By Noriko Nakada
Before: Hyde Park Homework
UMFoC. Upwardly Mobile Family of Color: pronounced, “um, fuck.” This is what I kept saying to myself as my family and I prepared to move from one recently gentrified neighborhood and into another.
I moved to Los Angeles over two decades ago. It started with a studio apartment in Eagle Rock: pre-Colorado-Street-gentrification. Then, there was a Ladera Heights condo, after Magic opened his Starbucks. After that, it was a Highland Park casita where our front fence housed bullets from Avenues, before Mr. T died and his alley was restored. Next was a Mar Vista condo pre-Starbucks and road diet. Now, we would make Hyde Park our home: pre-stadium and Crenshaw line.
All of these neighborhoods before, during, and after everything changes.
Our new neighborhood is shifting quickly. We are just a few blocks from the new Hyde Park train stop, a couple of miles from where two NFL teams will play. A woman from this area recently became a princess. Home prices are pushing/pulling families in/out. Developers make offers. Families who have lived here for decades can’t believe how much they can get for their homes. Houses are flipped. Tenants are pushed out, or like this house, where we will land, aging and a death in the family plays a part in the decision to sell.
My uncle lived just over the hill and hosted the Nakada mochi tsuki every New Year, but he’s passed on now. My parents courted at the Holiday Bowl during the days when my dad rented off Crenshaw, but that was decades ago and they raised me 1,000 miles away in Oregon. So, I’m having a hard time laying claim to this new neighborhood without saying, “um, fuck.”
Once we entered escrow, I reached out to Cassandra Lane, a writer, local resident and Women Who Submit member. She would soon be my neighbor, so I told her about our new purchase, and she gave me some homework: read Lynell George’s book After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame. I ordered it immediately, and as I packed boxes and prepared to move, I turned the thick pages, drinking in the words and images. In each essay, George captures LA as it is, as it was, and how it is shifting again, and again, and again. My history in LA skips my formative years, but George has roots here. She reflects a deep love for LA, and a growing discomfort for a city that is changing in ways that make neighborhoods unrecognizable, a city that displaces families leaving many with no place to go but out.
I share Lynell’s love for this city, even though my stay only spans a couple of decades, and as a new resident of Hyde Park, I am trying to make peace with my move. Still, as I read, I recognize that my choices land me squarely in the space of gentrification and, “um, fuck.”
After: Mortgage Payments
We’d been in our new home for a few weeks, when I finally got out for a morning run. It was early, but the sun was up, and it hadn’t gotten too hot. I mapped out my course on Google, not knowing the streets the way George did “committed to memory how many turns it took to get to Crenshaw from our house on 61st Street near West Boulevard,” but I felt the pulse of the neighborhood as I made my way west across Slauson, one of George’s “Arteries of Memory.”
I nodded to the occasional walker and tried to keep my heavy legs moving. As I crossed Angeles Vista, I recognized myself from the pages of After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame in “the horizontal-slat-wood fences; […]rehabbed homes; craft coffee; young women jogging in fancy workout gear.” I was the displacer of an older family who had lived on this block longer than any of the other neighbors. I was the jogger Karen Grisby-Bates talked about on Code Switch’s “Location! Location! Location!” the one wearing the bright tights and running shoes, making my way through the neighborhood with my headphones on.
I knew who I was, but I wanted to do better, so I kept asking the questions George asked in “Here Comes the Neighborhood.”
- How do you want to contribute to the story of the city? How do you want to influence and shape history?
- How do you protect not just a neighborhood’s unique character, but people and their imprint, their story, their struggle?
- As a new member of a community, how can you work to not be complicit in a cycle of displacement?
The answers weren’t coming easily, and they still aren’t, so as I run, I start making mortgage payments. I have to struggle with these questions and determine for myself: what do I owe this house, this plot of soil, this land? What do I owe these streets and this neighborhood? I will keep asking questions and keep answering, “um, fuck” as this upwardly mobile family of color attempts to make a life, and I will attempt to write it all down.
We are trying to put down roots here, a little further away from some things and a little closer to others. We are hoping to build a life here for our family, to write our story without erasing all of the stories that came before us. Maybe, after enough mornings of waking up and struggling to write, and afternoons talking sports with the neighbors, and evenings waving at the dog-walkers and apologizing for the noise of our kids, instead of struggling to find my place in this place, in this house, on this street, in this neighborhood, this house will start to feel like home.
Noriko Nakada edits the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit. She also writes, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Publications include two book-length memoirs: Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies, and excerpts, essays, and poetry in Catapult, Meridian, Compose, Kartika, Hippocampus, The Rising Phoenix Review, and elsewhere.