Street Smarts : USC Students Examine Urban Issues by Prowling Around L.A.

Hector, a Guatemalan who makes a living selling micas , or counterfeit green cards, is curious. The four guys who drove up in a white Saab near MacArthur Park--a neighborhood associated with crime, crack and Central American immigrants--have invaded his turf.

Like Scouts on a treasure hunt, Justin Feffer, Michael Aldapa, Calvin Banks and Howard Hawkes--USC students decked out in collegiate garb and backpacks--explain they are on a mission: to explore the ethnic community they usually drive through with doors locked and windows closed.

Across town, 23 other USC students also have ventured into different worlds: Chinatown, the Crenshaw, Fairfax and Mid-Wilshire districts, Boyle Heights and a strip of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood--areas associated with the Latino, Korean, Chinese, African-American, Jewish and gay communities.

Since 1968, students enrolled in the Los Angeles Semester, a class requirement for public administration majors, have become “community detectives” and L.A.’s urban neighborhoods their laboratory for investigation. By concentrating on issues ranging from homelessness to hate crimes, from ethnic empowerment to entrenched racism, Robert John Pierson’s students analyze urban problems and ponder solutions.

Because the semester is a 16-unit multidisciplinary program, it is the only class for which students have time. Eight weeks into the class--which will end in December--the students have been on numerous tours of the city, coming face-to-face with a multilingual landscape of cultural diversity “suburbanites rarely see, much less experience,” Pierson says.

They have heard from angry community activists involved in AIDS awareness programs and others who help feed the hungry on Skid Row. They have listened to impassioned Latino muralists, and they plan to meet with city and county officials whose jobs, in both the private and public sector, some students would like one day to have.

From the proposed redesign of the Los Angeles River as a natural recreational area to the fate of Olvera Street, by the time the class is over, the students will have discussed and dissected the city’s past and its present in order to help plan its future.

The program, one of the first of its kind in the country, was started three years after the Watts Riots. It is offered through the School of Public Administration and has inspired similar urban studies programs across the country “because of its experiential and experimental approach to learning about urban dynamics,” says Pierson.

He was a part-time instructor for almost three years before being named the Los Angeles Semester’s director 18 months ago. Pierson has a master’s degree in theology from Fuller Seminary in Pasadena and is finishing a doctorate in social ethics from the USC School of Religion. He shares teaching duties with Elpidio Rocha, a part-time USC instructor with a background in landscape architecture and community activism, and Youhansen Eid, who is working on a doctorate in urban and regional planning at USC.

Weekly, students participate in field work “to learn about life in the inner city, to promote face-to-face encounters rather than being safe in a classroom,” Pierson says.

In addition to clocking as many as 24 hours a week interning at a public or private agency, the students, by themselves, also must arrange a minimum of four trips into urban neighborhoods.

“These kids are going to help shape the future of Los Angeles, of cities across the country, and I don’t want them to follow the elitist model,” Pierson says. “It’s hideous that some city planners have no idea or don’t understand that ethnic communities have value. I want my students to immerse themselves in those places because before you can consider new policies in the operations of local government you have to get input from those communities. You have to understand the values of place that neighborhoods have for its residents.”

A case in point is the ethnic neighborhoods walk--three to four hours of nonstop hustle where teams of students must interview five or more people about the community’s history, lifestyles, businesses, quality of public services, religious institutions, landmarks and changes, if any, from deterioration to renovation.

The assignment stresses lingering on street corners, eavesdropping on conversations, grabbing a snack at a popular bakery or lunch at a landmark cafe, befriending locals and, always, asking questions.

“I’m real concerned about neighborhood justice issues,” Pierson says, explaining why the neighborhoods walks are crucial. “The most powerful tool in shaping the future in Los Angeles is zoning. It determines land use, density, where money will be invested and it also implies alternatives on how people can reshape their neighborhoods.”

Pierson also believes that “places tell stories and reveal narratives” about a community.

