Title: Porous powers create Los Angeles’s character

Los Angeles is a young city usually portrayed as a unique place that it captures the essence of a multi-ecological setting bringing the ocean, the skyscraper, and the happiest place on earth under one rooftop. Under this successful marketing pitch, the city has become one of the world’s biggest metropolises. However, the city is in the middle of the desert, and has insufficient natural resources to sustain life. As McWilliams said “Man has made it what it is” (pg.183).
This diverse complex metropolis has had many rulers, but all of them have something in common, they have wealth, or they have control over scarce resources, a required need in which the individuals in the area acquire. These characteristics gives them the power, not a complete control, but rather the ability to set the terms under which other groups and classes must operate. In order to keep their power, they must be able to manage both wealth and resources. In this anthology I would present a view of the changes in the power groups in Los Angeles, how these changes created the character of the city, and who was left out of this equation throughout history. In every society there are experiences and material objects that are highly valued. If it is assumed that everyone in the society would like to have as great a share as possible of these experiences and objects, then the distribution of values in that society can be utilized as a power indicator. Those who benefit the most, by inference, are powerful. The absence of water is an eternal problem weakness for this city, so whoever owns the water, has the power.
William Mulholland, the head of the department Los Angeles Department of Water and Power supervised the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, system to move water from Owens Valley to Los Angeles. The water rights were acquired through political power, lobbing, deception, tricks, and strategy of lies. The city started with crime justified by “the greatest good for the greatest number”. Farmers in the Owens Valley may not have received fair value for their water rights. According to the movie “Chinatown”, thousands of inches of water were dumped into the sewer system from reservoirs and storage dams creating an artificial water famine. The elite few, the ruling class, bought out most of the San Fernando Valley land for cheap, brought the water to San Fernando instead to City of LA, sold it and made fortune. The water made the economy going. Just these elite few people had control over the water resource, had the power to dictate the city, while continue consuming at the expense of Ovens Valley.
Contrary, in the ridings of City of Quartz, David illustrates that the city is fragmented because of the different people with power that try to access the scarce resources. The chapter starts with a powerful quote of Chandler, “There is no power structure here- only people who think they are it” (pg.101), which means the cities power structure is fragmented, as well as contradictory. He says that the power is definitely not organized, but lies in the hands of the “great constellations” of private capital. Power in L.A. for much of its history leaks, new comers often found ways to embed themselves into the political structure and their wealth imposes itself upon the community. He starts with the Otis-Chandler dynasty stating that it was “the most centralized power structure” for a long period of time. However, over the years lost their power structure, due to the increasing competitiveness brought by the Jewish and Democratic people looking for hierarchy of power. LA’s Jewish population secured power early in its history, eventually sharing it with new Irish arrivals. The Downtown has tried to keep power centralized, but the rapidly increasing population in the 1950’s and “changing modes of land speculation”, that often determined who held political power, made power in the city to became more complicated. There was a struggle of power between the Elite Jews in the Westside and Downtown. With the constructional and modernization boom, Century City and Orange County have become increasingly influential. Later, the “internationalization of class formation” led to an influx of wealth by Asian businessmen, many Japanese, along with large-scale migrations of other middle class Asian people to be a “major player” in politics. Contrary to earlier development of the city, Davis point out that today, Los Angeles is such a large, porous city so there is no more elite that can control the city.
This power pouring made the city what it is today, made its history, and filtered at the same time. “Golden Land” portrays Los Angeles as a place without traditional values. Even the people of Los Angeles are described as fake “with bronzed, unselfconscious bodies." Throughout the story, the reader finds that Los Angeles becomes a place where morality is traded for wealth, success and fame. Trough the characters, Falkner show that Los Angeles has the power to corrupt an individual through its construction and demoralize it trough its physical location. “…without dust, or on which a solid mat of flowers bloomed in fierce lush myriad-colored paradox as though in place of being rooted into a drawing from the soil they lived upon air alone” (pg. 3)
If we want to learn something more about Los Angeles we have to pass through its ethnic communities, its religious institutions, its architecture, its politics, its economy, its gastronomy. Each perspective indicates a different path through the city, a different believe and a different understanding. This diversity makes the city unique, but also often breaks the city. Like a volcano Los Angeles erupts, when there is so much injustice done. In order to understand the long path that this city has come, we have to understand that minorities are always left out of the equation, equation that is racially restricted. The division of housing in terms of races represents just one example of that Los Angeles. Mexican- Americans and African-Americans even if they had enough wealth, they were racially discriminated in terms of where they can live. Furthermore, there seems to be a very vast gap between the rich and the poor. The knowledge of any city that we live in is necessary, and of great importance in order to be able to understand it, and fall in love with it. Who we think we are relates to how we think the world should look like. For the first time I looked through the lens which we see the world, on the past and compared with the present, and saw how different the city is. That will help open our eyes and minds to the important social and political issues that have confronted this great metropolitan city. Starting from the Spanish era of the pueblo, going trough the battle of Los Angeles, its expansion and development, population changes, resource changes, political lobbing, the mix of the different cultures, races, cultures, their conflicts and unifications, with all of this, Los Angeles has come a long way to become what is today.

Works Cited
McWilliams. "“Water, Water, Water”." Google Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2012. <http://books.google.com/books?id=jcCrQC8rBPgC>.
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso, 1990. Print.
Polański, Roman. "Chinatown." IMDb. IMDb.com, 20 June 1974. Web. 23 Oct. 2012. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071315/>.
Faulkner, William. Golden Land. 1988. pp. 1-13. PDF.