Shot over the course of 2 hours, this video illustrates a panoramic view from Griffith Park Observatory and a hyperlapsed sequence of the sunset over Mt. Hollywood.
Hopscotching Through a Thick Los Angeles
“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of dirty and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world--such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define” (Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 9) For many years now, I have been sitting with this quote in my head. I first read it during a class I took at Kenyon College, my liberal arts, undergraduate institution. The rural campus was surrounded by corn fields on one side and soybean fields on the other, which perhaps helps to explain why this passage caught my eye. Four years of desolate, icy winters left me longing for the city, the crowd, the hustle and bustle of urban space. At the time, I had only a vague idea of what the words meant, to me personally and within their historical context, that of 19th century, French, bourgeois society. I have lost, sold, or gifted most of my books from my time in college, but I have always held onto my copy of The Painter of Modern Life (1964). I would pick it up now and then, re-read this particular passage in the hope that this mysterious (wo)man of the crowd, and her/his flanuering ways, would help me navigate, exist in, and feel at home at, “the center of the world” (Beaudelaire, 9). Whatever that meant…. I write this essay as my final contribution to a course titled, L@tino Noir, a literary and digital exploration of the Latinidad and the city of Los Angeles through the genre of noir. For me, the cornerstone of the class was the concept of “thick mapping,” both a technical and theoretical device used to excavate forgotten secrets of the past, in service of a more enlivened present and future. The act of vertical cartography brings to the surface an infinite number of counter-stories, and in doing so, exposes history as an unending narrative in a constant state of becoming. It was through the notion of thick mapping that I finally saw clearly the mission of the flaneur. It was not Baudelaire's ambling man of the crowd, nor the “digital dandy,” of HyperCities, which merely dives downward into the past. No, the flaneur that interested me most was more of a nepantlera/o, one who sees “through serpent and eagle eyes,” (Anzaldúa, 78-79) in order to glimpse the multiplicity of the past, as well as the co-existing present(s), real and imagined. Shifting away from the theoretical and towards the technical, how then does this flanuering nepantlera/o move between temporal and material space? And how can we use the lessons of this border-crossing flaneur to better navigate an increasingly globalized Los Angeles? Two L.A.-centered texts, one literary and the other cinematic, suggest that non-linear movement, one that I will refer to as “hopscotching,” can be used as a corporeal and psychological tool to make sense of the spatial realities and fantasies of both past and present. First used in Julio Cortázar’s counter-novel Rayuela (1963), hopscotching is offered by author Karen Tei Yamashita in Tropic of Orange (1997) and film director David Lynch in Mulholland Drive, as a mode of navigating an ever thickening map of Los Angeles and it’s surrounding areas. While Tropic of Orange gives the reader greater agency over the movement of hopscotching, and Mulholland Drive does the hopscotching on the viewer's behalf, both texts expose the fantastical layers that make up the imagined and material space of Los Angeles at the dawn of the new millennium. Flipping through the first few pages of Tropic of Orange, the reader is given a choice: Contents, or HyperContext. Choose wisely, because this decision determines how you, reader, will move through the rest of the novel. You may choose to move through the narrative linearly, beginning with chapter 1 and ending neatly with chapter 49. Alternative you may accept the challenge to hopscotch your way through the Tropic of Orange, which means the “HyperContexts,” will act as your roadmap as you move through the narrative both vertically, by character, and horizontally, by days of the week. The physical act of hopscotching enables the reader to move quickly through the narrative. In a mere seven chapters, you’ve seemingly traversed the entirety of the book, from the title page to the back cover. Each Monday through Sunday sequence centers a singular character, beginning with Rafaela, a Mexican mother of one who navigates a complex romantic and spatial reality, one that contracts and expands with her movement between Mazatlán and Tijuana. At various points throughout Rafaela’s journey, we are introduced to a variety of characters, some who may be peripheral to Rafaela’s story, but who will later be centered in their own narrative. When the reader finishes Rafaela’s story, one which ends with a sensual reunion with her husband Bobby, we think we know the entirety of her narrative, her movements, her desires and her motivations. Yet when we move to the next sequence, which is narrated from Bobby’s sphere of reality, we see that Rafaela’s story was just one of multiple, co-existing perspectives to which we have access. Objects, or characters that we think we understand from the first sequence, take on a new, more complex meaning during the subsequent hyper-contextual sequence. For example, Rafaela’s story introduces a poem titled “sun-kissed.” (Yamashita, 181) We learn that the poem is written by Arcangle, a side character in this story, but the protagonist of his own later story. The poem is initally handed to Rafaela and then to her son, Sol. Beyond offering aesthetic and thematic texture, the poem remains a two-dimensional object for the remained of Rafaela’s story. As we hopscotch into the later parts of novel however, the poem resurfaces and takes on new, three dimensional meaning. By way of a fax machine, the poem comes into Bobby’s possession and becomes the necessary roadmap that will eventually reunite him with his wife and son. This is literary thick mapping at it’s finest, when the author, reader and characters work in tandem to create an ever deepening plot, exposing the infinite possible spheres of reality that can frame and (re)frame a singular object. The act of hopscotching through Tropic of Orange allows readers to move circuitously and dynamically through a sequence of time that would otherwise be linear. It is then up to the reader to employ the hopscotching maneuver outside the literary and learn to embody the flanuering nepantlera/o within their day to day, lived reality. Screening Mulholland Drive is a more visual, less tactical experience of hopscotching through a thick map of Los Angeles. At the conclusion of the film, the spectator is left to ponder whether director David Lynch is responsible for the fragmented, deepening narratives, or if the split haunting realities and fantasies are a byproduct of the Hollywood industry itself. On the surface, the film presents us with two, bisecting stories: the first, a wish fulfillment fantasy, complete with a kitchey, glossy and overacted aesthetic that we’d expect from a long dream sequence. The viewer is introduced to the character Betty, a seemingly naive, blonde bombshell and recent Angeleno transplant. The counterpart to this female dichotomy is Rita, the mysterious, amnesiatic, femme fatale who comes to depend on Betty for every move. Part one ends with Betty’s acting career on the brink of major success, and a blossoming romance between the two women. The change between part one and two, the movement between fantasy and “reality,” is signaled when the lighting and makeup are darkened and the cinematography becomes agitated and fragmented. We learn that Betty and Rita are fictional character’s in Diane Sawyer’s fantasy. Part one is in fact an imagined, reworking of the failed relationship between Diane and Camilla Rhodes, the manipulative, unattainable Hollywood star. If we are to consider hopscotching a form of corporeal and psychological agency, or rather, a strategic way to navigate disparate, co-existing social spheres, Diane loses her navigational grip between parts one and two. Instead, a multiplicity of darker realities take over, flipping and twisting the binary framing of the central female characters. Diane and Camilla move in and between the innocent/guilty, or virgin/whore dichotomies, a visual hopscotching that exposes how Hollywood casts women within one of two rigidly constructed roles. The film is an unsettling one, and even more so when viewed from the space of Los Angeles. We are left to question the profound implications of Hollywood as a factory of dreams, and to what extent our quotidian realities are an extension of, or departure from, the omnipresent fantasy that has fueled the city of Angels since its inception. Herein lies the necessity of the flaneuring, border-crossing, nepantlera/o; the one who hopscotches through the crowd, the urban multitude, excavating the seemingly lost stories of our city’s thick reality and even thicker imagination. Works Cited: Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print. Baudelaire, Charles, and P. E. Charvet. The Painter of Modern Life. London: Penguin, 2010. Print. Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux. Imagine Television, 1999. DVD. Presner, Todd Samuel., David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano. HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014. Print. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. 1997. Print On HyperCities and Nightcrawler
I came to Los Angeles bundled up in cliché – doe-eyed, homesick, yet utterly determined to build a life in what I felt was a completely heartless city. I have since learned to stop worrying and love LA. Facilitating this process were two strangely connected sources -- HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities by Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano and Nightcrawler, directed by Dan Gilroy and starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Combined, these “texts” offer a way recognizing the deep history of Los Angeles – including the structures of violence it was built on and which have continued to be perpetuated by social inequities. Both HyperCities and Nightcrawler offer a way of contesting the curation of information and narrative in such a way that exposes the underlying power dynamics at play. It might seem curious that such difficult texts might offer emotional consolation but each item, showed me how to “see” Los Angeles in another way. As I stand on the precipice of moving from Westwood to South Central, I recognize the incredible power of the dispossessed and of the dense layering of story and life that populates each brick and wall. Loving a place involves both celebrating its beauty and coming to terms with its “ugly” and the violences that occur here. Hypercities and Nightcrawler offer us an opportunity to bravely open Pandora’s box and let it fill our hearts in constructive and informative ways. HyperCities will almost certainly be a crucial software, text, and concept in the Digital Humanities. But what exactly is DH? To that I would answer, broadly, that it