Category Archives: Jeanine

Having presented my experiences in LA to the MIIS community in conjunction with the group that went to the Philippine island of Mindanao, I was struck by how similar and yet how different our experiences were.

On one hand, they had a multi-cultural experience where they were exposed to new gestures, a different language, different food and a completely different environment.   I, on the other hand was in what I consider my native state, speaking uniquely English with other native English speakers. People didn’t seem odd to me, I blended in to my surroundings and I felt at home, like it could have been a town that I could have lived in. So the cultural experience wasn’t so pronounced for me as it was for the group that left the country. But that’s not what is odd.

What is odd is that the way I digested knowledge, the way that i interpreted my surroundings was through the lens of a native. I felt that i understood the historical, spatial and economic realities of LA and i took my lens for granted. Seeing LA, for the first time, but somehow, not. Being in skid row for the first time but the fact that i could place the policies and the history that created skid row, made it seem familiar, almost something that was obvious. I found myself reinforcing the historical and political narrative that I have cultivated instead of trying to create a new one.

So the group that went to Mindanao, did not have that lens of the “obvious”. They were perhaps able to be less judgmental because they were there, in actuality and mentally, for the first time.

I cannot write to the experiences of others, but i can recount my own. I feel that there was something yet still lost in the experience of LA, something intangible that i can’t quite get at. I was blocked in my understanding by my preconceptions, by in fact, the over information that i have about Los Angeles. How do we tear down that wall of knowledge that blocks us from having “new eyes” to see with “new ears” to hear with and a new sense of discovery. How do we eliminate the curse of knowledge in order to have a learning experience like you would have leaving the country?

Working in graduate school, it seems like there is a never ending competition to know everything, to be more informed, to do more and more research. In the classroom setting this is useful. Once in the field, the “real world” this seems to almost hinder people. In LA we hear “just shut up and listen” because people weren’t able to have a voice to express themselves because all the “educated” people ( I use the quotation marks sarcastically, school diplomas don’t seem to make people smarter) had researched the problems of others, they had the economic model on a piece of paper. Poor people are reduced to numbers and statistics, and their voices are lost because people, like me, already “know” what’s happening.

My lesson in this is to listen. to have the humility to not “know the answer”. To break the paradigm of proving how smart i am by speaking for others. Intelligence lies in humility and knowing when you don’t know something. And being able to ask and listen to others.

As I reflect back on Los Angelese i wonder what keeps people going to fight the good fight everyday. While in LA we met with amazing people who are the unsung heroes, the champions of the poor and unwanted. The people who work on behalf the rest of us have forgotten, who fight everyday to give a voice, not to themselves, but to their brother, their sister  in need. Yes there’s a personal agenda, yes, there are people who do it stroke their own egos as selfless martyrs but then again, there are energy company executives who spend their entire lives accumulating wealth,to spend their vacations on boats that kill manatees.

What i wonder about as i go to school everyday, while i spend my time studying and writing and thinking lofty thoughts, what will this all come to? What will become of me, will i choose the easy path, will i choose the life of the people i saw who spend their time “singing for their supper”? I know when it is the right time to make a decision other things will affect me, like my family, my friends, the pay grade, but how many of the people who i saw have always envisioned themselves in that role?

there is this double pull, the idea that nothing that we do is neutral, there is no middle ground. Everything we do, or choose not to do has an effect on something somewhere. How do we fight against the tide that pulls us unconsciously in one direction or another? How do we become the best versions of ourselves?

I ask myself this question a lot. LA has shown me two sides, the side that is fighting for what’s right, and the faceless “other” the side that supports the business interests and not the people’s. The side that shoots a mentally ill man in the street because earlier that system tore down the structures that would have housed him. I don’t want to be on that side. But that side too needs good people who want to speak up for the downtrodden. The question becomes how do you fight the tide. How do you exist in that system that wants to swallow up and make you just like them.

I hope that i find my “sacred purpose” the reason why I am here, the best version of myself, for i am fearful of being swallowed up by the tide, forgetting the bigger picture, forgetting myself.

One night in LA we took a Lift car home from our last event. You guys know the one, the car service with the pink mustache? Our driver’s name was Duke, a cordial middle aged man, nice car and prompt pick up. In the car he mentioned that he was from New York. As we continue down the road I ask him what brought him to the West Coast, what made him leave New York?

Well, his story starts out with him saying that he used to keep a baseball bat in his car, and he used to use it, regularly. He talked about what could only be called repeated incidents of road rage when other drivers cut him off, or took his parking spot. Apparently he also kept an ice pick in his driver side door. He said “and I know how many spare tires you got.” to the guy who allegedly “took” “his” place, “he could just stay there a while, you know what i mean?”

