From: James I. Davis <jdav%well.sf.ca.us@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Subject: Mike Davis i'view, Part I
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Resent-From: "Rich Winkel" <MATHRICH@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 21:14:43 GMT

AUTHOR/ACTIVIST MIKE DAVIS SPEAKS OUT ON THE L.A. REBELLION

'People were taking the necessities of life'

By Laura Garcia

LOS ANGELES -- This is Part One of an interview of Mike Davis of
Los Angeles. He is the author of the book "City of Quartz".

People's Tribune: Who were the people in the L.A. rebellion?  The
TV portrayed them as criminals.

Mike Davis: TV coverage is itself an illusion. People got this
sense that they were vividly on the street, but in fact all they
saw were the kind of selective highlights and the most luridly
violent moments. You never saw the police violence until people
who participated in the rebellion had a chance to talk and explain
their own motives and what they saw happening.

Just speaking from my own observation -- having been out in the
streets for most of the rebellion, particularly in the area around
here in MacArthur Park -- what was most striking was that people
were taking basic the necessities of life. The two most commonly
looted commodities in the MacArthur Park area, which is largely a
Central American neighborhood, were basic foodstuffs and diapers
and other such "luxury goods," for instance cockroach spray.

The District Attorney's Office here is waging a campaign to deny
any connection between economic distress and looting, pointing out
the large number of people who looted electronic goods. To be
honest with you, if my baby needed milk I wouldn't steal milk, I'd
steal a VCR and then sell it. What we see here is media which is
filled with betrayal of what the causes of this are.

If you just cross the freeway here you see a community. This is
probably the largest port-of-entry neighborhood for new immigrants
from Mexico and Central America to come. What's been happening
here over the last year is just virulent misery, as you see in
equivalent urban neighborhoods throughout the country.
Unemployment has tripled. There's a huge homeless colony on Crown
Hill, which was developed overnight and is composed mainly of
young Latino men who, a year ago, were busboys and waiters, who
worked in car washes, who lost their jobs. There is a first-class
hunger crisis in this city. People are coming here and they are
not even finding the sweatshop jobs.

People are falling through the cracks, first by the tens of
thousands and now by hundreds of thousands. So what the riot
revealed is just the scale of distress, the scale of an economic
crisis. Southern California is experiencing its most severe
recession since 1938. Some attention has been paid to unemployed
aerospace engineers, but the people who really suffer most
savagely are the new immigrant working poor, whose labor performs
every menial task, every difficult task in this city.


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This article originated in the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE (Online Edition),
Vol. 19 No. 39 / September 28, 1992; P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL
60654; Email: jdav@igc.org. Feel free to reproduce and use unless
marked as copyrighted. Please include this message with
reproductions of this article. The PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE depends on
donations from its readers -- your generosity is appreciated.
For an online subscription (no charge) send mail to jdav@igc.org
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