Aun otra creacion de nuestros profundos predecesores. Esta vez de Peten, Guatemala.
J.T.
Tikal Los Angeles,
Los Angeles Has Photographers
In the age of the smartphone it would seem that the world has no more secrets, but actually dispersed through the world are many gems still awaiting our ‘discovery’. Last night my eyes had the fortune to intersect with precisely such gems, and en masse, at the opening reception of a Master Photographer’s exhibit in Los Angeles. Held at The Lodge, in none other than my native ‘East Hollywood’ area, the work of fellow L.A. native George Rodriguez envelops audiences in a stunning blast through the past.
‘Stunning’ might also be understating the effect of the blast. For me personally, as a millennial twenty-something, there is hardly such a thing as the past before the new millennium to begin with, but I also live in a city where an endless wave of real estate developments and its chic new markets strive to place the ole pueblo at the edge of the future, or at least far away from ‘what [it] was‘. These factors together only make the past, in the historic sense, an even stranger figment to conceptualize, if not an outright absurd one.
Yet in George Rodriguez’s Double Vision, the past in historic terms is not only still with us, but roaring with a life-force so vivid that it matters little whether I know how to appreciate it or not; each photograph takes its place as a monumental reality to ‘contend’ with that any observer will have to reckon for themselves.
From the trepidation winding out like a terrible mist in a picture of Marilyn Monroe seated next to her Mexican boyfriend at a night out at the Hollywood Bowl, to the unmistakable charm and intelligence beaming from the mind of Eric Lynn Wright or ‘Eazy-E’ in a portrait of him, and much more, each of George’s photographs carry a magical sense of ‘time’, and just how precious it may actually be to be inside of that time.
The radiance beaming through each photograph is of course due in no small part to the photographer’s whimsical and indefatigable talent, but for the student of photography, it should be noted that the exhibit also benefits from the print quality of each picture.
Remember: as the exhibit features pictures from as early as 1962, absolutely none of the photographs hail from DSLRS, or digital cameras or photoshop; every photograph is from film, the ‘process’ and development of which can make for fine arts themselves.
Marc Valesella, French-American professor of Black and White photography at Santa Monica college, printed each and all of the photographs for Mr. Rodriguez’s exhibit, at grades more than justifying his title as professor. Chatting with Marc for a moment, the professor told me how each picture is a balancing act of punctuating exposure, or the light captured in the photograph, at just the right angles in just the right sections.
The professor’s passion for the work could be heard as much in his tone as it could be seen in the prints. It was a combination of forces. Marc was born in 1955. George, 1937.
Then, as if the exhibit were not enough of a treasure cove for yours truly, Professor Valesella encouraged me to go and talk with George Rodriguez himself for a moment. I replied that Mr. Rodriguez looked busy enough, what with the book signing and all, but the professor insisted, and accompanied me to walk over to where George was seated.
Standing before George and the table decorated with the books of his work, I had no choice but to cease the moment. I gestured towards him for a handshake, which he returned kindly, and on grasping his hand, introduced myself. George curbed his ear towards me to hear me more clearly–there were troves of people chattering through his exhibit–and I quickly registered the warmth of this reception. I then regaled George not only with congratulations on the exhibit, but on what was obviously a wonderful ride through the ages for him.
The Master Photographer thanked me, and then asked me about my own work. The rest was history, yet again in all its indispensable timeliness, as I proceeded to tell George Rodriguez of my writing and photography at JIMBO TIMES. A true discovery indeed.
J.T.
Deed Restrictions in Los Feliz and East Hollywood
T-RACES, or the Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces, is a powerful map and treasure cove of historical documents whose archives contain ‘area descriptions’ of L.A. neighborhoods as seen by former L.A. county and federal officials of the national Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC); basically, these officials distinguished which areas were “desirable” and which were “undesirable” for investment from private banks and government loans based on the areas’ racial makeup.
I’ve gathered a few of the area descriptions of the “Los Feliz” and “East Hollywood” neighborhoods, respectively, all of them dated from 1939. It’s fascinating to see the old vecindades distinguished by their racial and class makeup. For example, in the Los Feliz neighborhood, the absence of “foreign families” or “negros” based on the “deed restrictions” banning their presence, as well as single-family residential zoning, led to a “high green” or attractive rating for the HOLC:
“[In Los Feliz] …Deed restrictions cover both improvement costs and racial elements. Zoning is single-family residential. Conveniences are as available as is desirable in a multi-car garage neighborhood. This area was subdivided some 15 years ago, and was engineered and platted to contour resulting in well arranged and improved streets. Construction, maintenance and architectural designs are of the highest quality. Population is of a high character and many of the city’ s wealthiest citizens reside here. Values shown above are somewhat conjectural as size and location of homesite affects prices. This also applies to rentals as quality of tenant is a large consideration. With a convenient location, ideal building sites and high caliber deed restrictions, this area should continue indefinitely to attract a substantial type of resident. On the basis of present development and future prospects area is accorded a “high green ” grade.”
