Habitat Based identity: A Los Angeles Phenomenon
Habitat Based identity: A Los Angeles Phenomenon
In the past week, we have spent homework and class time investigating the Central LA addresses assigned to us.
Through our research, we are beginning to develop stories of the past experiences of these addresses with the goal of creating mini history books.
We have also been wrapping up our reading of Karen Tei Yamashitas Tropic of Orange, coming to conclusions on our perspectives of the identities of her characters.
As I pondered the two learning experiences separately, I realized that they were much more related to each other than I originally believed.
In other words, in Los Angeles, a significant portion of your identity is characterized by where you live, work, or otherwise spend much of your time.
In my opinion, 451 Prospect Circle, my home, is as much a part of my identity as is 1030 East California (school) or 360 North Arroyo (work).
In that regard, I have a connection not only with these physical places as they exist now, but also with the stories of the people and institutions that have riddled their historical timelines.
The government agency responsible for maintaining accurate records of address information is known as the Los Angeles County Countywide Address Management System (LAC CAMS).
Some might find the CAMS mundane or uninteresting, when in fact the history of Los Angeles cannot be accurately portrayed without describing how the address system has evolved.
Unit numbers increase from a center point in the street from one all the way to as many as five or six digits. Street name suffixes are actually rooted in legislature, and are therefore not random.
East and west thoroughfares are called streets, while north and south thoroughfares are called avenues.
Alleys are narrow service streets for serving the rears of lots, less than 30 feet in width. A Boulevard is a broad, formally laid out paved public way, 100 feet or more wide, ornamentally illuminated or decorated.
(Definitions from LACo Dept. of Public Works, Mapping and Property Management Division, Street Name and House Numbering Unit).
As we navigate and attempt to understand the sprawling metropolis we live in, we use the Countywide Address Management System
(knowingly or not) to not only establish where we are going, but what kind of people we invision inhabit each of Los Angeles’s diverse communities.
Now I wonder:
- Do you consider your (home) address to be a significant part of your identity? Have you ever considered the lives that were lived there before your family? What about other addresses that have significance to you?
- To what extent do we treat people differently based on where in LA they live? Or do we all view people from Brentwood or Bel Air the same way we view people from Hawthorne or Florence-Graham? Do we view people differently if they live on the streets or avenues, as opposed to courts, drives, ways or terraces? Does it matter if they live on their own lot, or if there is an apartment number following the address?
- What are the problems with having preconceived notions about people from particular places? Are there any advantages to this mindset?
- What other realizations have you made regarding your own identity in Los Angeles County and how it relates to the location of the dwelling you inhabit?
- What realizations have you made about identity in general and how it may relate to occupying physical space in Los Angeles?
ReplyDeleteAlthough I wouldn’t consider my current home to be a significant part of my identity, I do consider my original house in Hollywood to be a significant part of my identity. The Hollywood house is the place where I grew up, and I can clearly remember important memories that happened at that location. However, my current house in Pasadena, I don’t have that strong of ties to, and it acts just as a place where I sleep and where my family lives. I have never really considered the lives that were lived there before my family. I think part of the reason why I haven’t is because my home address is more about the people less about the place. I think people are the ones who make a place truly unique. Other addresses that have significance to me would probably be my elementary school, Polytechnic, and my volleyball club. Who are you referring to when you say “we?” I think there’s definitely preconceived notions about people who live in Bel-Air and the Westside just because looking from the exterior, there are no one story houses, and they all look very nice. Going to elementary school in Bel-Air, I will say that all of my friends did indeed complete the stereotype, but that was probably just the environment I was exposed to. Having preconceived notions about people from particular places have many problems. I think having preconceived notions about anything is a dangerous line; assumptions and making generalizations about a group or party always lead to problems because not everyone is exactly the same. Regarding my own identity and the locations I am associated with, I guess I’ve realized that there are assumptions people make. Because I go to school at a private school in Pasadena, people think that I am very smart. Because I live in Pasadena, people (like my volleyball teammates) think that I am very wealthy.
