Past Present Future

In 1962, went off to Coast Guard boot camp at Government Island in Alameda, my Parents used the opportunity to sell their home in La Puente. I learned this when a yellow cab I hailed at the airport dropped me at their house, which I was certain was a wrong address.

Because, Blanca, their landlord and her Hispanic friends and neighbors were having a party, they said, fiesta, in the common front yard of the three houses she owned, including the one my parents rented. Latin rhythms punctuated the sound of the adjacent freeway interchange and a few score brown-skinned young men and women were well on the way to a felicitous state of inebriation, that is to say, were already drunk.

Ed, my war-hero step-father was amused at my discomfort, which was less about the bigoted view of Mexicans, than my general narcissistic view of all others as less everything than I, a condition I reluctantly now say isn’t far from accurate but that’s a different story. That was in 1962.

In 1966, when I began making educational films, I learned that more than 50% of students then enrolled in Los Angeles City Schools were from hispanic or African American families and my films needed to reflect this ethnic and cultural mix. Now, I’m told the majority of students at UCSD and SDSU are from Asian, South Asian, African and Hispanic families and the cultural and the ethnic mix is increasingly colorful. People from China interest me more than Mexicans and Europeans–they are enigmatic and the more I learn about them, the more they seem like people from a very interesting and equally distant planet, where people have learned to think about things. Their language is musical–how a statement is voiced changes the meaning. To pronounce their names correctly is a music recital.

After Costa Verde and Renaissance I figure they will probably buy all the two to three million dollar condominiums under construction along the Pacific Highway downtown. Less affluent white people will better afford the condos on the east side, around the trolley building, where the homeless people are pitching tents, playing in traffic and pushing shopping carts around with all of their earthly stuff.

It’s possible the waterfront condo residents will be the same scions of wealthy Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Arabic families that now populate the University of California and many private colleges and work for biotech and IT companies around La Jolla. A host of new restaurants and markets, now mainly in Mira Mesa and Kearney Mesa to serve the Asian population will begin to appear downtown.

Guzheng concerts at the Balboa will be nice and classes in Chinese and Korean at SDCC and area high schools as the new condominiums sell out. Demographics of the Shelter Island and La Playa neighborhoods will begin to change as the condo sales impact local rea estate values, however, the cultural history of Pt. Loma is deep and the land will leave it’s stamp on the values of our new generations of Asian immigrants.