By contrast, in East Hollywood, to the Western Side of the area, because of the ‘concentration of Jewish families,’ along with 5 & 6 room dwellings, or apartment buildings with 5 to 6 units, a “medial yellow” or “only fairly” attractive grade was accorded.
“[In East Hollywood] …There are no deed restrictions and zoning, while mainly single-family, also permits all types of multi-family residential structures in different parts and is also “spot zoned” for business and provides for numerous institutional developments. Two of the largest hospitals in the city are located within the area. Conveniences are all readily available. This area was originally largely occupied by the old Sullivan Farm and was subdivided approximately 25 years ago. Divided by and surrounded with business thoroughfares this far-flung area contains a miscellaneous array of multi-family residential development; however, the pre-dominating type of residence is 5 & 6 room dwellings which are generally of standard construction and fairly well maintained. It is said to be one of the community’s best rental districts. Rumors of scattered Japanese and Negro residents were not confirmed as none were located except upon the business thoroughfares. There is a concentration of Jewish families between Melrose and Santa Monica Blvd. east of Western Avenue. The population in general is heterogeneous, as is also the aspects of the improvements. There is a fair percentage of owner occupancy and many homes are still occupied by original owners. There is a decided trend at present toward business and income properties; however, it is thought that the major part of the area will remain predominantly single-family for many years to come. The area is accorded a “medial yellow” grade.”
Such standards beg the question, just who was the HOLC describing these conditions to? That is, just who determined that ‘negros,’ ‘foreign’ and ‘Jewish’ people and their dwellings reduced the overall quality of life? In literature it’s called the white gaze, or the white imagination that dictates a certain narrative or reality as though it were a universal understanding, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.
With these frameworks in mind, I was excited to read about just how the vecindad my family and I would come to call home during the eighties when mom and pops arrived here fared ‘in the ratings.’
In the eyes of the HOLC, East Hollywood towards the East side was considered ‘blighted’ for 15% of its residency consisting of ‘foreign’ families, and for 10% of it consisting of ‘negros,’ as well as for the neighborhood’s multiple family dwellings and bungalows. This led to a “medial red” rating, meaning bank lenders were advised against issuing loans for homeowners or prospective homeowners here.
“[In East Hollywood] …The few deed restrictions which have not expired are irregular and largely non-effective. The major portion of area is zoned for single family dwellings, but multiple family dwellings are permitted in scattered sections. Conveniences are all readily available. This district was subdivided over 25 years ago as a popular price home district and has largely maintained the characteristics. Many of the improvements are of substandard construction and maintenance is spotted, being generally of a poor quality. Scattered throughout the area are a number of small “B” grade apartments, bungalow courts and other multi-family dwellings. The population is highly heterogeneous with more than a sprinkling of subversive racial elements, there being several concentrations of Japanese and Negroes within the district. There is also quite a Jewish population adjacent to the synagogue which is located in the northern part. While by no means a slum district, the area is definitely blighted and is accorded a “medial red” grade.”
On the one hand, it’s astounding to think that there used to be more Japanese and Black people in the neighborhood. But it’s also sobering to consider how World War II and the Japanese interment which followed violently displaced such communities from the area. When one considers these events and the subsequent or concurrent modernization that followed or accompanied the war, such as the building of L.A.’s first freeway in America in the Arroyo Seco Parkway in 1940, one can see how modern development has always been a matter of some violence on communities and restrictions of their space for the benefit of wealthier, more privileged groups.
It’s rarely ever easy to take another field trip through the historical foundations which led to our modern dilemmas with access to space in the inner city. But in order to know where we’re going, we have to know where we come from, Los Angeles.
J.T.
Redlining in Los Angeles
The Los Angeles we know in the 21st century is not just some place that arrived from out of the blue one summer day, but an environment built out through specifically racist laws, designations, and customs over decades, especially during the 20th century. During the 1960s, subsequent waves of civil unrest against such policies struck in several U.S. cities, among them in Watts, Newark, and Detroit.
In 1965, a traffic stop by white police officers in the community of Watts led to the arrest of two Black men, Marquette and Ronald Frye, and even their mother, Rena Frye, which angered a nearby crowd of predominantly Black residents, who witnessed the police officers roughhousing the family. When more officers arrived, who used their batons to threaten the crowd back, they fanned the flames of what would turn into six days of a war-zone in Watts, leaving 34 people dead, including at least 26 civilians killed by the LAPD and the National Guard, overwhelmingly Black but also including Latino residents, all of whose deaths were deemed by police forces as justifiable homicides.