is the study and exploration of the intersection of technology and human life. More specifically, it is the examination of the intersections of computer technology and a variety of its social implications, including its political ramifications. Unfortunately, in the field, there is often a great emphasis placed on the “digital” or “technological” aspect of the field which results in a preoccupation of “mastering” technological tools with little attention paid to the humanities aspect. This is where HyperCities makes its most important intervention – by effectively marrying and balancing the digital and the humanities elements in order to utilize tools to tell a story that directly impacts human life. The authors ask, “What if the World Wide Web was composed of lives, not pages?...Among other things you might find historical maps, architectural reconstructions, personal stories, pictures, documents, and other sources that bring alive the texture and vibrancy of past places…What if there was a way to let the ghosts return, the memories come to life, and the silenced voices be heard?” (13). HyperCities offers us a way of digging into the past at the crux of an important technological moment without falling into the mentality of technological determinism and in such a way that prioritizes human existence. In order to accomplish the merging of technology and story, Presner, Shepard, Kawano offer an emergent form of cartography – “thick mapping.” Thick mapping “refers to the processes of collecting, aggregating, and visualizing ever more layers of geographic or place-specific data. Thick maps are sometimes called “deep maps” because they embody temporal and historical dynamics through a multiplicity of layered narratives, sources, and even representational practices” (17). This dense layering of information creates an ever-expanding narrative that both tells a story and, with the help of digital technology, is also able to render this complexity visually by harnessing a variety of media forms across platforms and integrating them into a dense but singular (re)presentation – even while contesting this singularity and noting its incompleteness. This movement towards recognizing the value of human voice and the project of “stitching” together pieces is reflected even in the construction of the text which uses different fonts to differentiate between authors whose narratives and narrations themselves crisscross through each other’s work. This is, in many ways, an inherently political project as it refutes “scholarly” (read: elitist) means of archiving and record-keeping (Kawano’s section grapples extensively with Tweets in the aftermath of a major catastrophy) and offers a new and exciting way of documenting and preserving life. In terms of thinking about the incredibly rich and often problematic history of Los Angeles, HyperCities as both software and theory, provides a powerful way of reapproaching the city’s history. The text provides both a methodology for a variety of fields of study and for life. This brings me to Nightcrawler – a film that I watched upon its release, when I had first arrived to LA a dewy-faced child and which I recently re-watched as a grizzled graduate student. I think of this movie as one component of HyperCities in action – a story waiting to be stitched together with other stories that is, itself, made up of so many components that reveal the underbelly of the media business. The film exposes the curation of information in the media, of the banal way we too often treat the violence that fundamentally alters people’s lives, and the film literally and metaphorically maps the city. In Nightcrawler, we follow the business exploits of Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhall) as he sells horrific content to a news outlet as a stringer. Nightcrawler drags us around and through Los Angeles, showing us which lives matter and which do not. Nina Romina, played by Rene Russo, states, “think of our news cast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut” and clarifies by adding, “We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs. What that means is a victim or victims, preferably well-off and/or white, injured at the hands of the poor, or a minority.” Nightcrawler is one way of giving voice to the voiceless in that it directly addresses the necropolitics of LA and the way in which highways function as technologies of power by segregating the city by race and class. The position of people of color in the film is very specific and limited, much like real life in LA. In their first exchange, Lou tells Rick Carey (Riz Ahmed) to “sell” himself. Rick answers, “I took three buses to get here. I finished high school. I need a job. I'll do just about anything. That's me. Hire Rick.” Rick, a man of color, is not white and thus lacks a commodity to sell and does not articulate himself in the same way that Lou’s privileged position enables him to. Lou assumes that his white, heterosexual male view is universal. Rick, too, is very quickly able to tell that Lou is a sociopath disguised as a businessman. Later, when Lou videotapes a violent shoot out, his path crosses with Detective Fronteiri (Michael Hyatt), an astute detective and woman of color. Detective Fronteiri (Michael Hyatt) like Rick can see through Lou; they see his privilege and how he leverages this in an extraordinarily cold and calculated manner. On the other hand, Nina, a white woman, protects Lou and celebrates Lou’s work at the close of the film – even after her sexual exploitation by Lou (read: repeated rape). Power, profit, and place (both social position and actual