lareviewofbooks:

Mike Davis
This is part one of Mike Davis’s biography of Harrison Gray Otis, the first of nine episodes, which will be serially published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Future installments will include Otis’s interlude as “emperor of the Pribilofs,” his military atrocities in the Philippines, his bitter legal battles with the Theosophists, the Otis-Chandler empire in the Mexicali Valley, the Times bombing in 1910, the notorious discovery of fellatio in Long Beach, and Otis’s quixotic plan for world government.

Harrison Gray Otis and Eliza Wetherby Otis

EPISODE ONE: BROOM OF DESTRUCTION


General Harrison Gray Otis is the wrathful gargoyle with a walrus moustache and Custer goatee who glowers down on us from the battlements of Los Angeles’s Open Shop era. The proprietor of Times-Mirror Company from 1882 to 1917, he was recently hailed in a PBS documentary as the “inventor” of modern Los Angeles, both as an individual and via his descendants, the Chandler family.

Yet his eminence in the city’s history is cast almost entirely as shadow. Five or six serious books have been written about the Los Angeles Times and the Chandlers, but there is no published biography of the dynasty’s founder and leviathan. This is a major missing thread in the narrative tapestry of the current renaissance of Los Angeles history, but given the archival and literary obstacles in any potential biographer’s path, it is not surprising.

First, no one has yet excavated the pharaoh’s tomb. Rumors abound, especially in the tearoom of the Huntington Library, about family archives kept in a San Marino vault. But it is also possible that son-in-law and successor, Harry Chandler, destroyed many of Otis’s private papers when he ordered his own files burned after his heart attack in 1944. (Chandler might have been reacting to the literary and cinematic assaults on fellow-publisher and chief competitor, William Randolph Hearst.)

Second, any biographer has to tackle the fact that Otis was probably the most hated man in Ragtime America. His enemies ecumenically spanned a spectrum from evangelists to citrus growers, socialists to robber barons. Although chiefly remembered for his relentless crusade to destroy the labor movement in Los Angeles, Otis waxed most savage in his attacks on reformers within his own Republican Party. Progressive Republicans, in turn, repaid his vitriol with eloquent interest.

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Knocking back a Bud Light with a taco in hand at a backyard party, breaking for traffic on the 101 as a lawnmower bangs the front of a pick up’s bed, mopping a dark and empty office hallway around midnight, or tented outside the local K-Mart with gift-bag giveaways, the bumping sounds of corrido, banda and ranchera music constitute a significant aural landscape in the City of Angels. 

But is it political? Despite various differences within Mexican communities in Los Angeles, political subjectivities are collectively nurtured within quotidian sites of regional Mexican culture. According to geographer Clyde Woods, subaltern communities in struggle create regionally situated cultural institutions with highly developed traditions of social interpretation that morally instruct their collective thoughts and actions among themselves and against external forces of exploitation and domination. As the raw materials of aggrieved working-class experience are signified through available cultural frameworks appropriate to a group’s distinct position, the majority-Mexican immigrant community in Los Angeles share a relatively collective understanding of the social, political and economic relationships that shape their everyday lives. 

Spatial barriers between various migrant communities, for example, are often overcome through the electromagnetic power of radio waves. Geographically traversing the cityscape in automobiles equipped with radios regularly tuned into popular Spanish-speaking programming featuring hilarious locutores (radio jockeys) spinning regional Mexican music hits, Mexican migrants in Los Angeles are interconnected through shared sonic space. During the early 1990s, the power of regional Mexican music radio programming in Southern California exploded with the introduction of Los Angeles station KLAX (“La Equis”), achieving an astonishing 8.4 Arbitron rating that suggested roughly a quarter of a million listeners tuned in at peak hours.

At a time when a high-energy banda dance called la quebradita (“the little break”) became extremely popular, radio stations innovatively tailored their programming to the musical desires of an increasingly Mexicano Los Angeles. These radio stations facilitated a popular form of regional Mexican culture by promoting local banda nightclubs, music events and jaripeos (Mexican-style rodeos), creating what many commentators are now referring to as the “Nuevo L.A”. KLAX’s highest-rated program at the time was Juan Carlos Hidalgo and Jesus “El Peladillo” Garcia’s morning “drive time” show, which broadcasted regional Mexican music punctuated by banter on a variety of controversial issues that concerned their immigrant working-class listeners. The successful program format combined music, call-in system, caustic immigrant slang, explicit pro-immigrant views, discussions of social/legal issues, and humor directed at cultural and political figures. Other Spanish-language radio stations in Los Angeles such as KBUE (“La Que Buena”) were modeled after KLAX’s format in order to capture a share of this new lucrative radio market. Although commodified and contained, this new regional Mexican formation in Southern California provided a sense of cultural pride to immigrants in an era of migration and low-wage work. 

