South Los Angeles, one of the West Coast’s last great working-class places, has been a destination point for two great migrations: African Americans arriving from the South and East, and, more recently, Latin Americans immigrating to Southern California. While media have long dwelled on examples of interracial and interethnic conflict there, the everyday reality of South L.A.’s ever-changing neighborhoods has revolved around Black-Brown co-existence, cooperation, and innovative multiracial organizing. How have South Central’s diverse residents managed to find solidarity in unsettling and polarizing times? What new and shared place-based identities have emerged from the area’s mix of histories and cultures? And what can the rest of L.A., and the U.S., learn from South L.A.? 

USC sociologists Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor, co-authors of South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South L.A., and Corey Matthews, chief operating officer of Community Coalition, visit Zócalo to explore the lessons of South L.A.'s struggles and successes. This Zócalo/Esperanza Community Housing event was streamed live from Mercado La Paloma on July 27, 2021 and was moderated by Los Angeles Times assistant managing editor for culture and talent Angel Jennings. 

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For a full report on the live discussion, check out the Takeaway: 



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Is South L.A. Forging a New American Identity? at Zócalo Public Square

While smog in Los Angeles and wildfire smoke in San Francisco dominate headlines, California’s rural communities are also besieged by a constellation of forces that foul their air. In the San Joaquin Valley, one of the most polluted parts of the state, one in six children have asthma, and the impacts of air pollution cost the region $3 billion annually. Air quality is a statewide issue—more than half of California’s counties fail to meet federal pollution standards. But the burden isn’t evenly distributed: Black and Latino people are exposed to about 40 percent more fine particulate matter from cars, trucks, and buses than white Californians, and low-income communities about 20 percent more than their higher-income counterparts.
What would it take for the more privileged parts of California to reduce air pollution that disproportionately affects low-income and rural communities around the state? What political and economic strategies have succeeded in improving air quality locally and statewide? And can people and organizations fighting for clean air find inspiration from coalition-building and organizing efforts in other arenas?
Former California Air Resources Board chair Mary Nichols, Central Valley Air Quality Coalition executive director Catherine Garoupa White, and USC sociologist and “Solidarity Economics” author Manuel Pastor visited Zócalo to discuss how we can help all Californians breathe easier. This event was streamed live from the ASU California Center in the historic Herald Examiner in downtown Los Angeles on January 27, 2022 and was moderated by KQED correspondent Saul Gonzalez. 
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Can California Solve Its Air Quality Inequality?

The struggle to limit carbon emissions often pits sustainable energy against fossil fuels. But does it have to be this way? As Kartikeya Singh writes in a new essay for Issues in Science and Technology, India’s carbon-heavy government ministries have shown a surprising ability to engineer deep change: the nation brought electricity to over half a billion citizens between 2009 and 2019, then presided over a grid where wind and solar became cheaper than power from coal. Could these ministries—which employ 20 million people—transform the country’s energy sector to be ecologically and economically sustainable? Instead of pinning all our hopes on technology, entrepreneurs, and politicians, what can the world accomplish by harnessing fossil fuel bureaucracies for the future?
Center for Strategic and International Studies senior associate Kartikeya Singh visits Zócalo to ask how bureaucracies might embrace obsolescence and reinvent themselves to address today’s most urgent problems. This Zócalo/Issues in Science and Technology event was streamed online on Thursday, February 17, 2022 and moderated by Issues editor-in-chief Lisa Margonelli. 

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Can Bureaucracy Start a Climate Revolution?

Live from the ASU California Center: Legal scholars Jody David Armour of USC and Eugene Volokh of UCLA, attorney Jean-Paul Jassy, and Battinto L. Batts Jr., dean of the ASU Cronkite School, visit Zócalo to discuss how we might protect free expression while also protecting our society from the misuse of that freedom. Tonight’s event is moderated by Los Angeles Times editorial writer Carla Hall. 

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Does The First Amendment Still Protect Free Speech? at Zócalo Public Square

To leave your birthplace behind and make a home elsewhere is to cross any number of boundaries—national and linguistic, religious and spiritual. While loss is an inevitable part of this journey, it’s not just about displacement; it is also a story of cultural change and celebration. Migrants and immigrants find new ways to balance assimilation and tradition—and to create entirely new identities. This reinvention happens at home and out in the world, and cuts across religion, food, and art. Its impact is as personal as it is global. How do people who are separated from their homelands reinvent cultural practices in their new communities? How does cultural identity change across generations and over time?

Ragamala Dance artistic directors, choreographers, and principal dancers Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, writer and Science Fiction Poetry Association president Bryan Thao Worra, and USC Institute of Armenian Studies director Shushan Karapetian visited Zócalo to discuss how they are reimagining what home means. This event was streamed live from The Soraya at California State University, Northridge on March 16, 2022 and was moderated by Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. 

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How Do Homelands Cross Borders?

Survey after survey suggests Americans strongly support immigration. Yet fear dominates the politics around immigration. Elected officials and pundits routinely use the rhetoric that immigrants are threats to culture, public safety, and jobs—not only to justify restrictions on migrants’ rights, but also to divide communities and gain power at the expense of democracy itself. What makes this fear-mongering so effective, and is there any way to fight it? How have communities, organizations, and governments successfully reconciled differing views on immigration over the past few years? And could immigration inspire unity rather than conflict and crisis?

National Immigration Forum president/CEO and ASU Social Transformation Lab fellow Ali Noorani, author of Crossing Borders: The Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants, visited Zócalo to examine how new policies, stories, and responses to immigration can be used to build a more cohesive and welcoming nation. This Zócalo event was streamed online on Thursday, March 24, 2022 and moderated by New York Times national correspondent Miriam Jordan.