So we are driving along the road with this man who is very open about himself and his past, but the more he spoke, the more he became a sympathetic character. He talked about his kids, and his wife, how he got shot during a home robbery trying to protect his wife. He narrowly escaped paralysis, while his wife was 6 months pregnant with their last child.

This story makes me think about the narratives we have about ourselves. What is our lived experience? How do the stories we tell about these experiences make us who we are? Do we tell only the good side, hoping that strangers will see us in a good light? Or do we paint a negative picture to test other people’s tolerance? How does the narrative change the way we remember events, do we forget the things that don’t fit the story? Once I read about how easy it is to change the memories of children who were suspected of being molested. If asked enough questions in a certain vein, children would tell a story of molestation and abuse, actually re-wiring mental pathways so the story in their head fit the outside narrative.

I don’t think Duke was particularly aware of how he came off to me, a Californian, quick to say something nice and friendly lest I be taken poorly without an overt show of friendliness. But how does that come off? more than one time I’ve heard non-Californians complain about the lack of sincerity of the California “gushing” “how ARE you?, you are SO pretty!” to us the overt display of compliments and insincerity is an informal dance, a way to seem nice rather than show our actual feelings. I hate the fact that our “customer service” attitude in California is seen as insincere, but I have to admit that it performs more a ceremonial role in relationship forming than is an actual heartfelt thing.

I only hope for 2 things. 1, that people are semi-tolerant of first impressions, and don’t get turned off immediately by the ceremony and 2, that maybe we can learn someday to be as open and frank as Duke, be able to present the world with the things that we’ve changed in ourselves that we didn’t like, and stop hiding behind the plastic surgery of ceremony.

Los Angeles is famous for its empty spaces that accumulate garbage, wind blown trash, weeds and broken concrete. It creates a dialogue of neglect, despair and caged space, purposefully cordoned off from the sidewalks. But how can I call it violence?

These lots are one of the most visual examples in the city’s urban design that the space available in this city is only meant for certain people. In Boyle Heights we saw lots that were bought by the private metro company that used to contain laundromats, gas stations and groceries that have since been vacated and stayed that way up to 15 years now. These lots contribute to the look of urban decay that drives down house prices and adds to the food desert in that area. The fact that land prices were driven down, gives developers a chance to put in bids to develop that land. The metro claimed a community driven process that was literally just lip service, the people that were informed were in 500 foot radius that contains mostly freeway that cuts the neighborhood in half. Now that metro has built the gold line, these empty lots have risen in price, raising the price of surrounding property that pressures the home owners (not the renters) to sell to more developers thus driving out the people who can barely afford the rents they pay now.

Structural violence enters in specific points. The metro, not including the community, their voices are not heard, while their lives and livelihoods hang in the balance. The empty lots, cordoned off, attract garbage and devalue the space visually, a poverty of color and life. The city that has named Mariachi Plaza an “arts district” that has literally and ironically displaced the actual Mariachi dudes that hang out in that plaza.

Space (especially in L.A.) is intentional. The look of disrepair and neglect is intentional. The look of gentrification is intentional. People are either excluded or included intentionally. L.A has over and over proved to be insensitive and callus to the needs of its residents. It’s trying to re-invent itself but where do the people go after their buildings are torn down, their murals destroyed and their housing priced out of reach? Displacement and disenfranchisement is violence. The people today will fight back,one empty lot at a time.

So I have completed the portion of the class in LA. Leaving was kind of an intense process because I felt so immersed in the course, the participants, and in the process of moving around the city. Reflecting on how  I feel about conflict and the organisations that work in, on and around conflict, I still feel, well….very conflicted.

If we look at LA as an intentional process, the policies, practices and structures that reflect a vision of the people in charge politically and economically you have to conclude that it exists to promote uniquely the reproduction of capital off the backs of the black and brown residents. The poor have always borne most of the cost to make others rich. In the case of LA, you can see the abject poverty in the shadow of a hipster bar that keeps cheese the size of birthday cakes in a revolving display case with ceramic dancing goats. Saying this is “ironic” is forgetting the fact that these places are pushing out the open air mental asylum that is Skid Row. In Boyle Heights the metro has painted a golden line to the center of the city, leading the downtown directly to the latino enclave that watches their housing prices rise as their neighbors move out. South LA is much as it has always been, neglected crowded food desert that houses bad schools and out of touch teachers.

