Sociology Short Essay Response

Essays

BEVERLY HILLS

sounl PASADENA

sIII( GABRIEL T

5

AUlAMBRll

IH6LfWOOD

NAWHORNE

wnm SOUlH GAIE

LYHWOOO

Fig. 1 Los Angeles freeway system, 1998. Map dates indicate opening of first segment (from David Brodsly, L.A. Freeways: A n Appreciative Essay [Berkeley: University of California Press, 198 I ] )

The Folklore of the Freeway: Space, Culture, a n d Identity in Postwar

Los Angeles

E r i c R. Avila

Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class a n d nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration a n d renewal, of struggle a n d contradiction, of am- biguity a n d anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said “all that is solid melts into air.”

-Marshall Berman, A21 That Is Solid Melts into Air

Man loves to create roads, that is beyond dispute. But may it not be . . . that he is instinctively afraid of attaining his goal and completing the edifice he is constructing? How do you know, perhaps he only likes that edifice from a distance and not a t all a t close range, perhaps he only likes to build it, a n d does not want to live in it.

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes f r o m the Underground

Los Angeles in the age of the freeway saw a profound trans- formation in the shape of the city and the color of its inhabit- a n t s . I t fulfilled i t s d e s t i n y by becoming t h e u l t i m a t e “fragmented metropolis.”’ The acceleration of suburbanization, coupled with the dramatic expansion of the city’s nonwhite population (African Americans and Chicanos in particular) , created a regional geography splintered into isolated pockets

Aztlan 23:l Spring 1998 15

Avila

of race and class. A s the historic ethnic diversity of commu- nities like Boyle Heights and Watts gave way to expanding brown barrios and black ghettos, new communities sprouted on the urban fringe, insulated from the racialized masses of the inner city. This was not a n accident of poor planning. It was, in fact, t h e intended consequence of homeowners, realtors, developers, and government officials who sought to preserve southern California’s legacy of building separate and unequal communities.2

Various civic institutions of postwar Los Angeles under- pinned the construction of suburban whiteness. Central to that process was the freeway, which furthered the production of white space within the larger urban region. The freeway did not cause white flight, but it did sharpen the contrast between white space and nonwhite space in the postwar urban region by creating a conduit for capital flight away from downtown and by wreaking havoc upon the inner-city communities of East a n d South Central Los Angeles. Although many urban historians have traced the evolution of the freeway system and its impact upon the spatial and economic development of the metropolis, very few have considered how diverse peoples of Los Angeles have understood and assigned meaning to that complex p r o c e ~ s . ~

A s the freeway took shape, a folklore developed in the re- gional culture that reflected the very different ways in which people experienced the freeway and its c o n s t r ~ c t i o n . ~ The folk- lore of the freeway surfaced in such diverse cultural produc- tions as public ceremonies, theme parks, novels, murals, and poems, and reflected a cultural response to modernization in the postwar, postindustrial American city. Such cultural pro- ductions revealed a deep ambivalence about the introduction of the freeway. On the one hand, the freeway emerged in off- cia1 civic culture as a symbol of progress and modernity, a harbinger of a better tomorrow. On the other hand, Chicanos and Chicanas, who suffered the imposition of the freeway upon their neighborhoods, questioned the good it brought to their city and drew upon cultural forms to record that experience. Chicanos and Chicanas are b u t one social group who came to terms with the Los Angeles freeway, b u t their interpretation of the freeway illuminates the larger cultural response to the s t r u c t u r a l transformation of u r b a n life in postwar, post- industrial America.

16

Folklore of the Freeway

Sixteen Freeways in Search of a Suburb Central to that process was the freeway. I t did not initiate resi- dential a n d industrial development in s u b u r b a n s o u t h e r n California, b u t it facilitated s u c h development by paving ac- cess to undeveloped land. Under the landmark Collier Burns Act of 1947, Los Angeles County received millions of state dol- lars for freeway construction. Although the bill was aimed a t developing the state highway system as a whole, it clearly fa- vored the construction of freeways in the state’s metropolitan areas. Thus Los Angeles County received a larger piece of the pie.5 The construction of metropolitan freeways directed t h e movement of people a n d their money toward the s u b u r b s a n d away from the inner city, promoting what some scholars call the “Lakewoodization” of s u b u r b a n southern California-the process by which independent municipalities “seceded” from city and county government to form exclusive a n d homogenous s u b u r b a n communities.

