On Never Going Home to East L.A.
Gentrification and my East L.A. Dream
I grew up in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles, on the edge next to the California State University Los Angeles campus, once the Tongva Indian village of Otsungna. It was pretty quiet, except when it wasn’t. At least so I thought until a white colleague of my mother’s came to visit our house once and commented on the noise from the 10 freeway that ran close enough that you could see it from our living room. Then there were the house parties where the volume was turned up so loud that even though the house was a 100 meters away, it sounded like the stereo was in my bedroom, playing Norteño music. And of course there were those of us who drove around blasting whatever music was moving us — yes I grew up to be one of those people, because that’s just how we do, coming from El Sereno, listening to Shakira en Español.
The police used to come around. I don’t know if I should say frequently or infrequently because the frequency was just what it was, but compared to where I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts it was a lot. Sometimes they were driving slowly past all of our houses. A couple of times they were chasing people through my backyard, with a helicopter overhead shining a spotlight down on the chase.
There was a gang, Metro-13, but they never really bothered us. When one half of the gay couple next door died from complications due to AIDS, the other half — presumably due to depression and grief — fell into a deeper crack addiction, we were robbed a couple of times. My best friend’s house next door had what I was told were water bugs; I figured out as an adult that these were roaches.
Importantly, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) had so under-resourced our local schools that my mom was determined not to send me to City Terrace Elementary, El Sereno Junior High School, and Wilson Senior High School. So starting in first grade, I went to magnet schools, which existed thanks to a federal mandate in the early 1970s to LAUSD to integrate. For grades one through seven, I attended 32nd Street/University of Southern California Performing and Visual Arts Magnet.
What did this mean? It meant that every morning my mom and I got up around 6:30 AM and by around 7, I had to be across the railroad tracks (yup, grew up on the wrong side!) at my bus stop, which was far enough away that I couldn’t walk. I got to school around 7:30 AM and hung out until classes started around 8. At 3 PM, my mom was at the bus stop to pick me up and take me home.
In exchange for this, my mom couldn’t take a job where she worked 9–5. In exchange for this, I got a publicly-funded arts education that I absolutely would not return for anything. I trained seriously as a dancer, as a flautist, and an alto saxophone player with an emphasis on jazz. My jazz mentoring came from figures like Buddy Collette. My classmates included people like Ronald Bruner, Jr. My dance performances had audiences like Katherine Dunham in places like USC’s Bovard Auditorium. Simultaneously, my interest in science was nurtured by a Black math and science teacher who made sure that I didn’t fail out of school when my single mom became desperately ill and my grades took a nose dive.
Mr. Frank Wilson also vouched for me when I asked to skip 8th grade, seeing that I would be bored. So at age 13, I moved on to the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES), LAUSD’s first magnet school, and one with a disproportionately high number of gifted and highly gifted students like myself. LACES was a great place to be a student like me, and many of us remember our time there as being relatively idyllic, even though the school was under-resourced and I ran out of math classes after I finished AP Calculus AB in 10th grade.
But it was also on the edge of west Los Angeles. This meant that mom and I started getting up at 5:45 in the morning, getting to the bus stop at 6:23 or so (hoping to avoid the train that blocked our passage just before this), and I had a 90 minute commute to school — each way. To me it was all worth it because I knew we didn’t have the money to pay for college, so I was going to have to get into a school rich enough to pay for me to go. And I knew I wanted to be a theoretical physicist, so going to college was not an option, but a requirement.
One thing that was different about LACES from 32nd street: a lot of my classmates came from west L.A., which meant they came from money (middle class was money in my book back then). I had never really seen those kinds of differentials before, even though all through elementary school I had been dependent on hand-me-downs from a richer classmate for clothing. But I became aware that for many of them, going to LACES was a short drive, a short walk, a local experience. They didn’t have to spend three hours on the school bus just to get an opportunity. It was right in their backyard.
So, my dreams expanded beyond theoretical physics. I began to dream of going off to Harvard (which I did) and coming home to east L.A., a PhD in hand, ready to serve my community, both as an advocate and as a leader in the physics community.
I have been unable to do so.
Instead I have watched as major research institutions that are in relatively close proximity to where I grew up — the California Institute of Technology, the University of California at Los Angeles, and my pseudo-alma mater USC — have all failed to hire people who reflect Los Angeles’s immense socioeconomic and racial diversity. While the Cal States are a different story, for those of us who want to train PhD students, they are not an option. So I have been faced with an impossible choice: pick a dream, you can’t have both. Serve the community or train PhD students. You can’t have both.
Meanwhile, I came home for winter break from college one year and some gentrifiers had renamed my corner of El Sereno “University Hills.” My mom told me that some new professors at Cal State L.A. wanted to change people’s “perceptions” of our neighborhood. I didn’t see what the problem was. Had they been to west L.A.? It was a shit show of superficiality.
Last night I read that a new-build house in El Sereno sold for $1 million, and my mom sent me pictures recently of the monstrosity that some developers built in the lot next door to our house, the house where I was born and raised. The new house, instead of having a dirt backyard, had a cement yard. My childhood memories of running freely around in the dirt were buried in a layer of gentrification and cement. There goes the neighborhood.
I mention this gentrification because here’s what I see as a Black woman and a physicist: these institutions that should be accountable to local communities aren’t, and young professionals like the white men who are invariably hired over minoritized academics and are looking for “affordable” homes have “discovered” where I grew up and are buying it up. Some of those same residents are now advocating that Wilson High School be partially used for a charter school which will have better resources than the regular school, resources that the regular non-charter students won’t have access to. It is an abominable caste system. My dream on the long bus rides home was that all students at places like Wilson would get the resources that I had, while also getting more sleep, more opportunities to build local social relationships, more opportunities to feel like there is nothing wrong with where they grew up, no matter how many times people at Harvard gasped when I told them where I was from. It was not that the chosen few who were labeled as “worthy of the charter” would just have shorter bus rides.
Even with these changes, still, I dream of going home to east Los Angeles and of training PhD students. But every year, that dream seems to slip further away, and I feel angry. I am angry that it is not a high priority to ensure that people like me can go home and fulfill this dream of returning the resources the community put into me back to them. It’s easy for me to write this with detached language. It is harder to describe how it hurts my heart not just that I feel locked out, but that I don’t see anyone else getting their foot through the door either.
The lack of born and/or raised Black American, Native American, and Chicanx/Centroamericanx faculty in STEM departments — especially my field of physics — at Los Angeles county R1 institutions is unacceptable. It is also unacceptable that when one is hired, it will almost certainly be a cis man, not a woman or gender minority. While I value the (international) diversity that those departments do have, it’s not enough. Those institutions should be serving the local communities, and not through pedantic noblesse oblige-style outreach programs, but by returning campuses to their roots, to serve the community’s intellectual aspirations and needs. That goes far beyond hiring faculty who like me come from the barrios and the ghettos. But it would be a start. ◘
