USC Dornsife Magazine Fall 2018-Winter 2019

F O R A L U M N I A N D F R I E N D S O F U S C D A N A A N D D AV I D D O R N S I F E C O L L E G E O F L E T T E R S , A R T S A N D S C I E N C E S

MAGAZINE

FALL 2018 / WINTER 2019

The Los Angeles Issue

REINVENTION

METROPOLIS

Tracing L.A.’s past, present and future, we explore how the City of Angels is making its mark on the 21st century.

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L E A R N I NG T O L I S T EN T O L . A .

THOMAS GUSTAFSON Associate Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity

When I came to Los Angeles in 1984, I was an assistant professor of English at USC Dornsife who loved studying great cities of the world such as ancient Athens, classical Rome, Shakespeare’s London and the Philadelphia of our Founding Fathers. I first saw L.A. in very negative comparison. For me, it was a city 500 miles wide but two inches deep — a city with no cultural depth, no historical memory and not much to remember.

But then came a change, and I can date it: April 29, 1992, when L.A. erupted in riots over the verdict in the trial of four policemen for the beating of Rodney King. I stayed up all night watching the news in tears. The city was the home of my three young daughters. I had to figure out why the City of Angels fell into its own revolution and civil war.

I began reading intensively the rich literature of Southern California, which taught me that to understand L.A. in 1992 (or 2018), we need to study its stories — its hopes, fears, dreams and tragedies — in the light of classical, American and world history. What makes the city so fascinating to study in this regard is that it is such an extensive confluence of people and their words. The city is what Alexandria and Athens and Rome were in the past: a sign of the times, an inheritance of the world’s symbolism, a gathering place and Fertile Crescent creator of its stories.

My ongoing study of our great city informs my two favorite courses, which I’ve taught for more than 20 years at USC Dornsife: “Los Angeles: the City, the Novel, the Movie” and “America, the Frontier and the New West.”

Los Angeles — so dominated in our imagination by the gaze of the camera — has grown into a preeminent center of literary creativity, the home of a new generation of writers who work to address significant concerns as we confront the problems of 21st-century urban America, including environmental crises, social inequality, materialism and racism. As midcentury writings of USC alumnus Carey McWilliams and late University Professor Kevin Starr teach us, the study of this work can help perform one of the vital roles of education in this urban region: It can teach us to listen more carefully to the rich mix of voices that compose the vox populi of L.A., and thus it can help create a deeper, broader sense of our common ground.

GUSTAFSON PORTRAIT BY PETER ZHAOYU ZHOU TORCHED BUILDINGS, LOS ANGELES RIOTS PHOTO COURTESY OF THE GARY LEONARD COLLECTION/ LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY

COVER STORY

SENIOR ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR STRATEGIC INITIATIVES AND COMMUNICATION

Lance Ignon

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Darrin S. Joy

MANAGING EDITOR

Susan Bell

ART DIRECTOR / PRODUCTION MANAGER

Letty Avila

WRITERS AND EDITORS

Michelle Boston Emily Gersema Jim Key DESIGNER

Dennis Lan VIDEOGRAPHER AND PHOTOGRAPHER

Mike Glier

COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT

Deann Webb

CONTRIBUTORS Joanna Clay, Caitlin Dawson, Lilly Kate Diaz, Stephen Koenig, Diane Krieger, Gary Polakovic, Laura Russell, Annamaria Sauer, Matthew Savino

Destination: Los Angeles

From Pacific Palisades travel south along the coast to San Pedro, then north through Watts and South L.A., passing Central-Alameda to the right and then Crenshaw to the left before veering east to Boyle Heights. Next, turn north again heading up past Chinatown and Lincoln Heights to Highland Park and Eagle Rock before turning slightly southwest to touch on Atwater Village, Silver Lake, Los Feliz and then Tinseltown itself. Now swing north over the eastern Santa Monica Mountains into “The Valley” and make the circuit: NoHo, Van Nuys, Pacoima, Sylmar, Northridge, Canoga Park, Woodland Hills, Reseda, Encino, Sherman Oaks, before dropping south again through Bel Air and Westwood to West L.A. Now cut straight east through Mid-Wilshire and Koreatown and — BANG! — you’re in it: downtown L.A.

Los Angeles is much too big for this column. It’s too big for this page. For this magazine.

A tangle of freeways surrounding storied neighborhoods, planned communities and cluttered high-rises, food trucks and five-star restaurants, abject poverty and decadent opulence.

A sprawling city that’s easy to hate and impossible not to love, L.A. is a destination.

It always has been. Ask the rag-tag group of settlers that founded it. Ask the tourists.

Ask the countless millions swarming here year after year from Earth’s four corners, searching for their dreams, their lives, perhaps their angels of mercy. Who could blame them? It’s magnificent and awful all at once. It’s a city steeped in diversity, a home to anyone brave enough to be who they want to be, and accept others for who they are.

Los Angeles is the future. It’s where you want to be. —D.S.J. COVER ILLUSTRATION BY DOUGLAS JONES FOR USC DORNSIFE MAGAZINE

USC DORNSIFE ADMINISTRATION Amber D. Miller, Dean • Steven Finkel, College Dean of Graduate and Professional Education • Dennis Hedgecock, Interim Divisional Dean for Natural Sciences and Mathematics • Lance Ignon, Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Communication • Andrew Lakoff, Divisional Dean for Social Sciences • Peter Mancall, Divisional Dean for the Humanities • Eddie Sartin, Senior Associate Dean for Advancement • Andrew Stott, College Dean of Undergraduate Education

USC DORNSIFE MAGAZINE Published twice a year by the USC Dornsife Office of Communication at the University of Southern California. © 2018 USC Dornsife College.

The diverse opinions expressed in USC Dornsife Magazine do not necessarily represent the views of the editors, USC Dornsife administration or USC. USC Dornsife Magazine welcomes comments from its readers to magazine@dornsife.usc.edu or USC Dornsife Magazine, 1150 S. Olive St. T2400, Los Angeles, CA 90015.

LOS ANGELES WITH OLIVE © ED RUSCHA, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GAGOSIAN

USC DORNSIFE BOARD OF COUNCILORS Robert D. Beyer, Chair • Wendy Abrams • Robert Alvarado • Richard S. Flores • Shane Foley • Lisa Goldman • Jana Waring Greer • Pierre Habis • Yossie Hollander • Janice Bryant Howroyd • Martin Irani • Dan James • Stephen G. Johnson • Suzanne Nora Johnson • Bettina Kallins • Yoon Kim • Samuel King • Arthur Lev • Kathy Leventhal • Rodger Lynch • Robert Osher • Gerald Papazian • Andrew Perlman • Lawrence Piro • Kelly Porter • Michael Reilly • Harry Robinson • Carole Shammas • Kumarakulasingam “Suri” Suriyakumar • Rajeev Tandon

Contents

FA LL 2 0 1 8 / W I N T E R 2 0 1 9 1 Learning

to

Listen to L.A.

2 COVER STORY Jump in, buckle up and take a ride through a city that’s learning to honor its history while it defines the future.

4 FROM THE HEART OF USC Social media signals aggression; Conference explores what’s happening “Over L.A.”; Prisoners publish essays; Kids launch rockets; Scholars teach teachers.

5

Curriculum

6 Profile 10 In THE LOS ANGELES ISSUE

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Los Angeles Reinvents Itself

The City of Angels is undergoing a renaissance that embraces the attributes it once spurned: verticality, density, public transport, walkability and public parks. By Susan Bell P H O T O B Y J U L I U S S H U L M A N , © J . PA U L G E T T Y T R U S T. G E T T Y R E S E A R C H I N S T I T U T E , L O S A N G E L E S ( 2 0 0 4 . R .1 0).

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Worshipping on the Fringe

Take a walk on the wild side through Los Angeles’ long and colorful history of alternative religions.

By Lance Ignon

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City of Shadows

Los Angeles is the undisputed capital of noir. USC Dornsife faculty explore why the sunshine city inspired so much darkness. By Susan Bell

The Compassionate Guardian

A real estate developer who put himself through USC as a nightclub owner, Robert Vinson ’95 is president of the commission that oversees El Pueblo — considered the birthplace of Los Angeles. By Susan Bell

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L.A.-boratory

From earthquake safety to community health, USC Dornsife research is shaping Los Angeles life, policy and design. By Emily Gersema

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Talk the Talk

Dude, check it. Here’s, like, a fresh look at the rad language of L.A., a bomb way of talking that legit shreds way beyond the 405 and the 101. By Darrin S. Joy

The Field

12 Our

World

40 Legacy

41 Faculty

41 Alumni

News

News

42 DORNSIFE FAMILY Debut novel celebrates novels; Sociologist highlights peace-loving veterans; Deadly diseases meet their nemesis.

42 Faculty

44 Alumni 46 L.A.

Canon

Canon

Dreaming

Faculty reflect on what the City of Angels means to them.

48 IN MY OPINION History alumnus Dan Johnson reminds us that dreams in Los Angeles come in many forms.

CONNECT WITH USC DORNSIFE dornsife.usc.edu/facebook dornsife.usc.edu/twitter dornsife.usc.edu/youtube dornsife.usc.edu/instagram

dornsife.usc.edu/magazine

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Viewpoint EXPERT OPINIONS

“The real challenge ultimately is that the ethically problematic images that present ‘pitiful’ victims to the world are often the ones that capture public attention.”

ALISON DUNDES RENTELN, professor of political science, anthropology, public policy and law, on the ethical considerations of using images of famine or poverty to galvanize support for human rights campaigns (The Conversation, Sept. 12).

“To find the most promising pathways forward, we should look to decades past — to a time when universities and the American public were indispensable partners.”

AMBER D. MILLER, dean of USC Dornsife, on how research universities have historically partnered with the public to solve societal problems (The Conversation, May 22).

“We need to decontaminate a toxic atmosphere that casts

those on opposite sides of

ROBERT SHRUM, Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics and professor of the practice of political science, and veteran political strategist Michael Murphy on the launch of USC Dornsife’s Center for the Political Future, which they co-direct (Los Angeles Times, Sept. 4).

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Social media may send signals that indicate protests are veering toward violence. By Emily Gersema Moral rhetoric on Twitter may signal whether a protest will turn violent, according to a USC Dornsife-led study.

Published on May 23 in Nature Human Behavior, the study found that people are more likely to endorse violence when moralizing the issue they’re protesting — and when they believe others in their social network moralize it, too.

“Extreme movements can emerge through social networks,” said the study’s corresponding author, Morteza Dehghani, assistant professor of psychology and computer science and a researcher at USC Dornsife’s Brain and Creativity Institute.

“We’ve seen several examples in recent years, such as the protests in Baltimore and Charlottesville, where people’s perceptions are influenced by the activity in their social networks,” he said. “People identify others who share their beliefs and interpret this as consensus. In these studies, we show that this can have potentially dangerous consequences.”

Social media sites such as Twitter have become a significant platform for activism and a source for data on human behavior.

Recent e xa mples of movements tied to social media include the #MeToo movement against sexual assault and harassment, the #MarchForOurLives effort in favor of gun control and #BlackLivesMatter, a campaign against systemic racism.

Another example is the Arab Spring revolution, that began in Tunisia in late 2010, setting off protests in many countries that forced leadership changes. Clashes in Syria escalated into fullblown war, with hundreds of thousands killed and displaced.

Social media data help researchers understand real-world social dynamics and test hypotheses in real settings, said Joe Hoover, a Ph.D. student in psychology at USC Dornsife and a lead researcher on the study.

Using a deep neural network — an advanced machine learning technique — to detect moralized language, the study’s scientists analyzed 18 million tweets posted during the 2015 Baltimore protests in response to the death of Freddie Gray, who died as police took him to jail.

Then, the researchers investigated the association between moral tweets and arrest rates, which they used as a proxy for violence. This analysis showed that the number of hourly arrests made during the protests was associated with the number of moralized tweets posted in previous hours.

In fact, tweets containing moral rhetoric nearly doubled on days when clashes among protesters and police became violent.

The more certain people were that many others in their network shared their views, the more willing they were to consider the use of violence against their perceived opponents, the scientists found.

IL L U S T R AT I O N BY N IM A D E H G H A N I

the political spectrum as enemies, rather than opponents who also share a fundamental respect for the values that underpin the American political process.”

Harbinger of Aggression

Curriculum

DODD PORTR AIT COURTESY OF LYNN DODD; WIYOT ’ S CHILDREN PAINTING BY MARY LEIGHTON THOMSON, COURTESY OF THE FRIENDS OF BALLONA WE TL ANDS

EXPLORING ANCIENT WAYS OF LIVING: EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY Instructor: Lynn Dodd, associate professor of the practice of religion

This Maymester enables students to explore premodern

life, offering hands-on experience in such diverse ancient skills as making fire and medicines, crafting ceramics, spinning, dyeing, weaving, archery, cheese-making, copper smelting and blacksmithing.

“The students jokingly call this course ‘How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse,’ but what I want them to understand is the diversity of resources and skills that underlie everything we take for granted in our lives today,” Dodd said.

Students, she notes, will

never look at a knife the same way again after smelting metal to make their own.

To pass the course, students must master making fire using a fire stick. It’s harder than it looks, Dodd says — until students understand collaboration is the key to success.

During a three-day visit to USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Marine Science Center on Santa Catalina Island, students identified many plants and animals that supported people who lived there.

REL-303g

Despite teaching important survival skills, Dodd stresses this isn’t a survival course.

“This is an experimental archaeology class — we’re using traditional techniques to understand how we create knowledge about our shared human past.

There’s real innovation in the fact that traditional ways of living can teach us something today.”

She wants students to learn that humankind’s future evolution and success depends on our ability to learn and collaborate.

—S.B.

Wiyot’s Children by Mary Leighton Thomson depicts the Tongva settlement of Sa’angna, located near what are now Playa del Rey and Marina del Rey. As members of the Chia Collective — a collaboration among native and non-native people — Tongva/Gabrielinos shared food sources and food-making traditions with Dodd’s students.

Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 5

Profile

MARIO DEL PERO, ’95

Mario Del Pero ’95 is co-founder of Mendocino Farms, a Los Angeles born-and-bred chain of gourmet sandwich and salad restaurants.

Del Pero and his wife and business partner, Ellen Chen, work closely with the vendors who supply their restaurants. Here, they visit Drake Family Farms, which produces artisan goat cheese.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF MARIO DEL PERO

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

USC Dornsife alumnus Mario Del Pero grew up in a food family. Nearly a century ago, his great-grandfather immigrated to the United States from Italy, settling in San Francisco and opening a butcher shop in the bustling, seaside Embarcadero neighborhood.

Over the years, the business blossomed into a larger familyrun operation — a meat processing company in Marysville, Calif., north of Sacramento — that Del Pero’s father eventually took over.

The younger Del Pero, now a titan in the fast-casual California dining scene — he and his wife, Ellen Chen, co-founded Mendocino Farms artisan sandwich restaurants — said that his childhood experiences in the family business and his time at USC helped shape his career path.

Del Pero’s father made sure that his son understood the importance of a hard day’s work. He assigned him some of the meat processing plant’s toughest, and lowest paying, positions. One summer he was tasked with repairing the processing plant’s roof. Another stint had him working on the processing line, a job that he said is not for the faint of heart.

“A lot of my great grades were due to the fact that I did not want to be working at that processing table,” he said.

“Those were definitely formative jobs.”

AN ENTREPRENEURIAL MIND Del Pero earned his bachelor’s degree from USC Dornsife in 1995. As an undergraduate, he started out as a political science major but quickly switched his focus to international relations when he heard about an incredible new professor named Steven Lamy who was joining the faculty.

“I thought, ‘How do I not lose this opportunity to take

as many classes as I can with him?’ ” Del Pero said.

