Place Matters: Learning from South Central Dreams
By Karen Sternheimer
Who we are is shaped by the places where we live, and we in turn shape these places. This is one of the resounding messages in a new book by my colleagues Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor, South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South LA.
When many people hear the phrase “South Central LA” they may think they know a lot about the area, even if they have never been to Los Angeles. Movies such as Colors (1988), Boyz n the Hood (1991), and Menace II Society (1993) brought the collection of neighborhoods known as “South Central” to national attention, painting the area as a bleak landscape of gangs, violence, and mayhem.
The images that remain in the public’s mind are of the civil unrest of 1992, the gang warfare that too often wracked the area, and excess policing that has given South L.A. the vibe of a war zone. Reinforcing that is that if one drives . . . on the major boulevards, one often sees tattered shops, accumulated trash, hourly hotels, and an abundance of liquor stores operating amid a classic food desert. (p. 218)
But there was, and is, much more to the neighborhoods that comprise this area, which South Central Dreams details. Through interviews with residents, community leaders, and demographic data, the book challenges the one-dimensional image that the area retains despite dramatic changes.
My home institution, the University of Southern California (USC), sits at the north end of this area, in University Park. Out-of-town family and friends think they have a sense of the neighborhood, but they usually get it wrong. I am always surprised that even lifelong Angelenos--especially White Angelenos—have no conception of the area, and some don’t even know where USC is.
On multiple occasions I have heard people mention in passing that USC is in Watts, a neighborhood at the southern end of South LA and a freeway ride about eight miles from campus. This ignorance is largely due to the racialization of the area and the tendency to view this fifty-one-square mile area of twenty-eight neighborhoods as monolithic (read: low-income, predominantly Black, and a place to avoid). A new student—a White southern California native—once mentioned in class that he was told by a family member that if he got off at the wrong freeway exit, he would certainly be killed.
But South Central Dreams challenges these and other assumptions. Most important, the area is no longer mostly Black and is now mostly brown, as the Latinx population has grown while many Black residents have moved to other parts of southern California. While the area was about 80 percent Black in 1970, by 2016 it was about two-thirds Latinx (p. 60).
Yes, the relationships between longtime Black residents and Latinos can be complicated, but the authors’ findings challenge simplistic explanations of ethnic rivalries. Younger Latinx residents in particular felt a strong connection with their Black neighbors, challenging some of the anti-Black racism expressed by their elders and peers in other parts of the city. Several of their respondents talked about their ethnic identity as being informed by the Black culture in their communities and saw themselves as more racially tolerant than people in other parts of town. “Racial formation occurs in a particular place,” the authors explain, reinforcing how identity is not isolated but draws on “place-based sedimentation” (p. 228).
These findings challenge traditional theories of migrant settlement, and especially traditional notions of “assimilating into a white middle-class mainstream” (p. 12). Instead, the authors find “a sort of ethnic sedimentation” where “the legacy of Black political resistance was fueling a new place-based identity for African Americans and Latinos” (p. 12). Rather than thinking of South LA as a place to leave as soon as their fortunes improved, people in the neighborhoods they studied felt a sense of connection to the place and their communities:
The second-generation Latinos that we interviewed expressed love, hope, and pride for South L.A. They were proud of their social formation in the South L.A. setting, and they felt a strong sense of belonging and rootedness to this place. . . . None of them minimize the acute problems that still plague South L.A. (p. 138)
Yes, there is more crime here than in other parts of the city, but it has declined dramatically since the 1990s (as crime has throughout much of the country). The .
Listen to Karen Sternheimer's conversation with Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo on working as part of a research team:
Despite the ongoing challenges, the ability of many of the informants to purchase homes in the area both reflects and reproduces the sense of rootedness that many of the respondents experience. Some of the major boulevards in these communities are very run-down, but the residential areas often contain tree-lined streets with well-kept bungalows and community gardens. A recurring theme in South Central Dreams is the notion of “home making”: not simply cleaning and maintaining one’s home, but “coming to feel that you belong and are attached to a new place,” something they describe as “an active practice” (p. 83).
And just as home making is an active process, communities are dynamic and changeable rather than static. The book ends with a discussion of gentrification and displacement as high housing costs in Los Angeles County are changing the demographics of South L.A. today. With improved public transportation, and maybe even the use of the Waze app to introduce commuters to the tidy homes on residential side streets, this area is seeing more White home buyers; one of South L.A.’s neighborhoods, West Adams, “was rated as among the top ten most competitive neighborhoods in the entire United States in 2016,” meaning that homes sell quickly and often over asking price (pp. 218–219).
Scholars who study urban sociology, racial and ethnic formation, social movements, and migration will find that South L.A. offers a rich data source to explore the intersection between all these areas of inquiry. And readers who don’t know much about this area—or those who think they do based on the classic ’hood films of the 1980s and 1990s—will have a much deeper understanding about South L.A. and the complex role that place plays in people’s lives.
Want to learn more? Check out the book's Instructor's Manual with discussion questions and slides
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