01 Feb 2010, Written by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein in essay
Pasadena
Friday 29 January 2010
I can remember sitting in the backseat of my mom’s little Toyota and watching the lawns and the trees and the big driveways in front of the giant houses. It was all so pretty and neat and organized. I wanted something like that. When I got good grades we went to San Marino Toy and Book Shoppe, and my mom splurged on books that she hoped would enrich my mind. I understand now that she almost definitely could not afford those trips, even though they only happened twice a year. We bought books on anatomy and art. She tried so hard to make sure that even though we lived in a small house on the other side of the railroad tracks – far from fancy lawns and close to factories that produced . . . well, whatever it was, I never figured it out at 30 mph – my mind would not be limited by socioeconomic geography.
During those trips, I dreamed of Pasadena and its sprawling lawns. I dreamed of a car with fancy automated locks and windows that had ventilation in the back. I dreamed of living far enough from the freeway that I couldn’t hear it at all hours. I dreamed of bookstores and buying the occasional novel. I dreamed of the brown and cream colored buildings that said, “We are Californian, just like you.” Of a backyard with orange trees and a bridge over a little brook leading to a pond populated with frogs and newts. A kitchen with a refrigerator that dispensed ice and cool water and an island in the middle with stools, just because there’s space for it.
I dreamed this way even as I realized that something was not quite right with that picture, some people having so much while others have so little. I dreamed all the way to Harvard and into graduate school. Even as time and maturity chipped away at it, I held onto it so much that for years, when I drove through Pasadena, all I knew was love. I love this place with its trees and its sun-drenched gardens and its CalTech and its forever quiet. I love love love you Pasadena because you are so beautiful.
Something changed the last time though. As I drove my boyfriend through the neighborhood that is so distinctly not el barrio, I noticed that mid-day the only people who seemed to be home were people who didn’t live there at all. Pickup trucks filled with gardening equipment dotted the residential streets, and I could not/cannot believe that I had never noticed them before.
When I went back without Ryan, this was all I saw: giant houses whose beauty was built on the backs of poorly paid brown servants. Want that perfectly clean and well-tended garden? It requires someone to spend part of their day with a noisy, fume-producing machine next to their face. Maybe he also spends years on his knees, destroying his back, just to pull little weeds out of your grass. The grass that, along with all of the other grass like it, uses up to 50% of the water supply in a region where every drop is precious. But since the Colorado River isn’t decorating your backyard, you can’t possibly care that you are sucking it dry for the sake of appearances. And your house! It is clean because you don’t pay someone(s) enough to keep it that way, probably daily. And the final insult: the brown people’s cars must stay on the street because really, the whiteness of your driveway pavement is precious!
These are the thoughts that went through my head. Now I wonder whether I was secretly angry at Pasadena all these years because the only way people who looked like me could gain access to it was through the servant’s entrance. Maybe the dream was that one day I could walk through the front door and that this was possible without asking others to stay behind. In other rich neighborhoods I was aware early on that this kind of fantasy was impossible. But for some reason I was so in love with Pasadena that I could not see the incredible impossibility that it was any different from any other place where the resources pool so far away from the colored majority.
The day I finally gave my talk to the CalTech astronomy department, living out a dream on behalf of my long dead machine-worker grandfather, it didn’t matter so much that they were unreceptive to what I had to say. The spell had been broken, and I knew that Pasadena, like the rest of the elite world that I’ve been wading through for the last 11 years, did not care to have me there for a visit, much less a stay. Like my research, my existence violates a status quo that Pasadena lives to represent, and though I might have “earned” access to the front door for a time, I didn’t think I want it anymore.
I was reminded recently, though, that it’s not all that straight forward. When I read about the closing of the Pasadena Playhouse, a cultural institution that grew up with Pasadena and Los Angeles, I was infuriated. “All those rich people in Pasadena and they can’t be bothered to figure this one out? What the hell? Sure they love the stupid malls that have taken over, but they can’t be bothered to save a cultural institution,” I whined to anyone reading their newsfeed on Facebook.
I’ve never been to the Playhouse. Going to plays was obviously not in the budget when I was growing up. But now that I’m older and live near Stratford, Ontario, home to one of North America’s last remaining Shakespeare-focused repertory theaters, I have a new appreciation for the cultural importance of a place like it. Last summer at one of my many trips to see a Stratford production, I noted with curiosity how people dressed up to see Shakespeare and refused to react even when the actors clearly wanted us to, despite the historical fact that Shakespeare primarily wrote for drunken, noisy lower-class audiences. I recognized, with simultaneous amusement and fury, the confusion in one audience as a production of Macbeth that had been set in a nebulous location in post-colonial Africa closed with Jimmy Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” blaring. I got it. I thought it was brilliant. They were lost.
Good theater, like all great artwork, is supposed to speak to all of us, regardless of our socioeconomic position in life. Shakespeare, the great humanist, recognized that however poor or rich his audiences might be in some ways, they all had minds that desired emotional and intellectual engagement. The best theater, which of course is that which can be measured against Shakespeare, subverts our expectations and jolts us with new visions of the world around us. As I ponder Pasadena’s choice to spend money on its river-destroying lawns while California’s official state theater falls apart next door, I realize that theater is at least a piece of what Pasadena actually needs. A wake up call. Some Shakespeare set in East L.A., the barrio where those brown workers live and where I come from, would be a good start.
Photo by Flickr user Damien M