Lamy, professor of international relations and spatial sciences, was an influential figure for Del Pero. In addition to lessons on policies and theories, Del Pero picked up soft skills modeled by Lamy that have been crucial to his business acumen.

came up with the Mendocino Farms concept — gourmet sandwiches and salads that occupy a space somewhere between the convenience of Subway or Quiznos and upscale eateries like Joan’s on Third. They opened their first restaurant in downtown Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill neighborhood two years later.

hand in menu items.

Del Pero and Chen have redefined how their restaurants interact with vendors.

Instead of working through a third-party distributor, they have built direct relationships with local farmers who can bring the freshest produce and foods straight from farm to table. Scarborough Farms in

“I use my degree in every single thing I do.

Whether it is understanding a conflict in 1960s Venezuela or analyzing an issue with our restaurants’ supply chain …”

“One thing that Dr. Lamy drove home for me is the ability to connect with individuals in large settings,” he said. In a classroom of hundreds of students, Lamy knew every student’s name and if they had attended class the previous week.

“To this day, I walk into a restaurant and I think about how it’s filled with individuals who all have different needs. I serve them best by connecting with them, and letting them know they are heard.”

His international relations courses also honed his critical thinking abilities. Those skills, he said, come into play for him on a daily basis.

“I use my degree in every single thing I do,” Del Pero said.

“Whether it is understanding a conflict in 1960s Venezuela or analyzing an issue with our restaurants’ supply chain, I’m identifying all the players, I’m making sure I understand the history, and I’m thinking of what it will teach us for the future to give us the best shot for success.”

RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME In 2003, Del Pero and Chen

L.A., Del Pero said, was the best place for Mendocino Farms to be born because of Angelenos’ very specific tastes.

“It’s so much so that if you can make it in L.A., you can make it anywhere.”

The city has also gone through a renaissance in the past decade, he said, with many great chefs either hailing from L.A. or moving here to open restaurants.

“We’ve been blessed not just to be friends with them but to have a few of them help pushing us and how we think,” he said.

Del Pero is involved in research and development of menu items, but a number of highly accomplished local chefs have had a hand in Mendocino Farms’ culinary style. Judy Han of Eko Eats helped develop the restaurant’s first menus; Bryant Ng of Cassia created a sandwich with all proceeds from its sale donated to a nonprofit assisting the homeless and victims of domestic violence; and chefs Josef Centeno, Kris Morningstar, Erik Black and Joe Marcos have also had a

Oxnard, an hour’s drive north of L.A., delivers greens daily, and Drake Family Farms in Ontario, 45 minutes east, provides artisan goat cheeses.

COMING FULL CIRCLE In the past several years, Mendocino Farms has expanded from its L.A. base, opening new restaurants in Orange County, San Diego and the Bay Area. A location is slated to open in Houston, in 2019, which will bring the total to 28 restaurants.

But nothing might be as significant for Del Pero as the company’s new flagship restaurant. He recently oversaw its opening in San Francisco’s Merchants Exchange Building near the waterfront, just a few blocks from where his great-grandfather opened his butcher shop when he first arrived in the United States.

“The fact that 100 years later his great-grandson can be part of a company that employs about 1,200 team members, a good majority of whom are living out their own immigrant story — that meant a lot to me,” he said. —M.B. Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 7

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Numbers IMMIGRANTS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY USC Dornsife’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) explores ways to encourage the economic mobility, civic participation and positive social reception of newcomers to the United States. CSII shares its research, such as the breakdown of Los Angeles County’s immigrant population, below, with government, community organizers, business and civic leaders, immigrants and the voting public to increase understanding and to shape the dialogue on immigrant integration.

Bridging the Political Divide Veteran political strategists Robert Shrum and Michael Murphy launch a new center that aims to restore the middle ground for healthy debate and discourse. By Emily Gersema

9%

Estimated share of L.A. County residents who are undocumented immigrants.

20+

1:10

Number of years that more than half of L.A. County immigrants have been living in the United States.

Ratio of lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, to total residents in L.A. County.

30% Share of L.A. County immigrants who have been living in the U.S. for more than three decades.

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The political divide is as wide as it’s been in modern memory and spans the “#Resist” movement on the left to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain on the right, and beyond. The new Center for the Political Future at USC Dornsife, bridges the gap with a new model for political inquiry that combines scholarly research, education and practical politics.

The center is led by longtime Democratic political strategist Robert Shrum and veteran Republican strategist Michael Murphy.

“The Center for the Political Future aims to be the premiere entity on the West Coast that combines the power of academic research and education with the practical wisdom and experience of political leaders, activists and journalists to foster public dialogue in civil and constructive ways,” said Shrum, the center’s director. “Our goal is to create an environment where individuals with different political views can seek common ground and — even when they disagree — respect and listen to other viewpoints.”

He and Murphy believe the center will restore civility to political discourse.

“This is a moment to step up and redirect the conversations, to surmount the challenges of rancorous rhetoric and

fake news, to pave the path toward a genuine exchange of ideas, and to enrich the education of tomorrow’s leaders by modeling new approaches for engagement,” Murphy said.

The center sponsors an array of endeavors and draws on faculty from across USC Dornsife’s wide academic breadth.

One component, the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, focuses on educating students to become active in politics. Another, the nationally recognized USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, administered by the center’s partners at the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, monitors voter opinions on political issues, elected officials and candidates.

The center brings in resident fellows — both Republicans and Democrats — to engage students every semester.

The center also will host endowed chairs, drawing new tenure-track faculty with diverse, practical, and scholarly perspectives, while engaging current faculty.

Lastly, the center supports specific research endeavors, including an ongoing project to examine how technology could be used to strengthen political discourse in the 21st century.

FROM THE HE ART OF USC Spotlight

Over Los Angeles

Conference presents the city from new perspectives.

“It’s a disorderly city that somehow finds its own order in the disorder,” he said. —S.K.

Creativity Set Free

A collection of writings marks the crowning achievement of a workshop for men now free from prison.

E X H I B I T I O N O F S P R I N G - B O A R D D I V I N G A T O LY M P I C S W I M M I N G S T A D I U M , A U G . 1 0 , 1 9 3 2 , L O S A N G E L E S , C A . E R N E S T M A R Q U E Z C O L L E C T I O N , T H E H U N T I N G T O N L I B R A R Y ; C R E AT I V I T Y S E T F R E E I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y M AT T H E W S AV I N O ; M A N J A R R E Z P H O T O B Y E M I LY S M I T H

People think of Los Angeles as a horizontal city; a hazy basin of coast-to-desert freeways and hypertrophic sprawl.

But it’s also the birthplace of the aerospace industry, a bastion of art deco verticality and a landscape of lanky palm trees.

In many ways, L.A. evolved by virtue of those who donned their Wayfarer sunglasses and gazed toward the sky.

Such lofty ideas were explored during the “Over L.A.: Aerial Accounts” conference on Nov. 3. Co-organized by Professor of History William Deverell and Assistant Professor of the Practice of English David Ulin, the day-long event brought together scholars, students and community leaders for a series of panel discussions, interviews and impressionistic interludes.

Designed to spark new dialogue around underappreciated aspects of L.A., the conference explored far-reaching topics, from biodiversity to zoning to the future of taxi drones.

“We see this conference as a way to think about the city in three dimensions,” said Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

He and Ulin spoke enthusiastically about ways in which California’s legendary sunshine is baked into the city’s story. It was the quality of light that lured the movie industry west at the turn of the 20th century. Its rays inspired a surf culture in the 1950s that affected music, fashion and language. And its ubiquity has made the city a pacesetter in the harnessing of solar energy.

Ulin’s interest in studying L.A. across different depths and perspectives began when he moved to the city in 1991 and was trying to understand how it all fit together.

Eight men who are transitioning back into society after years of incarceration have been participating in a workshop through the USC Dornsife Writing Program. They recently reached a milestone all writers hope for: Their work was published.

Copies of the 48th Street Anthology: Stories from the Truly Free debuted last summer.

Stephanie Bower and John Murray, both associate professors (teaching) of writing at USC Dornsife, launched the workshop two years ago. Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Writing Emily Artiano and Lecturer Benjamin Pack joined them in coaching the men.

The stories, essays and poems that fill the pages touch on themes such as liberation, joy, forgiveness and loss.

They describe painful childhoods and the inescapable burden of regret.

“A rubber hose, slicing air with malice, welts the back of a naked boy tied helplessly to a tree,” writes Johnny Salmon.

“As the welts burst into tears, tiny lungs erupt into screams of familiar pain, to the whimpers of a beaten dog.”

An eye-to-eye examination of a gorilla leads David Smith to the painful realization that a zoo is a prison.

“There was a point in his life where he was a proud king; a ruler of his domain. Running, swinging in trees… whatever it is gorillas do, I could see. Now the loss of that life shows through his tearful eyes,” Smith writes.

K.L. Kristiansen recalls how a tower loomed over the prison, with a bird’s eye view of all below, inside and outside the walls. “Has it come to an ending, or is this a start? / Do you stand by a justice, that made you so strong, / Or blind to the horrors, and be damned the wrong?”

The anthology is available upon request by contacting Bower at sbower@usc.edu. —E.G.

MARIA MANJARREZ ’20 Political Science

“The Cal Grant really levels the playing field …

It gives me that financial resource to not have to worry what I’m going to eat the next day, if I’m going to have books for next semester – it’s that safety net that’s allowed me to pursue a lot of the passions and interests I have.”

Maria Manjarrez watched her Mexican immigrant parents toil long hours as janitors to support her and her sister. As a firstgeneration college student, she applied to schools on her own.

A junior double majoring in political science at USC Dornsife and public policy at USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, Manjarrez was appointed in August by Gov. Jerry Brown to the California Student Aid Commission after she lobbied for Cal Grants with USC’s Office of Financial Aid. She is also a USC Norman Topping Scholar, the beneficiary of a financial aid and mentoring program for first-generation and low-income students supported by the student body.

Until she graduates, which is when her term on the student aid commission ends, Manjarrez will juggle her time at USC with trips to Sacramento for meetings on financial aid policy.

“My goal being on this commission is to be a part of that effort to make higher education more accessible to our students,” she said. “Because it was accessible to me, I want to pay it forward and make it accessible to everyone else, as well.”

Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 9

In The Field Visitors to Southern California’s Santa Catalina Island in recent years have likely caught sight of what first may appear to be small dogs or halfgrown housecats. The docile creatures, sporting bushy salt-and-pepper tails, charcoal and brown camouflage coats and outsized ears, seem ready to overrun the island.

But nearly 25 years ago, that was far from the case for the Channel Island foxes. The dwarf descendants of the gray fox, possibly first brought to the islands about 7,000 years ago as companions to indigenous people, were in danger of extinction.

The population of creatures had been pushed to the brink of collapse by disease and hungry predators, and in 2004, foxes on four of the Channel Islands — Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz, San Miguel and Santa Rosa — were declared endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

HOWLING SUCCESS

10

years ago

THREATS TO FOXES

WHAT THEY EAT island deer mice, insects, birds eggs, snakes and lizards

4/6 Golden Eagles

4 of the 6 subspecies once listed as endangered

2016

removed from the endangered species list

native fruits such as the Catalina cherry, prickly pear, toyon fruit and manzanita help spread plant seeds around the island by eating fruit and swallowing seeds whole

Canine Distemper Virus

COLOR Gray back, rust sides and chest, white tummy

SIZE 12 to 13 inches tall, about 24 inches from nose to tail tip, and 4 to 5 pounds

CANINE DISTEMPER VIRUS IMAGE BY L ANCE WHEELER; FOXES PHOTO BY K ARL HUGGINS

With the support of conservationists and fox fans, the federal government launched a massive recovery effort that included, among other things, a vaccination program to protect the foxes against canine distemper, efforts to control predators — particularly the golden eagle — and a mating program.

The populations have quickly rebounded across the Channel Islands. After a low in 2000 of just 103 on Catalina, the number of foxes increased to more than 2,000 in 2017. On smaller San Miguel Island, the fox population rose from a low of just 15 to more than 450 over the same period, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In 2016, the foxes were

≈7,000

FIRST CAME TO THE CHANNEL ISLANDS

12-13”

FANTASTIC FOXES

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

removed from the U.S. endangered species list.

GENETIC FOX TALE

PHOTO COURTESY OF PETER MANCALL

Now, scientists at USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies are researching the foxes’ genetics. Through a comparison of their genomes before and after the near collapse, the researchers are working to determine if the foxes’ genetic diversity has returned to pre-collapse levels.

Genetic diversity is an important factor contributing to a more resilient species.

Greater diversity generally makes adaptation more likely should living conditions change.

“Population numbers don’t tell the entire story,” said Suzanne Edmands, professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife. “Genetic diversity can lag behind, potentially leading to difficulty responding to new environmental challenges.”

Nicole Adams, a Ph.D. candidate in Edmands’ lab, is investigating that very topic for her thesis. Adams collaborates closely with Edmands and is co-advised

by Edmands and Xiaoming Wang, a paleontologist at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum.

The work is supported by the Offield Family Foundation.

Adams is comparing the genetic diversity before and after these declines. Her findings could help inform any further conservation efforts to support the survival of the island foxes, and perhaps efforts to save other endangered species. Results are expected within the next several months.

“The foxes might be fine as long as conditions stay the same,” Edmands said. —E.G.

Rocket Kids

Elementary school students discover careers in engineering and aerospace.

careers for them,” Kast said. “I hope to ignite some type of STEM spark and the knowledge that, whether it’s in engineering or in aerospace, there are possibilities for these students.” —S.B.

Inspiring Scholarship

USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute scholars inspire middle and high school teachers.

Faces glowing with anticipation, a group of fourth- and fifth-grade students tumbled into the playground at Vermont Elementary School near USC’s University Park campus, proudly clutching the straw rockets they had just finished building during a USC Dornsife Young Scientists Program (YSP) aerospace and engineering workshop in the school auditorium. Excitement growing, they eagerly formed orderly lines behind six Pitsco straw rocket launchers stationed in the school yard.

The devices, lent by technology company Raytheon, which had partnered with YSP for the workshop, use pneumatic force to launch the rockets, enabling students to test and refine their design while conducting scientific experiments by varying the trajectory angle and launch energy.

“As an engineer, often you’re trying to figure out why something isn’t working,” said Dieuwertje “DJ” Kast, YSP STEM program manager with USC Dornsife’s Joint Educational Project. “The workshop gave the students insight into the ways engineers think and the idea that failure can be a good thing.”

The workshop kicked off with a talk by Jeffrey Tate, a senior engineering fellow at Raytheon, who used a mixture of popular characters from comics and props, including light sabers, to demonstrate how engineers use creativity. He also brought his own drone and some of his own childhood science fair projects to show students. He explained how those projects had sparked his interest in science as a kid and told students that he was there to do the same for them now.

At the workshop, students also built a miniature model of a hoverboard and several lucky students got to ride on a full-size Raytheon hoverboard made with a leaf-blower engine.

“I really want the students to see that these are potential

For the fifth year running, the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI) is helping ensure that students in middle and high schools nationwide find inspiration from their teachers.

Through EMSI’s annual summer seminar, “America in the Age of Discovery: 1492–1625,” 35 teachers from across the country gain insight into the latest scholarship on the early American experience.

An opportunity to spend a day at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, EMSI’s partner institution, gave teachers rare and valuable hands-on experience with early colonial era texts from the 16th and 17th centuries.

EMSI primarily supports advanced, cutting-edge scholarship by graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty members in history, art history, literature or music.

“We use this seminar as an opportunity for us to take the benefits of that scholarship — including our ideas and access to materials — and share it with an audience that wouldn’t otherwise have access to it,” said Peter Mancall, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities and professor of history and anthropology.

