Flavors of Empire

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Padoongpatt
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Ethnic Difference ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Racial Projects ◽  
Political Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Thai Americans ◽  
The Way

Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Mark Padoongpatt makes use of original archival research and rich oral histories to explore the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with the U.S. Cold War intervention in Thailand, he traces how the informal U.S. empire allowed Americans to discover Thai food and introduce it to adventurous eaters back home. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai cuisine in various ways to meet its rising popularity in urban and suburban spaces. America's fascination with Thai cuisine resulted in Thais having to remake themselves over the second half of the twentieth century in relation to the perceived exoticness and sensuousness of Thai food. Padoongpatt argues that this remaking produced "Thai Americans"—not a cultural identity rooted in ethnic difference but a social and political relationship defined by U.S. empire, liberal multiculturalism, and racial geography of Los Angeles. He also contends that while food brought Thais together, provided a sense of pride and visibility, and allowed Thai Americans to lay claims to their place in the city, it also led to divisions within the community and created barriers to collective mobilization for social justice. Padoongpatt deftly handles the history, politics, and tastes of Thai food, all while demonstrating the way racial projects emerge in seemingly mundane and unexpected places in an era of multiculturalism.

Holding the Center

2012 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-255
Author(s):  
Michan Andrew Connor
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Central City ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The City

Early television shows that focused on Los Angeles as subject, such as The City at Night (KTLA) and Jack Linkletter's On the Go (CBS), assured white, middle-class, suburban viewers that they had a place in the larger metropolis by presenting a selective knowledge of its features and issues. On the Go surpassed the entertainment level of The City at Night to address some serious social issues. By the mid-sixties, suburbanization had been fully embraced as the "good life." Shows such as Ralph Story's Los Angeles (KNXT), instead of engaging suburban viewers in metropolitan issues, entertained them with glimpses of the city's "oddities." The change in tone marked the passing of the center of cultural identity from the central city to the suburbs.

Resisting Dispossession: Performative Spatial Irruptions and the LA Poverty Department

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Chantal Welch
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Homeless People ◽  
City Council ◽  
Political Subjectivity ◽  
Skid Row ◽  
Community Organizer ◽  
Formerly Homeless ◽  
The City ◽  
Neighborhood Council ◽  
The Way

I was so unimpressed with the city council. … They had a line of homeless people who were allowed to vote because Kevin [Michael Key] was running for councilman and everything. So, they wanted IDs … [The person tabling] asked me, “Well I need some id. Do you have any ID?” And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any id. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible. He was just going through the motions of making the sound. But he didn't know he was dealing with R-C-B. So when I dropped my passport, and I do mean dropped my passport on the table, that's when I got respect.—RCB, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)What does it mean to perform presence or selfhood? What conditions necessitate these performances? In the opening epigraph, RCB articulates an instance when transparency was mapped onto his body—a moment in which he was simultaneously invisible as an individual and hypervisible as the projections of stereotypes surrounding homelessness and blackness collided on his body, rendering his history, present, and future as instantly knowable. During the election cycles of 2010, 2012, and 2014, KevinMichael Key, a prominent, formerly homeless Skid Row activist, community organizer, and member of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), ran for a position on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC). As part of his campaigns, Key sought to help homeless residents of Skid Row exercise their right to vote. One instantiation of this objective involved tabling in the neighborhood. In a show of support, RCB lined up to vote and subsequently encountered the tabler. “And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any ID. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible.” As understood by RCB, the tabler did not expect homeless individuals to possess government-issued identification. Instead of acknowledging RCB's individuality and subjectivity, the tabler assumed that RCB's status as homeless meant not having state ID, an official marker of occupancy in a state-recognized residence. In this interaction, RCB's political subjectivity was under erasure, invisible. For RCB, in this confrontation, homelessness marked him as a knowable (non)subject—a generic homeless man.

The Boom Interview

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Bon
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
American West ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
Los Angeles River ◽  
Moral Economic ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

Lauren Bon is a transformative figure. Through her work with the Metabolic Studio and as a trustee of the Annenberg Foundation, she examines a handful of enormous and intersecting questions about Los Angeles, the American West, the way we think about landscapes, our water and where it comes from, what we owe the land and communities, and our moral, economic, and political relationships. In this interview she discusses her work, including recent and forthcoming projects such as Not A Cornfield, 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and Bending the River Back into the City—the waterwheel she plans to build for a spur of the Los Angeles River that will sit adjacent to her studio on the edge of Los Angeles’s Chinatown.

