Ethnographies: Los Angeles

I love urban ethnography. These slices of a very particular life in time and place are tremendously engrossing, the best written among them totally subsuming the reader and transporting us to their subject to see it first-hand.

Few American cities have been so worthy of both love and hate as Los Angeles - not New York with its single-minded focus on being the biggest, tallest, deepest and most extreme example of everything a city can be, not Chicago with its roots firmly planted in the midwestern work ethic and philosophy of the Prairie, not cities that are so single-mindedly tied to their history as Boston or San Francisco. Los Angeles is a singular example of possibility, a model of how emptiness offers redemption and corruption, and how the two may be inextricable at this frontier. Los Angeles has offered so much to so many, but so often that promise has turned out to be a corrupted reality of sweatshops and strip malls, backbreaking labor, and a view of nothing so much as the homes in the hills bought with the blood and tears of immigrants new and old, pulled into this arid valley by the vacuum of its original inhabitants' marginalization and withdrawal.

But that promise! For the lucky few, the hope that LA offered was, through years of hard work, realized: the American dream became a waking paradise, homes were bought and children sent to college, and the view changed from looking up to looking out, surveying the citrus groves that once offered nothing but blisters and became, with perspective, a signifier of everything America could be.

The authors of several recent ethnographies, surveys and photo essays on Los Angeles tend to take a more balanced view of the city and its ethnic phenomena than those who lived (and live) the dream and (sometimes) its eventual fulfillment. They range from wide historical and sociological surveys of the city and its inhabitants, both specific and general (Imagining Los Angeles: Photographs of a 20th Century City; Irangeles: Iranians in Los Angeles) to the excellent and chaotic LA Now (volumes one and two), created for a variety of presentation events by the Art Center College of Design. Some are purely sociological, such as the excellent and thought-provoking Unmasking LA: Third Worlds and the City, or William McClung's imaginative and biting Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles. Even travel books, on rare occasions (such as Kim Weir's excellent Los Angeles Handbook, part of the better-than-average Moon Travel Handbooks series), offer insight and criticism into this city, which has been and remains so many different and contradictory things to so many different groups – the presentation of what we see every day to the outsider often succeeds in transforming the familiar into something new and exciting.

With an introduction by Carla Lazzareschi, manager of the LA Times' book development department, Imagining Los Angeles is a lush collection of 175 photographs detailing the city's rise from agricultural promised land all the way to a new and very different sort of promised land, one focused on a quite different kind of skin and pulp. The photos are drawn from the Times' own and a dozen other archives, and illustrate quite well how necessity became the mother of amazing invention in what was once a hostile and wind-swept outpost of missionaries and the Indians they subjugated. The photo selection pulls no punches - from the rape of the Owens Valley and Los Angeles' aqueducts and the myriad problems that caused, to reminders of the racial tensions that always seem just around the corner in a city that is both tremendously diverse and still very much ghettoized, the city's history is presented - both the spectacular triumphs of technology and the equally spectacular failures of spirit. It offers an engrossing and entertaining view of the good and the bad in LA's diverse history and imparts a bit of the excitement that the friction of such challenges always seems to generate.

In the wake of the Ayatollah's 1979 Islamic revolution, thousands of Iranians left their homeland for hopefully more welcoming environments. A huge number of these people found refuge in Los Angeles, which soon boasted the largest population of Iranian-born individuals in the west. Ron Kelley's Irangeles: Iranians in Los Angeles examines, though essays and Kelley's own photographs, the impact of the city on this population and the impact of this population on the city. Numerous interviews and short essays describe the Iranian experience in LA, from the difficulty of finding familiar food products to aspects of religious and political life. The book is insightful, showing the landscape of LA as an important factor in the ongoing drama of resistance and adaptation, and not simply as a backdrop against which this is all played out. The story is specific to Los Angeles and this particular population; it is not a generic tale of immigrants and their adaptive travails by any means. Kelley's words are moving and the photographs are alternately exciting and heartbreaking.

A huge volume of data and photographs supplement the alternately focused and chaotic essays of the two volumes of LA Now. The books are informal exhibit catalogs originally built to complement a series of events at or produced by the Art Center College of Design, and the breadth of their subject matter ranges from postmodern critiques of planning and architecture to meditations on weather, character, geology and geography and even the culinary peculiarities of the region. In some ways, these two volumes are glorified almanacs, with tremendous numbers of tables offering data addressing the most minute details of everyday life in Los Angeles, but combined with the text and graphic contributions – from the likes of Rem Koolhaas, Mike Davis, Kevin Starr and dozens of others – these books are elevated to something else. A very complete timeline of the region, overlaid with various sets of geographic data, make especially attractive maps that I wish were available in a larger form. The two-volume set is as hard to label as the essays prove its subject to be; amorphous, post-modern, overflowing its expected boundaries. The second volume, which presents seven proposals to "(shape) a new vision for downtown Los Angeles," does so quite succesfully and graphic-intensively, and includes a number of interesting and detailed renderings, plans, maps and other visual data. The large amount of such eye-candy and its integration with the text in both volumes will provide any cartophile with many hours of contented browsing.

Unmasking LA: Third Worlds and the City is a collection of essays, photographs and even poetry addressing the place of the "third world" (or technologically- and economically-challenged) and its residents, both in Los Angeles and outside of it, producing the materials that build the city and, in a very one-sided arrangement, consuming the culture that the city produces. The magical realist / culture war treatment of the subject is more a result of the combination of such disparate topics and authors (Deepak Chopra vs. Christian Parenti?) but the end result is surprising, and far more of an organic whole than its subject matter. I found this to be an interesting if slightly weird collection, and it certainly sheds much-needed light on not only the integration of and conflict with the formal third world and Los Angeles, but the equally important creation of a third world within the city, a culture of disenfrachisement and, barely, a lingering bit of hope.

William Alexander McClung's Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles tries to reconcile and find some common ground between the two great competing "mythologies of time and space" - the acquired Arcadia, and the invented Utopia. McClung finds more questions than answers in his examination of designed spaces, from freeways to buildings to entire communities. Ultimately his examinations are more thought-provoking than the answers he is able to ferret out; Los Angeles is, like its famous inhabitant Floyd Dominy, "wrapped in an enigma." McClung's toolbox is that of the critical analyst, and he uses these critical tools of his trade - that of a professor of literature - to deconstruct LA's man-made present to the metaphors used to justify and spur its building. A difficult but rewarding analysis of architecture, landscaping, literature, historiography and decorative and fine arts, McClung's book is sadly overlooked in many of the planning curricula that it could be most helpful in.