Boosters like to think of Los Angeles as a multicultural mosaic. But maybe, like much of America, it is really Babel, a place with too many identities, conflicting claims and mutually exclusive aspirations. These days it looks like we are heading into a dark future, a deadly version of the “Blade Runner” scenario.
By Greg Guma
High above the traffic-clogged Hollywood Freeway, MCA/Universal was constructing a new Los Angeles, a city without crime, homelessness or racial strife. Thirty years ago, that was the vision, a $100 million ($220 million today) poverty-free zone of shops, offices and restaurants to be called City Walk, the latest and grandest attempt to create an idealized L.A.
Meanwhile, in the real city below, a cauldron of crises boiled over.
In April and early May of 1992, one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history dramatized the racial and economic inequities that plagued the city. Two days into the upheaval —often called an uprising —after four policemen were acquitted of beating Rodney King, a charred and deserted Tinseltown was occupied by more than 4000 National Guard troops. There was an eerie resemblance to war-torn Beirut.
According to market researchers at MCA, which had been purchased in 1991 by Japan’s Matsushita, the appeal of City Walk was that, for many Angelenos, reality had become a daily hassle and a looming nightmare. Critics warned that the project could become another sign that L.A. had given up on itself. In any case, it looked like the latest installment of what was already known as the “Blade Runner” scenario.
In that prescient 1982 film, Los Angeles in the 21st century was a menacing “world city” marked by culture fusion and economic stratification, a sunless and polluted place, overcrowded with Latino and Asian drones who barely looked up at the fortresses of the wealthy. In “L.A. 2000,” a city-sponsored report that generally touted Los Angeles as THE city of the future, University of Southern California professor Kevin Starr warned in similar terms of “a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities.”
As dire as that prediction sounded at the time, in some way the present was worse. Many residents numbed themselves to life in an urban battleground. During the riots, mesmerized TV viewers watched looting, arson and gunfire in the streets as though it was an episode of the latest mini-series. Meanwhile, as shops were being firebombed and drivers beaten on live TV, film crews gathered footage for a TV movie slated to be called “Night of a Thousand Fires.”
California, and especially Los Angeles, had often been a crucible of social change that later spilled over to the rest of the nation. The city’s modern developers, people like railroad king Henry Huntington and Bank of America founder A.P. Giannini, had envisioned a city that could extend its reach clear across the Pacific, “the ocean of the future.” They and other capitalist dreamers created marvels like commercial strip development, freeways and the consumer credit system that transformed the nation’s buying habits.
In many ways, Southern California embodied the American Dream. The confluence of climate, capital and demographics had made it an international city that also served as the world’s image capital.
But the riots unmistakably demonstrated that there was trouble in paradise. By the last years of the 20th century a water shortage, along with air pollution and a traffic surplus, threatened to end the fantasy of endless growth. More than half of L.A.’s surface area had been given over to roads and parking lots — and it still wasn’t enough.
But the main threat to the white American dream, the one expressed through metaphors of flood and invasion, was the transformation of Los Angeles into a city populated mainly by brown and black immigrants. Soon, went the predictions, the city would be more than 40 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Asian, 10 percent Black, and less than 40 percent European-American. And that’s pretty close to how it worked out.
As David Rieff noted in his book, “Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World,” the rest of the country, and possibly the world, would likely follow the L.A. model. “Even Japan, with its fantasies of racial purity, has immigrants nowadays,” he wrote. “As for Europe, the only real question, for all the talk of Fortress Europe, is how many immigrants will come from Turkey and the Maghreb, Central Africa, the subcontinent and the Caribbean.”
Rieff saw the city as, at the very least, a national archetype. He pointed out, for instance, that Hispanics would outnumber blacks in the U.S. within 20 years. And he was right. By 2020, although White people were still in the majority, the nation’s population was 18.7 percent Hispanic, 12.4 percent Black, and 6 percent Asian. Hispanics also top the list in California. States with the largest Black population start with Texas, Florida and Georgia.
No longer an extension of Europe, Rieff observed, the United States was becoming instead “an increasingly nowhite country adrift, however majestically and powerfully, in an increasingly nonwhite world.”
The status of Asian newcomers to the city was another key factor in the riots. Blacks were, of course, enraged by the verdict in the Rodney King case. But they were also bitter about the light sentence given to a Korean shopkeeper who, in 1991, shot and killed Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl. That fueled resentment concerning the emerging dominance of Korean-American merchants in Black neighborhoods.
Racial competition and hostility had emerged as the region’s central political issue. Asian felt despised. Blacks were enraged. And Latinos, the most exploited and least acknowledged ethnic group at the time, complained that they deserved more and better jobs. Presiding over this powder keg was Mayor Tom Bradley, an uninspiring and ineffectual political leader.
Rieff suggested that Bradley, the city’s first Black mayor, might also be its last. He was right again, at least so far. His successors were White and Hispanic: Republican investment banker Richard Riordan (1993-2001), lawyer James Hahn (2001-2005), state legislator (and lawyer) Antonio Villaraigosa (2005-2013), and former City Council President Eric Garcetti. The first two were White, the next two Mexican-American and Spanish.
During the riots, two of the most effective public figures were Chicano, State Senator Al Torres and actor Edward James Olmos. “Our modern metropolis is returning to the enduring Pueblo de Los Angeles of years past,” Torres predicted. Unfortunately, things didn’t pan out that way. As Rieff’s narrative poignantly noted, many houses in west L.A. (the white enclave) were already surrounded by walls, while “caution” signs on the 16-lane San Diego Freeway were illustrated by a family in desperate flight.
Calling this another chapter in the triumphant story of the American “melting pot” was seriously misleading. In the past, immigrants had changed their names and assimilated, becoming as much like White protestants as they could. By the end of the 20th century, however, they built mosques and Buddhist temples, demanded signs to designate neighborhoods like Little Tokyo and Koreatown, and refused to speak English.
L.A. boosters still like to think of their city as a multicultural mosaic. To Rieff, a generation ago, it looked more like a bouillabaisse of cultures. But maybe, like much of America, it is really Babel, a place with too many identities, conflicting claims and mutually exclusive aspirations. Are White Angelenos only pretending when they claim to embrace multiculturalism? Or, is their real goal to make L.A. an imperial capital of Pacific Rim trade and finance?
To a large extent, the city’s economic life still depends on the exploitation of the nonwhite poor, the undermining of unions, and re-industrialization based on a bifurcated economy — high-tech manufacturing and struggling, small enterprises with low-paid workers. Apparently, being a “world city” means taking advantage of foreign capital, trade and skills, combined with Latino and Black sweat and desperation.
To be honest, while I lived in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, the future still seemed hopeful at times, the harbinger of what Mexican author Jose Vasconcelos once called “Universopolis” — a place where all the races of the world are melded into a final “cosmic race.” But even then I suspected that it was more likely to become an advanced imperialist state, one that encompassed its colonies within its own borders.
In those days I was also partial to Salman Rushdie’s multicultural prediction. It remained possible, he imagined and I hoped, that immigrants and longtime residents would not so much assimilate as leak into one another, like flavors when you cook. Perhaps L.A., as well as the nation, could eventually mutate beyond racial division and exploitation.
Perhaps a cultural bouillabaisse might be the first course of a deeper transformation, one as profound as the rise of nationalism. But these days it looks like we are heading instead into a dark future, a deadly version of the “Blade Runner” scenario.