If Los Angeles is going to rewrite its city charter, should everyday Angelenos take charge of the effort?

The people who run Los Angeles government are skeptical.

Mayor Karen Bass, City Council President Paul Krekorian, and other city leaders have called for reforming the city’s main governing document—a quasi-constitution that is called the charter—for the first time in a quarter-century.

The momentum for charter change has come from community groups, civic leaders and media who want to see changes to L.A.’s scandal-plagued city council. In recent years, there have been multiple indictments of top city staffers and of four city councilmembers, along with a leaked tape of three councilmembers and L.A.’s top labor leader making racially prejudiced comments.

With 15 members representing 4 million people, the L.A. council is simply too small to be representative of the city’s diversity, or to be close to everyday people, since each member represents more than 250,000 people. In fact, L.A.’s council is one of the smallest and least representative big-city councils in the world. (That of Seoul, which I recently visited, has 102 members.)

Changing the size or structure of the council requires amending the city charter. Bass, Krekorian, and other city leaders are developing plans for a November ballot measure that would create a charter reform commission.

But in preparing this ballot measure, they are moving toward giving themselves the power to appoint most of the charter reform commission members. The end result of this would likely be an establishment commission, mixing technocrats, lobbyists, and experts who are allied with the most powerful labor, corporate, and philanthropy groups in the city.

This approach is predictable. Elected officials and powerful institutions in L.A. have a longstanding unwillingness to cede power to regular people. But creating such a top-down commission makes it harder for Los Angeles to seize a historic opportunity to empower its people, incorporate promising 21st-century ideas into governance, and become a bigger player on the world stage.

A politician-appointed charter commission also badly misreads the current political moment in Los Angeles. If charter reform is led by political elites, it might be met with the same public disgust that started the call for reform in the first place.

There’s a better way forward—one that would have more political credibility and deliver more new ideas. Cities around the world have used “people’s assemblies” (also called citizens or civic assemblies) to tackle hard questions, incorporate the best local thinking, and implement reform.

Ireland, to take one example out of hundreds, used a people’s assembly to remake its constitution. Closer to L.A., in 2022, the Northern California city of Petaluma convened a lottery-based assembly to address a bitter controversy over land use.

The members of such civic assemblies are everyday people who are drawn by lot. The lotteries are managed with technology to assure that the resulting assembly represents its jurisdiction in terms of gender, race, neighborhood, and any other chosen factors. These assemblies are designed not merely to ensure representation, but to keep powerful people from dominating the debate. Studies of people’s assemblies also show that everyday people bring more diverse concerns and new ideas into governing processes. In Ireland’s constitution effort, for instance, the changes included legalizing abortion and same-sex marriage.

Using a people’s assembly to reform the Los Angeles charter would not freeze out politicians or powerful interest groups entirely. They could testify before the assembly. Nor would it leave mission-critical work to amateurs. Los Angeles’ commission, like others formed by sortition around the world, could have the power to hire experts and technocrats to answer questions and help with research.

When I’ve pressed key players in City Hall about this idea, they’ve deflected.

Many point to a measure on the November ballot that would create an independent redistricting commission. They note that that body would similarly consist of everyday Angelenos.

But they seem to regard a charter reform commission of everyday people as a bridge too far. They prefer a commission with city governance experts, major interest groups, and their own political allies. In short, elite Los Angeles has a narrow view of charter reform.

To be fair, the council president, Krekorian, has been a public voice for freeing the charter reform commission to take on whatever topics it wishes. He and other council members have also wisely proposed creating a new process for periodic reviews of the city charter that would allow for more frequent amendments and updates.

But picking a commission of political allies will likely limit the agenda to only obvious and pressing issues, like homelessness or public safety. An establishment commission has no need to advance novel ideas or change the fundamental governance structure, because those changes might make life harder for their political patrons.

Sticking to the status quo would be a missed opportunity. LA., like other American cities, retains the same outdated, 20th-century corporate structure—with separate departments for separate functions—that divides local government into bureaucratic fiefdoms.

This charter is an occasion to incorporate 21st-century practices into local democracy and to remake America’s most entertaining city for a faster, digital, more globalized age. A new L.A. charter should incorporate new democratic processes (including increased use of the lottery assemblies I propose for the commission) and digital environments that allow citizens to do more decision-making and governing.

