UC San Diego

This dissertation focuses on representations of the unavailability of spatial and environmental justice in Los Angeles in 1940s-1990s. The project includes several fictional and non-fictional counternarratives particularly in regards to displacement and dispossession in multi-ethnic U.S. literature and film, in relation to several regions of the city: Chavez Ravine, East L.A., Downtown L.A. neighborhoods, including Crown Hill, Pico-Union and Skid Row; and the communities of South Central and Koreatown during this period. The counternarratives include Culture Clash’s fictional play Chavez Ravine (2003) in Chapter 2, Helena María Viramontes’s fictional novel Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) in Chapter 3, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s and Christine Choy’s documentary film Sa-I-Gu (1993), John Ridley’s documentary film Let it Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992 (2017), Anna Deveare Smith’s non-fictional play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), and Héctor Tobar’s fictional novel The Tattooed Soldier (1998) in Chapter 4. In the project, I argue that all of the selected counternarratives feature several L.A. residents, both fictional and non-fictional, who encounter spatial and environmental injustice related crises that must be dealt with by the residents. I argue that the authors and filmmakers of the selected counternarratives use the metaphors of haunting and ghosts and other devices to critique and challenge (1) the erasure of people of color from the city’s history, (2) the recurring master narrative of supercity progress, specifically regarding the uses of “eminent domain” via “urban renewal” modernization, and (3) the simplistic mainstream interpretation of the uprising popularized by the local Los Angeles and national television news media networks, constructing it as an African-American versus Korean binary system, which uses half-truths to mischaracterize the rebellion as the “L.A. Riots”, while simultaneously ignoring many other complex factors and issues which help explain the significance of the L.A. Uprising. Moreover, the narrative devices that will be discussed in the project to examine the selected counternarratives, where appropriate, include the following: the metaphors of haunting and ghosts in conjunction with non-linear and disjointed uses of time, figurative language, “rasquachismo” aesthetics, “composite characters”, film noir stylization, “jumping” geographic scales, and documentary evidence.