memories

Searching for My Mom, and the History of La Puente’s ‘Little Watts’

Greenberry, Where She Taught for Decades, Helped Forge Today’s Multi-Racial San Gabriel Valley

I lost my mom to COVID in February 2021. She died alone, after spending 10 excruciating days in the hospital. A year after her death, a white envelope with no return address arrived in my Pomona College mailbox. Inside was a photo of my mom from the early 1970s.

In the photo, she is standing between two corridors of Sparks Middle School’s brick campus in La Puente, where she taught until she retired in 2008. She smiles gently, with her arms by her side. Her hair is long and straight, and …

by Gilda L. Ochoa |

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A Yearbook to Remember

We Can’t Hold Time in Our Hands, But We’ll Always Have Signed Messages, Funny Photos, and “Most Likely to …”

by Milissa Joi |

I lost my first year of high school to Zoom in 2020. Not just my first day, or first week, but the entire first year. This jarring start to a …

Los Angeles Is an Unreliable Narrator | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Los Angeles Is an Unreliable Narrator

The Truest Thing About the City: We Are All Just Making It Up as We Go Along

by David L. Ulin |

Los Angeles is an unreliable narrator. The very cityscape is an illusion, albeit on the grand scale—streets and buildings, the human design of it, erected on a bed of sand …

Beyond the ‘Dark Fog of Disdain,’ San Francisco Is Still There

How Revisiting a Children’s Book Helped Me See the City by the Bay, On and Off the Page

by Larry Gordon |

For a young bookworm like me in 1960s New Jersey, almost nothing was more exciting in elementary school than ordering my own paperbacks from the Scholastic Book catalog. I would …

Where I Go: Redondo Beach Brings Me Back to Myself

I’m the Keeper of My Family’s Memories. My Hometown Is Where I Uncover the Layers of Our Past

by Jim Hinch |

Late one afternoon last year, during a troubled time in my life, I took a long walk on the beach.

A day of rain was ending. Watery sunlight shone on glossy …

Why I Drove 80 Miles Across Southern California on Surface Streets

The Road to the Inland Empire Is Paved With Good Memories—And Gratitude for Freeways

by Joe Mathews |

Don’t ever complain about freeway traffic, especially around my mother.

“You’re lucky to have freeways—when I was a kid, we didn’t have freeways,” she used to say.

But that didn’t stop my …


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