More broadly, Los Angeles needs a governing structure that gives the city more power and flexibility to solve not just local problems, but to address planetary challenges that shape life here: the environment, health, the economy, and corruption.

Some of the best thinking on how to do this comes from Angelenos. In their forthcoming book, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises, Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman of Los Angeles’ Berggruen Institute argue for linking the governance of different cities to better address planetary concerns. They envision more powerful municipalities working in collaboration with each other and world institutions to address the problems our faltering nation-states have failed to resolve.

“National states should give up many of their governance functions, tasks, and decision rights: planetary functions should move to planetary institutions, while many other functions should move to local institutions,” Blake and Gilman write.

A new charter could translate such ideas into reality. It could grant broad new authority to the city’s well-managed international affairs office, commit the city to solving planetary challenges, and outline a governing process for the city to form and join new global policy-making bodies with other local governments.

These and other novel ideas are more likely to emerge from a charter reform commission consisting of everyday people who represent the diversity and madcap thinking of this city. New ideas are more likely to gain traction if they come from our neighbors.

So, let’s make the new charter a do-it-ourselves project.

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To get at the answer, a panel of democracy experts and L.A. political insiders discussed the history and future of L.A.’s embattled city council—and why, in this moment of pain and division, there’s a real opportunity to demand change in the way the city is run.

Moderator Janaya Williams, KCRW’s host of All Things Considered, started off the conversation by addressing the elephant (or, as she put it, the “two slightly racist elephants who will not stand down and resign”) in the room: councilmembers Kevin de León and Gilbert Cedillo. The legislators have ignored calls to step down following a leak of their conversation with the now-former council president Nury Martinez, where they were captured on tape using racist, crude, and homophobic language while conspiring to expand their political power.

“I was appalled at the remarks that I heard, embarrassed for the body that I serve on, and sad for Los Angeles,” said L.A. city councilmember Nithya Raman, who called on Cedillo and de León to step down before the scandal encourages “more pain and more division to form in the city.”

The leaked recording, she said, was all about power. But not, as her colleagues alleged, about consolidating Latino power; this was about consolidating their own, personal grip on L.A. “The more we focus on that, and the more we talk about how we can change processes in the city so that we don’t have a repeat of that kind of divisive conversation again, I think that to me is the way forward.”

Weingart Foundation president and CEO Miguel Santana agreed with Raman. This was a conversation about hoarding power, he said, something that he called “an L.A. tradition.”

“It wasn’t unique—it’s happened generation after generation, and in many ways, the city was founded on those principles,” he said. That’s because Los Angeles matured at a time when redlining—the systemic discriminatory practice of denying housing loan applications and other services based on race or ethnicity—was “the law of the land,” which meant that the majority of the city couldn’t buy property. Systems of governance at the time echoed this—“it was all about maintaining the privilege of some at the expense of others.”

Santana finds himself invigorated by the ways that Angelenos are reckoning with this reality in real-time today.

“It is very powerful to see all of Los Angeles react the way Los Angeles has,” he said. “To see the public testimony—20% of it being done in Spanish—to see folks say this isn’t the Los Angeles that I know, that I love, that I want us to be. And demanding that we do something dramatically different.”

But what should our new vision for Los Angeles be?

Public Access Democracy director Leonora Camner argued that we can’t just elect our way out of this situation. “Power is corrupting, even for people who have the best intentions.”

Instead, she suggests we think about the best ways to make a more democratic system. “There are a lot of exciting opportunities for us to do more experimentation and try out more innovative forms of government that really get to the heart of the problem,” she argued.

For instance, Camner said, we can think about using democratic lotteries that engage a representative cross-section of the community. “They elevate expertise more because people impartially listen to expert opinion when deliberating, without the worry of re-election,” she said.

This is something we already do with juries, and there’s a reason for that: “If you were on criminal trial and your fate was on the line, you’d never want that to be a political process,” she said. You’d want the process to be guided by facts and experts.

Why is it, California 100 executive director Karthick Ramakrishnan asked, that you can see innovation everywhere in California, but “not in the realm of democracy?” We can do so much more, he argued.  He cited innovations from around the world, like Japan’s intergenerational simulations, in which half of the participants represent citizens in, say, the year 2050, and the other half represent citizens in the present moment. The groups have to come together and make decisions that serve both parties.

