Olivia Landon
Focusing on the personal as political pushed us to keep asking questions and bridge the gap between scholarship that “objectively” describes gentrification and people who organize against it. In our class, community partnership has taken shape in a web of relationships and conversations between artists, activists, students and faculty. Each new perspective has been essential to taking steps forward. The limitations of these conversations often fell on the line between what we could do as a class as opposed to what we could as members of an institution. Early on, the articles we read suggested that studying gentrification through the lens of economic, historical, or sociological experts was not a means to ending it. Rather treating text sources as yet another voice in the room, loud or soft depending on who's listening, moved us away from unproductive, circulative academic analysis. As individuals we have the capacity to join existing actions in finite spare time and direct our academic lives toward anti-colonial and anti-gentrification work; however, social justice is not something that can be picked up when we get some spare time or solely approached from the long run. Combating gentrification in Highland Park and across Los Angeles requires hours of physical, mental and emotional labor. This is a burden that can be left to victims of gentrification and their friends and family or can be shared by all of us.
Organizing the play revealed how few of our neighbors had visited Oxy and how the campus, sadly, exists as an elite bubble in form and function. When participation at Occidental blatantly resembles membership to a country club it’s clear the way we relate to one another and our neighbors needs to change. If anything, we’ve learned that our conversations need to be expanded to include other Occidental departmental and administrative personnel, incoming residents, and most importantly displaced residents. Acute attention needs to be paid to survivors’ displacement and its driving forces, capitalism and colonialism, must be demystified. Occidental has contributed blatantly to both while promoting itself as committed to diversity, equity, and social justice. The school’s reputation will continue to unravel if the administration fails to adequately address its role in gentrification as it did with ongoing sexual violence and institutional racism. One resident attending the play pointed out Occidental’s ideal positioning between old and new residents of Highland Park. Our practices as a school, property purchases on York and existing relationships with community neighbors must be reevaluated with an anti-gentrification lens that revokes the notion that gentrification is inevitable. We have the resources, language and historical positioning to act as a mighty force against gentrification in Los Angeles and it's in our and our communities best interest to do so.
The data collection, digital mapping and experimental learning we’ve done in Spatial Justice are key examples of a few ways Occidental students can participate in a mission of anti-gentrification. As students savvy to the digital age, political nonsense, economic inequities, and long hours, we are well prepared to be organizers and have the respect and compassion for the community we live in to do something to save it.
============================================
Bio
Olivia Landon is a Critical Theory and Social Justice major and Media Arts and Culture minor. Originally from Evanston IL, she currently interns at 826LA, a nonprofit tutoring organization. At Roosevelt, Manuel Arts, and Mendez high schools she helps student writers with everything from space roaches with acne to decolonizing Boyle Heights. Olivia is passionate about anti-eviction work in Northeast LA, and this class has helped to complicate her understanding of displacement. Outside of academics, Olivia enjoys karaoke, roadtripping, and staring into space.