Like LA, I too am at a crossroads. The path that i take will only determine my future and that of my family’s, while LA moves millions of people with it in the direction that it chooses. The process that this transition is conducted with is sensitive. Who gets to determine their own path? Does metro get to determine how Boyle Heigts develops? Do the hipster bars and their clientele get to take over the warehouse district of Skid Row? Who gets to speak and who gets listened to is determined by power. The power of organized community and the power of entrenched  money and influence are facing off with each other in the city council chambers and in the streets of LA.  I would argue that this dichotomy exists to the detriment of all. Money and influence have a lot to offer the organized communities of LA, and the organized communities of LA have a lot to offer the money and influence. If I learned nothing else on this trip it is the power of relationships. The power of human networks, authentic communication, it is real human capital that has value and not the buildings or the stores.

The last day of our trip to LA was very interesting as all other days were, but for the first time I started thinking about where all the non-profits fit into the big picture of how America is in the world. We welcome asylum seekers and refugees, but our foreign policies are the things that created them. We penalize other countries for human rights abuses as there are sexual assaults and rape in our own prisons. Human rights is something for international studies students, they don’t apply to us or the USA (oosah).

We all occupy this space together, the city, the state the country and this world. We all have to live with a certain amount of ambiguity in our lives. We sacrifice certain principles to be in a relationship with someone else, to have a job, to participate in the market economy. For some reason when the contrast hit me, that even the organisations that does the good work, that sings for their supper that endures financial insecurity to help others has to live in this world of strings and limitations was jolting. The realization that even the people who are heroes have some point in their lives done something shameful, embarrassing or something that goes against their values makes us HUMAN and not hypocrites.

It’s easy to criticize the non-profit world because they are the ones with the money, the vision and the structure to make wonderful, non-market based solutions happen for the most marginalized, the forgotten, the people who slipped through the cracks. As they circulate the fringes of the capitalist machine they endure scrutiny, oversight and constant questioning. Why do we feel the need to pressure, to criticize and to question them? The agro-medical pharmaceutical industry continues on its merry way, destroying the environment, health and then provided the synthetic band-aid pills to make people live a little longer so they can continue to feed the system through their consumption. But the organisations that work with gangs, the prisoners, the victims of violence and injustice are ones who get the scraps of the giant capitalist machine that we have build to exponentially grow and destroy everything that live in its path.

So that’s how i feel. We scrutinize the few while the massive machine continues to turn out the violence, build the violence into our lives. Isolates us from human connections. Channels the relationships in our lives through the capitalist relationship to goods we purchase, the media we consume.

What is your definition of peace? Close your eyes and think about it for a minute. Is it the absence of violence? A large tranquil sea? Does peace include activity? Is peace intentional and dynamic? We ask this question over and over in our interviews to try and see what the people in LA see. We struggle to look through their eyes and see the same community. To many people we have spoken with peace is brotherhood. Peace is inclusion. Peace means that everyone gets to participate in the decisions that affect their lives.

We have heard many people talk about the need for understanding. The need to ask the question “what happened to you” not “what is wrong with you”. How else can you understand a person other than to know where they come from, their story, their narrative is. How can you heal what is broken when you don’t understand the sources of trauma, the context and history.

The stories I heard today made me think about even more deeply, the trauma of the students I work with. The fact that, 15 and 16 year olds are labeled as dumb stupid, or problem kids. How can they be anything else when they are treated as children, even as they have children of their own. When they have to conform to rules and regulations that would make a competent adult  cringe and rebel against. What kind of healing can be found for them when they are threatened with incarceration for the slightest infraction.

We have to start acknowledging that the criminal justice system is deeply flawed. That it works for the white minority and affluent to control the poor and people of color. In a society that can’t stand to see the reality of poverty around us, we criminalize the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill. In some states we execute the mentally ill. The criminal justice system is deeply sick. It doesn’t provide the outcomes that represent the people that it serves. To begin the healing, we need to reform the system. Not only the criminal justice system. The school system that has chronically failed our students of color. The development systems that displace people and perpetrate poverty, the legal systems, the political systems. We are reaching a “tipping point” is something that many people have said to us. The old status quo doesn’t serve the interests of the people, it doesn’t create the outcomes that we want, and it no longer has the legitimacy it needs to continue to operate.

So I will try this again, yesterday i tired to post this entry and the computer lost it. Yesterday we visited Skid Row. Named for the greased logs that used to be slid down to the trains, at the end of the line skid row is home to over 10,000 homeless people and countless organizations that have located their services and outreach there.

The tents and temporary encampments line the sidewalks, people sit on milk crates, under cardboard or patrol the streets. Skid Row is noisy. There is music everywhere. People yell and greet each other. Small, illegal vendors sell single cigarettes and lighters. A man walking past us was selling a single hammock. There, in skid row, sprawling in the shadow if the skyscrapers of the financial district, is a whole separate world, separate economy, a separate society. On one corner We saw the windowless monolith that is the LAPD headquarters for the district.