place) are always at the center of the discussion in Nightcrawler. Again, it must seem strange that I have found a way to make peace with my fear of Los Angeles through films like Nightcrawler – but we only what we do not know, what we cannot yet make sense of. Nightcrawler works towards a, albeit terrifying, form of transparency in the kinds of exchanges a city like Los Angeles necessitates and facilitates. Gritty and unflinching, it also exposes and unsettles the seat of white heterosexual male power by exposing it as a construction and, in the case of Lou, a kind of insanity. HyperCities is a collaborative project that works towards showing how all cities are themselves collaborative projects, made up of contingencies and deep running relationships in all forms. Nightcrawler depicts, this, too – the way we crash into one another and even the way our lives our often heavily intertwined by the violences we visit upon each other. Cities and cites are places rich and rife with narration. In the same place where someone experienced their first kiss, someone else may have been shot. What does it mean to recognize this layering? What does it tell us about our own lives and about the kinds of futuries we might envision if it is increasingly possible to build a relationship with the past through digital technology? How might we use technology different if we think of it not only as an artifact of modernity but also a doorway into experiencing history differently? The authors in HyperCities write, “thick maps betray their conditions of possibility, their authorship and contingency, without naturalizing or imposing a singular world-view. In essence, thick maps give rise to forms of counter-mapping, alternative maps, multiple voices, and on-going contestations” (19). In their own way, HyperCities and Nightcrawler offer a means of contestation, a way of exposing the realities of a particular place. Both texts are about seeing what is not immediately visible, about acts of forgetting remembering and the shapes survival takes – the survival of documents pHOTO COLLAGEI smile even as I look over these photos, at the end of my (nearly) complete academic year, my first year in Los Angeles. I see the photo of Venice beach that I took in my first week here -- as I stood behind my mother and we marveled at the waves. I see the first image I ever took of UCLA upon my recruitment visit -- before I even accepted the offer to attend here -- and how I already knew that I was where I belong as I stood before the library. I see the shore of some unknown beach along the PCH that my partner and I stopped at and it feels like falling in love. I see the roof of the Oviatt Building, taken just a few weeks ago, and marvel again...this time, at how far I have come and how much this place is starting to feel like home.
Towards the end of his song, "Glamorous Glue," Morrissey, a native of Manchester, England, croons, "We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/London is dead, London is dead, London is dead/London is dead, London is dead, London is dead." Morrissey is of Irish descent but grew up in England, thus he understand the colonial occupation of land. For a white citizen of the United Kingdom to look towards Los Angeles, arguably the greatest social experiment in modern human history, for linguistic progress and proclaim the death of the English capital is quite radical and extraordinary. Morrissey's acknowledgement of Los Angeles (a nod to his rabid Chicana/o fan base) establishes Los Angeles as the new (multi)cultural center of the United States, replacing New York, (the Big Aguacate has triumphed over the Big Apple). New York, named after the Duke of York of England, now cedes linguistic and cultural authority to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula. A white man born into decadent privilege is overtaken by a Marian apparition harkening to the original brown Virgin, the Virgen de Guadalupe. Myopic male authority yields to woman of color wisdom. The Big Aguacate would be an appropriate moniker for Los Angeles for the etymological root of the word originates from Nahuatl, representing a re-indigenization of the Americas, a Reconquista through the tongue—both gastronomic (what white person does not devour Mexican cuisine, albeit the bastardized Chipotle version?) and linguistic, a gradual acceptance of Spanish as the de facto second language of the city. According to the Pew Hispanic Research Center, the City of Angels is home to nearly 10% of the country's Latina/o population, and Mexicans/Chicanas/os comprise two-thirds (Brown and Lopez). Because of our shared border, the numbers of Mexicans/Chicanas/os will always outnumber the populations of Latinas/os from other Latin American countries. Despite such demographic, linguistic, and gastronomic evidence of potential, the Chicanx population of Los Angeles finds itself at a crossroads—emerge to become the political, intellectual, and industry leaders of tomorrow or relegate itself to rote existences of mind-numbing, repetitive labor and consumption of plastic material goods. The film, Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, and the novel, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, by John Rechy, paint portraits of the dystopic latter path and describe a potential future of a Los Angeles resembling Johannesburg, South Africa, during apartheid. The texts' two protagonists, Blade Runner's Rick Deckard played by Harrison Ford, and Amalia Gómez represent the Freirian colonized mind, programmed to decommission the aspirations of replicants (Mexicans) escaping the chains of wage slavery.
