land%20Acknowledgement.html; Native Governance Center website, undated, https://nativegov.org/a-guide-to-indigenous-land-acknowledgment. See also the summary of Civic Memory Working Group subcommittee on Indigenous Land Acknowledgement and the Work of Decolonization, as well as the Q&A with Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy, elsewhere in this volume.

  • Civic apologies. On September 8, 2000, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Kevin Gover, apologized on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs for the agency’s policies and actions over its 175-year history—in particular “for its devastating impact on American Indian nations, whether federally recognized, unrecognized, or extinct.” Eight years later, on June 11, 2008, the prime minister of Canada made a formal statement of apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools on behalf of the Canadian government.02 Christopher Buck, “‘Never Again’: Kevin Gover’s Apology for the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Wicazo Sa Review 21, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 97–126; “Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Statement of Apology,” CBC News, June 11, 2008, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prime-minister-stephen-harper-s-statement-of-apology-1.734250. At the time of this report’s writing, the Canadian parliament was considering proposed legislation to designate September 30 as a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
  • Reparations. A March 2020 NPR story told the story of an 81-year-old Angeleno named John Tateishi, who was interned at the Manzanar internment camp with his family, and decades later helped form the Los Angeles chapter of the Japanese American Citizens’ League, which, in 1988—a decade after the campaign began and four decades after the internment camps closed—saw President Ronald Reagan sign the Civil Liberties Act, which paid $20,000 in reparations to each survivor and offered a formal apology.03 Isabella Rosario, “The Unlikely Story Behind Japanese Americans’ Campaign for Reparations,” NPR, Mar. 24, 2020.
  • National holidays. In June of 2020, the New York Times reported on a 93-year-old Fort Worth, Texas, great-grandmother named Opal Lee on her fourth annual walk to promote Juneteenth as a national holiday.04 Julia Carmel, “Opal Lee’s Juneteenth Vision Is Becoming Reality,” New York Times, June 18, 2020; “The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth,” National Museum of African American History and Culture website, undated, https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/historical-legacy-juneteenth. The name “Juneteenth” derives from “June” and “19th”—the day in 1865 that Union Army troops arrived in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas and informed the more than 250,000 enslaved people there that the Civil War was over and that slavery had been abolished.

    • Examples of renaming streets, parks, and buildings, another category that our group discussed, include L.A.’s renaming of Rodeo Road to President Barack Obama Boulevard in 2019, with a ceremony held at the street’s intersection with Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in one of the city’s historic Black neighborhoods. Also in 2019, the state of Wisconsin declared October 14 Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and city and county leaders in Milwaukee honored the day by changing the name of the city’s Columbus Park to Indigenous Peoples’ Park.05 Alexa Díaz, “Street Officially Renamed Obama Boulevard in Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw Ceremony,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2019; Lauren Winfrey, “Columbus Park in Milwaukee renamed ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Park,’” WTMJ, Oct. 14, 2019.

    Civic markers and plaques are also common ways that cities and citizens partner to create and honor civic memory. The Community Remembrance Project of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) “collaborates with communities to memorialize documented victims of racial violence and foster meaningful dialogue about race and justice.” Closer to home, Los Angeles artist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville’s Omoide No Shotokyo (Remembering Old Little Tokyo) markers commemorate prewar Japanese American businesses and community on 1st Street. London’s famous blue plaques and Berlin’s Stolpersteine are among numerous other examples of this form of memorialization.06 Community Remembrance Project, Equal Justice Initiative website, undated, https://eji.org/projects/community-remembrance-project; Sheila Levrant de Bretteville with Sonya Ishii, Nobuho Nagasawa, and Susan Sztaray, Omoide No Shotokyo (Remembering Old Little Tokyo), 1996, concrete inlaid with bronze and stainless steel, Historic Little Tokyo, Los Angeles; “London’s Blue Plaques,” English Heritage website, undated, https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about-us; Stolpersteine project website, undated, http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/home. Preserved ruins are another mode of remembrance. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) was the only structure left standing in the area where the first atomic bomb exploded in Hiroshima, Japan, and it is preserved exactly as it stood immediately after the blast. In Virginia, the nonprofit Menokin Foundation’s Glass House Project has engaged Boston-based architecture firm Machado Silvetti to preserve a 1769 house owned by Declaration of Independence signer Francis Lightfoot Lee. The retrofit will feature structural glass to serve “as a window for peering into the layered pasts of the people who built, worked, and lived on the property,” including Black slaves.07 Nick Kirkpatrick, “69 Years after Hiroshima, a Look at the Dome that Survived,” Washington Post, Aug. 6, 2014; Nancy Kenney, “Menokin Preservation Project Offers a Literal Window onto Layers of Virginia History,” Art Newspaper, June 22, 2020. A similar project of the Getty Conservation Institute in partnership with the City of Los Angeles, completed in 2012, preserved the previously whitewashed 1932 David Alfaro Siqueiros mural América Tropical, located in the center of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument in downtown Los Angeles.08 Leslie Rainer, “The Conservation of América Tropical: Historical Context and Project Overview,” Getty Conservation Institute report, October 2012, http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/pdf/historical_context.pdf. Such public-private collaborations are powerful modes of restoring erased histories.

    The Public as Author

    Governments and institutions like Getty and the City are not the only actors who recognize the power of murals to reimagine public spaces. In February of 2012, as part of Latino Heritage Month, a group of artists paid homage to Siqueiros with Siqueiros: La Voz de la Gente! in an alley off La Cienega Boulevard in Culver City. The public, too, often acts to create informal monuments, sometimes spontaneously. Take for example the impromptu Kobe Bryant Memorial at Staples Center in February of 2020, or the George Floyd signs and portraits that covered and reimagined boarded-up businesses across the country in late spring and summer of the same tumultuous year.

    The public also engages in semiformal and organized action. In what has become known as the “Say Their Names” memorial, people wove strips of fabric into chain-link fences surrounding L.A.’s Silver Lake reservoirs in the summer of 2020, paying tribute to some of those who have died while in police custody or in confrontations with officers across the country.09 “Say-Their-Names Memorial Takes Shape in Silver Lake,” The Eastsider, June 6, 2020. Also in the informal, public category, temporary counter-monuments—like the Monuments and Murals of Erased and Invisible Histories series by L.A. artist Sandra de la Loza’s Pochx Research Society of Erased and Invisible History—raise challenges to official monuments and markers.10 Sandra de la Loza, The Pocho Research Society Field Guide to L.A.: Monuments and Murals of Erased and Invisible Histories (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2011).

    New Territories of Authorship

    Sometimes, city governments function as the activist in creating civic memory space. In a recent example of such a role reversal, Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser in June of 2020 commissioned a Black Lives Matter mural that spans two blocks of 16th Street, NW, leading to the White House. Bowser announced that the portion of the thoroughfare between H and K Streets would be renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza on June 5—and the DC Council voted unanimously in October to make the name change permanent.11 A. J. Willingham, “Washington, DC Paints a Giant ‘Black Lives Matter’ Message on the Road to the White House,” CNN, June 5, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/us/black-lives-matter-dc-street-white-house-trnd/index.html; Sam Ford, “D.C. Council Votes to Permanently Keep Name ‘Black Lives Matter Plaza,’” WJLA, Oct. 19, 2020, https://wjla.com/news/local/dc-council-vote-tuesday-permanently-keep-name-black-lives-matter-plaza.

    Other private monuments on a civic scale include the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a project spearheaded by the EJI. And the University of Virginia completed construction of its Memorial to Enslaved Laborers in 2020, the culmination of a 10-year, student-conceived project honoring the estimated 4,000 enslaved people who built the campus. In the absence of an opening ceremony due to the pandemic, the memorial has served as an informal “town square” in which people gather; on June 5, 2020, a crowd came together “to honor George Floyd, calling for justice at a site remembering years of injustice.”12 Sanjay Suchak, “The Bigger Picture: Honoring George Floyd at UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers,” UVA Today, June 5, 2020. Architect and scholar Mabel O. Wilson, who presented the project to the Civic Memory Working Group at its November 2019 meeting, was (with Boston-based architecture firm Höweler + Yoon) a member of the team that produced the memorial.

    Private land and private money can also go toward creating monuments and engaging civic memory. In the late 1960s, the city of Houston received a grant to help purchase a contemporary work of sculpture for the city. In 1969, philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil offered to match the grant and chose Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, specifying that it be placed near city hall and dedicated to the recently slain Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The city accepted the choice of sculpture but rejected the dedication. The de Menils ultimately withdrew their offer and purchased the sculpture outright; it now resides in front of Houston’s historic Rothko Chapel.13 Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk, 1963–67, sculpture, steel, Rothko Chapel, Houston, TX; Lisa Gray, “The MLK Tribute That Houston’s Power Brokers Couldn’t Abide,” Houston Chronicle, Apr. 4, 2018.

