So You Live in LA
Screenshot of detail from Native Land Digital’s searchable map
The tone of voice in which this phrase — the titular line — is spoken is generally not a flattering one. I was raised in California, but Northern California. At 42, I moved to Los Angeles, where I’ve made my home in a Northeast nook just outside Highland Park. In 2018, LA felt like a funhouse mirror of the world.
Just a few days ago, I went to a neighborhood screening of Mulholland Drive (2001) in honor of David Lynch, the legendary filmmaker who recently passed away. This screening was made a bit surreal by the fact that my husband and I noticed a key location for the scene was located just a few blocks down the very street we were watching it on. That’s the funhouse part of LA.
This isn’t the first time my husband and I have lived in a city well represented on the silver screen — we spent nearly ten years in New York — but sometimes the visual iconography of Los Angeles is overlaid by the countless other places it’s been used to portray for well over a century. During certain days of the month, around 4pm, there’s a traffic light near my apartment where I notice a distinct Star Wars: A New Hope quality to the light, and a very visible moon. Sometimes I look for its companion, a pinkish-reddish orb hanging nearer to the horizon.
The local stories, too, are the stuff of legend. Mulholland Drive is named after William Mulholland, the chief engineer who first spotted and mentally earmarked Owens Valley as the abundance needed to sate the growing thirsts of the metropolis over a hundred miles away. The resulting water wars of the 20th century make up the backdrop for yet another LA film classic: Chinatown (1974). But those water wars are preceded by the large-scale decimation and destruction of native Paiute societies whose irrigation systems were traceable back to 1000 AD.
Los Angeles is not an easy place to live in. But then, the United States in general is not an easy place to live in. Two of my favorite resources I learned about around 2019 or 2020 are Native Land Digital’s beautifully designed map of Native territories, languages, and treaties along with the Native Governance Center’s Guide to Indigenous Land Acknowledgement. Around the same time, I also made my way through Competing Visions: A History of California by Robert W. Cherny, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, & Richard Griswold del Castillo.
I worked on a progressive voter guide for California, and I was able to directly apply these resources to my work on it, and then to see over 600,000 California voters use the guide to help them decide who and what to vote for in 2020. I felt incredibly energized and inspired, despite the confines of the pandemic. Through taking direct action, I was able to make my peace with some of the internal conflicts I faced about living on the traditionally unceded land of so many Native peoples.
During that time, I also found that I was able to forgive myself for past inaction or complacencies because of my awareness that I was contributing to an inclusive society that acknowledged past harms and was willing to make up for them in real, lasting ways. I went from feeling powerless to powerful.
Today, I’m working on a very different type of project — fiction, long-form storytelling, and focused on physical geographies far removed from where I live. And of course, the actions of the administration during this time have rolled back so much of our progress from five years ago, and suggest a dark future for this country unless we push back, and hard. This Saturday, five million people came out in tens of thousands of localities across the United States to declare that we won’t stand for a fascist takeover of our country. It’s a start. But we have so much more work to do.
Based on my experiences during 2020, I highly recommend finding educational resources that will serve to fuel and guide your actions during this time. This is a time that urgently calls for growth and learning so that you can fully show up to help in the ways that you are best suited to. If you haven’t done so, make room for your own path to emerge — whether it’s through textbooks, maps, novels, films, or some other means of learning about other people you share your existence with. I don’t think you will regret it.
