Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 4

This week’s post will focus on the experience of taking the 720 metro bus. As a UCLA student without a car, I rely on public transportation to mobilize myself. I have taken the 720 various times whether heading towards Downtown Los Angeles or going to Santa Monica. Riding the 720 is in itself an interesting feat; the experience on this bus differs greatly from other bus experiences, such as riding the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus per se. The 720 takes you through Wilshire Boulevard for the most part, which is a boulevard that traverses various different neighborhoods enabling a greater understanding of the neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Due to the diverse neighborhoods the 720 drives through, it brings together a variety of people on this bus, which allows for the most fascinating people-watching.

The 720 metro rapid is usually red to distinguish from the orange local buses and it is usually a two-cart bus in order to transport more people. The interior of it is pretty standard; it has many seats facing all directions, TV screens, numerous large windows and a few sets of doors. Most of these buses are also a bit more ran down and many of them have tag marks throughout the bus. The neighborhoods included in the 720 bus route range from the upper-class shopping strip of Rodeo Drive to the ethnic community of Koreatown to the college-town like city of Westwood. On this bus ride, I was able to identify well maintained, high class neighborhood such as Beverly Hills, streets with Korean commercial signs in Koreatown, and also segments of Wilshire Boulevard where streets are dirtier, not as well maintained and the architecture does not describe high-end. It is intriguing to learn that on different ends of the same boulevard there are people from the extremes of the socio economic divisions and how the wealth of a city does not spill over to its not so well-off neighboring cities. My observation for this contrast is to go from the neighborhood of Beverly Hills with world-renown luxurious stores 2.2 miles east and find a 99 cents store. The proximity of these two types of stores amazes me because of the contrasting clientele they target.

As a result of the variety of destinations, the passengers on the bus also vary greatly. UCLA students can be seen taking the bus to go to their internships, jobs or even going home, uniformed workers are going to or from work, tourists take it due to their lack of other mode of transportation, elders are unable to drive or do not have cars who spend their days wandering from place to place and there is always the crazy or homeless person on the bus that nobody wants to be near.  Depending on where the bus is at a certain moment, the crowd starts to shift. For example, as the bus approaches Westwood, more students are seen on the bus. The metro buses also have a diverse ridership, therefore different languages are employed on the bus for the instructions, advertisements or shows aired on the TV screens.

The interaction among people on the bus is also noteworthy. Only in some few cases do people strike up a conversation with the random person near you and have a meaningful chat, otherwise when riding alone on the bus people tend to avoid eye contact and communication with other fellow bus riders. I also noted that there are a few people who I will call “bus locals” who are the frequent commuters that seem to ride at the same time and become acquainted with each other. They tend to see each other around and eventually become semi-friends. The example that comes to mind is of a group of Hispanic woman sitting sort of together and chatting about work (they seem to all work as cleaning ladies) and other superficial topics on the bus. Neither of them got on at the same time nor do they get off at the same time and their exchanges seem to be the basic small talk. As a result, although the bus is mobile, there is still a routine established within the bus, which enables the comparison of the bus to a neighborhood.

Riding the bus has a social stigma attached to it that is imbedded in society that the majority of the people who take the bus are not able to drive or do not have enough economic resources to have a car, because that’s the social standard; while only a small portion of bus riders do so to avoid driving long distances and worry about parking. In an article published recently by the Atlantic Cities from the Atlantic Company titled, “Race, Class, and the Stigma of Ridingthe Bus in America” the author goes much in depth about  the social connotations of bus-riding and the reasons for these beliefs. An interesting fact from the article states, “In Los Angeles, 92 percent of bus riders are people of color. Their annual median household income is $12,000.” Hence, riding the bus determines a certain socio-economic status and because most people seen on the bus are of color, all these characteristics become correlated. Conducting further research into the bus stigma, I came across titles such as public transport segregation or “loser cruiser,” “the poor man’s vehicle,” and various others. This reinforced my perception of the strong existence of this demeaning factor of taking the public transportation. The conversation below from the 2004 movie “Crash,” depicts that sentiment:

“Anthony: You have no idea why they put those great big windows on the sides of busses, do you?
Peter: Why?
Anthony: One reason only. To humiliate the people of color who are reduced to riding on 'em.”

Massey and Denton discuss about pervasive discrimination and the significance of race in “The Continuing Causes of Segregation.” Although their focus is on housing segregation, their analysis underscores the belief of an ethnic hierarchy, which is also created through the public transportation stigma. These types of discrimination can only further segregation, which will never concede to an integrated America.

Lastly, another point I wanted to make with regards to public transportation in Los Angeles is its mobility limitation. Ernest Burgess mentions movement and mobility in his article “Growth of the City,” in which he states that in order to have change in a place, there needs to be mobility, and mobility will most likely occur when there is movement. The reason is that only with movement, can there be opportunity for new experiences, and only with new experiences can there be stimulation, and with that comes change.  Consequently, it can be argued that public transportation hinders some group’s chances for progress. While the city expands, people who are able to mobilize themselves will benefit from the change and stimulation by receiving more opportunities; however, the communities limited by their mobility tend to fall behind. Therefore, in order for society to progress as a whole, everyone needs to advance together.

Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 3

This week’s trip was to Downtown Los Angeles and as one of the criteria for this project is to ride the bus, I decided to take the 720 Metro Bus headed towards Commerce. The bus stop is a bit of a walk from campus, which is located on the corner of Westwood and Wilshire. The waiting period was for about 15 minutes before the red express bus appeared. Once on the bus, the ride was fairly quick stopping mostly only at the major avenue intersections. Since it was earlier in the morning, it took me about an hour or so before arriving at my destination, which I thought was relatively fast compared to the often 2 hour rides to the same area. For next week’s blog post, I will further narrate about my bus experience on the 720 bus, as it is definitely an essential part to the Los Angeles experience.

 

 

Upon arriving to the Downtown Los Angeles area, I promptly got off at Los Angeles Ave and 6^th Street, in the Fashion District vicinity. Downtown Los Angeles is divided into various districts or sections in order to facilitate the location of stores, businesses or buildings and allow visitors to find what they need accordingly.  These areas include the Financial District, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, El Pueblo, Fashion District, Toy District, Jewelry District, and many others. The buildings located in this area are more run down, not maintained as well and its set up is very whole sale or intermediate sale oriented.  The quality of these buildings is incomparable to that of Beverly Hills, which can be immediately sensed once the bus started heading towards the east. The upkeep of the streets was not as well maintained either; trash could be found on the streets, tagging on walls, the smell of urine was strong and even the air felt more polluted. There was a shift in the type of cars that can be observed; although that is not to say there was only one type of cars in downtown, but there was an overall greater variety of car makes and state of the cars found here. Walking through these districts, I also recognized the cultural diversity present in Los Angeles. Other than the name of these cultural communities such as Chinatown or El Pueblo, there are also many restaurants and stores located throughout that have names in many different languages. 

 

 

For this blog’s purposes, I will focus on the Fashion District which is where I spent most of my time. A friend of mine had recommended buying clothes, shoes, makeup and accessories in this area, because the prices found in Downtown Los Angeles would be significantly lower than anywhere else. The interaction with the people here, especially the retail service experience, was much more different. If you are looking for excellent customer service and attentive salesmen, this is perhaps not the best place to go. The first thing I noticed was that many of these shops (that I went to) were owned by Hispanics or Koreans (not Asians, but Koreans.) However, regardless of their ethnicity, Spanish was still the best language to use during these transactions. From my experience, as long as Spanish was spoken, bargaining was much easier and they often gave you really low prices. The people observed walking through the streets differed greatly from the people one would see in Brentwood or around Westwood. The manner people were dressed, the language used and the way people behaved were indicative of a lower socioeconomic status.

Additionally, one of the most shocking memories from this trip is while walking down 6^th street, I turned at one of the intersections and I encountered numerous homeless people sitting row after row on the sidewalk. They were mostly African American in this group of people. This observation undermined the class and race segregation that Massey & Denton discuss in their book “American Apartheid.”

Having spent most of my day in the Fashion District and venturing out over to the Jewelry and Warehouse District, I believe this is the division of labor Emile Durkehim writes about in his article, “The Causes [of the Division of Labor].” This is where wholesale is made, and each of these stores/warehouses carries mass production of whatever product they were specializing in. These are the same products that make way to the department stores or shops throughout Los Angeles or anywhere else that then we purchase and become part of our quotidian life. This cycle can only function with Durkheim’s differentiation and division of labor, more so in a consumer based society where no one could lead a lifestyle owning all these products or doing all these activities without specialization.
 

Moreover, my experience in the Fashion District made me reflect on Friedrich Engels’ article “The Great Towns.” This is a place where many people do not frequent nor spend much time in because of its characteristics. It is not the safest place to walk around or the cleanest or even the most scenic, yet it is part of Los Angeles and I would say an important part as well since many products do go through the warehouses there. Like in Engels’ article on Manchester, this part of Los Angeles can definitely be avoided by taking the freeways and no one would ever have to see the state of these neighborhoods. I wouldn’t say the freeways were purposely constructed to hide these places, but they definitely allow drivers to skip through these parts of town. I thought this was something interesting to reflect on and to think about whether it was absolutely necessary for the residents of the Los Angeles to have to see these places.

 

Of course, Downtown Los Angeles is such a great area with so many topics to discuss that cannot be covered with one analysis or one blog.  This week’s post is merely an attempt to analyze section of Downtown Los Angeles to give contrast to the places I have visited and the places I want to go. With this said, anyone is welcome to provide suggestions in the comment box of cities/places in the Greater Los Angeles Area that would be interesting visiting.

 

Thank you for reading and lookout for next week’s post!

Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 2

The adventures have started! This past week a friend and I drove east on the I-1o freeway and ventured out to the city of Rosemead, which is located 25 miles away from Westwood and about a 40 minute drive without traffic.

