In the words of locally born Héctor Tobar, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author, Los Angeles seems to appear to the twenty-first century what New York City had been to its forerunner, “the crucible where a new national culture is being molded, where its permutations and contradictions can be seen most clearly.”ġ.3 One morning in 2014, a few weeks after my wife, Rachel, and I moved to Los Angeles, a large white man pedaled up to me on a bicycle and skidded to a halt.
As of the 2010 census, it was the most densely populated urbanized area in the United States. is both megacity and suburb, multicentered and scattered. The face of America’s housing crisis, a poster child for American hunger, a research experiment into income inequality gone horribly wrong-L.A. Torrey Connor and her Saunterings in Summerland from 1902: “A bustling, wide-awake metropolis has pushed north, east, south and west-over the hills where the vaquero tended his herds over the gravel flats where stood the shack of the Digger straight across the broad acres of the rancho, obliterating the last trace of the land baron’s hacienda.” Joel Garreau, writing in Edge City in 1991-“Every single American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban cores”-sounded like a descendent of J. Recently, L.A.’s economy outperformed Chicago and New York. Capital of incarceration and liberal policies. The most populous county in the most populous state, it is the United States’ seat of destitution and gated communities. Santa Clarita, San Bernardino, San Clemente.ĭefinitely no one brings to mind the Los Angeles of authorized cartography, drawn by centuries of conquest and boom, that looks on maps less like the principal metropolis of the Western United States than a palm tree blown west by heavy winds.ġ.2 Conceptually, Los Angeles is unequaled. Roaming offering plates in Korean churches in the San Fernando Valley. Roving micheladas in the San Pedro Fish Market. Because no one in Greater Los Angeles hears the name “L.A.” and pictures only Boyle Heights, Downtown, or Venice without also thinking of Beverly Hills, Compton, and Hollywood. Not the city in name but the place in realness. Less of a metropolis than an eighty-eight-city nation-state.ġ.1 In fact, Los Angeles is the largest government entity in the United States that is not a state, but to say so requires a definition of what’s meant anytime “Los Angeles” is invoked by locals: Metropolitan Los Angeles, El Lay, or the Southland. Nearly a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, Los Angeles had straggled, sprawled, and germinated to become a swamp-thing megalopolis, so boundless it was nearly impossible to perceive head-on. Bigger economically than nearly all of them, not to mention Saudi Arabia, Norway, or Taiwan. It is bigger than forty American states in population.
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Almost ninety separate villages of more than ten million people, spread across more than forty-five hundred square miles of swampland glazed by cement, mountains and canyons abutting an ocean, desert parcels cracked by quakes. 1.0 Los Angeles, California, is enormously ambiguous.
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