When the people of Watts took to attacking police cars and looting storefronts over six days of unrest, was it strictly a matter of Black people protesting police violence? It was not, because police violence had a certain way of being located in a handful of neighborhoods over others. Enter the redlining practice.
In L.A., as in “sister” cities, redlining was a discriminatory practice by the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which was a federal government entity supposed to oversee housing for all Americans, that dissuaded loan services or bank assistance to African-Americans and other minorities for home-ownership based on how “desirable” or white their areas appeared on a racial map, shown partly in the shaded areas below.
“The Home Owners Loan Corporation designated minority neighborhoods (those shaded in black and gray in the map in this section) as being unfit for home financing, which, with racially restrictive covenants, excluded people of color from the housing boom that afforded many white households their first house.”
SOUTH LOS ANGELES | SINCE THE SIXTIES BY PAUL M. ONG, ANDRE COMANDON, ALYCIA CHENG, SILVIA R. GONZÁLEZ
How were such racial maps created? As Mike Davis points out, the racial makeup of many neighborhoods in L.A. were formed by racial covenants, or Klansmen sympathizers and supporters in Los Angeles who exerted pressure on Blacks, Asians, Jews and others to keep out of what were then white neighborhoods in the city.
The absence of explicit Jim Crow segregation laws in a northern city like L.A. notwithstanding then, racial covenants were most active and effective during the early 1920s up until just before the 1950s. Thus, for African-American children born in Watts during the 1950s, the predominantly Black and under-served population of their community wasn’t spontaneously located there, but forced to live there due to racist policies, not to mention racist judges looking the other way on those policies.
The Kerner Report
In 1967, less than two years after the war-zone in Watts, a police-raid at a Black-owned night club in Detroit led to the arrest of up to 85 African-Americans, which then quickly escalated into racial rioting throughout the city. After five days, at least 43 people were killed and thousands more were injured. In response, president Lyndon B. Johnson called for action, including the formation of the Kerner commission, whose task was to examine the root cause of the rioting, as well as ways to prevent more such violence going forward. Among the commission’s findings, when it came to the issue of housing inequality for nonwhites in the United States, it found that:
“[C]ondemned by segregation and poverty to live in the decaying slums of our central cities, the goal of a decent home and suitable environment is as far distant as ever.”
U.S. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1967
In our major cities, that condemnation was due precisely to redlining. Redlining concentrated home loans in predominantly white neighborhoods while restricting them from those of ethnic minorities, leaving only poverty to concentrate in the latter. Enter the resentment. Then, the rebellion.
In 2018, any Angeleno taking a walk through neighborhoods like Watts can still feel the legacy of L.A.’s redlining, and the relative lack of accountability concerning the issue, as well as the anger and frustration towards such acts of sabotage and abandon against a people and their community.
Yet with reports such as UCLA Luskin’s South L.A. Since The Sixties, examining how much “progress” the city has made in Watts and South Los Angeles since the Kerner report and other studies, the spirit of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz lives on. From there, our work is not done, but it continues.
J.T.
Los Angeles Students, California: Do Not Stop at One March
I see that it was in March 1968 that the students of five high schools across the fourth street bridge in East Los Angeles walked out of their classrooms in order to make their voices heard. They stood in defiance of rules barring them from so much as even uttering a word in Español at their schools, in protest of being paddled in front of their whole class by teachers and administrators for doing so, and in ire at being left by the state to sift through worn and torn books abandoned by more affluent white high schools on the opposite side of the bridge.
In 2008 I saw that at the end of the school-year at LAUSD, a school district in which over 74% of students speak a language other than English at home, only 48% of students graduated from the district, meaning more students were dropping out than leaving these schools with their diplomas. Unlike in 1968, however, there were no protests regarding these conditions.
In 2012 I saw a community college system in California that stifled the progress of Black and Brown bodies with useless math and “remedial” English classes that fractured their progress as undergraduates at every step of the way, eventually turning these students away from the state’s colleges altogether.
I then saw that in the ninth greatest economy in the world, the liberal dream state, or the home of Silicon Valley, where Brown bodies, or people who speak nomas un poquito de Español en sus casas make up nearly 50% of the state’s population, only 11% of this segment of the population has a Bachelor’s Degree.
I saw this after I watched some of the best minds of my generation in Los Angeles, teenagers who could have been doctors, professors, artists, musicians and far more, ransacked by methamphetamine addiction and its criminalization. Before them, for Generation X in the 1980s, it was the crack cocaine epidemic. In 2018, it is Molly, Xanax, OxyContin, and more.
This is as my generation and I are forced to watch the invasion of our neighborhoods by white wealth, which is moving with the same organized violence against my pueblo’s character as that of 50 years ago.
