A Tour of the Countries

For Madeline Janis-Aparico, the morning commute to work often takes on the flavor of a trip around the world. The short drive from her Crenshaw district home to a downtown office building takes her past Korean shops and churches, Salvadoran pupuserias, Guatemalan bakeries, and businesses marked by signs in Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese.

“In Los Angeles,” Janis-Aparico is fond of saying, “you can experience the cultures of 80 countries in a half-hour drive.”

And that, she believes, is one of the city’s greatest assets. Janis-Aparico is executive director of the nonprofit Tourism Industry Development Council, which four years ago began promoting Southern California’s vast multicultural neighborhoods as tourist destinations.

Although the council’s agenda clashed, at least initially, with those of mainstream agencies such as the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, the idea of cultural tourism has taken such a hold it could become a big lure by the end of the decade.

The potential for growth is so great that that the visitors bureau established a cultural tourism advisory committee last year and invited community activists such as Judy Baca of UCLA’s Cesar Chavez Center and Irene Hirano of the Japanese American National Museum to help guide the panel.

“I think it’s so important that Los Angeles build on what indeed are its strengths. And one of those is its ethnic diversity,” said Robert Barrett, director of cultural tourism for the convention and visitors bureau. “[We are] making the culture of the future.”

Toward that end, the bureau is creating self-guided tours of Southern California’s diverse neighborhoods. Developed in conjunction with tourist bureaus in San Francisco and San Diego, these “ethnic itineraries” direct visitors to sites of cultural significance often ignored by traditional tourist agencies.

More than 1 million fliers promoting the itineraries will be distributed by airlines, hotels and travel agencies with the goal of coaxing visitors to extend their trips to the Southland by a day. Last year, tourists averaged three days per visit and spent nearly $10 billion in Los Angeles County.

“It’s the natural thing,” said Leticia Quezada, president of Los Angeles’ Instituto Cultural Mexicano and a member of the committee drafting the Latino heritage itinerary. “We’re trying to establish it as the direction for the future. When people think of L.A., they’re going to think of a city that has cultural destinations.The beauty of visiting L.A. is that you can spend one day going to the Japanese American National Museum and then a block up, you can go to the Mexican Cultural Institute.”

The tourism industry is the second-largest employer and source of revenue in the region, but the majority of visitors come from elsewhere in California, so Quezada’s committee has been careful to tailor its tour accordingly. “It’s for anyone,” she says, “including Mexican Americans who live in Pomona.”

As a result, an eclectic group of sites are highlighted, ranging from downtown’s Grand Central Market and the nearby murals to Long Beach’s Latin American Art Museum to a mariachi Mass in the West Adams district. Well-known destinations such as Olvera Street are included, but the goal is to expose cultural gems that usually remain hidden from outsiders.

One such gem is the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, a sprawling site on South Central Avenue in Watts. A provocative bronze sculpture titled “Mother of Humanity” rises above the center’s multipurpose room and an adjoining 99-seat theater. An art gallery and a gift shop share a neighboring building while closer to the street, workers in the center’s administrative offices help residents in the impoverished community gain access the shrinking social safety net.

Poverty is generally not a big draw for tourists, but it is a daily reality in Watts, one of many minority communities that have failed to profit from Southern California’s tourist boom. That’s one of the reasons Teryl Watkins, the committee’s president, has sought to build her center’s reputation as a cultural showplace.

“The whole concept was that we would use art and culture as an economic base,” she said. “I understand that if I bring you here to see this exhibit, when you leave you may need gas, you may stop to get a soda. So you begin to build commerce and economic stability in a community that it otherwise doesn’t have.”

Watkins was introduced to her neighborhood’s rich cultural history as a toddler when her mother took her to play in the shadows of the Watts Towers.

But the neighborhood’s legacy doesn’t stop with the towers. The nearby Dunbar Hotel was the center of a thriving black arts scene at a time when most downtown hotels were closed to African Americans. And Fire Station No. 30 was the first all-black fire company in the city.

Those were among the sites featured in a tour sponsored by the convention and visitors bureau for 5,500 international travel professionals last summer.

The tour was the second-most-popular of 29 offered during the five-day tourism convention, surpassed only by a visit Disneyland, Watkins said. And although news footage of drive-by shootings and the 1992 L.A. riots were fresh in the minds of many on the tour, Watkins said the fact they came anyway gave her a chance to show them that the fires have been put out and the community has moved on.

“We have to try to contradict and counteract 30 years of negative press,” she said. “Our message right now is . . . good things happen in Watts every day.”

Another form of street-level culture that has helped define L.A.’s ethnic neighborhoods is the city’s 1,500 murals, public works that reflect the faces of each community.

Venice’s Social and Public Art Resource Center and the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles have joined to organize monthly tours of what they call the world’s largest street gallery. The guided excursions, which cost $15 to $25, celebrate everything from the Jewish murals of the Fairfax district to the Chicano artwork of East Los Angeles.

“We need to share these cultural legacies with the general public,” said Debra Padilla, the center’s managing director. “I think it’s a very moving experience. You go with us and you’re going to see an L.A. that you’ve never seen before.”