Each year seems to present new threats to human connection—from political polarization and pandemic-enforced isolation to the siloes of our digital lives. And each year, a new crop of authors surprises and intrigues us with their incisive, provocative, forward-looking takes on the topic. We are excited to see how writers are rising to speak to this year’s challenges—and what they think will come next.

The 2025 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee consists of producer Sasheen Artis, screenwriter Alessandro Camon, USC historian and Zócalo Advisory Board member Natalia Molina, 2024 Zócalo Book Prize winner and Our Migrant Souls author Héctor Tobar, Mississippi Today CEO Mary Margaret White, and National Civil Rights Museum president Russell Wigginton. Zócalo is grateful to screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney for once again sponsoring our literary prize program, which also includes the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and participate in a public program in Los Angeles in spring 2025. We will also recognize the authors of the books we select for our shortlist. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit is October 25, 2024, at 11:59 PM PDT. Books must have been published in the U.S. between January 1, 2024, and December 31, 2024, to be eligible. Please send a single copy of any book nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date to:

ASU California Center
Attn: Zócalo Public Square, Book Prize
919 S. Grand Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90015

The 14 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. Some of their books meld personal memoir and historical research; others mine social science or economic and political theory. They are:

• Héctor Tobar for Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Michelle Wilde Anderson for The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion(Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

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Zócalo has awarded the $10,000 prize yearly since 2011 to the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients include Heather McGhee, Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, Jonathan Haidt, and most recently, Michelle Wilde Anderson.

Tobar is the author of six books, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a professor at UC Irvine; he was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the son of Guatemalan immigrants. Our Migrant Souls blends personal, local, and global histories to explore what it means to be “Latino” today. (The quotation marks are Tobar’s, and they address the word’s capaciousness and its limits.)

Our Migrant Souls is “an essential read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of race, identity, and the immigrant experience in America,” wrote one of our Book Prize judges. “Tobar’s exquisite use of the written word is a rare delight in and of itself,” noted another. Yet another concluded that the book “felt like a collage, or as the title says, a meditation. That felt just right as a way to show a sprawling, socially constructed identity.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Tobar, who will also be interviewed by USC historian and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina, will take place on June 13, 2024, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2024 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Tobar about the connections between Latino identity and social cohesion, how Los Angeles shapes his work, and what books he recommends readers dive into after finishing Our Migrant Souls.

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Lucky for you, we have an antidote to both forms of apathy. This year’s Zócalo Book Prize shortlist includes five nonfiction books, all published in the past year, that dig deep into the forces that strengthen or undermine social cohesion, human connectedness, and community.

We have awarded the Book Prize annually since 2011. Stay tuned for the announcement of our winner in late March and our event honoring the author(s) in June in downtown Los Angeles. Special thanks to screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney for returning to sponsor the 2024 prize.

In the meantime, we invite you to join our selection committee in reading and considering these titles, which explore subjects as divisive as guns and migration and things as mundane as finding a parking spot—and how they both bring us together and threaten to tear us apart.

Congratulations, again, to:

• Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, authors of Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age

• Myisha Cherry, author of Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better

• Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

• Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, authors of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15

• Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

And we thank our selection committee: 2023 Zócalo Book Prize winner and The Fight to Save the Town author Michelle Wilde Anderson; Human Rights Watch chief communications officer Mei Fong; Marquette University historian Sergio González; creative director and Zócalo advisory board member David Lai; infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine Rekha Murthy, MD; Lawrence Welk Family Foundation president Lisa Parker; Smithsonian National Board chair Jorge Puente, MD; LAXART director and curator Hamza Walker.

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Our mission is to connect people to ideas and to each other, which is why we have honored authors who explore these themes since 2011. Our annual award ceremony—which includes a lecture, interview, and reception—is a highlight of our year. It simultaneously captures the zeitgeist, honors a brilliant thinker, and allows Zócalo’s audiences to both create and investigate human connection.

Because community is such a vast field of inquiry that can be explored in myriad ways, we accept submissions on a broad array of topics and themes, from writers of many disciplines and professions.

