1984 Ethics Paper

Post-Ghetto Reimagining South Los Angeles

Edited by Josh Sides

Published for the Huntington -USC institute on Ca liforn ia and the West

by University of California Press, Berkeley, California, and

the Huntington Library, San Mar ino, California

Copyright 2012 Huntington Library, Art Co llections, and Botan ical Gardens and University of Californi a Press All rights reserved.

Series jacket des ign by Lia Tjandra Interior des ign by Doug Davis Copyedi ting by Jean Patterson Inde xing by Sue Marchman Cover photograph by Jose Sanc hez Printed in the Uni ted States by She ridan Books

library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Post-ghetto : reimagining South Los Angeles / edited by Josh Sides.

p. cm. -- (Western histories ; 5) Includes bibliographical references and ind ex. ISBN 978-0-87328-252-9 (alk. paper)

1. African Americans --California -- Los Angeles--Social conditions. 2. African Americans--Relations with Mexican Americans. 3. lnner cities--California--Los Angeles. 4. Social conllict--California--Los Ange les. 5. Los Angeles (Calif.)--Race relations. 6. Los Ange les (Calif.)--Social conditions. 7. Los Ange les (Calif.)-- Economic co ndi tions. I. Sides, Josh, 1972- II. Huntington -USC Institute on California and the West. F869.L89N4 2012 305.896'073079494--dc23

2012005115

SCOTT SAUL

"GENTE-FICATION" ON DEMAND:

THE CULTURAL REDEVELOPMENT OF SOUTH Los ANGELES

This city wasn't a city. And if it was, it was a hidden city. There were several cities within it, and you had to yield to it, before it revealed any of its magic to you . . . . Los Angeles was a rambling maze that didn't apologize for what it was . Instead it forced you to find the city within you. In that way it was a grown-up city.

-Chris Abani, The Virgin of Flames (2007)

I n Karen Tei Yamas hita's magical-realist L.A. novel Tropic of Orange (1997), the African American character Buzzworm is a funny sort of community organ izer. Towering like his be loved palm trees over the

action of the nove l, he cuts a striking figure: "Big black seven-foot dude, Vietnam vet, an Afro shirt with palm trees painted all over it, dreds, pager and Walkman be lted to his waist, sound plugged into one ear and two or three watches at least on both his wrists:' A freelance socia l worker and self-described "Angel of Mercy;' Buzzworm walks th e streets of South Los Angeles, ministering to the needy of all types- a Salvadoran street peddler trying to un load her oranges, bananas, and peanuts; a black gang member who has just dodged a bullet; even a crass, successful Japanese American news producer who denies that she has any needs whatsoever. Born and raised near the corner of Flo- rence and Normandie-the exact intersection wh,ere black assailants attacked white truck driver Reginald Denny during the Rodney King riots-Buzzworm speaks to the possibility that black strength might be channeled into interracial collaboration rnther than violence. As the two syllables of his name convey, Buzzworm is both sophisticated and humble, media-savvy and grassroots-oriented. And with all those watches, he knows what time it is: when traffic on the no Freeway is paralyzed in endless gridlock and a homeless colony takes residence on

147

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a strip of it, he seizes the political opportunity and turns the media spot- light on the trials of the poor. 1

Tropic of Orange is a dizzyingly postmodern multicultural novel. It evokes a world where characters are marked less by their point of origin than by the arc of their aspiration, where the borders of identity exist to be playfully manipulated, and where the Tropic of Cancer itself can lit- erally migrate to Los Angeles, defying the iron laws of geography. But for all its giddy air of excitement, the novel is also a serious -minded effort to imagine how the most economically ravaged parts of Los Angeles might regenerate themselves as communities. Buzzworm's plan on that score involves a redefinition of "gentrification" along more democratic lines:

Not the sort [of gentrification that] brings in poor artists. Sort where people living there become their own gen - try. Self-gentrification by a self-made set of standards and respectability. Do-it-yourself gentrification. Latinos had this word: gente. Something trans lated like us. Like

folks . That sort of gente -fication. Restore the neighbor- hood. Clean up the streets. Take care of the people. Trim and water the palm trees. Some laughed at Buzzworm's plan. Called his plan This Old Hood. They could laugh, but he was still trying to go to heaven.

Buzzworm is pegged as a listener-his Walkman is always on and often tuned to non-English -speaking radio stations-and his very in- vention of the term gente-fication suggests the creative outcomes that can result from "tuning in" to alternate frequencies, to communities not your own. It also speaks, more directly, to the possibility of a grassroots black-Latino-Asian alliance in Los Angeles, a coalition rooted less in identity politics and more in an ethics of solidarity and mutual care.2

Yet, there is a reason why people laugh at Buzzworm's dream of gente -fication, and it is the same reason that Tropic of Orange seemed so out -of-step-good-hearted to the point of cheesiness-when it was pub- lished a mere five years after the Rodney King riots. In the wake of that event, intense pessimism about the future of Los Angeles gripped many artists and intellectuals; the city appeared to be in the throes of "death by globalization;• its balkanized citizens at each other's throats while a glob- ally interconnected labor market fatefully pushed LA'.s working class and even middle class into a race to the bottom. Anna Deavere Smith's play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) offered a set of mono logues on the riot

The Cultural Redevelopment of South Los Angeles 149

in which a diverse group of Angelenos seemed especially gifted at talk- ing past each other and dwelling in their private pain. Mike Davis fol- lowed his City of Quartz (1990 ), whose scathing ana lysis of L.A:s class and racial inequality seemed to have forecast the riots, with Ecology of Fear (1998), which upped the apocalyptic ante: L.A:s politica l calamities were going to be compounded by a set of eco logical catastrophes, Davis predicted, as the greed of city elites pitted the city against nature itself. And T. Coraghessen Boyle's novel The Tortilla Curtain (1995) offered a parallel analysis of social and ecolog ical disaster. Its well-meaning "liberal humanist" protagonist, the nature writer Delaney Mossbacher, descends into a homicidal rage as he becomes convinced that an illegal migrant from Mexico is threatening the well-being of h is gated community. At the end of the novel, Delaney 's beloved corner of Topanga Canyon is con- sumed by a horrific mudslide that swallows Delaney himself, until he looks, tellingly, "like a man drowning in s-:•3

Something strange happened, though, on the way to death by global- ization: Los Angeles twitched back to life, galvanized by a multiracial, labor- led movement for "social democracy in one city:• This new Los Angeles- based social movement emerged out of a series of concrete campaigns fo- cusing on the struggles of the working poor-an expansive living-wage campaign, union drives among home health care workers and janitors, the fight for affordable public transportation spearheaded by the Bus Riders Union, and more. Umbrella organizations like the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) challe n ged and redefined the term "new economy;' which conventiona lly co njur ed up images of high- tech workers telecommuting to work in a newly rootless world, insist- ing instead that the new L.A. economy be tied to commu nity needs for decent-paying jobs and environment-fr iendly practices. Perhaps most crucially for the purposes of this essay, the Los Angeles County Federa - tion of Labor sought out strategies that would bring black and Latino Angelenos together. Fighting against the sense that African Americans were losing jobs to low-earning Latinos in the building trades and jani- torial services, for instance, the County Federation looked to groom African American leadership, raise the floor of wages, and reserve seg- ments for African American workers in those areas. The consolidation of this new black-brown alliance was reflected in the fate of former labor organizer Antonio Villaraigosa's two mayoral campaigns. In 2001, he had been defeated by an odd and, as it happened, unstable coalition of blacks and white conservatives; in 2005 , he rode to an easy victory by adding black Angelenos to his Latino -labor-Anglo-liberal base.4

