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Migratory Metropolis

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In September of 2015 two events took place simultaneously that in many ways encapsulate the largest questions this work seeks to address.  The first was the production of a play staged at the outdoor (Greek) theater at the Getty Villa, Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles, by the playwright Luis Alfaro.  Alfaro transposed Euripides' tragedy Medea, about the wife of Jason, the Argonaut, into a story of Mexican immigrants, and what happens to them as they cross the border and adapt to the rules of ann aggressively upwardly-mobile, avaricious society.  The Medea of Euripides (431 BCE) was a "barbarian," a non-Greek migrant to Corinth, who is left behind as Jason climbs the social ladder of Corinth.  Betrayed and abandoned, Medea commits a shocking slaughter.  Alfaro's adaptation is crisp, minimalist, and devastating.  Following generations of artists who have portrayed the American immigrant experience, Alfaro avoids cliches and sets this tragedy in its deepest context: that of western civilization, an unbroken tradition stretching at least 2,500 years to the days when Euripides and fellow artists staged their plays in competitions before audiences of thousands on the slopes of the Acropolis. Global cities, from Athens to Los Angeles, have always had large migrant populations. Likewise, Ghost Metropolis also asks: what is produced by, adapted to, gained and lost for the millions of immigrants who came to Los Angeles in pursuit of a better life?  How did their ambitions change them?  How did the rulers of Los Angeles shape everyone's fate?  And what did ordinary people, like Alfaro's Medea, the "mojada" (a "wetback," or "illegal" immigrant) do?  How and why did they support or oppose the regimes that dominated the LA metropolis?  Jason of Euripidies and Alfaro's Hason--are regime loyalists, so driven to assimilate that each cast aside their first wives in order to "marry up." Medea in both Euripides and Alfaro are noble resistors, rebels, tragic victims, and also perpetrators of deepest crime.  In these ways the multiplicity of the immigrant experience are laid ruthlessly bare.  

Alfaro creates such sympathy for Medea, and for courageous migrant motherhood in general, that her last bloody deeds provoke additional awe.  The play's violence reminds us that the countless happy-ending stories of successful, thriving immigrant families are achieved within dangerous boundaries: Latino migration to Los Angeles is a very long tale of blood-stained injustices, for the reasons mapped throughout Ghost Metropolis: racially-segregated workforces, police violence, enforced vice zones concentrated in barrios and "ghettos."  Conditions of state abandonment and encirclement create ghettoes, leaving neighborhoods to street-corner rule by armed gangs.  Alfaro's Medea was produced at the Getty Villa (an exacting replica of a first-century Roman Villa frequented by Pliny the Elder): literally a palace built by LA's ultimate Oil Baron--J. Paul Getty--in sight of the Pacific surf in a quiet and extremely exclusive canyon Malibu.  It was a far cry from Cesar Chavez and Soto, the heart of East LA. The year 2015 may be remembered as the year Latinos secured a high cultural beach-head on the Westside, but the massive spectrum of social capital and wealth among Angeleno Latinos runs all the way from sweatshop masses toiling in the central city to middle class suburbanites in Mercedes SUVs in the San Gabriel Valley (the Asian-Latino mesclanza of the "SGV")

Both the Alfaro play and its performance can stand for many developments across the centuries of the Los Angeles metropolis. A Chicano playwright with an all-latino/a cast at the pinnacle of Los Angeles cultural institutions would seem to be a very new thing, really a 21st century phenomenon, a post-1992 renacimiento across the metropolis.  With Venezuelan superstar Gustavo Dudamel wielding the baton of the Los Angeles Symphony; considering that Univision and Telemundo control bigger media markets than those in English, considering that native Spanish speakers outnumber all other groups in Los Angeles county; considering, finally, and the Antonio Villaraigosa, the first Mexican-American Mayor (2005-13) of Los Angeles in more than a century: considering all this, it is impossible to deny that more than four million Latino Angelenos have laid a greater claim to liberty and power than at any time since the U.S. Flag replaced that of the Mexican Republic in 1848.  But Los Angeles remains, very heavily, a blue-collar immigrant megalopolis... and this triumph on one tower of the Anglo establishment has happened before, with the runaway success of Luis Valdez's play, Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum in 1978, which became the first "Chicano" play on Broadway in 1979.  Valdez, the "father" of Chicano theater, beginning with his Teatro Campesino one-acts performed in the fields of the Central Valley, part of Cesar Chavez's fateful farmworkers movement.  Valdez and the Teatro Campesino have never ceased its activism and cultural production, so the plays of Alfaro, the second generation, are part of a never-ending arts practice flowing from the Borderlands/La Frontera, steady generator of both aspiration and exploitation by legal, economic, and cultural means.

The other event that took place during the month of September 2015 was the canonization, by Pope Francis I, of the Franciscan priest Junípero Serra y Ferrer (1713-1784).  Serra was the "Father-President" of the Roman Catholic missions and the central figure in the colonization of California beginning in 1769.  Because of the mass death and cultural disintegration suffered by the Native Californians under the tutelage of the Franciscans between 1769 and the "secularization" of the missions in 1835, the long-running campaign to elevate Serra to sainthood has long been a controversial, contested goal.  But now Serra has finally achieved sainthood, and by a humble Argentine Pope, the first Pope from Latin America and the first in 778 years to adopt the name of the humble Saint Francis of Assisi (San Francesco d'Assisi)--the Order that ran Missions that can be reasonably defined as forced-labor death-camps. Popes can fallible, and "saint" though Junipero Serra officially may be, the shadow of his work will never stop haunting Los Angeles, California, and the globe.  Latino Catholics may express institutional and ethnic pride, treating a sainthood as recognition of their heritage, but the world should never forget that the Spanish seized the lands of California by force and caused mass death and cultural genocide against a people who had inhabited the Los Angels Basin for at least two thousand years.  

Junipero Serra was a migrant, a founder of Los Angeles, a holy man who pitied the people he helped to decimate. Like all major figures whose leadership and decisions shaped the fortunes of millions over many generations, his legacy is complex, full of contradictions, and subject to multiple interpretations.  His legacy, however, is, along with that of all other major historical figures, susceptible to moral interrogation.  It is not difficult, by standards of human rights, for the historian and cartographer of the past to hold the antique architects of injustice accountable.

Ghost Metropolis is a narrative work of interpretation.  It is based on a broad empirical base, seeking to support its arguments through all the standards of proof developed over the centuries by the world of historical scholarship. Through its means, the author has intended to tell great stories very well.  In its ends, the author's purpose has been to evaluate and to judge the living legacy of the past in the present.  That, after all is the most important task of the humanities.

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