I chose Rechy's The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez for several reasons. Firstly, John Rechy, a child of the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez border, is a Los Angeles transplant and given his past as a hustler on its streets is intimately familiar with the urban sexual sprawl. Los Angeles features prominently in many of his texts, as he confesses his fascination with the cityscape in the introduction of another one of his texts, Bodies and Souls, "'It always astounded him, this city of bodies and souls. He did not consider it the flippant land of the inherited clichés. To him [Los Angeles] was the most spiritual and physical of cities, a profound city which drew to it the various bright and dark energies of the country'" (Rechy ix). Secondly, although both the director and the writer of my chosen texts are men, Rechy's Amalia experiences the grittiness of the city through a woman's body, a woman's desires, and a woman's pain—more specifically and importantly, a Chicana navigating multiple subjectivities—a first world woman suffering third world oppressions. Amalia embodies the spirituality and physicality of Los Angeles. Lastly, Rechy's dark vision of a Chicana struggling to survive the day-to-day realities of the harsh cityscape mirrors the travails of waves of immigrants who negotiate similar situations, regardless of the fact that she was born in Texas; for Amalia, citizenship grants few privileges. Amalia Gómez opens with the protagonist witnessing a miracle—a cross in the sky. Amalia convinces herself that the cross must be what she has been desiring, a heavenly sign validating her existence and actions. Throughout her "miraculous" day, Rechy weaves Amalia's traumatic memories of her childhood in the "Segundo Barrio" of South El Paso and on-again, off-again single motherhood in Los Angeles with her current experiences to paint a portrait of suffering and the development of a colonized mind. As a child mired in poverty, Amalia's mother, Teresa, conveys to her daughter their good fortune of not having to live in the squalor of Mexico (Rechy 16). Amalia's teachers and the church nuns force the yoke of colonization onto Amalia's shoulders, who attempts to resist. Later as a teen-ager, however, comes the ultimate betrayal. Teresa begins to resent Amalia when she realizes her husband desires his own daughter. Furthermore, the son of family friends rapes Amalia in an alley; her own parents dispute her veracity, forcing her to marry him. She escapes to the City of Angels to follow another man, yet he, like all the men in her life, treats her with little respect, and she must forge a meager subsistence for herself and her children. As her two sons and a daughter grow up, Amalia replicates patriarchy by favoring the older, heterosexual son who is in jail over her daughter and her younger, feminine son who are good students. Amalia's daughter accuses Amalia's current live-in boyfriend, Reynaldo, of trying to molest her. Amalia, like her own mother, doubts her story. When she discovers her younger son, Juan, is gay, Amalia disowns him and throws him out of the house. Societal racist misogyny and her childhood trauma force Amalia to become a petty tyrant who oppresses her own children. For how many Chicanas is Amalia an accurate trope? For example, Pearl Fernandez of the Antelope Valley has pleaded guilty to allowing her boyfriend to abuse and torture her young son, Gabriel, to death for acting effeminately (Garcia). Another petty tyrant is Lupe Moreno, infamous "Proud Chicana Minuteman," who actively campaigns against undocumented immigrants, even though she was once married to an undocumented immigrant, and Vivian Martinez of Orange County, another xenophobic activist who declares, "'We are not like them,' she said of undocumented Latinos" (Delson). Through the character of Amalia Gomez, Rechy illustrates the colonized mind from a Chicana's perspective, a dire warning for future Chicanx generations. Ridley Scott released his neo-noir science fiction classic, Blade Runner in 1982, the start of the Reagan era, describing a bleak future in which multinational corporations genetically engineer their own race of expendable workers, "replicants" (code for Mexicans), for dangerous work in outer space colonies. Harrison Ford plays the role of Rick Deckard, a law enforcement agent known as "blade runners" charged with the task of decommissioning any replicant on Earth, as they are banned for fear of stealing work from "real" humans. Set in the early twenty-first century, Blade Runner recalls historical events such as the mass deportation of Mexicans and Chicanas/os from the U.S. during the Great Depression and the conflicting immigration policies of the Bracero Program and Operation Wetback. This is not the first anti-immigrant/anti-Mexican film in Scott's oeuvre. Scott's film, Alien, released in 1979, depicts an (illegal) alien