    Another example in Texas of private space used for art in public view—which in this case was also used as an impromptu (if illegal) monument—is Tony Tasset’s Eye sculpture in Dallas, which was vandalized in May of 2020 in connection with George Floyd’s murder. Dallas artist lauren woods, who is among those who think the graffiti should be left on the sculpture, described the significance of both the giant eyeball and its defacement: [It] wasn’t just expressing protest solidarity—it acknowledges the symbolic power of the eyeball plopped down in the heart of downtown. How could a massive, larger than life, all ‘seeing’ bluest eye not be also read as symbolic of the surveillance state and white supremacy?”14 Tony Tasset, Eye, 2007, sculpture, fiberglass, steel, and resin, Joule Hotel sculpture garden, Dallas, TX; Jeremy Hallock, “Dallas’ Giant Eyeball Sculpture Was Vandalized with a Message,” Dallas Morning News, May 31, 2020.

    Nature and Art as Spaces for Civic Memory

    Cases of public and private actors using nature as an anchor to engage civic memory abound. In Cleveland, Ohio, the Cleveland Cultural Gardens in the city’s Rockefeller Park is a 276-acre public space for individual public gardens celebrating different ethnic and cultural groups’ contributions to U.S. and local heritage. A range of foundations conceive, develop, and maintain the individual gardens.15 Cleveland Cultural Gardens website, undated, http://www.culturalgardens.org/garden. The program celebrated its centennial in 2016 and continues breaking new ground today.

    In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, artist Sara Daleiden, a consultant to the Creative Placemaking Committee of the Greater Milwaukee Committee whose work focuses on “produc[ing] community,” worked with Oakland, California, landscape architect Walter Hood to restore an unused walking path between a redlined district and neighboring properties. The project, funded through grants from the Kresge Foundation and ArtPlace America, sought “to reimagine how Milwaukeeans move through their city.”16 Jacqueline White, “Milwaukee Moves: In Creational Trails, Sara Daleiden’s Role as Artist Involves Curating and Crafting Conversations,” Public Art Review, Feb. 29, 2016, 78–83. In Southern California, the Sleepy Lagoon memorial proposed for Riverfront Park in Maywood seeks to commemorate the 1942 arrest and mass trial of 22 Mexican youths on murder charges, which led to the anti-Mexican Zoot Suit Riots the following year. L.A. artists Sandra de la Loza and Arturo Ernesto Romo are working with the East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice to bring the Sleepy Lagoon project to fruition.17 Carolina A. Miranda, “Goodbye, Guy on Horse: A New Wave of Monument Design Is Changing How We Honor History,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2020.

    Artist-run spaces and other decentralized sites are also powerful territories of civic authorship. Project Row Houses began in Houston’s third ward in 1993 as a way to explore “how art might be an engine for social transformation.” A group of seven Black artists working and living in the ward purchased 22 historic shotgun-style row houses on two blocks in a disinvested neighborhood and began using the houses as spaces for thematic art interventions. A 2018 book, Collective Creative Actions: Project Row Houses at 25, showcases the project’s first quarter-century as a catalyst for transforming community through the celebration of art and African American history and culture.18 Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Collective Creative Actions: Project Row Houses at 25, edited by Ryan N. Dennis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). The initiative continues today. Chicago’s Rebuild Foundation, founded by artist Theaster Gates in 2009, is a similar platform for art, cultural development, and neighborhood transformation. The foundation takes abandoned buildings on Gates’s native South Side and repurposes them, “using art, culture and craft to bring investment and purpose back into the buildings and into the wider community as a whole.”19 “Theaster Gates and the Rebuild Foundation,” the modernist, Aug. 14, 2020.

    Artist Mark Bradford, social activist Allan DiCastro, and philanthropist Eileen Harris Norton created Art + Practice in south Los Angeles’s Leimert Park to support local foster youth and provide the community with free access to museum-curated contemporary art that celebrates artists of color.20 Paige Katherine Bradley, “The Trio Creating an L.A. Mecca for Celebrating Artists of Color,” Garage, Feb. 8, 2019. And in central L.A.’s Arlington Heights neighborhood, artist Noah Davis and sculptor Karon Davis created the Underground Museum in 2012 to “bring museum quality art to a community that had no access to it.”21 Diane Solway, “How the Family-Run Underground Museum Became One of L.A.’s Most Vital Cultural Forces,” W, Nov. 8, 2017. Also in L.A., artist and activist Lauren Halsey launched the Summaeverythang Community Center in April of 2020 as an extension of her art practice to serve south-central L.A. and the Watts neighborhood in particular, where her family has lived since the 1920s. The center, influenced by the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program, donates 600 boxes of organic produce weekly to address food insecurity.22 Catherine Wagley, “Lauren Halsey’s Summaeverythang Community Center Adds to the Social Fabric of L.A.,” ARTnews, Dec. 21, 2020.

    The Humanities and Civic Imagination

    Film, theater, and the written word are other vehicles capable of reconciling civic memory and creating intangible monuments. The Act of Killing, a 2012 film by Joshua Oppenheimer on the 1965–66 genocide in Indonesia, and Who Killed Malcolm X?, a 2020 documentary that prompted a reopening of the murder case in New York, are two examples that our group discussed.23 The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (Copenhagen: Final Cut for Real, 2012); Who Killed Malcolm X?, directed by Phil Bertelsen and Rachel Dretzin (Doral, FL: Fusion, 2020). Isabel Wilkerson’s 2010 study The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of three Black Americans who left the South, tracing their routes to New York, Chicago, and L.A. The book integrates information from more than 1,000 interviews conducted by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author. Zoot Suit, a play by Luis Valdez that debuted in 1979, is based on the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riots that followed. It was adapted into a film in 1981.24 Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010); Zoot Suit, directed by Luis Valdez, music by Daniel Valdez and Lalo Guerrero, lyrics by Lalo Guerrero, Winter Garden Theater, New York, NY, Mar. 25, 1979.

    These types of commemorations present opportunities to reach large audiences and speak to civic histories in uniquely and widely accessible ways. The Los Angeles Poet Laureate Program presents another such opportunity. A partnership between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) and the Los Angeles Public Library, the program seeks to “bring the literary arts to people in Los Angeles who have limited access to poetry or have few opportunities for exposure to expressive writing,” and to “create a new body of literary works that commemorate the diversity and vibrancy of the L.A. region.” The City can harness this avenue to, in the program’s own words, “create a focal point for the expression of Los Angeles culture.”25 “Los Angeles Poet Laureate Program,” undated, https://culturela.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/LA-Poet-Laureate-Guidelines-2016-revised.pdf.

    Other Engagement Opportunities

    The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative is a collaborative program among Southern California museums and arts organizations that creates thematically linked exhibitions every few years. Past themes have included Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, which “celebrate[d] the birth of the Los Angeles art scene”; Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A., which explored “Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles”; and Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., which “examined the built heritage of our region.” Its recently announced next theme, Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA, coming in 2024, will explore “the many connections between the visual arts and science, from prehistoric times to the present day and across different cultures worldwide.” Future themes could build on and add to this rich discourse around any number of civic topics.26 Pacific Standard Time website, the Getty, undated, http://www.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime. The Los Angeles Conservancy also runs a docent-led walking tour program that allows individuals to see and learn about architectural styles, the history of downtown and its diverse communities, and preservation efforts related to Los Angeles civic history.

    Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) projects offer further civic engagement opportunities. Founded in 1985 as the first arts program for L.A.’s homeless population, LAPD works to create “performances and multidisciplinary artworks that connect the experiences of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities.” LAPD’s Walk the Talk project is a biennial performance parade to honor people who live and work on Skid Row, and its Skid Row Art History Museum and Archives document “the culture that developed on Skid Row—an activist culture, artistic culture and recovery culture—that offers a useful model for other communities navigating gentrification pressures.”

