Trump's attacks on immigrants and cities swell pride in California and L.A. Don't confuse that for boosterism.
When federal immigration agents and National Guard troops massed in Los Angeles last June — as in Chicago and Portland now, and as a billionaire tech CEO asked the Trump administration to do in San Francisco — it filled many of us here with rage and fear, but also something else: pride.
But let’s not confuse that pride for boosterism.
When I consider what it means to be “proudly Californian,” I think of a mostly forgettable scene from the 2004 film “Collateral.” In it, the sociopathic hitman played by Tom Cruise derides Los Angeles’ sprawl and asks his cab driver and unsuspecting hostage, played by Jamie Foxx, if he likes it here. Foxx’s response: “It’s my home.”
That simple statement probably struck casual viewers as a throwaway line preceding the film’s murderous overnight rampage. But for me, a guy raised in Glendale who has only ever felt at home in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains, it was a “Eureka!” moment: At last, here is the right response to visitors and new arrivals who confuse culture shock for cultural superiority.
I live here. Whether I “like it” is immaterial. This is my home.
And you take pride in your home. That doesn’t mean you ignore its flaws or insist it’s better than anyone else’s. You don’t argue with people who point out its defects (though you should discern between honest helpers and opportunistic poseurs). You acknowledge the problems and work to correct them.
And we have plenty of problems in California and Los Angeles.
Major economic shifts combined with generations of reactionary tax and housing laws have set off one of the worst housing crises in any advanced democracy worldwide. Right here in the world’s fourth-largest economy, too many of us are a few missed paychecks away from homelessness.
Los Angeles specifically is a model of how not to design a city sustainably. Our roads prioritize drivers motoring through neighborhoods rather than the people who actually live, go to school and walk around there, with deadly results. Notoriously, we’ve built connections to distant water sources, fully draining one ancient lake east of the Sierra Nevada and threatening another. In this era of extreme housing scarcity, more than 70% of the residential land in L.A. is zoned for single-family homes. Cities around California continue to fight state housing mandates, even in the face of lawsuits.
But in many ways, the state is a lot farther along at fixing itself than many out-of-town critics acknowledge. We’re aiming to reduce our reliance on imported water and capture more stormwater rather than shunting it into the ocean. We’ve led the way on conservation, allowing Southern California to grow in population without growing our water use. In L.A. County, we’ve voted to tax ourselves to build more transit and address homelessness. Two high-speed rail systems are under construction.
It’s almost as if we’ve made all the major mistakes so other cities and states shouldn’t have to. California is both a beacon of hope and a cautionary tale.
California’s essential resilience is reason enough to be proud. But months of raids and terror, and the community backlash in response, has brought my California pride to a fever pitch.
Over the last few decades, our state has become the butt of cheap political criticism. Which is fine, as far as it goes — we’re big and important, and we can take it. But the enthusiasm with which the Trump administration unleashed federal agents on our streets, over the righteous constitutional objections of state and local leaders, shows what was really bubbling under the surface at the White House: the kind of hostility and contempt once reserved in certain political sectors for the Soviet Union. The administration found its new “evil empire.”
Almost overnight, many community members put the lie to the trope of self-interested, disconnected Californians. In some areas, neighbors watch for ICE activity and deliver food to immigrants too afraid to leave their homes. Far from merely brushing off stupid insults about the West Coast, more Californians are asserting an identity rooted in inclusiveness.
But I worry how easily “proudly Californian” could tip into boosterism — the kind that denies our flaws for the sake of winning an argument. The kind that minimizes our challenges. The kind that sweeps homelessness out of sight because we want to look good on TV for the Olympics. The kind that brags about protecting immigrants and women needing an abortion but doesn’t say anything about housing those seeking refuge.
It was in the context of the Trump administration’s attack on Los Angeles that Mariel Garza and I first started talking to each other about creating a home-grown publication to tell California’s side of the story. This isn’t a PR effort; it’s about identifying problems and how to fix them, and amplifying community voices — because this is our home, and we’re proud of it.
