A Love Letter to LA
On Los Angeles, pace layers, and the changing definition of America.
It’s been almost 15 years since I visited Los Angeles on a business trip and it captured my heart. And seven years since I moved here, dragging my husband across the country to live in a city that had it all—warm weather, food and culture, opportunity for our careers, and friends we loved.
I’ve always been drawn to polyglot cities, where different cultures pepper the streets and you live in a tapestry of people. We all live in our bubbles, but I like my bubble to prodded rather than protected. In LA, I found that.
Los Angeles is a city of storytellers.
It’s one of the most prolific producers of films in the world (beat out only by Bollywood). In the early 20th century, it drew Jewish immigrants fleeing from the terror of Germany, whose ingenuity and creativity fueled Hollywood’s rise. In the last 15 years it embraced new voices, catapulting people like Mindy Kaling, Ryan Coogler, Ramy Youssef, and so many more, into stardom because they brought to life worlds that felt personal to them. It’s been the home of some of our best writers about America, from Joan Didion to Raymond Chandler to Kendrick Lamar. And while some people talk about the demise of Hollywood, the ingenuity of storytelling—and profiting from it— keeps going. The TikTok house phenomenon started here, and AI studios are popping up from the minds of filmmakers who see new ways to bring ideas to life. But Hollywood has been mining its own stories, with The Studio and Hacks taking a keen eye to the entertainment industry.
Los Angeles is the host of the impossible.
Cactuses thrive next to bougainvillea, roses grow next to banana trees. It’s one of my favorite seasons here—when the prolific jasmine plants scent the walkways and jacaranda trees bloom, hailing their purple flowers onto city streets. Its scale is beyond comprehension. It’s more than 500 square miles, almost 4 million people— and less than 30% white. Between the web of highways, there are beach towns, bright Mexican neighborhoods, swaths of Korean and Vietnamese and Thai neighborhoods where English plays second fiddle to other languages, skyscrapers with rooftop bars, taco stands under string lights with street delicacies for a dollar.
We live uneasily together, united by the expansiveness, divided by traffic jams, astronomical differences in wealth, and enclaves of money, ethnicity, and lifestyle. But it feels like an America I believe in, one built from what we once called the melting pot, where anyone could come and eke out a bit of a Western American dream, with a white picket fence and a lemon tree out front.
I take heart in all of LA’s resilience.
Yet living here now feels precarious. We started the year on fire. Only six months later, ICE, Marines, and National Guard roll into the city. The news and social media is full of conflicting images of upbeat protestors dancing to music while a mariachi band plays, cars on fire, rows of law enforcement in riot gear.
And if I didn’t look at the news or social media? I wouldn’t even know. My neighborhood is serene, my workplace in a quiet neighborhood, and in the daily treks I make to live my life, I don’t see police blockades or ICE raids…yet.
But there is no perfect place to live, just the mess of humanity looking to stay alive in whatever circumstances we’re born into or find for ourselves. And trust me, I’ve lived in seven countries, countless cities, on a farm, in the suburbs. The grass may look greener but there will always be worms and snakes and dirt.
How much is America changing?
There are almost 2 million people of Mexican descent in Los Angeles. People who’ve been here since California was Mexico, and people who’ve crossed the border recently. The culture is indelibly shaped by Mexico. We have a Michelin star restaurant tucked in a Mexican food court. There’s an annual competition for the best tortillas. The baseball team is lovingly called Los Doyers. One of our best local media outlets is called LA Taco. The administration’s goal is not just to arrest criminals, but to erase half the culture of the city. No wonder they’re attacking taco trucks and fruit vendors, disappearing taqueros while asada is still sizzling.
No wonder this administration has targeted LA, the quintessential West Coast city that doesn’t just employ and rely on immigrants, but whose culture is unimaginable without them.
One of the most difficult things to grapple with is the wrenching away of a vision of America. The one written at the feet of the Statue of Liberty. The one that’s been forged by suffragettes and civil rights leaders, who have fought in the streets for more freedom and more rights. The one I was promised as a kid by Sesame Street and Benetton. The one that briefly emerged in the wake of MeToo and BLM, and has been buried under an avalanche of MAGA rhetoric and vitriol.
The speed of cultural change.
It makes me think of Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers, which I learned about from Noah Brier here. There is a long, slow hard-won cultural trajectory towards a more accepting world, freedom for more people. Governance has guided the way—a little over hundred years ago, women in the US could not vote, much less run for President. It’s only been 60 years since Black people were granted the right to vote. America has felt like it’s been crawling forward on that trajectory in spite of skirmishes along the way. Infrastructure like trains, telecom, internet move faster but still entail a deep investment of time, whereas commerce moves at the pace of money and business. Fashion is where trends live, lightening fast changes in taste that respond, double back, react and change.
If we mess with the speed of the pace layers, disaster ensues. As Brand observes:
If governance is changed suddenly instead of gradually, you get the catastrophic French and Russian revolutions. In the Soviet Union, governance tried to ignore the constraints of culture and nature while forcing a five-year-plan infrastructure pace on commerce and art. Thus cutting itself off from both support and innovation, it was doomed.
This government has been trying to shape shift culture at the speed of commerce. It has been governing at the pace of fashion, a mercurial confusion designed to scramble how quickly people can respond.
The thing about LA is, it’s an elemental city. It knows better than any other metropolis the edges of nature. Desert plants survive fire by building deep root systems and letting their leave die off. Cacti store water and build powerful spines that stand up to the heat. Surfers hit the waves even as storm reports roll in. The water flows in from Colorado, through mountains and deserts, reservoirs and pipes, thousands of miles away. Like everyone, I’m on edge and I don’t know what will happen.
But I do know we’re stronger and more resilient than men who are trying to arm-wrestle culture into an unfamiliar and cruel shape.