Whether solutions are old or new, we need to look at them with fresh eyes and determine what kind of political system we want, he argued. “What are the things we want to optimize for and encourage? What are the harms we want to minimize?”

Raman, too, pointed to existing innovations at the state level, the county level, and across America. “The question is,” said the councilmember, “if there is an idea we can consolidate around and how would you make it happen?” Among other issues, Raman said she’s especially interested in creating a “truly independent” redistribution commission and expanding the size of the city council.

Before the night ended, Williams asked all the panelists what they think L.A. would look like under a truly representative government. Would a city council be part of that picture?

“Maybe we’ll continue to have a city council,” said Camner. “But I hope that we make sure there are more opportunities for Angelenos to directly serve in some of these decision-making roles.”

Ramakrishnan called on Angelenos to “ground ourselves in core values—innovation, resilience, inclusion, and equity. These need to go from slogans to being operationalized.”

Santana pointed to the current urgency: “We need to reimagine it now,” he said. “We need to rely on those who have spent their careers thinking about these issues. We should give ourselves some permission and grace to imagine something different.”

And speaking from her role as a councilmember, Raman said she is heartened by how so many elected officials are now saying, “take away the number of my constituents, reduce the control I have over my district.”

This, she said, is “a revolutionary moment.”

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Politics is full of high-stakes battles and strategies concocted behind closed doors. But that’s no excuse for the level of venality, toxicity, self-aggrandizement, condescension, hubris, and racism exposed in the leaked recording on redistricting that recently shook the Los Angeles City Council.

Nothing about the conversation—in which councilmembers Gilbert Cedillo and Kevin de León listened quietly as then-council president Nury Martinez spewed hate—was blatantly illegal. But it was shocking. It revealed deep hypocrisy among leaders who, in a public setting, would be the first to claim that they condemn racism and embrace the city’s diversity. It also violated an unwritten rule requiring a minimal level of decency in the way people treat one another.

Cynical observers might opine that decency can’t be expected from politicians. But treating others with respect (in private and in public) isn’t asking too much. As I learned during my own career on the council, basic decency is a requirement for getting things done in the public sphere. And today, new realities dictate new approaches to doing this unpredictable, messy, sometimes delicate, and wholly essential work.

Embracing diversity has been a constant in L.A.’s public discourse for the last 50 years, ever since Tom Bradley beat back incumbent mayor Sam Yorty’s efforts to use Bradley’s race as a divisive tactic in the 1973 mayoral race. Bradley was L.A.’s Black mayor, but he was never the mayor only for Black people. His rise to power represented a turning point in the city’s tortured race relations because it demonstrated that the people of Los Angeles were ready to transcend the politics of racial division—moving from “me” to “we.”

I came of age politically during the Bradley era. Growing up in the cities of L.A. and Monterey Park, I never experienced much in the way of overt anti-Asian bias except for the occasional unintentionally condescending comment about my lack of a foreign accent. (I’m a native Angeleno.) I became a candidate for the first time in 1981, running for L.A. City Council in a district where students at the local school, Hollywood High, spoke more than 40 languages and dialects.

I thought my background as the son of an immigrant would be seen as a plus. Instead, I observed my opponent, an incumbent councilwoman, use my ethnic identity to raise suspicions about my ability to represent a diverse constituency. I learned the bitter lesson that race can be a devastatingly divisive political weapon—even among liberal, sophisticated voters in a big city—especially when racial fears are linked to a receding majority’s economic insecurity.

I lost that first council race. But I came back four years later and defeated the same opponent, winning decisively with 58% of the final vote. I had learned a crucial lesson about the necessity of building multi-interest coalitions in a diverse city. Support from Asian Americans had provided me with a potent political base. But if I wanted to win in a diverse district, I had to reach far beyond the 10% of the population (and only 5% of the electorate) comprised of Asian Americans. I studied the intricacies of U.S.-Israel relations, spoke Armenian phonetically for a cable TV commercial, and learned why owners and patrons of gay bars in Silver Lake felt they were being harassed by LAPD officers.

