In 2000, I ended up in a cage outside the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in downtown Los Angeles wearing a dark suit, swimming against the current in a sea of pierced protesters, raging against Rage Against the Machine.

As a kid who grew up in Dogtown and Z-Boys’ Venice, back when shops on Abbot Kinney sold cheap crack instead of artisan coffee, I had spent plenty of time raging against the machine. My punk rock youth took place in an alcoholic home, with a father who committed suicide, in a Venice patrolled by gangs. I knew who “The Machine” was, and it certainly wasn’t me. But there I was, in my suit, having quit a job at a fancy law firm to become the communications director for the 2000 DNC host committee, trying to control an uncontrollable demonstration. I was playing the part of “The Man” right out of central casting.

At the time, I lived in a strip of Marina del Rey called the Marina Peninsula that L.A. Times columnist Patt Morrison once labeled the “Clinton Ghetto” because so many of my fellow Clinton White House expats lived there: Rica Rodman, Jon Orszag, Rod O’Connor, Chad Griffin, and Rick Miller, to name just a few.

The Democratic National Convention was organized by the Republican Mayor of Los Angeles Dick Riordan—for whom I’d later serve as deputy mayor—and led by his top aide Noelia Rodriguez. Riordan’s close ally, civic leader Eli Broad, was bankrolling the convention just as he was stepping into his now-iconic role as a literal and figurative architect of modern Los Angeles. Simultaneously, the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia was being hosted by a Democratic mayor—across-the-aisle collaboration that feels like a quaint anachronism today.

Part of what drew the DNC to Los Angeles was the brand-new Staples Center, which two decades later, already marks a bygone era. In 2021, Staples Center was renamed the Crypto.com Arena—just a year before Sam Bankman-Fried’s infamous fall from grace that would ironically re-anoint staples as a smarter 21st-century investment than crypto. Two months before the DNC, the Staples Center hosted the first Lakers world championship since the Showtime era. As a fanatical lifelong Lakers fan, I took full advantage of my temporary, DNC-related all-access to watch the series-clinching championship game standing directly behind the basket. At one point, Shaq’s giant hand engulfed mine in a high-five, and I even walked into the locker room after the game to brazenly steal one of Kobe’s towels (which I still have).

Courtesy of author.

When convention week finally began and the political world descended upon Los Angeles, Democratic consultant Paul Begala’s famous quote about politics came to mind: “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.” For one fleeting week, the ugly people took over Tinseltown and got to be the movie stars.

I spent much of that week interacting with reporters in a time before the internet rendered them an endangered species. The center of gravity in the media universe for convention week was the L.A. Times, the cultural and political chronicler of Los Angeles, with great journalists like Jim Newton, Matea Gold, Michael Finnegan, Jim Rainey, Duke Helfand, Beth Shuster, Mark Barabak, Bill Boyarsky, Steve Lopez, Patt Morrison, and Janet Clayton.

This was all happening against the backdrop of a city finally emerging from a deep recession and civil unrest in the wake of the Rodney King beating. The convention slogan labeled Los Angeles “the capital city of the 21st century.” With the new millennium, we were ushering in a new downtown, a new economy, and a new identity. This same pre-millennium optimism had also infused the party’s national narrative. My old boss Bill Clinton famously framed his administration as “the bridge to the 21st century.”

Now, six conventions later, a series of budget cuts—including this month’s draconian layoffs—have hollowed out the L.A. Times newsroom just when democracy needs journalism the most. And the capital city of the 21st century has transitioned from an era of civic giants like Tom Bradley, Dick Riordan, Eli Broad, and Antonio Villaraigosa into an era of casual corruption. It seems like every other council member is in jail, is under investigation, has been indicted, is overtly racist, chills cash bribes in their freezer, or is for sale at the bargain price of a USC professorship or a lap dance.

A few months after the DNC, the Florida recount would shake American democracy. Less than a year later, 9/11 would upend our collective sense of security and redefine U.S. foreign policy. Two decades later, January 6, 2021, would usher in an unimaginably darker descent into tribalism, authoritarianism, and national division.