As with everything else Zócalo features, we are on the lookout for that rare combination of brilliance and clarity, excellence and accessibility. The 2024 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee consists of 2023 Zócalo Book Prize winner and The Fight to Save the Town author Michelle Wilde Anderson, Human Rights Watch chief communications officer Mei Fong, Marquette University historian Sergio González, creative director and Zócalo Advisory Board member David Lai, infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine Rekha Murthy, MD, Lawrence Welk Family Foundation president Lisa Parker, Smithsonian National Board chair Jorge Puente, MD, and LAXART director and curator Hamza Walker.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and participate in a public program in Los Angeles in spring 2024. We will also recognize the authors of the books we select for our short list. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit is October 20, 2023, at 11:59 PM PDT. Books must have been published in the U.S. between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023, to be eligible. Please send a single copy of any books nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date to:

Zócalo Public Square
c/o Book Prize Committee
1111 South Broadway
Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90015

The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. They have studied specific times and places—from a single street in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, to Jim Crow-era Hattiesburg, Mississippi—as well as phenomena, including cooperation, technology, and morality. They are:

• Michelle Wilde Anderson for The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post The 2024 Zócalo Book Prize Honors Nonfiction on Connectedness and Social Cohesion appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Four of the poorest, most maligned places in America have become beacons of hope—and burgeoning centers of trust, in people and local government—since going broke in the Great Recession. How did they pull themselves up from an especially low point, and what can the rest of the country learn from them?

This was the subject of 2023 Zócalo Book Prize winner Michelle Wilde Anderson’s The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America, which we honored last night as the year’s best nonfiction book exploring community and social connection at the Zócalo Book and Poetry Prize event.

Held at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles, the program, which also streamed live online, began with a virtual reading by this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize winner, Paige Buffington, of “From 20 Miles Outside of Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, Farmington, or Albuquerque.” Then, philanthropist Tim Disney—the sponsor of the program and both prizes—took the stage, where he lauded The Fight to Save the Town as “a moving and important document, and a timely one.”

Anderson received $10,000 in prize money and a pre-solved Rubik’s Cube, emblazoned with the Zócalo logo, for winning this year’s book prize. She announced she would be keeping the Rubik’s Cube, but donating all of her winnings to four organizations she wrote about in her book, and to South L.A.’s Community Coalition. “Because if this book moved anybody, that is because, above all, these people moved me,” she said.

During the 13th annual Zócalo Book Prize lecture, Anderson shared stories from the four places she wrote about: Stockton, California, Josephine County, Oregon, Detroit, Michigan, and Lawrence, Massachusetts. Since the 1980s, these towns and cities and others like them—often older, industrial cities with decaying housing and infrastructure, and high levels of environmental contamination—have grown poorer because of disinvestment from state and federal government and poorer tax bases.

“These cities are broke in part because they’re poor, and their people stay poor in part because their governments are broke,” said Anderson. “This is actually the start of a larger, vicious cycle of decline in which the conditions of poverty undermine the basic trust that is needed for human cooperation.”

But in each place, she found examples of how people and institutions are facing this vicious cycle and finding ways to work together to break out of it. In Stockton, that meant addressing the trauma and mental health effects of violence, segregation, and intergenerational poverty. In Josephine County—one of the most anti-government places in America—that meant saving public services by convincing angry, skeptical voters that it’s possible to build cooperation and trust in government. In Detroit, that meant fighting foreclosures and speculators, and putting property back into local hands. And in Lawrence, that meant forming strong, pan-Latino networks to help residents in the 21st-century economy make a living wage.

“All of these efforts add up to social repair,” said Anderson.

Following the lecture, Alberto Retana, president and CEO of South L.A.’s Community Coalition—which, like many of the organizations in Anderson’s book, engages in ground-up, locally focused work—joined her on stage to talk about The Fight to Save the Town’s inspirations, and how to apply some of its lessons to other communities around the country.

Retana noted that Anderson’s book celebrates what democracy is all about: “people fighting to make something beautiful from something broken.” How, he asked Anderson, did she come to this subject and perspective?

