Blogging Social Difference in LA: Week 1

Having grown up in a suburb approximately seventy-five miles away from Los Angeles, I never really considered myself an Angelino. I thought I was outside of LA's influence. However, now that I’ve lived in the city of Los Angeles for three years I can see that, while Redlands is by no means the same as “the city,” it definitely is influenced by it in some ways.

I used to think I had LA all figured out and wrapped up in a little box. But when I came to UCLA and met people who had already explored the city a little bit, I quickly began to realize how much I hadn’t discovered yet. I took Professor Wilford’s Metropolitan LA class last quarter, and became intrigued by the history of this area and how it came to be the way it is now. I was able to explore questions such as “why are certain areas of the metropolitan region demographically organized the way they are?” and “how did certain groups of people who may work in downtown end up living so far away from there?”

I hope to expand on those and other questions through my own experience this quarter. My plan is to use this blog to dig deeper into my understanding of how Los Angeles is laid out socially. Robert E. Park’s quotation (“The City is a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.”) inspires curiosity in me. I hope this project helps me discover aspects of LA that both prove and disprove his statement. I think both exist.

I think that individuals can be part of a number of those “little worlds” that exist in a city through their connections with each other and the activities in which they’re involved.  I’m eager to dig deeper into this idea by looking at every aspect of people’s lives: race, ethnicity, income level, family life, culture, interests, etc. Hopefully the places I visit will shed some light on how the people who are from there live their lives, and, furthermore, how their differences may or may not bring them together in their communities.

Mostly, I am excited to have an excuse to get out into LA, whether that is the city of Los Angeles, somewhere in the county of Los Angeles, or somewhere in what many consider to be the “greater Los Angeles area.” As a fourth-year student at UCLA, there is so much I have yet to see and discover here.