Future History of Los Angeles
Written by the students of 826LA's Summer Writers' Workshop 2021
Introduction by Myriam Gurba
This July, 826LA assembled a group of students eager to fill a time capsule: this chapbook! Participants spent a week translating their individual and collective here-ness into history through the Summer Writers Workshop, an instructional program that paired students from Echo Park and Mar Vista with LA creatives. This season’s program offered “the future histories of LA” as its unifying theme and over a five-day span, participants attended workshops that communicated this revolutionary message: everyone makes history. This message encouraged participants to understand themselves as history makers and instructors communicated this message using different pedagogies, inspiring a collection of literary and geographic artifacts that also serve as a regional history.
Marissa Lopez, Xavi Moreno, Gabriela Valenzuela, Efren Lopez, and 826LA staff shaped the contents of this chapbook. Marissa Lopez led “Documenting History,” a workshop that asked, “How do we know what we think we know about the past?” Moreno led “I am, Los Angeles,” a spoken word poetry workshop with an emphasis on corporeal storytelling. Valenzuela led “Imagining Historical Spaces,” a workshop on historical authority and cartography. Efren Lopez led “Writing the Future,” a workshop on ways that artists have depicted the LA of the future. By week’s end, students must’ve been exhausted from so much time travel. They leapt between past and present in service of LA’s future.
Like all prose, historical writing faces forward. While the intended audience of historical writing might inhabit the edge of the present, the historian always addresses people inhabiting moments waiting to happen. As you to turn these pages, you will find yourself confronted by the past in the future. This time capsule, which places LA at the center of the world, contains poems, maps, lists, collage, and various musings. Let’s look at some of them.
In an “Interview with Mamta Sinhgal,” Kay S. transcribes a series of questions and answers about quotidian LA life. From Kay’s interview, we learn that the coronavirus pandemic has altered the reality of Singhal, an Angeleno born in India in 1984. For Singhal, “a regular day” encompasses “[waking] up, [doing] everything in the morning, and [going] outside sometimes.” Singhal’s answers remind us that while many of us tend to think of dystopia as a horror yet to come, dystopia also unfolds in the past and present. Compulsively locating dystopia on the horizon is one way to ignore or deny its presence.
Poetry by Yaretzi H. and Melody G. give us sensory descriptions of LA, telling us what life here feels like. In Yaretzi and Melody’s poems, there is beauty and pleasure. We feel the softness of a mattress. There is the touch of a thin pillow, the memory of grapes. Carne asada cooks on the grill. Video games make cheesy sounds, competing with English and Spanish to fill the air. LA heat is contrasted with the Las Vegas heat. There is happiness in air conditioning.
Workshop participants also become cartographers with Aanya K, Macy B, and Rami G drafting a map of LA with landmarks and a compass. The map is delightfully Rami-centric, with their house at the center and Hollywood, freeways, Dodgers Stadium, and Universal Studios existing in the house’s orbit. Instead of water indicative of the shoreline, birds hover, seagulls suggesting sea.
In the spirit of Disneyland’s “Tomorrowland,” Kay S. muses about an invention titled the “surferboard.” The invention reminds me a bit of the jet packs that many children, myself included, dreamt of during the mid and later half of the twentieth century. The best part of the surferboard is that Bill Gates can’t seem to stay on it. He rides it, falls off and into the water, and “never [touches] it again.” According to Kay’s imagining, the boards are raced annually at Echo Park and speculating about future traditions moves us toward those traditions, including those that dunk billionaires.
A comprehensive picture of the summer workshops can be seen in closing self-portraits like Yaretzi’s. With pencil, Yaretzi illustrates herself flashing two fingers in a peace sign. Her page explains who she is, an Angeleno and Pisces with ties to Mexico. She would someday like to live in Istanbul or Paris but is amenable to remaining here, in LA. As a funny memory, Yaretzi shares that when she went to a water park, her tía attempted to climb a flotation device and failed, flipping into the water.
This chapbook preserves memories of steak, slapstick, and the Staples Center. The writing assembled here is unflinchingly regional and sentimental, and that gives me hope. It is good to have feelings for and about the place you call home. Those emotions can serve as a call to action. Emotion can also take history and turn it into a poem. LA has, does, and will contain multitudes.