Rubén Martínez
Last Wednesday morning, after a singularly terrifying night of fire in Los Angeles, people miles away from Altadena or Pacific Palisades discovered more than ash in their backyards. The pages of books, some almost entirely blackened and illegible, others serrated and singed by flame from which fragments of text emerged, had been ripped, I imagine, out of peoples’ burning homes by hurricane-force gusts. These were the remains of intimate archives, the runes of lives scattered by fiery winds.
We think of Los Angeles as a celluloid city, not a lettered one. Hollywood has long romanced disaster, films showing us the Hollywood sign tumbling down in a temblor, the enormous white letters losing their form and order, becoming gibberish. In disaster movies, Hollywood ironizes its relationship to the violence of its representations, its distortions and erasures, its fabulous wealth heavy against the barrios of East L.A. and South Central. Of course, Hollywood also reflects the actual geography of disaster here — earthquakes, fires and floods, the price of California paradise, of being able to ski and surf on the same day.
But Hollywood could never match the actual disasters. No director-screenwriter team has ever dared to approach one of the costliest social disasters in American history, the L.A. riots of 1992, the price of the city’s reactionary heartlessness in the early 20th century and the liberal fecklessness of its latter years.
Over the last couple of generations, Los Angeles has begun to write itself more seriously, through its scholars, journalists and poets and, more recently, its podcasters and even influencers. The pastless paradise has unearthed more and more of its history, peeled back the layers of the language of conquest to reveal Indigenous names beneath Spanish and English ones. The Gabrieleños are once again the Tongva, and colonial-era Indigenous rebel Toypurina is depicted in street murals and taught in the same fourth-grade classrooms where California history used to be a mission diorama assignment.
The city is written not just by its Didions, Hockneys and Chazelles or, for that matter, its Carlos Alamarazes, Charles Burnetts and Luis Rodriguezes. The development of West Coast hip-hop (culminating with generational rapper Kendrick Lamar) has provided a contemporary chronicle of survival on L.A.’s seething streets. Still, we are far from our representations catching up to our lived history.
Rubén Martínez is a professor of literature at Loyola Marymount University.
