10 things you should know about Los Angeles

For Los Angeles County's 27 million visitors, a new book co-authored by ASU professor Wendy Cheng offers eye-opening alternatives to L.A.'s usual sightseeing destinations. For Angelenos themselves, it offers a meaningful way to learn more about their home and engage in its history and landscape in new ways. 

"A People's Guide to Los Angeles" has received positive reviews from a range of media since it was published by the University of California Press in April. The guidebook, which was 15 years in the making, documents 115 little-known sites in the City of Angels where struggle related to race, class, gender, and sexuality have occurred. 

The authors divide the city into six regions – North Los Angeles, the Eastside and San Gabriel Valley, South Los Angeles, Long Beach and the Harbor, the Westside, and the San Fernando Valley – and the fascinating descriptions of each destination are accompanied by listings of nearby sites of interest and favorite neighborhood restaurants.

In bringing to life this city’s diverse communities and fundamental histories of struggle and resilience, the book brings in personal reflections from people who have lived in Los Angeles and features a mix of historical and contemporary photography (taken by Cheng). It even closes with suggestions for several thematic tours.

Cheng, who is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific American studies and justice and social inquiry in the School of Social Transformation, and her co-authors Laura Barraclough and Laura Pulido have done numerous book talks, signings and interviews over the last several months. And each Monday in August the Los Angeles Review of Books is running a series of related articles by the authors, along with excerpts from the guide. 

On August 15, the British online literary magazine Berfrois published a piece by Cheng and Barraclough titled "Ten Things You Should Know About Los Angeles." The article gives readers a flavor for the "real" Los Angeles and the people who built it – as well as insights into how we can all begin to understand more about our own cities when we look with fresh eyes.

"Los Angeles is well known as a place anchored by Hollywood and home to celebrities, beach culture and endless sunshine," write Cheng and Barraclough in introducing the article. "There are also the dystopic representations of the city as intellectually vacuous, absent of any redeeming culture and rife with traffic jams, suburban sprawl, environmental noxiousness and racial conflict.

"As longtime Angelenos and scholars who study LA, however, we know and love a more complex Los Angeles; rich with diverse histories and gloriously multifaceted presents. Since mainstream images depict a skewed and highly exclusionary view of the city – omitting vast swaths of its history, landscapes and inhabitants – we felt that it was a political prerogative to bring the places and histories of the 'real' Los Angeles to a broader audience: to literally put them on the map in order to tell a story about how power works through the making of place."