Boosting on the Page

IN the reading, David Fine argues that Los Angeles was “boosted” into existence for a variety of reasons, taking into account historical, literary and cultural situations. As a history Major, I found it interesting when he discussed the development of San Francisco as a city, with Los Angeles being the “new instant city being manufactured” in 1897. From this moment on, diversity proved to be a crucial element of the city, making it an immigrant destination where various nations and languages came together. I feel that this has an enormous basis for the Los Angeles we have today (specifically seen with destinations like Little Ethiopia and Little Tokyo). Next, Fine explored how Los Angeles came into existence through “the page”. Immediately this quote from Fine caught my attention: “Los Angeles fiction is about the act of entry, about the discovery and the taking possession of a place that differed significantly from the place left behind…by a sense of dislocation and estrangement, is the central and essential feature of the fiction of Los Angeles” (p.15). Those who began to write about LA were viewing it from the outside as new migrants to the city that was still in the crucial stages of development. However, even today I feel that this applies to me. I tend to look at LA from the outside myself, which means my writing may show that I am experiencing Los Angeles just as these writers were. These writers went about encompassing how they felt about the city (or even how they wanted to feel about it), and represented it on the page for others to see, adding to the mythology of Los Angeles, whether or not it was fact or fiction. Fine ended this article with an interesting quote; “Twentieth-Century fiction about Los Angeles is less a collection of hate mail to a beleaguered city than an expression of anxiety about the modern condition”. Through this reading, he was expressing how the booster mentality that was so evident in the beginning years of Los Angeles has been lost. But those now writing about this city are not viewing it begrudgingly, but almost longingly, to return to how the city was once viewed instead of what may come in the future
--Reilly Wilson

photo: union station passenger terminal
credit: via hidden l.a website