Week Four: Busing to USC

This week, I took transit to USC to visit an old friend. I know--taking the BUS to south central LA?! But don't worry, I'm a regular bus-taker (and also a relatively athletic six-foot-tall girl), so I've got some experience under my belt.

Here's the route I took:

The 720! *Gasp!* That's right--insert dramatic music wherever you'd like. The 720 Metro bus has a earned itself a real reputation, but I'm not exactly sure why. I've never heard of any crime on that bus line, so I think it's probably the collection of characters that the bus gathers as it moves from deep East LA into the Westside. Because you know Westside people... they're the ones who "don't do the ten." Anyway, here's the route map for the bus:

I hopped on at Westwood and got off on at Alvarado to take the 200 bus, but I'll be focusing on my experience on the 720. I was a bit over-cautious, as I was leaving around 8:00 pm, and I hid my iPhone and my wallet in my clothes the entire trip--I figured, why tempt fate? But that also meant that I didn't take any pictures, so here's one of the bus during the daylight:

Right near good ol' UCLA! (Or at least the Hammer Museum.)

Like I said before, I've taken the bus quite frequently both in high school and college, so I wasn't expecting to be surprised. And I wasn't, really. But I did observe a lot of interesting quirks about the bus route and its riders in the 40 minutes or so that I was on it. 

First things first: I was riding the bus from the Westside into the South Central/Downtown area at night, which meant that most of the people on it with me seemed to work nearer the ocean and live much further inland. That said, the ethnic makeup of those riding the bus left me as the outsider. And by that, I mean the only white female, with one other white male who got off somewhere around Rodeo. Other than that, the beginning of the bus ride had your usual groups represented: your small middle-aged Latina commuters, your black teenagers coming back from school/entertainment, the elderly people who probably can't drive safely, and an assortment of males that are harder to pin down.

The bus was crowded to begin with, but got more and more packed as we kept moving. It was strange to see the humble clothes and belongings of the people on the bus against the background of Rodeo Drive at night, and it was also strange to think of myself as one of them--who has the money for a car AND shopping on Rodeo these day? It really made me think about the socioeconomic differences that cause people to ride the bus.

Most of the journey was through pretty nice areas--Wilshire goes through some of the most iconic parts of town, like LACMA's lamps all lit up at night. Things got a little shabbier around Highland. The cars driving past tended to be older models, and there were fewer luxury cars. There were also more strip malls of the breed you see in Sawtelle, with smaller, seedier businesses. The characters who got on the bus, however, changed a lot as we moved further east. A lot more young men boarded, most of them with tattoos, tightly-woven braids, and sagging pants: quite befitting of a "gangster" stereotype from a rap music video. Along the lines of these guys:

I was curious: why wasn't anyone who looked like these guys boarding the bus west of San Vincente? What about the change in territory brought about this change in demographics? Nobody else who joined the 720 was unanticipated or all that different from the people who got on near Westwood. So why the change for this specific group of 20-something Latino and black males?

This week's reading, the LA Times article about the LA riots, really made me think about the culture of distrust that still exists between wealthy, sheltered, West LA and gritty East LA and South Central. After living in the Bay Area for 18 years, the so-called "quiet" or "underground" racism in the LA area seemed really blatant to me. People on the Westside don't want a subway connection to downtown for fear of "riff-raff" coming to their side of the city. People on the Westside would rather go to the valley to get a car part than drive east on the 10 for twenty minutes to the closer business.  People on the Westside may work downtown but wouldn't take their kids there. These ideas and many others float around in the West-Angeleno's consciousness, and they freak me out. They probably also freak out these guys who only boarded the bus after we got far enough east. The obvious cultural divide between these people is challenging to post-riot LA, but the geographical difference is more striking and probably more problematic. It's unjust to be relegated to a specific societal rank because of your culture, and even more unjust to feel safe in only one geographic area because of that culture--and that goes both ways, west and east. LA might be better off now than it was in 1992, but if that's true, I can hardly imagine what kind of difference existed if today's isn't enough to set people off. If anything, perhaps the fear that the East and Westside people have for each other is buried in the residual resentment of the riots. If that's true, Angelenos have a lot of issues to work out between each other, and that work has barely, if even, been started.



