yg,y
g;
The New York Times Magazine 39Tribune — drove down to Watts
to report on the riot. He kept a
small brown notepad in which he
described what he saw and heard:
Watts residents clinging to the
chain-link fences that separated
their homes from the chaos
of the riot; National Guardsmen
returning re at unseen
assailants; a resident advising
him to nd shelter elsewhere —
every hotel in the neighborhood,
my grandfather wrote, having
burned down. Most of all, he
described a black smoke emanating
from burning structures across
the area. What he witnessed was
a direct response to a state
of socioeconomic misery that
had plagued the community
for decades.
The unrest that spread through
Los Angeles 27 years later was,
in part, a function of rage at the
same privations. A Los Angeles
Times editorial 23 years after
Watts noted, ‘‘Serious crime, drug
addiction and gang violence did
not begin to rise rapidly until
after the mid-1960s, and did
not begin to reach catastrophic
proportions until the mid-1970s.’’
The people who rioted in 1992 were
the o spring of that history of
abandonment. Looking back on that
night, I feel as if Huntington Park
and its surrounding communities
were stuck in an vicious loop.
With every hour that passed, our
neighborhood collapsed into
a version of itself that it hadn’t
experienced since August 1965.
Business owners shut their
doors, nailing pieces of plywood
against their windows in hopes
of deterring the looters heading
toward the brand-name stores
on Paci c Boulevard. The skies
became tinted with the same blend
of azure and pebble gray that my
grandfather described that August.
I’ve always wondered what my
grandfather felt when he reported
on the violence. What did it do
to his psyche to see crowds of Black
men and women running through
the streets, eeing the guns and
violence of the National Guard? How
did seeing Watts residents resort
to violence change him? His notes
are terse and objective in tone,
serving more as a historical archive
than a window into his spirit.
Every time I read through them,
I am left to wonder where his
emotional compass steered him that
night. But amid the weathered ink,
there is one moment that resonates:
When my grandfather drove
back to Oakland after spending two
weeks in Watts, he used the word‘‘ nality’’ to describe what he had
seen, an irrevocable sense that
something had come to an end. The
experience of living through the
1992 riots produced a similar sense
in my mind.
Finality is part of what my
mother and I experienced when
we left Huntington Park in
the summer of 1992. A month
after the riots turned the sky gray,
my family and I celebrated my
birthday at the Olive Garden. It
was the rst time we celebrated
two birthdays, my aunt’s and
mine. I was 7. It was a special
night, and I was surrounded by
the adults who cared for me:
my mother, Tía Licha, Tío Eve,
Tía Meche and Tío Lulo. It would,
however, be the last time I
celebrated in Huntington Park.
Frustrated and fearful of what
further violence the deprivations
of life in South Los Angeles
would cause, my mother revealed
that we would be moving to
the Westside at the end of the
summer. She boasted about
the prestigious elementary school
I had been accepted to on U.C.L.A.’s
campus, and an apartment
that had opened up in a graduate
housing complex.
The 1992 riots ultimately led
to quick and slow deaths all across
the city. More than 60 people
were killed over the course of ve
days. Thousands of people were
critically injured. A slew of
rst-generation business owners
lost their livelihoods. I became
a part of a generation of young
people whose neighborhoods were
scarred. Like the communities
that were irreparably damaged and
abandoned after the riots, our
connection to the South Los Angeles
of our youth was marked by a
slow, aching death. In my case, my
body and memory were sundered
from the place I called home.
I remember that while the
adults continued to watch
the chaos that night on television,
my friends and I met outside
to play. The adults retreated into
their homes, but the street was
lled with children who came out
to see the smoke disappear
into the night sky. We yelled long
into the night and raced
one another through the empty
streets until the lights came
on. We were freer than we had
ever been — unaware of the
lasting e ects of the smoke in
the sky. As my grandfather
wrote in 1965, children are ‘‘the
fearless ones,’’ always ‘‘too
young to recognize disaster.’’returned this year with his son, lis-
tening as the drum corps played
a stirring cadence for the school’s
freshman orientation. Darling
says he doesn’t understand why so
many of his Long Beach neighbors
send their kids to private schools,
when the local public schools are
so good.
It can be argued that the 1992
Los Angeles riots helped create a
new racial fault line in the Unit-
ed States. The images of large
numbers of Latino people looting
the city helped feed the anti-im-
migrant movement in California,
leading the Clinton administration
to begin building new fences at the
Mexican border in 1994. Today,
across the United States, a chau-
vinistic multitude equates Latino
identity with backwardness and a
variety of social ills; for many peo-
ple, attending a ‘‘Latino’’ school
would carry a stigma.
On Wilson High’s campus, I
found a glimmer of the Los Ange-
les that I remember from my child-
hood in East Hollywood. This is
the version of race relations in Los
Angeles County that The Times’s
coverage of the riots — Wilson
High in particular — obscured.
I always felt, as a reader and as a
reporter, an underlying insistence
that conversations about race were
about confl ict rather than the pecu-
liar ways in which Angelenos con-
struct multiethnic lives together.
In those lives there is a complexity
and richness that journalistic nar-
ratives of race sometimes fi nd hard
to embrace. Woodrow Wilson High
School was not, and is not, a utopia.
April 30, 1992, was a microcosm of
Southern California and the forc-
es and frustrations that caused Los
Angeles to explode that spring. In
the days that followed the riots,
as plumes of smoke still lingering
over the city, Timica Godbolt says
she noticed that more people than
ever were attending the meetings
of the campus Christian club. Those
meetings closed with a prayer. She
joined her classmates to ask ‘‘for
protection for our school, and for
our teachers, and for us and our
friends.’’ As she recited the words,
they conjured those fraught times,
and those students, both fearful
and hopeful. Solemnly, she closed
with an ‘‘Amen.’’Bradley lifts curfew (May 3, 1992,
11:30 a.m.): By late morning on May
3, large-scale violence had subsided.
Bradley lifted the curfew; bus service
returned and freeways reopened.
By May 4, life in Los Angeles had begun
a hesitant return to normalcy.Marines arriving in Compton (May 2,
1992, 4 p.m.): Thousands of federal
troops — including Marines — had
arrived at bases in Orange County, just
south of Los Angeles County, on May 1.
The next day, they deployed to the city
of Compton.