    Alternate Site Types for Engagement

    The understanding of Los Angeles in terms of civic memory and civic engagement has tended to return repeatedly to examinations and reconsiderations of particular spaces and infrastructures. For example, Eric Avila, a member of the Civic Memory Working Group, has written two books on the L.A. freeways. Meanwhile, the L.A. River has been a site not just of historical reclamation but also of ecological and environmental activities tied to the watershed’s deep history. As we create a broadened definition for civic memory, we should also think expansively as we identify potential sites for new projects. This work, however, must be done in dialogue with communities as part of a collaborative asset mapping process, so that any potential new project becomes an integrated part of its neighborhood. The following are potential site types to consider, with community input:

    • The Los Angeles River drew settlement throughout human history in the region. In 1986, Poet Lewis MacAdams, artist Pat Patterson, and gallerist Roger Wong started the nonprofit Friends of the L.A. River to reimagine the river from a concrete drainage channel back to a natural river.
    • Our group discussed on a few occasions the problematic history of the L.A. freeway system as one that systematically divided neighborhoods of color.
    • The committee was interested in expanding on the idea of the garden as a “living” memorial space, which would also address environmental issues (such as water percolation, microclimate, and phytoremediation). We also discussed gardens as food production sites to address agricultural histories; the broad range of cultural and ethnic produce in L.A.; and, most importantly, issues around food insecurity. Unused or underused parking lots could be used for this.

    A Roadmap to Engage the Public, Artists, and Leaders with the City Fabric

    Although our subcommittee is making recommendations to the City of Los Angeles on how to engage the important work of civic memory, some of this work will inherently overlap with other governmental structures as well as private activities; it also has the potential to engage with sister cities. We traditionally think of civic memory as represented by a series of big objects, but it can also be processes, partnerships, actions, networks, and other types of civic activity. In a number of important ways, the full scope of what is considered civic memory will be beyond the City’s control. Nonetheless, the City has an opportunity to reach beyond the programs and processes it does control to acknowledge, validate, and give a framework to all of these other activities that comprise the city’s civic memory.

    Our subcommittee’s recommendation is that the City engage a pluralistic approach in working with artists, community-based organizations, and other city stakeholders. In lieu of using the same selection and working process for each project, Los Angeles could become a “civic memory laboratory” that tests various working methods tailored to each specific project and the context of its site. The following are questions to consider when engaging this work:

    1. What selection processes should be considered? Besides using formal requests for proposals (RFPs) and committees to select new works in the public realm, are there other selection processes that might at times be better suited to elevate new artists who might not otherwise have access to work on projects of a particular scale? For example, Maya Lin’s memorial in Washington, DC, was selected in a blind competition; she was not known at the time. Are there other times when a closed nomination process might be appropriate, or should work in the public realm always have an open selection process? Are there times when the public alone should decide?
    2. Does the role of a selection committee need to be rethought? In other words, rather than a panel comprised primarily of arts professionals, should committees encompass other professional backgrounds as well as other demographics to support more diverse selections?
    3. The proposal and selection processed can be biased against groups that have rarely taken part. Acknowledging that the work of people of color and women has historically been devalued, how can the selection process be adjusted to bolster participation from historically underrepresented groups, and also to minimize or eliminate expectations of free labor—both from the artists as they prepare proposals and from selection committees? A precedent to consider is Creative Capital’s process,27 Creative Capital Foundation website, undated, https://creative-capital.org. which provides up-front support for applicants, selection panels that compensate participants, and architecture competitions that provide honoraria to shortlisted firms for their concept design schemes.
    4. If we hope to build a process with more public input in the selection process, would an arts, cultural, and political education approach help to foreground discussions of aesthetics to ensure that public input does not favor by default or seek to emulate Western European art standards?
    5. In trying to find a balance between the voice of the general public and a process with input from “experts” from the arts, the following questions should be addressed to establish a clear decision-making hierarchy for artist selection:
      • When a memorial is planned for a cultural figure who has living relatives or an estate, and they are part of a selection committee, do they get a “super vote” or veto right?
      • If a selection committee is used for a public memorial and the public disagrees with its selection, does the public get a veto right?
      • What other stakeholders historically affect the selection process (for example, funders or elected officials)? How can those roles be made more transparent, and the hierarchy of their impact on the decision process more ethical and just?
      • Are restorative justice process guidelines necessary when selections are challenged or overturned (as happened when the city of San Francisco reversed a committee’s selection of Lava Thomas’s proposed Maya Angelou memorial)?28 Heather Knight, “Artist’s Vision for Maya Angelou Statue Crushed by City Hall’s Dysfunction,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 19, 2019.
      • Who gets to represent whose pain? If a memorial is proposed to commemorate a particularly sensitive or fraught topic, should it be a requirement that members of the public with experience or knowledge of the events in question participate in the selection and/or working process?
      • When an artist is selected for a new work, who within or alongside the City should safeguard that process and the artist from other potential pitfalls?
      • What systems of accountability should be in place to ensure that the City takes on this work in good faith from beginning to end without enacting harm?
      • When removing an old sculpture or memorial that is recognized as a symbol of oppression, what guidelines should be in place so that new traumas are not enacted? (For example, the city of Dallas removed a Robert E. Lee memorial, then auctioned it to the highest bidder—a golf course overlooking the U.S.-Mexico border, where the statue was installed.)29 Demond Fernandez, “Controversial Robert E. Lee Statue Removed from Dallas Has New Home in Lajitas, TX,” WFAA, Sept. 20, 2019.
      • What guidelines should be developed for when a particular monument that might otherwise be slated for removal is better suited for artist intervention or contextualization?
      • What are the ethics of private money used to create public space? What are the ethics of private land that functions as public space (such as Tony Tasset’s Eye sculpture in Dallas)?30 Hallock, “Dallas’ Giant Eyeball Sculpture.”
      • What monuments and civic memorial projects should be designed with a multigenerational or permanent time frame in mind, and which might need shorter time frames in order to be of civic use?
      • Rather than working in isolation as a city to address these questions, are there ways to tap into the collective brainpower and resources of other civic bodies, nonprofits, and foundations already engaged in this work? As the EJI did before producing the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, are there lessons to be learned from studying the history of peace and reconciliation efforts in other cities?

    Recommendations

    1. City advocate for the arts. Create a new position or office within the City of Los Angeles (or alongside it) to advocate for the arts, artists, and programs designed to diversify and deepen engagements around civic memory. The position could be a “distributed model” (in other words, not subject to political hire). It could work alongside the DCA, the Department of Civil and Human Rights, and other relevant agencies, and should have a rotating, three-to-four-year appointment.
    2. Civic memory in Los Angeles. Identify all city agencies and 501(c)(3) organizations that could be participants in this process. The rich network of cultural, community, and educational organizations across the city—large and small—should be tapped.
    3. A pluralistic approach. Recognize that each project and its unique set of needs will be different. Rather than finding one approach for this process, Los Angeles could be an incubator to test out a series of working methods and become a lab for the future of civic memory–making.
    4. A global approach. Create a civic memory project to collaborate with other cities, nonprofits, and foundations also engaged in this work, as a means of both mutual accountability and resource-sharing. The project could start as a website and series of public dialogues and branch out from there.
    5. Preparatory work. Before starting any new projects, engage communities in their neighborhoods to map their current cultural assets as a way to engage the current layer of civic memory before projects are added.
    6. Advisory committee. A committee of relevant partners—including artists, designers, creators across disciplines, community leaders, and City representatives—should be formed to help guide the process of civic memory outreach and action.
    7. Civic memory archive. The work of civic memory–making has been active in L.A. in various forms before this Working Group and its subcommittees were formed. Acknowledging, researching, and archiving these contributions is an important project. We recommend forming a diverse committee of artists, curators, historians, and other leaders adjacent to and outside of the arts to work both internally and in concert with communities to develop such an archive. For the archive to reflect the diverse authorship discussed above, it should engage a similarly diverse committee and process.
    8. Monuments’ afterlife. The meaning of a monument is neither singular nor static. Meaning changes as social, political, and financial contexts shift. As we trust artists to strategize and envision new monuments, so too should we invite them to intervene to reimagine existing ones. A monument is by nature didactic and presents an educational and artistic opportunity throughout its lifetime, including its potential removal. Perhaps a sunset clause or reevaluation milestone should be built into new commissions. A rigorous consideration around if, when, and how monuments are removed or “retired” should be included in any civic memory monument project.

    Creating New Histories

    The understanding of Los Angeles civic history will continue to shift and develop over time, and efforts on the part of the City will need to adapt accordingly. It is not realistic to assume that this report will be the final word on an issue of enormous complexity. It is likely that in the next generation, very different goals and processes will be necessary. As such, it is imperative that a process be developed that allows for continual adaption to changing circumstances, and that facilitates the inclusion of voices and groups long excluded from broader participation and integration within policy discussions of this kind. We see this subcommittee’s work as the start of a discussion that must continue and broaden over time.