She said she chose to write a “people-centered” book because she’s “really concerned that the way we tell stories about poverty is part of the problem.” Our narratives of poor places feature “crooks in the government and bullets flying everywhere and hell holes … Those narratives reinforce faithlessness that things can be better. So they give outsiders an excuse to stop working alongside people on the ground.”

You can see this dynamic in Los Angeles, a city of 40,000 unhoused people, particularly among the white middle class, Retana agreed. But what, he asked Anderson, is the “heart of the heart of the central solution” to tackling poverty and disinvestment?

“Turning government back toward its people,” said Anderson. “We have to invest in people where they live.” But she cautioned that one community cannot write the playbook for other communities. To the extent that, say, Lawrence has a method to teach the rest of America, it would be “showing up and listening,” and forming tight and supportive networks among people and organizations.

Why center the book on these local networks? Federal and state policy cause many of the problems they are tackling, said Retana.

It’s true that the problems are systemic, and we need federal and state policy changes, said Anderson. But upper tiers of government don’t work without this grassroots level—which creates places for outside funding, policies, and philanthropy to land.

Anderson turned the question back on Retana—whose work is local, after all.

The greatest changes in American history, he said, come from localities up—“whether it’s Ferguson in 2013 or Birmingham, Alabama, in the ’60s, or Los Angeles solving the homelessness crisis in the next few years.” He added, “I really love this book because it recenters the conversation where it really needs to happen: in our backyards, on our blocks, in our living rooms.”

After concluding their discussion, Anderson and Retana turned to audience questions, which largely centered around their advice for people and organizations hoping to effect change locally.

In response to one person who wondered what opportunities community-based organizations might be overlooking, Anderson shared a lesson from Stockton. There, a youth development program gathered all the local youth programs staff together one morning a week for orange juice and doughnuts. “It was an incredible moment for the city’s network-building,” she said—not because spectacularly important plans got made in these meetings, but because they helped people and programs get to know one another and coordinate in an environment of scarcity. “I do think there’s a form of casual coordination that we don’t give enough credit to as a component of social change,” she said.

Last night also kicked off Zócalo’s 20th birthday celebration, and before the program wrapped, Zócalo executive director Moira Shourie took the stage to thank Zócalo’s past and present staff, funders, and audiences for their support over the past two decades, through more than 700 public programs and 3,000 published essays. And then, in true Zócalo fashion, everyone came together for cake and more conversation.

The post Where Local People Build Local Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If California wants to curb poverty, its local governments must become richer.

That may be the most important lesson of the recent history of Stockton, as recounted by Stanford Law School professor Michelle Wilde Anderson, a scholar of poverty and local government, in her Zócalo Book Prize-winning book, The Fight to Save the Town.

Anderson expertly portrays the challenges of four troubled U.S. localities, including Stockton. Her work is noteworthy for how it connects the dots between the poverty of people and the poverty of our local governments.

Anderson begins by detailing a woefully underappreciated Californian, and American, problem: deep, decades-long declines in federal and state support for local governments. The cuts have been especially deep at the community level. Between 1979 and 2016, the author notes, federal funding to neighborhood development decreased 80%.

Cities with lots of business and wealthy residents can weather these storms. But the trend has been devastating to municipalities and rural places with high percentages of poor residents, who have less to offer in tax and fee revenues, and desperately need the local programs—in areas like health, recreation, and crime prevention—that get cut. Local governments responded by taking on debt, reducing services and staff, selling public land, and raising taxes and fees—all measures that hurt local residents.

“When local governments are populated mostly by low-income people, there is typically much less money for public services,” Anderson writes. “Weak, broke local governments make it harder for residents to lead decent lives on low incomes or get their families out of poverty. Entire towns become poverty traps.”