The first thing I noticed was the physical appearance of the place, and how it greatly differed from Westwood. The layout of the city consisted of boulevards with blocks of “mini-plazas” where stores were located and most of them were usually franchised stores. The suburban aspect of Rosemead was most noticeable when driving through the residential areas where many of the houses were each identical to the next. The lack of architectural variation was a detail that stood out to me, compared to Lima, Peru where I am from and even Westwood, the houses and stores did not vary in styles, colors, sizes, etc.  This distance between places was much more extensive as well, without a car going from one place to another was an inconvenience. As a result, there were not as many pedestrians, especially when compared to Westwood where many people walk to the stores and restaurants. In that respect, there was more of a car activity in this place and for the most part they were usually the average sedan or SUV.

Another striking aspect of Rosemead and its surrounding cities is the immediate acknowledgement of a large Asian and Hispanic community when driving through the boulevard, as many of the store signs are written either in Chinese, Vietnamese or Spanish. This observation was also reinforced when we went to the Montebello mall in the neighboring city, where many of the languages spoken were Spanish, Vietnamese or some variation of Chinese. By using Simply Map afterward, it confirmed my observation of the highly concentrated Asian and/or Hispanic community in Rosemead and it surrounding cities such as San Gabriel, Montebello, Alhambra, Arcadia, El Monte, and others.

Since my friend’s family is Chinese I had a greater exposure to the Asian culture of Rosemead. It was interesting to see that there was such a community outside of Los Angeles Chinatown, where I would think would be the center for the Asian community. However, it seems that if people wanted to have authentic Chinese food and a wide variety, these are the cities to go to. Even the supermarkets in these areas are tailored to the community, with products that were imported from Asia that would not be found at Ralphs or Vons in West LA. These cities in Los Angeles have been able to create a large community with people that share the same culture. And these places sort of become the replica of the community’s hometown in the United States. When speaking to my friends’ mother, she stated that although she left China a few years back, coming to the U.S. and living in this community did not feel too different at all. If she did not venture out of the 10 mile radius, it would not even feel that she was in a different country. Despite not speaking English, she has been able to easily adapt to life in the United States because there did not seem to have a need to learn English, when everyone in her surrounding spoke Chinese.  

This testimonial is not specific to Rosemead or Los Angeles; similar communities were generated throughout cities in the United States. In one of this week’s class reading, Ernest Burgess’s article “The Growth of the City,” he uses Chicago as an example and in that map it can be observed as well how the different communities are labeled. Burgess also mentions the idea of “centralized decentralization,” in which the focus of the Chicagoan life was no longer centered on downtown, but slowly moving towards the suburbia. He states that with all city expansions, it is the natural tendency for local communities to become a larger economic unit and these local communities will coalesce into sub-business areas. From my point of view, Los Angeles is already further along that process where there are already larger economic units formed and business zones, and Rosemead in this case, is one of these sub-business areas. The difference is that Los Angeles did not originally begin like Chicago with a concentric city lay-out. It began with different communities spread out in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. This also underscores Kling’s, Olin’s and Poster’s concept of multicentered metropolitan region from the article, “The Emergence of Post Suburbia,” where they state that through time instead of long commutes these areas will start to have centers of their own. As observed on my trip, this is the occurrence in the city of Rosemead and their neighboring cities where their business activity was no longer as dependent on the dominant business center in downtown Los Angeles, but they focused on their own city’s center. The focus could be in Rosemead itself, Monterey Park, Alhambra, Arcadia, San Gabriel, and the other neighboring places. This creates the multicentered metropolitan phenomenon in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area.

Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 1

Hello everyone!

My name is Christina Chang, a fourth-year Political Science student at the University of California, Los Angeles. As a project for my “Geography 151: Cities and Social Difference” class, we have to keep a blog of our weekly excursions throughout the city of Los Angeles. As the focus of this class is on social difference in the city, these blog posts will consist of observations that illustrate the socio-cultural diversity as well as the physical differences found in the various urban areas in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. Having grown up abroad, and being a student at UCLA, my knowledge of Los Angeles is limited to the places surrounding campus. Therefore, this course will enable me to step outside of my Westwood comfort zone each week to explore a new location in the Greater Los Angeles region. Hopefully, with this project I will be able to gain a greater insight into what makes this city so unique.

Without needing to have lived in this city for long, it is easy to identify that a main characteristic of Los Angeles is its diversity and with diversity comes social difference, a key role in the structuring and development any urban area. More importantly, through social difference we are able to garner a better understanding of the social inequality present in society. This course pushes us to go even further and asks, “What difference does difference make? Why should we care about social inequality?” I hope to answer these questions in this blog and further examine the influence social difference has had in the difference in people, architecture, socioeconomic status that seem to drastically vary from one area to another based on the geographical divisions. Is “The City is a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate” like Robert E. Park put it? Or does this “difference” influence all of us?

These questions will unravel as the weeks progress, watch out for next week’s post!