Maintenance and Destruction of an East Side Los Angeles Indie Rock Scene

This article is based on an ethnographic study of the independent (indie) rock scene in the east side Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park. There is very little money derived from music circulating in this scene (musicians are routinely paid only about $35–40 for a show), and musicians, indie label owners, and others attach symbolic values to certain amounts of money, which are viewed in terms of what they can help the musicians purchase, such as gas for the band’s van. People in the scene also produce and exchange value in a number of ways that aren’t capitalist, from generalized reciprocity to several forms of patronage. This article ultimately argues that scenes such as this are simultaneously maintained and destroyed by capitalism: maintained because capitalism needs a reserve army of those who operate outside of it but destroyed because such scenes are deprived of their ability to reproduce themselves given how little money circulates.

Brown Like Me? The Author-Function, Proper Names, and the Rise of Fictional Nobodies

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which the two principal criteria for defining Latinx literature—identity and theme—are insufficient in making sense of this body of writing. It looks at three representative cases to demonstrate conclusively that we need a better way to understand the literature we have heretofore labelled Latinx. It examines a white writer (Daniel James) who, under a Latinx name (Danny Santiago), penned in the 1980s a popular Chicano novel of the barrio. It shows how the author of the novel The Madonnas of Echo Park, Brando Skyhorse, further confounds our understanding of identity matters and Latinx literature. He was raised as Native American and only as a teenager discovered he had a Mexican biological father. He has since written a memoir, Take This Man, about his upbringing, race, and ancestry. Finally, the chapter turns to a readily recognizable Latino author, Eduardo Halfon. However, this particular author writes on themes that critics would not readily identify as Latinx.

The Importance of Place and Place-Makers in the Life of a Los Angeles Community

This article looks at restaurants as urban forms of public space in which ethnic entrepreneurs act as place-makers. The author highlights El Nayarit, a Mexican restaurant in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles, from 1947 to the present, as a nucleus of a community where racial, ethnic, class, and generational boundaries were breached. This restaurant and its spin-off enterprises also helped to define the neighborhood as ethnic space. In contrast, urban redevelopment and gentrification, beginning in the 1990s, have resulted in erasure of the area’s history and the sense of space in which ethnic identity and multiethnic bonds were once fostered.

On Identity, Place, Dignity, and Honor: The Madonnas of Echo Park (2010) by Brando Skyhorse

Brando Skyhorse’s first novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, set in Echo Park, Los Angeles, portrays the lives, thoughts and feelings of eight different and diverse characters. All of them expose their direct link to the space they inhabit: the barrio. Parting from the premise that the link between space and identity is inextricable, and the fact that the general living conditions and access to different resources is scarce in many U.S. Latino quarters, the aim of this essay is to observe whether the way the characters experience this space affects their personal identity and relation to dignity and honor. Particularly, the way barrio life affects and shapes the personality of male characters. For this purpose, we will employ Alfredo Mirandé’s conceptualization of Chicano masculinity, characterized by a strong sense of honor, dignity and pride, among other things. We thus will observe whether a tough environment produces tough men.

The Invasion of Echo Park

A review of Brando Skyhorse's The Madonna's of Echo Park.