Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 6

The following is a comment on Kathy's blog entitled "Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 3", which can be found here.


Hi Kathy, I have never even heard of Boyle Heights, no less been there, so I enjoyed reading your blog post and learning a little bit about the area. I like how you chose one particular block in the area so that your analysis could be specific. Your depictions of the murals you observed seem accurate, and I think you are correct in your presumption that the "tagging on the walls and floor can be related more to lower economic communities" since it has often been associated with those groups of people. However, I'm not sure whether you are referring to the picture you posted when speaking of the tagging, but it seems that those words don't resemble to tagging that is usually done on walls/buildings; instead, those words seem more positive and hopeful than most of the graffiti/tagging I have seen.

It's great that you had the opportunity to interview a friend from the area (and even more advantageous for the purpose of understanding more about Boyle Heights) that he has lived for over two decades. I find it interesting that 90% of the community is of Hispanic decent, and this brings up the topics from class having to do with class and race. From this week's reading, "The Continuing Causes of Segregation", Massey and Denton consider the idea of segregation having to do with racism. While I do not know the history of Boyle Heights or its class, it seems as though those who live there would fall under a lower social class category according to the small information I have collected from your post, regarding the education system. That being said, I do not mean to imply that racism exists in Boyle Heights; rather, I am trying to get the point across that is brought up in this reading: that is, segregation from the past relates to living patterns spatially in a city. In this sense, the vast majority of Hispanics in Boyle Heights seems to demonstrate this idea.

Furthermore, according to the Marxist view, the fact that your friend's school was "too populated" implies that the community is trying to use the city as a tool for reproducing labor (and it's working; in fact, it's over-working, if you will). In Marxist's view, virtually everything within a city can be related back to the production of goods, and therefore, labor to produce the goods. In class, schools were described as "factories for producing labor" and when your friend says that "some [students] had to be transported to an occupational center in order to get an education", this is in correlation to the 'schools as factories' idea, in that education must remain organized in order to effectively continue the production of labor.