scholarly journals “12th Street is Dead”: Techno-Heritage and Neoliberal Contestation in the Maya Riviera

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 242
Author(s):  
Brandon Hunter-Pazzara
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Tourism Development ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

In 2017, the Beats Per Minute (BPM) electronic music festival was banned from Playa del Carmen following a horrific shooting that left five dead and fifteen injured. The city’s response was to crack down on electronic music, arguing the scene posed a unique danger to the safety of the city and that electronic music was not part of Playa’s cultural identity. Those in the scene argued something else was underway, suggesting that the scene was being pushed out of the city to make room for higher end, luxury tourism development. The ousting of electronic music from the city raised important questions about the city’s cultural identity and the direction of tourism development the city would take. This essay takes a critical look at these events, tracing the way Playa’s particular electronic music scene grew to global notoriety as both a cause and consequence of the Maya Riviera’s impressive tourism expansion over the last two decades and how those in the scene believed themselves to be an essential part of the city’s heritage. The city government’s decision to oust BPM reveals how struggles over cultural heritage are at the very heart of how urban space is organized in tourism zones. Using the concept of “contestation”, this ethnographic account demonstrates how disputes over heritage and culture frame important questions of neoliberal, political-economy and can lead to counterintuitive outcomes.

Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958-1977

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Glick
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public History ◽  
Social Consciousness ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
The City ◽  
Civic Institutions

Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 explores how documentarians working between the election of John F. Kennedy and the bicentennial created conflicting visions of the recent and more distant American past. Drawing on a wide range of primary documents, this book examines the films of Hollywood documentarians such as David Wolper and Mel Stuart, along with lesser known independents and activists such as Kent Mackenzie, Lynne Littman, and Jesús Salvador Treviño. While the former group reinvigorated a Cold War cultural liberalism, the latter group advocated for social justice in a city plagued by severe class stratification and racial segregation. Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History analyzes how mainstream and alternative filmmakers turned to the archives, civic institutions, and production facilities of Los Angeles in order to both change popular understandings of the city and shape the social consciousness of the nation.

“Chasing the Yum”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Padoongpatt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
College Students ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grocery Stores ◽  
Local Supply ◽  
Building Practice ◽  
The City ◽  
Thai Americans

This chapter examines the origins of Thai foodways inside the United States, focusing on food procurement as a community-building practice among Thai Americans in Los Angeles before free trade. Before the 1970s, Thai and Southeast Asian ingredients were not widely available, which led to a crisis of identity among Thai immigrants. The chapter follows Thai food entrepreneurs who resolved the crisis by developing a local supply of Thai ingredients, opening grocery stores like Bangkok Market, and starting import/export companies. Chapter 2 also discusses the first wave of Thai immigration. U.S. cultural diplomacy in Thailand encouraged thousands of Thais to obtain student visas to study in the United States. These college students were among the first to open Thai restaurants and food-related businesses in the city. Many, however, ultimately overstayed their visas and became "ex-documented."

Utopian Visions in United States Urbanism

Moreana ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 42 (Number 164) (4) ◽  
pp. 157-186
Author(s):  
James M. McCutcheon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
New World ◽  
New Technology ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Garden Cities ◽  
Oneida Community ◽  
The City

America’s appeal to Utopian visionaries is best illustrated by the Oneida Community, and by Etienne Cabet’s experiment (Moreana 31/215 f and 43/71 f). A Messianic spirit was a determinant in the Puritans’ crossing the Atlantic. The Edenic appeal of the vast lands in a New World to migrants in a crowded Europe is obvious. This article documents the ambition of urbanists to preserve that rural quality after the mushrooming of towns: the largest proved exemplary in bringing the country into the city. New York’s Central Park was emulated by the open spaces on the grounds of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The garden-cities surrounding London also provided inspiration, as did the avenues by which Georges Haussmann made Paris into a tourist mecca, and Pierre L’Enfant’s designs for the nation’s capital. The author concentrates on two growing cities of the twentieth century, Los Angeles and Honolulu. His detailed analysis shows politicians often slow to implement the bold and costly plans of designers whose ambition was to use the new technology in order to vie with the splendor of the natural sites and create the “City Beautiful.” Some titles in the bibliography show the hopes of those dreamers to have been tempered by fears of “supersize” or similar drawbacks.

The Unassailable Self: Freud's Image Among Post-war American Intellectuals

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
External Force ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Human Being ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Way

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.

Los Angeles in the 1930sThe WPA Guide to the City of Angels

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federal Writers Project of the Works ◽  
David Kipen
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
The City
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