What most people see in skid row is the poverty, visible mental illness, the smell traces lines from the concrete into your nose and surrounds you. I was surprised to see all the richness. Richness in people’s smiles, the human relations that at once bonded people and made it hard to leave the Row. I saw richness in the compassion that everyone who worked in the organizations that i visited had. One man on the street spoke to me to say that I looked nice, i was genuinely touched by his honest frank manner. Women in the shelter we visited waved and smiled.

In contrast I did see poverty as it hard to ignore the fact that anyone in this area is either homeless or employed to provide services to the homeless. As i walked the sidewalks that served essentially as front porches and living rooms in my group i couldn’t help but feel intrusive, that my being there infringed on privacy and dignity of the residents. I could feel the fear that people had when I walked past, worried that i would bring with me more gentrification, bad inspection reports or more punishment down on their heads. I felt like I did often, in Africa, as people saw me as a representative of my race, there to pass judgement and scold.

Having completed my first day here in LA, i cannot help but to HAVE to talk about fashion. LA is one of the fashion capitals of the Left Coast, and people who live here seem to have a special dedication to upholding this reputation.

I’m not going to talk about what they wear, LA Time has a fashion section if you must check it out, but there is definitely that runway look when you walk down the street, you can’t help but wonder, “are they models?”

I want to talk about my turbid relationship with clothes, fashion and beauty (and yes you can extrapolate into feminism and beyond) and how I see this city. I essentially see myself as a northern Californian girls, “take a sweater” when you leave the house is more than common sense, it’s a mantra that has been deeply internalized, so internalized that this morning when i was about to wonder out into the 80+ day, that was today, i had to physically put on and remove a jacket and say out loud “I do not need a coat, it is hot, it will be hotter and I will be too hot” to get myself to reluctantly leave this essential, highly practical item of clothing behind.

To see people walking around in short dresses and short skirts and short shorts, midriff bearing tops, i was deeply taken aback. Girls walking around in shoes that in my head made me go “that must be so uncomfortable, why could anyone want to wear these shoes” before realizing that in my head I was being ethnocentric and culturally relativistic. Who am I to judge the footwear options of these women, how much skin they show, what kind of person they are with. My values have nothing to do with their choices, or do they? How do I see these women? In all honestly I do judge them, i pity them and their poor morals surrounding comfort and functionality, i wish with all my heart I could speak with them, explain about the patriarchy that sends them subliminal messages to objectify themselves, to squeeze (so very literally) into these molded forms of beauty and feminine identity.

This made me think about the archetypes that inform us, not only about other people, but about ourselves. How we dress is an expression of our archetype. How we see ourselves, the social aspirations, the acceptance that we strive for. People search for an outlet of expression in conformity. It’s almost as if the woman walking down the street in the platform heels, tiny dress, her make up troweled on is desperately to attain the beauty standards set for herself, designed by others so that if her body doesn’t fit, she doesn’t fit, and must choose between exclusion and her own physical form.

So what does this say about me? How is what I wear an expression of the archetype that I seek to conform to? What about the excitement and obsession that I have for shopping? I too want to be accepted and included socially. I want people to think i’m sexy and attractive, maybe even a bit mysterious and original. How would I like to be judged by an older woman, sharing the same street but not the same life, experiences or values as I?   How we look at others is more of an expression of what we see in ourselves. The insecurities, the pathologies we see so clearly in others, are uniquely the coloration of our lenses that we have developed for ourselves. How I will continue to judge others will yet be determined, but I hope to work on the knee-jerk reaction to the otherness that I see around me. I hope to keep an open mind, curious but not harsh, sympathetic but not naive.

So i am finally here in downtown LA! Having spent at least two weeks “in LA” every year to visit my grandparents in Ventura county i have always been curious to see this “LA” place that is fabled to have crime, homelessness and “inner-city-ness” (basically all the things my family considers yucky). I have been sheltered in the mountains and canyons, not far from malibu, but very far away from what i will be researching as LA. The drive to my grandparents house is like going into a story book, windy roads, forested glens, dry canyon desert with lush crevasses stretching to tho ocean.

Here on Figeroa (or Fig street) there are the sounds of sirens, car alarms, the whooshing of traffic, the sounds rubber makes when it brushes the concrete floor of this metropolis. The metro pumps its air breaks, and buses heave and snort down blocks. Walking downtown, the heat comes from both ends, from the super heated concrete and the sun, both baring down on you, making walking across an open storefront heaven with its super cooled air strong enough to blow 5 feet in diameter from the open doors.

This evening we are all 7 of us finally together. Everyone made it down safe and sound and we are all ready to start this adventure to see the real LA.