Summoning Other Moments

Richard White

From California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History, with photographs by Jesse Amble White (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020)

We can think only in the present moment, but the present moment is always awash in memories and ideas produced by the past. At least professionally, historians try to discipline themselves and remember that because no moment is inherently more important than any other, no moment can give a complete view. Their sorcery is summoning other moments. History is looking into the tangled and devilishly complicated connections among an infinity of moments. The relationship of those moments is what matters. ●

Daily Life in Early Los Angeles

Marissa López

+ See this subject on our map of Los Angeles→
E.O.C. Ord's "rst map of the city of Los Angeles, drawn in August 29, 1849. Courtesy of the California Historical Society collection at the University of Southern California.
The Bella Union Hotel on N. Main Street, photographed in 1876. Photograph courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.
Show Footnotes

“Daily Life in Early Los Angeles,” a self-guided bicycle tour through nineteenth-century Mexican L.A., is a collaboration between Picturing Mexican America01 https://www.picturingmexicanamerica.com/ (a digital, public humanities project managed by UCLA professor Marissa López) and the Los Angeles Explorers Club02 http://www.laexplorersclub.com/, which organizes bike tours of the city and was founded by Aimee Gilchrist and Brantlea Newbury.

Explorers Club arranges large, group events culminating at a local bar or restaurant where riders can unwind, refuel, and socialize. None of those things were possible in the spring of 2020 as Los Angeles was locked down in a series of COVID-19 quarantines. Cut off from the city, the Explorers Club reached out to Picturing Mexican America in an effort to think differently about Los Angeles. Our inability to go about our daily lives provoked thinking about historic daily life. What did those who moved through this cityscape long before us do for fun? How did early Angelenos entertain themselves, and what do nineteenth-century popular culture and daily life reveal about twenty-first century Los Angeles?

 The coronavirus pandemic presented us with an opportunity to show cyclists the Los Angeles of the past—not the cartoon past of Olvera St. and imaginary Spaniards, but the past that’s been built over and erased, that you have to slow down and make an effort to see. The key is to move through space differently than you normally would. You can read about history in books, see it in public monuments, or scroll through it on social media, but we were looking to catalyze physical interaction with city spaces.

Cycling defamiliarizes our sense of space by allowing us to move through the city at different speeds; it amplifies and makes possible what philosopher Henri Bergson refers to as “presence.” To be “present” in space is to experience time as “duration,” apart from chronology. This idea allows Bergson to distinguish between knowledge and sense experience and to develop his theory that an encounter with anything outside our self is a physical transformation that depends on presence and duration.03 Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory: Essay on the Relation between the Body and the Mind. [1896] Trans. NM Paul and WS Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990; Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Data of Immediate Consciousness. [1889] Trans. FL Pogson. London: Dover Publications, 2001; The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. [1934] Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012.

Changing the way we move through the city can shift us away from a conception of time as spatial progression to time as sense, towards Bergson’s duration, where the past can be sensed rather than known. Duration involves “dimensional” experience, according to Bergson, rather than “representational.” He explains this as the difference between walking through a city versus looking at pictures or reading about it. Our tour replaces representation with dimension, offering a transformative experience of the history of Mexican Los Angeles. For us, transformation relies on bikes: specifically, in the case of this project, the bike-share program that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or Metro, launched in 2016. 

 Metro Bike Share has weathered its fair share of criticism, but our tour imagines bikes—the Metro bikes in particular—as the people’s tool for empowered movement, for an active reclamation of our streets, the importance of which we all saw in summer 2020. We had initially planned to release this ride on June 5, 2020, but by then we had learned about the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. People in Los Angeles and cities around the country rose up to protest police brutality and anti-Black violence. When the National Guard was called to Los Angeles, we knew it wasn’t the best time to send people out on their bikes. In the end we launched the ride in July; the physical danger had passed, and the ride seemed more important than ever. 

The ride is based ion ideas of collective, embodied action, but we’ve designed it as a solitary activity that can be enjoyed alone or together with others. A route map and audio guide are available for download at both the Los Angeles Explorers Club’s and Picturing Mexican America’s websites, along with a GPS enabled ride guide that offers turn-by-turn audio directions.

Riders can listen on their devices (one earbud only, as per California state law!) while learning how nineteenth-century, Mexican LA was neither idyllic, egalitarian, or anti-racist; nevertheless, it’s important to understand that it was here and that the version of California history you might have learned in grade school represents what scholars have described as either a “Fantasy Spanish Heritage” or a “Fantasy Anglo Past.” Whatever you call it, it devalues people of color, depicts them as marginal outsiders, and justifies discrimination and racial violence. Our ride seeks to untangle some of those threads. 

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy

Show Footnotes

Christopher Hawthorne: I was really struck by your talk at the Toppling Mission Monuments conference about various models of land acknowledgement—particularly those that include action items for the audience to take up and other strategies for moving past perfunctory or rote approaches to land acknowledgement.01 “Toppling Mission Monuments and Mythologies: A Conference—California Indian Scholars and Allies Respond and Reflect” was an online event held via Zoom on July 15, 2020. It was organized by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center in collaboration with partners at UC Riverside, UC San Diego, and UC Santa Cruz.
 And I wanted to talk with you a bit about those approaches, and how they might be relevant to our civic memory work. To begin, could you just tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, and the work that you do now? 

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy: I’m the department chair and associate professor of Native American studies at Humboldt State University. I’m Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk—those are three of the largest tribes in Northern California. I’m enrolled in the Hupa Valley Tribe but have ties to Yurok and Karuk peoples. I like doing work with people and in communities, but my research really focuses on decolonization and California Indian peoples, and especially California Indian politics and the ways in which we understand and enact sovereignty and self-determination. My passion is land return and decolonial futures. 

CH: Our working group has been interested in various approaches to decolonization. Can you talk a little bit more about the forms your work has taken in that area, or models of decolonization—particularly in public spaces and public design—that you might point us to?

CRB: For me, it’s been a couple of different interventions that I’ve started to really focus on when I think about what decolonial space work looks like. One is renaming and using Indigenous languages a lot in spaces. I think we’ve been taught for far too long that our languages are very weird or foreign, and it actually spreads the message to our own people, our own youth, that somehow our languages are inaccessible. Because they’re not seeing it every day or everywhere. And in part it’s because, in order to reflect the way we speak with English letters, you have to use a lot of colons and accents and barred Ls and things like that, because our languages are very different from English. When you see it written out in this way, it can at first feel jarring. But when you start to refer to spaces by the Indigenous names, you begin to have a different relationship with them. 

One of my colleagues, Dr. Kayla Begay, she’s a linguist, and she talks about how in Hupa, for instance, when we talk about coming into a new space, we don’t say, “I’m lost.” We would never say, “I’m lost here” or “I don’t know where I am.” We actually say, “The land doesn’t know me.” There’s something about introducing yourself and knowing the land and the relationship you’re supposed to have to it. Our languages have a lot to say about that relationship. So in our own area, in Hupa, we often have signs, and we’ve named our roads in our language. We all know the name of our medical center is K’ima:w Medical Center. It means medicine—that’s our word for medicine. In my own land acknowledgments, I always make sure that I don’t just say wherever I traveled to. I don’t just come to the place and say, “I’m here in this city and it’s the land of these people.” I try to find the name of the place in the Indigenous language and use it and say it, and then have other people pronounce it and say it, to help people get more comfortable with everyday Indigenous language.

 In our region, they just returned a sacred island to the tribe. It was taken more than 150 years ago because of a massacre that occurred there. And because of that massacre, the people had to leave. And then that island was taken over, but it is still considered the center of the world to the Wiyot peoples. Eventually it was returned—an unprecedented return. The city of Eureka said, “We’ll give you this island back.” In our area, that island is often referred to as Indian Island. And that’s how people colloquially talk about it. I can’t call it Indian Island, because it’s only called that because that’s where they went and killed a bunch of Indian people. But before that the village was called Tuluwat. [The island was called Duluwat.] And I think it’s really important to start just calling it Tuluwat, so I try in my own practice. I try with my students. I try with people I know to be like, “That’s Tuluwat. That’s Tuluwat.” More and more you hear people saying, “Oh, that’s Tuluwat, that’s where the Wiyot people are from.” 

I think that those sorts of moments are really important. I give my students extra credit in their papers if they refer to the areas they’re writing about using the Indigenous words. A lot of them refer to Arcata, which is where Humboldt State is, as Kori [the name for the Wiyot settlement that existed on the site]. And that’s how they talk about it. Same thing with Eureka, which is Jaroujiji [in Wiyot]—they just talk about it that way. There were so many attempts to divorce us from our language, knowing that our language held our culture and our beliefs and our reasons for being, knowing that our language tied us together and tied us to the land. Reclaiming that can become so important. Seeing it in public spaces is also important, and knowing that these languages are still living, that they’re not dead languages or gone languages. And that all these places had names—that they were renamed through colonization, but they all had Indigenous names before that.

