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.
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.