invading a sovereign corporate ship that interrupts commerce by slaughtering its crew and impregnating each member who die once the alien offspring bursts from their stomachs. Alien evokes fears of Mexican women birthing hordes of children, thus eliciting the need to implement sterilization practices at hospitals in areas heavily populated with Mexican/Chicana women. Whether Scott, a British national, is calling attention to historical xenophobic policies or is warning his white brethren to beware of the hordes of Third World peoples, particularly women of color, invading sovereign First World Nations to leach resources from hard-working citizens can only be ascertained from an analysis of his complete body of work. Blade Runner's protagonist, Rick Deckard, represents another colonized mind. Suffering from internal colonization, the blade runner seeks to deport/decommission all replicants from Earth. Unbeknownst to Deckard as he pursues the fugitive replicants is the fact that he too is a replicant, akin to a slave acting as an overseer. According to postcolonial theorists such as Albert Memmi and Paolo Freire, once a people have been colonized, they begin to identify with the colonizer, thus the formation of petty tyrants, colonized people granted limited power who treat other colonized people harsher than the colonizer. At one point in the film, Deckard is hanging for his life from a ledge and a replicant remarks, "Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave." Deckard resigns from his blade running duties to live with Rachael, a replicant femme fatale who is unaware of her status as a replicant. Must a replicant (Mexican) adopt a false identity in order to escape the clutches of the State? Rachael's unawareness of her replicant identity conjures historical amnesia who must wear the mask of "real" humanity in order to escape termination. Mexicans, therefore, integrate more easily into this culture if they adopt Western values and practices and ultimately "forget" who they are. Why terminate Mexicans if their minds can be further colonized by the allure of a staid, plastic middle-class life as a reward for obedient servitude. The City of Angels represents a microcosm of the hemisphere. An expanding working-class brown population is juxtaposed against a diminishing middle and wealthy white populace. The structural impediments instituted and supported by white supremacy account for much of the stagnation of the Chicanx/Latina/o population in this country. Additionally, internal colonization and its perpetuation continue to segment our community into "us vs. them." The Chicanx population of Los Angeles stands on the precipice of permanent wage enslavement with the possibility of escaping such a fate through the painfully difficult process of decolonization. Rechy's The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez and Scott's Blade Runner describe dystopic realities where Chicanxs serve as a permanent underclass who exist to serve those in power—the State, the Church, the Corporation. Both works represent warnings of such an impending future. Do we heed Morrissey's lyrics and decolonize ourselves from our masters? Or are Chicanxs doomed to slavery and petty tyranny? Works Cited Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, and Veronica Cartwright. Twentieth Century Fox, 1979. DVD. Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, and Edward James Olmos. Warner, 1982. DVD. Brown Anna and Mark Hugo Lopez. "Mapping the Latino Population, By State, County and City." Pew Hispanic Research Center. Pew Research Center. 29 August 2013. Web. 10 June 2015. Delson, Jennifer. "Latinos Work to Shore up Border." The Los Angeles Times. The Los Angeles Times. 14 August 2005. Web. 10 June 2015. Garcia, Michelle. "Report: Couple Refuses Deal in Torture Case." The Advocate. The Advocate. 30 October 2014. Web. 10 June 2015. Morrissey. "Glamorous Glue." HMV, 1992. CD. Rechy, John. Bodies and Souls. New York: Grove, 2001. Print. --. The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez. New York: Grove, 1991. Print. Growing up in Orange County, Los Angeles always seemed like some faraway land that I had no interest in or claim to. Actually, my interest in Los Angeles continues to be largely non-existent despite the fact that I moved to the city almost a year ago. Whether I like it or not, I am now officially connected to Los Angeles and Los Angeles is connected to me. My knowledge of the city stems from the information I am currently presented with in the classroom. All three of the seminars I took this past quarter incorporated Los Angeles into the readings and subject material. Even though the focus of each seminar was different, my L.A.tin@ Noir course helped me recognize the underlying thread that connected the courses: LOCATION! LOCATION! LOCATION! And how LOCATION greatly influences the practices of identity, belonging, and re-invention.
