Is La Really Necessary
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday January 22, 1994
PALM trees, beloved of cartoonists, photographers and property developers as instant shorthand for Los Angeles, become a more telling symbol for this troubled city when you learn two things about them. They harbour rats and they are not indigenous.
The metaphor summarises the city's schizophrenia: the menacing, sinister side of life in the sunshine - crime, drugs, gangs, poverty and a pervasive fear - and demographic changes, in which foreign immigrants will eventually dominate the City of Angels. It is sometimes called a "reconquista" because of the number of Mexicans now residing as documented workers or illicitly, but LA will not be turned over entirely to the people who owned it before Statehood in 1848.
It is almost a cliche now that more Mexicans live here than anywhere other than Mexico City, but there are also more Koreans other than in Seoul, more Iranians other than Tehran, more Samoans other than the islands, and even more Louisiana Creoles than in New Orleans. In LA's school district, which educates 600,000 pupils, 83 languages are spoken. The second language at Beverly Hills High School is Farsi.
The "browning" of Los Angeles, in which by the year 2010 Hispanics will be a majority in the region, is the driving force behind the metamorphosis of the city's character. It is this sense of decisive change that exacerbates the increasing tribal rivalries and intensifies political difficulties.
The earthquake on Monday, with a 40-odd death toll and damage and repairs estimated at nearly $US30 billion, will deepen LA's difficulties, because the economy will be further damaged. This is despite media and politicians'rhetoric about "pulling together" and unity in the face of catastrophe. It is another disaster in a series that have almost the proportions of a biblical curse.
In the past four years, LA has suffered a drought, floods, devastating fires, an economic recession worse than the national one, the divisive racial beating of Rodney King and the resulting riots in 1992 (the worst urban disturbances in America this century) and now the earthquake, the worst since 1971.
Murders, about 1,100 a year, have doubled in 20 years, and drug use has quadrupled.
Stretching over 48 square kilometres, LA includes eight municipalities with a total of 600,000 people - 84 per cent Hispanic.
More than 100,000 jobs have been lost in LA since the late 1980s, many because the city's over-dependence on aerospace and defence, which has been cut back since the end of the Cold War. But before that, tyre, car and other highly-paid manufacturing plants closed. The tax revenue losses and dwindling funds from the State and Washington have brought the city close to bankruptcy
Amid these agonising social, economic, demographic and physical threats, we may wonder whether the City of Angels should exist at all. A reasonable argument can be mounted that it should not, although this would outrage the Chamber of Commerce boosters who have promoted LA as the "city of the future"since it sought to become a modern Western city late last century.
Most great world cities have either a navigable river or a natural harbour- acting as a trade crossroads - or are strategically sited, adjacent to rich agricultural soil or on land of great beauty. None of these applies to the City of Angels, thrown up at the end of a railway in the desert, and sold by largely crooked real estate agents for its "Mediterranean" climate. They didn't mention the mud slides, fires, aridity or the blistering Santa Ana winds when, as Raymond Chandler observed, "meek wives eye the back of their husband's necks and finger the carving knife".
The huge wave of settlers came between the wars - white people from America's mid-west, bringing prudish social views and a complete misunderstanding of the geography (insisting on growing lawns in an area where the annual rainfall compares with that of Tangiers).
The boosters and developers knew water was at a premium, so Los Angeles stole it from the Owens Valley, 560 kilometres away, and piped it in. It was then stolen again by fraudulent entrepreneurs who diverted it to their purchased plots north of LA in the San Fernando Valley - the epicentre of Monday's quake. The valley is now the world's biggest suburban dormitory, although it, too, is becoming increasingly Hispanic.
The mid-westerners created the puritan paradise of LA in the half-century up to 1960, a time still fixed in the popular imagination as quintessential LA lotus land: barbecuing by the pool under a cobalt sky at the back of a ranch-style bungalow in a tranquil suburb.
This vision is vanishing forever. The new LA is turning into a dystopia, a Third World capital, a polluted junkyard of abandoned buildings and rampant gang crime where the backyard barbecue is more likely to be bullet riddled.
WITH the economic crisis and the neglect of vast ghetto areas, the city has become almost ungovernable. But then it has never experienced proper politics since the 1920s, when the transplanted mid-westerners deliberately created a weak mayoralty - an unwieldy bureaucracy of unaccountable paper shufflers and a strong council that was apolitical, so it would respond not to a party line but to the people who mattered: bankers, property developers, affluent home-owners. Even today councillors do not call themselves Democrats or Republicans and they still look after developers.
The whites have become increasingly isolated from city affairs. "The upper middle class simply buys its way out of the public sector, sending its children to private schools, hiring private security guards for its own protection," says Harold Meyerson of the LA Weekly, the city's most astute critic.
"These are private solutions - like the mass purchase of hand guns - that aren't real solutions at all."
Another private addiction is the car and LA's famous freeways - the same freeways that collapsed in the earthquake to produce paralysing jams. LA has only had a suburban train network since 1992 and it is still regarded as an exotic novelty. A prewar light-rail system, one of the most extensive in the world, was dismembered in the 1950s by a secret cabal of car, tyre and bus manufacturers and an oil company. They were convicted of conspiracy in court, but fined only derisory sums.
The bus system is actually one of America's most densely used, a fact that surprises many (white) Angelenos and visitors because it is almost exclusively used by poor blacks and Hispanics. The latter use them to travel to the prosperous (white) Westside - the "three B" wealthy enclaves of Brentwood, Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, where they are gardeners and maids.
LA's servant class of Hispanics is its nastiest little secret. Clusters can be seen on various street corners where passing motorists pick them up for"yard work" or quality craftsmanship, like laying bricks or carpentry, for a pittance. Many are illegal and dare not demand a fair wage. If these street scenes are reminiscent of prostitution, the analogy fits - except these folk are exploited for less money.
The very people whose gardens bloom from their work now rant about illegal immigration, the "hot button" issue for conservative politics this year. They are egged on by the Governor, Pete Wilson, a conservative whose ratings in the opinion polls are less than 30 per cent.
LA's foreign immigrants have been scapegoated over the decades every time the economy falters. Yet a survey by the University of California shows that Hispanics embody the vaunted "family values" and are the least drain on welfare.
The percentages of blacks, whites and Hispanics break down as follows:
Population: 11 per cent, 41 per cent and 38 per cent. A household of two parents and children: 14, 16 and 43 per cent. On welfare: 35, 12 and 6. Working males in household: 66, 76, and 80. In every category, Hispanics represent the most desirable citizens, according to the precepts of those who criticise them most. Can it be fun in the sun again? Of course, it still is and always has been - if you're rich. Even the earthquake spared Bel-Air.
"It may be the disaster that turns LA around," says the State's historian, Kevin Starr. "An urban riot shows human failure, but an earthquake is an act of God. It's nobody's fault, nobody can be blamed and we have behaved so beautifully."
Hollywood loves a happy ending, too, but that does not necessarily apply to the city that gave it a home. LA is reality; grim reality.
© 1994 Sydney Morning Herald