frequencies

by josh kun

L.A. boogie

PHILLIPE'S HAS BEEN hugging its corner on the northern stretch of Alameda in downtown Los Angeles since it opened in 1908, one of the last chances for food before bridges carry you across the river to the east side. Go there any weekday morning before the 9-to-5 shuffle begins and, along with your pocket-change coffee, hash, and eggs, you'll be served Los Angeles. There are Chinese men reading racing forms, black and Latino cops on patrol break, white skyscraper bankers in ties, and Mexican women in polyester server uniforms and thick hose throwing out orders in Spanish from behind a silver cafeteria counter. There's usually no drama, no beatdowns, no breakfast race wars, just people sharing long wooden tables and sitting on rickety stools – connected only by the city that waits for all of them outside and the sawdust on the floor that clings to construction work boots the same way it clings to two-inch heels.

Just one block away is where the whole L.A. experiment started back in the mission days of 1781, the original plaza founded and planned out by Spanish explorers and Mexican homesteaders. In his prescient 1933 gonzo history, Los Angeles, Morrow Mayo traced L.A.'s birth back to cleared sagebrush and wild mustard, a barren swatch of acreage "that resembled a sort of glorified unoccupied tennis-court in the desert, surrounded by empty polo-fields." The first chapter of Mayo's account – with its colonized Indians and environmental carelessness – is the grand finale of a new anthology, Unmasking L.A.: Third Worlds and the City (Palgrave), the latest literary panic room for L.A. doomsdayers. Of the two most dominant schools of L.A. thought – booster-Baywatch-Hollywood L.A. and earthquake-riots-apocalypse L.A. – Unmasking is a proud member of the latter.

Little in Unmasking is allowed to stray from the path set out by editor Deepak Narang Sawhney, who tells us over and over that the city "is an epic tale of racial disharmony, territorial conquest, and the attempted extermination of the original peoples." For Sawhney, L.A. is a city of civic instability, economic disenfranchisement, social inequality, police brutality, and militarized public space. It is defined by what it no longer has: an identity, an ecosystem, a good school system, and cops who aren't vicious race-baiting thugs.

It's not that Unmasking gets any of this wrong; it just doesn't get it all. In trying to tell the story of power, the writers fall prey to power itself by forgetting that it's not the only story that needs to be told. There is also the story of culture, how people respond to power and make sense of their own lives. As one of Unmasking's own contributors, Roger Keil, asks of the trend to turn L.A. into one big metaphor for global urban distress, "Where is the Los Angeles filled with human interaction, a place where incredibly complex social relationships ... are reproduced daily?"

One place to look is in the music of Pachuco Boogie (Arhoolie), a dazzling collection of R&B-tweaked swingers recorded by Chicano musicians between 1948 and 1954. These were not easy years for L.A. Chicanos. Just five years before Don Tosti's Pachuco Boogie Boys honked and shouted their way through "Pachuco Boogie" – a song that celebrated the pleats and drapes of the pachuco zoot suit and the linguistic codes of pachuco-speak, caló – the Zoot Suit Riots found suited Chicanos assaulted in the streets by hordes of off-duty white military men. The '40s had made Sawhney's "racial disharmony" a way of urban life: anti-Mexican and anti-black sentiment was everywhere (the black main drag of Central Avenue was shut down because too many white girls were showing up) and Japanese Americans were being corralled in racetracks.

But if we focused only on the facts of these injustices we would miss what they inspired. We would miss the mambos, rumbas, corridos, and blues that Chicanos were playing after spending hours listening to black music. We would miss the stories of laborers and roughnecks, of girls who drink too much and boys who let them.

We would miss all the love songs ("I got a girlfriend who knows how to love") and dance shuffles ("shake it here, shake it there") and marijuana odes ("beer makes me ill / Wine makes me crazy / Tequila tastes terrible / But weed...Oh yeah!"). We would miss black meeting brown in a dance step or a piano solo.

We would miss, in short, the sound of pleasure in the face of terror. "Se pone a todo tren cuando bailan boogie," Lalo Guerrero sings on "Chicas Patas Boogie." "Everything is all right when you dance boogie." This is Guerrero's unmasked L.A., a city that doesn't succumb to apocalypse but makes music out of it, whether it be at the end of a police billy club, between cracks of shifting earth, or over breakfast at a table full of strangers.