Guest commentary: Roger Rabbit and the Great Angelino Land Robbery

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By Rodolfo F. Acuña / Guest contributor

As a doctoral student I’d drop by the 901 Club, across from the University of Southern California on Jefferson Blvd., on my way to my seminars. There I would see Manuel Servín, my adviser, seated at his designated booth holding court. I am sure we stood out, we were the only Mexicans in the bar. I had acquired stature because I was with Servín, a USC history professor. Frequently Bill Mason would stop by. Mason was a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum, a man with a vast knowledge of LA and its documents.

When I first met Bill at the 901, he was seated next to Manuel dressed in a hospital gown, wearing a hospital bracelet, and hospital slippers. According to Manuel, he had helped him escape from a local institution. (This was a decade before One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

I do not in any way want to romanticize the meetings as I will memorialize in a later blog — alcohol is the scourge of humanity, and it contributed to the early demises of Manuel and Bill.  At the time, however, I was impressed, and would hang on every word especially when Manuel talked about history while we consumed beer and an occasional boilermaker.

He would advise me to stay away from sociologists – it was not really a discipline; you could learn it on any street corner. Manuel said that sociologists wanted to be evaluated on articles like scientists but when they wrote books, they posed as historians.

History, according to Manuel, was all about books, and that took time and craftsmanship. He advised me to begin writing book reviews. You got free books from the publishers, got known to other historians, and learned to critique books. It is an advice that I have followed religiously and I have published over 200 academic book reviews. They have been so peripheral to my resume that I haven’t listed them for over a dozen years; I have not even kept drafts. But as Manuel said, they are the building blocks of the profession, and they teach you how to relate pieces of the story.

I am currently reviewing Ethan N. Elkind’s Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City. It is a good book; however, out of habit I think outside the monograph paradigm that is standard for most academic works. A monograph is a specialized work usually limited to a single subject. It differs from a textbook that synthesizes the field of study.

Other stories kept creeping into my thoughts as I read Railtown, especially the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) that depicts cartoon characters interacting with people. Set in 1947 the “toons” lived in Toontown, an area near Hollywood, California.

The story of Roger and his wife Jessica and a murder mystery are peripheral. Central are Judge Doom and his Toon Patrol of weasel henchmen. My heroes are the toons who like Mexicans work cheap and own the land that Cloverleaf Industries wants. Cloverleaf had bought the Pacific Electric system of trolley cars, and wanted Toontown. Roger, Jessica, and Eddie, a detective, are captured by Doom and held captive at Cloverleaf’s Acme Factory.

For me, Toontown is a metaphor for East L.A. Like in real life, Doom plans to destroy it to make room for a freeway. Doom wants to dismantle the trolley fleet, and make a fortune by building a series of businesses to appeal to the motorists.

Eddie manages to get the weasels to self-destruct, and Doom is run over by a steamroller. Unlike in real life, the Toons end up with their land.

Railtown’s narrative begins in the 60s a decade after Roger Rabbit left off.  Circa 1936 General Motors led a conspiracy known as the Great American streetcar scandal. It carried Doom’s dream to fruition, buying up the Pacific Electric Railway streetcars. Joined by Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Trucks, and the Federal Engineering Corporation—GM purchased over 100 electric surface-traction systems in 45 cities including Baltimore, Newark, Los Angeles, New York City, Oakland and San Diego and converted them into bus operations.

Their dreams were much grander than Doom’s; today only a few U.S. cities have effective rail-based urban transport systems as a result.

Los Angeles once had thousands of miles of streetcar tracks — a Yellow Car Line alongside the famed Red Cars. They gave way to freeways, and by the early 1960s the pockets of developers and building contractors had been lined.

But a funny thing happened: by the 60s Angelinos grew nostalgic for rails and subways. It had to keep up with San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system. The hype was traffic, air pollution, and sprawl—the silver bullet was a rail system

Enter Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley in 1973. After his election the Los Angeles Metro Rail  patched together a rail system. Elkind’s narrative is about ambitions of local leaders. Theirs was not so much a vision but a venture for prestige, contracts and undoubtedly political contributions. The basic flaw was that L.A. did not have the rider density of other cities. Lacking demand, fares could not sustain its growth and operation.

The book is grounded in extensive research. For my taste, it is too careful, I wanted to expose the Gordon Gekkos who propelled the greed that cost taxpayers billions and motivated city and county leaders to squander Los Angeles’ future.

Instead, “Everyone has a story about themselves or their parents or somebody riding these streetcars,” and want to bring back those happy days.  Everyone has a plan a laBart, New York, Portland, Toronto etc.

It is not by accident that many of rails run along the Yellow and Red Car routes.  The Pasadena and Long Beach routes are established. There is a subway from downtown to the San Fernando Valley. In poorer areas LA Metro has thrown together lines that remind me of the Juarez-El Paso or San Diego-Tijuana border trolleys (probably more like Disneyland).

In 1992, the Bus Riders Union emerged to defend the interests of the poor who mostly rode the buses. The BRU was favored by the lack of cohesiveness among the advocates who could not answer the simple questions: have rails improved the transportation of the working class? Where did the money go?

The founder and organizer is Eric Mann, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement who brought those organizing tactics to the struggle, E.g., lawsuits, demonstrations, sit in’s etc. Mann set out to organize poor Latinos, Blacks, Asians and whites. The strategy was to bring down fares and put more buses on the streets. Belatedly Latino politicians were admitted into the county’s political club, and the BRU targeted them, although the views of most Latino politicos became more conservative as they became part of the political establishment.

The bottom-line remains, should the poor subsidize the travel of the rich through the fare box? What does light rail mean for the poor if they cannot afford to ride the trains? But this is LA, that builds a Music Center so it can say that it has one. Look at the splendor, although the reality is that poor cannot afford to go in and listen to the music.

I thank Manuel Servín for turning me on to book reviewing. Books taught me that Roger Rabbit lives in Ethan Elkind’s Railtown.  The problem is that most do not see Roger, and this  contributes to the “silence of the lambs” and our failure to ask, what happened to LA’s rail transportation? Shouldn’t the Gekkos pay for what they have destroyed?

 

A Gift

Every time I come out with a new edition of Occupied America, I feel guilty. The cost of books has gone through the roof. For this edition I wanted to say thank you so I am posting online a 194 page Student/Teacher Manual—or, as I call it, the “Mini-book”—that is over 194 pages. It is designed to accompany Occupied America, it is also meant to guide the students through Chicana/o history as well as periodically refresh their knowledge of the field. The manual also makes Occupied America and the field of Chicana/o history more online friendly for teachers and students. It makes heavy use of the internet. If the hyperlink is down, please email me to Rudy.Acuna@csun.edu. It is available free of charge at http://forchicanachicanostudies.wikispaces.com/Acu%C3%B1a%2C+Occupied+America+Student+Teacher+Guide    It is also available on the link for Center for the Study of the Peoples of the Americas (CESPA; http://www.csun.edu/cespa/Acuna%20Manual%20Binder.pdf. It is not much but perhaps it will facilitate more Chicana/o History courses and you’re learning.

 

For those who have an extra $5 a month for scholarship