One of the things I like to do when I move to a new place is get a feel for the city by figuring out its layout. Rome is a massive circle and to an extent, so is Mexico City. But Los Angeles? The only thing I was sure of was that it is a hot mess. I couldn’t geographically situate myself in the city and didn’t have a car or the time to explore it via the inefficient public transit. Ultimately, after hitching rides with friends, I got a sense that Los Angeles is essentially a long rectangle with a slight deformity in the center (to the north and to the south). Knowing the city’s shape (at least what I perceive it to be) has made existing in this city more bearable. But within this shape, I soon learned, are many enclaves --each with its own shifting history and community. It wasn’t until we conducted some mapping exercises and attended a Raymond Chandler walking tour that I took the politics of mapping Los Angeles more seriously. The importance of historical and contemporary “placeness” in Los Angeles is best exemplified in the films and literature that takes Los Angeles as its muse. Published in 2010, Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, takes the author’s own experiences of growing up in the then-predominantly Mexican enclave and turns them into stories filled with social commentary on the racial, gendered, classed, and sexual dynamics Chicanas/os face in Los Angeles. The novel opens with the powerful line, “We slipped into the country like thieves, onto the land that was once ours” (2) and then the chapter’s protagonist, a Mexican-born Los Angeles-raised immigrant named Hector, proceeds to share the story of how Mexicans were displaced from a neighborhood once known as the Chavez Ravine. The themes of displacement, loss, and redemption are prevalent throughout the novel. As is usually the case, death is what brings people together in Skyhorse’s book. The most poignant death happens one Friday afternoon during April at the corner of 6th Street and Westlake. The corner, located outside a restaurant/pool hall named El Guanaco (of Madonna’s “Borderline” video fame), is transformed by Felicia, a cleaning lady, into the weekly hangout for mothers and daughters to dress up and dance along to Madonna songs. As the Chicana Madonnas pose for a picture, a drive-by shooting takes place and one of the young participants is shot --a three year old named Alma. The shooting and death of “Baby Madonna” sets in motion a series of events revolving around the attachment to places and familial bonds. Aurora Esperanza, Felicia and Hector’s daughter, is a product of the strength and hope attached to the Mexican presence in Los Angeles. Her mother, despite having been born and raised in Los Angeles, hardly speaks English. It is Felicia’s disconnectedness from the English language that makes her feel like an outsider in her own land to the point where she tells her oblivious white boss, “It’s okay. My English should be better. It’s America, your country” (31). The simultaneously displacement and belonging Aurora and her mother experience extends to the rest of the Mexican community that inhabits Echo Park. Take Freddy for instance. He is a streetwise conman who has been away in jail for years. After he is released, he is happy to go back to his old stomping grounds in Echo Park, eager to see a familiar face. Shortly after, he realizes how much things have changed; old family-run businesses are now hipster eateries and he learns about his lover’s death from a drugged out neighbor. Freddy’s eagerness for freedom is soon outweighed by the inadequacy he feels in his own home turf, his own land. Brando Skyhorse strategically crafts out well-thought stories that are humorous, sentimental, and stimulating. His vast array of diverse characters is reflective of the Los Angeles population. Even the title of his novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, is filled with multiple meanings. The title is an obvious reference to the group of mothers and daughters that gathered outside of El Guanaco every Friday. But, it also serves as an allusion to the Catholic figure of the Virgin Mary, a symbol of hope and home for many Latina/o immigrants and citizens of the United States. The Virgin Mary, in her many embodiments, is an iconic figure of Los Angeles. After all, the city itself is named after her: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Ángeles. However, her figure takes a different turn and meaning in the 1996 Gothic fantasy film, The Craft. Set in an unnamed yet affluent part of Los Angeles, the film focuses on Sarah (Robin Tunney), a recent transplant from San Francisco. Sarah’s complicated mental health history and dark family past amplify her feeling of outsiderness as she struggles to make friends at her new school. She soon befriends the other outcast girls. Led by the power-hungry Nancy (Fairuza Balk), the trio also includes Bonnie (Neve Campbell) and Rochelle (Rachel True). The three girls are actually a budding coven in search of their fourth member. Shortly after Sarah joins them, they get more than what they bargained for as they experiment with their powers and end up in magical complications with serious consequences. Despite being set in Los Angeles, The Craft serves as a great example of the bubbles people and neighborhoods can create for themselves --even when they inhabit one of the most diverse cities in the world. With the exception of Rochelle, people of color are hardly part of the storyline or backdrop of the film. The only other person of color who gets more screen time than Rochelle is the Virgin Mary (albeit in her Virgen de Guadalupe form). Her first apparition is on a mural at the girls’ high school, St. Benedict’s Academy. She literally serves as the background while the camera focuses on Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle who are sitting in