150 Scott Saul

This fragile and hard-won alliance between blacks and Latinos grew out of a pressing demographic reality: the transformation of many bastions of'black L.A:' into mixed-race neighborhoods , with a large influx of Lati- nos tipping the balance. Typically, the fabled Lincoln Theater-the mu- sical hub of L.A:s black community in the 1930s and 1940s, the "West Coast Apollo" -now hosts a Spanish-speaking congregation, the Iglesia de Jesucristo, Sur Central. Numbers suggest the massive scale of this shift. The larger South Los Angeles region was 55 percent black in 1990, 40 percent black in 2000, and only 31 percent black in 2006, as tens of thousands of black Angelenos left the area and a larger number of mi- grants from Mexico and Centra l America settled and raised families there. No longer could black Angelenos press claims for representation in city government based simply on demographic predominance in South Los Angeles. With only a few areas in South Los Angeles, such as Leimert Park, Baldwin Hills, and Inglewood, retaining a majority-black presence, African Americans had to find a coalition beyond the black-white liberal alliance that stood behind the administrations of Mayor Tom Bradley (1973- 93). As Raphael Sonenshein and Mark Drayse have observed, 'J\.frican Americans have found themselves playing catch-up in a new era of diverse city poli- tics. Forging alliances with available groups on a self-interested, pragmatic basis will inevitably be a key part of the new black politics'.'5

We might ask, then: how much has the culture of South Los Ange- les prepared the way for this "new black politics"? The rest of this essay will explore three separate attempts to reimagine the terrain of South Los Angeles for the twenty-first century: first, the underground hip-hop music that emerged from the Crenshaw district's Good Life Cafe and Project Blowed and offered a freestyling alternative to gangsta rap; sec- ond, the recent boomlet of novels set in South Los Angeles, which seek out the hidden interracial history of the area as a prelude to its open- ended future; and third, artist Edgar Arceneaux's Watts House Project, an ongoing "collaborative artwork in the shape of a neighborhood redevel- opment:' These three projects represent only a small fraction of the cul- ture produced through and around South Los Angeles-after all, with a population of almost a million residents, the area would be the fourth- largest city in California if it were incorporated as such-but they do sug- gest three over lapping modes of engagement. In music, literature , and the built environment, artists are upending conven tional repr esentations of South Los Angeles as America 's ultimate urban comba t zone. Instead, they are underlining -an d, more powerfully, embody ing-a dream of community, puttingg ente-fication into practice.

The Cultural Redevelopment of South Los Angeles 151

Two Decades of Underground L.A. Hip-Hop The history of underground L.A. hip - hop begins with the story of an open-mic, held every Thursday night from December 1989 through 1995, at the Good Life Cafe. For most of the week, the Good Life was a health- food store, offering an alternative to the highly processed options avail- able at the nearest supermarket. On Thursday nights it became the center of lyrical battles between local hip -hop emcees, offering an alternative to the rap music then dominating the airwaves. Aiming to create the "at- mosphere of a serious arts workshop ;' Good Life owner B. Hall forbade the use of obscenities onstage, and anyone who slipped one in would be roundly booed. The performers took the prohibition as a goad to aes- thetic innovation: since the usual provocative moves were banned, they would have to find more subtle ones. Hip -hop of that moment had been undeniably ghettocentric, its imagination driven by the attempt to de- scribe "the 'hood;' but Good Lifers aimed largely to step outside the aes- thetic of caricature that, tellingly, excised neighborliness when it turned the "neighborhood " into a "'hood '.' As journalist-documentarian Brian Cross observed more generally, "The success of the Good Life was a re- action to the more cartoonish Delicious Vinyl pop-radio hits of the day at the one extreme and the gangsta -thugs-at the other, with dope money and radio payola always lurking in the background .... The Good Life was the first self-consciously indie-thinking movement in hip-hop driven by a passionate commitment to lose all this garbage'.'6

At the same time that gangsta rap was searing an indelible image of "South Central" in the American, and even global, imagination, Good Lifers moved away from the gangsta aesthetic in two crucial ways. First, gangsta rap forcefu lly developed an analogy between gang posses and rap posses, putting a premium on stylish boasts that belittled rival posses and defied police authority; the "badman" was the key persona of gangsta. In N.W.Ns genre-establishing Straight Outta Compton, for instance, Ice Cube bragged of "mix[ing] up" his rivals and "cook[ing] them up like gumbo;' claimed a "crime record like Charles Manson;' and pledged to "swarm on any m-- in a blue uniform'.' By contrast, Good Lifers thought of hip -hop as a spiritual and politica l alternative to the world of gangs and drugs. Abstract Rude (Aaron Pointer) rapped that

Hip hop, if it were not for you, I would probably walk the street, Carry Glocks and heat, Be on some ill s- that you would not believe,

152 Scott Saul

Maybe a cat thief giving you grief, family beef. Instead I use the inner eye, energy and chi.

Likewise, the paradigmatic Good Life group Freestyle Fellowship took its name to mark a healthy distance from the posses and crews that dominated the gangsta rap scene. Myka 9 (Michael Troy) remembered thinking, "Dude, I don't want to be a crew. Why don't we become a fellow - ship? Let's pull something more conscious, spiritual:' Good Lifers tended to embrace traditional bohemian and political imperatives (turn on and expand your consciousness; expose the unspoken rules of "the system") rather than traditional badman ones (go out guns blazing) .7

Second, the music coming out of the Good Life departed from gangsta's "hard" aesthetic, which one musicologist has described as the "hip-hop sub lime;' in that it was meant to inspire both fear and pleasure. The music performed at the Good Life was marked by a "freestyling" aes- thetic, where the aspiration was less to be menacing and invulnerable than to be open to an ongoing flow of possibilities. As the Freestyle Fellowship announced on the open ing manifesto of their first album To Whom It May Concern ... (1991), "Acknowledging rap as an artform, we break the rules and set new standards in the vocal arena. By experimenting in tonal and harmonic inflections and sporadic pitch changes in delivery, we'll stir your emotion and take rap music to its threshold of en lightenment:' Self- consciously modeling the rhythm of their raps after the postbop soloing of Miles Davis and John Coltrane , Good Lifers seemed, in the words of one observer, "like musicians trapped in rappers' bodies:· Their chief vocal method (the one advertised above) became known as "chopping": words delivered rapid-fire, with rhythmic displacements that played in and around the beat, and with internal rhymes that emphasized the angular- ity of the phrasing. The chopper par excellence was Myka 9, who aspired to the vocalese mastery of jazz singer Jon Hendricks, who had himself cut an album (Freddie Freeloader) with words set to the solos of Davis, Coltrane, and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley . In all, this was a far cry from the dominant vocal strategy of gangsta rap, in which words were spoken, not sung, and often with a finger-jabbing insistence; the vocal styles com- ing out of the Good Life were plastic, one might say, rather than hard.8

Yet, along with its far-reaching ambitions to "take rap music to the threshold of enlightenment;· the early Good Life milieu was also decid - edly black-black in its demographics, and black in the cultural nation - alism that suffused the scene and its productions. To question a rival emcee's blackness was one of the most serious insults that cou ld be slung

The Cultura l Redeve lopment of South Los Angeles 153

in the "battles" arou nd the mic; a virtuosic blackness (and argua bly a vir- tuosic black masculinity) was implicitly what mos t Goo d Life rapp ers aimed to perform. One of the few Latino em cees to emerge from the Good Life, 2Mex, te stified with both amb ivalence and appreciation to its "pro-black" vibe:

We got sweated for being Mexican. It was very pro-black. So when I got to the Good Life and there was a lot of that more militant vibe, it was just something tha t I wasn't up on, an d I app reciated it if it was something that was mak- ing people mor e proud. I though t it was beautiful.