One of those poverty traps is Stockton, which Anderson depicts both before and after its 2012 bankruptcy, then the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Stockton, a city of 322,000 at the southern edge of the California Delta, is one of the state’s oldest and most diverse places. Its history is too long and complicated to recount here, but segregation, drug trafficking, police violence, overdependence on the military, and long commutes (to Bay Area jobs), have all been major factors disrupting the lives of its people, impoverishing neighborhoods, and making Stockton a “city of orphans,” Anderson writes.

Stockton’s government has long failed to address such problems. Facing declines in federal and state support, the city subsidized real estate developers instead of investing in existing community members. It chased new residents, visitors, and tax revenues by building retail, new housing, and tourist attractions in its center. And it prioritized local government employees, and their unsustainable retiree health and pension programs, some of which were financed with debt.

The strategy fell apart in the Great Recession, with record home foreclosures and the failure of high-profile developments. The city’s giveaways to its powerful local government employees overwhelmed its budget. The results? Layoffs (including 20% of police officers, 38% of public works employees, 46% of library personnel, and 56% of recreation staff), huge cuts in programs, and the 2012 bankruptcy.

Anderson’s book is deeply interested in how community groups, nonprofits, and a new generation of local officials, led by a Stanford-educated twenty-something city councilmember-turned-mayor Michael Tubbs, responded after the bankruptcy. The story she tells is at once encouraging—it shows the ability of local people and officials to make progress in the most difficult of circumstances—and also sobering, because the progress is so tenuous.

What worked best were intense, multifaceted efforts to empower residents to solve problems in South Stockton neighborhoods after decades of stigma and disinvestment.

Working together, local officials, nonprofits, and community groups listened to residents and pursued their priorities. This work, mostly by people involved in the Reinvent South Stockton Coalition (RSSC), started with cleaning up and reclaiming public spaces—first shoring up a park, then shuttering an open-air drug market near a liquor store. Community members opened a clinic that offered mental health resources. And Tubbs and other allies led the way in taking a series of small and large steps focused on treating and reducing the trauma local residents felt.

Poor cities, the scholar concludes, often cut everything except emergency services and public safety, leaving them without the fundamental ingredients that fight poverty: mental health resources, a sense of personal safety, access to living-wage jobs, and secure housing.  “Our theory of change,” one RSSC leader tells Anderson, “is investing in people. We have to shift the language from people’s problems to their assets.”

South Stockton, and the city as a whole, saw significant gains from this work, though it’s far from clear if the progress can be sustained. Tubbs and his allies lost their re-election bids in 2020. The pandemic undermined local systems and community projects. The founder of one important group, Fathers & Families of San Joaquin, was arrested, undermining trauma recovery work.

Anderson is clear-eyed about the need to change the very structure and organization of local government. One of her suggestions for places like Stockton is “changing jurisdictions,” which could mean moving around municipal lines or combining cities into regional units. She also argues that we need new ways of thinking and talking about troubled cities—not as “hellholes” that are “dying” but as places that, with the right resources and new structures for residents, can make poor residents wealthier.

In California, I’d go even further than Anderson and suggest that empowering cities requires restructuring the state itself. California, since the passage of Prop 13 in 1978, has become heavily centralized, with tax policies and resource allocations for localities mostly decided at the state level. Returning power to local governments would require so many different changes to existing policies and budgeting that the best path forward would be a new constitution.

Our last two governors, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, have both championed local government and fighting poverty, at least rhetorically. Meanwhile, both men centralized more power in their offices, and eschewed constitutional reform. Fighting poverty in this state requires politicians at the state level to do the very opposite—and place more resources and power in the hands of people, their communities, and their local governments.

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Zócalo awards the $10,000 prize annually to the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. Our 12 previous winners—a mix of distinguished historians, social scientists, journalists, and public thinkers—include Michael Ignatieff, Sherry Turkle, Jia Lynn Yang, and, most recently, Heather McGhee. Anderson is a professor of property, local government, and environmental justice at Stanford Law School.

