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Abstract
In 2010, a group of black and brown former gang members from South Los Angeles started a tour called LA Gang Tours, in which they give oral histories of their lives to an overwhelmingly white tourist population. Some local politicians, reporters, and activists contend that the tour is “exploitative” because tour guides profit off of LA’s gang history. Using interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis, I argue that the exploitation critique misses tour guides’ analyses that link racism and classism. Challenging the exploitation argument, I theorize tour guide labor as a “lumpenproletariat’s redemption,” by which they use and critique capitalism.
Notes
Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 5.
Ibid., 5.
Gangs, “Los Angeles Police Department,” 2014, http://www.lapdonline.org/get_informed/content_basic_view/1396 (accessed December 28, 2014).
Ibid.
Randall Archibold, “A Gangland Bus Tour, with Lunch and a Waiver,” The New York Times (New York), January 16, 2010a, 1; Madeleine Brand, “Los Angeles Gang Tour Puts a Twist on Drive-Bys,” National Public Radio, January 22, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122822689 (accessed August 9, 2015); Stephen Gold, “Los Angeles Bus Tours to Offer Visitors a Look at Cradle of Nation’s Gang Culture,” The Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland, 2009a), 15; “Stoner Commentator: Tours of the LA Gang Area?” YouTube, December 8 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52BVQOAPhps (accessed January 8, 2014); and Thomas Watkins, “Gang Tours: For $65, Tourists Get Peek at Los Angeles Gangland,” W.E. A.L.L. B.E., January 16, 2010, http://weallbe.blogspot.com/2010/01/for-65-tourists-get-peek-at-los-angeles.html (accessed July 12, 2011).
“Question of the Week: Are Gang Tours Educational, or just Unsavory Exploitation?” The Daily News of Los Angeles (Los Angeles, January 19, 2010b), A10; “‘Ghettotainment’ Tours Offer Taste of Gang Life,” The New Zealand Herald (Auckland, New Zealand, 2010); “Journey to the Underbelly of Los Angeles,” The Timaru Herald (Timaru, New Zealand, January, 25 2010), 9; Romain Raynaldy, “Gang Tour Displays LA in Whole New Light,” Sunday Territorian (Darwin, Australia, June 6, 2010), 43; and Mark Textor, “Poverty Tourism Offers No Solution,” Australian Financial Review, June 2, 2014, 46.
Public Forum: Q&A, The Daily News of Los Angeles, (Los Angeles, January 24, 2010a), A15.
I have changed the names of most people interviewed in this project. Some of the pseudonyms used are “Nathan,” Carol,” “Eric,” “Sam,” and “Eduardo.” The names that I have not changed are the public figures such as Alfred Lomas. I have chosen not to change Alfred’s name because his face is on the official ad and he is also the only tour guide named on the tour’s website. Alfred prefers to be known in order to promote his efforts against gang violence. I also have not changed the names of people mentioned by name in newspaper articles or videos that I analyzed, such as tour guides Clarence Stewart and Melvin Johnson and those who work at the Pico Union Graff Lab, like Lisa Sprinkles and Rick Guerrero.
For example, politician Jan Perry ran her own bus tours of South LA, which included largely white businessmen. Her goal was to get businesses to invest in property in South LA, and, thus, spark economic growth for the community. This was not considered exploitative. For more information on this, see Archibold, “A Gangland Bus Tour.”
LA Gang Tours is far from perfect. For example, Sarah Sharma and I have argued that the normalization of white tourists’ movement on tour “plays a role in racially categorizing and controlling South Los Angeles.” Put differently, white tourists are allowed to create an imagination of what South LA is through their movement on the tour bus, which often largely reduces the entire community to an image of the “black male gang member.” This occurs in the tourists’ desires to see the neighborhoods where black rappers lived and the spaces were movies like Boyz n the Hood were filmed. This tourist creation of South LA involves a purposeful exclusion of the Latinx population and, especially, the women and children of color in South LA. Although women and children are seen outside during the tours and South LA has changed from a predominately black neighborhood to largely a Latinx one today, on tour, the community is often remade as a largely black, adult, and masculine neighborhood in line with tourist desires. Relatedly, we argue that the gang tours speak to a long history of the “white savior” complex. On tour this complex manifests itself as the mostly white tourists feel like they are “saving” South LA simply by taking the tour. For more information on this, see Sarah Sharma and Armond R. Towns, “Ceasing Fire and Seizing Time: LA Gang Tours and the White Control of Mobility,” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 1, no. 6 (2016): 26–44.
Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marxists Internet Archive, 1999, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf (accessed May 23, 2016).
Although the Latinx tour guides, and many of the Latinx residents of South LA, would not classify themselves as “black,” I use blackness politically to acknowledge the overlapping forms of oppression faced by black and brown residents of South LA and to address the importance of the African slave trade to Central and South America. According to Paul Robinson, a large majority of Mexico’s brown population has African ancestry. In addition, Robinson notes that after the occupation of California by the United States, the Latinx population of California increasingly faced discrimination similar to that of black people in the other parts of the Union. In many instances, this meant forcing darker-skinned, Spanish-speaking people to live with U.S. black English-speaking people based solely on their assumed racial affiliation. This has caused many important forms of what Robinson calls “black evolution” and solidarity between black and brown people in California, and I argue that LA Gang Tours is another instance of this. For a discussion of the complexity of blackness in Los Angeles, see Robinson, “Race, Space, and the Evolution of Black Los Angeles,” in Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities, edited by Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 21–59.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967).
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
Safe Passage, “LA Gang Tours—‘Saving Lives, Creating Jobs, Rebuilding Communities’—One LA Tour at a Time,” 2016, http://lagangtours.com/safe-passage/ (accessed April 10, 2016).
LA Gang Tours has created a three-hour-long ceasefire between participating gangs who control the territories toured. During the tour, these gangs do not engage in any illegal activities and, for the most part, remain indoors until the tour is complete. For more information, see Safe Passage, “LA Gang Tours—‘Saving Lives, Creating Jobs, Rebuilding Communities’—One LA Tour at a Time,” 2016, http://lagangtours.com/safe-passage/ (accessed April 10, 2016).
The tourists are only allowed out of the tour bus in designated areas, all predetermined by tour guides. In addition, no photos are allowed to be taken as the bus drives through the city. These are the rules set up by the tour guides with their respective communities.
While much of the popular media refers to these events as the “Watts Riots” and the “LA Riots,” the residents refer to both of these events as “Rebellions.” I use Rebellion throughout this article in line with the wishes of the residents of South LA.
Alex Alonso, “Out of the Void: Street Gangs in Black Los Angeles,” in Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities, edited by Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 140–67.
The Pico Union Graffiti Lab is typically the final stop for the larger tours. For the private tours, depending on the time, the tourists may not make it to Pico Union.
It is important to keep in mind that this only speaks to the opinions of some activists, not all. Eduardo, one my interviewees who is a local activist who provides food drives in neighborhoods like South LA, tells me that the tours are “like a train crash, you can’t look away even though you should.” By this he means that the tours fetishize gang violence rather than challenge it. Likewise, local activist and anthropologist Jorga Leap has also been critical of the tour, noting that while she admires their efforts, “[W]e can’t treat it like its Disneyland. … Like it’s another amusement for tourists to come and see when they visit Los Angeles.” But Eduardo and Jorga are not all there is in terms of activists. Tour guides, of course, consider themselves “activists” as well. So my usage of activist, for this article, specifically speaks of those critical of the tour. For more information on Jorga Leap’s position, see Jonathan Lloyd, Chuck Henry, and Marry Harris, “LA Gang Tour: ‘A Story of Redemption,’” NBC Los Angeles, 2010, http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/LA-Gang-Tour--99546594.html (accessed July 8, 2016).
For more information on this, see Melvin Oliver, James Johnson, Jr., and Walter Farrell, Jr., “Anatomy of a Rebellion: A Political-Economic Analysis,” in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge Press, 1993), 117–41.
Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 39.
Wynter provides a discussion of Man1 and Man2. While Man2 is most important of this analysis, Man1, for Wynter, is invented out of the Renaissance and is differentiated, but never fully separate, from Western conceptions of religious humanity. Man1, thus, is a fiction that comes to represent humanity as defined via European Enlightenment. This conception of humanity, for Wynter, structures the produced lack of humanity for those nonwestern people and the invention of race. For more information of Man1 and Man2, see Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, 9–89.
Ibid., 11.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2006).
Moten, In the Break.
Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” 8, emphasis added.
Ibid., 38.
Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: The Macmillan Press, LTD, 1982), 364.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 81–82.
Marx, Capital, 88.
Moten, In the Break, 1.
LA Gang Tours, “NBC Los Angeles,” July 29, 2010, http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/LA_Gang_Tours_Los_Angeles.html (accessed January 8, 2014).
Ibid.
Rebuild LA was a program the city planned to implement after the LA Rebellion in 1992. It was supposed to provide economic and political opportunities for the people of South LA, the lack of which were considered central factors in the LA Rebellion. Rebuild LA, however, never really materialized, and South LA remains in a similar political and economic situation as it was when the Rebellion started. For more information on Rebuild LA, see: “After L.A. Riots, A Failed Effort for a Broken City,” NPR, April 29, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/04/29/151608071/after-l-a-riots-an-effort-to-rebuild-a-broken-city (accessed May 31, 2016).
“Tinseltown to Gangland,” Seven Days (Burlington, VT, May 24, 2010), 10.
Robinson, “Race, Space, and the Evolution of Black Los Angeles,” 21–59.
“Inner City Visions,” January 23, 2013, http://innercityvisions.org/ (accessed January 8, 2014).
“Real in tha Field,” 2013, http://realinthafield.com (accessed August 9, 2015).
Ibid.
LA Gang Tours Videos, “LA Gang Tours.”
About Us, “Dream Center,” 2016, http://www.dreamcenter.org/about-us/ (accessed April 10, 2016).
About Us, “LA Gang Tours—‘Saving Lives, Creating Jobs, Rebuilding Communities’—One LA Tour at a Time,” 2016, http://lagangtours.com/videos/ (accessed April 10, 2016).
Alfred Lomas, “LA Gang Tours—‘Saving Lives, Creating Jobs, Rebuilding Communities’—One LA Tour at a Time,” 2016, http://lagangtours.com/alfred-lomas/ (accessed April 10, 2016).
Lloyd, Henry, and Harris, “LA Gang Tour: ‘A Story of Redemption.’”
Snoop Dogg is from Long Beach, CA, which is not a part of LA Gang Tours, but Eric lumps the two together.
“!! $65 LA GANG TOUR (GHETTOTAINMENT)!!,” YouTube, March 7, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_9HS4Nnr5E (accessed July 12, 2011).
“LA Gang Tours,” YouTube, March 30, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M81WtBGhO8 (accessed January 8, 2014).
Alonso, “Out of the Void.”
Ibid., 145.
Ken Vandermeeran, “Audioboo/LA Gang Tours Paints a Better Picture,” 2010, https://audioboo.fm/boos/110012-l-a-gang-tours-paints-a-better-picture (accessed January 8, 2014).
Ibid.
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Notes on contributors
Armond R. Towns
Armond R. Towns is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Denver. His work draws on theories from black studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and political economy.