Nonblacks who survived the Good Life's initiation rites seem, like 2Mex, to have found a place for themselves within its putatively black aesthetic. Cut Chemist (Lucas MacFadden), perhaps the only whit e artist to emerge from the Good Life, remembered tha t th e word "devil" was floated a number of tim es in his presence (as in "whit e devil")-to which he riposted th at "if th e devil makes beats, they're going to be hot:· He be- came the turntablist for th e apt ly na med Unity Comm ittee, o ne of th e Good Life's main crews. 9

The conto ur s of th is black aesthetic, it s open ness and its co mbat- iveness, can be observed in Freesty le Fellowship's "Inner City Bound - aries," from th e ir wou ld-be breakthrough album ln nercity Griots (1993). Featuring a jazz co mbo (vibrapho ne, saxo phone, bass, and drums ) that might have been at home on a 1960s Blue No te recording session, and propelled by a sinu ously funky beat, the song was clearly indebted to ear- lier generation s of black musicians. At th e sa me tim e, it ann oun ced "the birth of a new gene rat ion of blackness;' one that was "forced to set it s boundaries:• Its cho r us (sung, not rapped) was propell ed by an equ ation between the desire to be "righteous" and "conscio us;• the de sire to be free and open, and the desire to be black:

I gotta be righteous, I gotta be me I got ta be consc ious, I got ta b e free I gotta be able to cou nt erattack I gotta be stab le I gotta be black I gotta be open, gotta be me and I gotta keep hopin' we're gon na be fre e I gotta be able to counterattack I got ta be stable I gotta be black

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"Inner City Boundaries" was pointedly not nonviolent: released just a year after the riots, it put a premium on the need to "counterattack" in self-defense, in the name of both freedom and psychological stability. The "enemy" who "crossed the wrong boundar y" was warned, ominously, that he would "disappear here and end up in a tree" -threatened in effect with a lynching. Yet the song's center of gravity rested on the power of self- knowledge rather than the power of a gun. Its first lines - repeated twice over the course of the song and scatted in increasingly esoteric melodic patterns-announced that "Once we have the knowledge of self as a peo- ple, then we could be free and no devil could enter the boundaries~ 10

W hen the Good Life closed its open-mic in 1995, the epicenter of L.A'.s alternative hip-hop community moved a mile and a half south, to the Project Blowed open-mic in the commercial village of Leimert Park. The Leimert Park strip was, in many ways, a perfect fit for L.A'.s alternative rap scene. Leimert's arts institutions had roots in the local Black Arts movement of the late 1960s, and they drew on the same mixture of cultural natio nalism, bohemianism, and progressive politics that colored the hip- hop vision of the Good Life. More specifically, postbop jazz-the music that inspired the aesthetic of"chopping"-was at the heart of Leirnert's re- development as an arts distri ct in the wake of the Rodney King riots . The scene was anchored by the jazz performance spaces of sth Street Dick's Coffee House and the World Stage, and many of Leimert 's "village elders" had strong connections to the mus ic: Kamau Daaood operated the record store Final Vinyl and performed jazz-inflected poetry ; cafe owner Richard Fulton was a street-level jazz impresario; World Stage owner Billy Hig- gins was a legendary jazz drummer; and Horace Tapscott, who lent his skills on piano to a Freestyle Fellowship recording session, was an inno- vative bandleader whose Arkestra had supplied the pulse for black L.A'.s commun ity-arts scene for thirty years. The growing presence in Leirnert of Project Blowed-housed in filmmaker Ben Caldwell's KAOS Network arts space, just a few doors down from sth Street Dick's and the World Stage-promised, at least in theory, to bridge the generational gap that often divided old and young members of the black community. As Daaood announced in his poem "Leimert Park":

i stand on the o.g. corner tell old school stories with a bebop tongue to the hip hop future i see new rainbows in their eyes as we stand in the pudd les of melted chains

The Cultural Redevelopment of South Los Angeles 155

With its multicultural evocation of"new rainbows;' Daaood's poem points to a striking aspect of the relationship between the older generation of jazz bohemians and the newer generation of hip -hop artists. Elder states- men like Daaood had mellowed in their Afrocentrism since their days in the Black Arts movement, and they now encouraged a more inclusive vision of community, rooted in "village" values of mutual care but not structured purely along racial lines. 11

The relationship between "Project Blowedians" and the Leimert busi- ness community was not without tension. Older black entrepreneurs ac- cused Blowedians oflittering, selling and using drugs, writing graffiti, and driving away their business-in essence, of being the sort of"ghetto youth" that were to be feared rather than welcomed. At one low point in January 1996 the LAPD raided Project Blowed, quite possibly in response to these sorts of local complaints. But in light of the music produced out of Project Blowed, these accusations seem quite ironic. Project Blowed aspired to be, in the title of an Abstract Tribe Unique album, a "South Central Thynk Taynk; and much of its intellectual energy was devoted to deglarnorizing gang life and repurposing the neighborhood. "Life is hell, so why don't you dwell in your hood? " asked Abstract Rude, in a song that ruefully examined the lives destroyed in the crossfire of the LAPD and local gangs. What the 'hood needed, according to a Project Blowed manifesto that was a ringing endorsement of th e politics of uplift, was a "haiku d'etat" -a "poetry takeover" that would restore "dignity;' "integrity;' and "unity" to the com- munity. On a lighter note, Project Blowed artists were not averse to sati- rizing the very "nuisance" that their audience was sometimes imagined to be. The worldly moralist Aceyalone (Eddie Hayes), for instance, warned his listeners not to become a mumbling, stumbling disgrace, "drooling from the mouth with them bloodshot eyes;' unable to "remember a thing no matter how hard you try'.' No puritan, Aceyalone had straightforward ad- vice for those who would indulge in drugs or liquor: "master your high'.'12

Over the last decade, the circumscribed "' hood" has, surprisingly, loos- ened its hold over the imagination of Good Lifers and Project Blowedians, and arguably over the imagination of hip -hop as a who le. In the early 1990s, hip -hop seemed an intensely territorial art, riven and structured by the East Coast vs. West Coast rivalry, and subdivided into local grou- puscules (in Los Angeles, for instance, such artists as Cypress Hill, Comp- ton's Most Wanted, and the South Central Carte l). Ethnomusicologist

156 Scott Saul

Murray Forman has coined the term "extreme local" to evoke how keenly hip-hop drew attention to particular streets, neighborhoods, telephone area codes, and zip codes. The insistent hip-hop claim to "represent" was, he underlines, a claim to represent a place back to those who identified with it. But for various reasons large and smalJ-the increasing ease of digital collaboration, which unites musicians and producers from vastly different locales; the relaxing of the traditional condemnation of "cross- ing over" as "selling outt given the decline of mass markets and the ex- pansion of niche markets; the "accepted eclectic" identity of many Good Life and Project Blowed artists, which led them away from trademarking a particular sound as the sound of South Los Angeles; the growing prominence and influence of Latino emcees and Latino-led groups within Los Angeles; the smaller and more scattered place that black An- gelenos inhabit within Los Angeles, which makes it less plausible to equate "the 'hood" with the black community-alternative L.A. hip-hop no longer seems as fixed in its attachment to one 'hood, one identity, rooted in a black aesthetic. 13

One can see this shift in the work of original Good Lifer Aceyalone. Ever-stylish and ever-interested in the lineaments of different styles, Aceyalone has pursued three radically divergent projects, each of which situates his music in a different soundscape. In Magnificent City (2006), Aceyalone teamed with Ohio- and Philadelphia-based underground pro- ducer Rjd2 to make an album that was alternately punchy and upbeat ("All For U"), smooth and soulful ("Fire"), dissonant as a Bomb Squad-era Pub- lic Enemy production ("Cornbread, Eddy, and Me"), and icily techno ("Moore")-to take just the first four tracks. (The album also ended with the floating and glossy "Beautiful Mine;' an instrumental version of which was later adopted as the opening credits music for the TY show Mad Men.) lf Magnificent City seemed, in its sampling of styles, to suggest that underground hip-hop was heading in a multitude of directions, Lightning Strikes (2007) brought Aceyalone back to 1970s Jamaica and the roots of hip -hop with its dancehall and reggae production. Then, traveling backward another decade or two for his source material, Aceyalone followed Lightning Strikes with Aceyalone & the Lonely Ones (2009), a tribute to doo-wop and Motown that slipped dissonant insin- uations into its largely nostalgic sound. Its single "The Way It Was" fea- tured a catchy chorus in falsetto, sung over a Supremes-era backbeat, and might have been at home on Motown-inspired, neo-soul releases by Raphael Saadiq and Mayer Hawthorne, if its refrain did not hammer on an unsettling, noir -like question: "ls your weapon out?" 14

