Roots

Growing up in Los Angeles, the closest thing to a “neighborhood” came in the form of the cities and towns nestled in the north side foothills around Pasadena, the home of the Rose Bowl. At the end of the 110 freeway, the northern end of the vast Arroyo Seco at the foot of San Gabriel Mountains is where I grew up. The people I grew up around mainly came from the cities dotting those hills: Pasadena, Altadena, Glendale, La Canada, and Sierra Madre. It is the northern region of Los Angeles that you would never know existed side by side with the parts seen in the movies because its all tucked behind the hills, but surprisingly close to Downtown and Hollywood. It’s a trek down freeway after freeway from the beaches, but close enough that you can still see the ocean from the hillsides, and you can get there in under an hour.

It wouldn’t be accurate to call the area “the valley,” but part of it’s still sitting in what’s called the San Gabriel valley. Growing up here was my version of a small town, until I meet people from real small towns, and I realize my city alone is the home over 140,000 people.

What makes the north side so populated yet somewhat bubble like, separate from Los Angeles, is part of what makes LA what it is – the topography. Neighborhoods are perched along hilly areas above the Arroyo Seco and the LA River. The neighborhood of Frogtown, for example, is a riverside community that keeps most out, and has created a whole little world. These cities within cities are what makes Los Angeles what it is. Pasadena borders the city of Los Angeles on three sides, but at the neighborhoods of Via Marisol, Highland Park, Mt. Washington, El Sereno and Chinatown before reaching Downtown Los Angeles.

The Northeast region of LA is an incredibly diverse place. It’s a reminder that Los Angeles is a truly unique American city in the sense that its roots are not Colonial European like New York and Chicago – they are Latino and Asian. Northeast Los Angles is 63 percent Latino, 16 percent white, 16 percent Asian according to the Los Angeles Times’ Mapping LA survey. Pasadena is 39 percent white, 33 percent Latino, 14 percent black and 10 percent Asian. We all live side by side with each other, living and working and driving past each other every day. 

Sunday morning I woke up early and watched the sunrise in the hills from the fourth floor of this building nestled on a steep slope. The bright lights slowly fading from the sun, just beginning to peak over the ocean’s horizon line that you can barely make out in the distance. It’s a bit foggy, smoggy, really, but it was warm like always, even though its January. There are already many people shuffling around outside the building. One of them, Edgar, has the LBC tattooed on his neck. I overhear another, Carlos, talking about his oldest son, who just achieved a full ride to USC, the first in his family to go to college.

I get in the car and start making my way to the coast, down the hill, past some taco trucks and some strip malls winding my way through the city on the highway. The journey from the hills to the coast is thirty minutes, just like the saying goes. I walked along the water until I come to a park with a large metal structure blocking the way. A structure covered in color and art and life on one side, and on the other, surrounded by nothing but empty space. I turn around and look at the hills. I look down to the shore and see the waves being interrupted by the structure.

I’m far from home but I’m seeing people I walk by every day, and I’m struck by how similar it is to where I am from. A short 4-hour drive from my childhood home, the land is the same. At night, the hills of Tijuana lit up like Hollywood, the buildings indistinguishable in the darkness from the hills I grew up around. But, at the coast, the same coast 40 minutes from my house in Pasadena, there’s a wall that designates the boundaries, where naturally, none existed. It’s striking in its bluntness, and I am forced to listen and see things that at home I can rarely be bothered to see – how similar we all end up living next to each other and ultimately influencing each others our natural, urban and cultural surroundings.

People live right up to the border wall on the Mexican side. But in the states, the closest parking lot is a mile away from the wall that feeds into the sea.

Seeing the palm trees, the waves crashing, it all felt so familiar. The double metal fence bisecting those waves though, was quite unfamiliar.

Sean Eckhardt