Mancall, who is director of EMSI, co-leads the annual session, which is funded by The Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History, a nonprofit supporting K-12 education.

Mancall said teachers attend because they believe they can do a better job teaching if they know what prominent scholars in their field are discussing.

“They spend the week with us, then they go back and spread the word,” he said. —S.B.

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Our World STUDENT Atlantic Ocean

Making Waves

Bulk DNA sequence data is used to reconstruct the genetic makeup of unobserved bacteria.

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The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner roared down the runway before soaring serenely up into the skies over Los Angeles International Airport. The recent Qantas flight to Melbourne, Australia, seemed like any other, except this plane was partially powered by biojet fuel, making for a reduced carbon footprint.

That this — the world’s first United States to Australia biofuel flight — happened at all, is thanks to alumnus Steve Fabijanski.

While less than 5 percent of flights are currently powered by blends of biofuel with traditional jet fuel, Fabijanski, the CEO and president of Agrisoma Biosciences Inc., is optimistic that eventually half of the more than 79 billion gallons of fuel used by the airline industry will be replaced by biofuel.

Fabijanski said earning his Ph.D. in biology from USC Dornsife in 1981 inspired him to change the world. The holder of 96 patents founded Agrisoma in 2001 in Quebec, Canada, to provide a solution for more sustainable commercial transportation.

The answer, he found, lay in a mustard-like oilseed called carinata. Using plant-breeding techniques, Fabijanski’s team developed carinata into a non-GMO seed-producing crop containing high levels of oil and protein. Once processed, carinata is chemically identical to conventional, fossil-fuel derived jet fuel.

But that’s not all, he says. Carinata offers a win-win-win situation: for the environment, for the world’s food supply and for farmers.

Not only does biojet fuel reduce our carbon footprint, the protein contained in carinata seeds can be used for animal feed, while the plant rejuvenates and enriches the soil.

His company’s mantra, he stresses, is to grow this crop without taking food out of production. Indeed, Fabijanski developed carinata to flourish in areas where typical food crops won’t grow, and during a season in which a food crop cannot be grown due to crop rotation.

“The company we formed was built on the idea that we can do better with what’s available and more with less,” he said.

FACULTY Spain

California’s cultural and historic ties with Spain stretch back almost 500 years, so the visit to the Golden State by Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón — the first by a sitting Spanish head of government — was a historic occasion. This was especially true for Trojans, as Sánchez, fresh from his address to the United Nations Assembly earlier and a meeting with California Gov. Jerry Brown, made time to visit USC on Sept. 28 to deliver a President’s Distinguished Lecture.

Sánchez’s inspiring speech moved the packed auditorium of students, faculty and alumni to a standing ovation.

Reminding students that they are “the change makers and the leaders of [their] own time,” Sánchez urged them to avoid complacency by getting involved.

“Above all, do not take injustice as something acceptable,” he said. “Never let anyone take away your desire to shape and change the world and seek to better it.”

Jacob Soll, University Professor of Philosophy, History and Accounting, was instrumental in arranging the USC visit.

GR AHAM PHOTO BY BABAK HA S SANZ ADEH; FABIJANSKI PHOTO COURTESY OF S TE VE FABIJANSKI; SPANISH PRIME MINIS TER PHOTO BY S TE VE COHN

Elaina Graham, a graduate student studying microbial ecology, spent a month aboard the RV Atlantis with a group of marine scientists. She collected bacterial DNA sequence data from ocean water samples as part of her research to identify organisms never observed in nature.

Working with John Heidelberg, associate professor of biological sciences and environmental studies, and postdoctoral scholar Ben Tully, Graham compiles DNA sequence information extracted from entire microbial communities in nature to reveal genomes of new organisms.

Thousands of species have already been discovered by the USC Dornsife team, but Graham is interested in one particular finding: In the ocean, there are many organisms that perform photosynthesis, and others called phototrophs that use light for energy in a more direct way. Graham and Tully created a computer program that spotted DNA sequence anomalies indicating another group of bacteria — one that can both use light as energy and take compounds from the ocean to fix carbon.

Graham’s research cruise afforded an opportunity to further cement this connection. Using samples she collected from her trip, the team is exploring metagenomic sequences to find more evidence of these mysterious microbes. If the team can eventually nurture the bacteria to grow in a lab, they could reveal a new world of marine microbiology.

ALUMNUS Canada

FROM THE HE ART OF USC

FACULTY California

T OX I C A L G A E IL L U S T R AT I O N BY D I A N A M O L L E DA ; B O T S WA N A IL L U S T R AT I O N BY M AT T H E W S AV IN O A N D D E N N I S L A N

A study led by USC Dornsife scientists shows the Southern California coast harbors some of the world’s highest concentrations of an algal toxin dangerous to wildlife and people who eat local seafood.

The findings are a “smoking gun” linking the neurotoxin domoic acid produced by some species of algae to deaths of marine birds and mammals, say David Caron, USC Associates Captain Allan Hancock Chair in Marine Science and professor of biological sciences, and postdoctoral researcher Jayme Smith.

“We are seeing an increase in harmful algal blooms and an increase in severity,” said Caron, also a researcher with the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. “The Southern California coast really is a hot spot, and our study also shows that the concentrations of particulate domoic acid measured in the region are some of the highest — if not the highest — ever reported.”

While the research reveals the growing scale of the problem over the last 15 years, it also could help protect human and environmental health by improving methods to monitor and manage harmful algal blooms.

FACULTY Armenia This past spring, the world watched in wonder as peaceful protests — accompanied by line-dancing, folk-singing and spontaneous hugging — overthrew Armenia’s autocratic regime, sparking hope of real democracy in the post-Soviet republic.

Riding the wave of Armenia’s “velvet revolution,” the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies put together an ambitious program — called “Armenia Tomorrow” — that featured political leaders, activists and intellectuals and drew about 50,000 spectators live and via webcast.

Salpi Ghazarian, institute director, framed the event for attendees, noting academe’s role in supporting positive change.

“It’s the job of the academy to feed institutions with facts, with analysis and with options,” she said.

The program began with a dialogue between Ghazarian and new Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, who joined the meeting via Skype.

Pashinyan described the “pan-Armenian nature of the present movement,” noting that the overarching goal must be to make all Armenians feel ownership of their country — a transformation that can only happen with free and fair elections.

“I want to congratulate you all, and mention that your support has played a vital role in the success of our struggle,” he told attendees.

STUDENT Botswana

The Dancing Computer Scientist

A USC Dornsife program enables undergraduate to explore her twin passions while studying in Botswana.

At USC, Sabrina Kiamilev ’18 was either dancing or programming.

Kiamilev, who holds a computer science degree from USC Viterbi School of Engineering, pursued both passions in Africa, where, thanks to a program offered by USC Dornsife, she studied computer science at the University of Botswana by day and learned traditional Setswana dance by night.

The first student to travel to Botswana with the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) program, Kiamilev lived with a host family while studying and exploring the region.

“I’ve been backpacking in Nata, where elephants just roam the highways,” she said.

Kiamilev, who minored in Russian, now works as a software engineer with Flatiron Health in New York City after meeting a recruiter — you guessed it — on the dance floor.

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Los Angeles Reinvents Itself The City of Angels is undergoing a renaissance that embraces the attributes it once spurned: verticality, density, public transport, pedestrian culture and public parks. By Susan Bell

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No metropolis has been more loved or more hated.

To its fans, Los Angeles is an urban paradise, an Eden where ordinary people are free to reinvent themselves and realize their dreams. Detractors, however, have often delighted in portraying L.A. as a bunch of nondescript suburbs in search of a city.

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This disdain was perhaps nowhere more eloquently — or comically — expressed than in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall, when Alvy Singer (Allen), a die-hard New Yorker, mocks L.A. as a superficial place where “the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.”

Singer might now be eating his words. Recently hailed by cultural critics as the nation’s new artistic and cultural capital, L.A. is enjoying a renaissance. With the city’s revitalized downtown booming as it undergoes restoration and development, a new crop of world-class museums and the spawning of Silicon Beach, L.A. has become a global magnet for arts and technology leaders.

The city is metamorphosing in surprising ways. Long characterized by its urban sprawl — fueled by a seemingly limitless, pioneering ambition to colonize surrounding land — it is now folding back on itself as desire for a different way of city living takes hold among Angelenos. This new aspirational lifestyle includes access to public transport to create a walkable, accessible L.A. that will be more vertical, denser and more connected than ever before.

A SMALL PLACE WITH BIG AMBITIONS

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NEWFOUND CONFIDENCE

A clear indication of City Hall’s commitment to this revitalized version of L.A. is Mayor Eric Garcetti’s recent appointment of the city’s first chief design officer, Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times’ former architecture critic.

For the first time in decades, city officials are spending billions on redesigning the city to make it more livable and sustainable, including the creation of a world-class public transit system and the renewal of the L.A. River.

The initial confidence of the early 20th-century boosters, who were so determined to put L.A. on the map, has returned in force a century later, Deverell notes.

“If we could call up those boosters now, many of them — the most intelligent and far reaching and visionary of them — would say, ‘I told you it was going to be an exciting place,’ ” he said.

TWO CRITICAL TURNING POINTS

Philip Ethington, professor of history, political science and spatial sciences, argues that there are two key factors that laid the groundwork for the city’s current transformation. The first was the 1992 uprising following the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department officers, a defining moment in the city’s history.

“That’s the critical turning point because L.A. did have a dystopic reality until then,” he said. “The LAPD acted as an occupying military force in South L.A. from the 1950s until the uprising forced that to end and caused the police department to reform and shift toward community-based policing.”

The result, he says, changed the tone of society, making people feel safer and creating greater possibilities for interaction between residents of different ethnicities.

The second factor, Ethington says, is that L.A.’s legendary sprawl “finally hit the wall,” making it impractical to commute.

“RIDIN’ ON THE FREEWAY OF LOVE”?

As postwar L.A. benefited from a boom economy, thanks largely to the aerospace industry, the city enjoyed seemingly endless space for affordable housing as it sprawled further into the surrounding landscape. The American Dream, it seemed, was within everyone’s reach — thanks in large part to L.A.’s futuristic freeways.

“You could live in an affordable suburb and commute because we had these beautiful highways,” Ethington said.

Indeed, the freeways were once the glory of L.A.,

(PRE VIOUS PAGES) PHOTO © VINCENT L AFORE T - AIR

Founded in 1781, El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula began as an upstart city, a relatively small, insignificant place that by 1910 had grown to a population of merely 319,000.

Today, L.A. is the nation’s second largest metropolitan area after New York City, while L.A. County is the most populous county in the United States, with more than 10 million inhabitants. Half the population of California — 16 million people — live within 60 miles of downtown. People continue to flock here, attracted by the city’s cutting-edge industries, its diverse and thriving culture, its many service jobs for migrants and, of course, its legendary climate.

For a place that originally had limited water, no natural resources or port, L.A. achieved this remarkable feat, historian Sir Peter Hall notes in his seminal Cities in Civilization, by marketing itself relentlessly to the rest of the nation.

As the late Kevin Starr, noted California historian and USC University Professor, put it, L.A. was “the Great Gatsby of American cities; it envisioned itself, then materialized that vision through sheer force of will.”

“Part of the excitement about L.A. is the velocity with which it enters the national imagination,” said William Deverell, professor of history at USC Dornsife and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

Part of L.A.’s population explosion is due to sheer timing, he says, pointing to the end of the Civil War, which put a lot of people on the move, eager to escape the hardships and heartbreaks of the conflict, and the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876.

Another huge factor was L.A.’s burgeoning reputation as a place of health and healing sunshine.

But the factor most responsible for L.A.’s exponential growth was the intensive marketing of the city as an urban paradise to the rest of the nation by its civic boosters.

“There’s room in the Greater L.A. Basin to spread out, and by the 1880s, the real estate speculators, the orchardists and the suburban developers have grappled with the idea that what they’re building out here is going to look different than conventional or European, Rust Belt or East Coast cities,” Deverell said. “They’re going to build something deliberately horizontal and spread out.”

The idea of building a civilization that looks and acts differently than other cities or metropolitan regions and that allows nature to flourish between those dispersed nodes of population was exciting, Deverell said.

“L.A. was marketed on the idea that you can build a house with a patio where you can spend time outdoors, you can have an orange tree. It’s not built on, ‘you’ll get rich,’ or ‘you’ll get famous.’ It’s ‘you’ll live a good life; you’ll live a healthy life,’ ” Deverell said.

Now, L.A. is once again reinventing itself as it undergoes urban rejuvenation that sees it starting to leave behind its post-World War II building blocks — automobiles, freeways, single-family homes, lawns — and move toward a new urban blueprint. It’s a renaissance that puts mass public transit, sustainable landscaping, walkability, innovative high-rise multifamily housing, park design and an ambitious Civic Center master plan at the heart of its rebirth as a model city for the 21st century.

© T H E E S TAT E O F G A R R Y W I N O G R A N D, C O U R T E S Y F R A E N K E L G A L L E R Y, S A N F R A N C I S C O

BACK TO THE FUTURE Garry Winogrand’s 1964 photograph of two women walking toward the iconic Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport portrayed L.A. as a futuristic city. Now the City of Angels is poised to become a model 21st century metropolis — ironically by adopting ideas from some of the earliest plans for the city.

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D E PA R T M E N T O F P U B L I C W O R K S • B U R E A U O F S A N I TAT I O N • WAT E R S H E D P R O T E C T I O N D I V I S I O N

w w w . L A s t o r m w a t e r. o r g As a covered entity under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the City of Los Angeles does not discriminate on the basis of disability and, upon request, will provide reasonable accommodation to ensure equal access to its programs, services, and activities.

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AN IRONIC REVERSAL

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT USC Dornsife researchers are working to help create a bucolic, sustainable future for the L.A. River.

As the imprint of the city reaches its maximum potential and population pressures make it impossible to build enough freeways to relieve the resulting congestion, public fascination has shifted to the nodes created by the new public transit lines and stations. When a transit line station opens, Ethington notes, land value nearby skyrockets. That, he says, is driving momentum toward the smart urbanism that is now increasingly directed toward public transit and vertical living, instead of the old model of private automobiles, freeways and single-family homes.

“It’s quite revolutionary, a completely different way of envisioning L.A. and a function of the fact it used up all the available suburban space,” he said.

“Those factors really just forced this new urbanism. But it’s definitely a sea change. It’s a reversal of a century of the way L.A. developed.”

A NEW WAY OF LIVING

The sense of freedom and experimentation with which the city is associated is reflected in L.A.’s iconic architecture — among the most filmed and photographed in the world.

From the Arts and Crafts movement expounded by its architectural masters Greene and Greene — a prime example of which is USC’s Gamble House in Pasadena — to Frank Lloyd Wright’s textile block houses to the Southern California modernist movement pioneered by Wright’s protégés Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, to Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall or the Capitol Records Building, L.A. is home to some of the world’s most beautiful and experimental buildings.

The most influential, Ethington argues, belong to the midcentury modernist movement, which redefined not just architecture but a new way of living that remains strongly 18

identified with L.A. and is as seductive today as it was almost a century ago when Schindler and Neutra first arrived from Vienna.

“When Schindler and Neutra got here, they realized it was a perfect environment for their architectural vision, which mixed the interior and the exterior in a seamless way,” Ethington said. “They took advantage of the light and the new industrial building materials that were cheap and easy to use. L.A. became a great place to innovate.”

Once criticized by preservationists for its throwaway culture in which notable buildings were all too often bulldozed, L.A. has undergone a transformation in attitude as the city starts truly valuing its architectural heritage.

