Place Bio Los Angeles - Essay Example

? Place Bio; Los Angeles Place Bio; Los Angeles (Different Sites in Los Angeles) The AAG Newsletter presented a more balanced and accurate picture of Los Angeles’s past and its regional diversity than other guides to the city. This will inspire its audience to re imagine tourism, rethink the spatial organization of Los Angeles and other urban areas. “A People’s Guide to Los Angeles” is a blueprint to places where progressive groups fought battles along lines of color, gender and class. Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng who are professors tries to explain the history of Los Angeles, why campaigns were launched, how the lines of segregation were drawn, where garment workers have been enslaved. Therefore, they have collaborated on ‘A People’s Guide to Los Angeles.’ Davis and McWilliams alerted visitors to the existence of Los Angeles's deep division and hidden history of conflict but they did not specifically tell where the evidence was prominent, where one could go to actually see it (Ward, 1992). The guide brilliantly produced listings of many historic sites of struggle with themed tours of the city from Latino, Native American and the African American. A People’s Guide to Los Angeles is a socio-political look at the West Coast’s occasionally explosive cultural reservation that do not turn up in the usual tourist guides. There are several sites highlighted in the site including Biddy Mason Park which is located less than 50 yards south of the Bradburry. Dalores Hayden created the sculpture, mural dedicated to the lie of Biddy Mason. She was born a slave in Georgia, 1818; however, she went to San Bernardino in 1851 with Rebeca Smith. California was a free state and a judge declared Mason set free (Robert, 2003). Kashu Reality is another site in “A people’s Guide to Los Angeles”. Kazuo Inouye was propelled towards the success by his experiences with discrimination. He worked hard to open up all-white neighborhoods to the white people. He worked with Japanese Americans and African Americans to purchase homes often from Jewish homeowners or others who were sympathetic to racial integration. He helped to change the face of several Los Angeles neighborhoods. When he found a Japanese American buyer, a rival white estate agent broke all the windows in the home. Inouye confronted him directly and threatened to shoot the white real estate agent if he dared to interfere with the property again. Through similar tactic, he managed to sell a number of homes in the Crenshaw district during the 1950s and 1960s (Chaz & Mitchell, 2005). He advertised regularly in the Black Press and facilitated the area’s demographic shift from an all-white to a multiethnic African, American, Japanese and Latino place. Another location of great importance is the southern California Library for social studies and research on Vermont. It is well known for their extensive collection of books, posters, political pamphlets and other memorabilia in connection with struggle in Los Angeles. Philips who is a Los Angeles native, author of many in his fiction uses geography to discuss race, class and social fabric of Los Angeles. He touches on Downtown gentrification, Japanese in the Crenshaw District, the Library Tower among others. City of Quartz is another site evident in the “A people’s Guide to Los Angeles”. Davis took it as his responsibility in correcting of Banham's refusal to look into Los Angeles's shadows and alleyways. City of Quartz is the closest that could be used to giving Los Angeles the noir sociological treatment that it deserves. Davis lays bare the structures of power, inequality, and violence that diminished the Californian dream. He also highlights a cast of villains that includes the real estate and railway barons who carved the place up in the twentieth century. Davis produced affecting chapters such as the ones on the militarization of the city through initiatives designed to keep out homeless people, and his account of the creation of the new downtown. He tells the heart-rending story of Fontana, a blue collar suburb-city in the outer reaches of the San Gabriel valley, where the cycle of hyper-industrialization and shattering deindustrialization played out in just half a century. Southern California is fresh, quirky and inquisitive site. A journalist for many years in Los Angeles and a practicing lawyer, McWilliams defended the Mexican-Americans accused of murder in the infamous 1942 Sleepy Lagoon case, in which more than three-hundred Mexican Americans were arrested after a body was found in a city reservoir. As a supporter of many progressive causes, McWilliams places