The Fight to Save the Town chronicles the stories of Stockton, California; Josephine County, Oregon; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Detroit, Michigan—four places with histories of booms and busts, places that the rest of the nation often readily dismisses for their high levels of poverty and violence. But Anderson, who came across these communities as part of a larger research project on cities that had gone through municipal bankruptcy or state receivership during the Great Recession, found them to be places of hope. Here, people were coming together—to train trauma recovery counselors, to rebuild a broken-down library, to make parkland out of industrial wasteland, to stop foreclosures.

One of our Book Prize judges wrote that in telling these stories, Anderson is able “to explain how much place matters to humans, and what they’re willing to do to save a place buffeted by global forces rather than abandon it. … Anderson’s portraits are a stirring antidote to anti-government cynicism and a call to action against wealth inequality and the disinvestment from public goods.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Anderson, who will also be interviewed by Community Coalition CEO and President Alberto Retana, will take place on June 15, 2023, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2023 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Anderson to talk about communities as teachers, the push and pull between federal policy and local problem-solving, and what it takes to build trust in a place of scarcity.

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Since 2003, Zócalo Public Square has been on a mission to connect people to ideas and to each other. Whether you visited us in person, streamed our programming live online, or watched on YouTube or Soundcloud later on, thank you for being part of our ongoing experiment to promote public curiosity and dialogue.

Join us as we take a trip down memory lane to relive five events (and one special musical performance) that our staff felt best encapsulated the spirit of 2022. And be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to learn about our very special, upcoming 20th anniversary lineup.

What Can We Laugh About?

Comedy has always been society’s release valve. Which is why we invited political satirist Bassem Youssef, and playwright, actor, and performance artist Kristina Wong to speak about the political and psychological power of humor. In partnership with ASU Gammage, this Zócalo event, moderated by Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, explored comedy’s great potential, and made the case for why the joke can be mightier than the sword.

Will Americans Ever Be in This Together?

The economist and social policy advocate Heather McGhee offered us a new story of American solidarity during her 2022 Zócalo Book Prize lecture. McGhee was our 12th annual winner for her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. In prepared remarks and a Q&A with LA84 Foundation president and CEO Renata Simril, she reminded us that everyone loses when we see prosperity and success as a zero-sum game.

How Do Homelands Cross Borders?

Can you leave your homeland while keeping your cultural and ethnic identity alive? At this Zócalo/Soraya event, presented in conjunction with a performance of Ragamala Dance Company’s Fires of Varanasi, we asked Ragamala Dance Company’s Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, Science Fiction Poetry Association president and poet Bryan Thao Worra, and deputy director of USC’s Institute of Armenian Studies Shushan Karapetian to reflect on the pain and promise of being a member of a diaspora in America.

What Would the End of Mass Incarceration Mean for Prison Towns? with Keri Blakinger

Susanville, California, is one of many rural communities whose economic survival is currently tethered to incarceration. Which is why the city sued the state this year to avoid having its prison shut down. To understand the link between prisons and rural economies, we assembled Lassen Community College president Trevor Albertson, Parlier mayor and retired correctional officer Alma Beltran, and University of Wisconsin sociologist John M. Eason, author of Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation, to speak at this Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event in Susanville. Moderated by journalist Keri Blakinger, the discussion explored how prison towns came to be, and how they might imagine new futures.

How Can Women and Girls Win in Iran?

Ongoing unrest in Iran, incited by the death of a young Kurdish woman detained by Iranian authorities for supposedly violating state dress laws, has become one of the top stories of 2022. For this Zócalo event, co-presented with the Goldhirsh Foundation with support by Pedram Salimpour, and moderated by author Porochista Khakpour, we invited Iran analyst Holly Dagres, artist Sahar Ghorishi, and anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi to discuss how months of mass protests have created a new movement—and what the world can learn from it.

A Special Zócalo Music Presentation: How Immigrants Composed L.A.

A first for Zócalo: A string quartet from the Los Angeles Opera visited the Public Square. In the historic lobby of the ASU California Center at the Herald Examiner building, musicians Evgeny Tonkha, Roberto Cani, Ana Landauer, and Erik Rynearson performed to a packed house, bringing the music of L.A.’s immigrant composers to life during this special Zócalo/Artistic Soirées event, presented in partnership with ASU Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

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