Lesser Known Deserts and Oases
It’s not a part of the Nothing New challenge, but increasingly I have felt the need to purchase things locally, and to eschew giving my money to large corporations, like Amazon and Kroger. We vote with our wallet. The Nothing New challenge has just increased my general mindfulness of the shopping experience, and that includes the electoral power of my purse.
My living situation further complicates this. I live in a very nice apartment complex in a very poor neighborhood, East Hollywood. I am not so daft as to think that I am not complicit in gentrification, nor am I, as a friend once said to me, willing to write it off by noting that “If it’s not me gentrifying the neighborhood, it would be someone else.” It is me that is doing it. Certainly, I could find a replacement with ease, but it’s my body and my wallet that is here. Gentrification may be a near inescapable fact of our modern housing market, but I don’t want to participate in it passively.
As such, I shop locally when I can. I want to support the businesses that feed and service this community. Rather than going to a fancy coffee shop—and even in East Hollywood, they have started to appear—I would prefer to go to a panderia so that my purse pays the lease of a business that offers prices palatable to those poorer than me. Because, if this panderia is evicted and replaced with something more expensive, there will be little recourse for those who rely on its sweets to brighten their day. The power of my purse can help, in a small way, prevent that from happening.
It is one small justice I can do. It is so small as to barely qualify as a Boy Scout good turn. But it is a justice I can do.
Many have heard of food deserts, education deserts, greenery deserts, transit deserts.
East Hollywood, or at least my corner of it, is not a food desert. There’s a Filipino grocer across the way that sells good produce, and a carniceria that sells the staples of American and Mexican cuisine. In a wider radius, there is a Von’s, Jon’s, two other Filipino grocers, a (recently defunct) Armenian grocer, a Latino grocer, and a number of street food carts and pupuserias. For our poorest neighbors, there is a community fridge which I have donated to. It’s not a transit desert, with access to the red line and a bus system that I have found quite reliable. And it is a less of an education desert than some other places: there’s a local library branch, and LA City College is down the street.
But it is a greenery desert. There’s an almost total absence of parks. Having walked around the residential neighborhoods and the shopping centers, the only park I have found is Madison West Park, which hugs the smoggy 101.
And there are other, lesser known types of deserts that I have found in East Hollywood. Things that I would love to purchase locally are absent, or hard to find, unavailable even in larger retailers like Rite-Aid. This has complicated and inconvenienced my life, and I am sure this inconvenience is compounded for less wealthy residents. They are tiny absences, unworthy of the deep critical and statistical analysis lavished upon food deserts, but deserts nonetheless.
Public Art Desert: East Hollywood is a public art desert. The large public murals that splatter the rest of LA with color are absent. There’s a 7-11 nearby with a lovely mural, but I don’t think I’ve noticed anything else. While there is Barnsdall Art Park to the north, a group of museums including a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is somewhat insular due to its being at a top of a large hill, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery stationed there is closed Monday-Wednesday. From Thursday-Sunday this gallery is only open for five hours, recreating the issues with accessibility of art museums about which others have written eloquently. I believe LA City College has a few murals, but its campus is closed due to the pandemic, and art that is hidden within a campus is just as public (or private) as art hidden atop hilly Barnsdall. That is, all the public art has asterisks, some complication that prevents them from truly belonging to the people. Unlike other parts of LA, art does not greet you on your daily walk, on your drive. Instead, it recedes into the desert.
Art Supply Desert: But, in addition to being a public art desert, it is a private art desert. The nearest art supply store is north of Barnsdall park, a half hour walk from where I live. I am having trouble identifying if there are other places I can purchase colored pencils and sketchbooks—Rite-Aid sells a few, but it’s rather paltry, and a burgeoning artist would outgrow them shortly. The presence of LA City College and the library prevents it from being an art education desert, with LACC’s extension program offering art courses for youths and adults. But I don’t know how easy it would be for a young artist growing up here to find the supplies needed to practice their craft, and certainly the more capital intensive arts such as ceramics would be off limits entirely.
Parking Desert: There’s not much parking in my neighborhood. My roommates both do street parking, and have both received multiple parking tickets. The parking ticket system in Los Angeles is unfair, particularly to the poor. This blog post for a Brazilian magazine—certainly a left-field source—is probably my favorite delineation of how much money LA bilks from its poorest thanks to parking tickets. Parking for highway-braided LA is critical, but it is denied to residents of East Hollywood.