“It takes a ruling class who are proud of their city and want to protect that heritage, but L.A. also needed to create a heritage to preserve,” Ethington said. “Until the midcentury modernists, L.A. didn’t really have a homegrown architectural style. Now, of course, that’s the architectural legacy we’re most interested in preserving.”

L.A. is fortunate to have one of the best-preserved downtown areas in the country, ironically due largely to indifference and neglect. When the once bustling urban center with its elegant shops, grand houses on Bunker Hill and ornate cathedrals to cinema was abandoned by the middle and professional classes in favor of suburban singlefamily homes, it fell into a state of neglect that continued for decades. Apart from Bunker Hill, which was torn down in the 1960s to create the city’s financial center, the remainder of downtown was largely forgotten by developers.

Now its handsome granite buildings are being rediscovered, with former banks converted into upscale lofts, restaurants, bars and shops as downtown L.A. hums with life anew.

DOWNSIDES: DENSITY AND GENTRIFICATION

This appetite, particularly among young people, for a different way of living is, Deverell says, the result of a combination of imagination, youthful sensibilities and the harsh reality that a mortgage is out of reach.

However, Angelenos’ aspiration to live differently brings several notable downsides. First, the city’s increasing density is not to everyone’s taste.

But perhaps the single biggest problem is gentrification,

P O S T E R BY O S C A R A M A R O, C I T Y O F L O S A N G E L E S , D E PA R T M E N T O F S A N I TAT I O N , B U R E AU O F P U B L I C W O R K S ; P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F L . A . M E T R O

considered one of the city’s most fascinating and attractive features, he noted.

That started to wane in the 1970s with increasingly severe pollution and congestion.

“People came to hate the freeways,” Ethington said. “People aren’t fascinated by them anymore. Nobody goes to a city now because they think it’s fun to drive on the freeway.”

which transforms neighborhoods and makes it harder for people with lower incomes to stay.

Dana Johnson, associate professor of English and American studies and ethnicity, has experienced gentrification firsthand. A longtime resident of L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood, she was forced to move in 2005 when rents there became too high. She relocated to downtown, which at the time was much less expensive.

There were only a couple of places to eat when she first arrived, Johnson remembers. “But forward to 2018 and, of course, downtown is booming with countless restaurants, bars, museums — it’s just a completely different place. That’s great, but the bad thing I see is that folks who used to be here are increasingly being edged out with no place to live, no place to go. So, there’s this tension between having tons of money downtown and seeing people downtown who have nothing, trying to survive.”

Johnson is aware that she is both a victim of — and a contributor to — the problem.

“When I moved downtown, I was contributing to the displacement of folks who’d been there way before I had by driving up the prices of their housing,” she said.

She is the author of a recent collection of short stories, In The Not Quite Dark (Counterpoint, 2016), that focus on these effects of gentrification in L.A. Several of the stories take place downtown. One focuses on the challenges of raising a child close to Skid Row, witnessing people struggling with mental illness, drugs and extreme poverty. In another, the protagonist has to keep getting roommates because he can’t afford his apartment without them.

Johnson exemplifies the new desires of Angelenos to live differently in their city, not in a suburban, single-family home, but in a loft or apartment in a multifamily complex downtown — to live in a walkable city, take advantage of the culture and get around by public transport.

“The expectation always was that in order to have arrived in American culture you had to be a homeowner. I would’ve loved to be a homeowner, but not at the cost of living far away from the things that I wanted to see and do. I love living downtown.”

LESSONS FROM THE PAST

Interestingly, some of the current ideas transforming L.A. aren’t new. They were part of the original plans for the city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when trains crisscrossed the L.A. Basin and downtown was the city’s epicenter.

Take lawns, for instance. Deverell noted that early migrants to L.A. in the mid-19th century were so entranced by native cactus, succulents and pampas grass that they planted those, instead.

“Our drought resistant planting today looks like the gardens they were creating 150 years ago,” Deverell said.

“We’re going back to the future with them — and that’s a good thing.”

Ethington recalls the creation in the 1920s of a master plan for the city by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the great park designer, echoing his father’s Emerald Necklace in Boston — a network of connected parks circling downtown.

While Olmsted’s plan for L.A. foundered, ignored by municipalities that allowed wall-to-wall construction that obliterated vast swathes of green space, Ethington says the revival of the L.A. River — an important part of the city’s master plan — is part of the process of undoing that loss.

Ethington, along with Deverell and Travis Longcore of USC Dornsife’s Spatial Sciences Institute, are researching the historical ecology at the river and watershed as it would have been in 1880, before heavy urbanization.

Investigators will gather existing ecological studies and combine them into a single database. These data will be added to the extensive set of digitized historical maps and information that Ethington has developed for his 13,000-year history of L.A., Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to the Age of Nixon and Reagan​(University of California Press, forthcoming 2019).

“Part of the excitement about L.A. is the velocity with which it enters the national imagination.”

“The river still reflects the natural landscape, going back thousands of years,” Ethington said. “This research is obviously useful to this new phase of development of the city, where it’s not just smart urbanism, but also an attempt to make an ecologically sustainable development.

“What did this place actually look like before it was covered with concrete? We’ll be able to provide the answers.”

THE ARTS SCENE

The fact that L.A. is now hailed as a world center for arts and technology is an acknowledgement that’s long overdue, Deverell and Ethington agree.

“Since avant-garde artists Ed Ruscha and Ed Kienholz and iconoclastic curator and museum director Walter Hopps became active here in the 1950s, L.A. has been generating the world’s cutting-edge art,” Ethington said. However, it wasn’t until galleries and art schools accumulated a critical mass that the city was finally considered an arts capital.

L.A.’s liberal shift in the 1990s was key to creating an environment where artists can thrive, Ethington noted.

A crowning moment for L.A. came in 2007, with a major retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris titled “Los Angeles: The Birth of an Art Capital.”

“It’s ironic,” Ethington said, laughing. “Paris, which lost its own crown as world art capital to New York after 1940, then crowned the Big Apple’s successor by paying homage to L.A.” A MODEL CITY

If L.A. is to be considered a model city for the 21st century, Ethington argues, it is above all because of its public culture of tolerance.

“It’s something that’s hard to achieve — you can’t plan it really — and that’s the tolerance, the cosmopolitanism, the amazing cultural exchange,” he said. “That’s what will keep it attractive for people of all races and cultures.”

Deverell cautions against falling into the tired old stereotypes and tropes often used to describe L.A. Noting that it defies easy caricature, he reminds us the city is a complicated place.

“L.A. will always have the stories that prove those caricatures wrong,” he said. “That phrase ‘only in L.A.’ means nothing surprises us anymore because the city is so complicated that anything can happen — and will.”

TRAINSPOTTING L.A. moves toward greater connectivity through public transport as excavation is conducted on the Purple Line Metro extension at Wilshire and Fairfax, near the Petersen Automotive Museum.

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WO R S H I P P I N G ON THE FRINGE Los Angeles’ long and colorful history of alternative religions

By Lance Ignon

He was the original rocket man.

As a member of a group of daredevil Caltech scientists aptly known as the Suicide Squad in the 1930s and ’40s, John Whiteside Parsons helped usher in the Space Age with his combustible rocket fuel formulations.

Along the way, Parsons, who studied chemistry at USC Dornsife but never earned a degree, co-founded not only one of the first rocket companies but the prestigious Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Every space shuttle was thrust into orbit by fuel that was derived from his work.

Charming, brilliant and always nattily dressed, he was widely considered one of the most important figures of the U.S. space program.

He was also widely considered a colossal kook.

By day he worked shoulder-to-shoulder with preeminent scientists and government officials. By night, from his sprawling mansion on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, Parsons indulged his passion for the occult. Indeed, he considered his experiments in black magic, not rocketry, to be his greatest contribution to humanity.

Frocked in a long black robe and with Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto providing the melodramatic soundtrack, Parsons would stand before a pentagram and an altar in his bedroom as he tried to conjure up spirits and, in one case, a new girlfriend.

“ TO DAY ’ S C U LT I S TO M O R ROW ’ S R ELI G I O N . ” The mansion, with its 11 bedrooms and secret passageways, was not only the home of Parsons but an improbable mix of occultists and scientists. Monogamy was brushed off as impossibly bourgeois, leading to rampant partner swapping that made for a Rubik’s Cube of carnal combinations.

Twenty-five acres of land afforded plenty of room to raise animals, which came in handy when their blood was needed to make wafers for religious ceremonies.

But the good times didn’t last.

Parsons’ fortunes began to ebb after a young, charismatic science fiction writer took up residence and proceeded to make off with his girlfriend and most of his savings, according to the Parsons biography Strange Angel by George Pendle. The science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, went on to found the Church of Scientology.

Parsons died in 1952 at the age of 37, when his home laboratory exploded. Police ruled it an accident, but theories of foul play abounded, including the idea that Howard Hughes had ordered his murder in retribution for Parsons having taken documents from the eccentric industrialist.

Welcome to the City of Angels — and other mystical phenomena.

Beginning in the mid-19th century and careening into the present, L.A. has been a magnet for alternative spiritual movements. From harmless sects to murderous cults, these movements have helped define the city as the land of rebirth, new ideas, reinvention and, sometimes, the plain old whacky. “[L.A.] draws people who are seekers,” said Professor of History William Deverell. “They feel themselves at the edge of the world so why not look for another edge between this life and the next?”

RELIGIOUS RUNDOWN

So much of what we know about alternative religions has been conveyed through the media’s coverage of the most outlandish examples. L.A. denizen Charles Manson and his band of malevolent misfits still generate headlines. So does preacher-turned-mass murderer Jim Jones, whose Peoples Temple church was located blocks from USC at the corner of Alvarado and Hoover streets.

“Ever since mainstream media became beholden to a mass audience, which was when the penny press began in the 1830s, it needed to appeal to the lowest common 22

denominator, and the publishers quickly realized that meant sensationalism and conflict and scandal,” said Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a former religion reporter.

But the vast majority of alternative religions are distinguished only by the fact that they are not part of the Abrahamic tradition. What most share is mockery, derision and disregard from the mainstream.

“Every religious minority community has had a challenge of assimilating into a country that was founded on religious freedom,” said Varun Soni, dean of religious life at USC. Although L.A. remains a hotbed of alternative religions, the golden age of new spiritual movements unfolded in the 1920s and ’30s. Predictably, it drew howls of ridicule from the media and various pundits.

As Britain’s Aleister Crowley put it in about 1915, L.A. is home to “the cinema crowd of cocaine-crazed, sexual lunatics, and swarming maggots of near-occultists.” Never mind that this description fit Crowley to a T — and that his work in black “magick” had inspired Parsons.

Or, as Los Angeles Times columnist John Steven McGroarty wrote in 1921: “[L.A.] is a breeding place and a rendezvous of freak religions. But this is because its winters are mild, thus luring the pale people of thought to its sunny gates.”

Mind you, in those days, “freak religions” included practices that are now widely endorsed by health professionals, including yoga and health food. They also included now wellaccepted religions such as Hinduism, Mormonism and Self Realization.

In the seminal book Southern California, An Island on the Land, published in 1946, author and USC Gould School of Law alumnus Carey McWilliams ’27 described the town of Ojai as “a section of Southern California thoroughly impregnated with occult and psychic influence,” in part because it was the adopted home of religious philosopher Krisnamurti, whose foundation carries on and is hardly considered a home for the dark arts. (For the record, I grew up in Ojai a short walk from Krisnamurti’s home. I never once heard him utter incantations. He did, however, speak at my high school.)

The point is that the animus directed toward various alternative religious movements often wanes over time — as long as the movements are not too extreme. “Today’s cult is tomorrow’s religion,” Soni said.

REACHING FOR SOULS AND WALLETS

Many of the alternative religions that took root in L.A. were founded by charismatic individuals who were as interested in fattening their savings as saving souls.

Aimee Semple McPherson arrived in L.A. in 1922 with $100 and two kids. Within three years, she was a millionaire.

At her Angelus Temple overlooking Echo Park Lake, she attracted thousands of followers from all walks of life, rich and poor, black and white. With seating for 5,300, the temple was America’s first megachurch.

Like many successful preachers, she was a master showman. “She was cinematically gifted,” Deverell observed.

As with so many religious leaders who claim to eschew worldly temptations, McPherson’s downfall arrived when it was discovered that she had faked her own kidnapping, during which she had engaged in a tryst with a former Temple employee.

One of the most successful and enduring religious

movements to originate in L.A. was I AM. Like many others, it was started by transplants from the East Coast — in this case Guy and Edna Ballard — who saw or heard visions.

Guy Ballard claimed to have his encounter with the divine when the famed alchemist Comte St. Germain offered him a cup of “pure electronic essence” during a hike on Mt. Shasta.

Apparently avoiding electrocution, Ballard said he and St. Germain then embarked on a trip around the world through the stratosphere visiting, among other places, Yellowstone National Park.

Ballard chronicled his travels in a 1934 book titled Unveiled Mysteries, which established the foundation for a thriving enterprise of additional books, photos, records and New Age cold cream, among other enlightening — and enriching — curios. According to McWilliams’ book, an audit of I AM showed that it amassed $3 million in sales, contributions and “love offerings.” The organization remains active.

So does Maria Paula Acuña.

VISION QUEST

For more than 20 years, hundreds, even thousands, of people have followed Acuña every month to a parched stretch of the IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY P H IL W R I G G L E S W O R T H F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

Mojave Desert, 100 miles north of L.A., where she claims to see the Virgin Mary.

“People take photos of the sun and then decode them for messages from God and the Virgin,” said Lisa Bitel, Dean’s Professor of Religion and professor of religion and history, who wrote a book about Acuña titled Our Lady of the Rock (Cornell University Press, 2015).

“The group I studied out in the desert called themselves Catholics, but they were far more charismatic, and of course they were following a particular woman who sees the Virgin Mary and skips priests and church to give them the theology and doctrine they want,” Bitel said. “They were negotiating with Catholicism.”

The abundance of alternative religions in L.A. is one of the reasons so many people from the rest of the country view the state with deep suspicion. But for those who thrive on diversity, free thinking and the eccentric, L.A.’s religions — from the staid to the loopy — are part of the multicolored fabric that gives this city its vibrancy.

“I see a ferment, a petri dish of religions,” Bitel said. “Who knows what’s going to come of it. It’s been that way for a century. Isn’t it cool?”

$AVING $OUL$ Some of L.A.’s most successful religious figures have been as good at larding their savings accounts as saving souls.

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Los Angeles is the undisputed capital of noir. USC Dornsife faculty explore why the sunshine city inspired so much darkness. By Susan Bell

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry “Santa Anas” that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.

Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.

In this gritty passage from his noir classic “Red Wind,” Raymond Chandler sets up an unmistakably tense relationship between a Southern California city and its tormented denizens. The short story is a definitive example of noir’s hard-boiled prose, filled with fast-talking dames, desperate grifters and hardened detectives.

Chandler and other archetypal noir authors such as James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) and James Ellroy (L.A. Quartet) drew their inspiration from what is the genre’s capital: Los Angeles. So, too, did iconic film noir, from classics such as Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly and Sunset Boulevard to more recent acclaimed neo-noirs including Chinatown, L.A. Confidential and Mulholland Drive.

In all these works, L.A. is far more than a simple backdrop. Instead, the city assumes a leading role, becoming itself a major character in the dark dramas unfolding on its mean streets.

Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 25

Marrying stylish European cynicism with raw American angst and originally written to be as disposable as the past lives of the ambitious dreamers who came to L.A. looking to reinvent themselves, noir’s appeal has endured for almost 90 years and shows no signs of abating. From the city’s shadowy past as a place awash in corruption and violent crime to a scandal-ridden movie industry that offered talented but poorly paid writers of pulp fiction the chance to finally strike gold, L.A. has much to inspire the genre’s writers and directors.

