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2005 Antonio Villaraigosa elected mayor of LA, the first Latino since 1872. Born poor in East LA, he said in his victory speech, ‘I will never forget where I came from.’

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The Culture

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REGIONAL IDENTITY

LIFESTYLE

MULTICULTURALISM

ECONOMY

SPORTS

MEDIA

RELIGION

ARTS

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Go ahead: mock. Bad-mouth, belittle, bemoan, besmirch, debase, decry, demean, disparage. Get it all out. Put down, reduce, ridicule, slam, sling mud, thrash, trash.

Now open wide and prepare to eat your words, because anyone who thinks that Southern California has no culture hasn’t been paying attention.

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REGIONAL IDENTITY

There’s no city more American than Los Angeles, with all the good and all the bad. Its people are among the nation’s richest and poorest, most established and newest arrivals, most refined and roughest, most beautiful and most plain, most erudite and most airheaded. Success here can be spectacular, failure equally so.

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Few writers nail SoCal’s culture as well as Joan Didion. In Where I Was From (2003), she contrasts California’s mythology and reality.

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But what binds Angelenos is that they are seekers. Nearly everyone – or their forebears – arrived by choice. Whether from across the country or across the globe, they were drawn by a dream, be it fame on the silver screen or money to send back to the family. It’s as if America’s dreamers rushed west and stopped where the continent ran out of land.

They found plenty of company.

Stereotypes

Valley girls snap chewing gum in shopping malls, surfer boys shout ‘Dude!’ across San Diego beaches, new immigrants gather around street corners in search of day jobs, surgically enhanced babes sip margaritas poolside, gangbangers flash hand-signals, harried soccer moms flip out in Orange County’s rush-hour traffic and everyone works in ‘the Industry.’

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A dozen SoCal colleges and universities are ranked in the top 50 nationally.

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Reality

Certainly the stereotype exists, but if that’s all you’re expecting, you’re in for a shock.

The first question you’ll often hear from locals is ‘What do you do for a living?’ It’s how people place each other and, unlike elsewhere in America, nobody here is surprised if the answer takes more than a minute; there’s nothing unusual about holding down one or more jobs while working toward your ultimate goal.

Daily interaction tends to be pleasant, sometimes to the point that it can be hard to figure out what people really think. Saying someone has ‘issues’ is a polite way of implying that the person has problems. ‘Let’s get together’ is often not to be taken literally; it can mean ‘It was good talking with you, and now I have to go.’

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SoCal inventions include the Space Shuttle, Mickey Mouse, whitening toothpaste, the hula hoop (or at least the trademark), Barbie, skateboard and surfboard technology, the Cobb salad and the fortune cookie.

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Then, of course, there’s the car you drive. There’s an underlying truth to the common joke: the right car is to Angelenos what the right shoes are to Italians. Fancy imports, convertibles and muscle cars still turn heads, but the status symbol du jour is the ecofriendly Toyota Prius.

LA and the rest of SoCal have a symbiotic relationship; generally LA goes about its business and the rest of the region either depends on or resents it.

You can see this in politics, for starters. LA leans to the left – often there is no Republican candidate for mayor – and its politicians carry significant weight in Washington (eg Democratic Congress members Henry Waxman of West LA and Santa Monica, Jane Harman of the South Bay and Maxine Waters of South LA).

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DAMN THAT TRAFFIC JAM!

Traffic is LA’s great leveler. Outsiders often marvel that it’s a city without a center; that’s less true than it used to be thanks to Downtown LA development, but it’s also more true in that business districts have dispersed in the last 10 years. And as home prices have