‘Animals in the hood’: L.A. gang tours ‘zoo-ify’ citizens living in poverty
Lisa Gray-Garcia wants to protect the L.A. neighborhoods she loves. (Photo: Estevan Oriol)
In the latest issue of Poor Magazine, reporter Lisa Gray-Garcia calls out the nonprofit organization L.A. Gang Tours for ‘zoo-ifying’ the residents of poor, minority communities in Los Angeles. The tours are billed as providing “customers with a true first-hand encounter of the history and origin of high profile gang areas and the top crime scene locations in South Central, Los Angeles” — a mission statement that doesn’t sit well with Gray-Garcia.
Gray-Garcia’s article, “We are not animals in the hood,” levels the claim that throughout time, many have fetishized the poor, and that L.A. Gang Tours is simply the latest offender. As an example, she cites Charles Dickens’ 19th century travelogue — American Notes for General Circulation — and his report on poverty that was published in the The New York Times and led to the displacement of thousands of poor immigrants from New York’s tenements:
“[Dickens] characterized the tenements as deplorable cesspools. The subsequent demolitions of thousands of buildings in New York housing poor folks was for our own good, the social workers, city planners and real estate speculators told us, for the betterment of us seething, unwashed masses of poor people, unable to care for ourselves, speak for ourselves, or think for ourselves, our children or our homes.”
L.A. Gang Tours, Gray-Garcia concedes, has a similarly Dickensian bent in its neo-liberal approach to “save” those living in neighborhoods like Compton, Wilmos, and East L.A.
…in the case of the bizarre, wrong-headed-ness of the LA Gang Tours and its non-profit organization of the same name, once again it is staffed by well-meaning advocates who aim to Save Lives, Create Jobs and Rebuild Communities, as their tag-line says. We are told by staffers and their corporate and non-corporate advocates that bus tours through gritty, neighborhoods peopled by poor youth of color caught up in violence, drugs and poverty, is for our own good. It will bring us jobs and opportunities and hope.
L.A. Gang Tours, as Gray-Garcia states above, does have an advocacy slant. But it appears to be built upon the notion that outsiders believe they can swoop in to economically depressed neighborhoods (see: any gentrification debate in any city in America) and solve problems that residents are unable to solve on their own — a concept that many like-minded groups in neighborhoods across the country have attempted and failed to successfully implement. And while these groups are not always the villains they are sometimes made out to be, effective community advocacy requires more than a nonprofit status and good intentions.
Admittedly, I know nothing of L.A. Gang Tours successes or shortcomings, aside from the limited information provided on their website. And tours don’t officially begin until January. But the tours are coordinated by Alfred Lomas (pictured below), a gang intervention worker in South L.A. and former Florencia 13 gang member, which lends credence to the real-world experience behind this project. Gray-Garcia, however, remains skeptical of the group’s endeavor:
One of the many oxymoronic aspects of this concept is the notion, just like Dickens reported, that our neighborhoods, our communities, our corners, our schools, and our homes, are crazy, dirty, sick, disgusting and must be cleaned up, cleaned out and eradicated, hygienic metaphors about humans scattered about with impunity.
Alfred Lomas walks into the Los Angeles River basin below the 6th Street bridge. The tours will make a stop here, to show the urban tagging scene. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)
Gray-Garcia ends her piece with a sort of reverse-psychology warning to the community:
I started this piece by saying I had terror in my heart about the gang tours, but be clear its not terror for the poor, unsuspecting tourist, default colonizers and 21st century missionaries, stumbling and trampling over our communities and cultures as the well-meaning gang tours commence, rather, its terror for the residents of the proposed tour sites, and so I caution all of the community members, families and young people to hold on carefully to their purses, wallets, belongings, poetry, art and scholarship, cause, well, you know how dangerous those tourists can be.
Perhaps there is an unseen silver lining to this story. However, if Gray-Garcia’s observations are an indicator of what other residents are thinking, the fate of L.A. Gang Tours may already be sealed.
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[...] in South Central, Los Angeles” — a mission statement that doesn’t sit well with Gray-Garcia. Read full story (via Annals of [...]