But now I can also see how “the other” is necessary for the legacy of white supremacy to survive, as necessary as it was over 500 years ago when the first colonizers arrived to the islands of the Western hemisphere to massacre the indigenous people who made their lives here; the colonizers knew early on that “the others” had to be maimed and then made inhumane in order for them to validate the exploitation of their character and that of the resources around them. Today the colonizers no longer arrive in wooden ships upon natives, but they arrive in the form of real estate evictions and rent hikes upon tenants. A war of attrition.
It does not end there, however. It only begins. I can also see that from Orange County to Los Angeles, to Ventura County and Santa Barbara, onto Fresno, Solano, Modesto, Stockton, Sacramento, and the Bay Area, it is the bodies of young Black, Brown, and “others” whose entrapment and displacement together account for over 90% of the state of California’s “juvenile” cases, aiding and abetting the survival of a multi-billion dollar police state here.
I then see how in addition to the state’s incarceration, probation, and other forms of entrapment of California’s Black and Brown bodies, the state also contracts “shadow” organizations or “nonprofits” it oversees and regulates to apply services to these bodies. Once these shadow organizations deem their services applied, though only to a select portion of these disenfranchised Black and Brown bodies, both the state and its partners are proud to tout such “reformed” Black and Brown people as “examples” of change or what could “one day” be of more of them.
At the same time I see that the people overseeing these services maintain the same white power structure, that is, of liberal white men and their peers claiming leadership, differing little from those service-providers who “corrected” my peers 50 years ago, and who “civilized” my people across the American continent long before then.
And so I see that in 2018 many in “the resistance” who like to think of themselves as helping the helpless are actually just helping themselves, signing the contracts, citing the services, and professionalizing the process over the long term in order to assure the state’s backing and its survival rather than assuring a reduction of its assault on Black and Brown bodies or otherwise dismantling.
I see many even in “the resistance” taking and brandishing the intellectual property of these Black and Brown bodies. “Advocates” getting awards off these Black and Brown bodies. “Counselors” getting grants off these Black and Brown bodies. Even “Marchers” getting paid off these Black and Brown bodies.
In turn, I see white guilt relieving itself in a country that is still shooting, maiming, and incarcerating more Black and Brown bodies with the day at the same time that it employs its court systems to further degrade and demoralize our conditions, and to justify such degradation and demoralization afterwards.
And I see that in 2018, the democrats are touted as our only hope in a U.S. Congress currently dominated by a republican majority, as if Black men and their families should forget how they were sent to prison at the highest rate of all time under a democratic president in the 1990s. And as if immigrant families should forget that Obama deported more economic refugees seeking shelter from U.S. destabilization policies abroad –primarily women and children– than the previous three presidents combined.
I further see that since 2016 in California there’s ruled in the state a democratic majority, which nonetheless makes for legislative sessions that are more interested in expanding California’s prison systems than the state’s universities. See Senate Bill No. 776, or Assembly Bill No. 2028.
California could likely be Clinton’s most prized tough-on-crime jewel; over the last thirty years it saw the largest expansion of the prison industrial complex in the country, which now increasingly contracts the private sector to lock up more Black and Brown bodies; so-called undocumented Black and Brown bodies. But the state of California also saw an expansion of its “shadow” organizations or shadow “services”, many of which in 2018 enjoy claiming responsibility for the “reform” of great portions of those same Black men incarcerated in the 1990s. As such, it is just a matter of time before many of these same groups claim responsibility for “services” applied to “undocumented” Black and Brown bodies as well.
Finally, I see my boy G, who is 12 years old and now a student at LAUSD, and one of the sharpest minds I’ve seen through my neighborhood in a generation. Like his peers 50 years before him and prior, he lives in a home without his father, but he must also face a mother in that home who doesn’t know how to nurture or appreciate his mind. G’s life is at risk.
He could be a champion for his pueblo, but the numbers speak for themselves. There is a higher chance of G’s going to prison than the state’s colleges for no other reason than his and his family’s coming from the pueblos.
I see hatred of G’s condition. But I also see collusion in his condition.
I see silence about G’s condition, its normalization.
And this is not all I see. But it is just enough.
Students; Professors; All:
Moving forward with your movements, keep this information close:
There are generations of violence they’ve inflicted on our bodies going back longer than one moment can recount.
Now, we’ve got to be careful with how we distinguish the different mechanisms of this violence. From our school systems, to rent hikes, to evictions and the courts which support them, to incarceration, surveillance of our public transportation, and even the organizations we join in resistance to these things: we’ve got to be careful not only with recognizing the system in its normalcy out in public, but even with those we call allies in the work of resistance to that same system in our more private movements; the state is widespread, covert and overt, and if we’re not careful to trace our steps as we move forward, the state is just as much with us as we hope to be against it.
Let us still be against it.
Let us be against it for the students of L.A. in 1968. But let us also be against it for the students of L.A. in 2008. Let us be against it for G.
For you and me, and the pueblo we all share.
The pueblo of Los Angeles.
J.T.