Indeed, the transpatial medium of regional Mexican radio produced an aural community for working-class immigrants and promoted an awareness of affiliated political interests. Music scholar Josh Kun suggests that popular sound culture in the transnational economy of late capitalism is capable of supplying forms of imagined community to aggrieved populations sundered and separated by borders of various kinds. These aural spaces are simultaneously representational spaces or, as Kun argues, modalities of “audiotopia” that cognitively remap the imaginaries of subordinated communities with new meaning in new contexts of social struggle.                                                               

 The regional Mexican audiotopias of Southern California were in fact constituted during a critically new period of anti-immigrant politics. In 1994, amid economic recession and demographic change, the popular passage of California Proposition 187 sought to deny undocumented people access to public education, social services and non-emergency health care. Known as the Save Our State (SOS) initiative, Proposition 187 was supported by then-governor Pete Wilson and signaled a historic resurgence of nativist hegemony. In response to the socio-political war against migrant communities, Spanish-language radio became an important discursive site for disenfranchised and working-class immigrants to circulate and articulate collective outrage and opposition. Popular locutores dedicated airtime for commentary and discussion about the political fate of their listeners’ communities, often deploying satire to ridicule racist politicians who fomented anti-immigrant hysteria and allowing callers to share opinions and voice dissent. 

In this historical context, emergent regional Mexican cultural institutions in Southern California were infused with political significance and served as cultural corollaries to the mass mobilizations against Proposition 187 and other forms of exploitation. Banda social clubs in the early 1990s, for instance, functioned as important resources for mobilizing Los Angeles drywalleros, or drywall workers. Not only did cultural spaces of leisure reinforce political affinities of labor in a new economy characterized by low-wage immigrant work, but more importantly, regional Mexican cultural formations sustained social claims by subaltern populations when formal political paths were closed. In this way, Spanish-language radio in the era of migration and low-wage work has become a medium for the circulation of various struggles in Southern California. A veritable technique of potential counter-power.                                                                                                                   

Stage review of “The Vault: Unlocked” by L.A. Weekly’s Amy Lyons:

“The gentrification of downtown Los Angeles is a sinister metamorphosis engineered by spoiled hipsters and well-heeled land grabbers in this whodunit parody by the Vault Theatre Ensemble. Greedy real estate developer Ron Dillinger (Fidel Gomez) has plunged to his death from a rooftop near Spring and Sixth Street. The gory details of the maligned millionaire’s end are revealed via a series of sketches and songs that create a backdrop against which he was offed. Suspects include a local dress maker whom Dillinger couldn’t buy; a down-and-out entrepreneur whose dreams were crushed when Dillinger cut him out of a deal; a kinky dominatrix; the homeless population; and Dillinger’s impregnated, undocumented maid. The immigrants, drug addicts, hot dog vendors and small merchants all have a common enemy in Dillinger, and they despise the homogenous crowd his live/work developments attract.

While clues to the murder are slowly gathered, hilarious song-and-dance numbers about “hurricane hipster” keep the social commentary on track. An intensely pathetic gaggle of overconfident dudes practically shoot their wads in anticipation of the downtown artwalk, at which they intend to soak up the ironic coolness of the grimy area and “get wasted at a dive bar.” The local hot dog vendor is hilariously displaced at said artwalk by a hot dog eating performance artist. All of this territorial outrage is executed skillfully by the intensely cohesive ensemble, but the material sometimes meanders. Jasmine Orpilla’s original musical score holds things together when the sketches get a little saggy and Francois Pierre-Couture’s stylized scenic design strikes the right cartoonish note. Co-directors Aaron Garcia and Fidel Gomez adroitly manage the chaotic fun. Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., dwntwn.; Thurs.-Sat., 9 p.m.; thru Oct. 8. (866) 811-4111,thelatc.org.”

According to co-director Aaron Garcia, the production is a convergence of Brecht’s epic theatre, Eugene Ionesco’s absurdity, Edward Bond’s polemic structure and Fernando Arrabal’s innocent carnage. “In order to engage our audiences on a heightened level, we knew we had to develop a modern theatrical language that was flexible enough to support a cartoon-like absurdity in one moment and the brutal reality of downtown the next.” In my opinion, it’s an excellent show. “The Vault: Unlocked” stages the diverse social forces of downtown gentrification without being too serious but without being too silly. The imaginative theatrical techniques deployed in conjunction with a coherent narrative about urban change demonstrates that The Vault Ensemble is mature beyond their years. I’m definitely looking forward to what they’ll cook up next.

Rosie Albrann and Ramona Fonseca are part of a long women’s labor and fashion history that extends back to the turn of the 20th century. These garment workers are from the Barenveld Shirt Factory in San Fernando, California (ca. 1943). Their placards read: “We want a union.” and “We want a free country too.”

(via heartbreakmonday)

nativeangeleno:

Tamales were Los Angeles’ first mobile street food, according to ¡Ask A Mexican!’s Gustavo Arellano in a recent L.A. Times column.