“Noir gives us the insider city, as opposed to the fantasy city. In that sense, it opens up our sense of L.A. as a dynamic and complex environment.”

SUNLIT PARADISE TO DISTURBING DYSTOPIA

NOIR’S DARK ROOTS

Ulin defines noir as writing that grows out of Depressionera desperation and the sense that whatever promise the American dream offered has been betrayed in some way, stripped away or made unavailable by economic hardship.

“Noir is what happens when a character is pushed beyond their limits to the verge of despair and is brought face to face 26

THE DETECTIVE AND THE CITY

Noir, Braudy says, is deeply connected to the idea of the city and both the detective’s intimate knowledge of it and his ability to move through it freely — allowing him to transcend place and class and us to experience L.A. fully as we follow his journey.

The archetypal example is Chandler’s existential hero, Philip Marlowe, who is required by his job as a private eye to visit both the mansions of the wealthy and the dive bars on Central Avenue.

In all these places, he’s an outsider, equally welcome and unwelcome, Ulin notes, citing Chandler’s memorable description from the opening chapter of Farewell My Lovely: “Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”

This simile, with two wildly disparate elements juxtaposed into one unlikely but striking phrase, is a wonderful expression of the city’s paradoxes, argues Braudy, Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature and professor of English, art history and history.

“That’s very much L.A.,” he said. “And it’s very much the world that Chandler creates and that Marlowe inhabits.

Chandler’s L.A. is the city of mean streets, not the sunshine city. He portrays L.A. as a world of facades and he wants to punch holes in those facades.”

Indeed, noir can be seen as a way to discover the city’s truth, Ulin argues, offering us a key to understand its hidden depths.

“Noir gives us the insider city, as opposed to the fantasy city,” he said. “In that sense, it opens up our sense of L.A. as a dynamic and complex environment.”

WHERE REAL LIFE AND FICTION MEET

That dark side of L.A. inspired generations of noir writers and filmmakers. There was certainly no shortage of material, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. In addition to L.A.’s notoriously corrupt police force and local government at the time, a series of high-profile Hollywood scandals and grisly murders, such as that of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, known as “The Black Dahlia,” gripped the country and contributed to the city’s unsavory reputation.

“The city’s dark past is part of the background of noir and why films focus on L.A. as the place where all these things happen,” Braudy said. “It’s the city of shadows.”

L.A. remains both fascinated and haunted by its dark past, Braudy notes. The Millennium Biltmore Hotel, the last place Short was seen alive, still serves a Black Dahlia cocktail in her memory. Short’s sobriquet was inspired by a film, The Blue Dahlia, released the year before she was murdered — a prime example, Braudy says, of reality feeding off fiction, only for

(PAG E 24) PH OTO C O U R T E S Y O F T HE LO S A N G ELE S P O LI CE M U S EU M

UNDER THE BRIDGE (page 24) Detectives investigate a corpse found on the bed of the Los Angeles River, circa 1955.

Noir, argues David Ulin, assistant professor of the practice of English, takes the mythology of L.A. as a golden land of endless opportunity and upends it. The genre represents the disturbing flip side of that urban paradise relentlessly promoted by the city’s boosters for more than a century as a sun-drenched utopia of sand, surf, palm trees, mountains and endless orange groves.

L.A. was healthy, its promoters claimed; it would cure you of all that ailed you. It was a place to throw off your past, to reinvent yourself, a city bursting with opportunity and imbued, of course, with the glamour of Hollywood.

Come to L.A. and you might see a real-life movie star and — who knows? — if you were good looking and talented enough, even become one yourself.

All this was true — to a point — but as University Professor Leo Braudy notes, L.A., particularly in the 1930s and ’40s, was also home to a thriving underworld rife with bullet-riddled bodies, dope and prostitution rings, sensational murders, petty criminals, shady nightspots, illegal gambling joints, liquor and vice. Alongside the thousands of innocent — and frequently naïve — transplants from the Midwest and East, ambitious for a better life, were also the hoodlums and the crime bosses, the bootleggers, con artists, self-proclaimed saviors of the soul, and ladies of the night who set up shop in L.A., eager for a different kind of opportunity — an opportunity to prey on the gullible.

It was in this city of paradoxes and contradictions that noir flourished, offering in both literature and film a stylishly cynical vision of L.A.’s mean streets that reeks of disillusionment and alienation and yet still succeeds in seducing us, generation after generation, with its dangerous whiff of doomed, delusional romance.

with a universe that is, at best, indifferent and possibly malevolent, and how they deal with it.”

It is, he argues, the flip side of aspiration — the dark underbelly of an idealistic vision of prosperity, good health and self-fulfillment. Both noir and aspiration, he notes, coexist as a vital part of L.A.’s DNA. “Noir is what happens when the aspiration is revealed as a lie,” he said. “L.A., of course, is the aspirational city because of Hollywood, and as we all know, even now to this day, it’s a city of mirrors. So, the idea that you come to L.A. to find opportunity then realize there is no opportunity, it’s the end of the road and you’re still in trouble and you can’t go home — that’s the root of noir.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF USC UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

fiction to bloom again from reality.

“L.A. is a city of hucksters,” Ulin said. “It always was.

It still is, in some ways.”

Another reason that noir flourished in L.A., Ulin argues, is the city’s populist aesthetic tradition.

“Because of Hollywood, there wasn’t the stigma about writing in popular forms, like science fiction or detective fiction, that there was in more established literary centers like New York City, where so-called literary writers looked down their noses at people who wrote in genre,” Ulin said.

As Chandler observed: “If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I should not have come.”

AN ENDURING PASSION

Why has our fascination with noir endured? Braudy attributes our long-lasting love affair with the genre to its

reflection of our fear of life going horribly wrong.

“Noir corresponds to a pessimistic view of the American dream, where the idea of failure is always present.”

However, Ulin argues that people like detective crime fiction because it suggests that — maybe — there’s a moral order to the universe.

“It’s a very compelling fantasy, and I think we turn to those kinds of books because they offer us some kind of consolation, or solace, in the face of chaos. But I also think the particular appeal of noir is that it doesn’t sugarcoat, and although it does resolve those stories, it does so in weird and ambiguous ways that make it feel truer to our experience of the world.”

Noir begins, he added, when hope is gone.

“Its aspiration is not to make you feel better, but to reflect the brutality of the universe.

“There are no happy endings in noir.”

I SPY ... ... something beginning with “M.” Onlookers and a cop stare through a bullet-riddled window at a crime scene, circa 1953.

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As president of the board of commissioners of Los Angeles’ historic El Pueblo, Robert Vinson ’95 is the official guardian of the city’s birthplace. A real estate developer who put himself through USC as a nightclub owner, he has worked on presidential political campaigns and with the Dalai Lama.

By Susan Bell

the compassionate guardian

BALANCING ACT As president of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Board of Commissioners, Robert Vinson must weigh the diverse needs of all who live and work in the historic district.

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Striding through the plaza of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, Robert Vinson cuts a dapper and purposeful figure. Shopkeepers at the colorful Mexican market on nearby Olvera Street and workers at the Chinese American Museum nod and smile as he passes. “Good morning, Commissioner. Good to see you,” one calls out.

Vinson is president of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Board of Commissioners, the city authority that governs the historic site, considered the birthplace of L.A. In September 1781, following a journey of more than1,000 miles, part of it across the desert from what is today northern Mexico, 44 settlers of Native-American, African and European heritage established a farming community not far from El Pueblo’s current location. Today, seven museums, the Olvera Street market and many historic buildings, including the city’s oldest, the Avila Adobe, mark the site.

The monument, which attracts more than 2 million visitors annually, promotes itself as a living museum, the historic and symbolic heart of the city.

El Pueblo, Vinson says, is important on many levels. It is the birthplace of the city — a diverse community from its beginnings. “It’s always important that we honor and remember that,” he said.

“It’s also in the middle of downtown L.A., which is rapidly changing. So, we’re strategically placed to have a unique effect on how this area is developed and what’s important.”

VISION OF COMPASSION

Appointed by L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, Vinson is determined that El Pueblo lead the way for the kind of compassionate city he hopes L.A. can become.

“My vision for El Pueblo is that the dance between its culture and history and the development of downtown move in sync,” Vinson said.

But being the guardian of the 44-acre El Pueblo is a delicate balancing act. It’s one that Vinson is passionate about.

He must carefully weigh how the neighborhood maintains its history, whether services should be provided for the area’s

PHOTOS BY DENNIS LAN FOR USC DORNSIFE MAGAZINE

Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 29

homeless population and how that balances with the needs of local merchants.

“It’s up to this commission to lead the way, to decide what’s important,” he said.

Recalling the 18 Chinese massacred during the race riot of 1871 on the site of what is now the Chinese American Museum, and the undocumented Angelenos who, in the 1930s, were lured to what was then the Mexican Consulate in El Pueblo and then deported, Vinson said, “The history of this place has to be presented in a way that’s always a teachable moment, not just celebrated by having some trinket that is reminiscent of a time gone by.”

“The history of this place has to be presented in a way that’s always a teachable moment, not just celebrated by having some trinket that is reminiscent of a time gone by.”

Now, thanks to Vinson’s stewardship, El Pueblo will host L.A.’s first “A Bridge Home” housing program for the homeless. The initiative, launched by Garcetti, will house 45 homeless people for a three-month period. They will receive treatment for mental health and substance abuse issues, along with services to help them get back on their feet.

At the end of the 90-day period, they will be moved into permanent housing and another cohort will take their place.

“Frankly, it’s been a struggle to pull off, largely because of nimbyism,” Vinson admits, “but it’s very important because until people’s basic needs are met, services are just not going to be as effective.”

Helping L.A.’s homeless is an El Pueblo tradition, Vinson notes. Both churches on the plaza have a long history of aiding those on the streets.

It’s also the kind of compassionate action those who know him have come to expect of Vinson. The motto of VRG Vinson Real Estate Group, the real estate brokerage firm he opened more than 20 years ago, is “Building Community.”

To that end, clients may opt to have 10 percent of Vinson’s commission go to a charity of their choice.

Vinson has also built affordable single-family housing.

Tupper Tobias Village in Panorama City, which provides 28 homes aimed at single parents, is one notable example.

Vinson said that when he acquired the property, he could have built more than 100 apartments.

“Instead, I went door-to-door to all of the neighbors and asked, ‘What do you want here?’ ” he said. Residents’ biggest concern was losing the neighborhood’s single-family home character, so Vinson and architect Michael Mekeel, his business partner, designed a community where parents could see their children playing — and ensured the cost to own a home didn’t exceed what they would pay to rent.

Vinson serves on the advisory board of Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), a social justice nonprofit that helped pass L.A.’s minimum wage ordinance and reduce truck-related pollution at the Port of Los Angeles by 90 percent. The nonprofit is also bringing 30

recycling services to 500,000 apartment residents.

The project Vinson is proudest of is one he created while serving on the board of Alternative Living for the Aging. He described the concept as a way to promote “independence through interdependence” by building housing for groups of people with different skills, so one person drives, one plays the piano, another cooks.

“It created these beautiful communities, and residents lived longer and were happier and healthier,” he said.

That sense of compassion, which has been a driving force and a guiding principle in his professional life, Vinson credits to his single mother, Darlene Montano, an Emmy-nominated set decorator, painter and sculptor.

A MAGICAL CHILDHOOD

A native Angeleno, Vinson grew up near Encino in the west San Fernando Valley. It was an idyllic childhood, Vinson says. His Mexican mother took him to museums and he spent weekends with his father, Robert Vinson Sr., a studio executive at MGM. “He was the consummate Disneyland dad,” Vinson chuckles fondly.

Vinson was a keen magician as a young child. “I was in the junior Magic Castle,” he said with pride. In addition to making a lot of his own magic tricks, 8-year-old Vinson performed shows for younger kids (“I had capes; I loved capes”), appeared on the children’s television show Romper Room and collected old magic books from the 1920s that he scouted out in L.A.’s secondhand and antiquarian bookshops.

Yoga and Shakespeare were Vinson’s other fascinations growing up, along with photography.

“I had a photo lab given to me by a friend of my father who was a spy in Germany,” Vinson said. “I most enjoy photographing people — it gives me the opportunity to capture a moment of humor.”

Vinson credits his mother with shaping his political views.

“When she went to work in studios, I had a front row seat to the sexism she had to endure,” he said. “I became sensitive to the plight of people through my mom, and that’s really how I developed my sense of compassion.”

He also credits her determination with getting him into USC after she worked on a scene filmed on USC’s Fraternity Row and was impressed by the residents’ studiousness.

ART AND HAPPINESS

Vinson started out majoring in theatre but transferred to USC Dornsife, where he graduated in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in humanities.

“I wanted to be practical, and I was interested in urban planning and politics, so I transferred into USC Dornsife and minored in theatre instead. As you travel further from your ego, you don’t need to be on stage as much.”

Vinson put himself through USC in an unusual way — as the owner of The 2nd Coming, a nightclub located in L.A.’s Westlake district.

Wanting to create a venue where he could bring cultures together, he booked mainly world music. Tom Schnabel of KCRW was involved. Tom Tom Club played for three weeks (David Byrne and Debbie Harry performed together at the band’s last show there). Vinson rubbed shoulders with guests like David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen and Barbra Streisand.

Vinson also organized art shows. When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held a major Latin America retrospective in 1991, Vinson exhibited important Latino artists from L.A. who were not included in the LACMA show.

“Our alternative show was so much more interesting.

We had an old ’50s Chevy that was painted by Latino artists.

The seats were flaming chiles.

“Art is seminal,” Vinson said, “because it’s what we do everything for — art and happiness.”

He experienced plenty of the latter at USC, where he made friends from Taiwan, Iran, Mexico, South America and France.

“Realizing that there are different approaches to the same everyday problems and issues — there’s no better way to broaden yourself than to see how other people solve the same problems you’re faced with,” he said.

Vinson closed his nightclub shortly before graduating. He worked briefly for a global bank before his love of people drew him into real estate and politics.

Vinson met his long-term mentor, Josh Baran, owner of an L.A.-based public relations firm, when the two organized an event at USC. “Baran taught me the full importance of compassion and getting past my own ego, which is my real life’s work,” Vinson said. “I was really fortunate to have a mentor like that.”

Through Baran, Vinson made contacts in Bill Clinton’s campaign and started organizing events and coordinating press for President Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore and Secretary of State John Kerry.

“It was a great experience, with the constant sense of

witnessing history firsthand,” Vinson said. “The respect I have for each of those candidates is only compounded because I saw their human side.”

Vinson remains deeply involved in politics and, at the time of writing, was working toward ensuring California Democrats gained U.S. House seats in the November midterm election.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Baran also introduced Vinson to meditation and to the Dalai Lama, whom Vinson worked with for years, managing press and event production for the spiritual leader’s American tours.

Vinson family connections with El Pueblo go back a long way. His maternal grandfather, Robert Montano, who described himself as “the most skilled cabinetmaker in L.A. still with all 10 fingers,” was a regular customer at the neighborhood’s saloon and then at it’s speakeasy during Prohibition. Vinson has a treasured photograph of his mother, aged 9, next to the cross marking the entrance to El Pueblo and vivid memories of his own cherished childhood visits.

Now, as he walks through El Pueblo, Vinson carries with him the Dalai Lama’s words.

“He was asked, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ Vinson recounted. “And he said without hesitation, ‘To be happy.’ ” Vinson took the answer to heart.

“It’s the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard.”

PRESERVING HISTORY Robert Vinson stands in front of América Tropical, painted

by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros on the side of what is now the ItalianAmerican Museum at El Pueblo. Dating to 1932, América Tropical is L.A.’s oldest extant mural.

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From earthquake safety to community health, USC Dornsife research is shaping Los Angeles life, policy and design.