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Could Immigration Unite America? With Ali Noorani & Miriam Jordan

California is turning away from mass incarceration. After generations of opening prisons and increasing the number of inmates inside them, the state government now plans to close a number of institutions. But many state prisons are located in struggling rural communities that depend on the jobs and health care infrastructure these facilities provide. The Newsom administration’s announcement of its intention to close the California Correctional Center in Susanville this year has sparked questions about the resulting effects on the Lassen County community. How do the economies and civic spheres of our prison towns really work? What is the relationship between these institutions and their communities? And what assistance, if any, should the state provide to towns that lose their prisons?
Lassen Community College President Trevor Albertson, Parlier mayor and retired correctional officer Alma Beltran, and University of Wisconsin sociologist John M. Eason, author of Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation, visited Zócalo to discuss what the end of prisons will mean for neighboring communities. This event was streamed live from Susanville, CA on April 7, 2022 and was moderated by Marshall Project staff writer Keri Blakinger.

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What Would The End Of Mass Incarceration Mean For Prison Towns?

Growing homelessness has fueled bitter conflicts in hundreds of neighborhoods across California. The drought is renewing generations-old local wars over water. Schools have become political and cultural battlegrounds, with parents and teachers at odds. And fights over pandemic response, from Shasta to Orange Counties, have escalated into violent threats between citizens and local officials. Why are so many Californians falling into fights with their neighbors? How much do social media and our polarized national politics contribute to local divides? And what are the best strategies to extract ourselves, and our neighbors, from intense conflicts so that we might work together to solve problems?
“High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out” author Amanda Ripley, UCLA sociocultural anthropologist Kyeyoung Park, and mediator and former California Superior Court judge B. Scott Silverman visited Zócalo to discuss how we can stop contentious disputes from escalating and taking over our communities. This Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event, co-presented with the Natural History Museum of LA County, was streamed live from the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum on April 13, 2022 and was moderated by Los Angeles Times columnist Erika D. Smith.

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How Can Our Communities Escape Polarizing Conflict?

In 1933, Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg immigrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles; he would spend the rest of his life writing music and teaching composition at USC and UCLA. Following him, in 1940, came Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor Stravinsky, who settled in Hollywood after making the move from France. Then, in 1942, fellow Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor Sergei Rachmaninoff arrived in Beverly Hills. These immigrants—and others who followed them—fused L.A.’s free-spirited culture with the traditions they brought with them from their homelands.

A string quartet of four Los Angeles Opera musicians—cellist Evgeny Tonkha, violist Erik Rynearson, and violinists Roberto Cani and Ana Landauer—visits Zócalo to perform the music of L.A.’s immigrant composers, from Schoenberg to contemporary Indian American composer Reena Esmail, who continues in this proud tradition today by merging the worlds of Indian and Western classical music. This event was streamed live from the ASU California Center in Los Angeles, CA on April 28, 2022 in partnership with Artistic Soirées and the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

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A Special Zócalo Music Presentation: How Immigrants Composed L.A.

Food, art, culture, weather, beaches, mountains—and people, from all over the world and with a broad range of talents and dreams—make Los Angeles an amazing place to live. A homelessness and housing crisis, drought, traffic, inequality, and political dysfunction can make Los Angeles an impossible place to live. The county is home to areas with the lowest and highest rates of child poverty in the state; innovative tech companies and broadband dead zones; and some of America’s best infrastructure to support green energy as well as poor air quality and deeply entrenched, polluting industries. Los Angeles has a serious gap between its potential and its reality. How are individuals and organizations working to harness L.A.’s many resources to solve its worst problems? What would the best possible Los Angeles look like, and how can the entire city come together to create a shared vision?

Gloria Gonzalez, Youth Development Coordinator at Youth Justice Coalition, and Sissy Trinh, Founder and Executive Director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance, visit Zócalo to discuss the efforts that inspire them—from mutual aid to policy change—and what they think it will take for Los Angeles to live up to its full potential, for all Angelenos. This event was streamed live from Los Angeles, CA on May 4, 2022 and was moderated by Meztli Projects Director Joel Garcia. 

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Can We All Live in the Best Version of Los Angeles?

Direct democracy is supposed to be a people’s process, allowing everyday citizens to enact their own ideas for laws or constitutional amendments. But does California’s system live up to that promise? Qualifying a measure for the ballot costs so many millions of dollars that only the richest people and interests can bring their proposals forward. Elected and appointed officials have considerable sway over the process, and routinely use it for their own aims. And voters have little information, and few opportunities to deliberate, as they make decisions about complicated proposals that, once approved, are very difficult to fix or change. How should recall and ballot initiatives change, and what reforms does the state seem likely to enact?

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, Public Policy Institute of California president Mark Baldassare, and Initiative & Referendum Institute president John Matsusaka, author of Let the People Rule, visit Zócalo to explore what it would take to bring more democracy into California’s direct democracy. This event was streamed live from Los Angeles, CA on May 11, 2022 and was moderated by Nathan Gardels, Editor-in-Chief of Noēma Magazine and Co-founder of Berggruen Institute.

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For a full report on the live discussion, check out the Takeaway: https://zps.la/3PlXl1p    




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Is This What Direct Democracy Looks Like? With Shirley Weber

An innovative blend of ideas journalism and live events.

Is South L.A. Forging a New American Identity? at Zócalo Public Square

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