I consider my home address to be very significant to my identity, it Is both where I live but also my home. A lot of important events and things have happened at 1550 San Pasqual st for as long as I can remember. My house is more than a 100 years old and sometimes I am confronted with the lives of people who lived here before. Behind my clothes in my closet sit a large green safe in the wall, it looks straight out of 1930. There is a spooky stone gazebo in my backyard that I forget is there but has been with the house forever. A huge oak tree covers the back part of my yard and I haven’t ever really thought about how old it could really be. When I am confronted with these things I often stop thinking about them though, caught up in whatever i’m doing at that moment I let the things like the safe and a gazebo fade out of my head and I go back to whatever im doing. I think the problem with having preconceived notions about places or where people are from is that negative notions of a place get rubbed off onto the person whether or not they actually embody those qualities. One realization would definitely be how much of a bubble I am in not only just in LA County but Pasadena too. Since I have grown up in the part of pasadena im in that is what I consider to be pasadena even though for many people there is a whole different part that I never see. Also considering my location I realize that when I pass certain homes or places in my neighborhood I have these preconceived notions of them being good or bad which are totally arbitrary, they're based on things like aesthetic or the amount I light I see around the place and come together to make me think a place is good or bad when in reality how could I know? I've never been to these places, met the people who live there, I just pass them everyday.
ReplyDeleteI consider my home address a significant part of my identity. I especially feel connected with my home address because my house is where my Grandparents used to live. Amongst my family members, I’ve heard so many stories of the amazing, huge family parties my Grandparents would throw in my home. I feel like my home address, specifically for my family, is so embedded with many happy memories of times when older family members, who have since passed away, were alive and healthy. I also consider the addresses of Poly, Loyola Law School, and the Echo Park Neighborhood Council meeting space significant to me because I’ve spent a lot of time there. I think that some people definitely judge others based on where they live in LA, and whether or not they live in their own lot or an apartment. I feel like some people think that people who don’t live in what they perceive as “nice” neighborhoods look down on others and think of them as less than. I think having negative preconceived notions about people from particular places is dangerous. If you start negatively generalizing a whole neighborhood, specifically low-income neighborhoods, that leads to discrimination and stereotypes. If it is a positive generalization like “it's such a beautiful area” or “everyone there is so nice” then I think that would be considered an advantage to that mindset.
ReplyDeleteEspecially after our urban lab last week, its apparent to me how differently people live based on their location within Los Angeles. Even though Westlake was only about 20 mins away from our familiar environment of Pasadena, it felt completely different in so many ways. All signs and billboards were in Spanish, and our group of 5 Poly students stuck out enough to receive several comments from passersby. I definitely think there are stereotypes associated with towns and places because many times, physical neighborhoods are larger reflections of specific communities. Stereotypes about a given community end up reflecting onto that physical space/neighborhood. This means that avoiding spaces is actually just a polite way to avoid people. In Los Angeles, it is so easy to live in your own bubble, whether the bubble is Pasadena or Westlake. However, I think it is important to recognize the inherent overlap in physical spaces and the people who live(d) there. For me, my house/home is a big part of my identity. I’ve moved several times, and each time has been pretty difficult. It is easy to attach feelings and memories to the physical shell of a house, and differentiating between these two things is difficult. It’s so strange for me to think about other people living in the shell(s) that I once called home. It’s also strange to think about myself attaching my own memories and feelings to a shell that once harbored someone else’s feelings and memories.
ReplyDeleteI do consider my home address to be a significant part of my identity. It may not be the first thing I say when someone asks me to talk about my “identity,” but it is definitely a significant part of who I am. There are really only two locations that come to mind when I think about my identity, and like Julian, it is my home and my school. I spend the majority of my time at home and at school and both places are very important to me. Both places are full of connections to friends and family, which are the most important things to me. I would like to think that we treat everyone the same no matter where in Los Angeles they live, but we do not. Certain locations attached to the end of an address greatly affect the way people see a person. This makes me think of the time when Compton was occupied by mostly white families, but they quickly moved out when black families started moving in and around Compton. Another thing that comes to mind is the G.I. Bill and how the Dixiecrats worked to create discrimination in this Bill. They decided they would rate homes using a color system. Blue and Green Lines meant no collateral, the best property, and one that you cannot sell to a minority, Yellow Lines meant you must give 10% collateral and not the nicest property, and Red Lines meant no loans were given and it was considered the worst property. There are problems with this mindset because we do not give everyone the same opportunities because of where they live, and people who live in locations that outsiders have negative views of are constantly playing catch-up for the majority or their life. I have found that making any sort of assumptions about anybody can cause problems. Even though we have preconceived notions based on where someone lives, I do not think we have preconceived notions based on if their address contains “street” or “boulevard.”
ReplyDeleteI do consider my home address to be an important part of who I am. It is where I lived my entire life, and subsequently has acted as the backdrop for many of the most important events in my life. It is also crucial to my perspective of Los Angeles. Living where I do has largely impacted how I think about Los Angeles’ geography, topography, and geology. However, it being said that my home address plays a significant part in my identity, I do not know much about the individuals who lived here before me. I have done some research on this history of the house, specifically, but very little research on the past inhabitants of the house.