It’s difficult to legislate decency—to require a minimal level of respect for other groups or individuals—because decency depends on having shared values that tell us how to act toward others, and that predict how others will act toward us. I learned, the hard way, that decency can’t be written into the legal verbiage of an ordinance or a charter amendment.

But I also learned to listen respectfully, and to talk respectfully, and I became comfortable crossing conventional boundaries. It served me well during my council years, when I sometimes became an unexpected messenger, speaking out on behalf of Central American political refugees seeking sanctuary, Latino street vendors trying to earn a living, and African Americans demanding justice and accountability in the face of police misconduct. During a very uncomfortable period when the city’s elected leaders were struggling to respond to the LAPD’s brutal beating of Rodney King, an unarmed African American motorist, I became the first voice in City Hall to publicly call for the resignation of the chief of police.

The fact that I was neither Black nor white made a difference because it meant that police misconduct was more than a Black versus white issue. It sent the message that doing the right thing was more than a matter of which tribe was in control or had the power to dictate the outcome.

Today, the rules of engagement I learned over decades in politics are in a state of flux. New rules apply.

First, the rise of micro voice recorders in mobile phones and watches, and instant dissemination of information through 24-hour TV news and social media, mean that the old boundaries between public and private no longer exist. A politician shouldn’t say or write anything, even in a private meeting or an email message to trusted associates, that they wouldn’t want to see splashed across the front of a newspaper, creeping across the bottom of a television screen, or retweeted.

The end of privacy comes at a cost. But it also may be the best guarantor of accountability, especially in an environment such as City Hall, where insiders tend to cover for each other and maintain a code of silence.

A second new rule applies to “bystanders” such as Cedillo and de León, who listened quietly to their colleague’s racist remarks. For those in the political arena, silence in the face of crude, demeaning, racist words is equivalent to concurrence. If someone says something deeply objectionable in your presence, even in a private meeting, you must express your disapproval, walk out, or otherwise end the discussion—immediately. This may be difficult, especially when it means confronting an ally in a position of power. But the current uproar shows that failure to object will be condemned later.

Los Angeles also needs to develop a new set of “ethics for ethnics,” rules of engagement for interactions between the emerging Latino majority and everybody else: African Americans (who maintain a substantial power base despite their declining population); Asian Americans (still underrepresented despite being the fastest-growing ethnic group in California); Jews; Armenians; other Middle Easterners; and whites, who retain a large share of power, influence, and resources.

Latinos make up nearly 50% of the city’s population but until last month held only four seats on the council. Their leaders today must define their obligations to themselves and to other groups. As they work to achieve better representation, what is appropriate for Latinos to acquire or aspire to as a political bloc? How do they address diversity among themselves? What is their obligation to other ethnic groups who are not as numerous but have real unmet needs? Can the city survive if the brutal, old school, winner-take-all, “grab-as-much-as-you-can-for-yourself-while-you-have-the-power” approach to leadership exemplified in the redistricting discussion prevails?

Arturo Vargas, longtime CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, recently called on Latinos to recruit a more diverse range of candidates for public office, going beyond the Mexican American and Cuban American core. This could go a long way toward addressing the intra-Latino rivalries (embodied in Nury Martinez’s crass comments about the stature and skin color of Oaxacans) that indigenous communities view as the default ploy of Mexican Americans striving to maintain their power.

But diversity in and of itself is not a solution. An underlying question remains about the quality of political leadership in Los Angeles: Does public office attract the best members of a community to seek leadership—and if not, how can we change that?

Perhaps aspiring leaders need better training, mentoring, and apprenticeships, or a wider range of career and life experience paths, to prepare themselves for the grueling demands of leadership roles. We also might consider whether there could be better ways to choose our leaders, so that those among us who actually believe in the fundamental values of our community can rise to the top.

The post Can Los Angeles Elect a City Council That Reflects Our Values? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The people of Los Angeles need you, their power-hungry representatives, disgraced by a tape of your racist insults against nearly every demographic in town.

Why?

So they can have the pleasure of firing you themselves!

Sticking around to be fired could galvanize change in city governance. Because resignations can’t cure what ails Los Angeles and its governing body. Nor can reforming the city council within the existing charter.

Abolition is the only real solution.

Which means both your 12 other colleagues and your entire institution need to go, too. Now is the moment to dissolve the Los Angeles City Council, which has never been anything more than an embarrassing and powerless failure.

