Strengths as Well as Needs

Armed with donated cameras, Cal State Northridge students set out last semester to explode some stereotypes. They started with their own.

The results are on today’s Valley Perspective page. The students went to one of the poorest parts of the San Fernando Valley to ask a question not many people had asked before: What is beautiful about Pacoima?

The answers surprised them. But that was the point of Professor Kathryn Sorrells’ graduate seminar in intercultural communication.

Sorrells, who teaches in CSUN’s Department of Communication Studies, sent the students to work for a semester in a neighborhood with a large population of immigrants, many of whom have never had the opportunity to go to college or to finish high school.

Although few of Sorrells’ students had been to Pacoima before, most had a notion of what it would be like from news stories or from friends who also had not been there but said things like, “Pacoima? Beautiful? Are you crazy?”

“Intercultural communication basically looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds have different values, norms, behaviors and assumptions,” explains Sorrells. “We tend to see difference as a negative because it’s put in a hierarchy, with one culture dominant. [In the seminar] we try to see cultural difference as a positive--and to uncover the differences in power that create poverty.”

There is much poverty in the northeast Valley. Stories in last month’s Times told of families living in cramped garages and children suffering from an intestinal ailment commonly seen only in developing countries. Editorials on these pages have called on the Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to address the crisis in housing and health care by stepping up apartment inspections and enrolling eligible people in Medi-Cal.

But the CSUN students found that there is more to Pacoima than its problems. With introductions provided by Pacoima Beautiful, a nonprofit environmental education and advocacy group, the students fanned out to work alongside residents in schools, community centers and nursing homes.

What is beautiful about Pacoima? A homemade welcome sign. A family center mural. Elderly residents enjoying a sunny afternoon. Teenagers sharing a snack and a park bench.

When students asked people they met what mattered, what they heard about was not possessions--the makes and models of cars, the shapes and sizes of houses--but people and their relationships with each other.

“The students saw things that don’t exist in their own communities,” says Sorrells. “A sense of connectedness, a real concern for each other. Some of them had lived in the San Fernando Valley all their lives. They’d never seen this kind of community identity before.”

Pacoima has great needs. It also has great strengths--and much to teach more affluent communities. See for yourself on the opposite page.