But inside the convention hall on August 17, 2000, the biggest scandal was Al Gore’s slobbery kiss of his then-wife Tipper on stage before his acceptance speech. And the biggest concern amongst political operatives like myself was bartering the green “middle-school-geek” credential into a “political-nerd-cool-kids-club” orange floor pass by the end of the day.

Courtesy of author.

Three nights before that speech, Rage Against the Machine performed a concert in a designated protest zone outside the convention hall. The show would be a harbinger of the darker times ahead—at least for those who were paying attention.

I left in the middle of the concert to hear President Clinton’s speech from the convention floor (brandishing my successfully acquired cool-kid orange credential), after lead singer Zack de la Rocha defiantly declared that “our democracy has been hijacked.”

By whom, I thought?

Soon after I left, the concert devolved into violence between the protesters and the Los Angeles Police Department, which was still embodying the macho cowboy culture left over from Chief Daryl Gates. The title of Rage Against the Machine’s new album, The Battle of Los Angeles, was all the excuse they needed to break out their fancy riot gear.

Rubber bullets, tear gas, and chaos engulfed downtown Los Angeles that night, while I instead listened to President Clinton tout an airbrushed version of 1990s “peace and prosperity” from within the sheltered confines of the convention hall. I was proud to have played what I felt like was my very small part in that peace and prosperity: to have done everything from working on his presidential campaigns and in his White House as a young (unimportant) staffer to flying around the world on Air Force One representing the United States.

But I had a hard time relating to the existential split-screen inside and outside the convention hall. I couldn’t understand why the protesters were so angry, and I didn’t immediately appreciate the Orwellian irony of journalists getting shot at inside what we’d labeled the “First Amendment zone.”

As we approach the 2024 nominating conventions and presidential election and I reflect on that moment in time, I can see now how that night represented a liminal state for our local and national narratives—a transition from a troubled past into an imagined future that never materialized. The stark contrast inside and outside the convention hall that night signified those narrative threads coming apart at the seams.

Seven years later, I saw Rage Against the Machine perform again in a diametrically different Southern California setting: Coachella. As I took in the bucolic scene, it occurred to me that they might have known more about the trajectory of our city and our nation than I gave them credit for at the time.

Maybe I was The Machine. Maybe I had left something behind in my youth, in other epochs, and maybe it would do me good—however difficult the task—to sort through it all: the man, the machine, and all that rages in between.

In retrospect, maybe we also shouldn’t have been in such a hurry to usher in the 21st Century.

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In 1995, as a freshman at Stanford, I watched two Texans two years above me land the highest number of votes in the race for student senate. They were identical twins, no less, a fact that made for a catchy story in the school paper (“Twin Senators Not Two Close for Comfort”) and a portrait of the smiling, newly minted politicians clad in khakis and polo-style shirts, sitting back-to-back on the floor of the Stanford Quad. It seemed Julián and Joaquin Castro had grasped a critical lesson my sister and I had learned running for our junior high student council: Being a twin pays in politics because it doubles your publicity and votes-and people love twins.

That was 17 years before Julián would keynote the Democratic National Convention, “plucked from relative obscurity,” as CBS News put it Tuesday, though he is now the mayor of the nation’s seventh-largest city.

I didn’t know the Castros well at Stanford, but we had friends in common and a natural affinity as fellow Mexican Americans from Texas, meaning we smiled at each other when we crossed paths on campus. I perceived them to be more mainstreamed Hispanics less invested in the ethnic politics that others of us had embraced away from home. When one or the other showed up to a party at Casa Zapata, the Chicano-themed dorm, I sensed he was there mostly to watch, to check it out, maybe, to understand one part of his constituency better. I had no idea they’d already had their own schooling in 1960s-style Chicano activism from their mother, Maria del Rosario Castro, a longtime community organizer (and single mother) who’d battled for the political inclusion of Mexican Americans, a demographic majority that remained outside the power structure in San Antonio.

