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The Wheels on the Bus: The Tourism Industry Development Council and Envisioning Spatial Futures in post-Rodney King Los Angeles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2021

GEORGE FRANCIS-KELLY
GEORGE FRANCIS-KELLY*
Affiliation:
School of History, University of Leeds. Email: G.W.Francis-Kelly@Leeds.ac.uk.
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Abstract

The aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King crisis in Los Angeles produced a flurry of debate regarding urban social policy in America that has gone unexamined by scholars. This article suggests that by exploring grassroots activists and their proposals for how the city should be rebuilt, we can gain valuable insight into the role of racialized space in motivating protest. It therefore considers a case study of the Tourism Industry Development Council (TIDC), a largely unknown coalition of some of LA's most dynamic activists, created in an attempt to reform the city's tourism policies. By examining a series of bus tours hosted by the TIDC in 1994 and 1996, this article argues that in addition to trying to establish equitable and inclusive economic development in low-income communities of colour, these activists were also reimagining the meanings and uses of urban space. In creating these tours, organizers utilized a “spatial imaginary” to challenge the ideological underpinnings of urban redevelopment and reconceptualized how social justice could be achieved through the remaking of urban spaces in ways which would have important implications for the future of protest and resistance in modern Los Angeles.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 217 - 241
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies

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References

1 The terminology surrounding this event has been controversial and has often been referred to interchangeably as “riot,” “rebellion,” “uprising” and “disturbance.” Terms like “riot” deny the political agency of participants. Yet terms which directly acknowledge this, such as “rebellion” or “uprising,” have been seen to validate the racial targeting of Korean immigrants. I have therefore followed Lynn Mae Itagaki's example in using the term “crisis” throughout, to connote political communication on the part of participants while also recognizing claims of racial violence. See Itagaki, Lynn Mie, Civil Racism: The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and the Crisis of Racial Burnout (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 4–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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48 “Liberty Hill Foundation Application for Funding,” 5.

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61 Inevitably, some of these tours did contain some aspects which overlapped with the exploitative “slum tourism” that the TIDC had hoped to avoid. As discussed by Fabian Frenzel, this kind of community-based tourism can sometimes be created with the intention of exploring an authentic “reality” of everyday life which encourages or facilitates social activism. See Frenzel, Fabian, Slumming It: The Tourist Valorization of Urban Poverty (London: Zed Books, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 “The World City Media Bureau; Get the Inside Story on the Best of L.A.”

63 Baxter.

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67 TIDC, ‘Background to the Making of the Video, “On Any Day’.”

68 Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists, 65.

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75 Ibid., Roxanna Tynan, “Progressive Coalition Building in Los Angeles,” Democratic Left, 33, 3 (Winter 2006), 9–11, 10, Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, 152, 181.

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79 Ibid., 10.

80 Sara Lin, “Voters in Inglewood Turn Away Wal-Mart,” Los Angeles Times, 7 April 2004, A1.

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