Everything is louder in LA– not simply sonically but visually as well. It was striking to feel dropped into the ethnic diversity of the city. In our experience, Houston is incredibly diverse as well, with long histories of various, overlapping immigrant communities. Los Angeles, on the other hand, loudly, boldly, and enthusiastically defines itself by their multiple nationalities– in everything from clothing and self-presentation to countries’ flags hung from balconies and windows. They’re upfront about it. They don’t play around about their ethnic and national identities.
The diverse communities feel mixed up and tangled throughout many parts of the city, making LA’s own history of racial segregation is hard to see. While Houston’s geographic segregation has been noted by many scholars and writers (such as Understanding Houston, Rice’s Kinder Institute, and Segregation by Design), Los Angeles’ was less apparent to us, for many reasons– one of which: our newness to the city.
To help us think through our projects goals, we began along the intersection of class and class differences since the affluent areas of the city are a completely different landscape than the poverty-stricken ones. Thinking across class helped us understand how race and ethnicity shaped the geographies of LA black and brown communities. Generally, LA is already invested in telling the city’s history, with multiple digital projects arising recently. One of such projects is the Instagram account, Color a la Mexicana (@coloralamexicana), which seeks to document the Mexican American history of 19th century LA.
Moreover, most of California’s state archives have been or are in the process of being digitized, so Sophia, Gaby, and I had plenty of material to research the history of the city from afar. But we could not have made all of these observations about the city–which describe things such as the feeling of being in never-ending traffic, or the disparity of resource allocation in each county, or how cultural pride is louder there–without having visited. Our experiences of LA were foundational to the goals of our project: to produce educational and historical tools about the history of Chicana consciousness.
Thus, our first two days inspired us to question how the histories of señoras and other community leaders was being told in the official historical narrative. In preparation for our trip, the team read history books about Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles, so we had a good sense of what we might find in various city and university archives. The next day, we drove to UC Santa Barbara to check out the (in)famous California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) which house a variety of historic and community documents that have been essential in helping us shape our project.
Unfortunately, we all contracted COVID.
Despite taking as many precautions as possible during our travels, including outdoor dining and wearing masks indoors at all times, Sophia’s test results arrived first: positive.
Our plan was to scout potential LA sites in Boyle Heights, a historical Chicanx community, and to establish relationships with any vendors, leaders, or señoras we could find. However, we didn’t want to risk bringing the virus into these already vulnerable populations (Latines and Black people are at higher risk of contracting COVID because these groups are overrepresented in the service industry, heightening their exposure to the virus).
At that point, I had started to feel symptoms as well, thus the research plan shifted. Researching in the time of COVID calls for instant revisions, adjustments, and foresight. Plans become fluid and goals shift in the face of the pandemic.
After a frantic hour, we decided to cut the trip short. Our flight was supposed to leave the next day but we decided to cancel it, not wanting to risk further spread and contamination. Instead, we rented a car and drove from Los Angeles to Houston, limiting our stops to bathroom breaks and food to avoid contact with people as much as possible.
In the 22 hours it took us to drive halfway across the country, Sophia and I had extensive conversations about what we had seen in the archive and in LA as a whole. When we reconvened with Gaby, the three of us were able to refine the focus and goal of our project to Mexican-American women specifically. This initial visit to LA, even if it was cut short, helped us make so many connections between historic political movements and the community leaders who make those movements happen. Before our COVID exposure, we were able to meet with really important people, who later became necessary support for our IRB application.
Because our work requires us to engage in intimate conversations with the women we seek to highlight, most of whom are now elders in the community, our next visit to Los Angeles will be as cautiously and mindfully scheduled as possible. With the constant progression of COVID variants, we will continue to research during a pandemic, taking as many precautions as possible to care for and hold ourselves accountable to all communities. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with our UCLA colleague, who not only helps hold us all to best COVID practices (even when local, state, and national leaders refuse to do so) and who continues to help establish vital community connections in LA.