By Emily Gersema

For most of its nearly 140 years, USC has been conducting research in Los Angeles.

The institution and the city have grown up together. As L.A. expanded, so did the research opportunities at USC. Many of the 966 researchers at USC Dornsife have spearheaded projects across the metropolitan area that help Angelenos better understand themselves, and scholars to better understand humans, including their behaviors and their needs. The work of some USC Dornsife researchers is even guiding the city toward improvements in areas such as earthquake preparedness, urban design and maintenance and affordable housing communities.

What the researchers have learned, and will discover in studies to come, may save lives.

BRACE FOR THE BIG ONE

In 2015, the L.A. City Council approved laws requiring property owners to reinforce as many as 15,000 buildings built before 1978 to reduce their risk of damage during an earthquake. The requirements, with a seven-year deadline for compliance, came years after scientists signaled a dire warning about the region’s lack of earthquake preparedness.

In 2008, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and several institutions affiliated with USC Dornsife’s Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), teamed up to develop simulations for a 7.8 magnitude temblor on the southern San Andreas Fault.

Several studies on the impact of this potential earthquake projected a dire picture. Scientists estimated 1,800 people would die and 53,000 would be injured. The quake would cause a cascade of infrastructural failures, including 200 million square feet in damaged or collapsed buildings.

Water would be shut off for months, raising other public health risks. Economic losses would top $190 billion.

“It was a plausible large scenario earthquake, but it was not intended to represent the worst case,” said Christine Goulet, IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY D E N N I S L A N F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

executive science director for special projects at SCEC and a USC Dornsife research scientist.

Concerned, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti assembled a seismic task force to estimate the number and types of buildings built before 1980 that were at greatest risk of significant damage from a large quake. The results were published in the panel’s report, Resilience by Design, and, in 2015, spurred the City Council’s adoption of earthquake retrofit requirements to better prepare the city for “The Big One.” The city hired a resilience officer.

The results also led SCEC to launch an emergency preparedness exercise, “ShakeOut: The World’s Largest Earthquake Drill,” which is held each fall for people living in earthquake-vulnerable areas. The ShakeOut exercise, currently reaches over 50 million international participants yearly. The exercise involves people practicing basic personal safety and rehearsing the “drop, cover and hold on” technique that involves protecting their heads and seeking shelter within their offices, classrooms or homes, such as under tables or desks, during a quake. To reduce risk of injury, SCEC also urges people to remove heavy or potentially harmful items from tall shelves and cabinets and to properly secure furniture that might topple over.

“There is the science, there is the engineering, and that needs to make it to policy and public education,” said Goulet.

“If you don’t have all of those working together, then there is no societal impact from the science. This ShakeOut scenario is a good example of how it does take good science to make progress, but it takes more than just that to make the world a safer place.”

TRANSFORMATION Could a community’s health improve simply by moving into a new setting?

IF A TREE FALLS, THE FOREST SHRINKS

For an example of how L.A. functions as a laboratory, see the work of USC Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI) researcher Travis Longcore, assistant professor of architecture, spatial sciences and biological sciences and Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 33

RESILIENCE Scientists conducted realistic simulations that led L.A. to set new standards for reinforcing buildings to withstand quakes.

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USC Dornsife SSI lecturer Su Jin Lee. Last year, Lee and Longcore led a study revealing that 20 cities across the Los Angeles Basin lost a significant amount of shade from 2000 to 2009, at a rate of more than 1 percent per year.

With all the cranes dotting the L.A.-area horizon, many people would be quick to assume the trend is driven just by large-scale construction of apartment complexes, office buildings or hotels. But Longcore and his colleagues found that all forms of construction and renovation — including on single-family properties — have stripped out urban shrubs and trees.

Some areas experienced a more significant loss than others. Baldwin Park, for example, saw a 55 percent loss of green cover on single-family residential lots — from 70 percent to 31 percent — over nine years. Other areas in the study that had at least 20 percent loss in shade, due to all forms of construction, included Pomona, Downey, Sylmar, Compton, and San Pedro/Port of Los Angeles.

Longcore says he and study collaborator Catherine Rich of The Urban Wildlands Group, who is also his spouse, were certain of the trend years ago, when they first wrote up plans for the research project.

“It didn’t take any data to know that the problem — the disappearance of trees and shrubs — was occurring,” Longcore says. “The paper has sparked a bit of activism in Los Angeles because it confirmed what people knew intuitively: that for all the city-led efforts around tree planting, L.A. was getting less green.”

Los Angeles plans to write an urban forest plan that might restore some of the lost shade that helps convert carbon into oxygen and cools neighborhoods, Longcore said.

SSI Director John Wilson, professor of sociology, civil and environmental engineering, computer science, architecture and preventive medicine, who worked on the study with Longcore, is working to create an app that Angelenos can use to report damaged or dying trees across their community to assist the city with saving the trees.

TRADING SPACES FOR BETTER HEALTH

Eight miles south of USC’s University Park campus, in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, an estimated 2,200 residents await the completion of what will become their new home. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), with at least $18.5 million from the state and millions more from federal and local sources, has been building a $1 billion, 1,400-unit affordable housing community on a cleaned-up, former industrial property directly next door to the residents’ current home, Jordan Downs.

Originally built in 1944 near Alameda Avenue and 97th streets, Jordan Downs’ two-story stucco buildings have been home to several generations of impoverished families.

At the center of the 1965 Watts riots and as a flash point for the 1992 Rodney King riots, Jordan Downs is a testament of failed housing policies that exacerbated — rather than alleviated — racial tensions and disparities.

Public housing communities like Jordan Downs are hotspots of social, economic and health disparities — violent crime, poor school test scores, poverty with low employment, drug abuse, and high rates of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

Ashlesha Datar, a senior economist at USC Dornsife’s Center for Economic and Social Research, is interested in monitoring the changes in the residents as they move to determine how people’s environments may influence their health and well-being. Her prior work indicates that environments can be a much greater factor in community health than previously thought.

Earlier this year, Datar and a colleague, Nancy Nicosia of The RAND Corp., found that military families assigned to U.S. bases in communities with higher rates of obesity were more likely themselves to be overweight or obese.

Their findings raised a key question: Could obesity and other related health issues be managed or reversed just by moving a whole community to a different complex with

better amenities and healthier people? Over the next five years and with $6 million from the National Institutes of Health, Datar and her research team aim to find out.

Jordan Downs is one of L.A.’s “build first” projects, in which the city first develops a new community before moving the public housing residents out of the dilapidated old buildings. The community, expected to be completed in the next few years, will feature brand new housing, a state-of-the-art gymnasium and a retail center with a supermarket within the complex, along with several other enhancements to improve the community’s walkability and social interaction. Moreover, doubling the housing in the community will bring in new residents.

City officials hope it will result in what scientists refer to as a “whole-of-community intervention” — a transformation that extends far beyond aesthetic improvement and curbside appeal.

Perhaps at the new Jordan Downs, residents will regularly jog on the treadmills or squeeze in a round of weightlifting. Instead of the typical high-sugar, high-fat fare at the convenience store, they’ll reach for an apple, carrots or other fresh foods at the new supermarket.

Maybe the move will lead some residents to find new jobs or make new social connections.

“It’s incredibly hard to move people out of poverty,” Datar said. “Interventions are typically just influencing one aspect of their lives. It’s not clear if you improve one aspect, will all of it change?”

With HACLA’s permission and the assistance of a local community health researcher, Cynthia Gonzales, of Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Watts, Datar and her team have begun inviting hundreds of households to participate in the study. For a baseline comparison, the research team also is gathering similar health and well-being information from 150 households in two other L.A. public housing communities, Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts.

“There is the science, there is the engineering, and that needs to make it to policy and public education. If you don’t have all of those working together, then there is no societal impact from the science.”

The team is asking residents to provide information about their health and other indicators of well-being for each of the next five years. The research team will also check participants’ body mass index — a measure of healthy and unhealthy weight.

City housing officials look forward to Datar’s findings because they will reveal whether L.A.’s “build first” approach could be a national model for healthy community design.

“The USC Jordan Downs Health Study represents an important effort in understanding the health impacts of public housing revitalization that emphasizes improvements to the built environment and housing quality on the residents who live there,” Guthrie says. “This study is critical to understanding the role that housing environments can have on a person’s health and well-being.”

Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 35

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Dude, check it. Here’s, like, a fresh look at the rad language of L.A., a bomb way of talking that legit shreds way beyond the 405 and the 101.

By Darrin S. Joy

Bill Hader is breaking character again.

The comedian and actor, sporting an exaggerated mane of blond hair and an obvious spray tan, contorts his face as he struggles — unsuccessfully — to suppress his laughter. The cause of his impending outburst is his fellow Saturday Night Live cast member Fred Armisen emitting a string of words rendered nearly unintelligible by his farcical Southern California accent.

“I theenk yew shuhd geh hooome now, Devaaahn,” Armisen drawls, his own effort to stifle laughter beginning to show.

Barely a minute into the scene, Armisen’s camp, along with an equally ridiculous slur of extended vowel sounds from castmate Kristen Wiig, proves too much, and the three actors are all but laughing out loud.

“The Californians” series of sketches have since become embedded in America’s pop culture — the above scene was viewed nearly 3 million times since it was uploaded to SNL’s YouTube channel in 2013. The skits satirize Southern California residents as vapid air-heads who frame most of their dialogue around driving directions.

But it’s the accent that makes the mockery work — an exaggerated version of “Valspeak” (short for “Valley Speak”) made popular three decades earlier by musician Frank Zappa and his daughter Moon Zappa with their hit song “Valley Girl.” Valspeak is attributed to residents, usually the teenage girls and young women, of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.

LA LA LANGUAGE Los Angeles’s colorful dialect draws from surf culture, “Valley Girl talk,” Chicano slang and the music and entertainment industries.

Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 37

LIKE, TOOOTALLY?

The defining characteristics of the caricatured accent seem to stem from three sources: pronouncing those vowels toward the front of the mouth; drawing out vowel sounds to a nearly absurd length; and using “uptalk,” ending sentences, and even phrases, on a high note, as if asking a question.

(It also doesn’t hurt to insert the word “like” as frequently as possible.)

According to Sandra Disner, pronouncing the vowels toward the front of the mouth, though highly exaggerated in Valspeak, is common among Californians.

An associate professor (teaching) of linguistics at USC Dornsife, Disner is also a forensic linguist and an expert on accents. She has testified in numerous civil and criminal court cases, including a famous trial in the mid-1980s in which a man was acquitted of phoning in bomb threats against an airline when the caller’s thick East Coast accent was determined to be from Boston. The accused was from New York.

Disner notes that most native English-speaking residents of the Golden State display few defining accent characteristics but rather speak a somewhat featureless version of the language. Those attributes that do exist seem to stem from the positioning of the tongue in words such as “food” and “foot,” and from the merger of once-distinct vowels in words such as “caught” and “cot.”

“In California, we spread our lips, and we push our tongue frontward, which creates a shorter chamber for sound resonance,” she said, demonstrating with the word “food,” which she makes sound almost like “fuhd.”

Disner, born in New York, contrasts this with her native accent. “In New York, we pull our tongue way back and extend our lips to make a really long mouth.” As she demonstrates, “fuhd” becomes “foood” with a hint of a “w” just before the “d” at the end.

I AM WHO I AM, BRAH

So, if Californians in general speak with little or no defining tone, why then would an exaggerated accent such as Valspeak take root? Disner says the reasons may be social. Accents of any kind may have to do with residents’ pride in their home.

“They’re proud of being from Boston; they’re proud of being from New York; they’re proud of being from Southern California; they’re proud of being from the South,” she said.

So rather than submit to a single American accent, they flaunt their local peculiarities and let it label them as belonging to a certain region.

It becomes a part of their identity.

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Disner also noted that accents tend to arise among young people. The young are more adaptive, more likely to adopt new traits than are older adults who are more set in their ways. A desire to foster inclusion among their peers also may reinforce young people’s use of a developing accent, which they might use to fortify their place within the group.

Andrew Simpson would agree, extending the principle to include vocabulary, as well. Simpson, professor of linguistics and chair of the Department of Linguistics at USC Dornsife, recently finished writing a new textbook focused on the role of language in culture, due out in January 2019 from Oxford University Press.

In the book, Language and Society: An Introduction, Simpson notes that language serves as an important representation of both individual and group identity. In other words, you are how you talk, dude.

Terminology that stems from daily life in “the Valley” — think “tubular,” “grody” and “totally” — as well as jargon from surfing and skateboard cultures and the film industry serve to identify the user as a Southern California denizen.

A FRESH TAKE

In her 2017 book, Talk Like a Californian: A Hella Fresh Guide to Golden State Speak, Colleen Dunn Bates (writing as Helena Ventura) catalogues California’s current popular lexicon, noting which region or subculture terms come from.

Most of the local vocabulary you’ll hear in and around L.A. seems to stem from surfing culture (that is, “surfspeak”) and Hollywood, with influence from Spanish language (think “Spanglish”) and more than a little hip-hop.

Words like “brah,” “insane” and “stoked” come straight from surfspeak. “Sup ey?” (“what’s up?”) and “la troca” (meaning “the truck,” as in the ubiquitous taco trucks found

IL L U S T R AT I O N S BY D E N N I S L A N F O R U S C D O R N S IF E M AG A Z IN E

around the city) are popular terms pulling from Spanish and Chicano slang. And “the industry” (Hollywood) is its own pervasive beast. As Bates, a native Angeleno who studied journalism at USC from 1978 to ’80, writes in her book: “If you’re going to live in L.A., ... you’re going to hear Hollywood slang, even if you never set foot on a studio lot.”

Hollywood clearly contributes significantly to the popularity of Valspeak, surfspeak and other L.A.-area language.

Films such as 1983’s Valley Girl, no doubt inspired by the Zappas’ song a year earlier, kept up the Valspeak momentum, and more than a decade later, the success of Clueless, a cult classic to this day, assured Valspeak’s position as a mainstay of popular culture — witness again “The Californians,” popping up 20 years after Clueless.

Likewise, the music industry has proven a major influence, elevating surfspeak to national and even global standing. While surfing appears to have arrived in California in the early 20th century from Hawaii, the sport and its associated lexicon saw a rising tide of popularity in the 1960s, boosted in large part by the music of the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, the Surfaris (the band actually put “surf ” in their name!) and similar artists. Suddenly it was very cool to look, act and, of course, speak like a surfer.

Words like “gnarly,” “rad” and “epic,” which surfers had bandied about for years prior, were rapidly moving into the mainstream. Early Valspeak even drew from surfspeak — “tubular” refers to the interior of a breaking wave (a sick spot for a surfer to shred, but no place for a Barney).

Adopting jargon is common, according to Simpson, who notes that changes in language often arise when members of a group begin to admire and then emulate those among them with some level of status. Musicians with their celebrity would be a natural point of focus for the public, especially teenagers and young adults seeking to establish identities separate from their parents.

For instance, Simpson notes that “dude,” now nearly universal, actually originated in the late 19th century to describe a well-dressed person. It gained popularity among young fashionable Mexican Americans and African Americans in the 1930s and ’40s before surf culture, overwhelmingly young and white, co-opted its use. Show business then spread it everywhere.

“It is very hard, if not impossible, to predict which words will stick around and spread.”

Similarly, “rad” (short for “radical”), “epic,” and “shred” and most other words, all held meaning long before surfspeak came along, but surf culture nabbed them and skewed their meanings, creating new slang. Now “rad” is good, “epic” is even better and “shred” is to do really well or be exceptional or excellent.

