Catching Hell In The City Of Angels: Life And Meanings Of Blackness In South Central Los Angeles

by João H. Costa Vargas

Since the 1980s, Los Angeles has become the most racially and economically divided city in the United States. In the poorest parts of South Central Los Angeles, buildings in disrepair—the legacy of racial unrest. Moving beyond stereotypes of South Central's predominantly African American residents, João H. Costa Vargas recounts his almost two years living in the district. Personal, critical, and disquieting, Catching Hell in the City of Angels examines the ways in which economic and social changes in the twentieth century have affected the black community, and powerfully conveys the experiences that bind and divide its people.

Through compelling stories of South Central, including his own experience as an immigrant of color, Vargas presents portraits of four groups. He talks daily with women living in a low-income Watts apartment building; works with activists in a community organization against police brutality; interacts with former gang members trying to maintain a 1992 truce between the Bloods and the Crips; and listens to amateur jazz musicians who perform in a gentrified section of the neighborhood. In each case he describes the worldviews and the definitions of “blackness” these people use to cope with oppression. Vargas finds, in turn, that blackness is a form of racial solidarity, a vehicle for the renewal of African American culture, and a political expression of revolutionary black nationalism.

Vargas reveals that the social fault lines in South Central reflect both contemporary disparities and long-term struggles. In doing so, he shows both the racialized power that makes “blackness” a prized term of identity and the terrible price that African Americans have paid for this emphasis. Ultimately, Catching Hell in the City of Angels tells the story of urban America through the lives of individuals from diverse, overlapping, and vibrant communities.

João H. Costa Vargas is assistant professor in the Center for African and African American Studies and the department of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin.

Robin D. G. Kelley is the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books, including Yo Mama's Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America.

Genres: Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

João H. Costa Vargas
Professor: Anthropology

"My written work is a result of engaging collective inventions aimed at combating antiblackness. Categorically different than racism, antiblackness defines the modern world's foundational concepts of the Human and the Social. Emerging from collaborative efforts in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador (in Brazil), and in Austin and Los Angeles (in the United States.), the collective inventions attempt to propose alternatives to the current dynamics of social death and early physical death by preventable causes. Such dynamics include juvenile and adult imprisonment, repressive policing, punitive schooling, residential hypersegregation, exposure to environmental hazards, and blocked access to health care and well-being. Exploring the possibility and terms of Black-nonblack collaboration, such inventions pursue the imagination and practice of viable Black life worlds. To seek horizons beyond planetary antiblackness is to reconfigure the terms of our individual and collective existence, and to engage the endless process of abolition."

Reviews

[Lizz · Rating 5 out of 5]

finally! this is way back from W22 where me and Gideon presented on 2 chapters from this book.

[Jean Robert Petnkeu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for class. The shocking realities of this ethnographic work will leave a mark on you.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is brilliant in so many ways, one of them being what it attempts to deliver, so I don't think it is quite its fault that it doesn't quite manage the full delivery.

One of the things I most appreciated about Costa Vargas's ethnographical approach was the solid stance it takes within and for the community he is studying. It is unapologetic in its politics and its sympathies, but the 26 months of fieldwork this Light-skinned Black Brazilian carried out in South Central (is it wrong to be smitten with the idea of intellectuals from the Global South coming to study the Global South in the North so to speak?) really manages to grapple with the world views and realities with true integrity unlike so much of what I have read. The insights he offers and the way these are wielded to critique other work on the inner cities ring so true with me, particularly in my work on segregation and it's meaning...

As this work will show, many factors are pushing Black communities to new configurations in which relations between class, gender, and generation are in the making. Idealizations of, or values based on the stable, nuclear family, must be revised. They do not help understand the present conditions defined by hypersegregation. They do not provide a useful and attainable model of social relations in a context in which work, and therefore social relations, have been refigured dramatically since (at the very least) the deindustrialization of the 1980s; and, finally, they project values that inevitably condemn the so-called dysfunctional families to moral and social marginality. Without a fuller, ethnographically informed, historically grounded comprehension, one will not be able to perceive the inventiveness of their survival strategies, or the pains and pleasures experienced in extremely difficult social conditions. Furthermore, without this deeper and broader perspective one will not be able to understand that grassroots, alternative projects of social organization are being developed within Black communities, in their own terms, based on their own comprehensions of themselves. Black communities' own comprehensions of themselves, in turn, have to be understood as dialogues and struggles with histories, institutions, persons, and ideas that go well beyond the confines of the imposed ghetto."

I am still thinking of how this can be conceptualized, segregated physical space within a broader political economy of scarcity and severe unemployment creating an entirely new social and political space that those from outside have trouble understanding, much less finding empathy with. This book calls that out, and gives you ammunition in the form of case studies for explaining just how wrong it can be. It also manages to see how much is being done within the community itself to heal, improve, struggle. It attempts to remove the pathologies and culpabilities long associated with individuals by academics and policy makers, and to see what actually exists, both the good and the bad.

I am not quite sure whether or not he nails down the nexus between this and blackness on a wider scale, the broader interplays between class and gender, nor the potentials for social action. He goes into three in depth case studies of ideas of blackness: the women living in his own apartment complex and their mutual aid and solidarity; the political activism of the Coalition Against Police Abuse and the gang truce; and the music scene at Leimert Park. Each of these is fascinating and offers great depth of insight, but I was left trying to see how these fit together, and what possibilities of a greater transformation they could offer. They did not seem to touch each other, remaining three processes in parallel. And all of them parallel again to the organizations and people that I knew working in South Central like Agenda and Community Coalition. In part I think this is the problem, the great tragedy of human efforts in the ghetto, this working in parallel, this great institutional fragmentation while on the ground people just do what they have to do to get by. So perhaps this is the underlying lack I felt. Or perhaps the examples just are to small, too localized and not quite built back again into something of more inspiration. I couldn't tell.

I did like the conclusion, grappling as it was with the strengths and limitations of ideas of Blackness, which is so important in the United States where everything is experienced through race, yet nothing can be accomplished without broader alliances. Costa Vargas writes

Blackness therefore, can encapsulate both the emphsis on Black identity and the exploration of how new identities may be formed on the basis of a progressive and inclusive political program. Blackness's contradictory natures and its multiple manifestations are the very engine of its creative and revolutionary potential. (217)

[Molly O'Leary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for my cultural anthropology class at Pitt. It describes the horrors of the division between race and class, and examines the affect of changes to the black community in Los Angeles. Very impactful.