 CH: That’s really helpful. Before we get to land acknowledgments specifically, another question on decolonization. This report is coming out of a mayor’s office, which makes it somewhat unusual. It’s a bit of a hybrid. Many of our [Civic Memory Working Group] members are not city officials, of course. What would be your advice to a city like Los Angeles to expand the work of decolonization beyond some of what you were just talking about? 

CRB: The most practical thing is land return. There’s a great article called “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”02 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

It’s by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, and what they’re basically saying is, when we talk about decolonization, we can’t talk about it as a metaphor. It actually comes down to one very key thing, and that is the return of Indigenous land. That’s what decolonization is. If land is stolen, it needs to be returned. So if that’s the ultimate goal of decolonization, when you start talking about decolonization in your own practice, what you’re really signing up for, ultimately, is land return. Now, there’s multiple steps to get there. When I come into spaces and say, “We’re all going to start working to give land back,” everybody goes, “Uh, what?” And they get all scared about it. And then my job is to say, “There’s multiple steps to get there.” We as Indigenous peoples acknowledge that it’s not going to happen overnight. Even though I think that’d be amazing and righteous, if tomorrow somebody was like, “Oh, you want it back? Here you go!” I have actually flirted with becoming a notary just because I go to all these spaces and I think, “You could give it back right now. I’m a notary”—

 CH: I’ll sign the document right now!

 CRB: I’ll fix it. And I know someday it’s going to happen. But it’s a longer process. In our area, with the Wiyot, they started that conversation over 25 years ago. It was Wiyot leaders saying, “We want the island back. That’s what we want.” And a lot of people at first told them that it was impossible, that it’s just not going to happen. But their leaders kept saying, “It’s going to happen. Maybe it’s not going to happen today, but it’s going to happen, because that’s what we’re working for.” It was constant education and outreach. They held vigil on the island every year for 20 years. They started to do their ceremonies again; they brought those back. They educated people. They did all these things. And through that developed a really important relationship with the city of Eureka, saying to them: “We are the Indigenous peoples of this area. We have to build a real relationship with you.” So it was talking with them. It was visits. It was taking them to the island. It was retelling that story. It was making videos about what they wanted to do. 

Ultimately, it was a grassroots movement. Cheryl Seidner, who was the tribal leader at the time that this started, she was so sure that this was what needed to happen—the return of this sacred space—that she started doing bake sales to raise money. She started selling T-shirts. They did a campaign around it. All told, it took about 25 years to get that to happen. And once you had a city council that was ready to truly move it forward, it moved forward, and the island was returned. 

So land return is the ultimate thing. Los Angeles is in a very particular position because so many of their tribal peoples are unrecognized [by the federal government]. I think helping to show support for the return of land to unrecognized tribes is going to be something that puts a city on a map in a really good way. That’s decolonization. It’s saying, “We don’t need the federal government to decide that these are our tribal peoples. We know who our tribal peoples are, and we’re going to honor them in a really meaningful way. We’re going to bring them into this conversation and we’re going to talk with them about what land return looks like.”

And in the city of Eureka’s case—and this is really important—Tuluwat was not given back just because it was a sacred site and so important to the Wiyot people. It was considered surplus land by the city. The city wasn’t using it or doing anything with it specifically, because it was a brownfield site. It was so contaminated through the work that had been done there by settlers throughout the whole period of time that they couldn’t afford to fix it. It was unbuildable, unusable. So there’s this other layer to it: it happened in part because the land was considered surplus land. 

It did, however, open up, in the Indigenous imagination, “Hey, there’s surplus land in cities that they’re not doing anything with? And yet we haven’t had this conversation about the fact that we want to do things with it?” And with the Wiyot tribe, they are now the ones doing the cleanup. They have shared several of the ways in which they have now cleaned up the island so that it’s once again usable. When they showed up, there was so much trash there. Somebody had built a retaining wall of old car batteries on the island and they had to remove it. They had to remove several layers of soil that were contaminated. They had to rebuild buildings. This is what they signed up for, because this is their sacred space. And I think the partnership built between the city and the Wiyot was really important, because here was an island that was in disrepair, that the city was not using, but was also a sacred space to these Indigenous peoples.

To me, the land return part is the most important part—and actually makes the biggest impact, because when we’re talking about climate change, climate justice, environmental justice, it’s Indigenous peoples who want to come in and to be able to work with the land in a meaningful way so that it’s good for everyone. So I think those kinds of opportunities are there under decolonization.

 CH: It’s so interesting that you note that 25-year timeframe. This has been a theme in many of our conversations: that things that can seem to outside observers—or to city governments, for that matter—as happening really quickly, like the toppling of monuments, are almost always the process of many years of activism and community advocacy. Part of what cities need to do is just recognize the amount of work in communities that is ongoing, that has been ongoing, when it comes to these issues and this kind of change, and to begin to think in a different timeframe as well. Again, this report is coming out of a mayor’s office, and there’s so much connected to the idea of a fixed, finite term of office. And that can be in tension with the way these movements work, which is over many, many years. 

CRB: Even the city of Eureka, though it’s much smaller than a city like L.A., had to work out that the Wiyot relationship, the relationship with their tribal peoples, was structural to the mayor’s office. No matter who came into office, they understood this as a structural part of it, that you work with the Wiyot tribe in this way. It’s not dependent on one mayor to say, I value this. Instead, it’s a structural part of our city government.

 CH: Is there a designated staff position to be the liaison to the tribe in the city government of Eureka? 

CRB: No, not yet. But I think certain people have taken on that role. They’ve been talking about making it official. And actually it was just a couple weeks ago that the city of Eureka finally adopted a land acknowledgement. They’re moving forward with many related things in part because of the very positive response to their action to return this island. It went international. We were doing interviews with people from countries all over the world about this movement and this moment. And suddenly Eureka, which in our area doesn’t have the best reputation, is known as being the place. It was the first city that we know of in the United States to return land to Indigenous peoples. And so this relationship actually built something really powerful that people are talking about all over the world. I think that inspired the next steps that they’re taking now.

 CH: Before we get to some of your thinking about new models of land acknowledgement, just a basic question: why from your point of view is it important for cities to adopt land acknowledgements?

CRB: I think the most important thing is that cities are some of the first relationship builders and responders to Indigenous peoples in their regions. The U.S. government’s relationship with tribes is nation to nation, and that’s really important to remember. But when we’re talking about who tribes have to interact with and deal with every single day, a lot of that comes down to cities and counties. And I do think that that relationship is important because the cities are occupying Indigenous land, and because the decision-making that happens in a city is going to affect Indigenous lands. It’s going to affect Indigenous peoples, because the Indigenous lands are right up against city lands, and oftentimes right there in the same spaces. And Indigenous peoples, having been here for thousands upon thousands of years—I mean our timeline of what it means to live here is very, very long. And then we’re also always thinking long into the future. We’re making decisions now, and we’re thinking about how beneficial something is going to be seven generations in the future. It’s that long-term process of, “We’re always going to be here.” I watched a really good documentary yesterday [“Dancing Salmon Home”] in which Chief Caleen Sisk—she’s from the Winnemem Wintu—she tells a government agency, “At some point you’re going to retire, but I am never going to retire. This is my place. This is the work that I do. I will always be this person.”03 “Dancing Salmon Home,” directed by Will Doolittle, Moving Image Productions, LLC (Eugene, OR), 2012. City government to tribal government, you can do real things. There are some amazing impacts that you can have on a local level that can affect international conversations about what the world should look like next.

 CH: I wanted to ask about models of land acknowledgement that you think cities like L.A. might consider. I’m particularly drawn to this idea of yours about using a land acknowledgement at a conference or public event to ask the audience to take up a particular action or make a donation, right then and there.

CRB: What it always comes down to for me is this: we don’t want land acknowledgments to be prescriptive or rote. What I constantly ask people who come to me and say they need help in developing a land acknowledgement is, “Why are you doing it? Why?” Each person who is having this conversation needs to really reflect on what that means for them, because as we’ve discussed, land acknowledgement is supposed to be the first step toward signing up for land return. So if you are not willing to say, “Yes, I’m willing to work toward land return,” then why are you doing it? Otherwise, it doesn’t really amount to anything. It’s a statement, and we don’t need a statement. We don’t need a statement that you know that we’re alive. What we need are compelling actions and calls to action to remind people that we’re always in the process of building toward a decolonized future. And it’s going to look different in every city. It’s going to look different in every town. Every land return is going to look different. This is what I always say to people: “I can’t give you the answer of how should you do it, because it’s always going to look different. And that’s okay. But you do have to say that you’re signing up for decolonization. And if you’re not willing to say that, then don’t do a land acknowledgement.”

