Walking the Talk: Art, History, and the Politics of Public Participatory Memory in L.A.’s Skid Row

Abstract

For three afternoons on Memorial Day weekend in 2012, a ragtag group, including me, led by the Paradigm Brass Band, and accompanied by shopping carts filled with acoustic equipment and three dozen signs bearing street-style portraits, paraded through downtown Los Angeles (Figure 1). ‘It’s a parade! It’s a performance! It’s visual art dancing down the street! It’s YOU!’ declared the newsprint program and route map that Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) members and volunteers in bright yellow t-shirts handed out to participants and bystanders of Walk the Talk, an ‘epic history of Skid Row!’1 The enthusiastic exclamation points following each declaration pushed back against presumptions held by many, including me, about where I stood: the corner of Sixth and Stanford, near the center of downtown Los Angeles’s Skid Row. This is where, year after year since 1984, Los Angeles has won the statistical badge of inhumanity as ‘homeless capital of America’ and ‘meanest city in the nation’ for its density of unsheltered people, their living conditions, and their rate of incarceration.2 Worse than a refugee camp and with fewer toilets, declared a 2017 U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights. This in a state with the fifth largest economy on the planet, and a city with a bigger GDP than all but the ten wealthiest countries in the world.3 Tent dwellers and those in makeshift lean-tos shared the sidewalks around me, alongside which people had hung their belongings on the chain link fence enclosing lots where cars are granted more designated spaces than people.