A popular geography project that aims to build spatial understandings of power.
A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, based on the book of the same name, “flips the script” of the traditional tourist guidebook to reveal a myriad of power relations that have shaped Los Angeles County’s development over time.
Most other tourist guides to Los Angeles directs readers and visitors primarily to Downtown, Hollywood, and the Westside. Historically, these areas have been – and, to some extent, still are – inhabited predominantly by people who are white, wealthy, famous, and/or powerful. Meanwhile, South and East Los Angeles are regularly and systematically omitted, deflecting attention from some of the city’s most impoverished, segregated, and polluted neighborhoods, and the institutionalized forces of neglect and oppression that have created such conditions.
Such partial representations also obscure the efforts, past and present, of the people who live and work in these areas – people who have led vibrant, innovative movements to resist environmental racism, the expansion of the prison-industrial complex, state violence, and residential segregation, among other forces.
A People’s Guide to Los Angeles intervenes in these biased patterns of representation by focusing attention on those people, places, and histories that are systematically left off the map — and out of the history books. Many of our site entries highlight lesser-known histories that have been overlooked by existing tour guides as well as in most popular images of Los Angeles. These sites are often ordinary places such as beauty salons, bowling alleys, church basements, and restaurants where extraordinary events have occurred. Other site entries offer a fresh interpretation of places that are already well known, including many that are regularly included in mainstream tour guides, by highlighting the struggles to create or resist inequality and oppression that have occurred there. Collectively, the places and people that we present create a dramatically different perspective on the Los Angeles region: an oppositional, or counter-hegemonic, one.