Sanitation Desert: Despite the weekly tickets my roommates receive for “street cleaning,” we have never heard a street sweeper rumble down my street. Trash litters the sidewalks. I can’t find any places where dog poop bags are publicly provisioned, meaning dog shit really is everywhere. This is much to the chagrin of my neighbors: multiple signs have been posted around the neighborhood, with varying levels of passive aggression and invective, telling dog owners to clean their shit. The answer, of course, would be for the city to publicly provision doggy bags—such a public good was freely offered near my apartment in Madison. But, in the absence of a public solution, we have a cacophony of public signage telling dog owners to do something they simply cannot do. So, we get dabbing dogs and nails in otherwise beautiful trees.
To portray a neighborhood solely by what it lacks is a disservice to it. East Hollywood doesn’t exist so that carpetbaggers like me, alien to the area, can write think pieces illuminating the small things that a neighborhood goes without, nor does it exist so that people like you can read them.
It has just as many oases as deserts. There’s that community fridge that I mentioned, for example. It is an oasis of little bargain shops, where you can buy Hello Kitty backpacks for cheap and as well as money transfers back home. God, the number of pupeserias and taquerias in this place is astounding, with food almost good-looking enough to make me recant my refusal to eat cheese! Life happens no matter what is denied—that’s the beauty of an oasis, that it springs up in an otherwise inhospitable environment.
My favorite oasis of East Hollywood is the swap meet. This year, the swap meet was closed down due to COVID-19. But many of these people need to sell their wares to survive. I see the cars they’re selling out of—I know they live in them, that these goods and this car are the sole capital that they own. This is their profession, and they are not eligible for unemployment or PPP loans or any of the fiscal aid that Congress has given the working poor, the middle class, and the rich.
The dirt poor got nothing. So, instead of heeding orders, they set up on the sidewalk every Saturday and Sunday.
There are so many strange and wonderful objects here! I love Mexican mercados, and the energy of these street vendors and the variety of their wares reminds me of Mercado 95 in Cancun. You can buy laundry detergent, PS1 games, old rock and roll CDs, Mormon books in Spanish, learn-English-by-VHS programs, candles, bicycles, cars, goat-meat tacos, oatmeal, and, of course, masks. Walking among these vendors has become a treasured part of my weekly routine. Given my commitment to used goods, I'm lucky to have them.
It also reveals an oasis of community. Faced with (well-intentioned) legal restrictions that complicated their survival, they banded together and set up shop anyways. I greatly would have preferred a world where we floated these people cash so that they could stay home rather than congregate in public and possibly spread COVID, but our political class couldn’t be forced to care about these people. Comparing their struggle to that of anti-maskers, those who avow that their right to free speech gives them the right to refuse a mask, to refuse even the most minor of inconveniences, is illuminating. These are people who actually have gotten the short end of the stick in this pandemic, who have no insurance, no stimulus, nothing. They do not have the luxury to protest at Dodger’s Stadium to end the lockdown.
Just imagining the Beverly Hills socialites and failed stand-up comics that make up the anti-mask movement meeting these people who are actually damaged by these policies is a humorous juxtaposition. Likely, these people would not see themselves as having any solidarity with the street vendors in East Hollywood. Because they are not really defending a right to do business, a right to publicly gather in a community. They are defending only a right to convenience, a right to brunch.
There's one final thing that I think it is critical to remember whenever I'm some place that has seen an outsized share of struggles so that I don’t pontificate and make abstract the lives of real people, which is that somewhere is always home to somebody. There are lot of families in East Hollywood. I see kids, tweens skateboarding through the residential streets, hitting up the local mini-marts for a snack. I see babies getting burped by their mothers. I have seen so many kitties with little collars wandering their turf. This isn’t to do that thing where a writer portrays the downtrodden as salt of the earth folks, poor in wealth but rich in spirit.
I want to say that while this place is not home to me, it is a home. So, no wonder there would be an oasis here. The human spirit—I know, posting cringe etc.—creates an oasis wherever there is a home, no matter how desertic the environs.