Mr. Newton,
I read your piece, I read M.Gray-Garcia’s piece, and I read the webpage of tour. Incredibly I ended up, quite unknowingly, on a similar sort of tour. It was supposed to be about parks and rivers in Los Angeles but it ended up being something of exercise is what used to be called “slumming” (I don’t think intentionally). On top of all of that I know most of the places on the tour. I grew up not far from the “Dream Center” (it used to be Queen of Angels hospital), I had a friend who worked in the county jail, I used to work right in 3rd street in the hear of “skid row, I have been through the tunnel under the sixth street bridge on to the concrete bottom of the LA River, I have been on Florance Blvd. lots of times and even knew some of the guys from “The Slausons” who became the Los Angeles Black Panthers.
Despite all of that, I cannot say that I know how I feel about the whole exercise. On the one hand, it is ultimately harmless, no one’s lives are going to harmed in anyway, either the tourists or the locals. I will confess to being fairly uncomfortable with at least part of the slum tour I ended up on but I rolled with the punches. The part in my old neighborhood was fine, the part in Compton was a bit uneasy, more because of the demeanor of our guides than the behavior of the residents (there were a lot of local charros riding their horses along the dirt embankments of Compton Creek). I rather doubt that there are enough of these tours that any significant number of the folks along Florance will even notice the buses, much less have clue what they are about, or even care too much if they did know. I further doubt that any significant number of jobs will be created by these tours. I cannot imagine that the number of these tourists will be large enough to either cause harm or be harmed. I found the webapge for the tour surprisingly glib (offering “an unforgettable historical experience for our customers with a customized high-end specialty tour.”) and the stops are really not that interesting (I mean Florance Ave is Florance Ave and the building that the Panthers occupied is nothing special). I thought they even glamorized gang activity a bit. For example, their details about Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegal and Meir “Micky” Cohen, two famous Jewish gangsters of yesteryear, seemed gratuitous as well as inaccurate (Micky was a “homey” from Boyle Heights, graduated from Roosevelt High School). The details about whose bodies were autopsied where seemed boorish to say the least.
While well intentioned and generally harmless, I for one would never take that tour.
Thanks for sharing your experience David, and your thoughts. It seems like these tours are, at best, a head scratcher. On the surface, the tours seem a one-dimensional vehicle used to capitalize on the general public’s fascination with true crime stories. But then the altruistic undercurrent of “Save Lives, Create Jobs and Rebuild Communities” throws a monkey wrench into that theory.
I agree with your assessment re: job creation. The tours don’t strike me as a viable economic engine for sustainable jobs. However, if the tours happen to catch on, and could then enlist a growing number of former gang members as guides/consultants, maybe it would work and fulfill its mission of job creation. Crazier things have happened. But even if the tours catch on, I wonder how neighborhood residents will react to the ethics of it all. Gray-Garcia makes an extremely valid point re: how the tours propose to put residents on display, as though front-and-center in a living and breathing exhibition on ‘Life in urban America.’ It’s unsettling.
What you said here interests me too: “The part in my old neighborhood was fine, the part in Compton was a bit uneasy, more because of the demeanor of our guides than the behavior of the residents.”
What demeanor did your guides have during the tour?
In response to another comment. See in context »Mr. Newton,
You asked about the demeanor of our guides, well, it was something. There is a local environmental group (which shall remain nameless here) that wants to not just clean up the rivers and coastlines of Los Angeles county but also make them more friendly to recreational use. Certainly a noble cause, one I certainly support. They have historically been based in the more affluent and residential (and whiter) west side of Los Angeles county, where there are long stretches of sandy beaches. They have been fairly successful at raising awareness about beach water quality and fighting pollution in the Santa Monica Bay. However, it would seem, that they have decided to take their fight inland, which is actually quite logical since a lot of pollution that ends up at the beach begins its journey there far inland. So they have been trying to work in communities along the Los Angeles River, the San Gabriel River, Ballona Creek, and Compton Creek. The inland communities that sit astride these water courses are less affluent, more industrial, and considerably less white than the beach front communities along the Santa Monica Bay. So they have had significantly less success working in these communities. They realized that they were coming across as arrogant and insensitive outsiders throwing their west-side privilege around. So they decided that they needed change their approach and recognize that what had worked in Huntington Beach might not work in Huntington Park. One of their projects was a “micro-park” long Compton Creek. Compton Creek was once a local barranca with plants and wildlife but is now a “channelized” storm water conveyance system with dirt trails along top.