Cheers!

Amy

Week Three: Walking in Anaheim

So normally, when people hear "Anaheim," they're expecting one of three things:

This:

This:

Or maybe, for the sports fans, these guys:

If you imagined Dinseyland, then you know where I was this weekend! 

...sort of. 

My boyfriend lives in the Bay Area, but since he's a volleyball coach he occasionally swings down to "LA" (read: the Anaheim Sports Center) for a weekend. Because we're both poor, we usually meet up by bus near Downtown Disney, exploring the sea of IHOPs and shabby hotels in the area around Disneyland--which is definitely not intended for walkers. 

This also means that I have to undertake the epic journey via not-car to get 40+ miles away from my apartment. Last time, I did it like this:

Not cool. So this year, I decided to pay more for the convenience of the Prime Time Shuttle! (Which meant that first, I had to take the FlyAway to LAX, and I may have had to lie about my AirCanada flight number. The things we do for boyfriends, right?) Anywho, getting to Anaheim took me 50 minutes instead of 178. Worth it!

Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with the landscape around Disneyland, it looks like this: 

Note the lack of sidewalks, even in the residential neighborhoods.

Here there are sidewalks, but never any people walking on them!

(They're also very well-manicured--unlike high-traffic sidewalks and very

 like Disney. Also--check out the dramatic weather change!)

The strong division between residential and commercial areas here is striking. Walking the streets near Disneyland, it's easy to see that the area is not zoned for residential living. A sea of hotels and motels with cheap chain restaurants attached to them is the norm. So much so, in fact, that we couldn't find each other at first because there were two IHOPs on the same street less than four blocks away from each other, and each of us was convinced that the other person was not at IHOP... woops! 

It's obvious that the main focus of this area is Disneyland, but the convention center is prominent as well. Both structures are very much intended for travelers, and as such, the area is flooded with hotels. Like, this many hotels:

The blue arrow points to Disneyland. The number of surrounding hotels is outrageous!

We've been talking about differentiation in class, and to me, this area embodies the idea of geographical specialization. The biggest businesses in the area, Disneyland and the convention center, have influenced which businesses pop up around them and how they're run--even the balloon man in IHOP had a special set of Disney-themed balloon characters. Because so many people travel to these places, there are hotels with attached restaurants and trams that take them wherever they need to go--so no one ever has to walk on foot. And because there are no necessary businesses within walking distance of people's houses in the area, there are not sidewalks! (The closest Ralph's is almost 4 miles away, to give you some perspective.)

When I think about the fact that this entire area--which covers a huge amount of square footage (mileage, even!)--I can't help but wonder how healthy it is. The whole setup outside the two main attractions is kind of dilapidated, and it seems like it would lower the property values of the areas zoned for houses just behind these other streets. I'm also curious as to whether or not the weight of the Disney corporation helped zone the entire area for businesses that help feed the Disneyland monster, because that's really how it feels--everything in Disneyland's vicinity is dependent upon Disneyland for its profits, and if Disneyland were to go, so would all of these smaller businesses surrounding it. It reminds of previous lessons I've learned about Marxist critiques of the factory-centered factory town, in which the factory owners own the factory, the town, and the town's grocery stores, launderers, etc.--moving way beyond "owning the means of production" and instead owning... everything! 

Whether or not that's true, Disneyland has definitely had a strange impact on this area. Rental cars, people who are clearly not southern Californians, and semi-shoddy chain restaurants are the norm. My advice: if any of you are actually going here to go to Disneyland, take a car. 

'Til next time, IHOP!

Cheers,

Amy

Week Two: A Visit to Reseda

Today I went to John R. Wooden High School in Reseda to teach creative writing. It's a continuation school for at-risk youth from 16-18, and it maintains a seriously flexible schedule to accommodate parents, homeless and foster kids, and other students who would struggle to graduate at a "normal" four-year high school. Click here to read more about the impact that LA's continuation schools have on their students--and to understand what a tragedy it would be to lose them.

This was my first to Wooden, and actually my first trip to a continuation school ever. I've worked in LAUSD before, so I didn't think anything would be able to surprise me. When we pulled up to the school, the surrounding area looked pretty average:

Garages, lawns, recycling--looks like a suburb!