The emerging pattern of freeway construction ensured the vitality of s u b u r b a n society in the Southland: a radial pattern extending outward from downtown like spokes, a n d a concen- tric pattern, encircling the downtown in a series of rings. The concentric pattern of development undermined both t h e spa- tial a n d symbolic importance of downtown. The arc of the 405 Freeway is a good example of this kind of development because it bears no relation to the historic center of the city. It emerged during the late 1950s a n d early 1960s as a corridor through t h e affluent Westside, connecting the postwar centers of s u b - u r b a n whiteness i n Orange County a n d the S a n Fernando Valley. Developments like the 405 Freeway assisted the popular perception t h a t Los Angeles was a centerless city, despite the thousands of people who actually lived in that center. Unlike systems of mass transportation in other American cities, which were developed to serve t h e downtown area, the Los Angeles freeways bolstered decentralized development a n d vitiated downtown.

Early on, public officials in East Los Angeles identified the economic hardship the freeway brought to their communities. Recalling J. B. Priestly’s famous description of turn-of-the- century Los Angeles as “sixteen s u b u r b s in search of a city,” Ninth District Assembly Member Edward F. Elliot modified the maxim in 1961, describing postwar Los Angeles as “sixteen freeways in search of a ~ u b u r b . ” ~ Elliot deplored the decline

17

Avila

of downtown as a n economic center of the region, pointing to the severe loss of downtown retail sales. In 1950, 75 percent of all retail sales in the city of Los Angeles occurred in the downtown district. By 1960, with the completion of suburban shopping malls and regional shopping centers, that number had dwindled to a mere 18 percent. In response to s u c h fig- ures, Elliot concluded that “the suburbs have taken the rest of the business.” Although a complex of factors is to be held accountable for this development, t h e assembly member pointed to the freeways, arguing that they had become “speed- ways to carry the buying public through instead of into the central business area.”

Elliot also decried the way in which downtown “had be- come encircled, cut u p and glutted by freeways,” recognizing that the impact of the freeways upon the Eastside was not only economic, b u t also physical. Certainly, the construction pro- cess itself unleashed massive destruction and chaos upon the inner-city communities of East and South Central Los Ange- les. Because property values in those areas were dispropor- tionately lower than in the suburbs, East and South Central Los Angeles became prime locations for massive interchanges consuming vast amounts of property. In Boyle Heights alone, the freeways displaced one tenth of the local population, a n especially devastating statistic in light of the vast influx of new residents to the Eastside and the desperate shortage of hous- ing in the area.8

Of course, the state was aware that people were not going to welcome freeway construction in their backyards. Through- out the 1950s and 1960s, a n official publicity campaign em- phasized the importance of the freeways to Los Angeles and claimed overwhelming public support for freeway construction. Even those who were displaced by the freeway, according to the state, gladly abandoned their homes and communities to make way for its construction. In the process of building the Harbor Freeway through a neighborhood of East and South Central Los Angeles, for example, the California Division of Highways lauded the people of that community:

Southerly of Exposition Boulevard, the freeway lo- cation is through a n area of older houses that some of the occupants have owned for thirty years or more. Some of the occupants are older people who expected to live in their homes for the rest of their

18

Folklore of the Freeway

lives. It would be assumed, in approaching owners of this type that one would meet with tears, hesita- tion, reluctance and perhaps outright defiance when asked to move. This is not the case. The older folks seemed to have resigned themselves to the fact that they should not stand in the way of progress and gladly cooperate. This is the rule rather than the exception. We have met wholehearted cooperation and support many times where least e ~ p e c t e d . ~

Through such allegations, the state justified the building of freeways in older, downtown neighborhoods. (Sources from those neighborhoods, tell much different stories, as I shall address later).

