Choose one source to analyze:
- 1961 film The Exiles
- The play Chavez Ravine
Choose one scene from the source above to analyze one of the following question:
What do Mackenzie's film and the play Chavez Ravine suggest about how L.A. communities negotiate and contest the structures of urban space while engaging in complex processes of place-making?
How do the film and play contribute to our developing conversations about memory and urban place-making alongside different forms of what Victor Hernández Cruz termed "urban vanishment" (when writing about the NYC Lower East Side, if you remember Module 1)?
How do our Module 6 materials speak to ways that urban place-making plays out alongside experiences of migration, displacement, dislocation, and/or diaspora?
What questions do our Module 6 readings raise about whose spaces and stories get (de)valued within a changing city? What's at stake in telling and retelling histories (such as the near-obliteration of Chávez Ravine communities) that spotlight the often-unseen effects of urban growth, "progress," and "renewal"?
Sample Solution