As with most major cities, it is the nature of Los Angeles to segregate people. This segregation makes you feel comfortable on your own turf and uncomfortable on somebody else's. I had to develop survival mechanisms for the hatred I encountered when I crossed those boundaries. Ultimately, the power of those moments made it possible for me to do fieldwork in a city where divides of a few miles sometimes seemed greater than those separating nations. Leo was the first person to help me learn to negotiate those divides successfully, and in the process he taught me how to deal with my own mistakes in the field.
Fieldwork is full of anthropologists making mistakes.
Some of those mistakes can be costly indeed. But mostly people understand them and try to help you to comprehend the nature of your mistakes. I had relatively few dealings with Leo altogether, but even after his death my experiences in the field always seemed to revolve around him or to lead back to him somehow through his family and friends. I learned many lessons from my first fieldwork. They were so painful that I long resisted putting them to paper.