http://bridgehunter.com/ca/los-angeles/bh40572/
So the idea was to reclaim a bit of this creek and make it available to the local people for their benefit and perhaps help keep the creek a bit cleaner. As it turns out, not knowing the neighborhood very well, they put it in a poor location, one not too readily accessible. In any event, we were supposed to go visit that little bitty park, with rocks, seating, and native plants which was indeed rather nice but something of hike up from the nearest street. This was the last stop on our tour. We had been to other parks along rivers that were “reclaimed”. Of significance, an abandoned railroad marshaling yard (Taylor Yards, right next to the LA River where I used to catch tadpoles and crawdads as a kid) was converted into a large and popular park with soccer fields and other facilities.
So on our way to this micropark on Compton Creek our guides were explaining about some of the political intricacies of working in Compton. Compton had at one point been an entirely white community but by the 1960’s was almost entirely Black but was now largely Hispanic. Since a large portion of the population were recent immigrants and not citizens, they could not vote. As a result the elected officials were still largely Black. This created a certain amount of tension in the city that they needed to work around. As an example, one of our guides told us that they had gotten a letter from a city counsel member to NOT bring tours down to Compton without checking with her office first. Someone in the back of the bus asked if they had checked with the counsel office and cleared this tour. They reply was “no” they did not need any stinking approval from the city. There were some wide-eyed glances exchanged in the back of that bus. He added that it was just the counsel members attempt to hold on to control in this newly Hispanic town. That got some fur raised, let me tell you. When we got there were more or less told not to listen to the locals if they were saying anything to us. As it turned out we mainly just ran into the local “charros” riding their horses along dirt paths above the creek who were quite friendly. The park was right behind Compton High so we could hear the cheer squad practicing. Not a bad stop really, except for the guides.
Thinking about it, to get the most non-flood control use out of Compton Creek and make the most inroads with the locals who might actually use the riverbanks, they should have done something with a strong equestrian element in to. Along just about any river bank in Los Angeles county, you will find many paddocks and local communities with zoning allowing horses. It is not, as one might assume, only for wealthy people. As already noted, the communities along the riverbanks are generally of pretty modest means but there are horses kept in a great many of them. I have even run across informal horse races organized long the railroad right of ways that parallel the rivers or even flood control overflow areas. The railroad folks discourage this of course. This is true for Compton as well. Making the trails more friendly to equestrians would have been a much better use of their funds and energies.
In response to another comment. See in context »$65 bucks to people watch? Oh wait…I get it. They’re not people- hence the safari.
Is the Advancement Project or any wing of the defense industry involved in this fiasco? Monied white people are generally safe in so-called bad neighborhoods. The residents don’t want the heat should something bad happen to someone of the wrong color. Thank god there’s no corollary tour for the working class through Brentwood. That would be an outrage.
The word “gang” in many cities goes beyond the fetishizing and stereotyping discussed in Matthew Newton’s posting. Loose gatherings of friends/acquaintances/neigbors become ominous-sounding “gangs” in the parlance of law enforcement officers. Then law enforcement agencies cite the “gang problem” in making arrests, seeking larger budgets from legislators and generally carrying out race-based law enforcement (whether the so-called gangs are African-American or Caucasian or Chinese-American or Hispanic-American, ad nauseum).
Consumers of news dished out by law enforcement sources must treat any “gang” references as dubious until proven otherwise.
Interesting point Steve. So what you’re saying is that law enforcement has actually built up a greater mystique around the word “gang” — more than it deserves perhaps?
In response to another comment. See in context »Yes, Matthew, “mystique” is an appropriate word, although “reverse mystique” might be even more appropriate. We’re talking about intentionally imprecise use of language by law enforcement personnel as a means to a not always admirable end. I often approve of larger budgets for law enforcement agencies, but not larger budgets to fight a type of crime that might not exist and that sometimes results in unjust targeting of minorities.
In response to another comment. See in context »