The Cultural Redevelopment of South Los Angeles 157

Aceyalone's video work has similarly made it hard to locate him within any particular contemporary urban locale. The video for "The Way It Was" leans decisively on nostalgia for its effect, alternating be- tween images of Aceyalone in a vintage red Cadillac, cruising down the sun-drenched Santa Monica coast, and black-and-white footage of the song being performed in what appears to be a black neighborhood club in the early 1960s. There is no more 'hood here-just idealized images of "alone time" and "party time" untouched by postindustrial decline. Like- wise, in the video for "Thynk Eye Can" (2009), a positive-message-rap collaboration with Abstract Rude and Myka 9, the camera cuts between a multiethnic group of skateboarders and BMX bicyclists at several L.A. locations-the Venice Beach boardwalk, the Watts Towers, the L.A. Col- iseum, a railroad yard-and watches them pra ctice their hotdogging moves as an example of motivation on the highest level. The "extreme local" seems to have been transformed into the "sprawling local" here, as the original Good Lifers mug for the camera and travel from one part of the city to another in search of summer fun . 15

This movement away from representing "the 'hood" in extreme local terms-as a place where constriction is a necessary condition for possi- bility, as in "Inner City Boundaries" -can be glimpsed also in the work of the Visionaries, a Southern California hip -hop supergroup that has aimed to bring neighborliness back into its representations of the 'hood. The Visionaries came together through the efforts of South Bay emcees Key- Kool (Kikuo Nishi) and Rhettmatic (Nazareth Nirza), whose album Kozmonautz (1995) is commonly regarded as a breakthrough for Asian American hip -hop. On Kozmonaut z, Key-Koo l and Rhettmatic reac hed out to fellow emcees 2Mex (Alejandro Ocana), Lord Zen, LMNO (James Kelley), and Dannu to record the track "Visionaries (Don't Act Scary)" - the beginnings of a collaboration that has produced four albums thus far. As LMNO raps on their single "If You Can't Say Love" (2004), the Vision- aries understand themselves as an example of multiethnic community in practice: "do-gooders with the filteration, / We're Mexican, Islande r, Euro- African, Asian. / Celebrate creator before creation, / Division we're erasin."' Notably, there is no simply "white" representative in this catalogue of identities-a sign perhaps of how 'filteration' has turned the mainstream interethnic. The video for "If You Can't Say Love" follows the progress of a multigenerational, multiethnic house party, one that fills the backyard of a modest home (the group's turntablist sets up shop in the kitchen). Begin- ning with only the members of the group setting up the party and end- ing with a lawn packed with grandparents, parents, friends, wives, and

158 Scott Saul

children, the video suggests how the music itself has the power to gener- ate a community, and how close quarters can be the best quarters of all. 16

T he Visionaries' "In the Good" might be taken as a manifesto of this movement toward the reinvention of the 'hood, a movement that aims to bring together discrete neighborhoods in a larger network of mutuality. Just as the video for "Thynk Eye Can" leads the viewer from Venice to Watts to University Park, so "In the Good" takes the viewer on a tour of Southern Californian geography , from L.A'.s Mid-City (the intersection of La Brea Avenue and Washington Boulevard) to North Torrance , Cerritos, Long Beach, and San Diego. These are the areas where the individual Vi- sionaries first connected to hip-hop, and each rapper in turn relates how the neighborhoods "made me who I am, / Taught me how to be a man'.' There is no desire to equate these neighborhoods , which retain their speci- ficity: for instance, Lord Zen raps about "growing up in the [L.A.] proj- ects ... where the darkest darkness falls on the block" and "ghetto prophets speak in codes to those that know;' while Key-Kool bikes through the streets of North Torrance, recalling record swap meets and b-boy dancing outs ide a shopp ing mall. But there is a shared sense of a common initiation into the multiracial cu lture of hip-hop, where individual sty lizat ion pro- vides a means of surviving in postindustrial times. The Long Beach-raised LMNO raps about "jhericurl mullets, skaters and gangsters who ain't afraid to pull it. ... / kids sagging it free, wrapping a sheet around a dead body in the street I when the toejam's busting, listening to the beats"-as good a picture as any of the life-and -death struggles answered by hip-hop's in- sistent rhythms, by its call to community (which br ings "skaters and gang- sters" together), and by its multiracial working -class accents. In this admittedly "visionary" music, the jheri curl can join forces with the mul- let, just as Latinos , Asian Americans, African Americans, and Euro- Africans can find common cause in consciousness-raising hip-hop. ln tonsorial and musical style, it seems, anything is possible. 17

Enmity and Mutuality: The Intimate History of South L.A. Like contemporary underground hip-hop, the L.A. novel has registered the shifting urban terrain of the last twenty years. ln Chris Abani 's haunt- ing Virgin of Flames, the artist-protagonist carries the name "Black;' but he is nothing like the allegorical "strong black man" of much Black Arts writing from the 1960s and 1970s. Living in a pocket of East Los Angeles, far from any sort of black community , Black is the son of a Salvadoran mother and an Igbo father named Frank (no Igbo name is given, and Black feels acutely the blankness of his African origins). He is a racial cipher-

The Cultura l Redevelopment of South Los Ange les 159

"dark enough to be black, yet light eno ugh to be someth in g else" -in a multiracial city; even his so-called Blackmob ile, the dilapidated Volks- wagen bus he drives around the city, is a bright yellow. He is also acute ly troubled in his sex ual and racial identity, painti ng his face white and dressing up regularly in a wedding dress a nd blonde wig in order to im- personate the Virgin Mary (whom he sees in visions during sex). In the novel's climactic scene-which transpires ironically to the sou ndtrack of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, that Black Arts spiritual touchstone- Black suddenly attacks the transsexual stripper who is his lover and muse, pummeling her in a fit of self-loathing and rage. The novel ends on a sim- ilarly brutal note: while in his wedding dress, Black lights himself on fire with a casually dropped cigarette, and he is soon enveloped in flames. It is a harsh, seeming ly capr icious ending, less poet ic justice than the hol- low laughter of fate. Black becomes his own "virgin of flames;· purifying himself in a spectacular auto-da-fe, just afte r he has committed a sin that, as he acknowledges, has turned him int o a "monster'.' 18

With its tragic denouement, The Virgin of Flames may be the most sobering L.A. nove l of the last two decades, but several othe r s share its basic narrat ive premise-that we must come to gr ips with our tang led racial identities, or die. Nina Revoyr's Southland (2003) and Walter Mosley's Little Scarlet (2004) are Sout h Ce ntral murder-mysteries, both set around the Watts Riot of 1965, and in each the mystery can be solved, in typical noir sty le, only by puncturing the "official story" of the city with its secret history. An d what is this secret history of Los Angeles? Cur iously, it is a version of th e "new new" social history of Los Angeles, which has un- covered a rich multiethnic past in L.A. neighborhoods, like Boyle Heights and Crenshaw, co mm only thought to be simply segregated. Such scholars as George Sanchez, Mark Wild, and Scott Kurashige have challenged L.A. historians to think of multiethnic neighborhoods as the norm rathe r than the exception in L.A'.s past, and they have une arthed exam ples of more radical multiracial politics that put the Bradley coalition of the 197Os and 1980s in a new perspective. Like these historians, Revoyr and Mos ley ask what stories of mutual entanglement lie beneath th e more obvious story of ghettoizatio n and segregation. But they also delve, as novelists do, into questions of psychological motive-how to account for race-inflected love and race-inflected hatred?-that L.A. histo rians, for now, have largely left unattended. Their murder-mysteries can only be solved if their detectives explore the intimate history of the neighborhood. 19

