Episode 13: When We Live Our Best Truth and Speak Our Minds
Episode 13. Vana Thiero describes a Great America where the kids of today become leaders who speak their minds and seek what is best for the greater good ALL humanity for the long term.
Vana Thiero is a single mom of two sons diagnosed with autism. She is a producer, writer, public speaker, Emmy winning editor, activist and comedian, who goes by the letter V.
Vana grew up in Pontiac, during the time in the 60s when black people were migrating to the north for great jobs. It was a time of positivity and great opportunities. Her family was the first black family to buy a house in her neighborhood, so she was friends with white and black children alike growing up. Their house was featured in Ebony Magazine.
Los Angeles, CA: THE GREAT AMERICA OF 1900-1950
The first half of the 20th century was arguably the heyday of Los Angeles. This was the era when what was once considered a secondary city at best, first surpassed rival San Francisco as the largest city in California, and then became one of the largest cities in the country. Where economic expansion was once restrained by a modest supply of fresh water and the lack of a natural harbor, massive projects pushed by city leadership addressed these limitations, and Los Angeles became a center for trade and petroleum production, well prepared for the industrial boom to come. Los Angeles in this era seemed to embody the dream of opportunity, economic and otherwise, which had been associated with California in the American imagination since the days of the Gold Rush.
More than anything, however, what elevated Los Angeles to the status of great American city was the outsized place that it would hold in popular culture thanks to it having become a center of the burgeoning motion picture industry. Echoing previous generations of emigrants who came west to escape the constraints of the east, film pioneers settled in Los Angeles starting in 1910 to evade legal entanglements in the Atlantic states and to take advantage of year-round sunshine. By the 1930s, six Los Angeles based film studios, all started by Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs who had come from the East coast, would dominate the industry and the local economy. As an extension of filmmaking, Los Angeles quickly became a focus for the arts in general, and a vision of a lifestyle driven by Southern California’s sunny climate influenced American notions of fashion and leisure.
But this lifestyle was not easy to achieve or maintain. Much of what Los Angeles became could be credited to one man, William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant and self-taught engineer who first arrived in the 1870s when the city’s population was less than ten thousand. By 1902, he was head of the city’s water department and quickly recognized that Los Angeles simply did not have enough water to accommodate the growth that city fathers envisioned. Mulholland and a clique of Los Angeles businessmen reached out to communities far removed from the city and through a combination of legal maneuvers and engineering rerouted distant rivers. Mulholland’s career effectively ended in 1928, when a dam collapse in the adjacent San Fernando Valley that killed over 400 people was blamed on him, but Los Angeles would continue to reach further and further away to sate its need for water, turning once productive farmland into wasteland and even sparking disputes with adjacent states. For residents of Los Angeles proper, however, there was little discussion of this cost, and the problems of distant people without the political or economic wherewithal to resist were far from their minds.
Civic boosters likewise found certain communities inconvenient to their vision of what they wanted the city to become and found them all too easy to set them aside in the name of progress. At the beginning of the century, African-Americans saw Los Angeles as a haven from the discrimination they faced in the East, but by the 1920s, they found themselves increasingly segregated by language in deeds, euphemistically referred to as “restrictions,” which limited their choice of neighborhoods. A thriving and well-established Chinatown was forced to move as a result of railroad expansion in 1938.
Nowhere does this seem more ironic than in the case of the Mexican-Americans community, once the city’s majority, but now less than ten percent of the population. Though Los Angeles embraced architectural elements like Spanish tile and promoted an admittedly antiseptic version of its Spanish and Mexican past, the people who represented that heritage were marginalized and had little voice in the City’s future. Restrictions kept Mexicans, immigrants from Japan and certain parts of Europe, in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights. Eventually, the sense of solidarity that emerged in these communities would provide them with some political clout, but this would be in the future.
Los Angeles continued to thrive after World War Two, but as it reached two million people, it became increasingly difficult to simply engineer its way out of problems or to ignore its issues. Growing suburbs in places like Orange County now competed for resources and political power. Emerging African-American and Mexican-American political leaders challenged the cliquish leadership at city hall. More than anything, this city that emerged largely during the era of the automobile was becoming too spread out and difficult to manage. The city is now more diverse and more representative than it was in those days, and retains its special place in our popular culture, but there is still a sentimental attachment to the era when it seemed that anything was possible there.
-Tom Prezelski, Resident Historian
In Search of the Great America 