Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles

Chapter 2. Mapping a Metropolis in Motion

2 Mapping a Metropolis in Motion Celebrate the world . . . Celebrate L.A.! —Grand Performances brochures, 2001 and 2002 Because it’s downtown, it attracts everyone from all places—Westside, East Side, North, everywhere. Because there are so many different areas, the Pico area, Echo Park, South Central, as well as West L.A. can all go there and be in the same place. —Grand Performances audience member When I entered Grand Performances’ office to begin fieldwork, the director handed me a well-worn copy of The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California (Allen and Turner 1997). They were interested in the information in the book, he explained, for fund-raising and marketing. I leafed through its pages, stopping to look at maps showing the spatialization of 1990 census data. A blue map with the caption ‘‘Persons in Poverty’’ reflects a concentration of purple in and around downtown (31). A tan map reveals that people of Iranian Ancestry—as denoted by the book—live mostly around Beverly Hills and Brentwood in West L.A. (59).1 Areas in which Blacks compose more than three-quarters of the population make a jagged line from Crenshaw south to Inglewood east to Watts and south to Compton (62). Hispanics are broken down into their countries of origin; maps on opposing pages distinguish that Mexicans live east and south of downtown while Guatemalans are concentrated northwest of downtown (100–101). Chinese, who compose between half and three-quarters of the Metropolis in Motion 47 population of Chinatown, otherwise largely live in areas to the east such as Monterey Park and Hacienda Heights, though some Chinese live in nearly every part of the county other than counties that are predominantly Black. One map shows movement. Titled ‘‘Major Shifts in Ethnic Populations After 1940,’’ it uses arrows to represent the direction in which various ethnic populations moved (Allen and Turner 1997:51). Everyone moved away from downtown, which, circled by tails of arrows of various colors, is a center of focus on the map. Large white arrows outlined in black show a centrifugal spread of the White population from a circumference around downtown. Green arrows indicate the Mexican population’s stability and movement from downtown and East L.A. eastward, while pink arrows trace the trajectory of Black migration from Central Avenue to adjacent areas south and west, and farther away toward the town of Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley. Chinese, in orange, remain in Chinatown while having also moved east and northeast. Though the rest of the maps represent a particular, fixed moment of residential patterns, the text emphasizes change, as each chapter, focusing on a broad ethnic category, provides a history of its subgroups’ arrival in Southern California. In constructing a vision of the city in which discrete demographic categories are linked with territory (Wood 1992), the book is useful for Grand Performances in its effort to identify areas of population density of ethnic groups. Yet the representation of residence fixes a city in motion, a city in which people and sounds circulate within and between neighborhoods. This is motion that Grand Performances also depends on and invokes in presenting performances downtown and in advertising them to people around the area so that they will move through the city to attend a performance, where they might dance or otherwise be moved by the music. Grand Performances sounds the city in and through its rhythms (Lefebvre 2004). As a media producer, it taps into sonic and social circuits of a metropolis in motion (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002:17). Radio advertisements, word-of-mouth recommendations, television announcements , and brochures with visual and textual representations of musical performances expand the sonic range of public concerts. A process that is dynamic and mobile, the circulation of information about performances articulates the urban rhythms of media in everyday life, their use marking everyday temporalities and geographies. Like the ‘‘imaginative texts’’ of urban cinema, civic performances become ‘‘spaces of association’’ that ‘‘take on phenomenal lives’’ (Larkin 2008:250) through their relationship 48 Chapter 2 to the city, to people’s imaginations of that city, and to their connection to media that map onto and imbue urban imaginings and everyday life. Brochures travel across the city to arrive in mailboxes, perhaps of people who have since moved to other neighborhoods. Radio waves carry sound that becomes music in a car’s stereo as it...