Set in Wa tt s just after the flames have died down, Mos ley 's Little Scarlet opens with a vignette that establishes the novel's moral center. The

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detective Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is visiting the burnt-out shell of Stein- man's Shoe Repair, a store torched to the ground on the riot 's first night. A black customer comes to Theodore Steinman, the store's owner and a German emigre, and, shaking with a rage that brings him close to tears, demands a pair of nice shoes he had left with the cobb ler. The shoes have obviously been destroyed in the fire, but Steinman offers the man $10 as recompense. After the customer refuses the offer and huffs out of the store, Easy asked Steinman why he made it:

"He was hurting;• the small man rep lied. "He wanted ju stice:· "That's not your job:' "It is all of our job;' he said, staring at me with blue eyes. "You cann ot forget that:'

Steinm an's examp le sugges ts that, no matter how often one is turned into a scapegoat (and Steinm an would appear to have been doubly scape- goated, by Nazis in the 1930s and by black Angelenos in the 1960s), it is still one's responsibility to under sta nd and attend to other claims ofloss. Such a "job" certainly cannot be left to the police, who in this novel sub- scr ibe to a clannish view of justice-"serving and protecting" white lives and property-that insp ired the riot in the first place. And so it is the Jewish middleman -st oreowner, sometim es demonized as a parasite or interloper in black militant rhetoric of the 1960s, who appears as a figure of conscience in Mos ley's reconstruction of 1960s Los Angeles. 20

This opening move forecasts Mosley's comp lex engagement with the Watts Riot and its meaning. Easy is soon called onto a case by a reluctant LAPD chief, who fears that Los Angeles wiU erupt again if a murder be- comes public before it is solved: a you ng black woman in Watts, Nola Payne, or "Little Scarlet;' has seemingly been raped and killed by a white man, and the police have little ability to investigate the case themselves, given how the commun ity fears and distrusts them. The murder appears to be a straig htforward crime of racial violence, and in this sense Payne's death seems connected to the deaths of the thirty - three black Angelenos killed in the riot, largely by the police. But Easy comes to unravel a more enigmatic sto ry: the white man who visited Payne was her lover, not her killer, and the killer was a homeless black man named Harold with an obsessive loathin g for black women who date white men. The screw takes a further turn when Easy discovers the circumstances behind Harold's hom elessness: he was th e so n of a gras ping black woman who has been

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passing for white and who refused to claim her son as her own because the color of his skin betrayed her masquerade. "Pain has a memory of its own," says Easy at an earlier point in the novel, and Haro ld's anger illus- trates this aphorism perfectly. Treated "like dirt" by a mother who cov- ers up her own racial identity with "enough makeup to star in an opera;· he channels his own pain into a murderous rage at other women who trouble the racial divide.2 1

The mystery of little Scarlet, then, is solved only by uncovering two interracial relationships that existed on the down low-Little Scarlet's ro- mance with her white lover, and the interracial relationship (whose inter- racial character was hidden even from the husband) that produced Harold. It is perfectly clear why, in the universe of Little Scarlet, these interracial re- lationships would be hidden. Blacks in its Los Angeles face the hostility of white Angelenos and the harassment of the police; endure a lifetime of foreclosed possibilities (the prodigious ly capable Easy is working at the novel's opening as a janitor); and have to understand that, even in death, they will not be treated with dignity by those in power (Payne's murder, it turns out, is one in a series of murders of black women, none of which the police have investigated). But Little Scarlet also suggests that the interracial character of Los Angeles is inescapable-and inescapably com plic ated, too. Its int erracial relationsh ips run the gamut, from the hidden love of Payne and her white lover to the sympa th etic friendship of Easy and Theodore Steinman; from th e edgy, if eve ntually respectfu l, collabora- tion between Easy and a white LAPD detective to th e partnership-in- crime that Easy's friend Mouse deve lops with a whit e thief, who provides protective co lorat ion by driving the truck that haul s loot ed goods from the neighborhood. The int erracia l future of Los Angeles is per haps fore- cast most clearly, and most optimistica lly, in the shap e of Easy's own fam- ily. Though he has no childr en of hi s own, Easy ha s taken in a Latino boy named Jesus (whom he calls Juice) and a mix ed- race child named Feather (whose moth er was a white st ripp er who died shortly after she was born). Rather than fearing L.A'.s interracial future, Easy chooses to embrace it, to commit to it.

Nina Revoyr's Southland likewise exp lores the interr acial intimacies that run beneath a Sou th Los Angeles ne ighborhood, in this case th e Crenshaw district of the 1940s through the 1960s. For Jackie Ushida, the novel's protagonist and a UCLA law student living in th e co ntemporar y Fairfax district, the making of the Japa nese American middle class ha s, in no small par t, bee n a histor y of forgetting. What has be en forgotten is encapsulated by the con tents of a box left by her grandfather Frank Sakai:

162 Scott Saul

$38,000, along with a 1964 will, never executed, leaving Frank 's Cren- shaw grocery store to Curtis Martindale. Who wa s Curtis Martindale, then, and why has her ever-practical grandfather left this money hidden from sight ? To solve the mystery, Jackie must become, like Easy Rawlins, an expert in the ways of the old neighborhood; like him, she needs to de- cipher the relationship between the ways of the police th ere and the ways of love there. With the help of James Lanier, Curtis's cousin and a com- munity organizer "who live[s] and breathe[s] Crenshaw;' she pieces to- get her the prehistory of her grandfather and, in a crucial way, herself. Invest igating the "boxed-upn pain of her grandfather, she begins to see the limit s of her own prot ected, middle-class upbringing: "Everyone , it see m ed, had some thin g awfu l in their lives-some death or misfortune that shaped them. But she had nothi ng: her life had been flat an d texture- less as a starched white shee t. And while she'd always cons idered herself lucky to be so blessed, now she felt that she was somehow not real:'22

Curtis, we learn quickly, is part of her grandfather's personal history of misfortun e: he was a black teenager killed, along with three oth er black teenage boys, when he was locked in the freezer of Frank's grocery store on the last day of the Watts Riot. Lanier has long believed th at a white cop named Lawson was responsible, and he takes Jackie's int erest in the re- lationship of Cur tis and her grandfather as a spu r to build a legal case against Lawson. But, as in Little Scarlet, the story of the enmity between white cops and black Angelenos proves to be only one piece in a more comp licated puzzle. Lawson, it t urn s out, did beat Curti s, but the mur- derer was a black police officer named Robert Thomas, a pioneering mem- ber of black L.A'.s middle class, whose family had faced a burning cross when they moved into a West Los Angeles neighborhood. Thomas's ex- perien ce of racial persecution has turned him against those blacks who are disturbing the peace, whet her through civil rights action {which Curtis pursues through wildcat sit-ins in Redondo Beach, Torr ance, and Beverly Hills) or through the inchoate protest of the Watts Riot {which Curtis sits out, though Thomas does not believe him; Curtis comes to Frank's store to defend it, not burn it). "It's niggers like you who give the rest of us a real bad name;· Thomas tells Curtis before locking him in the freezer to die. "White people don 't treat you the way you like? Well, it's because you do this kind of s-'.' 2 3

Southland, then , is a dua l meditation on th e price of middle-class mobility, taking in both the "flatness" felt by Jackie as her family moved to Torrance and severed itself from its roots in Crens haw, and the cur- dled a nger felt by blacks like Thomas, who have experie nced their pas-