Native Americans, Jesuit missionaries, Spanish colonial elites and later, waves of Mexican-American immigrants as the main theme of the city's story. He points the eccentricities, fantasies, and foolishness of the city's breakneck growth after its inclusion in the US. McWilliams’s briefing of the rise of Hollywood and its relationship with early waves of pious Christian settlers and peace-seeking sanatorium clients is outstanding just as his descriptions of the orange grove latifundia of the Inland Empire. Marilyn Monroe’s handprints is also an important site at Grauman's Chinese Theater. The entertainment industry plays a major role in the city of Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods. It provides a beautiful collection of short essays, maps, stories, photographs, directions and secret histories. The architect is a field that could not be ignored in the guidebook. Richard Neutra is the emigre architect who defined the international style in Los Angeles housing. English architect and planning theorist Reyner Banham zips past the unregulated mix of housing and mini-malls, of commercial strips, parking lots and warehouses, and ticks off the architectural oddities he encounters: neo-classical mansions and Japanese artisan cottages, Art Deco movie palaces and the neon-clad coffee shops of 1950s futurism. He embraces the city's freeways as central to understanding Los Angeles. After Banham's tour of the city, his account of its suburbs, with their hidden enclaves of privilege, precarious foothills, hedonistic beaches, and urban prairies of ranch-style sprawl springs out the desire to readers of wanting to travel beyond it. Another site of tourist’s destination is the City of Angels where struggles related to race, class, gender, and sexuality have been experienced. Many events concerning the above stated malpractices have divided Los Angeles to six divisions, which are North Los Angeles, the Eastside and San Gabriel Valley, South Los Angeles, Long Beach and the Harbor, the Westside, and the San Fernando Valley (Robert, 2003). Power has been impacted in shaping of the places and fully imposed within the regions. There has been a clear struggle in Los Angeles’ history and landscape. The history of California and especially Los Angeles shows race has been one of the central forces shaping the development of the region. Since the arrival of the Spanish missionaries to the development of Chinatown and the beating of Rodney King, race has been an influential factor on the region’s economy, landscape and history (Richard, 2011). There have been efforts to memorize various communities of color, as it is evident in the Dunbar Hotel, Olvera Street and Little Tokyo. The guidebook creates dramatically different perspectives and histories of those who have been systematically excluded from most representations of the city’s history: the working class and the poor indigenous people, people of color, women, immigrants, gays and lesbians, environmental justice activists, political radicals and other marginalized groups. Howard Zinn critically examined the past from a perspective of marginalized groups and tried to answer the question concerning the historically significant in Los Angeles. He analyses a site of Musicians Union Hall. The hall houses the first musician’s union in the United States to become racially integrated from segregated origins. Before integration, a separate Negro musician’s union struggled to achieve the same pay and access to gigs as its white counterpart. The joining of the two unions is an important early civil rights victory in Los Angeles (Wendy et al. 2012). California Eagle Building is also a site that housed the California Eagle, an early black-owned newspaper that was published from 1879 to 1964. The founder of the paper was John Neimore who escaped slavery while in 1921 Charlotta Bass bought the paper and changed its name from “The OWL” to California Eagle. The paper built a reputation for challenging racial discrimination, the mistreatment of workers and abuses of policies. The Eagle remained owned by woman until a short period before its closure. References Laura P., Laura B., and Wendy C., (2012). A People’s Guide to Los Angeles. CALIFORNIA: University of California Press. Ward S. (1992). Always a Rebel. SAN DIEGO: Christian University Press. Chaz B., and Mitchell C.V (2005). Dreams of Freedom. SAN DIEGO: AK Press. Robert N. (2003). The Destruction of The California Indians. CALIFORNIA: Biston Books. George H. (2006). Indians in Los Angeles. LOS ANGELES: Alferd Knopf Publishers. Richard G.C (2011). The Magonista Capture of Tijuana. SAN DIEGO: Christian University Press. Read More