ReplyDeleteOn the topic of address-based-discrimination, I would like to hope that it does not exist, but that is just simply not true. Even though it is an unfortunate part of Los Angeles culture, where you live definitely plays a role in how you are perceived by others. This often results in stereotypes, bias, and generalized assumptions, all of which tend to be detrimental to the person and areas to which they are applied. These can all limit our understanding of certain places and the people who reside there. From my perspective, there are very few advantages to this mindset.
Over my 18 years, I have learned a lot about who I am, where I live, and Los Angeles in general. On the surface, very little of that learning has been about my physical location or the physical location of others. However, when pondering this question, I realized that though much of my learning has not been explicitly about my location, it has all been done through the lens of my location. Everything I learned about myself and others is colored by my experiences, and much of my experiences and ideologies, are a direct result of the location in which I was raised. So while until this point I have not done much specific thinking about my physical location in the city of Los Angeles, it is something that has informed everything I had learned.
There seems to be great significance to our childhood homes considering their role in literature, in memory, in maturing, and maybe in the way we select or decorate our homes when we're older. Relationships with neighbors, This is all exacerbated by the historical tendency of Los Angeles residents to either decide or be forced to live in homogenous neighborhoods. Whether on account of racist legislation or social preference, Angelenos have formed communities based on shared identity. I know we're seeing more and more exceptions to this, but considering the past classification of neighborhoods and their houses, I think this all still holds relevance. If the kids of Los Angeles are spending their developmental years in the context of their own racial, ethnic, socioeconomic demographic, it's no wonder we hold geographical biases. Massive generalizations are made to span a given neighborhood. Stereotypes have always been harmful, and now, as neighborhoods begin to diversify (whether on account of gentrification, accessibility, etc.), no one stereotype will fit an area.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I know my house to be evidence of my parents' class mobility, and my dad's achievement of his American Dream or whatever you'd like to call it. So, in that way, it's a lot more than a house. At the same time, I've always been told that a house is just a house. Now that I think about it, that's a massively privileged mindset because it only works if there's a long way between your current living conditions and homelessness. (Interestingly, we don't own any significant portion of our home, which brings me back to the limbo that is upward class mobility. Status symbols that aren't your own, conspicuous wealth v. what's happening behind the scenes, generational v. new wealth, etc.)
I do consider my house to be a significant part of my identity. I don't know if I think about the suffix (it's just "road" after all) much, though there are streets near my house that end in "drive" and "terrace" which may hold connotations of a more ritzy and lavish lifestyle than most people in my neighborhood have. I'm very aware of the types of houses that are in my neighborhood, though. There is a street, Midlothian (suffix: Drive), that almost constantly has some sort of filming occurring at one of the properties. The houses around and including mine are all custom (not part of a tract) and will sell for nothing less than $1 million. Even the street named after the city (or maybe vice versa I don't know), Altadena Drive, has a suffix that easily reminds one of Beverly Hills. I'm not too aware of the assumptions that people make about Altadena, but from a closer look at the street names, I can only assume that it aspires to be seen as a wealthy area. Combined with the address/location of Poly, the other place where I spend most of my time, I definitely feel like there's a level of wealthy/privileged that people assume I must be. And not that I'm not either of those, to some extent. I just sometimes wish it wasn't such a large part of how people probably form their initial judgements about me, especially since when getting to know strangers one of the first couple things typically shared is where you go to school and where you live. I haven't much considered the people who lived in our house before us. All I know is that it was (probably) only one family/couple before us (I have just made a realization that I always have assumed they were white, but I actually have no idea). I definitely think that we if not outrightly treat people differently, at least make judgements/assumptions based on where we know people to live. Personally, I have never considered the suffix of the address, just the city and for sure the apartment number, if there is one. The issue with this is that it's quite hypocritical of me as I've just stated that I don't feel like I fit into the preconceived notion about inhabitants of my area, but the assumptions seem to be deeply rooted into LA society (and likely society as a whole — I don't think this is a phenomenon unique to LA).
ReplyDeleteAs we all know by now, Los Angeles is an incredibly complicated city. As Julian pointed out, your home address really isn’t your address — it’s a number meticulously assigned to a plot of land that has been inhabited by generations of families/individuals. The only thing I know about my home address’s history is that the homeowner before my family was a Scientologist who also had the last name Thompson, so we still get Mrs. Thompson’s mail now and again. I know that Thompson is a common last name, but I can’t help but wonder what the chances of that happening are.
