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Chapter 1 Looking for the Public in Time and Space: The Case of the Los Angeles Plaza from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Mary P. Ryan On July 1, 2005, a jubilant procession marched through downtown Los Angeles to celebrate the inauguration of Antonio Villaraigosa, the first person of Mexican descent to be elected mayor in over a century. The parade route went from City Hall to the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels , where an interfaith service, representing Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists , Sikhs, and Hindus, had just been conducted. Fortuitously, this event seemed to proffer a positive answer to the questions raised by the conference on public culture, which met at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the spring of 2003. “Is there an inherent and unbridgeable tension between cultural diversity and civic community?” The new mayor exhorted a gathering of a few thousand citizens to “dare to dream together. Let’s dare to work together.”1 The hopeful words spoken on this occasion are too evanescent to sustain an argument about the variety and vitality of American public culture. I look not to the words heard on this occasion but to the place where they were spoken in order to fulfill my assignment in this volume: to ascertain the “historical roots of this conflict between cultural diversity and public community.” It is on the public spaces of downtown Los Angeles that I have attempted to plot out the relationship between cultural differences and the public realm. The space that most interests me as a historian is the old plaza found just across the freeway from Mayor Villaraigosa’s line of march to City Hall. A few acres laid out more than two hundred years ago on Spanish principles of town planning serve as my laboratory, a specific space in which to put public culture to an extreme test. Can the space between City Hall and the Plaza be bridged? Do the political and ethical values we invest in the term “public culture ” have any meaning, any chance of survival, in such a seemingly hostile environment as Los Angeles, reputedly the epitome of sprawl, solipsism, and the facile commonality manufactured by Hollywood. By pursuing a method that is empirical, historical, and spatial I hope to steer clear of the theoretical impasse and conceptual confusions that plague the literature on public culture. By focusing on a narrow space and looking through the long lens of time, I will foreground the political and ethical stakes that make the concept of public culture so important to us. The debate around various permutations of the term “public” that began in earnest among American scholars more than twenty years ago has not abated: it has not been resolved and cannot be put aside. On the one hand, proponents of Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy of the public sphere persist in a quest to find some universal, rational, or at least procedural, foundation that will undergird the public good. Critics speaking from positions of subaltern status or sexual differences, on the other hand, tenaciously resist the pull toward a unitary public that would suppress both the aesthetic and the social diversity of contemporary culture. The persistence of this debate testifies to the irreducible tension at the heart of the concept of the public. Most parties to the debate gravitate between two equally valuable political goals, to find, on the one hand, some way of bringing together all the fractious people and con- flicting interests of our small planet, and, on the other, to give full expression and strong voice to every possible cultural and social difference. It is in the space between these poles that the substantive civic action that concerns me takes place, the pursuit of justice and the practice of democracy.2 This combination of political urgency and intellectual stalemate that surrounds the question of public culture warrants a pragmatic research strategy and a look beyond both Habermas and his postmodernist critics to the writings of the premier American pragmatist John Dewey. The closest Dewey ever came to a definition of “the public” was “the objective fact that human acts have consequences upon others.”According to Dewey, the boundless terrain of shared consequences could only be given concrete meaning in specific times and places. The consummate public intellectual, Dewey looked to very specific social institutions through which to shore up the democratic public process, especially voluntary associations and the protection of free speech and...

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