What You See Depends on Where You Stand (And Where You Stand Depends on What You See)

About thirty or so years ago, when my eldest daughter Kelly was a toddler, her mom worked for the Israeli owner of a furniture store in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Little Kelly was often in the care of the Israeli’s Guatemalan nanny, along with his own two small children. Carmen, the nanny, was a single mother with a small child of her own.

On the rare occasion we all had some social obligation on a Saturday night, Kelly and the other two kids would spend the evening with Carmen’s daughter. Carmen and her daughter lived in an apartment complex in Canoga Park, one of umpteen such places in the middle of the San Fernando Valley; two-story multi-family dwellings with maybe twenty units built around a common courtyard area. Security gate in front. No pool. Most of the tenants were LatinX immigrants. At the end of the evening, our Anglo kids could be found sleeping on blankets on the living room floor of an empty apartment, along with Carmen’s baby daughter and the other kids from the building whose parents were also spending their Saturday night out. One of the neighbors served as the building manager, and he would utilize vacant apartments as community spaces. A couple of old women in the building—the building Abuellas—would sit in the makeshift sleeping room and watch the kids, softly chatting to each other until all the sleeping children were gently bundled away by their parents.

When Carmen’s daughter turned three, we were invited to her birthday celebration held one Saturday evening. It was hosted in a vacant apartment in Carmen’s building, and everyone in the complex seemed to be there. The women and girls wore bright and pretty dresses, the men mostly jeans and button-down long-sleeved collared shirts, cuffs neatly buttoned. I wore a t-shirt. In the kitchen was a card table, arranged with a large wooden bowl of chips, containers of beans and salsa, and an over-sized salad bowl filled with lettuce, sprinkled with dressing and cheese. By the short wall surrounding the small patio area outside was a grill covered with thin-sliced chuck steak, hissing and smoking while one of the men tended to the meat, beer in hand. Next to him, the top of the wall held a platter of hot cooked steaks, with another plate bearing a substantial mound of uncooked meat within closer reach. Some his friends were around him, beers also in hand. Surprisingly to me, the teens in the complex attended the party as well, cheerfully hanging out until they were given leave by their parents to go have their own weekend night. South-of-US-border music (which always reminded me of syncopated polka dances) blared from a boom-box. Some people danced. Children played. It seemed all the tenants were there. Young mothers gossiped. A guy about my own age and I attempted to have a conversation about children, though neither of us spoke the other’s language. People kept offering me food.

It occurred to me that the unremarkable-looking apartment complex surrounding me was actually something very much like a village, a functioning and vibrant community. It struck me a bit funny that surely the occupants of upper-middle class homes within walking distance had no such connections with their neighbors (I don’t even know the names of many of mine.) It also occurred to me that many of the party-goers probably tended the lawns and washed the cars of those same upper-middle class homes. In the work-a-day Los Angeles extending beyond the walls of the apartment complex, the birthday celebrants were both ubiquitous and somewhat invisible to people outside of their world. People like me. But here they had established something essential and critical—support systems and improvised extended families. And surely there were countless other such de facto villages around town.

What I realized then was how insular life in LA is. I’m not referring to distinct neighborhoods, though there are a lot of such social geographical divisions. What became clear is that life in Southern California exists in different community layers, all co-existing at the same time and in the same place. It’s sort of social string theory: different societal dimensions occupying the same space in a kind of multi-superimposition. And what you see of these different realities depends on what you expect to see. Physical space becomes less relevant than community space, whose maps are defined by something more meaningful than mere physical barriers.

Most of us are held in place by our own personal maps, maps that are delineated by the boundaries of our preconceived expectations. Narrow, unquestioned assumptions limit these expectations and—more importantly—at their worst tend to promote an “Us vs. Them” way of looking at the world. And this sense of tribalism has only become much more rabid in the ensuing years.

What I came away with in that 1990 evening was a need to question the limiting assumptions I had held; not to reject them all necessarily, but to at least remember to ask “says who?” when confronted with them. It is a very powerful thing, to at least examine our assumptions before they are reaffirmed. Doing so has probably made me a better story-teller, and certainly made me easier to work with as a creative collaborator than I had been before.

Oh yeah, and maybe it’s made me a somewhat better person as well.