Hayden King is an Anishinaabe scholar from Canada, and what he says is, when you make a land acknowledgement a very prescriptive statement and you just read it or somebody else reads it, that’s not building a relationship. You have to make this something active. And that to me can be so many things. Everywhere I go, I’ll research not just the actual name of the Indigenous peoples for the region that I’m going to, but whether there are multiple tribes in that region. So for instance, in Los Angeles, the Tongva are the peoples, but there are multiple tribes within the region. So I would want to name every tribe in my land acknowledgement as well as the peoples. Then I try to find out the Indigenous name for the place that I’m in, so I can give them that language. And then I say, “Okay, I’ve said this to you, but what are we going to do? What’s the action that we’re going to take?”

Sometimes you hear amazing, beautiful, powerful things from members of the audience about what this means for their relationship to Indigenous peoples. I had one woman who said, “This compels me to teach my daughter about the strength of Native people, because I know she’s not going to get that in school. So now what we do is, when she’s going to talking about Native people in school, I give her these resources. We have these conversations. I take her to these events.” And I was like, “That’s a really good start.” When it comes to larger organizations, I always say you’re going to talk with action or you’re going to talk with money. And I always educate people about land—specifically that close to 90 percent of land in the United States is owned by white people. And when you know that but you’re not compelled to address it, then what you’re saying is that you’re okay with this disparity. So stop being okay with it and start saying what you’re going to do.

 In the case of organizations, I constantly try to get them to put in actions toward supporting what’s already happening in their communities. I’ll often look up nonprofits, or even tribal agencies or land trusts. In the case of the Toppling Mission Monuments discussion, I had asked them to donate directly to the Kumeyaay Trust because I previously taught at San Diego State, so I had been on Kumeyaay land. And I was saying here’s a way you can actually support what land return and what land management looks like. And then I’ll call attention to certain activist movements that are happening at the time, because I think it’s important to just give people things that they can feel like they’ve done something to help. And maybe it inspires them to compel other people to action. You don’t have to stand up and be like, “This compels me to demand the end of capitalism, at this very moment.” I want to give people things they can do right now. And then I want to tell them that in doing that, they are starting to open up their imaginations so that we can see the end of settler colonialism, so that we can see past the system that has tried to teach us that there’s nothing we can do.

 CH: And I recall you saying that sometimes you will pause to give people time to act at a conference, or you will come back at the end to update the audience on their progress in taking up these actions, whether it’s writing a letter to the president of San Diego State asking them to change their mascot from the Aztecs or making a donation to the Kumeyaay Trust.

CRB: All the time. The first time I did it, it was at Cal State East Bay. They asked me to do a land acknowledgement and I did it, and then at the end I said, “So there’s actually a nonprofit that is a land trust that is trying to get land back in the Bay Area for tribes that you can give money to. You can actually pay land taxes, honor taxes to tribal nations.” I do know that there have been some cities that have been able to put into their tax forms the option to say, “Yes, I will pay the honor tax.” People can opt into paying a tax to tribes, as part of their property taxes. In the case of this land trust, they use the honor tax to start to buy back pieces of land in the Bay Area. Sometimes they’re small pieces of land that are available. Sometimes they’re larger pieces of land. So I asked people to donate and then I said, “Okay, I’ll wait.” And I just stood there and they were all kind of looking around. And I said, “Yeah, pull out your phones and start typing because you can pay now. You should do it now. It’s not like I want to inspire you to do it later.” And then they all very slowly started. And I said, “Keep going, and when you’re done, send it to me and I’ll post it up on the screen. I’ll show people the work that you did today, the actual work that you did.”

At the Missions conference, people tweeted at me when they donated and I retweeted it. I celebrated them. I don’t want you to get into your car later, after you’ve heard me speak. and be like, “Wow, she gave me a lot to think about.” I want you to do something. And sometimes it makes people uncomfortable. But I also think we should make people uncomfortable.

 CH: Do you think there’s value in having a short statement that can be used in certain circumstances, then paired with a more adaptable one that can be configured to match a particular event or context? What’s your advice about how a city might take on that set of questions?

CRB: This is a good question. I think it’s important to take time to do a land acknowledgement if you’re going to do it. When people invite me to do land acknowledgments, I’ll say, I will come into your land acknowledgement for your event, but my land acknowledgement takes ten to twelve minutes. And then they always say, “Ten to twelve minutes? Because we were thinking, you know, one minute, maybe two, because we don’t have much time on the agenda.” And then I say, “Then you don’t really want a land acknowledgement. You want a statement.” So call it a statement. I’m not going to show up to do a two-minute statement. If you’re going to invite us into the space, you have to invite us in as partners, and at least give us the time to do a true acknowledgement of who we are, and our lands.

CH: What are the institutions or cities that have done this well, in your opinion? 

CRB: San Diego State has a land acknowledgement that was written by a Kumeyaay who works for them, who’s one of their instructors. His name is Mike Connelly. It doesn’t compel action, but as a statement it is one of the most beautiful I’ve heard.04 “SDSU Senate Approves Kumeyaay Land Acknowledgement Statement,” news release, Department of American Indian Studies, San Diego State University, Sept. 11, 2019, https://ais.sdsu.edu/articles/land-acknowledgement.htm. He’s a writer and a poet, and the way he wrote it, it reconnects Kumeyaay people to the land in a way that I had not heard done in a long time. [It reads, in part, “We stand upon a land that carries the footsteps of millennia of Kumeyaay people. They are a people whose traditional lifeways intertwine with a worldview of earth and sky in a community of living beings. This land is part of a relationship that has nourished, healed, protected, and embraced the Kumeyaay people to the present day. It is part of a worldview founded in the harmony of the cycles of the sky and balance in the forces of life.”] I have been blown away by that one.

 CH: In the few minutes that we have left, is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to mention or talk about? 

CRB: Earlier you asked something about public spaces. We have a new mural in the lobby of our Native American Forum at Humboldt State. For a long time, the lobby was a very plain space where you would gather before heading into the auditorium. And we found funding and we redid the lobby with all Native art, and we put in a bunch of information about the tribes. We put in a bunch of information about the school and its ties to Indigenous peoples. And it’s become a really important space on campus. People walk in and they recognize that it’s an Indigenous space and we’re being represented here. I do think that public art can be really important as a part of how we reclaim space. 

The other thing I’ll say is that people have started to give abandoned or empty buildings to Indigenous peoples in downtown areas. In Oregon, there was a nonprofit that actually donated their building to the Indigenous peoples to be able to open their own art and cultural center in downtown Portland. In Eureka, the Wiyot just worked with the city of Eureka to purchase a building. These downtown spaces are important because sometimes people think of Native peoples as, “Oh, they’re out there, away from the city.”

CH: Speaking of reclaimed space, one of the recommendations we’ve heard from a lot of our members is that the city consider some way, when we produce new monuments and memorials or when we recontextualize existing ones, to have a reference to Indigenous landscapes or to the longer history of the land. I’m wondering if you think there’s value in that, or if there are examples of that happening already that you’re aware of.

CRB: When we’re talking about memorials, I always think about how I don’t want to just memorialize the genocide or death of Native peoples. For so long, people have tended to say, “This is the statue of Junípero Serra. Look, he killed all these Indians.” To me, that just talks about us as people who died. I like to talk about how we are people who are still alive, people who have survived and resisted. That has to be centered in terms of how we’re talked about. Recontextualizing anything has to recenter us as living, vibrant peoples who are also resistors. Otherwise, people get so used to just talking about our deaths. When people write about us, the bestsellers tend to be books about our genocide, books about our death. And I don’t want that to be what’s centered at any type of public memorial or acknowledgement of us, because we are so much more than the attempted genocide of us. And it’s the same thing that happened on Tuluwat: for a long time, people only talked about Tuluwat as a place of a massacre. And my point had always been, “This is not a place of massacre. This is a place of world renewal. And we need to talk about it not just in terms of what happened in 1850 or 1849, because of what was going on with settler colonialism. We need to talk about it in terms of what happened thousands of years before that—and 150 years later. It’s our world renewal place, so let’s think of it that way.” People kept asking if we needed a big plaque that says, “This is the place of this giant massacre that was attempted by citizens of Humboldt County against the Wiyot.” And I said, “I acknowledge that that’s important, because we don’t want people to forget that that happened. But when we center Wiyot death, let’s not ignore Wiyot life and Wiyot revitalization and Wiyot resilience.” That’s what I want people to keep in mind.

 CH: That’s a perfect place to end it. This has been really fantastic. I can’t thank you enough.