The school itself was only five or six permanently placed portable classrooms attached to the campus of an elementary school. (Sorry for the lack of pictures, but most schools have strict photography rules.) I did get a picture of their wonderful John Wooden mural from the internet, though--with Wooden himself in it!

When I walked into the classroom, it looked pretty average as well, save for the small class size. The kids and their teachers, however, clearly had great relationships, and talked to each other with respect and understanding, and that (unfortunately) stuck me as unusual. It's not that the teachers I've worked with before weren't good teachers--it's that these teachers were so obviously different. It turns out the the entire environment of the school was completely different than I expected, in a good way, and in one that makes for an interesting comparison between this continuation school, populated by the "worst" LAUSD has to offer, and other "normal" high schools in the system. 

As I began the lesson, the kids were about as attentive as any high school class, but it was when we started asking them individual questions about their work that their personalities really shone. They wrote poems today, and one girl raised her hand because she was struggling with symbolism.
"What are you trying to symbolize?" I asked. "What's the poem about?"
"My daughter," she said.
It was then that I really understood the demographic I was working with. I helped her out--she decided to use a princess as the symbol in her poem--but my mind was whirring the rest of the class. Especially when 6 out of 7 girls left early for "parenting" class. I also found out that most of the boys in the class were kicked out of their old high schools for fighting, or because they'd been caught selling or using drugs on multiple occasions.

I can't help but wonder: are these kids victims of the differentiation of American society? Most of them were bitter about their lives before they came to Wooden, arguing that their old teachers didn't care, and that the students at their old schools were intolerable in their wealth/attitudes/judgement. If kids from the same school district can't even get along because of societal stratification, how can any of us? The reading for this week, "The Emergence of Postsuburbia," grates on me now because of its focus on things like housing, commercial centers, individualized forms of transportation, and other elements of middle-class living that my students have never been able to take advantage of, and remain bitter about. I look at them and I hope, over the next ten weeks, to get to know them better. I also hope that these motivated but set-back students might spark a change--for their children, or their families, or even just for themselves--that gets them out of their current situation and helps them combat the societal norms that helped get them there. 

Cheers!

Amy

Neighborhoods.

I love living in a city long enough to understand how it's been divvied up into neighborhoods. (I may or may not enjoy the street cred, too... hmm.) Anyway, the LA Times has had an awesome "Mapping LA" project going since 2009, and with the help of readers' input, the map is really a great way to investigate LA on the neighborhood scale. Check it out:


http://projects.latimes.com/mapping-la/neighborhoods/

What's good in the hood?! (We'll find out!)

Amy

Week One: So what's "social difference," anyway?

What's up?!

(Is that a weird blog introduction...? Is it weird to not care?)

My name is Amy, and I'm a third-year English & Geography student at UCLA. I'm writing this blog for a class I'm taking this quarter, called "Cities and Social Difference." Quite appropriate in a city like LA, which is definitely divided along basically every line that you can think of that separates and classifies people. The fact that LA is such a bizarre "city" -- which sometimes seems more like disparate neighborhoods modge-podged together by a toddler -- really drew me to the class in the first place. I want to know how all of these places got lumped together and called one city, while still maintaining so strongly how different they are. How can people who "don't do the ten," who "can't handle Venice's hipsters," and who "avoid Hollywood like the plague" be so territorial and yet still claim the general title of Angeleno?

These are my questions. And those quotes are all real. (And while perhaps not a very nice reflection of LA's residents, you can't say you've never heard anyone drop a comment like that, haha.)

My specific interest, though, is education. I've worked as a teacher, TA, intern, tutor, mentor, and a you-name-it-I've-done-it; I've worked in LAUSD and SMUSD; I've taught in elementary, middle, and high schools. Needless to say, I've seen a lot of social difference in my experience in the classroom. Understanding that difference is key, because it can help you better manage your students. More importantly, however,  understanding the differences between students presents unique opportunities for leaning and cultural understanding that can only come out of a room full of people from different backgrounds.

Overall, my hope is that taking this class will give me a better perspective on the role that social difference plays in an urban classroom by giving me more information about the various ways that cities influence the culture of the people that live there. Hopefully you'll watch me move closer to that goal as the weeks move forward!

Cheers,
Amy