I realized a couple days ago that I haven’t been blogging much about Los Angeles, about my studies of it and the various exploration projects that I go on. I haven’t been on any Metro art tours, or trips to Elysian Fields, or excursions to museums. I haven’t even set foot in Griffith Park in months and months.
However, I did just finish reading East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio over Xmas break, and it led me on a whole tangent of study with regards to minorities and minority ghettoes in L.A. – including my own Jewish ancestors. So I’ll be working on that soon.
And really, I am going to get around to biking to Echo Park soon! I would have gone yesterday if it hadn’t been all blustery outside.
So there’s a whole 2006 of Los Angeles study coming up. I have exploring to do, mostly on my bike. I have yet to even trace my own family history, as my grandparents and their siblings and parents nomaded their way around L.A. County. I have yet to visit Boyle Heights, which is where my family first moved to when they came out from New York in 1946. I have yet to visit the South Central farmers & help them on their fight.
I’ve been so busy tracing white American history in L.A. that I haven’t pushed anything else. And while I’ve learned a lot about Bunker Hill and Angels’ Flight, about Echo Park as the ancestral home of movies, about the Red Car routes as get-rich-quick real estate devices, I haven’t moved into what makes L.A. a unique city – that it’s not like every other American city.
Let’s mark this as a New Year’s resolution: keep pushing my studies of Los Angeles. Move to Echo Park, where they have a better historical society. Trace the city through time and perspectives. Find how much memory has been forgotten in the interest of image.
Los Angeles has memory issues. I’m here to fix that.
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