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CITY OF ANGLOS
Los Angeles is probably the most racially diverse city in the United States. The greater Los Angeles region includes more than 140 incorporated cities with at least 18 large urban cores. It comprises 13 major ethnic groups, and 86 languages are spoken in its schools. It is plagued by nearly 1,900 gangs and has the highest rate of urban unrest of any city in the country. But this wasn't the Los Angeles of a century ago. In 1850, the year California entered the Union, Los Angeles was inhabited mostly by white English-speaking settlers. It was a pristine desert wilderness that gave these Anglo developers' imagination free rein.
William Alexander McClung's Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles portrays the century-long rise and fall of English-speaking Los Angeles. For many chroniclers, writing this history would have entailed describing the city's transition from a small, homogenous community to a multicultural metropolis where different voices compete-sometimes violently-for control over the city's destiny. But McClung resists such neat divisions. For him, Los Angeles isn't so much one place that became another-it has always been a city with a divided imagination of itself
Ever since its humble beginnings, McClung contends, the city has inspired varying mythologies of place and space: "life in an idyllic garden" or "life in a community of manageable dimensions"; the maintenance of "a found natural paradise" or the organization of "an empty space inviting development"; the...