City of Angels 2019-20

California was the home of nearly 350,000 Native Americans before European settlers arrived and displaced them. The Gabrillino-Tongva people settled in Los Angeles (L.A.) where the 405 freeway meets the Sepulveda Basin. The largest village was known as Hahamog'na, now a park located at the southeast corner of Oak Grove Drive and Foothill Boulevard. The Spaniards “discovery” of the west coast forced the Tongva people to construct the Spanish Missions to produce and cultivate crops for the Spanish. Tongva Tribal council member Mark Acuña explained to KCET's Departures: "In order to accomplish all that mission work it was on the backs of Indians. There's no other way to talk about it. We built the 21 missions. We worked the fields." Additionally, downtown L.A. was home to a large Tongva village called Yaanga. That area was just far enough out of reach from the nearby Mission San Gabriel that fewer Tongva people were enslaved for the padres . Unfortunately, close e...

When I requested placement in this semester’s economics class as a natural next step to my work in investment banking and hedge fund management with Beau, I was reminded of how little I knew about economics, how much I had been faking it through our meetings. Beau and I and other investors have made concerted effort to invest only in firms we deem morally sound while also aiming to earn a profit. This means no oil, no globalization, mainly green energy and health care. Such a standard has been easy enough for our group to uphold, but it is clear why holdings in oil or pesticides would be increasingly tempting had our main objective been to make a profit. The market does not reward morality, environmentalism, or a guilty conscious. In all its amoral glory, the market works toward its singular goal of allocating its resources to make the most money. In today’s climate, it is easy to consider the market immoral for all its lack of sympathy.  But for a non-moral system, eco...

In her one act comedy,  Confessions of Women from East LA , Josefina López explores (among other things) the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in East Los Angeles.  I wonder what light her characters can shed on the role that these identities and fear play in our current political divide. Marisa “La Valentina” Chavez rallies the revolutionaries in the basement of Killer Tacos (in modern diction) to ‘get woke’: “Today I heard something very disturbing and wanted to cry, but tears don’t change things; action does. It’s 1996 gente, raza, but before we know it, with all the Republicans in office, it will be 1950 again! Women won’t be able to get safe and legal abortions, affirmative action will be gone, under-represented people like us won’t have equal access to jobs…All that was fought for and accomplished in the ’60s will be lost.” A few pages later she states: “This is no longer a “white America,” and that is why there is a backlash...

In the introduction to our edition of  Twilight: Los Angeles , Anna Deavere Smith talks about the inadequacies of thinking about the violence in 1992 as a "riot" or "uprising" or "rebellion." She argues that "beneath this surface explanation is a sea of associated causes," and points to larger trends of a declining economy, urban poverty, a deterioration of public services and education, and decades-long racial animosities in the national and local contexts. I'm curious about whether--and how--the play and our text, which incorporates characters that did not make the performance version, serve to illustrate this "sea of associated causes." To what extent does it allow us a more complete view of local and national pressures that led to the tragedy? If associations are made, how are they made? How is this associative picture that the work provides us different than the picture that we get from the labels "L.A. Riots" or ...