Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Conceptual Preface

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In September of 2015, as the author finished the final draft of Ghost Metropolis, 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 Euripedes (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 this Pacific Coast metropolis?  Jason, Alfaro's Hason, is a regime loyalist, while Medea in both Euripides and Alfaro are rebels.  Los Angeles has been, in many ways, a city-state with an autonomy not unlike that of Athens, and an enviable comparison as global exporters of culture.

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).  Saint though he officially may be, the shadow of his work will never stop haunting Los Angeles, California, and the globe.  Ghost Metropolis presents an unflinching moral-ethnical evaluation, not only of Serra, but of all major figures whose leadership and decisions shaped the fortunes of millions over many generations.

Ghost Metropolis, in short, 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.  But in the end its purpose is to evaluate and to judge the living legacy of the past in the present.

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  1. Preface Phil Ethington

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