Histories Concealed explores a Broadway movie palace located in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a far journey from South Broadway in Los Angeles. A movie palace turned church, the building formerly known as the Loew’s 175th Street Theatre has been owned and managed by Black televangelist Reverend Ike’s United Christian Evangelistic Association congregation for the past 45 years. This section provides a broader context through which to understand Los Angeles’ South Broadway movie theaters, as similar questions about proper use, race, place and space inform the historical development of Rev. Ike’s United Palace Cathedral.
 
While “Histories Concealed” addresses the material and discursive repurposing of (former) film exhibition spaces, Projecting 1943: Pachuco Goes to the Movies considers how movie theaters recur as spaces of violence in accounts of one specific five-day period in history. Moving beyond conventional representations of the so-called Zoot Suit Riots, this chapter suggests paying attention to how and when movie theaters are visible in the background of the attacks launched on “zoot suiters,” which became coded as Black or Mexican American, across the country in June 1943. The concept of the “ejected spectator” is used to identify the repetition of the act of removal from the movie theater during the attacks, relating the racialized violence of the Zoot Suit Riots to discourses about cinematic spectatorship.
 
Sense of Pachuca is composed of short video essays that consider how the figure of the “pachuca” is represented in three films about Mexican Americans living in Los Angeles. Inspired by Kara Keeling’s pursuit of the “black femme” in the cinematic and Rosa Linda Fregoso’s work on the entangled relationships of representation and reception in building diverse meXicana histories, these videos point to instances that demonstrate how the “pocha” (in the case of México de mi corázon) and pachuca are “produced within the very structures she might challenge” (Keeling 144). More tenuously linked with representations of movie theaters than others, this section hints at how films can affect and reflect everyday common sense about identity and history.
 
Addressing the connections between physical space and cinematic representation more directly, Broadway as Background analyzes depictions of South Broadway in films according to the following themes: “Mexico lindo y querido,” “Invisibility/ Hypervisibility,” and “Everyday.” Each with a dedicated subsection comprised of image and video galleries, these themed studies consider how the street is portrayed differently depending on the artists or industries producing the work, and as the intended audience varies.  The film scenes featured in “Mexico lindo y querido” present South Broadway as a place for diasporic belonging for Mexican immigrants. Scenes excerpted in “Invisibility/ Hypervisibility” are from Hollywood films that alternate between portraying the people on South Broadway as passive, no more than background set dressing, and as caricatures, performing broad stereotypes as the criminal “other.” Finally, “Everyday” considers viewpoints presented by Chicano/a artists that counter the pathologizing and erasing of Mexican and Mexican American identity on the street in mainstream portrayals. Together, these clusters survey how film images uphold nationalist or racist ideas about South Broadway’s audiences, or suggest new ways of documenting the everyday.    
 
“Marquee Stories” is a photo essay that explores the ways history is mediated in the cultural memories of people who have worked on South Broadway over the past 30 years and are now adapting to the street’s recent transformation. It also presents a counter archival view of the location, emphasizing the importance of people over the movie palaces. 

Supplemental explorations and potential future directions for the project are presented in the Prototypes section. A preliminary experiment with the HTML5 media framework, popcorn.js, demonstrates that video annotation has been an area of interest since the project’s beginnings. The “Semantic Video Remix” prototype features a video trailer made early on in the project, demonstrating how the steps of dissertation mapping and planning for a multimodal dissertation may differ from more traditionally manifested dissertation projects. The “Augmented Reality Rituals” prototype shows how low-tech iterations of technologically influenced project ideas can be beneficial for considering the performative and bodily aspects of unexpectedly technological acts. 

This work can be explored by following the linear path that connects one section to the other, Histories Concealed --> Projecting 1943 --> Sense of Pachuca --> Broadway as Background --> Prototypes. You can also follow any path of your choosing, connecting from one node to another, led by themes, tags, video or image assets. 

For more information on how to read a Scalar book, you can consult the Scalar Guide. You can continue on this linear path by following the links at the bottom left corner of the page.