the foreground. Next, when the girls venture into a New Age shop, the camera briefly focuses on a shrine dedicated to the Virgen de Guadalupe. The figure of the Mexican Virgin Mary is a symbol in the film that highlights the girls’ otherness. It also serves as a reminder to the viewer that the film they are watching is taking place in Los Angeles. Like The Madonnas of Echo Park, language is used as a way to bring attention to otherness. In one of the first scenes of the film, Sarah is sitting in French class. The teacher is struggling to engage some of the teenage boys in the course. One of the boys asks, “This is Los Angeles --shouldn’t we be learning Mexican?” “That would be Spanish,” he is corrected. It just so happens that Sarah speaks French very well and is able to have a conversation with the teacher. In doing so, Sarah brings attention to herself for being different. At the same time, the otherness brought up by the mention of Mexicans and Spanish is glossed over. The male student’s observation that they would benefit more from learning Spanish instead of French offers a sharp contrast to Felicia from The Madonnas of Echo Park who believes she should speak better English because she lives in a space run by English-speaking white people. The Craft’s storyline and its characters may not pack much depth into its 101 minutes of running time but the film does a decent job in getting viewers to think about how Los Angeles is often portrayed as the land of misfits. Additionally, the supernatural elements that are incorporated into the story add a semi-entertaining dimension to the blandness of teenage life the rest of the film depicts. While The Madonnas of Echo Park makes extensive use of both Echo Park and the rest of Los Angeles in the stories Skyhorse interweaves, The Craft diverges by treating its main protagonists and Los Angeles as confined entities living in a vacuum. Thus, both cultural texts offer viewers and readers the opportunity to explore how one location can be fictionally mapped out in multiple ways and encompass layered experiences that never depict the full story. The question then becomes, “How does Los Angeles speak to you?” Yet, that is one of the aspects that characterizes Los Angeles: it always provides a space for re-invention and re-imaginings. The following images were taken during our class trip to the Griffith Observatory. My phone ran out of space so I wasn't able to take more. I also had a brief video but unfortunately, the site does note seem to be able to host it.
***Originally posted under L.A.tin@ Noir Stories***
Tia Matilde put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. Thoughts were racing in Marina’s head. It all seemed so surreal. LAX was such a huge airport. She hadn’t been in Los Angeles since she was two. Now, 17 years later, she is in a car with her aunt and cousin, driving across the city to her mother’s family’s home in Boyle Heights. Only her mother would not be there. At least not really. She’d been dead for a little over a week now. All because of a uterine infection that took a turn for the worst and lack of medical insurance. Marina’s mother had not kept in touch with Marina, her twin brother Hernan, or her father. Apparently, her mother had divorced her children, too, --not just her husband. There were many times Marina wished she could have talked to her mother. So many overwhelming questions and feelings that no one else could have understood. Her father never brought up her mother and even Hernan did not care enough to probe into the family history. But Marina, on the other hand, longed for a motherly connection. Marina didn’t resent her mother but was hurt by the fact that she did not seem to care enough about what happened to her children. How can you just decide to get up and leave one day? Sever all ties? Did mother think of us as she took her final breaths? The importance of thick mapping for me is to resurrect the voices of the queer in order to provide oxygen for their desires, even if they remained hidden in the shadows. Thick mapping of queer lives--queer history--demands a rewriting of the master narrative of history. The Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 in New York City is accepted as the birth of the modern LGBT movement. However, queer activists were organizing in Silverlake as early as 1951. As the pictures above illustrate, there were several rebellions against police brutality at the Black Cat bar here in Los Angeles. Why is this rebellions not considered the birth of the queer movement? Who decides such things? I demand a maternity/paternity test of the Stonewall birth. Even respected scholars like Jose Esteban Munoz (RIP) repeat these "truths" that are ahistorical. In Queering Utopia, Munoz mentions the Stonewall Inn as the site of the birth of the queer movement. I would think someone as respected as him would not fall prey to repeating mis-truths. This might be a minute error in some people's eyes, but it actually makes me livid. Since reading that passage in Queering Utopia, I do not hold his theories in the same regard as I had before. This may seem harsh, but what many people believe this drivel! Again, I revert back to the original, original gangster of queer letters, Rechy, who wrote about the Black Cat rebellions many years ago. This writing can be found in his collection of essay, Beneath the Skin. Munoz's ahistorical error reinforces the my belief that I must start with Rechy. His corpus is marginalized as a relic or an artifact not worth studying and examining from multiple perspectives but this is a tragedy. Ultimately, this stresses the importance of thick mapping for me. The third picture is a matchbook cover of a gay bar on the Sunset trip in the 1940s. Until I found it, I had never heard of Cafe Gala. More lives to be resurrected.
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