ABSTRACT
The first time I saw Los Angeles for real was in the summer of 1978, when I was 23 and passing through in a beat-up VW bug, on my way from Tijuana to San Francisco. I had just spent three adventurous months south of the border, travelling by bus, boat, and train through Baja California, Guadalajara, the Yucatan, Belize, Guatemala and back to the US via Mexico City. All I saw of LA that first time was the cliché: the cloggedup freeways, and a cluster of skyscrapers surrounded by yellowish clouds in the distance. I passed through Los Angeles twice more during the mid-1980s and did not really get more thoroughly acquainted with the city until the summer of 1995, when I received a good taste of the top end of the latino theatre world at the South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project in Orange County and of the text-based avant-garde at what turned out to be the final edition of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival. I was also introduced to Sally Gordon, who was then a part-time instructor at Cal State. She invited me to a performance of La Mujer Hambrienta (‘The Hungry Woman’), which she had collectively created with Latina women from Northeast LA. In May and June of 1997, I returned to document one of Sally’s new community-based theatre projects. Whereas in 1995 I had lived in Santa Monica, this time Rod Prosser and I were invited to stay with one of the project par ticipants, who lived in racially mixed, predominantly working-class, and some say not altogether safe, East Hollywood. Sally’s partner Beto, a Salvadoran refugee, lent us a second-hand pick-up, which was no luxury, given the mess that is LA’s public transport system.