It was Rosie Castro’s values around public service that made Julián, the elder of the twins by one minute, wonder if it now was his turn to continue advancing her cause. In a lyrical essay he penned in a freshman writing class in response to the prompt “Do people ever make assumptions about what you’ll do after college, and how do you feel if they do?” he described the political gatherings he’d grown up around (“functions,” his mother called them) that all seemed to him to blur together (“the same speeches and speakers, the same cheese and ham sandwiches”). But he concluded that “maybe politics” was his future.

Stanford became the Castros’ first staging ground. Both brothers double-majored in political science and communications, working under the mentorship of professor Luis Fraga, who specialized in Latino urban politics. After they graduated in 1996, they returned home for a year and took a job at City Hall while they waited to begin Harvard Law School the following fall. Ever more aware of the media cache of their personal story, they granted an interview for another feature in the local newspaper (“Double the Talent, Twice the Ambition”). Though they claimed not to know what they’d be doing in the future, Julián vouched it would include public service, adding that no San Antonian had ever been elected to the two highest offices in Texas. “We do not consider the office of governor or senator an impossibility,” he told the reporter.

Several years later, I met up again with the twins to write a piece for Texas Monthly about their formal launch into politics. They’d finished law school, and now 26-year-old Julián was serving his first year as San Antonio’s youngest councilman, while Joaquin, previously less sure about politics, had thrown his name in a local state representative race he’d win that fall.

Surrounded by energetic young volunteers, they were running grassroots campaigns that hinged on heavy analysis of voting data and relentless canvassing. Their mother served as their chief strategist; always a feminist, she wouldn’t allow them to use the supposedly masculine term “war room” for their workspace. In fact, it was a failed attempt by Rosie 30 years earlier to get on the council that helped the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund to make a case, successfully, to the U.S. Justice Department that San Antonio needed single-member districts to ensure fair representation.

That Rosie’s son was now the direct benefactor of those struggles moved her, enough to inspire her to believe a Latino could someday be president, she confessed to me. But that was before Barack Obama, when many of us couldn’t yet imagine the country embracing anything but a white president.

In Julián’s case, his next step was to move from the city council into the mayor’s office, and, though he hoped to break another age record, he fumbled a run-off in his first attempt in 2005. The business establishment had found him too far left on some council issues, so they supported an older, more conservative candidate. Julián was forced to sit out the next four years but returned a more cautious, centrist candidate in 2009-this time winning comfortably.

It was an important lesson in broadening his appeal that Julián would carry forward as his popularity began to grow. That December, he was invited to a White House economic forum where he caught the eye of the President. By the next summer, The New York Times Magazine was branding him a “post-Hispanic Hispanic politician,” a Democratic pragmatist who favored affirmative action, gay rights and green energy policies yet supported free trade and championed balanced budgets.

Julián in that piece seemed like much more of a centrist than the one I’d gotten to know as a journalist eight years prior. About his mother’s politics, he told the Times, “I don’t want to turn back on my mother’s generation, but we are less burdened.”

The rest now seems like history. In January, Michelle Obama invited Julián to sit with her at the State of the Union address. Then the president asked him to co-chair his re-election campaign and chose him to be the first Latino to deliver the same DNC keynote that catapulted Obama into fame. Joaquin, for his part, is likely to win a fall race for the 20th Congressional District seat in the U.S. Congress. The twins have become the convention’s darlings and an overnight media sensation.

In his keynote address (which received high praise and Al Gore called a “grand slam”), Julián reflected on his family’s past and his college experiences with “some of the brightest folks in the world” but questioned whether other students from his public high school shouldn’t have been at Stanford, too. He hammered home the argument that prosperity demands opportunity and that opportunity demands investment.

“We know that in our free-market economy some will prosper more than others,” he declared. “What we don’t accept is the idea that some folks won’t even get a chance. And the thing is, Mitt Romney and the Republican Party are perfectly comfortable with that America.” Romney, he said, was a “good guy” who “just has no idea how good he’s had it.”