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sage into the m iddle class as a harrowing trial by fire. To the end, Thomas is unrepentant: ''.At least [the murder] got [Curtis and his friends] off the streets;' he says. "Probably saved everyone a lot of trouble in the long run~ Southland raises the question then: how much do working -class Angelenos need to pull themselves up into the middle class by dissociat- ing themselves from-and, in the most extreme case, murdering-those in the community they have left behind? The mystery of Curtis's murder evolves into the mystery of why the American middle class often imag- ines itself in opposition to the American working class and poor. 24

Again like Little Scarlet, Southland invests much of its narrative en- ergy in developing the promise of interracial intimac y, which offers an antidote to the bitterness felt by Thomas and the potential for a shared sense of social mobility. Frank comes to own his grocery store through his friendship with its previous owner, Old Man Larabie, who sells the store at a fraction of its market price in recognition of the losses suffered by Frank's family during the internment. Frank wishes to pass it on to Cur- tis not only because Curtis works diligently at the store, as Frank did for Old Man Larabie, but also because Curt is is (drumroll, please) Frank 's son, the product of a longstanding and long-secret affair with Curtis 's mother, Alma. Meanwhile, in the present tense of the novel, the relation- ship between Jackie and Lanier-a relat io nship intimate but not sexual- suggests how much Japanese American and black Angelenos need one another to understand their shared past and anticipate a promising fu- ture. Frank's $38,000 finally finds an appropriate home at the end of the novel: it is earmarked for Lanier's organization in Crenshaw, the Marcus Garvey Community Center, which Jackie sees at the beginning of the novel, "glitter[ing] against the tans and grays of the surround ing neigh - borhood, like a mirage in a desert'.' The $38,000 will be invested back in the community it came from and, hopefully, make the mirage less so.25

Collaborative Artwork: Edgar Arceneaux's Watts House Project "Part of my goal here is to prove to people that this neighborhood is ordi- nary; says Edgar Arceneaux, the director of the Watts House Project and an internationally recognized, Pasadena-based multimedia artist. "We're not trying to counteract any narrative about Watts already-why even touch that? You buttress these things trying to knock them down'.' It is a balmy July morning in Watts, and we are sitting in the backyard of Felix Madrigal's bungalow on East 107th Street, just across from Simon Rodia's Watts Towers. Felix, who has the energy and stout body of a lifelong do- it-yourselfer, is working to replant an avocado tree in the corner of the yard,

164 Scott Saul

and he is enlisting the help of a friend to uproo t and move it. Edgar and I are sitting in the shadow of a half-built storage she d, where Felix hopes to store his tools and other materials so that the Watts House Project can more easily renovate the interior of his family's modest stucco home.26

It does feel surprisi ngly, well, ordi nary, but appearances here are a bit deceiving. The Watts House Project, in its devotion to making this block of East 107th Street a more livable neighborhood, is actually an extra- ordinary arts- and comm uni ty-centered experiment, one that both en- larges the scope of standa rd artist ic practice and offers very practical benefits for the residents of th e twenty houses it serves. Launched in 1996 by Arcenea ux's mentor Rick Lowe , the Watts House Project pa rtners 107th Street residents with artists , architects, and able-bodied volunteers, so that the neighborhood might become more of a pleasure to inhabit and also mor e aesthetica lly connected to the Watts Towers , that famed monument to the beauty found in humble industrial materials. After over a decade in th e neighb orhood , the Watts House Project has gained the confi dence of the 107th Street reside nt s, and it has made a num ber of concrete improvements to buildin g exteriors-a new tiled driveway for th e Ma dri gal home, custo m fencing for anothe r, and a se t of mu rals de- signed by and painted by Locke High School st ud ents for still others. But the Project promises much more: Arceneaux sees the st reet as a holistic system rather than simp ly a set of individual properties waiting for home impro vement. He aims to bring wire less Internet , so lar paneling , and vegetable gardens to each of the properties; to harness the gusty winds that blow late each afternoon so that the neighb or hood generates some of its own energy; to renovate the street itself with better paving and storm dra ins; and to help transition all the homes on the block from renter - to owner-occupied. All this takes money, and Arceneaux has been leveraging his cachet in the art world to generate the Project's funding . Grants from LAX.ART, UCLA's Hammer Museum, and USC's School of Architecture have allowed the Project to come this far; a low-interest loan from the president of th e board of L.A:s M useum of Co ntemporary Art enab led Arceneaux to buy thr ee homes on a single lot across from the Watt s Towers Art s Center, which he plans to rehabilitate as a headquar- ters buildin g, a coffee shop run by neighborhood residents, and a gallery and mee ting hall. In December 2009, th e Andy Warhol Found ation rec- ognized the project with a $125,000 gra nt, adding a conside rable boost to the $250,000 raised over th e previous year a nd a hal f.27

In all, the Watt s Hou se Proj ect is arguab ly as close as th e art world co mes to th e promise of co mmunity that opens thi s essay, Buzzworm's

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dream of "gente-fication:• Arceneaux himself describes the Project as an alternative to the usual practices of gentrification, wherein "one makes an investment [in the neighborhood] and there's no way of extracting that investment back out again. For example, if you're a renter in Red Hook or Brooklyn, and let's say over five years you invest $50,000 in time, labor, and materials to this neighborhood, the landlord will sell the apart- ment and make lots of money-and who can blame him?" Arceneaux's dream-and it is one shared by the many residents, volunteers, and spon- sors who are giving the Watts House Project its momentum-is to model a new form of nonprofit housing development. "If the people who help create that profit were able to take that investment back out;· he says, "that's a different story:• He sees the Project's investment in the homes of East 107th Street as rippling outward-toward "social services, culture, and Uob] training; all of which "have to be part of the fabric [of the neigh- borhood]:' At the same time, he acknow ledges that his plan to transition the whole block to owner occupancy is in the interest of the project it- self: "Right now the investment we're making in these properties is be- tween $35,000 and $50,000 per home, and it's imp ortant that when we make this investment, it doesn't go just one way'.'28

With its nonprofit alternative to gentr ification, the Watts House Project both builds on and marks somet hin g of a departure from the Watts community-arts organizations that have preceded it. Not long after the Watts Riot devastated the neighborhood in 1965, Watts started humming with new cultural life, as the creative energies of L.A'.s black community (and some War on Poverty funds) were directed toward such grassroots artistic initiatives as the Watts Towers Arts Center, Watts Writers Workshop, Watts Happening Coffee Hou se, Mafundi Institute, and Studio Watts. At the Watts Towers Arts Center, the artist Noah Purifoy brought together youth from the neighborhood to collect debris and then assemble it into sculptures in th e spirit of Rodia; at the Watts Writers Workshop, a group of poets and dramatists scorch ingly de - scribed the trials of black life in Los Angeles. Perhaps the closest ana - logue to the Watts House Project was James Woods's Studio Watts , a multiracial artist collective that hosted acting, writing, and visual arts workshops and aimed to have its in -residence artists design and build spaces for the community. Though the wide-ranging artwork produced in this Watts renaissance defies easy generalization-b lack artists were split somewhat between nationalist and cu ltural -liberal sensibilities- many artists were spur red by a newly felt urgency to art iculat e a black aesthetic. Trumpeter Bobby Bradford testified that "The national spirit

166 Scott Saul

was all over the place, we were all caught up in th is thing, this new black awareness about the validity of the black aesthetic on every leveJ:'29

Even as the Watts House Project has partnered with the Watts Tow- ers Arts Center and other community organizations that sprang out of the Watts renaissance , its underlying philosophy also registers the dis- tance that the community has traveled from the days of the "black aes- thet ic:' As of the 2000 census, Watts was over 60 percent Latino ; in the sixteen years since the founding of the Watts House Project , its portion of East 107th Street has transitioned from a half-black, half-Latino block to a block with one black family. For Arceneaux , this demographic trans- formation is no cause for anxiety, in part because he is one of many you nger black artists troubling the underlying premises of the Black Arts moveme nt. "I don't believe there is a black aesthetic;' he says. "I don't know how one would categorize that or quantify it without some kind of overdeterminism, without locating these things physiologically or bio- logically. I don't really know where the edges of one culture would be drawn-and even to use 'edges' implies that it occupies one space'.' For Arceneaux-a black artist living in Pasadena, coordinating a multiethnic corps of volunteers, and helping largely Latino residents in Watts-this departure from "the black aesthetic" is part of a larger reconceptualization of community itself. "We've been working ... to describe community not as something physical and geographical but as something which is intrinsic- meaning it's relational;' he emphasizes. "This whole insider-outsider di- alectic is such a problem because it allows for us indirectly or directly to agree that these problems are incurab le. What is it that I can do to change [the neighborhood] if I'm not from there? We've got to get people to let that go."30

This reconc ept ualization of "community" grows out of the working method of the Project, which brings 107th Street residents into contact with a wide-rang ing cast of artists, architects, designers, and young vol- unteers . Each home has particular needs, and it is assigned a group of architects, artists, and designers. Once a particular home -improvement project is agreed upon-often after a vigorous back -and -fo rth, with res- idents exercising veto power - the Project then assembles the crew to comp lete it. The residents of 107th Street bring their own considerable set of skills: the street is home to severa l roofers and general contractors, a blacksmith, a house painter, a welder and pipe -fitter, and a cabinet- builder. T heir labor is supplemented by a crew of volunteers, some from th e local neighborhood and some from more far-flung L.A. colleges and art institutes, who supply the muscle for large-sc ale improvements. The

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relationship between residents and nonresidents is meant to be an evolv- ing partnership, with everyone offering w hat they can from the nature of their personal resources.31

For an artist who expends much effort organizing home-improvement projects, Arceneaux has surprisingly little investment in the final shape these projects assume-and in fact, he seems in principle opposed to thinking of them in any sort of "final" terms, since such terms would cut against his relational sense of the community. "Here we see everything as changing-like that mural on that house ;' he says, pointing to a bright floral mural on the house next door. "It looks great ... but if we painted over it tomorrow, we'd document it. then move on to the next adven- ture~ The Watts House Project may offer concrete results-a fact that residents and arts-granting organizations certainly appreciate-but Arce - neaux himself believe s that if it lives up to its potential, those results will be provisional and unexpected. "There's an ongoing dialogue between the goals of the project and the place itself;' he said on another occas ion. "It's not just about you conforming a thing to your ideal. You allow for contingency and chance, for variables to come into play and breathe life into the thing:' In a nut shell: "The true artwork is the collaborative socia l sculpture at the center of Watts House Project:' 32

This emphasis on the community as the artwork itself has led Arce- neaux, ironically, to object to the city's handling of the very artwork that inspired the site of the Watts House Project. In seeking to restore the Watts Towers as a monument, frozen in the moment of their comple - tion, Arceneaux argues, the city's preservationists are in con flict with Rodia's own working method, wh ich tended like Arceneaux's to empha- size open endi ngs, process over product. "For thirty -three years when Rodia was working on it, there was no fence:• he says,

this was a worksite, a work-in-progress. He didn't have any predetermined ideas of what he was going to do .... Towers would come up and come down again, but the city now owns it, it's a national monument, and there 's a mandate to keep it in the state it was left, which is more or less impossible.

Arceneaux would prefer that the city open up Rodia's towers as his Project is trying to open up the neighborhood, bringing art and everyday life into daily contact: "There's a baptistery in there. There's a wedding chapel in there. There's a fountain and a small ship in there. Can you

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imagine people having weddings in there? Can you imag ine people get- ting baptiz ed in there? ... Let this place be aJive:'33

How much Arceneaux can transform this one block of Watts, in his quest to "Jet this place be alive:• remains to be seen. After sixteen years in the neighborhood, the Watts House Project can point to modest tangible results, though nothi ng as earthshaking as the art world usually expects, or as earthmoving as private development demands. There is a great distance between Arceneaux's vision for the Project-which he hopes will not only transform the block but also serve as a model for export, a new mode of community redevelopment in which private needs and th e public interest can be folded together in collaboration-and the Project's current reach. It has proved difficult to translate that art-inspired vision into the more pro- saic realms of building permits, tax codes, and construct ion schedules.34

Yet th e Project has been built with a patience that is now paying var- ious dividends among the res ident s of 107th Street, the large volunteer base of artists and helpers, and its financial sponsors from the art world; it is on the verge of a large sca le- up. City developers seem to be taking notice, too: Arceneaux is fie ldin g more and more calls to serve as a community-arts liaison and consu ltant -most notably, on the $1 billion redevelopment of Watts's Jordan Downs housing project, which seeks to turn the 700-person barracks-style examp le of public housing (formerly nearly all-black, now two - thirds Latino) into a 2,000-person "urban vil- lage;' complete with health spa, computer center, a bank of stores, and a state-of-the-art high school nearby. Here Arceneaux's emphasis on the Watts House Project's open-ended community dynamic seems not only sincerely felt but strategic, too. Though the specifics of the project-its proximity to a world-renowned artwork, its link to a vibrant tradition of community arts, and its director's art-world cachet-will be hard to re- produce, its vision of art- and consensus-driven redevelopment is more likely to take wing and take root elsewhere. One does not need an artist's sensibility to imagine that Watts, as in the mid-196os, might become a barometer of things to come. 3S

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NOTES

Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (Minneapolis: Coffee Hou se Press, 1997), 26-27, 31, 84-86, 176-81, 251-54. For an insightful analysis of Buzz- worm's character and of the novel more generally, see Caroline Rody, The lnterethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contempora ry Asian American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 126-44.

2 Yamasnita, Tropic of Orange, 83.

3 T. Coraghessen Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain (New York: Penguin, 1995), 353. On the widespread diagnosis of "death by globalization," see Manuel Pastor Jr., "Common Ground at Ground Zero?: The New Economy and the New Or- ganizing in Los Angeles," Antipode 33, no. 2 (2001): 260-89; Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (New York: Anchor , 1994}; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990); Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998) .

4 The phrase "socia l democracy in one city" comes from Daniel Widener, "An- other City ls Possible: lnterethnic Organizing in Contemporary Los Angeles:• Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 1, no. 2 (2008): 188 -219. For more on this labor -led movement, see , in addition to Widener and Pastor , Robert Gottlieb et al., The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (Berkeley: Un iversity of California Press, 2005); and Robert Gottlieb, Reinvent - ing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City (Camb ridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007). On African Americans and the mayoral elections of 2001 and 2005, see Raphael ). Sonenshein and Mark H. Drayse, "Urban Elec- toral Coalitions in an Age of Immigr atio n: Time and Place in the 2001 and 2005 Los Angeles Mayoral Primaries;• Political Geography 25, no. 5 (2006): 570-95.

5 Jill Leovy, "Com munity Struggles in Anonymity;' Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2008; Dowell Myers, Demographic and Housing Transitions in South Central Los Angeles, 1990 to 2000 (Los Angeles: USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development, 2002); Paul Ong et al., The State of South LA (Los Angeles: UCLA Schoo l of Public Affairs, 2008), 5; Sonenshein and Drayse, "Urban Electoral Coalitions," 593. On the Bradley coalition, see Raphael J. Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Pr ince to n , N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

6 Cross and B. Hall quoted in Brendan Mullen, "Down for the Good Life: A Unified Revolution Called Jurassic 5," LA Weekly, June 29, 2000; Marcyliena Morgan, The Real Hiphop : Battling/or Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground (Dur ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); This ls the Life, directed and produced by Ava DuVernay (Sherman Oaks, Calif.: DuVernay Productions, 2008) . On ghettocentricity and hip-hop 's discourse of place, see Murray Forman, The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Mid dleton, Conn.: Wes leyan University Press , 2002).

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7 On the aesthetic of gangsta rap and its emergence in the context of post- industrial Los Angeles, see, for instance, Eithne Quinn, Nuth in' but a "G" Thang: The Culture and Commerce ofGangsta Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); and Jeff Chang, Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005). Ice Cube quoted in N.W.A, Straight Dutta Compton, Ruthless Records, 1998; Abstract Rude and Myka 9 quoted in This ls the Life.

8 Freestyle Fellowship, "We Are the Freestyle Fellowship." To Whom It May Concern ... , Beats & Rhymes, 1991. On the aesthetic of"hardness" and the hip-hop sublime, see Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (New York: Cam bridge Univers ity Press, 2000). On "chopping" and Myka 9, see This Is the Life; "Down for the Good Life:'

9 Marcyliena Morgan recounts a battle at the Good Life's successor, Project Slowed, in which an emcee was asked, "Are you a Black man?" in The Real Hip Hop, 104-9; 2Mex and Cut Chemist quoted in This ls the Life.

10 Freesty le Fellowship, "Inner City Boundaries;' lnnercity Griots, 4th & B'way Records, 1993. Genera lly, Freestyle Fellowship did not pose as a "menace to society" according to the ga ngsta formu la, but interestingly the first single from lnnercity Griots, "Bullies of the Block." brough t them closer to the gen re. Whereas the video of "Inn er City Bound aries" shows the Fellowship jamming in the stud io, wearing vintage clothes that sugges t a nosta lgic affec- tion for previous generations of black bohemians, the video of "Bullies of the Block" places the Fellowship under a naked light in an abandoned, burning building, where they testify one by one to their place as "bullies of the block: The lines between gangsta rap and the music of the Good Life, that is to say, were never as bright and clear as they were sometimes supposed to be.

11 On the Leimert Park renaissance and its jazz foundation, see Steven L. lsoardi's excellent study The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 217-38 (Daaood quoted on p. 229); Erin Aubry Kaplan, "The Long Road Home," LA Weekly, April 14, 2005; Eric Gordon, "Fortifying Community: African American His- tory and Culture in Leimert Park," in The Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in L.A., ed. David E. James (Phi ladelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 63-84; Joao Costa Vargas's illuminating Catching Hell in the City of Angels (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), which has an especially good discussion of the spectrum of cultural nationalism among Leimert 's jazz community; and the film Leimert Park, directed and produced by Jeannette Lindsay (Los Angeles: Foster Johnson Studios, 2006).

12 O n resistance to Project Blowed within the Leimert Pa rk commun ity, see Morgan, The Real Hiphop, 161-70. See also Abstract Tribe Unique, South Central Thynk Taynk, Ocean Floor, 1999; Abstract Rude, "ln the Hood; on DJ 'D, Workers Union, Massmen Records, 2000; Haiku D'Etat, "Poetry Takeover:• Coup de Theatre, Project Slowed, 2004; Aceyalone, "Master Your High;' Accepted Eclectic, G round Contro l, 2001.

The Cultura l Redeve lopment of South Los A nge les 171

13 Forman, The 'Hood Comes First. Hip - hop cu lture has always been influenced significantly by Latino music and style (for instance, N.W.A's buttoned - to- the-top Pendleton shirts recalled the fashion se nsibility of Latino gangs), but the last fifteen years have witnessed an exp losion of Latino emcees and groups, and a corresponding transformation of the genres mixed into hip - hop. See Poncho McFarland, "Chicano Hip - Hop as Inter ethnic Co nta ct Zone," Aztlan 33, no . 1 (2008): 173-83; McFarland, "Chicano Rap Root s: Black-Brown Cultural Exchange and the Making of a New Genre," Cal/aloo 29, no. 3 (2006): 939- 55; and Josh Kun, "What ls an MC if He Can't Rap to Banda?: Making Music in Nuevo LA;' American Quarterly 56, no . 3 (2004): 741-58.

14 Aceyalone and Rjd2, Magnificent City, Project Blowed/DeCon, 2006; Aceyalone, Lightning Strikes, DCN, 2007; Aceyalone, The Lonely Ones, DeCon, 2009.

15 Abstract Rude, "Thynk Eye Can," Rejuvenation, Rhymesa yers, 2009.

16 Key-Kool and Rhettmatic, Kozmonautz, Up Above Records, 1995; Visionaries, •tfYou Can't Say Love," Pangaea, Up Above Records, 2004.

17 VJSionaries, "In the Good," We Are the Ones (We've Been Waiting For), Up Above Records, 2006.

18 Chris Abani, The Virgin of Flam es (New York: Penguin Books, 200 7), 15, 30, 287.

19 Nina Revoyr, Southland (New York: Akashic Books, 2003); Wa lter Mosley, Little Scarlet (New York: Little, Brown, 2004). Revoyr and Mosley's novels were part of a wave of fiction, published after the Rodney King riots, that examined racial and sexual violence in the simmering cauldron that Los Angeles-and South Los Angeles in pa rticu lar-was imag in ed to be. See, in addition to those works already cited, these variations on the police procedural: Paula Woods, Inner City Blues (New York: Fawcett Books, 1999); Michae l Conne lly, Angels Flight (New York: Little, Brown, 1999); and Len Deighton, Violent Ward (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). Revoyr and Mosley's novels are dis t in- guished, though, in the textured sense of L.A. history that they evoke. On L.A:s multiracial neighborhoods and politics, see Geo rge J. Sanchez, "What's Good for Boyle Heights ls Good for the Jews: Creating Multiracialism on the Eastside during the 1950s;' American Quarte rly 56, no. 3 (2004): 633-6 1; Mark Wild, Street Meeting : Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth- Century Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Unive rsity Press, 2007); and Widener, "Another City ls Possible:' Wild's excellent book includes a chapter on interracial couples. For a broader antho logy t hat exam- ines interracial sex and intimacy in a historical light, see Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

172 Scott Saul

20 Little Scarlet, 7-8. For the classic analysis of Jewish-black relations in the mid- to-late 1960s, see James Baldwin, "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White; in Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism, ed. Nat Hentoff (New York: Schocken Books, 1970).

21 Little Scarlet, 49, 253, 261.

22 Southland, 24-26, 61, 146, 300.

23 Ibid., 236-39, 312-13.

24 Ibid., 330.

25 Ibid., 58, 120-21.

26 Edgar Arceneaux , interview with the author, July 7, 2009.

27 Ibid.; Sharon Mizota, "Public Equity;' Artforum, November 2008, which dis- cusses how the Watts Hou se Project revises the idea of "community arts" project s; Lynell George, "Watts House Project: Art Meets Architecture Near the Towers;• Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2008; "Andy Warhol Founda- tion Funds Bid to Rehab Homes near Watts Towers as Live-in Art Objects; Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2009.

28 Arceneaux interview.

29 On the Watts renaissance, see lsoardi, The Dark Tree, 74- 111 (Bradford quoted on p. 87); Curtis L. Carter, Watts: Art and Social Change in Los Angeles, 1965-1992 (Milwaukee, Wis.: Haggerty Museum of Art, 2003); and Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Dur ham , N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), which analyzes the Watts Writers Workshop in th e context of th e clash between cultural -liberal and nationalist paradigms.

30 Arceneaux interview.

31 Ibid . See also George, "Watts House Project; for a description of the collabo- rative process.

32 Arceneaux interview. See the video and text produced by the Hammer Museum as part of its sponsorship of the Watts House Project, Hamm er Museum website, http: // hammer.ucla.edu / residencies / detail / residency _id/ 1.

33 Arceneaux interview. On the Watts Towers and the history of their preserva- tion, see Sarah Schr ank, Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

34 The gap between the project's reach and its grasp has incited controversy among its stakeholders. See Jori Finkel, "Watts House Project under Fire; Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2012.

35 Arceneaux interview. On the Jordan Downs redevelopment, see Sandy Banks, "Utopian Ideals Clash with Gritty Reality in South L.A.;' Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2009 .