"We Live in the Shadow": Inner-City Kids Tell Their Stories through Photographs

3. “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central while Drinking Your Juice in the Hood”

3 “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central while Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” The History and Transformation of the Inner City L os Angeles, like other large urban centers (New York City, for example ), is a big place with lots of people. Unlike New York City, Los Angeles has long been noted for its sprawling major commercial, financial , and cultural institutions, which are geographically dispersed rather than being concentrated in a single downtown or central area.1 It also makes sense, then, for Los Angeles to be known as a city of car-dependent communities . The term urban sprawl generally has negative connotations because of the health, environmental, and cultural issues associated with the phrase. Residents of sprawling neighborhoods tend to emit more pollution per person and suffer more traffic fatalities.2 Nicknamed the City of Angels, the Entertainment Capital of the World, and La-La Land, Los Angeles is considered a leading world center of business, international trade, entertainment, culture, media, fashion, science, sports, technology, and education, and it has been ranked the third-richest city and fifth most powerful and influential city in the world. The city is home to renowned institutions covering a broad range of professional and cultural fields and is one of the most substantial economic engines within the United States, making it the third-largest economic center in the world, after the Greater Tokyo and New York metropolitan areas. The Entertainment Capital of the World, as the home base of Hollywood, is also known to lead the world in the creation of motion pictures, television productions, stage 30 | Chapter 3 productions, video games, and recorded music. The importance of the entertainment business to the city has led many celebrities to call Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs home. Additionally, Los Angeles hosted the Summer Olympics in 1932 and 1984. It has been recognized as the most diverse of the nation’s largest cities.3 Of course, like most large cities, Los Angeles has a side that only minorities and the poor and working class see—a repository of ethnic groups, low-skill jobs, a large service and informal economy, and a host of other lowpaying occupations that residents tend to see as being related to racism and nativity status. According to the author of the report “Concentrated Poverty Neighborhoods in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles is one of only two major metropolitan areas in which concentrated poverty became more prevalent between 1990 and 2000.4 The author “found that neighborhoods with concentrated poverty are clustered in a corridor extending from downtownadjacent neighborhoods to South Los Angeles.”5 The findings point to four serious social problems in these areas: (1) 8 percent of the tracts in the city have concentrated levels of poverty, and these tracts are home to 15 percent of all the city’s households in poverty; (2) residents of concentrated poverty neighborhoods are disproportionately Latino and Black; (3) residents in these areas are less likely to be employed and more likely to be out of the labor force; and (4) these residents tend to experience widespread impacts of indicators of social well-being and are 63 percent more adversely affected than the city as a whole by housing insecurity, immobility, educational attainments , school performance, young adults at risk, maternal health outcomes , and public safety.6 These problems serve as a backdrop for the images produced by the South Central kids in this study. History of South Central: “The Gang Capital of America” South Los Angeles, often abbreviated as South L.A., is the official name for a large geographic and cultural area southwest and southeast of downtown Los Angeles, California. The area, formerly called South Central Los Angeles and still widely known as “South Central,” has become almost synonymous with urban decay and street crime.7 While attempts have been made to gentrify areas such as Baldwin Hills, Crenshaw, and Leimert Park, there are neighborhoods where if kids like Kyle or Cesar play street games, they can easily become victims of drive-by shootings. “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central while Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” | 31 Negative images tend to blur some of the other interesting factors about South Central. For example, South L.A. contains some of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, featuring many spectacular examples of Victorian and Craftsman architecture in West Adams. This area is also the site of USC...