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Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World
Writing before the riots of 1992, Rieff found not a city of dreams but a city of bitter contradictions. A city that, like the United States itself, was being transformed by immigrants and refugees from Latin America and East Asia from an extension of Europe to a diverse patchwork of the peoples of the world. This is an L.A. that has never been described before. With a new afterword.
- GenresCities
272 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1991
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About the author
David Rieff
49 books40 followersDavid Rieff is an American polemicist and pundit. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 3, 2015
I can't believe it took me 20 years to read this book and the biggest takeaway I've got is, "You really are Susan Sontag's son, aren't you?" This *was* an interesting read. But it was also gratuitously simplistic and polemical.
Rieff's by-now familiar point is that white people in Southern California at the end of the 20th century remained willfully ignorant about their enormous reliance on immigrant labor and on the ongoing demographic change of Los Angeles into a plurality-immigrant city.
To get there, he starts off by criticizing his New York friends for being unable to speak of L.A. without deriding and stereotyping the city. Then he spends half the book hanging out with his very upper-middle-class, white Los Angeles friends and ends up drawing his own derisive stereotypes about the city--not the least of which is the laughable idea that his moneyed, pampered, privileged Westside friends somehow represent the average white Los Angeles resident. He criticizes them for not being able to accept Latino Angelenos--especially their own maids and gardeners--as fellow human beings. Yet in doing so, he makes it seem pretty clear that he, himself, doesn't know many people of lesser means than these whom he's criticizing.
He eventually makes it to the Eastside to basically see how the other half lives. But for all the great import he gives--as did many 1990s reviewers--to his "discovery" of demographic change in L.A., it's amazing to note that he never seems to notice the ethnic diversity in his NYC hometown. He has to travel 3,000 miles to discover some rich white people don't take poor Latinos seriously. Not for nothing, but he could have simply left the Upper West Side and crossed the 59th Street Bridge into Queens or 155th Street into Washington Heights to learn the same thing.
____
UPDATE: So now that I've made it all the way to the end, I have three more brief observations:
1. Reiff repeats himself so many times in the final 150 pages, there's probably only about 50 pages of real content there.
2. It's *VERY* hard to swallow that after 300 pages of scathingly criticizing the entirety of white Los Angeles, at the very end he claims his point to be that we must all love each other.
3. What a schmuck.
Rieff's by-now familiar point is that white people in Southern California at the end of the 20th century remained willfully ignorant about their enormous reliance on immigrant labor and on the ongoing demographic change of Los Angeles into a plurality-immigrant city.
To get there, he starts off by criticizing his New York friends for being unable to speak of L.A. without deriding and stereotyping the city. Then he spends half the book hanging out with his very upper-middle-class, white Los Angeles friends and ends up drawing his own derisive stereotypes about the city--not the least of which is the laughable idea that his moneyed, pampered, privileged Westside friends somehow represent the average white Los Angeles resident. He criticizes them for not being able to accept Latino Angelenos--especially their own maids and gardeners--as fellow human beings. Yet in doing so, he makes it seem pretty clear that he, himself, doesn't know many people of lesser means than these whom he's criticizing.
He eventually makes it to the Eastside to basically see how the other half lives. But for all the great import he gives--as did many 1990s reviewers--to his "discovery" of demographic change in L.A., it's amazing to note that he never seems to notice the ethnic diversity in his NYC hometown. He has to travel 3,000 miles to discover some rich white people don't take poor Latinos seriously. Not for nothing, but he could have simply left the Upper West Side and crossed the 59th Street Bridge into Queens or 155th Street into Washington Heights to learn the same thing.
____
UPDATE: So now that I've made it all the way to the end, I have three more brief observations:
1. Reiff repeats himself so many times in the final 150 pages, there's probably only about 50 pages of real content there.
2. It's *VERY* hard to swallow that after 300 pages of scathingly criticizing the entirety of white Los Angeles, at the very end he claims his point to be that we must all love each other.
3. What a schmuck.
April 26, 2013
I found the historical material most interesting. Such matters as Los Angeles diocesan support for the clericalist Cristero revolt in Mexico in the 1930s, are rarely heard of. And quite well written in style.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews