EVERY GENERATION OR SO, THE REAL LOS ANGELES INtrudes itself into the palmy myth preferred by the outside world. The riot two weeks ago was such an occasion. Suddenly, La-la land -- with its beaches and movie stars, Rolls- Royces and Evian, its Italian suits and car phones, its upscale shopping malls and matching, coke-sniffing boy-girl bimbos -- was gone. In its place were wasted landscapes and hard people whose anger and alienation seemed for a while to know no bounds.
An immediate good that may emerge from the rioting is that the world will finally begin to lose its sense of Los Angeles as primarily a city of careless rich people. It was never that, isn't today and, if demographic trends continue, never will be. In the past decade, the number of Hispanics and Asians in Los Angeles has nearly doubled. The new immigrants came to the largest manufacturing center in the U.S. not to sell movie "projects" but to find jobs. The truth is thus the very antithesis of the myth: at its core, Los Angeles is a blue-collar and workaday town. Its residents tend to drive pickups or subcompacts, not Beemers and Rollses. They wear jeans and baseball caps and speak in accents redolent of Oklahoma or Texas, Ohio or New York, Mexico or El Salvador, Vietnam or Korea. Few Angelenos have ever seen a movie star. Many have never even seen Rodeo Drive, much less shopped there. Black, white, brown and yellow, they have created little communities that frequently resemble the places they left behind. In the poorest of those communities, the streets may not be as mean as those in, say, the South Bronx, but they are every bit as tough.
Many of the big dealers of Bel Air and Hancock Park have good intentions where the city as a whole is concerned. They are liberals, and they want to be involved, but they -- even more than their counterparts in other big cities -- are an enclave of such rare privilege that it is quite possible for them to avoid contact with Angelenos of, let us say, a different stripe. Even when they venture out, with eyes straight ahead on the freeways, most of them never even see the problems they care so much about.
So what? So this: for better and worse, L.A. is the city of the future. It is the first major metropolis in history in which everyone is in a minority. A place that has no majority culture is a place, paradoxically, in which the West's old, traditional promise -- that, if you can get there, you may have a new beginning, regardless of bloodlines or station in life -- is most likely to be kept. That promise, however, is not fulfilled in the "when you wish upon a star" myth; it is fulfilled by the Okie strawberry picker who survived the Depression and bought a farm, by the New Yorker who built a chain of car washes, by the Vietnamese refugee who worked his or her way through Cal State Long Beach and became a physicist. In stressing its most trivial and least typical aspects, we miss the lessons that L.A. has to teach about how modern urban societies should -- and should not -- be organized.