A New Place in History

Los Angeles, the city that isn’t supposed to have a past, has suddenly become the darling of history scholars.

Observers say record numbers of academics, working on dissertations, journal articles and mass-market histories, are scattered around Southern California, their labors aided by several improvements in archiving and historic preservation.

“Los Angeles has become one of the hottest topics on the table for scholars,” said Tom Andrews, executive director of the Historical Society of Southern California. “Los Angeles no longer resides in a historical vacuum, reduced to a sentence or two in history classes or journals. People want to know how this city grew and

developed.”

Gloria Riccu Lothrop, professor of history at Cal State Northridge, said, “We finally have the proper perspective to look back. Given its relatively recent beginnings and explosive growth after World War II, Los Angeles is the most obvious and perfect postmodern city.”

Chicago was the typical American city to study in the 20th century, but the academic buzz now focuses on Los Angeles as the prototype for the 21st.

“L.A. is where things happened,” including the suburbs and the freeway system mimicked around the world, Lothrop said.

The historical society’s activities are a good illustration of the boom in scholarly work. In the 1960s, the society printed 22 institutional and biographical histories relating to Los Angeles, but from 1985 to 1999 it issued more than 100. The increase has been helped by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, a private organization that in 1997 began funding a program for scholars researching and writing on Los Angeles and Southern California.

“Once the word was out, we were contacted by students and PhD candidates from all over, including places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Georgia and Colorado,” said the historical society’s Andrews, whose organization administers the program. Diane Cornwell, administrative director of the Hayes foundation, said she has seen an 80% increase in the number of historical study proposals in the last 10 years.

Other studies are being published by distinguished university presses such as Johns Hopkins, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Temple, focusing on subjects that include the Los Angeles River, Monterey Park and the role of the automobile in the city’s history.

This newfound interest in Los Angeles does more than elevate the city’s prestige.

“These books and studies help raise the national consciousness about Los Angeles,” said Doyce Nunis Jr., a history professor emeritus at USC and author of more than 60 books and 100 articles on the history of L.A., California and the West. “Books published about Los Angeles before World War II were so divisive and awful, and that’s how people across the country viewed the city.

“Los Angeles is now not just seen as cuckoo land. I am sure that is why we’re seeing more venture capital companies starting up businesses here. This academic attention helps us get rid of the myth of Los Angeles as so utterly unique and far-out: We are a city like any other, and we are to be taken seriously.”

Ethnic diversity, a hallmark of L.A., is one of the scholars’ most popular subjects. Author George Sanchez often can be found in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood east of downtown L.A. and his boyhood home, conducting interviews and recording oral histories for a new study, “Reexamining Boyle Heights, Making Community: Multiethnic Interpretations of Neighborhood Life.”

“Boyle Heights has been the place to go and live for a lot of different ethnic groups,” said Sanchez, who also teaches history at USC. “It was the first suburban community for Japanese Americans and, of course, the Jewish community. Later, the ‘White Russians,’ or Russian Molokans, came, then a small community of African Americans, Armenians and Greeks. Finally, Mexican Americans arrived there.”

Sanchez has been investigating the ethnic communities’ living conditions, children’s education and social interactions. He plans to turn the study into a book, and part of it will be included in an exhibit on ethnic interaction in Boyle Heights, being prepared by the Japanese American National Museum.

“There is something unique about this area because so many civic and community leaders came from Boyle Heights,” he said, citing Ed Roybal, the former Los Angeles city councilman and U.S. congressman; Harold Williams, former head of the J. Paul Getty Center; and Mike Garret, Heisman trophy winner and current USC athletic director. “The neighborhood is home and continues to be considered home even for people who left it 40 years ago. The neighborhood is also unique because it’s probably the only community of its size that has five freeways running through it.”

Study of Chinese Americans

Xiao-Huang Yin, a historian and chairman of the American Studies program at Occidental College, is using Chinese American literature to examine that community’s experience in Los Angeles for his book, “Chinese American Literature Since the 1850s,” to be published in April by the University of Illinois Press. He has found books, poems and other writings by Chinese Americans, such as Los Angeles short-story writer Yi Li and a 1852 collection of essays, “An Analysis of the Chinese Question,” responding to anti-Chinese rhetoric of the day.

During the late 1800s, the Chinese, who had immigrated to America to work on farms and build railroads, were seen as a threat to Easterners who had come West looking for jobs. In 1871, Los Angeles’ Chinatown was the site of a violent riot against the Chinese that left 19 dead. Today, about half a million Chinese Americans live in Southern California, about a quarter of the country’s total Chinese American population.

Yin said he has been especially captivated by back issues of Chinese-language newspapers, some nearly 80 years old and focused on distinct groups, such as Taiwanese immigrants or those from Hong Kong.

“Newspapers are a wonderful way to see how the community adjusted to life in America, what the issues were that were important to them, how they grew politically, socially,” he said.

The newspapers chronicled interracial marriages, the growing gap between the wealthy and poor Chinese, and the conflicts that Chinese-born parents were having with their American-born children.

Like Yin, University of Michigan graduate student Natalina Molina also is tracing an ethnic community’s experience in Los Angeles--studying the interaction between the L.A. County Public Health Department and Mexican Americans in the first half of the 20th century.

Going through city records, Molina discovered that racism existed despite L.A.’s early ethnic diversity.

“Back then, citizens thought the health department was some sort of policing force,” she said. “I’ve actually seen old petition files with complaints that such-and-such Mexicans are unclean and their businesses are bringing down property values. Someone even made a nuisance report to the health department claiming that certain Chinese people were ‘contaminating the air we breathe.’ It’s incredible.”

Molina credited the efficient organization of the Los Angeles City Archives, which opened in 1980, for helping her find literally tons of information for her dissertation. Many researchers say Los Angeles always has had good libraries, archives and museums, but resource organizations only recently have begun to make that information more accessible, particularly by going online.

A Growing Online Database

For example, the Getty Institute’s “L.A. as Subject” project, begun only four years ago, is a growing online database of hundreds of local resource centers, museums and libraries that house photographs, maps, letters, journals and other historical information.

USC’s “Information System for Los Angeles” project has more than 10,000 digitized items, such as photography, transcripts of oral histories and census, economic and environmental data, organized by neighborhood. Using a map, researchers can click on an area and receive all pertinent information about it. The “Information System” prototype has been so successful with university faculty members and school teachers that plans are to make it availableonline soon to the general public.

The Los Angeles City Historical Society is using a more traditional scholarly method: preparing a book on the evolution of city government from 1850. Two dozen historians and scholars are lending their talents to the project, expected to be completed in 2001.

Such work supports Los Angeles’ growing awareness in the last decade of its historical beginnings, foreshadowing this current academic interest, said Clark Davis, a historian and co-chairman of the Los Angeles History Research Group, a network of graduate students, faculty members and other professionals.

“Look how excited we, as a city, got when a Metrorail construction dig near Union Station unveiled artifacts from old Chinatown,” Davis said.

For the city’s longtime historians, the sudden academic attention is a pleasant and welcome surprise.

Martin Ridge, a senior research associate at the Huntington Library, said it is about time Los Angeles got its academic due.

“People would do plenty of studies about the black community on the South Side of Chicago, but they wouldn’t come here to Watts,” he said. “They would do studies of Jewish culture in Brooklyn but not Boyle Heights. But now, with all that is going on, they will.”