Photo by Keith Skelton/Flickr (Creative Commons)
The skyline as seen from East Los Angeles, November 2009
A post last week featured an excerpt from the latest novel by Denise Hamilton, a Los Angeles mystery writer who since her acclaimed first novel a decade ago has used the city’s immigrant enclaves as the backdrop for her twisting noir plots.
Her characters, good guys and bad, are also drawn from unsung L.A. neighborhoods that Hamilton covered in her reporter days, when she worked for the Los Angeles Times. Issues of race, class and immigration are woven into the stories, which unfold in places like the San Gabriel Valley and Pico-Union.
Los Angeles is different things to different people. But in film and literature, the western side of town – more affluent, less foreign – often wins out as defining the city’s identity. For Hamilton, whose new novel Damage Control was published last month by Scribner Books, L.A. is an altogether different place. What prompts her to portray it as she does? Read on.
M-A: Since the beginning, when your first lead character Eve Diamond was investigating prostitution rings in the San Gabriel Valley in The Jasmine Trade, the Los Angeles that you have set your novels in is distinctly multiethnic. You’ve made a point of painting the city in this light. Why?
Hamilton: I’m an L.A. native who grew up in the San Fernando Valley. My mom was a White Russian immigrant from France, and I married a man from East L.A. whose parents came from Mexico, Nuevo Leon and the Yucatan Peninsula. My mother-in-law speaks a dialect of Mayan as well as Spanish. My mother spoke French and Russian and we spoke French at home, while my husband grew up speaking Spanish. Now, I speak Spanish to my in-laws. So multicultural and multilingual is my default mode. It feels ‘right.’
Also, I’ve always lived east of La Brea (except for a short stint in West L.A.), so diverse neighborhoods are what’s normal for me. Then at work, I was a reporter for the L.A. Times in Glendale, which is heavily Armenian, and in the San Gabriel Valley, which is heavily Asian and Latino. So again, those are the stories I told.
That was the prism through which I saw LA., as a very diverse, vibrant, scrappy and linguistically rich place. It’s Pacific Rim and Latino and white. It’s immigrant and hard-working. It’s often blue-collar and bohemian and funky. When I go to Santa Monica, I feel like an Eastern European peasant. Everyone is so blond and tanned and tall and perfect.
The reality is that everyone in L.A. is an immigrant, give or take a few generations. In the 1850s, this place was a dusty Spanish pueblo with scattered Indian tribes. The city was founded by a ragtag group of Spanish, blacks, mestizo and mulattos. The Anglos who came here intermarried with the Californios, the descendants of the land-grant Spaniards who had settled here. In the 1870s and 1920s, people poured in from all over America due to very successful civic boosterism.
Nowadays, people come from all over the world. So we have Little Saigon, Thai Town, Little Yerevan, the nation’s first suburban Chinatown in Monterey Park, historic FilipinoTown. And everybody mixes it up together. It’s a rich palette to write from.