Indigenous Land Acknowledgement and the Work of Decolonization

Show Footnotes
This subcommittee was chaired by Theresa Gregor (Iipai/Yaqui), Professor of American Indian Studies, Cal State Long Beach, and ​Gail Kennard, President, Kennard Design Group (KDG) and Commissioner, Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission. Its other members were​Julia Bogany (Tongva/Gabrieleno), member and Cultural Consultant, Tongva Tribal Council, and Christopher Hawthorne, Chief Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles in the Office of Mayor Eric Garcetti. In addition, the subcommittee was advised by ​Cindi Alvitre (Tongva/Gabrieleno), lecturer, American Indian Studies, California State University, Long Beach; Theresa Ambo (San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians, Tongva/Gabrielino, Tohono O’odham), Assistant Professor, Education Studies, University of California, San Diego​; Yve Chavez (Tongva/Gabrieleno), Assistant Professor, History of Art and Visual​ ​Culture, UC Santa Cruz; Bruce Durbin (Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel), Supervising Regional Planner, LA County Department of Regional Planning; ​Elisapeta Heta, Senior Associate and Maori Design Leader, Jasmax, Auckland, New Zealand; Rudy Ortega (Fernandeño Tataviam), Tribal President, Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, Commissioner and former Chairman, Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission; ​Joely Proudfit (Luiseño), Chair, Professor of American Indian Studies and director, California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center, California State University San Marcos; Kristin Sakoda, Director, Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture; and ​Alexandra Valdes (Tlingit & Athabascan), Executive Director, Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission.

This subcommittee was asked to consider whether the City of Los Angeles should adopt an Indigenous Land Acknowledgement policy. We began investigating this question by organizing a series of listening sessions with Native American scholars, experts, community members, artists, and activists to gather input and perspectives for our recommendations regarding the implementation, application, and institutionalization of such a policy.

We held community forums, via Zoom, on July 7, 2020; July 20, 2020; and September 23, 2020. We compiled a list of contacts from the Indigenous people affiliated most closely with the City of Los Angeles, the Tongva/Gabrieleno/Kizh and Fernandeño Tataviam peoples. We contacted Indigenous scholars and community professionals to provide perspectives and input about land and territorial acknowledgements. We also collaborated closely with members of the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission (NAIC). We would like to express our gratitude to those members and in particular to the executive director of the NAIC, Alexandra Valdes. The full list of the names of the individuals with whom we consulted can be found at the bottom of this summary.

Land acknowledgements have been increasingly adopted by institutions, primarily colleges and universities, in recent years. The number of cities, counties, and state governments adopting them has been somewhat smaller but is also growing. One working definition, published by UCLA’s Ralph & Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, notes that an Indigenous land or territorial acknowledgement “is a statement that recognizes the Indigenous peoples who have been dispossessed from the homelands and territories upon which an institution was built and currently occupies and operates in. For some, an Indigenous Land or Territorial Acknowledgement might be an unfamiliar practice, but it is a common protocol within Indigenous communities in the United States and is a standard practice in both Australia and Canada.”

This is an important point. While institutions outside Indigenous communities may regard land acknowledgements as a relatively novel idea, they are well established within those communities. They are also more common in countries that have done the difficult and extensive work required to create equitable national treaties or other formal arrangements regarding sovereignty with Indigenous groups, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The work that Los Angeles and other cities are now doing to consider the adoption of land acknowledgement policies therefore begins with an effort to understand how they are already operating within the Native context.

The UCLA definition continues by noting that “the terms ‘land’ and ‘territorial’ are not necessarily interchangeable, and the decision as to their use should be specific and local, pertaining to those Indigenous people who are being acknowledged as well as to those legacies and responsibilities of an institution that are also being acknowledged.”

It also says: “Within cultural institutions, these statements can be adopted in various ways. However, it is vital that they be spoken as a verbal statement given at the beginning of programs or events. In addition, they can also be expressed through a text panel or plaque, and an acknowledgement on an institutional website.”01 Los Angeles American Indian Children’s Council, UCLA Ralph & Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, 2004; http://lewis.sppsr.ucla.edu/publications/policybriefs/AIANAdultReport1.pdf

In recent years some Indigenous leaders and scholars have explored new or broader models of land acknowledgement. (See the accompanying interview in this section of the report with Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy for more on that subject.) These models have tended to emphasize an interest in taking care to avoid land acknowledgements that are perfunctory or rote in favor of more dynamic and adaptable policies. Such approaches include calls to action whereby a Native leader not only delivers a land acknowledgement but also suggests ways that that audience members at an event can contribute financially or otherwise to Indigenous causes, including land return, or act as advocates for better treatment of Indigenous groups by institutions, non-Native governments, or other groups.

An important milestone in the development of land acknowledgements in the state of California was reached in January of 2020, when Assemblymember James Ramos, the first California Native American elected to the California State Legislature, introduced Assembly Bill 1968, the Tribal Land Acknowledgment Act of 2021. The proposed legislation, which has yet as of this writing to become law, would “authorize the owner or operator of any public school, state or local park, library, or museum, or other state or local government building in this state to adopt a land acknowledgment process by which Native American tribes are properly recognized as traditional stewards of the land on which the public school, state or local park, library, or museum, or other state or local government building is located.”02 http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB1968

The language of the bill goes on to note: “The teachings of United States history in schools, museums, and the media have left out the voices of the original nations and peoples. California native people have endured colonial efforts to erase their existence, cultures, religions, languages, and connections to ancestral territories. Despite the importation of the mission system and genocidal action during California’s statehood, native people have maintained their presence in, and stewardship of, their homelands. California is home to nearly 200 tribes. Had the 18 original treaties with California Indian tribes been honored by the state and federal government, California Indian tribes would possess over 7,500,000 acres of land. Today, California Indian tribes collectively possess about seven percent of their unratified treaty territory. Despite federal and state efforts to erode ownership, control, and visibility, California Native American people remain actively engaged in cultural revitalization, resource protection, and self-determination within every region of California. Systematic denial of Native American knowledge, cultural authority, and historical experiences perpetuates the colonial structure of oppression.”

The bill also includes sample language for a land acknowledgement “that could be used within a museum setting.” It concludes with this sentence: “This acknowledgment demonstrates a commitment to beginning the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.”

There are some particular complications and layers of complexity when it comes to pursuing an indigenous land acknowledgement policy in and for Los Angeles. There are nearly 600 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States, including more than 100 in California. According to the NAIC, the state “is home to more people of Native heritage than any other state in the United States…The City of Los Angeles holds the second largest percentage of Native Americans in the United States, totaling around 54,236 people. Los Angeles County, home to more Native Americans/ Alaska Natives than any other county in the United States, totals around 140,764 people.”03 https://lanaic.lacounty.gov/resources/tribal-governments/ Yet there are no federally recognized tribes in Los Angeles County.

As a land acknowledgement policy developed by Cal State Long Beach puts it: “The Gabrielino/Tongva/Kizh and Fernandeno/Tataviam people are the First Peoples of the region, their lands were unceded, they did not negotiate a treaty with Mexico or the US government. Today, the First Peoples of Los Angeles struggle every day for their sovereignty.”04 https://www.csulb.edu/sites/default/files/u69781/csulb_land_and_territorial_acknowledgments_faq_002.pdf

What is more, the particular history of Los Angeles and Southern California has led to not one but multiple erasures of Indigenous history and legacy, at the hands, variously, of Spanish, Mexican and American governments. The very name “Los Angeles” implies that the history of the city, and of the land it occupies, begins with the arrival of the Spanish. And yet, as other subcommittees of this Working Group have observed, these erasures by no means ceased and in certain ways accelerated when Spanish rule was replaced by Mexican and then U.S. governance. As Brenda E. Stevenson, Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History at UCLA, observed in a discussion on constructions and meanings of whiteness in Los Angeles, selections from which are reprinted elsewhere in this volume, “When we think about California coming into being, or Los Angeles coming into being, we think about the Spanish Empire, we think about the Mexican Empire, we think about the United States. But there still tends to be more than anything else erasure of Indigenous peoples. I think that's the most invisible group we have in our society.”

We are fortunate that the work of this subcommittee evolved alongside, and benefited from collaboration with, similar efforts at the Los Angeles County level. In June of 2020, the County Board of Supervisors adopted a Countywide Cultural Policy,05 https://www.lacountyarts.org/CEIICulturalPolicy which includes a section “regarding the development and use of land acknowledgements at County public events and ceremonial functions.”06 http://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/bos/supdocs/147732.pdf In addition to our productive work with the NAIC, we are deeply grateful to Kristin Sakoda, director of the Los Angeles County’s Department of Arts and Culture, for her collaboration. It is our hope not only to develop City and County land acknowledgement policies in tandem over the year 2021 and beyond, working closely with the NAIC, but also to see that cooperation stand as a larger symbol of the power of City-County partnerships to reassess and grapple more forthrightly with the region’s past. Such collaboration would also have the benefit, as a gesture of respect, of reducing the potential for redundant or overbearing requests for consultation with Native leaders.