It all may fade tomorrow, though. Valspeak, for instance, has dropped much of its lexicon. While the terminal uptick and extended vowels still apply, Valley dwellers rarely, if ever, utter “tubular,” “grody” (meaning gross), “fer shur” and “to the max.” Those terms are relegated to the linguistic dustbin. Others, including “like” and “all” (as in “I’m like” and “he’s all”) remain entrenched for reasons unknown.

“Slang and new expressions come into existence continually,” said Simpson, “but it is very hard, if not impossible, to predict which words will stick around and spread.”

He points to “groovy,” a very popular term from the ’50s and into the ’70s that is now completely out of fashion. But “cool,” he says, has made a major comeback after declining in popularity for years.

“No one really knows why.”

Probably because it shreds.

LEGIT OR BOGUS?

Simpson also notes another important factor in developing a new way of speaking: Changes are often not so much invention as reinvention. Existing words are given new meaning and renewed life.

Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 39

Legacy

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lined with cars, a clear harbinger of the direction the City of Angeles would eventually take as it became increasingly obsessed by its love affair with the automobile. It’s even possible to spy an early convertible in the foreground.

A fascinating glimpse into L.A.’s past, this image is part of an innovative 2013 digital exhibition of photographs drawn from the Southern California Edison (SCE) archive that explored the birth of a modern metropolis.

It was co-organized by USC Dornsife’s William Deverell, professor of history, and Greg Hise, former associate professor at the USC School of Policy, Planning and Development and now professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Titled “Exploring Form and Landscape in the Los Angeles Basin, 1940-1990,” the exhibition was part of “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.,”

an initiative of the Getty Trust. The exhibition offered a collaborative approach to understanding how L.A. was “made modern” via its unique architectural heritage. The photographs featured in the exhibition were drawn from the SCE archive housed at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, where Deverell directs the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. The exhibition, which can still be

viewed online at pstp-edison. com, was an institute project.

“I have been fascinated with the Edison archive since it arrived here in 2006,” Deverell said of the trove of 70,000 images that Edison International, SCE’s parent company, donated to the Huntington. “It’s such a gold mine of history.” —S.B.

Looking north on Broadway from 6th Street in 1916.

P H O T O B Y G . H A V E N B I S H O P, C O U R T E S Y O F H U N T I N G T O N L I B R A R Y , S A N M A R I N O

Broadway is portrayed as the sparkling jewel at the heart of Los Angeles in this 1916 shot

by Southern California Edison photographer G. Haven Bishop.

Illuminated by neon, architectural lighting and signs, here is a city that already loves to party, boasting numerous choices for the nightlife lover from vaudeville and motion picture theatres to dancing, shopping and bar hopping.

While the streetcar tracks are clearly visible, Broadway is

WILLIAM DEVERELL/HUNTINGTON-USC INSTITU TE ON CALIFORNIA AND THE WEST

Faculty News IRENE CHIOLO, assistant prof essor of biological sciences, received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award from the National Science Foundation.

FRANK CORSETTI, professor of Earth sciences, has been named winner of the 2019 William R. Dickinson Award by the Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM).

DANA GIOIA, Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture, received the 2018 Poets’ Prize for 99 Poems: New and Selected (Graywolf Press, 2016).

JENNIFER GREENHILL, associate professor of art history, has been named a 2018-2019 Tyson Scholar in American Art

by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art for her current book project, Commercial Imagination: American Art and the Advertising Picture. She also received the Joe and Wanda Corn Fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in support of the same project.

DENNIS HEDGECOCK, Paxson H. Offield Professor in Fisheries Ecology and professor of biological sciences, has received an Honored Life Member Award from the National Shellfisheries Association.

NGUYEN PHOTO COURTESY OF VIET THANH NGUYEN

MARC HOYOIS, assistant professor of mathematics, received a 2018 K-Theory Prize from the K-Theory Foundation.

ANNA KRYLOV, Gabilan Distinguished Professorship in Science and Engineering and professor of chemistry, was awarded the 2017 Mildred Dresselhaus Award from the University of Hamburg.

DONAL MANAHAN, professor of biological sciences, has received an Honored Life Member Award from the National Shellfisheries Association.

CHERYL MATTINGLY, professor of anthropology and occupational science and therapy, was awarded an honorary doctorate by Denmark’s Aarhus University.

BÉATRICE MOUSLI, professor (teaching) of French, was named an Officer of the French Order of Academic Palms (Officier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques) by the French Minister of Education.

DAPHNA OYSERMAN, Dean’s Professor of Psychology and professor of psychology, education and communication, was awarded the 2018 Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

MANUEL PASTOR, Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change and professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity, was awarded the 2018 Public Sociology in International Migration Award from the American Sociological Association’s International Migration Section.

JOHN PLATT, professor of Earth sciences, was awarded the 2018 Stephan Mueller Medal by the European Geosciences Union.

STEVE ROSS, Myron and Marian Casden Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of Jewish Role in American Life and professor of history, received the 2017 Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association for the recorded performance of his book Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against

Hollywood and America (Bloombury USA, 2017).

RAYMOND STEVENS, Provost Professor of Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Neurology, Physiology and Biophysics, and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and director of the Bridge Institute at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, received the 2019 Biophysical Society Anatrace Membrane Protein Award.

Alumni News 1960s Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge VINCENT OKAMOTO (B.A., linguistics, ’67; J.D., ’73) was grand marshal of the 2018 Nisei Week Japanese Festival.

1970s Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Minnesota GARY COHEN, (B. A., history, ’70) was awarded the František Palacký Honorary Medal for Merit in Historical Sciences by the Czech Academy of Sciences.

True North: Hunting Fossils Under the Midnight Sun (Bering Press, 2017), a memoir by LOU MARINCOVICH (M.S., graduate studies, ’70; Ph.D., biological sciences, ’73), won a Foreward Reviews bronze INDIE award in the Adventure and Recreation category.

MICHAEL TOM (B.S., psychobiology, ’79) was named chair of the Yale Alumni Fund board of directors.

Continued on page 44.

HONORS

Nguyen Joins Obama in Academy Pulitzer prize-winning professor among notables elected to 238th AAAS class.

Viet Thanh Nguyen has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is USC Dornsife’s 24th faculty member elected to the prestigious academy, which honors exceptional scholars, leaders, artists and innovators, and engages them in sharing knowledge and addressing challenges facing the world.

Viet Thanh Nguyen Nguyen, University Professor, Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature is among 213 notables elected this past year. Others include former President Barack Obama, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, author Ta-Nehisi Coates and actor Tom Hanks.

Posting a portion of the academy’s announcement to Twitter, Nguyen expressed awe at being associated with one name in particular: “I shivered a little to see my name next to Barack Obama in this announcement about our selection as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.”

With his election, Nguyen joins prominent historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr. “This was a completely unexpected honor, for which I’m grateful,” he said.

In 2016, Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his novel The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015).

His follow-up, nonfiction companion piece, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016), was a finalist for the National Book Awards that same year.

In 2017, Nguyen became only the sixth USC faculty member to be named a MacArthur Fellow. This past February, he was named a University Professor.

“Professor Nguyen applies his extraordinary talent as a scholar, writer and advocate to help us build empathy and broaden our understanding of the world,” said USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller. “USC Dornsife is proud to join in celebrating his election as an academy fellow.”

Nguyen was inducted into the 238th class of American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellows at a ceremony in October in Cambridge, Massachusetts. —D.S.J. Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 41

F A C U LT Y C A N O N Maya Maskarinec looks outward to examine how Rome interacted with the wider Mediterranean world in the Byzantine period. Maskarinec extends her analysis to the end of the ninth century, when the city’s ties to the Byzantine world weakened.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE LEGACY OF LOSS University of Michigan Press / Associate Professor of English Emily Anderson analyzes 18th-century visual and textual references to Shakespeare alongside the performance history of his plays, shedding new light on how we experience performance, and why we gravitate toward an art and artists we know will disappear.

Celebrating Stories

Writing instructor Amy Meyerson’s debut novel paints L.A. as a literary paradise.

In 2010, Amy Meyerson, then a student in USC Dornsife’s Master of Professional Writing program, pitched an idea for a story to her thesis advisor, novelist and then USC Dornsife Lecturer Judith Freeman. It involved a small bookshop, a literary scavenger hunt and a shocking family secret.

“The first time I met with [Freeman], she said my idea could be a novel,” said Meyerson, now an assistant professor (teaching) of writing in USC Dornsife’s Writing Program. She proved Freeman right by publishing that novel earlier this year.

The Bookshop of Yesterdays (Park Row Books, 2018) tells the story of Miranda Brooks, a young history teacher who leaves her hometown of Los Angeles to live in Philadelphia. After her estranged uncle’s unexpected death, Miranda returns home to learn he has left her his bookstore, Prospero Books. However, it turns out he has also bequeathed her a scavenger hunt in which every clue is hidden in a novel.

The hunt sends her on a journey through L.A. and concludes when she uncovers a deep family secret.

Meyerson grew up in Philadelphia herself and chose to set her novel in L.A. due to the city’s unique history.

Intentionally distancing herself from overused images of Hollywood and the beach, Meyerson set her novel in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood and sends Miranda on a journey through the city’s diverse suburbs and neighboring towns, including Pasadena, West L.A. and the mountain resort community of Big Bear Lake in San Bernardino County to the east.

Meyerson said she wanted her novel to be a celebration of L.A.’s abundant literary history, something that often gets overshadowed by the film industry.

“I always tell my students that if you’re not interested in what you’re writing, then your reader isn’t going to be interested in it.” —L.R. 42

NO LIMITS TO THEIR SWAY: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions Vanderbilt University Press / Assistant Professor of History Edgardo Perez Morales tells the story of Cartagena’s multinational and multicultural seafarers, revealing the transatlantic and maritime dimensions of South American independence.

BLUE ROSE Penguin Books / Professor of English Carol Muske-Dukes navigates around the idea of the unattainable — the elusive nature of poetry and of knowledge, and the fact that we know so little of the lives of others and the world we live in.

PERSIAN LEARNER PART FOUR: Advanced Persian for College Students UCI Jordan Center for Persian Studies Press / Associate Professor (Teaching) of Persian Peyman Nojoumian focuses on the development of advanced language proficiency skills through a rich content and sociocultural context.

CITY OF SAINTS: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages, The Middle Ages Series University of Philadelphia Press / Assistant Professor of History

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY

Veterans Commit to Peace

Published to coincide with the centennial of Armistice Day, Michael Messner’s book portrays veterans advocating for peace.

THE FRAGILITY OF POWER: Statius, Domitian and the Politics of the Thebaid Oxford University Press / Assistant Professor of Classics Stefano Rebeggiani presents a new framework for interpreting the Thebaid’s relationship with its literary predecessors, offers a new reconstruction of cultural life under Domitian, and employs an interdisciplinary approach based on literary, artistic and archaeological sources.

Watching the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq on television, World War II veteran Ernie Sanchez suddenly began shaking and sobbing uncontrollably. Later, through therapy, he learned he was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that his symptoms revealed his deeply repressed memories of having killed between 50 and 100 Germans during the war. As part of his healing, he now speaks of those dead Germans as sons and brothers, people who were loved by their families, thereby humanizing them.

This moving anecdote is one of many contained in Guys Like Me: Five Wars, Five Veterans for Peace (Rutgers University Press, 2018) by Michael Messner, professor of sociology and gender studies. Published to coincide with the centennial of Armistice Day, the book tells the stories of five veterans from World War II through the Iraq War. All have dealt with the trauma of war and all have become lifelong peace advocates.

Their stories contain their paths to reconciliation with former enemies and to their own personal healing from trauma and from what Messner calls “the deep moral injury” they carry from having killed other people, sometimes in great numbers.

“One of the reasons I wrote Guys Like Me was because I wanted to make these veterans’ voices and stories more visible to the American public,” he said.

While Messner says some might view them as weak, or as advocating weakness, he has found veterans who are peace activists to be among the strongest people he has ever met.

“They’re exhibiting a certain type of bravery that to me is exemplary and I think serves as an example of a redefinition of strength, that we can be strong in advocating for justice, peace and a world where nations treat each other as equals,” he said. “To me, that’s a new form of heroism.” —S.B.

Veterans for Peace members march in a Veterans Day parade in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

VETERANS FOR PEACE PHOTO BY MICHAEL MESSNER

PERSONAL AUTONOMY IN PLURAL SOCIETIES: A Principle and Its Paradoxes Routledge / Professor of Political Science, Anthropology, Public Policy and Law Alison Dundes Renteln cowrote and co-edited this volume, which addresses the principle of autonomy and explores whether it can effectively be deployed in situations of internormativity and how to ensure it remains meaningful.

Also co-edited and co-written

by Renteln IMAGES AND HUMAN RIGHTS: Local and Global Perspectives / Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 43

ALUMNI CANON

1980s memorials that conceal — but also reveal — the ambiguity of this little understood figure.

LATINO BOXING IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Arcadia Publishing / Gene Aguilera (B.A., sociology, ’76) tells the true stories of Latino and Mexican ring idols who fought on the West Coast, while exploring the mythical devotion boxing purists and fans have for boxers.

THANKS FOR TAKING THE TIME TO BE PREPARED – A Handbook for Emergency Preparedness Tips AuthorHouse / In his first book, Michael Cantor (B.A., humanities, ’70) provides tips on how to be prepared for natural disasters, stay informed, and create emergency plans and kits.

MANAL FAKHOURY (B.S., biological sciences, ’82; Pharm.D., ’87) was awarded the distinguished alumni award from Webster University, where she earned her master’s degree.

TOM MIRTI (B.A., international relations, ’81) was selected to become the deputy executive director for water and land resources at the Suwannee River Water Management District in Live Oak, FL.

ALL-IN CAREGIVING: A Guide for the Care of Aging Parents Alfadore Press / Christine Klotz (B.S., occupational therapy, ’72) shows how to care for the health and well-being of an elderly loved one.

DOUG MOFFAT (B.A., international relations, ’88) was promoted to executive vice president and regional president of Pinnacle Bank.

RUSSELL WEST (B.A., history, ’88), counsel and deputy director of instruction for New Visions for Public Schools, was given an expanded role, supporting and developing the MicroCert program’s professional learning opportunities.

DOUBLE LIVES: True Tales of the Criminals Next Door Mango Media / Eric Brach (M.P.W. ’10) offers terrifying, true stories about the criminals hidden among us and the banality of evil and crime, elevated by a frank discussion of the nationwide criminal scourge of the moment: opioid addiction.

MARK CATESBY’S LEGACY: Natural History Then and Now Catesby Commemorative Trust Incorporated / With co-writer M.J. Brush, Alan Brush (B.A., zoology, ’56) provides an important historical perspective on the scientific discoveries made by Mark Catesby (1683–1749) three centuries ago.

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PHOENIX ZONES: Where Strength Is Born and Resilience Lies The University of Chicago Press / Hope Ferdowsian (B.S., biological sciences, ’96) combines survivor stories with the science on resilience to explore the link between violence against people and animals and the biological basis of recovery, peace and hope.

LINCOLN: The Ambiguous Icon Rowman & Littlefield / Steven Johnston (B.A., political science and psychology, ’82) explores Lincoln’s political thought and practice, reinterpreting the Gettysburg Address and many monuments and

GRACE NOTES: A Novel Based on the Life of Henry Mancini Barbera / Through dialogue portraying pivotal scenes from Mancini’s life, Stacia Raymond (MPW ’03) paints a picture of the famed composer as he has never been seen before.

MASS: A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest Pelekinesis / Jo Scott-Coe (B.A., English, ’91) probes the hidden wounds of paternal-pastoral failure and interrogates our collective American conscience in relation to gun violence and mass shootings.

1990s

ROGER LYNCH (B.S., physics, ’93) was elected to Mattel Inc.’s board of directors. He is the president and CEO of Pandora, a music streaming service.