T h e Popular Culture of Progress In the best tradition of world’s fairs, expositions, and wild west shows, which glossed over the horrors of nineteenth-century industrialization and expansion, the dark side of freeway con- struction was sublimated by a n affirmative regional popular culture. Walt Disney, for example, went to great lengths to celebrate the construction of the freeway in southern Califor- nia. Disney not only shared the popular faith in the promise of unrestricted automobility, but also realized that the free- way, the Santa Ana freeway in particular, was crucial to the success of his enterprise, Disneyland. Following the advice of the Stanford Research Institute, Disney strategically situated his theme park alongside the proposed route of the Santa Ana Freeway and built a parking lot twice the size of the park- the largest in the nation in the mid-1950s. In fact, Disney built a miniature road system inside his theme park and called it a “ride.” The Autopia Ride was a mile-long “freeway” upon which one could safely drive miniature gasoline-powered cars. That the line for the Autopia Ride in Disneyland today is among the shortest in the park is not surprising, given the techno- logical savvy of American audiences a t the end of the twenti- eth century. Nonetheless, the inclusion of the Autopia Ride among the thirteen original attractions in 1955 suggests that as Iittle as forty years ago it was possible to imagine the Los Angeles freeways as a ride-an attraction for popular fun and amusement. Indeed, freeways were attractive to Disney’s sub- urban audiences, who readily accepted his representation of the freeway as a symbol of American progress and modernity.

19

Avila

Along with a rocket ship ride a n d a simulated lunar expedi- tion, the freeway in 1955 seemed a t home in Tomorrowland, that section of the theme park dedicated to postwar idealiza- tions of a bright American future.

Autopia was not t h e earliest attempt to link the freeway to the course of American progress from sea to shining sea. In 1939, various civic officials gathered to dedicate the Pasa- dena Freeway, the first to open in Los Angeles. A s in earlier celebrations of progress in American history, this one was ex- plicitly racialized. Present a t t h e ceremony, along with the mayor of Los Angeles, the governor of California, a n d the reign- ing queen of the 1941 Tournament of Roses Parade was a m a n described by local newspapers as “Chief Tahachwee.”’* The so- called chief (photographs of the event suggest h e was white) dressed in a costume t h a t resembled not the modest apparel of southern California’s indigenous populations, but rather the wildly elaborate costume of a n Indian in a Hollywood west- ern. A s if the massive feathered bonnet a n d excessive costume jewelry were not enough to convey authentic “Indianness,” a photograph in a state publication reveals t h e Indian seated “Indian-style” with the state director of Public Works. Together, the Indian a n d the bureaucrat smoke a peace pipe. By 1941, stereotypical images of the “White Man’s Indian” were all too familiar. The presence of a “primitive” or “savage” Indian a t the opening ceremony of a freeway, however, makes clear that it belonged to a n unambiguously Anglo-American progress, much like its predecessor-the railroad. The presence of the friendly Indian may also have signaled the final surrender of Native Americans to the encroachment of Anglo-American civi- lization. Indeed, official coverage of the ceremony smugly de- clared, “to t h e beating of tribal d r u m s , Chief Tahachwee relinquished the rights of his people in the Arroyo and formally transferred the property to the State” (5).

The symbolic exploitation of Native Americans in the open- ing ceremony of the Pasadena Freeway is appropriate, given the fate of southern California’s indigenous populations. The freeway, after all, materializes t h e Anglo-American world view, which saw history as a highway-an unbroken path of linear progress toward distant horizons. Such a world view clashed with t h a t of the Indians, who viewed t h e cosmos as cyclical a n d lived according to a principle of regenerative growth. U1- timately, that clash proved fatal for t h e Indian, who was u n - able to survive not only t h e degenerative forces of g u n s ,

20

Folklore of the Freeway

disease, and alcohol but also the linear conception of progress in which history pushed relentlessly forward, often over the peoples who stood in its path. “Thrown onto the highway of history,” Indians could not withstand the force of Anglo-Ameri- can progress, symbolized in the freeway.” Long after their conquest in southern California, Indians could safely return as a figment of the Anglo-American imagination to commemo- rate such civic works as the freeway.

Throughout the history of American popular culture, progress h a s been defined as “American” in contrast to the “un-Americanness” of the Other. Often, t h a t c o n t r a s t is racialized. The opening ceremony of the Pasadena Freeway demonstrated the way public space is implicated in the con- trast of white a n d nonwhite, using Indians as the racialized Other. S u c h popular signifiers of progress legitimized the physical and economic destruction wrought upon the inner- city communities of Blacks and Latinos. Although the pro- cess hardly needed legitimization-the freeway would have punctured those communities in any case-official Los An- geles (vested in such political authorities as the mayor of Los Angeles and the governor of California, and in s u c h cultural authorities as Walt Disney) took great measures to gild the freeway with the cultural legacy of Anglo-American progress in southern California. Beneath the optimistic gloss, however, the experience of destruction a n d dislocation informed the cultural production of other social groups in Los Angeles dur- ing the age of the freeway.

The Hegemony of the Freeway The Autopia Ride of Disneyland and the opening ceremony of the Pasadena Freeway underscore a hegemonic interpretation of the freeway, in which oppression and domination are le- gitimized through the production of culture. Hegemony, how- ever, often says more about the dominator than the dominated. To end the story here would be disingenuous. More important, it would ignore those historical actors whose words and deeds complicate a facile understanding of the freeway as a n incon- testably hegemonic or oppressive device. Citizens of East Los Angeles (predominantly Chicano), for example, registered for- mal protests against the construction of the freeway through- out the 1950s. They packed public hearings with the California Division of Highways to voice their opposition; they met in

2 1

Avila

neighbor’s homes to organize community opposition; a n d they formed several community groups to fight the onslaught of the freeway, s u c h as the Eastside Citizen’s Committee Against the Freeway a n d the Freeway Fighters. They also wrote to local papers, which routinely published the letters of a n angry com- munity. One s u c h letter poignantly asked the question, “Five freeways now slash through Boyle Heights, namely t h e S a n Bernardino, t h e S a n t a Ana, t h e Golden State a n d now the Pomona. Question is, how do you stop t h e freeways from con- tinuing to butcher o u r town?”12

Chicanos a n d Chicanas took action against the freeway through other m e a n s besides t h e institutional networks of committee hearings, community activism, a n d newspaper edi- torials. Folklore, after all, is as complex a n d contradictory as the people who create it. Sometimes folklore underscores the dominant perceptions of a society, other times it is a venue for alternative ones. While theme park attractions a n d m a n u - factured Indians represent popular understandings of the free- way in the 1940s a n d 1950s, they a r e b u t one aspect of t h e folklore of t h e freeway. Chicanos a n d Chicanas of Los Ange- les enriched that folklore by drawing upon traditional a n d non- traditional cultural forms to record their experience of the freeway a n d its construction. S u c h cultural productions do not summarize the perceptions of Chicanos a n d Chicanas in Los Angeles, b u t they do enlarge o u r understanding of the complex cultural responses to modernization in the age of the freeway.

In t h e Tujunga W a s h of t h e Los Angeles River, J u d i t h Baca’s mural, “The Great Wall of Los Angeles,” depicts t h e struggle of freeway construction during the 1950s. In that sec- tion of the mural entitled “Division of the Barrios,” a Chicano family is divided-mother a n d son o n one side, father a n d daughter o n t h e other. In between, t h e freeway writhes, im- posing a wide gulf between them. Baca’s image plays on the word itself, taking the “free” o u t of “freeway.” In her image, the freeway is instead a n oppressive monolith dividing a n d constricting instead of unifying a n d mobilizing. The rnurulistu personifies the freeway as a serpentine, parasitic force, prey- ing upon Chicano families a n d asphyxiating t h e old Los An- geles barrios.

Nostalgia, even melancholy, m a r k s other Chicano a n d Chicana recollections of life before the freeway. For many who grew u p in the cities of southern California, the freeway plowed

22

Folklore of the Freeway

over backyards, churches, and schoolhouses-now j u s t debris in the path of progress. In the poem, “The Journey,’’ by Patricia Preciado Martin, the narrator walks with her grandmother through the old barrio where s h e grew u p . Little is left from the days of her youth, however, save the sparse geraniums that grow in the cracks of the pavement. At the heart of the old barrio, the freeway stands, indifferent to childhood memo- ries of family a n d community. Walking through a much- changed barrio, the grandmother recalls a river t h a t r a n through the town. The freeway, however:

had cut the river from the people. The freeway blocks the sunshine The drone of traffic buzzes like a giant sleeping bee A new music in the barrio.13

The “new music” of the barrio also resonates in the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes. In her poem, “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” Cervantes implicates the freeway in t h e gendered oppression of Chicana women by men-Anglo a n d Chicano alike. The narrator of the poem remembers life with her “woman family”-her mother and grandmother, as well as the fleeting men. Wayward men are in stark contrast to the sanctuary of her grandmother’s home, “the house s h e built with her own hands,” a central image of the poem. More strik- ing, however, is the contrast between the home and the free- way, the “blind worm wrapping u p the valley from Los Altos to Sal si Puedes.” The freeway fills the author with dread: “Ev- ery day a t dusk as Grandma watered geraniums the shadow of the freeway lengthened.” The “cocky disheveled carpentry” of her grandmother’s home is juxtaposed against the inhuman symmetry of the freeway monolith. The freeway, the poet sug- gests, was built by men; men infatuated with movement, mo- bility, and most of all, escape. Two central oppositions gird “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway”-men’s movement ver- sus women’s anchoring, and the freeway’s movement versus the house’s stability. Wrapped in s u c h contradictions, the narrator concludes, “In time, I plant geraniums, I tie my hair in braids, a n d t r u s t only what I have built with my own hand^."'^

The freeway h a s invoked a complex range of emotions among Chicana poets and artists-defiance, nostalgia, suspi- cion, and dread. Some Chicano writers even bring the free-

23

Avila

way into their fantastic and surreal imagination. In The Road to Tanazunchule, by Ron Arias, the freeway frames the fanta- sies of Don Fausto, a very old man on the verge of death who lived in the barrio of Los Angeles. The freeway is such a promi- nent part of his daily environment t h a t he invokes the free- way in one of his many fantasies-a Peruvian shepherd leading his herd of alpacas onto the Los Angeles freeway. The scene is loaded with Bufiuelian illusions and ambiguities:

“What’s that?” Mario said, jumping u p . Fausto hurried to the sidewalk. “Vente, don’t be

afraid,” he told Mario, then stepped off the curb into the m a s s of bobbing, furry heads. The shepherd, lagging behind, seemed confused by the traffic lights and horns. A t the intersection leading to the free- way on-ramp the frightened alpacas blocked a row of funeral cars, headlights on. Fausto, shouting and waving his hoe, stumbled u p the ramp a n d tried to turn the herd from disaster. Mario ran after him, catching a glimpse of the motorcycle escort, racing to the head of the funeral p r o c e s ~ i o n . ~ ~

Drawing upon the imagery of Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, and Carpentier, Arias makes the freeway a link between the Los Angeles barrio and Latin American cultural expres- sion. Although Arias wrote The Road to Tumazunchale in 1987, long after the freeway hacked its way through the barrio, his reference to it demonstrates another way Chicanos derived meaning from that process: by immersing the freeway in the cultural currents of Mexico and South America. The author skillfully defamiliarizes a n ordinary, yet prominent, structure of the barrio landscape, rendering it part of the make-believe world of Don Fausto. Although the freeway is not of the bar- rio, Arias shows how it is woven into the fabric of his commu- nity. He does not accept the freeway for what it is, b u t strips it of its functionalism and uses it as a magical stage for dream and fantasy.

While theme parks and public ceremonies affirmed the dominant perception of the freeway, Chicanos and Chicanas contradicted s u c h official p a e a n s to progress through a counterfolklore that assigned a very different meaning to the freeway. Their endeavors, however, were more than a Pavlov- i a n response to oppression. The work of Baca, Martin, Cervantes, and Arias demonstrates the ways in which Chicano

24

Folklore of the Freeway

artists and writers have exploited the freeway as a source of creative inspiration, and, in that process, imparted their own identity upon the public spaces of the city. Chicanos a n d Chicanas could not change the course of the freeway, but they could change its meaning. Such a contrast between the domi- nant meaning of the freeway and the Chicano meaning of the freeway illuminates the larger cultural conversation between the intentions of cultural producers and the uses of cultural consumers. Chicanos and Chicanas used the freeway to con- struct a discourse of resistance to its imposition upon their world, and in doing so, defied the intended meanings of city engineers, public officials, and cultural impresarios.

A more contemporary example of this dialogue around the built environment recalls another cultural practice that thrives in the Los Angeles barrio. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a graffiti writing explosion hit the Bronx in New York. There, most of the work was painted on the sides of subway cars. With no subways to bomb, however, Los Angeles taggers aimed for the freeways. In the words of one local tagger, “Ev- erybody takes the freeways. Everybody, everybody and their mother sees this. This is like the subways in New York, ex- cept that you move past it instead of having it move past you.”16 The tagger has named a very important cultural practice, that of taking public space and using it as a means of self-expres- sion. Graffiti is a good example of what anthropologist J a m e s Scott calls “hidden transcripts”-jokes, songs, folklore, graf- fiti, and other cultural expressions that manifest a dissident political culture. l7

On the freeway, however, such transcripts are not so hid- den. True, freeways eliminate the kind of cultural encounters that were routine in the “democratic” spaces of older Ameri- can cities (Olmsted’s Central Park is perhaps the most cel- ebrated example). High above (and sometimes below) the landscape of human activity, the freeway removes the driver from social contact. For many, the freeway is a safe passage through the ghetto or the barrio t h a t (by design, many would argue) maintains the social distance between separate and unequal worlds. Even so, graffiti works against the “out of sight, out of mind” principle of urban design. It is a highly visible reminder of the Other-inner city Chicano a n d Black youth. While the city spends 150 million dollars a year in its war on graffiti, and while homeowners and public officials rail against graffiti as “visual pollution,”18 such well-funded efforts

25

Avila

are unable to stop the expressions of power sprayed onto the wall, which articulate presence, convey identity, a n d person- alize the impersonal universe of the sprawling metropolis. Despite the trend toward the privatization of public life in the postindustrial metropolis, graffiti on the freeway is a reminder that “they” are still here. Cultural dialogues are still a t work in the spaces of the city, even in a “city of quartz” like Los Angeles. While urban scholars a n d theorists rightly dispar- age the “destruction of public space,” “the militarization of city life,” a n d the “South Africanization of Los Angeles,”lg s u c h criticisms often obscure the counternarratives, counter- strategies, and counterexpressions t h a t assert and maintain humanity, even in a space as inhuman a n d alienating as the Los Angeles freeway.

Beyond the Barrio The use of the freeway as a n u r b a n canvas for the expression of diverse Chicano identities compels a more balanced perspec- tive of the relationship between the Los Angeles freeway and the Chicano community. To say that that relationship can only be characterized by conflict, defiance, a n d resistance would be specious, as other aspects of the Chicano experience shed a more ambiguous light upon the freeway. The folklore of the freeway, for example, i s complicated by t h e work of Gil Cuadros, another Chicano writer who understands the inner contradictions of the Los Angeles freeway. In his novel, City o f G o d , Cuadros reminisces about his childhood in the barrio and his adult life as a gay man searching for sex in the boozy discos of West Hollywood, “Rage, Revolver, Motherlode and Mickey’s.”20 West Hollywood is far from his home in City Ter- race, where he grew u p with a homophobic father and a n abu- sive mother, but it is the place where he can momentarily forget the whispers and dirty looks of his old neighborhood. Not that he is “at home” in West Hollywood-the author recounts the racism and condescension of the “West Hollywood bar types- blond hair, blue eyes,” who crave “hot Latin, brown-skinned, warm, exotic, dark, dark, d a r k men. His identity is as frac- tured a n d fragmented as Los Angeles itself, a “hot Latin” in one world, a “faggot” in the other. The freeway is his link be- tween these imperfect worlds. It is the space in-between his two selves-his West Hollywood incarnation and his Chicano roots in the barrio. “Driving the San Bernardino is the closest

26

Folklore of the Freeway

I get to Mecca,” Cuadros muses as he passes over the land- marks of his youth, “I was born below this freeway, in a house with a picket fence now plowed under.” But there is no sweet sorrow here:

I imagine the house still intact, buried under the dirt and asphalt, dust and neglect. Hidden under a mod- ern city, this is my Aztlan, a glimpse of my ancient home, my family. All it takes is a well-chosen phrase to cave-in. Mom, why did you burn my hands with the iron and say it was a n accident? Tattoo my arms with the car’s cigarette lighter? Make me wish your wish, that I was never born? Make me admit they are all lies. I starved and refused your breast, lav- ished me instead with gifts and I would destroy them . . . dolls without eyes, legs, heads. Like the house, these words spiral in on themselves, stab into the moist earth and rot; the angry lords eat their own. Ivy grows over this hell hole. The sprinklers kick on. The traffic roars. ( 5 5 )

Cuadros reviles both the privilege of a happy childhood and the nostalgia that infused Chicana memories of life before the freeway. Even before the freeway smashed the barrio into dust, the pain a n d misery h a d grown unbearable for some. For Cuadros and others like him, once trapped in the small world of the barrio, the freeway is both a way out and a way in-an escape from intolerance and a path to passion, love, even death. Cuadros’s memories light the spatial paradox of the free- way-it is both savior and destroyer.

The Chicano folklore of the freeway shelters a variety of ways in which Chicanos and Chicanas have represented (and represented themselves upon) the Los Angeles freeway. And yet, such musings about how Chicanos and Chicanas have imagined the freeway speaks little to how they use the free- way in ways like everyone else. While Chicanos a n d other Latinos were concentrated in East Los Angeles during the post- war period, there is no longer a monolithic barrio of which we can speak. Since the 1960s (and even before), the Chicano community h a s dispersed throughout the metropolis and to s u c h far-reaching suburbs as Whittier, Norwalk, Alhambra, Montebello, a n d Pic0 Rivera. The socioeconomic gains of Chicanos and Chicanas in recent decades have accelerated their dispersal throughout the region. Central to that process

27

Avila

is, also, the freeway, which bestows upon suburban Chicanos the same opportunities of access and mobility as it bestowed upon a n earlier generation of white suburbanites.21 The bar- rio, like other working-class immigrant a n d ethnic neighbor- hoods, is inspired by the great modern dream of mobility. To live well is to move u p socially; and to move u p socially is of- ten, but not always, to move out physically. “Sal si Puedes” is more than a local joke in southwestern barrios, it is a moral imperative-an imperative that breaks down the old barrios from within, even as the freeways break them u p from with- out. And more often t h a n not, due to the peculiar circum- stances of life in Los Angeles, the freeway is the key to realizing that imperative. It is the most accessible, most immediate means of securing the American dream of movement and mo- bility. Now our only complaint is that for many the dream is unfulfilled and people are not moving about fast enough or freely enough.

Conclusion: Modernity and I t s Discontents The history of freeway construction in metropolitan Los An- geles transcends the particularities of space a n d time. The history of any freeway recalls the triumphs a n d tragedies of millions who found themselves overpowered by progress in various spatial and temporal contexts-Haussmann’s Paris, Moses’s New York, and Porfirian Mexico City. Even in a city as postmodern as Los Angeles, the recent history of freeway construction demonstrates that the energy of modernization has yet to cease and that the experience of modernity perme- ates both historical and contemporary consciousness. But, as Marshall Berman reminds us, that experience is one of con- tradiction and paradox. The freeway, as a comprehensive sys- tem of m a s s t r a n s i t i m a g i n e d a n d i m p l e m e n t e d by a technocratic cadre of planners and engineers, is a quintes- sentially modern space. Even in its totality, however, the free- way cannot mask the seething tensions within postwar Los Angeles. Alas, it created new ones.

The history of freeway construction in postwar Los Ange- les illuminates the countervalent forces of modernity. While the freeway gave rise to a new experience of the city, it simul- taneously catalyzed the disintegration of older, familiar pat- terns of life in the “little worlds” of localized communities. This contradiction points to w h a t Theodor Adorno a n d Max

28

Folklore of the Freeway

Horkheimer identified as the “Dialectic of Enlightenment”-in which the Enlightenment gave rise to new systems of domi- nation a n d oppression. Every aspect of Western progress h a s not been without its dark twin: expansion/conquest, indus- trialization/enslavement, construction/destruction. S u c h dualities define the experience of modernity a n d inform the history of Los Angeles in the age of the freeway, a world of “disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.”22

Chicanos and Chicanas, a people born of the globalized forces of modernity, bore the brunt of freeway construction as they endured displacement and dislocation. Somehow, their voices have been absent from historical accounts of freeway construction in postwar Los Angeles. This is not surprising given that the voices of the oppressed have usually been miss- ing from larger histories of modernity a n d modernization. Adorno and Horkheimer, like other Marxist cultural critics, overlooked another dialectic within the Dialectic of Enlight- enment-that between the oppressor and oppressed. While historians and scholars often focus upon the former, the vic- tims of progress have not been silent in the face of their op- pressor-man or machine. Chicanos and Chicanas devised various means to resist the freeway through the organized channels of political protest, as well as through the produc- tion of culture. The two should not be viewed separately, but rather as strategies designed to preserve neighborhoods or the memory of them when gone.

Other complexities remain. The history of the Los Angeles barrio in the age of the freeway is more than the simple story of us versus them. The folklore of the freeway, or the cultural response to modernization, is broad enough to encompass both the complexity of metropolitan society in postwar Los Angeles and the diversity of the city’s Chicano community. Although Chicanos and Chicanas derived meaning from and assigned meaning to the freeway in ways that defied or subverted offi- cial meanings, those meanings were not uniform and were not shared alike by all Chicanos and Chicanas, namely those who used the freeway to forge new identities and to explore the world beyond the barrio. Chicanos and Chicanas were some- times a t odds with the forces of modernization; and sometimes a t odds with each other. Perhaps they understand the com- plexities and contradictions of the Los Angeles freeway so well because those complexities and contradictions are their own.

29

Avila

Notes For their help with this article, I would like to thank Lawrence W. Levine, Anthony Macias, Louis Suarez Potts, and the editorial staff of Aztlan. This article is taken from chapter two of my dissertation, “The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Los Angeles in the Age of the Freeway,” University of California, Berkeley, 1997.

I . Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1 930 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993).

2. See Gary Miller, Cities by Contract: The Politics of Municipal Incorporation (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1981); a n d Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

3 . A few who have done so include David Brodsly, L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 198 1); and Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Penguin, 1973). See also Eric R. Avila, Reinventing Los Angeles Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 1940-1 965, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of History, University of California, Berke- ley, 1997.

4. “Folklore” is defined here as meaning assigned to a particular object or experience by cultural consumers or producers that reso- nates with wide segments of the population. Although folklore is of- ten associated with pre-industrial societies, popular culture (culture that is widely accessible and widely accessed) is viewed in recent scholarship as “the folklore of industrial society.” Thus, my use of it. See Lawrence W. Levine, “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences,” in The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural Histo y, ed. Lawrence Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

5. Brodsly, L.A. Freeway, 115. 6. Miller, Cities by Contract, 85. 7 . Eastside Sun, January 26, 1961. 8. Carlos Navarro a n d Rudolf0 Acufia, “In Search of Commu-

nity: A Comparative Essay on Mexicans in Los Angeles as San Anto- nio,” in 20th Century Los Angeles: Power Promotion and Social Conflict, ed. Norman Klein and Martin Schiesl (Claremont, Calif.: ReginaBooks, 1990), 203.

9. California Division of Highways, California Highways and Public Works 33, nos. 5-6 (May-June 1954): 15.

10. California Division of Highways, California Highways and Public Works 32, nos. 3-4 (January 1941): 4.

11. Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1990).

12. Eastside Sun, November 11, 1957.

30

Folklore of the Freeway

13. Patricia Preciado Martin, “The Journey,” in Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature, ed. Tey Diana Reboldo and Eliana S. Rivero (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 167.

14. Lorna Dee Cervantes, “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” Emplumada (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 198 1).

15. Ron Arias, The Road to Tamazunchale (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1987), 44-45.

16. Ruben Martinez, The Other Side: Notes From L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond (New York: Verso Press, 1993), 12 1.

17. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). See also Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994).

18. Martinez, The Other Side, 118. 19. These quotes are taken from Mike Davis, City of Quartz (New

York: Verso Press, 1990), perhaps the most influential book on con- temporary Los Angeles. Similar perspectives on the “postmodern” city can be found in Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New Amencan City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992).

20. Gil Cuadros, City of God (San Francisco: City Lights, 1994), 54. 2 1. W. A. V. Clark and Millan Mueller, “Hispanic Relocation and

Spatial Assimilation: A Case Study,” Social Science Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 1988): 836.

22. Marshall Berman, All That I s Solid Melts into Air: The Experi- ence of Modernity (New York: Simon a n d Schuster, 1982), 326.

31

ERIC R. AVILA. Assistant professor in the Cesar Chavez Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently writing a n intellectual history of the Los Angeles freeways.