LOS ANGELES TIMES
October 17, 2004

SNAPSHOTS FROM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
Welcome to Post-Anglo L.A.
A filmmaker ponders the city's future
BY ABEL SALAS

Phillip Rodriguez can't take his eyes off his city. As the director and
producer of "Los Angeles Now," an hourlong PBS documentary set to air next month, Rodriguez talked to local poets, artists, business tycoons, teachers, politicians and other notables about L.A.'s future through the prism of its changing demographics. Fluctuating cultural boundaries are a fascination for Rodriguez, 43, a Glendale native who made the film with support from Loyola Marymount University, the Skirball Foundation and others. His previous projects include a look at architecture and culture in the San Diego Tijuana border area and a documentary portrait of artist Manuel Ocampo. Aided by cinematography and animation from Claudio Rocha, "Los Angeles Now" argues that L.A. is entering a dynamic, ethnically diverse, mainly nonwhite era. We savored the mix during a recent conversation at Echo Park's venerable Les Freres Taix restaurant.

"Los Angeles Now" is your latest exploration of identity in Los Angeles and California. Where does this theme get its power for you?

I went to Japan for vacation a couple of weeks ago, and coming back through security I was taking my shoes off and there was this young man. He'd just finished four years in the Navy and he had a shock of blond dyed hair. Well, it was clear to me that he was Mexican American. And when we finally got around to talking about ethnicity, he says, "Let me make it clear to you. My parents were Mexican American. But I don't consider myself Hispanic. I don't consider myself Chicano. I'm a Californian." I'm a suburban, middle-class brown guy raised on an Anglo Angeleno ethos, maybe the zenith of their power, the '70s. In 30 years of my somewhat adult life, I've witnessed the transformation of this super-Anglo city to a super-brown city. I tried to chronicle this sea change. And I'm as impressed by it, unnerved by it, perplexed by it as anybody else.

The film's ambience conveys motion and disorientation. Was that intended?

I think we're in an in-between period where we haven't settled into an understanding of what we are becoming. The majority of our city's intellectuals, authors, writers, journalists and filmmakers have very little contact with the part of the city that's changed so drastically. When they do have contact, they have no way to understand it. We're in a period of great flux. Guys like me, we're not the final word on the subject. We're just momentary translators. Our great Los Angeles poet will be some beautiful young Korean-brown-Vietnamese-Blaxican phenomenon that's probably going to define Los Angeles in a way maybe that George Gershwin or some New York immigrant did [on the East Coast].

What was the personal impetus for the project?

I think it came out of a dissatisfaction with the way that Los Angeles is seen and understood. A movie like "Volcano," they shoot it down in MacArthur Park, and there's no Mexican in the whole thing. I saw "Collateral." And it was still the black and white deal. [Latinos] were still marginal, like bad salsa. The cultural elite, the people who narrate this place, couldn't be more inadequate to the task of understanding [it]. Right now the people who define this place don't even live here, aren't of Los Angeles, truly.
They're still on the New York-L.A. axis. [East of La Brea] is Mexico; it could be Lima, Peru, for all they know. That'll change.

The film envisions a multiethnic Los Angeles composed of mainly nonwhite groups. Yet according to the numbers, many African Americans are moving out of metropolitan Los Angeles.

I think that for every group there's a sense of displacement. I don't think African Americans are any different than anybody else. I think those people happen to be perhaps a little more candid, a little more honest, a little less politically correct than a lot of us. There's a [second-generation] Mexican American lady in the film who says, "I don't want to speak disparagingly" [of more recent Latino immigrants], "but sometimes I miss the quiet." She wasn't at ease. And I don't think anybody is at ease.

So is today's Los Angeles a transitional space?

All spaces are transitional spaces. Culture is always changing and identity is shifting, if you're alive. You know, once you unclench your fists. Even if you keep your fists clenched, the ground's still moving underneath you.

What about you? What is L.A. to you?

It's home, the place I was born. A place where my parents met. A place a lot of my people came to. A place where a lot of my childhood friends live and a place where I'll never quite feel particularly comfortable or at home. I keep imagining a life that's not here. Somewhere more rooted, more touching, a bit sweeter. But I'll never get there, because I'm too Los Angeles. I'd crawl out of my skin.

"Los Angeles Now" airs Nov. 27 at 9 p.m. on KCET.