As I watched the address unfold, I detected a bit more of Julián’s evolution, the frames that had subtly shifted to accommodate this audience in this political moment. Julián now underscored his immigrant roots. The leading character in his story became not his activist mother but his newcomer grandmother: an orphaned child who crossed the border while very young and spent her life “barely scraping by” as a maid, cook, and babysitter, cleaning homes so her daughter could get to college.

Certainly, Julián’s speech was part a strategic effort to capture more Latino votes for Obama in critical swing states. But I also wondered if the narrative of immigration-a narrative of new beginnings, not unlike that of Barack Obama, of America as a land of opportunity and exceptionalism-wasn’t intended to replace Rosie’s stories of battling structural racism and the narrative of America as a nation of social exclusion rather than inclusion.

Still, as I heard Julián speak and watched the twins I went to school with grin and embrace each other on the stage-this time in smart business suits, commanding the attention of a nation-I found myself swelling with pride. Whether there’s any hope for Julián to first climb the political ranks in Texas, where the Democratic Party is powerless and in disarray, and whether he has enough of a record to satisfy conservative critics who accuse him of riding on potential, Tuesday was a big day, and not just for the Castros. Because they hadn’t been plucked from obscurity or landed on-stage overnight. They’d been working their way there for almost two decades, and for two generations before that. And that was a story some of us could recognize.

Cecilia Ballí is an anthropology professor at the University of Texas and a contributor to Texas Monthly.

*Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Jason Reed.

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We hear so much about presidential candidates–and so little about life in the states that elect them. In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the trail and give us glimpses of politically important places. Today, Charlotte.

I was a high school senior the first time I saw a cigarette boat–those sleek aggressive vessels that can reach speeds of up to 100 miles an hour–on Lake Norman in North Carolina. Several of us were floating in the water off a friend’s dock and we could hear the boat before we saw it, the engines whining through the water and roaring above it. Back then, Lake Norman, created in the late ’50s and early ’60s when Duke Power built the Cowans Ford Dam on the Catawba River, about 20 miles north of Charlotte, was still a scruffy place of red clay and pine trees and muddy water, with A-frames or small cabins with screened-in porches on enormous lots. We were used to motorboats, pontoon boats, canoes (best for drinking beer in and then holding the empties underwater until they sank), sailboats (none too large), bass boats, and occasional jet skis (all of which seemed to be owned by doctors’ kids and which, to those doctors’ kids’ credit, they shared with the rest of us). But none of us had encountered in that habitat a boat whose sleek purpose was intense, deafening speed itself. The rumor, which I found credible, was that the cigarette boat’s owner was Larry Hedrick, the founder of the (very large) Statesville Auto Auction and a NASCAR team owner, and that he had two of them.

This was the beginning of the 1990s, and I thought to myself: Man, here comes the neighborhood.

A lot of money came pouring into Charlotte over the next couple of decades. The banking deregulations of the ’80s and ’90s removed (among many other constraints) the prohibitions against a bank from one state owning a bank from another state. This meant that Charlotte-based institutions like North Carolina National Bank and First Union, under their leaders Hugh McColl and Ed Crutchfield, would grow, consolidate, consume, change their names, grow some more, encounter crisis and accept bailouts, change their names again, etc. etc.–and become the headquarters of Bank of America and the East Coast headquarters of Wells-Fargo, thereby making Charlotte, as the visitor will repeatedly be reminded, the Nation’s-Second-Largest-Banking-Center.

It is tempting to say here that banking has brought in the money, honey; and NASCAR is what people do with their time. But that would be incomplete.

NASCAR, with the mechanical and infrastructure requirements of a major industry, is a massive and sophisticated business, expert at extracting branding cash from its partners, and it has brought in a lot of money of its own. Many lucky good ol’ boys are playing with their machines for what has become a very well-compensated living. The shores of Lake Norman now boast many of their homes, with their generic grandeur, precise lawns, and big toys. For a sense of this lifestyle and its pleasures, watch Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights and just pretend it’s a documentary.