Orange County District Attorney’s Office Chief of Staff SUSAN KANG SCHROEDER (B.A., political science and journalism, ’91) was recognized by the Korean Prosecutors Association with the Community Service Award for her extraordinary dedication and service to protecting the public, especially in the area of human exploitation and trafficking.

TINA THOMPSON (B.A., sociology and communication, ’97) was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in June and was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in September.

2000s Lieutenant Commander MEGHAN GRAY (B.S., geological sciences, ’07) assumed duties of executive officer of the USS Hopper in Honolulu, HI. JANELLE HOLMBOE (B.A., English, ’03) has been selected as vice president of enrollment management and dean of admissions at McDaniel College.

ADAM HURDER (B.A., political science, ’00) was named executive director of educational services for pre-kindergarten through fifth grade of Valley View School District 365U in Illinois.

DANIELLE HULTENIUS MOORE (B.A., political science, ’00) has been announced as the chair of the development committee for labor and employment law firm Fisher Phillips.

2010s

KELLY BRICE BARON (B.A., English, ’11) has been cast in the ensemble of the First Folio Theatre’s world premiere production of SHREW’D!, an adaption of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew set in a 1930s Chicago jazz club.

EMILY FRIDLUND (Ph.D., literature and creative writing, ’14) won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her debut novel, History of Wolves. The book was also a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.

WILL HELDFOND (B.A., economics,’11) was hired as vice president of True Wind Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity firm.

NATALIE STROM (B.A., political science, ’14) has been appointed director of communications for the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C.

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY Marriages and Births

CARLIN DALEY (B.A., psychology, ’02; M.A., occupational therapy, ’06; O.T.D., occupational therapy, ’07) married Gregory Reaume on May 19, 2018, in Foresthill, CA.

TROJANA LIT Y

The Disease Detective

After earning a degree in both biological sciences and international relations with a minor in philosophy from USC Dornsife, Neil Vora is working to keep us safe from some of the deadliest infectious diseases on the planet.

ATHENEUS OCAMPO (B.A., psychology, ’03) and TRINIDAD PAEZ OCAMPO (B.A., political science, ’02) welcomed their first son, Teo Manuel Paez Ocampo, on Oct. 27, 2018. He joins two older sisters, Nari and Diem.

In Memoriam NTOZAKE SHANGE (M.S., American studies, ’73) Bowie, MD (10/27/18) at age 70; playwright, poet and author whose most acclaimed work was the 1976 Tony Award-nominated play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf; Guggenheim Fellow and Pushcart Prize winner.

KURT G. VAUGHAN (B.A., social sciences and communication, ’89) of Aptos, CA (4/6/18) at age 50; pilot for Alaska Airlines; dedicated father and husband; admirable outdoorsman.

IL L U S T R AT I O N BY M AT T H E W S AV IN O; VO R A P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F N E IL VO R A

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Moving into the dark cave, Neil Vora turned on his flashlight and saw the ground was heaving with a living carpet of frogs, lizards and giant bugs.

And that wasn’t all.

“There were bats flying everywhere,” he said. “I felt liquid dripping from the ceiling.

I didn’t know if it was condensation or bat urine.”

Vora is a disease detective. A physician and epidemiologist with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he trekked through the Nigerian rainforest to reach this remote cave to investigate an annual festival of bats — mammals that carry deadly viruses, including Ebola and rabies.

Currently posted at New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Vora focuses on infectious disease preparedness and response. He was involved in the 2014 CDC Ebola response in Liberia and in 2015 he

oversaw active monitoring of Ebola in New York City, allowing the United States to keep borders open so healthcare and aid workers could continue to travel, fighting Ebola at its source.

The following year, Vora set up a Zika testing coordination program in New York City. A commander within the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, he deployed to assist Hurricane Maria evacuees in 2017.

As a teenager, Vora watched the 1995 film Outbreak with his smallpox-scarred father.

“I saw these people wearing the spacesuits and dealing with dangerous diseases,” Vora said. “I loved the idea of doing that, and my dad then told me about the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. He planted that seed in my mind.”

A USC Renaissance Scholar, Vora graduated with a double major in biology and international relations with a philosophy minor.

“I draw upon those different fields in my work on a regular basis. … On so many levels I think it’s one of the best jobs in the world.” —S.B Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 45

L.A. Dreaming

Faculty reflect on what the City of Angels means to them.

“Los Angeles is fascinating to me for what it was in the past and is becoming in the emerging future.

I wonder whether those first few people who foraged along the shoreline and hunted in the wide, mountainringed, dry coastal basin, perhaps 13,000 years ago, ever thought of the day when 4 million hustling, hoping people would wake up here every morning and find water and food waiting for them each day for breakfast.”

LYNN DODD, associate professor of the practice of religion

“I’ll admit it. My first impressions of Los Angeles were not very positive. I had driven with my partner cross-country to start a new chapter of our lives in the city, and as we traversed what seemed to be the never-ending sprawl of its outskirts, I thought: ‘This is the apocalypse.’

How would I ever feel at home in this vast centerless place? That was 18 years ago.

What has most surprised me is that this huge metropolis came to be my home, and to feel even small at times. I attribute this to the dynamism of my multi-ethnic neighborhood where I buy olives at an Armenian store, walk for pupusas on Sunday, and send my son to a Spanish immersion program at the local public school. Los Angeles became for me a global city where I was just another one of the locals.”

SARAH GUALTIERI, associate professor of American studies and ethnicity, history and Middle East studies

PHILIP ETHINGTON, professor of history, political science and spatial sciences

“Los Angeles has creativity flowing through every vein. I believe that the future of health care depends on that creativity as it becomes the fabric that weaves together medicine, science and technology. L.A. also represents global citizenship, and it will be a driver for constructing the future by being the place where opportunity can meet preparation every day.”

PETER KUHN, Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences and professor of biological sciences, medicine, biomedical engineering and aerospace and mechanical engineering and associate director of the Bridge Institute at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience 46

MANUEL PASTOR, Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change and professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity

A E R I A L F R E E WAY P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F U S C U N I V E R S I T Y A R C H I V E S- C A L I F O R N I A H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y C O L L EC T I O N

“Los Angeles to me is the modern equivalent of Imperial Rome: the glorious and also grotesque center of vast global networks of trade, migration and power.

It aggregates all cultures of the world — Latin, European, Asian, Middle Eastern and African — in a kaleidoscopic cosmopolitanism, and also typifes — because it produces — American mass culture. Like Augustan Rome, it is studded with citadels of the highest scientific and artistic achievements of our age, from USC to the Getty Museum to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It is a great seaport and a great space port. It is also honeycombed by the cruel disparities of inequal wealth: landscapes of opportunity joined to landscapes of injustice, from Beverly Hills to South L.A. All of America’s worst problems are present here, and also America’s greatest opportunity to solve them. This is why I am thrilled to live and work here.”

“Los Angeles feels like the land of the possible — where people reinvent themselves, where new ideas are trotted out for their first view, where innovations in business, technology and society are waiting to be born. But for me, the most significant space where L.A. has shown the world what’s next is in the realm of social justice organizing and policy.

“After all, this is a place that has been wracked by widening income divides and deep racial tensions — and against that canvas of injustice has been etched a new model of social movement mobilization that has helped to protect immigrants, reform policing, raise wages, and correct environmental inequities. It is absolutely intriguing to me as a scholar and absolutely inspiring to me as a citizen of the world.

“I was once asked what I loved about L.A., and I blurted out: ‘It has the nation’s biggest problems.’ And I meant that in a loving — and challenging — way. Faced with our economic and social dilemmas, we have rolled up our organizing sleeves to take on this messy experiment in multicultural democracy and show the country and the world that we can also generate some of the nation’s biggest and most hopeful solutions.”

D O R N S I F E F A M I LY

“Los Angeles can bewilder the first-time visitor because there’s no obvious center of town; downtown isn’t quite the hub, but then again neither is any other one specific place. That’s because L.A. sprouted up like a mushroom patch, a city of separate neighborhoods loosely knit together by freeways. Each neighborhood is a unique enclave with its own character. Finding your place in L.A. is all about picking your neighborhood and staying there, putting down roots. I don’t love everything about the ginormous city of L.A., but I truly do love my neighborhood of Eagle Rock. It’s got a college campus (Occidental), hikeable hills, walkable flatlands, decent coffee, and food offerings ranging from Peruvian to Filipino, Thai to tacos. It’s got an active and frequently cranky neighborhood Facebook group, artists, weirdos, PTA parents in rock bands, and totally normal folks that got lost en route to Pasadena. It feels like home.”

DARBY SAXBE, assistant professor of psychology

“This may sound crazy to most, who complain about traffic and rush hour and driving in Los Angeles in general, but I love the freeways of L.A. I love our metro rail, too, but driving the freeways of Los Angeles is not the same as driving anywhere else in the country. I feel a sense of freedom watching the landscape shift and change as I drive east, drive west, just drive. A word I don’t find occasion to use often, ‘amplitude,’ comes to mind. I feel amplitude in Los Angeles, freedom of space, expression, an expanse that has to do with ideas, point of view, identity.

Many cities in our great wide country offer us their own particular way of being, but Los Angeles, my home town, is the only city that makes me feel that I can take up as much cultural space as I want and make it look like whatever I want. Nighttime, the 60 freeway, headed west, the wind whipping past halfopen windows. Ziggy Stardust and Al Green on the radio, hurtling forward, lights of the city streaking past.”

DANA JOHNSON, associate professor of English and American studies and ethnicity

“I could never have imagined I would settle in L.A. I grew up on the coast of New Jersey, walking the beaches, fishing, surfing, diving — activities that pre-disposed me to my career as a marine scientist. L.A. was so many things: massive, diverse, mountains to sea — and surfing and its lore, one of my boyhood loves. L.A. was certainly intriguing from this perspective, but my spouse, Linda Duguay, and I had deep roots on the East Coast and Linda had serious reservations about relocating to the City of Angels.

‘L.A.?’ she said. ‘LaLa Land? Movie stars, sports trainers, therapists? I don’t think so.’ So, we demurred at first. Now we are cresting 20 years at USC. Linda has been reformed; she now refers to ‘the much-maligned L.A.’ “And what’s not to like? L.A. weather and USC football (most years). We spend many mornings walking the cliffs at Palos Verdes: The natural beauty and whale sightings are incredible. I’ve reconnected to my ocean roots and taken up surfing again. Trips to our amazing Wrigley laboratory on Catalina Island are routine and most important are the great colleagues and research challenges that have kept us fully engaged. We haven’t looked back.”

DOUGLAS CAPONE, William and Julie Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and professor of biological sciences, and LINDA DUGUAY, associate professor (research) of biological sciences

“I will never run out of things to study in Los Angeles. The ways in which lives from all over the world intersect here, the triumphs and the conflicts, the things people accomplish, often against all odds. The ways people get along, and the ways they don’t — these are case studies of humanity, of decisions made, of roads taken and not. I am amazed at how new this place is, as well as how ancient it feels to me at times. Studying L.A. feels to me like studying my home, which it is, but it also feels like studying a place very unfamiliar at times, a place that seems to greet every question with mystery.

I love that.”

WILLIAM DEVERELL, professor of history and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West

“I have been lucky to live in different cities in Europe and on the East Coast of the United States, which, despite their long history, were still growing by constantly trying to outdo each other. When I moved to L.A., I was amazed to discover a huge city that is growing not by simply looking at what other places are doing, but by inventing new ways for its people to live. This is particularly clear in the field of architecture and the arts scene.

L.A. is always looking toward the future, and I feel like it will be a bright one.”

DAVID CROMBEQUE, associate professor (teaching) of mathematics Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 47

IN MY OPINION

Los Angeles, Give Me Some of You

Writer and alumnus Dan Johnson explores what it means to dream in the City of Angels.

48

Dan Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in history from USC Dornsife in 2008. He is the creator of the Skid Row Reader, an adult literacy textbook oriented toward homelessness recovery. His first anthology of L.A.-based short fiction — Brea or Tar — is due to be released later this month. You can read more of his work at FreeDanJohnson.com.

WRIGLEY PHOTO BY MAURICE ROPER

For the past three and a half years, I have spent my Wednesday mornings at the Midnight Mission located on the corner of 6th and San Pedro streets in Los Angeles’ infamous Skid Row. I teach a class geared toward achieving an eighth-grade reading equivalency for adult students who are recovering from a variety of issues including substance abuse, incarceration, homelessness and deep poverty.

My route to and from class takes me along streets that couldn’t feel more alien from the campus where I once studied.

The immaculate landscaping in Alumni Park disappears in favor of heaping piles of waste that connect a warren of tents where humans live. The spirit of collegiate joviality withers beneath an imperative for survival that is tinted with the jaundice of drugs, violence, insanity and exploitation.

This is a conundrum familiar to anyone who has ever studied at USC. Beyond the university walls, there is another Los Angeles. Indeed, another California. One that is difficult to reconcile with the reality we Trojans have enjoyed.

Late USC University Professor, State Librarian Emeritus and all-around titan of the craft of history Kevin Starr devoted his life to a study of the Golden State and the City of Angels. He couched his work in the language of dreams.

For a man who loved wordplay, the exploration of dreams was more than an enduring pun. Starr drilled into his students a sense of paradox inherent to this place. If a city like Los Angeles can support dreams of abundance and prosperity, surely it is also capable of hosting equally potent nightmares.

From Skid Row to Santa Monica and Calabasas to Compton, there is a remarkable pessimism in vogue today —

a sentiment Starr might have called “doubting the dream.”

Ours is a crowded city whose larger metropolitan footprint creeps steadily outwards to accommodate nearly 20 million. Gone are the orange groves and the bucolic imagination of a sleepy rancho past. The rivers have been cemented into place even though the rain has given way to drought. There is a shortage of housing and a longstanding desperation among those who are beginning to believe that the dream was little more than a botched sales pitch.

It is interesting to note that USC was created in an era of similar pessimism. In 1880, the country was reeling from a crushing economic recession. Los Angeles was still a fledgling city with newly minted railroad access and a reputation for acts of unsavory brutality that make today’s City of Angels look tame.

Our alma mater was chartered less to enshrine eternal prosperity than to create a bedrock of citizens who would be equipped intellectually, emotionally and spiritually to bulwark and uphold Los Angeles itself.

As alumni, we are the proud recipients of an inheritance of fortitude that demands as much of us as it gives.

There’s a reason why the inscription on Tommy Trojan instructs us to be faithful, scholarly, skillful, courageous, ambitious. The university’s founders understood the core truth — that dreams of life in Los Angeles were only as potent as those who worked to render them into reality.

It is a remarkable gift and a tremendous responsibility.

We are expected to give of ourselves with resolute consistency as an article of faith that the dream of this place can be reconsecrated in our own time.

Not long ago, a wayward student who disappeared onto the streets a year ago returned to the Midnight Mission.

He was overcome with a need to change his life. So, he walked 20 miles overnight to arrive in time to get a bed.

The student appeared in my class desperate to find out the name of a book we had read together: John Fante’s L.A. classic, Ask the Dust.

He couldn’t forget one literary riff that haunts him as it haunts me.

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!

Think Globally, Act Locally USC Dornsife’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies is a diverse community of scholars, researchers and students who believe that creative thinking and collective action can preserve the planet — and our livelihoods.

Frontier research and education at the USC Wrigley Institute is focused on a 360-degree understanding of the complex problems threatening the environment. With facilities on the University Park campus and the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Santa Catalina Island, the USC Wrigley Institute discovers and tests new sustainability practices that can be scaled in communities throughout the world.

Fall 2018 / Winter 2019 | 49

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Life Moment L.A. NIGHTS The lights of USC’s University Park campus are lost in the shimmer of the Los Angeles Basin as the sun goes down over the city.

PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER