My trip to Cerritos started with the drive. The city is quite a ways away from Los Angeles, and the drive can be quite terrible in LA Traffic. After traveling across the 405, the 105, the 91, and then finally the 605, you enter into the city of Cerritos. Upon exiting the freeway, you can't help but notice two of the more famous points of interest for the city: the Cerritos Auto Square and the Cerritos Shopping Mall. That these are some of the first things you encounter when entering the city references the Marxian view of suburbia: a place for the storage and distribution of overproduction and accumulation of goods. This characteristic of suburbia at first scared me into believing that Cerritos would be yet another example of a city containing the debilitating, segregation, and alienating social aspects common to many suburbs throughout the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. Thankfully, my fears were soon put to rest.
My next stop in Cerritos was the public library. This library is an amazingly beautiful library. A huge, impressive structure of titanium panels and concrete, the library stands for a possible future where social difference does not have to exist, and where it cannot limit peoples' potential. This library, built to entertain all ages, had within it people of all races, studying and reading near one another.
The social restriction that sometimes comes about in the city, as in the case of the carceral archipelago, was not present in this location as all felt welcome to enter, to participate in the amenities provided, and to enhance themselves through study or reading. Because the city is so diverse in it's ethnic make up (61/5% Asian, 16.6% White, 12% Hispanic, 8% Black, http://www.city-data.com/city/Cerritos-California.html), the library was a focal meeting point for people to come and enjoy themselves without feeling like they were unwelcome or unwanted. Thus, the Cerritos Library becomes a beautiful tool that removed the import of social difference, allowing all types of people to feel comfortable crossing city or county lines in order to participate in and gain the benefits of public outreach.
Considering that the city does not have really well defined boundaries, it is very easy to find yourself in one city one moment, and the neighboring city the next, sometimes without ever having meant to change locations. This, however, is beneficial rather than harmful to the people living in the city, as it allows them greater opportunities of mobility and integration with those around them. There are less physical barriers to the inhabitants and visitors since they now can freely access the amenities within this city, and through a short drive or walk, the amenities in another city. I think that this is a perfect counterargument to Robert Park's assertion that "The City is a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.” Rather, Cerritos is a great example of how cities can "interpenetrate," allowing those in the city to enjoy their own residence and to travel to other residences so as to experience new things. While there are still parts of Cerritos that may keep it from fully disproving Park's assertion, I still believe that the city holds many of the important characteristics that can help us to better understand how to move away from a society that so heavily produces social difference to one that no longer leaves people better or worse off than others.
The city of Cerritos is very familiar to me. Though I grew up in a part of Lakewood just directly south of Little India, I attended elementary and middle school in Cerritos so I am quite familiar with the extent of diversity the city has to offer and agree that it is quite amazing. If you ever get a chance to come back and check things out again, I cannot recommend enough dining at one of the Chinese restaurants on the southern edge of Little India. Sam Woo’s is excellent, as is the Prince Seafood Restaurant.
ReplyDeleteThere were several things in your post that caught my eye. I really liked what you noted about the way that the various city boundaries all kind of mesh together and you often lose track of where you are. You probably didn’t realize it, but you actually did this in your post when you identified Little India as a part of Cerritos. That section of Pioneer is actually in the city of Artesia.
While I agree that Cerritos is a great example of ethnic diversity, I do not agree with the idea that the city can be held up as an example for diminishing social differentiation. The Auto Square and mall that evoked fears that “the debilitating, segregation, and alienating social aspects common to many suburbs throughout the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area,” would be found in Cerritos are exactly why the symbol you hold up as indicative of diminishing social differentiation (the Library) exists. Funding for the library and its renovation ten years ago came from sales tax revenue schemes the city put in place in response to Prop 13.
As far as its usage by different groups goes, up until just a few years ago access to free library cards was severely restricted. It used to be that you either had to live in Cerritos or live in a city that had a library sharing agreement with Cerritos (typically these were similar upper middle class cities like Huntington Beach) to obtain a free card. It has since been expanded to include anyone who attends a school in the local school district which covers Lakewood, Hawaiian Gardens, Cerritos and Artesia and students who go to Cerritos College. Everyone else is paying a hundred dollars a year. When you consider how the different cities intermesh with each other as you noted, the disadvantages that people like myself had to deal with growing up in the area because we didn't have library cards were problematic. If I want to use my laptop to browse the internet there it still is.
Also, consider the library itself as a building and institution and compare it to any other library or place of learning nearby. What function do the titanium plates adorning its exterior provide? What value do pieces of blown glass that cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars add to the library going experience? Those dry frozen palm trees that cost several thousand dollars apiece and the giant salt-water aquarium are neat, but do they belong in a library? While the LA County library system was seeing massive cutbacks Cerritos decided to engage in what many people saw as blatant conspicuous consumption.
As someone who just visited the city you wouldn't be expected to know these details or understand them, but they give context to the different social processes going on. The fact is, Cerritos is an incredibly wealthy city surrounded by several poorer cities and makes the majority of its revenue off of sales taxes gathered from non-residents. Social differentiation is not only present in Cerritos, it is heavily institutionalized.
LA Times article on some of these issues: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/03/local/me-cerritos3