TIME PLAYS tricks.It's impossible to believe that almost 20 years has passed since the L.A. Riots of 1992. This week we will look at a set of essays that look at what was brewing under the surface of airbrushed, nip-and- tucked L.A. for decades.
I found a bit of my piece I wrote for L.A. Weekly online over the weekend and it brought it all back in a rush...
from: "Waiting for the Rainbow Sign"
By midnight, no one phoning long-distance bothers with hello. Instead, they just ask, ‘Is it as crazy as it looks?’ I want to say, ‘It started long before all this . . .’ Long before this afternoon’s bewildering decision left me less astonished than strangely numb. Long before George Holliday ran tape capturing Rodney G. King’s struggle and submission. Long before Latasha Harlins, Eulia Love and Marquette Frye became cautionary symbols. Long before Watts shouted its existence into the sky in ’65, sending up searchlights in the form of flames...
Everything felt different for a long time after that: The way people interacted with one another -- or didn't. The texture of the city changed for some time after -- much like the way it feels after you've been in an argument with someone whom you love dearly yet are not what sure the first sentence out of your mouth might or should be.
Years later, essayist Richard Rodgriguez wrote of those three days in April 1992:"It was the worst moment for Los Angeles. It was also the first moment, I think, when most people in L.A. realized they were part of the whole. The city that the world mocked for not being a city, for lacking a center, having only separate suburbs, separate freeway exits -- L.A. realized that it was interconnected. In fear, people realized that what was happening on the other side of town implicated them.”
A Letter from the Future -- Fifty Years After the L.A. Riots (Jinn Magazine 4/28/97)
-- by Richard Rodriguez
Rodriguez was right, though only partially. Three days after, the first day of "clean-up" community volunteers crossed the region attempting to pick up the mess as if one would be cleaning a negligent child's messy room. But it was a powerful symbol watching people working together. Eerily, however, there were little pods of town that seemed to be operating as if nothing happened: people near the water meeting for their lattes and such talking about work, childcare, and maybe, the "bad air" that the smoke, curling into the sky, was creating -- while others, not so far away, were digging through ash, rubble and worry.
But I guess that's L.A. -- a swirl of stories, a cacophony.
-- L.G.
photo caption: watching l.a. burn on t.v.
photo credit: dan graves, flickr creative commons