And denizens of the area have leisure pursuits besides NASCAR. (Believe me when I tell you that some do not even follow NASCAR at all.) In the years since Larry Hedrick buzzed us at the dock, Charlotte has acquired: the mortifyingly terrible and anemically attended pro basketball Bobcats to replace the beloved Hornets (who themselves just got started at the end of the ’80s); a professional football team, the Panthers, who play in Bank of America Stadium (where President Obama is scheduled to accept his party’s nomination on the last night of the Democratic National Convention); an enormous downtown branch of the city’s art stalwart the Mint Museum; and plenty of new restaurants and bars willing to explain that they will “drizzle” some vinaigrette on your plate and eager to sell you and your hard-working work pals a Happy Hour bucket of Bud Light. There’s at least one good indie movie theater, which my parents drive for an hour from Statesville to visit. They go out to dinner afterward and make an evening of it.

I’ve long felt that Charlotte’s determined growth–its ceaseless acquisition of new cultural institutions, buildings, and other landmarks–is all part of an effort to finally, irrevocably, and indisputably establish it as a Major City. Whether you’re an opera company or the first Olive Garden within comfortable driving distance, Charlotte wants you, and when Charlotte gets you it wants the world to know. The Democratic National Convention is just another trophy in the case. In Boston people tell you how old something is–it’s always the oldest or first whatever-it-may-be in America. In Texas they tell you how big it is–always the biggest. In Charlotte, they tell you where it ranks. “The world’s sixth-busiest airport” or “the fourth-largest university in the state system” or “the tallest building between Philadelphia and Atlanta.”

Both the skyline (it’s fuller) and the feeling uptown at 1 a.m. (it’s jumping) are undeniably different from what they were just a couple decades ago. The Bank of America Corporate Center, often called the Taj McColl (guess: what is the tallest building between Philadelphia and Atlanta?), has been the centerpiece of a refurbished crossroads where the money and the ambition are visible in the way that only marble, glass, steel, vaulted air, clean concrete, and brand-name architects can achieve. This axis of Tryon and Trade Streets has always been a merchant’s hub, and a place where an otherwise squared-away place might be able to let loose a little. I’ve always understood those to be the double-meanings alluded to in a local phrase suggested as a dating aphorism by one of my uncles, “If you can’t trade on Tryon, try on Trade.”

There have been many jobs lost in Charlotte and in the surrounding region since the crash of 2008, but the net jobs added over the past several decades still add up to a larger number. Civic accoutrements–the ball teams and their arenas, the expanded museums, the new buildings–are still standing. That said, any and every job lost hurts and frightens at least one worker and family, and rounds of layoffs in the thousands, large enough to be reported in the papers, are chastening for a city whose very proudly tracked growth was a product of its ability to outwit the fatal vulnerabilities of North Carolina’s historical economic mainstays: the “three T’s” of textiles, timber (by which is meant furniture), and tobacco. Two of these industries can and have been moved overseas. And the third, people can quit. Banking, especially large, aggressive, innovative banking, must have seemed impervious to these kinds of troubles. But that’s what bubbles feel like from the inside–lots of fun, sustained by the wisdom of those who are enjoying them, and bound to last. Until they don’t.

Chapel Hill, another important North Carolina town, has several nicknames, one of which is “the pat of butter in the sea of grits.” I guess Charlotte could be called “the credit card stuck in a patch of red clay.” Or “the credit card stuck in a patch of red clay, with a splash of gasoline.” Charlotte is an aspirational place with a strong and observable feeling of pride, an acute consciousness of its own status, and a sense of humor about itself. It’s shaking off a hangover and finding itself. It’s a part of America.

David R. Patterson is a literary agent. He grew up in Statesville, about an hour north of Charlotte.

*Photo courtesy of Willamor Media.

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