ReplyDeleteI think I have a pretty good relationship with my address. The number is relatively easy to remember and so is the street name. However, after thinking more about the name of my street, I thought of something that had definitely come up a few times in my life but is not something I think about often. The street I live on is called “Moreno Drive.” For as long as I can remember, my family and I have pronounced it “more-ay-no.” I guess in the back of my head I always assumed Moreno was a Spanish word for something, and after doing a quick Google search just a minute ago, it turns out it’s Spanish for “brown.” Also, the correct pronunciation is “more-eh-no” not “more-ay-no,” so my family and I have been using the Anglo-cized pronunciation of the Spanish word all these years. Taking a step back from this exploration, I realize that this small situation of a white family pronouncing a Spanish word the “English” way is incredibly symbolic of Los Angeles’ history as a whole. Just like the title of Deverell’s book sets forth, Los Angeles is a city built from “whitewashed adobe.” And the subjugation of Spanish/Mexican culture by the Anglo/European/white majority still exists in this city today.
Lastly, I want to touch briefly on the idea of Angelenos associating one’s address with one’s personality/character/identity. On Moreno Drive, it’s unlikely — if not impossible — to find one single-family home under a million dollars, which is consistent with/representative of the gentrification of Silver Lake as a whole. So, building off of this information, it would be fair to assume that someone who purchased a home recently on Moreno Drive was relatively wealthy. However, could you make this same characterization of a resident of Moreno Drive back in 2000? What about in the 90s? 60s? 40s? I’m not sure. But it is unlikely that things have stayed the same. My mom told me a little while back that Silver Lake used to be home to a relatively large Japanese-American population. Over the course of Japanese Internment though in WWII, Silver Lake basically lost all of its Japanese-American residents. My point in providing this information is that not only can I make the inference that my street’s economic status has changed over time but so can I make the inference that my street’s racial/ethnic make-up has changed over time.
ReplyDeletePrior to this class, I never viewed my home address as a part of my identity. While I do believe that the location of an individual's upbringing can affect and shape a personality, I never applied it to myself. Yet, I don’t think that a single address can fully form a personality. You can view addresses as markers of success. People are born into poor situations all the time and end up living in large houses further along into their life. Due to this, both addresses and identities can change with or without each other. Along with this, people are treated differently depending on where they live in Los Angeles. A great example of this is the reputation of Pasadena. Some of my friends who attend other schools outside of Pasadena only view it as a predominantly white and preppy area full of rich people. While this is not totally false, this does not make up for the entirety of Pasadena.
Although I have not lived at my current address for very long, I think it has had an impact on my identity and how others perceive me. There are a combination of factors that contribute to how my home has shaped my identity. Similarly to how we all have an exterior identity that other's interpret and a personal identity, the home (what it looks like, where it's located, who lives there) can cause assumptions about one's identity, while on the inside of the home personal memories are made which contribute to a more private and individual identity. I often think of the history my home holds. I wonder what the previous inhabitants were like especially because our neighbors seem to have not liked them very much. I find it strange to think about the people that were here before and called this same building home, but I am curious nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteI think it is natural to make assumptions about identity based upon where somebody lives. People are quick to try and make associations, no matter how inaccurate. The location where someone lives seems to tell something about their economic status and the communities they associate with. That being said, I also think people are treated differently and seen as different based on where they live, and that is something that is not limited to LA. This causes an inability to get to truly know individuals and instead creates interactions and ideas based upon assumptions and inaccuracies.
Especially considering I moved and changed home addresses a few days ago, I've been reminiscing on all the meaningful memories I had in my old house. My old house certainly makes up some of my identity; it's a part of countless moments I've experienced and therefore will always have a place in my heart. I think my old home will have an especially meaningful impact on me because it represents an entire community I'm leaving. Moving made me hyperaware of the differences between Silverlake, my old neighborhood, and Pasadena, my new neighborhood. My old house not only represent the memories created in it, but also the memories created in my old elementary school down the block, on Sunset Junction, and at my preschool JCC. Even though home addresses may just serve to mark house as different from the rest, a deeper look reveals addresses are a window into the past, housing numerous invaluable memories.
ReplyDeleteFor me, I don't consider where I live/my address a large part of my identity. I've never gone to school close to my house, and therefore spend very little time in the area that I live (Atwater Village.) I think that if I lived near my schools and had activities, friends, and things to do in the area, this would be different. However, ever since not attending an LAUSD school, I have noticed the differences in how I perceive the city, living in Los Angeles, versus people who live in Pasadena. It is shocking to see how little students from Poly do things in LA I considered normal, such as taking the metro in the city.
ReplyDeleteThere are also very strong assumptions we make about people based on the neighborhood they live. For example, if when meeting someone I told them I live in Bel Air, I am sure that they would treat and regard me differently than if I said I live in Glassell Park. We know, generally, what "kinds" of people live in each area, and this effects the assumptions we make about people based on where they live.