Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
105
account of life in Watts. Identified as a Black urban ghetto, Watts has a long-standing history
of marginalization in which residents encounter limited access to basic resources (for
example, education, work, health) that perpetuate poverty in the community. Urban ghettos
have been characterized as spaces densely inhabited by minority groups who live in deprived
conditions that perpetuate social and health disparities. Such dominant narratives have
obfuscated the lived experiences of discrimination in these spaces. For this reason one of the
most severe and intensely studied race riot in L.A. history — the 1965-Watts Revolt — is
largely misunderstood. It has become a trope from which scholarship and popular media aim
to represent the people from Watts in its totality. Thus, the community’s future is threatened
by disappearing community participation and gentrification projects that may not aim to
displace the residents, but may do so inadvertently. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that
despite dual legacies of cultural inheritance and survival, over the past 50 years, Watts has
been misrepresented as a powerless community. This auto-ethnography engages the following
methodological tools: postcolonial, critical race and feminist theories of representation and
identity formations; a review of historical and social science literature on Watts and ‘ghettos’
in general; interviews and archival research in Watts; and my own experience as a lifetime
resident of Watts. In addition, I critically examine the persistent reductive representation of
Watts as a poverty-stricken backward community, addressing how such representations have
impacted residents and their identity. The auto-ethnographic methodological and analytical
approach of my research addresses the limitations of historical and contemporary scholarship
conceptualizing Watts, its residents, and the idea of the urban ghetto.
Dr Cynthia Gonzalez
is the Faculty Outreach Liaison in the Division of Community Engagement
and Teaching Faculty in the College of Science and Health’s MPH Program in Urban Health at
Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. Dr Gonzalez attended UCLA where she majored
in Chicana/o Studies with a minor in Public Health and completed her MPH at USC in Epidemiology
and Biostatistics. She received her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the California
Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. As a first generation Chicana, her doctoral research
included a multidisciplinary methodological approach to address the quality of life for residents of
Watts, an inner-city neighbourhood in Los Angeles and her hometown.
Name
: Daniela Kraemer
Affiliation
: Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto
Awarded
: 2013, London School of Economics
Planting Roots, Making Place: An Ethnography of Young Men in Port Vila, Vanuatu
This thesis is about an organised group or ‘squad’ of young men in Port Vila, the capital of
the Pacific Islands nation-state of Vanuatu, and their practices of place making in the rapidly
developing context of ‘town’. The young men who are the subject of this research are second-
generation migrants and thus first-generation born and raised ‘urbanites’. Based on twenty
months of fieldwork, this thesis examines how these young men are transforming Freswota
Community —
the residential area in which they live —
from a place with no shared and