“At 7th and Alvarado streets there is a sense of place even in the alleyways,” he says, adding that the MacArthur Park area is where many residents share a laugh, where children play, where mothers talk and visit with friends.

“But before the city initiates a knee-jerk policy of closing alleyways (due to drug dealing), they need to look at all the activities and all the functions the alleys serve,” Pierson said. “Many Hispanic immigrants come from village cultures where social networking occurs in narrow alleyways, creating a sense of village.”

Pierson wants his students to “take the risk of confronting people and places and issues.”

For the foursome that emerges from the Saab, gathering clues about the assigned territory include a lively chat with Adam Bennion, a 41-year-old activist for the poor who believes, “the English-speaking born in Los Angeles are ignorant and arrogant about this neighborhood”; an encounter with two police officers new to the MacArthur Park beat, and meeting Hector, the 28-year-old Guatemalan who moved to California less than two years ago. Hector had worked at a Texaco gas station for a while but found he could make as much as $100 a day selling micas .

“I won’t tell you my full name, I’m afraid to tell you that. I don’t want someone coming after me,” Hector tells the group as they begin their work while standing in front of Langer’s Restaurant and Delicatessen, a landmark neighborhood eatery.

On the street, a symphony of noise is in full swing: people are crammed onto sidewalks, many leaning against graffiti-filled walls watching the traffic whiz by. Nearby, at a newsstand, three women share pages from La Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper, and then head toward a drugstore, Botica del Pueblo . A cluster of men standing outside Joyeria del Pueblo , a jewelry shop, pass out cards for a palm reader.

“I can tell you that there are drugs over here,” Hector continues. “I can tell you that it’s dangerous out here. During the day, during the night, any time.”

Hawkes, 22, who lives in South Pasadena and is interning with the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, furiously takes notes while Feffer, 21, who lives in Beverly Hills, asks the questions. Meanwhile, Banks, a Mid-Wilshire District resident, and Aldapa, of East Los Angeles--in charge of drawing the area’s map--break away in search of a barber shop or hair salon where people might be socializing.

“I know I’m going to get into trouble talking to you,” says Hector. “You see, the people with the businesses around here don’t like us to express ourselves. They don’t like us--the immigrants--in the streets or standing in front of their doors. The police don’t like it either. So we just keep walking and when we’re tired we lean against the buildings until the police or someone else tells us to go away, to keep on walking.”

Hawkes and Feffer move on. At Archies of Hollywood, a hair salon, they find their two classmates engaged in lively conversation at the back of the shop.

Standing at a podium with an open Bible--and surrounded by bottles of spray and perming solutions, Archie Herrera tells the students he welcomes anyone to prayer sessions in the salon “because we need the spiritual enrichment to save our community.”

Herrera, 71, has lived in the MacArthur Park area since 1940 “when it was a beautiful place, when you could sleep in the park. Nowadays I don’t even want to walk through it during daylight. I don’t want to get shot or stabbed or robbed.”

When asked by the students about the park’s recent cleanup efforts and a new police substation on its grounds to deter drug deals and crime, Herrera and his barbershop friends say they are not yet convinced “it’s safe to use the park.”

“People are still going around destroying our community. They kick benches, they spray graffiti all over the place, they urinate in the streets. They abuse property. I had a guy in here last week who scratched my mirrors with a knife. Senior citizens are robbed of their checks and women get their jewelry ripped off their necks,” Herrera tells the students.

Asks Aldapa: “Why has your community changed?”

“Why? Because families are breaking up. Because there are too many people here and there are more poor people here than ever before. Because people are using their welfare money for drugs. Because people are rebelling against society. And because economically this area has gotten 100 times worse than when I first built my business here,” Hererra says.

Still, he and others in the salon tell the students they are optimistic about life in their inner-city enclave. “It’s going to get better. We can’t move because we can’t afford to, so have to have confidence in the city and in the police that services for us will get better, that drugs and crime and prostitution, our biggest problems, will go away. That’s what we pray for.

“We love our neighborhood. For many of us, it is all we have.”