Unless we want more of the racist politics caught on tape, unless we want more of the conflict over redistricting that inspired your awful conversation, we don’t need a city council.

The people of Los Angeles can do the job themselves.

The tools and the concept now exist. L.A. is perfectly positioned to be the first city in California to replace its city council with a citizens’ assembly.

Elections require big money that can compromise politicians. A citizens’ assembly, by contrast, is chosen by lottery. Los Angeles can design lottery processes to make sure the assembly is representative of its city by race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, national origin, class, neighborhood, and just about any other factor we like.

L.A. would be a Californian and American pioneer in this, but not a global one. Paris just established a permanent citizens’ assembly; a Belgian province also has one. Countries from Japan to Ireland have established such bodies after breakdowns in trust in public officials, with the goal of addressing difficult issues from abortion to climate change.

L.A., by switching from an elected council to a lottery-based panel, would be doing more than just advancing democracy. It would be jettisoning a broken system.

What you heard on that tape of the three council members and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor Ron Herrera wasn’t just four powerful people spewing hatred. You heard what a thoroughly broken system sounds like.

The Los Angeles city council has never been representative of the city. It’s simply too small for that—with 15 members for 4 million people, L.A. city councilmembers have far too many constituents (more than 260,000 each) to represent them all properly. Global cities of similar population typically have more than 100 council members.

The city council has always been a weak player in L.A.’s complex and progressive governing structure, with its many boards and commissions. The council is even weaker than the mayor, whose powers remain limited, and the city’s department heads, who live in fear of their unionized employees. It doesn’t help that this weak council exists within a weak city government: This is California, where voters have spent decades centralizing tax and budgeting power at the state level.

Holding so little power, city councilmembers spend much of their time doing what they did on that tape—talking shit and playing games. Martinez, de León, and Cedillo were plotting and whining not about the city’s problems but their own seats, their own power, and how the redistricting commission was drawing their own districts. They talked frequently on the tape about wanting to have more big “assets” in their districts—by which they mean wealthy companies or institutions that would have to give them money for their campaigns, and favors for their friends.

Councilmembers not captured on the tape play these games, too; that’s how they get into office in the first place. That’s why you’ve seen them respond not with pledges to change how they behave and do business, but with condemnations, and calls for their colleagues’ resignations.

With a citizens’ assembly, the games stop. There will be no redistricting process because there will be no districts. There will be no need for scheming meetings with union bosses who politically control the city council. And there should be no racist rhetoric or racial conflict over council elections, because there wouldn’t be any council elections.

The lottery replaces the elections. A representative sampling of the people become the legislature. Transparent, public meetings replace secretly recorded backroom discussions. And more people can participate—the assembly should have at least 200 members.

This can, and should, happen fast. Good government groups should file a charter amendment to abolish the city council and replace it with a citizens’ assembly right away. Citizens need to push the new mayor to recognize the structural failure, and commit to holding a special election on the charter amendment early in the new year.

Then, the people of L.A. will have the opportunity to live a dream and fire their failed politicians, so they can take up the work of local democracy themselves.

By staying in office until you’re fired, Kevin and Gilbert, you can serve as inspiration for this change in governance, reminding Angelenos why we don’t need you or the system that made you—and why local democracy is one of those things that everyday people should do for themselves.

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“We’re finding more and more people moving into Los Angeles who are earning high salaries and they’re gentrifying neighborhoods and driving people who are of lower income out of the city, and out of the county for that matter. It’s a fact and it’s happening, and it’s one of the great challenges that we have. So nothing ever stands still and things are changing,” Yaroslavsky told a full house at Cross Campus in downtown Los Angeles. They had gathered to hear the former Los Angeles County Supervisor reflect on Los Angeles’ past and present.

During the wide-ranging conversation, which touched on housing, homelessness, and public transportation, Yaroslavsky took time to look backward. “When I entered the city council, there were five Republicans on the city council and two Democrats who voted like Republicans, and it [was a] different ballgame then. I don’t want to say it was better, but first of all, we had debates on the council. We actually had divided votes.”

Speaking of the Los Angeles City Council of the last 25 years, Yaroslavsky called its decisions “basically consensus.” “And it can be consensus,” he said, “because it’s almost like a one-party state. In those days, everybody was different.”

