Lisa Gray-Garcia wants to protect the L.A. neighborhoods she loves. (Photo: Estevan Oriol)
In the latest issue of Poor Magazine, reporter Lisa Gray-Garcia calls out the nonprofit organization L.A. Gang Tours for ‘zoo-ifying’ the residents of poor, minority communities in Los Angeles. The tours are billed as providing “customers with a true first-hand encounter of the history and origin of high profile gang areas and the top crime scene locations in South Central, Los Angeles” — a mission statement that doesn’t sit well with Gray-Garcia.
Gray-Garcia’s article, “We are not animals in the hood,” levels the claim that throughout time, many have fetishized the poor, and that L.A. Gang Tours is simply the latest offender. As an example, she cites Charles Dickens’ 19th century travelogue — American Notes for General Circulation — and his report on poverty that was published in the The New York Times and led to the displacement of thousands of poor immigrants from New York’s tenements:
“[Dickens] characterized the tenements as deplorable cesspools. The subsequent demolitions of thousands of buildings in New York housing poor folks was for our own good, the social workers, city planners and real estate speculators told us, for the betterment of us seething, unwashed masses of poor people, unable to care for ourselves, speak for ourselves, or think for ourselves, our children or our homes.”
L.A. Gang Tours, Gray-Garcia concedes, has a similarly Dickensian bent in its neo-liberal approach to “save” those living in neighborhoods like Compton, Wilmos, and East L.A.
…in the case of the bizarre, wrong-headed-ness of the LA Gang Tours and its non-profit organization of the same name, once again it is staffed by well-meaning advocates who aim to Save Lives, Create Jobs and Rebuild Communities, as their tag-line says. We are told by staffers and their corporate and non-corporate advocates that bus tours through gritty, neighborhoods peopled by poor youth of color caught up in violence, drugs and poverty, is for our own good. It will bring us jobs and opportunities and hope.
L.A. Gang Tours, as Gray-Garcia states above, does have an advocacy slant. But it appears to be built upon the notion that outsiders believe they can swoop in to economically depressed neighborhoods (see: any gentrification debate in any city in America) and solve problems that residents are unable to solve on their own — a concept that many like-minded groups in neighborhoods across the country have attempted and failed to successfully implement. And while these groups are not always the villains they are sometimes made out to be, effective community advocacy requires more than a nonprofit status and good intentions.
Admittedly, I know nothing of L.A. Gang Tours successes or shortcomings, aside from the limited information provided on their website. And tours don’t officially begin until January. But the tours are coordinated by Alfred Lomas (pictured below), a gang intervention worker in South L.A. and former Florencia 13 gang member, which lends credence to the real-world experience behind this project. Gray-Garcia, however, remains skeptical of the group’s endeavor:
One of the many oxymoronic aspects of this concept is the notion, just like Dickens reported, that our neighborhoods, our communities, our corners, our schools, and our homes, are crazy, dirty, sick, disgusting and must be cleaned up, cleaned out and eradicated, hygienic metaphors about humans scattered about with impunity.
Alfred Lomas walks into the Los Angeles River basin below the 6th Street bridge. The tours will make a stop here, to show the urban tagging scene. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)
Gray-Garcia ends her piece with a sort of reverse-psychology warning to the community:
I started this piece by saying I had terror in my heart about the gang tours, but be clear its not terror for the poor, unsuspecting tourist, default colonizers and 21st century missionaries, stumbling and trampling over our communities and cultures as the well-meaning gang tours commence, rather, its terror for the residents of the proposed tour sites, and so I caution all of the community members, families and young people to hold on carefully to their purses, wallets, belongings, poetry, art and scholarship, cause, well, you know how dangerous those tourists can be.
Perhaps there is an unseen silver lining to this story. However, if Gray-Garcia’s observations are an indicator of what other residents are thinking, the fate of L.A. Gang Tours may already be sealed.
