VII. Glass Walls are Still Walls

Once lined with historic jazz venues and African-American families, South Los Angeles’ Central Avenue is now home to a predominately Latino population. The area still battles with poverty, homelessness, and poorly kept facilities. But after the riots of 1992, the city allowed for a 14-acre patch of land in South Central to be utilized as a community plot for planting everything from banana trees to papaya trees, corn to cabbage. It became the largest urban community garden in the world.

In a documentary titled The Garden, director Scott Hamilton Kennedy follows this group of 347 farmers and their families as they fight eviction. While the likes of Daryl Hannah, Danny Glover, Antonio Villaraigosa, and the Annenburg Foundation have all pledged support, and the farmers have raised more than an unfathomable $16 million to buy the land, ultimately, the white property owner says he will not sell it. The farmers have conducted themselves through the course of their legal battle in a manner that the property owner swears is not in keeping with American ideals. He specifies: they never said “thank you” for letting them exist there so long in the first place. And so the bulldozers arrive.

Throughout the film, there are allusions on the part of some African-Americans to resentment over a mostly Latino group of gardeners claiming that they represent the “community.” There is talk of tension between the black and the brown.

This City of Angels teems with diversity. Looking at it, walking through it, one wouldn’t consider that its infrastructure has long been rooted in division. Subtle cues reinforce the inclination to remain distant.  Some people see racism only as screamed epithets and burning objects or hanging bodies. But more often it is quiet as glass. It is the hushed separateness, the one masquerading as a peaceful silence, of which we must be weary. It takes action to break it.

In a recent New York Times article, Nicolai Ouroussoff writes that Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., whose father designed New York’s Central Park, once “proposed digging up parts of the Los Angeles River’s concrete bed and transforming its banks into a necklace of parks that would provide green space for some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Almost 70 years later, the Los Angeles City Council, prodded by a mix of local advocates and architects, revived that vision.” Perhaps instead of conveying the illusion of openness through see-through surfaces, Los Angeles will some day open itself, unblocking areas that have been walled off by glass and freeways, fences, cement, and stereotypes.