The evening’s conversation, titled “How Can L.A. Use Its Past to Build a Brighter Future?,” was moderated by Zócalo’s Joe Mathews, who asked Yaroslavsky what the politician would tell his 26-year-old self if he were running for city council for the first time today, instead of in 1975. “Would you tell him to run?” Mathews asked.

Yaroslavsky countered that his early ambition had been to be a congressional staffer on Capitol Hill. But when a window opened up to run for the council after Ed Edelman got elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, he threw his hat in the ring—supported by $1,000 loans from his mother-in-law and a few friends. “My wife and I talked about it, and she said, if you’re going to do it, now’s the time to do it. We don’t have any kids, you can take a leave of absence from your job, and then, when you lose, you can go back to work,” Yaroslavsky recalled.

At the time, he said, he had been admitted to business school. He applied for and was granted a deferment to delay his studies until after the election. That was the plan, at least. “Funny thing happened on my way to my MBA. I got elected,” he said.

Describing himself as the quintessential anti-establishment candidate—“my hair was not above my ears, my clothes were baggy, my car was smashed up”—he won. The climate was right. President Nixon had recently resigned from office, and Los Angeles was primed for change.

When Yaroslavsky was sworn in by Tom Bradley, he remembers the mayor saying: “You are now part of the establishment.” He pushed back. “I may be part of the establishment but the establishment is not part of me.”

Yaroslavsky turned to his favorite quote, by 19th-century British historian Lord Thomas Macaulay—“No man is fit to govern great societies who hesitates about disobliging the few who have access to him, for the sake of the many whom he will never see”—as his mandate. “That became, basically, not the Ten Commandments, it became the One Commandment. To me and my staff—and I had a great staff—we were always about the people we would never see. And that was about as anti-establishment as you can get.”

But, Mathews asked, could an outsider’s candidate like you get elected today? “You’d need richer friends, right?”

“Money is necessary, but it’s not sufficient, as we see every election,” Yaroslavsky said, pointing to politicians such as councilmember David Ryu, who represents Los Angeles’ Fourth District. “He’s a Korean American who won in a district that is close to 90 percent Anglo, [and he] represents Sherman Oaks, Sunset Plaza, Hancock Park. If he had asked me for my advice, I would have said probably not the district you’d want to run in. But he did. He snuck in in the runoff as I did when I first ran … I said knock on every door you can knock on and meet as many people as you can.” Ryu did that, Yaroslavsky said, “sometimes going to the same door twice, and he was able to win.”

Switching to housing and homelessness (an “easy, non-controversial topic,” Mathews joked), Mathews asked Yaroslavsky if he had any regrets about legislation such as Proposition U, a ballot initiative that he coauthored with councilmember Marvin Braude in 1986. Critics have declared the initiative, which aimed to limit commercial development as part of a backlash against the rise of massive buildings like the Beverly Center, the Westside Pavilion, and the Fujita Building, as one of the reasons Los Angeles has a housing shortage.

“Absolutely not,” Yaroslavsky said. “Prop U had absolutely nothing to do with residential housing,” he said. “The reason we put Prop U on the ballot, and the reason it resonated with the public and it passed with 70 percent of the vote in L.A., is not because of residential. It was because of commercial development.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, Yaroslavsky was asked about what to do when locals don’t want homeless people in their neighborhoods but are unwilling to build new housing—the so-called “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY, phenomenon.

“From 2007 to the time I left office, we built nearly 1,000 housing units for homeless people, for chronically mentally ill homeless persons—and never had a NIMBY problem,” Yaroslavsky said. “Why? Because if you want to make a statement then you try to make a homeless housing project in Bel Air. Or a drug rehab facility in Bel Air. Then you’ll be in court for 10 years. If you want to solve the problem, you’ve got to be more intelligent about how you do it.” Instead, he worked with non-profits like Step Up on Second, on whose board he now sits, to buy motels and hotels and repurpose them as housing. In addition to being cost-effective, he says, “the great thing about motels is that they are in every community in Los Angeles.”

Repurposing these motels and hotels while working on longer-term solutions, he says, is the way forward “if we want to solve the problem and not make a statement.”

The post An Architect of L.A. Government Looks Forward and Back appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.