Tourism Video Touts L.A.’s Ethnic Neighborhoods

East Los Angeles, Koreatown, Pico-Union and South-Central are not often powerful magnets for out-of-town visitors coming to Los Angeles. But that would change if the makers of a new video succeed in a fledgling campaign touting Central City neighborhoods to tourists otherwise headed to just Beverly Hills and Malibu.

“What makes this city great is not necessarily beaches and sunshine, but that you can drive across town and cross 80 different cultures,” said Madeline Janis-Aparicio, executive director of the Tourism Industry Development Council.

The organization, which has strong links to the hotel and restaurant employees union, led well-attended tours of Los Angeles neighborhoods for visitors in town for last summer’s World Cup soccer championship games. With $12,000 in funding from the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, a 15-minute presentation was produced from videotapes of those tours.

Titled “On Any Day: A Visit to Four Los Angeles Neighborhoods,” the upbeat video was publicly premiered Thursday at the Los Angeles Central Library for about 100 tourism executives and community activists. Several hundred copies are to be distributed to international convention planners and travel businesses, along with copies of the bureau’s 2-year-old “Cultural Kaleidoscope” guidebooks to Latino, Asian American and African American culture in Los Angeles.

The goal is to present positive images of neighborhoods that might scare, confuse or just draw a blank from tourists and insular Angelenos.

The video, directed by Antonio Ogaz, shows a bakery and a mariachi band in East Los Angeles, a food market and murals in Koreatown, soccer games and a community meeting in Pico-Union, the Watts Towers and the African Marketplace in South-Central.

“Without sounding defensive, it goes a long way in showing the quality and complexity of the city in appealing images that run counter to images on your television set,” said Michael Collins, senior vice president of the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

In contrast to the chirpy and apolitical nature of most travelogue tapes, “On Any Day” advocates unionization of tourism-related jobs as a way to improve the lives of those neighborhoods’ residents. The bureau funds came from hotel occupancy taxes, including those hotels that are non-union.

The bureau’s support for the neighborhood promotions represents a peace treaty with the organization. In an opinion article published last year in The Times, organization officials sharply criticized the bureau for what they alleged was its abandonment of ethnic and working-class neighborhoods.