Arizona Bay

(Or, Los Angeles is a Horrible Place and it's Worth Fighting For)

There's a joke about Los Angeles. It goes something like this:

Q: Why is Saigon the sister city of Los Angeles?

A: Because they're both foreign cities formerly occupied by Americans.

It's funny because it's true. There's very little America left in LA. One of it’s more apt nicknames is the “Capital of the Third World”, because of it’s “2nd largest populations”.

Los Angeles has the 2nd largest population of Ethiopians outside of Ethiopia, and the 2nd largest population of Persians outside of Iran, and Koreans, and Armenians, and Thais, and so on and so forth. Every ethnicity and nationality is represented, and every language in spoken.

An immigrant can spend their entire life in LA and never have to learn English—and many never do.

My favorite place in Los Angeles is Olvera Street. It’s also the oldest place. To be precise, it’s the oldest place LEFT. There were older parts of LA, but the buildings were destroyed by fire and floods.

What’s left feels like a Mexican village.

The buildings of Olvera Street date to the late 1700s. And if you get there in the morning, before the arrival of the tourist hordes, you can feel the ghosts of the Spanish Empire.

I used to walk there from my downtown loft. It was a good place to nurse a hangover. After a bowl of menudo and a few Micheladas the alcohol withdrawals would subside and I’d start to wonder, who walked this street?

In my imagination I’d picture campesinos, and merchants, and Indians, and vaqueros. Maybe a soldier on his way to claim a land grant awarded to him by the Spanish crown. They all walked here. And they all left a mark.

Every part of Los Angeles has been immortalized in film, and Olvera Street isn’t different in that regard. Many movies, needing a Mexican village location, filmed here. Charlie Chaplain filmed The Kid here.

Walking south towards home, I’d leave the narrow confines of Olvera Street and enter the old town square.

This feels more like 19th Century America. More like the remnants of a frontier town--when California was acquired at the conclusion of the Mexican American War. (And if you don't believe it was rightfully acquired please read the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.)

There are ghosts here too. Union Station, with it’s combination of Mission Revival, Art Deco, and Streamline Modern is still there in all it’s glory.

It was built on top of what was once the LA Chinatown. Chinatown moved north when the station was built, displacing French Town—a community of French and Swiss immigrants.

There’s not much left of French Town. The last thread is the restaurant Taix. It started in French town, but the Taix family abandoned downtown and move their restaurant to Echo Park in the 1960s.

But just ahead of the square and it’s ghosts is the 20th century. The Downtown Los Angeles skyline looms over the Pueblo de Los Angeles. Beyond the skyline lies the endless sprawl of the Southern California megalopolis—built when car culture and freeways made endless sprawl possible.

This modern Los Angeles was built by Anglos—by Americans. They were attracted by oil, endless amounts of land, and that perfect perfect California weather. New industries, like aircraft/defense and the recently industrialized entertainment complex provided jobs that paid well enough to provide a middle class lifestyle.

Home and car ownership became the norm. What emerged was a different type of city.

It was a city without a center. Because of the automobile and (at the time) excellent freeway system, people no longer had to live close to where they worked. Angelenos were free to go anywhere—and live anywhere—and work anywhere.

It was an individualistic city. The center was where ever you happened to be. You were the center.

And people came. They flooded in. And not just white Americans. Blacks from the south came too. So did hispanics from Mexico and Central America.

But the whites who built modern 20th Century Los Angeles began to get displaced.

For example, the notorious City of Compton used to be a white city. Then it became black. Now it’s Hispanic.

The floodgates opened in the 1990s, and the city was filled with the former denizens of the East Block, The Middle East,Asia, and Africa.

The entire world came. They all wanted a piece of the dream.

Today the working and middle class whites are gone. The whites that are left cling to the hills. It’s almost all white above Sunset Blvd, but as you move down into the flats the city becomes increasingly “diverse”.

There’s an underlying feeling of dread in Los Angeles. It’s an inkling of impending doom.

There’s a phenomenon Angelenos call “Earthquake Weather”. The earthquakes tend to come on warm gloomy overcast days. And the dread is extra palpable on Earthquake Weather days. You can see it on peoples faces. You can see it in how they move and walk and talk.

Because everyone knows the place is unsustainable. Not just environmentally—but socially. The entire place could go up in flames at any minuted. Just one perceived outrage could set it off.

Los Angeles is a big place, but how many people can it hold before it sinks into the ocean and becomes forever known as Arizona Bay?

I left LA over a decade ago.

We decided it wasn’t the place we wanted to raise our kids, so we got out. But what drove us away was that sense that it’s all temporary. That it’s all going to collapse someday.

And maybe it already has.

Even in the early 2000s I felt like I was living in the ruins of a grander and better civilization. Like a primitive tribesman looking at walls erected by some ancient king, I’d walk the streets and wonder, who built this, and where did they go, and why did they leave?

It was a silly question—because I know the answer. It was people like me and my ancestors who built this place. And we left because other people wanted it and we weren’t willing to fight for it.

Watching these riots from my quiet mountain state home, I can’t help but think that maybe it’s time to go back.

Maybe it’s time to evict the squatters from the ruins and fight for what’s ours.

If you liked this, my book Hollywood Samizdat: Notes From Below the Line is now available to preorder from Passage Press. Please reserve your copy today.