From the start this subcommittee was careful to limit its considerations. We agreed early in our discussions that our goal should be to decide whether the City should adopt a land acknowledgement policy and examine successful models of such policies from elsewhere, rather than to prescribe specific language or other guidelines for the policy itself. It is well beyond the expertise and the authority of this subcommittee to dictate the specific details of any land acknowledgement. We leave that to Native leaders working in concert with the Mayor’s Office, the City Council, and City departments in collaboration with the similar efforts at the County level we have already outlined. Nonetheless we think there is value in using this space to support a land acknowledgement policy for the Mayor’s Office and the City of Los Angeles and its departments and offering our support in seeing it adopted.

At the same time, the subcommittee agreed that to have meaning and impact any land acknowledgement for the City of Los Angeles will need to go beyond language and address the issue of how the City might recognize and begin the process of making amends for historical mistreatment of Native peoples. As Alexandra Valdes put it in one of our discussions, “If you’re acknowledging the land then you’re acknowledging the history of what’s been born out of that history: how Native peoples have been treated on this land, and displacement. Without any action to address that, it’s going to fall flat.” This point—that a land acknowledgement policy for the City of Los Angeles, to have genuine effectiveness, must be seen as a first step in a longer process of reckoning and reparation—was raised consistently in our discussions with tribal leaders and scholars. In addition, the group felt strongly that the Mayor’s Office should add a Native staff liaison to the NAIC for Native peoples to have their concerns represented directly in City Hall. The tribal liaison would, thus, ensure that the process and practice to implement the Land Acknowledgement policy is institutionalized and not just memorialized in the City.

In addition, the group felt strongly that the Mayor’s Office should add a staff liaison to the NAIC and Native peoples so that their concerns are represented directly in City Hall.

In our first two sessions, in addition to hearing from local Native leaders about their perspectives on land acknowledgements, we considered and analyzed examples from local and international institutions that are meaningful for the power of their language, the equitable process that was followed to create them, or both. Among the land acknowledgements that stand out, a few are worth noting here.

The first was adopted by UCLA in 2019 and includes three versions, any of which can be used. The most detailed reads as follows: “UCLA acknowledges the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles basin and So. Channel Islands). As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to the Honuukvetam (Ancestors), ‘Ahiihirom (Elders) and ‘Eyoohiinkem (our relatives/relations) past, present and emerging.” This statement is notable, among other reasons, for making a point of recognizing “emerging” members of the region’s tribes. We heard throughout our discussions about the importance of not consigning tribes or tribal culture to the past.

The process by which the UCLA land acknowledgement was developed is also worth studying. The language of the acknowledgement reflects decades of collaboration between the UCLA Fowler Museum’s Curator of Archaeology, Wendy Teeter, “and local Indigenous peoples of Southern California, including the Tongva, Fernandeno/Tataviam, Chumash, Juaneno/Acjachamen, Serrano, Luiseno/Payómkawichum, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Paiute/Nuwu, and Kumeyaay. In the fall of 2018, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block created the position of Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs, appointing Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) to the role. In 2019, professors Goeman and Teeter worked with the Tongva Community to develop this land acknowledgement, which recognizes that UCLA is built on unceded Tongva land.”

We would emphasize the phrase “decades of collaboration.” The process of maintaining a robust and collaborative relationship between the City and Indigenous leaders may include, but will not end with, the adoption of any land acknowledgement policy. A successful policy will instead reflect the health of the larger relationship and the steps the City and County are continuing to take to engage the larger issues related to reparation and supporting the contemporary vitality of Native peoples in the region.

Another model worth noting is the approach to land acknowledgement—and the broader work of decolonization and reconciliation with First Peoples—practiced in New Zealand, the islands known in Maori language as Aotarangi. Following the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, public events that begin with acknowledgement of Maori culture and land are not only expected but marked by an unusual level of specificity, shaped to accompany the specific events of which they are a part.

Finally, for the poetry of its language, we include the land acknowledgement adopted in 2019 by San Diego State University. It was written by Michael Connolly Miskwish (Kumeyaay), a Kumeyaay historian, researcher, and assistant professor of American Indian Studies at SDSU. It reads, in part, “We stand upon a land that carries the footsteps of millennia of Kumeyaay people. They are a people whose traditional lifeways intertwine with a worldview of earth and sky in a community of living beings. This land is part of a relationship that has nourished, healed, protected and embraced the Kumeyaay people to the present day. It is part of a worldview founded in the harmony of the cycles of the sky and balance in the forces of life.”07 https://ais.sdsu.edu/articles/Land-Acknowledgement.htm

After two sessions, this subcommittee produced a series of draft recommendations. We then convened a larger group of tribal elders and experts in land acknowledgement to consider those draft recommendations. This final session, on Sept. 23, 2020, included representatives from the NAIC, the County of Los Angeles, Tongva/Gabrieleno leadership, and other Native leaders and scholars. In all 13 people joined this discussion, 9 of whom have tribal affiliation. They helped us refine and extend our final recommendations, which are as follows:

  1. We urge the City to adopt a Land Acknowledgement Policy. The process of developing such a policy should begin by convening a committee made up of representatives from the Indigenous People of Los Angeles, perhaps with a consultant to facilitate discussions. This committee should be coordinated by or formed in close consultation with the NAIC. Furthermore, we recommend that this work of this committee should:
    • Acknowledge the history of erasure of the Indigenous People of Los Angeles.
    • Recognize the contemporary vitality and struggles of the Indigenous People of Los Angeles, rather than treating the community as a historical artifact or vanished people.
    • Include an apology, or statement of reconciliation, to the Indigenous People of Los Angeles, with clear practices and policies to ameliorate and/or decolonize practices of erasure and exclusion.
    • Outline practices, identified by representatives of the Indigenous People of Los Angeles, about how to build lasting, mutually respectful, culturally sensitive, and beneficial relationships with this community.
  2. We recommend, per the definition above, that the land acknowledgement should be delivered at events hosted by the Mayor, City Council, City departments and commissions, public meetings, groundbreakings for public and significant private buildings, grand openings, sporting events, events at public libraries, etc. Here is one suggested rule of thumb: consider using the land acknowledgement at any event that includes a performance of the National Anthem, flag salute, or recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. A written version of the acknowledgement should also be posted and made visible at culturally significant sites identified by the committee. First Nations of the City of Los Angeles.
  3. We recommend that the City work collaboratively and in tandem with the County of Los Angeles, specifically with the L.A. County Department of Arts and Culture and City/County Native American Indian Commission (NAIC), as they develop Land Acknowledgements policy guidance and protocols for the County as part of the Countywide Cultural Policy adopted by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on June 23, 2020. The Countywide Cultural Policy provides that the County will “identify ways to acknowledge Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards of this land at County public events and ceremonial functions and celebrate the contributions of culture bearers and traditional arts practices of diverse communities.”This will provide an opportunity to center cultural equity, utilize an arts and cultural lens, and build on aligned efforts for regional impact in both City and County of Los Angeles. We recommend that the Land Acknowledgement should be delivered by the person chairing a given meeting, an event organizer, or an Indigenous person who is invited to deliver it; however, if an Indigenous person is asked to deliver the Land Acknowledgment, we further recommend that the selected person be incorporated in a substantial or constructive role in the agenda of the event and be compensated for this work.
  4. We recommend the City provide regular orientation on decolonization and the history and culture of the Indigenous people of Los Angeles to City employees by funding curriculum development for employee orientation training about the history, experience, struggle, and resilience of the Indigenous People of Los Angeles.
  5. We recommend that the committee, as part of its work, study effective and equitable models of land return, in the United States and elsewhere, and make specific recommendations about progress toward land return to the Indigenous people of Los Angeles.
  6. We recommend that the committee work with the City’s newly established Racial Equity Task Force to study how City policies have adversely affected Indigenous people and how past harm can be ameliorated, such as an institutionalized permanent staff member in the Mayor’s Office to recommend policy changes and coordinate the kinds of work specified above, i.e. a Tribal Liaison.
  7. We recommend that the committee consider ways to incorporate this policy and larger attention to Indigenous culture and presence in the region into planning for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games; in prominent locations at Los Angeles International Airport; and in major cultural events held in and/or broadcast from the City or County of Los Angeles, such as the Academy Awards, Super Bowl LVI (2022), etc.