Making Space and Marking Race: Emoji Mapping and Liberatory

Cartographies in South Los Angeles

Kaelyn D. Rodríguez

Diálogo, Volume 21, Number 2, Fall 2018, pp. 83-90 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dlg.2018.0030

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/704903

Access provided at 29 Jun 2019 00:27 GMT from UCLA Library

Making Space and Marking Race: Emoji Mapping and
Liberatory Cartographies in South Los Angeles
Kaelyn D. Rodríguez
University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract: This article introduces a social cartography technique called Emoji Mapping, as a component of a larger
mural project on the Watts: Riots/Rebellion 50th Anniversary Commemorative Mural Project. While not used
exclusively, it served as a catalyst for communal memory and community development.

Key Terms: Watts, mapping, memory, Black spatial imaginary, murals

E moji Mapping, a recently developed social

cartography technique, was intended to serve
the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and
Social and Public Art Resource Center efforts in imag-
ing the Watts: Riots/Rebellion 50th Anniversary Com-
memorative Mural Project.1 Moving away from deficit
models of Watts’s powerful histories, we wanted to
learn about residents’ past and present experiences, as
well as their visions of the future, in order to represent
them in the mural. Shortly after introducing Emoji
Mapping (EM) at community functions in Watts, it
was clear that it was capable of more than what we en-
visioned; it was a powerful decolonial methodology for
community members to share their stories, to locate
their lives in a space, and to reflect on their community
over time. While the use and development of EM are
in early stages, there are many theoretical and tech-
nological implications. This article seeks to emphasize
the theoretical potential by situating EM with other
theories of space, belonging, and race in a Los Ange-
les neighborhood.2
In this article, I discuss how this new method re-
frames “sites of containment and confinement into
spaces of creativity and community making” (Glissant
53), by highlighting the participants and their engage-
ment with EM. Furthermore, I offer theoretical pos-
sibilities for using EM and possible innovations and
improvements for its use in the future.
As we began this project, Pilar Castillo and I were
aware that our position as outsiders to Watts was a po-
tential obstacle.3 Early on, we consciously navigated
our identities, our positionalities, and our methods for
connecting with residents and building relationships.
It was inside this struggle that we developed EM, a pic-
tographic mapping methodology that would become a
tool for learning from, collaborating with, and uplifting
Watts residents and their memories. EM would become
a powerful vehicle for residents to share their stories;
for us, it would become a beautiful lesson in what the
making of a mural could be. While this method offers
a social-justice intervention to artists and art histori-
ans making and writing about public artworks, it also
breaks ground as a radical geographic tool for decolo-
nial cartography. While EM may be useful for scholars
and artists, this method was created primarily for the
city of Watts and its residents, who inspired its creation.
As expressed by Katherine ­McKittrick, “[T]he naming
of a place—regardless of expressive method and tech-
nique—is also a process of self-assertion and human-
ization. . . . To put it another way, naming place is also
an act of naming the self and self-histories” (xxii).
Although EM is not the only innovation taking
place in Watts, I submit that through EM, residents
name their histories and recognize their lives through
a different lens. The rest of the article demonstrates
this with two case studies where EM was shared; of-
fers an analysis of the theoretical possibilities within
EM, followed by a visual analysis of the mural Watts
Still Rising; and concludes with a look to the future for
EM techniques.
We knew that to make the Watts: Riots/Rebellion
50th Anniversary Commemorative Mural—a project

Diálogo © 2018 by the University of Texas Press

Kaelyn D. Rodríguez Volume 21  Number 2  Fall 2018

that was supported by the Department of Cultural Af-

fairs (DCA) and executed by Judy Baca and our team
at the Social and Public Resource Center (SPARC)—
a success for the residents in Watts, we would need to
work within the community. With goals to highlight
and celebrate the strength and beauty of Watts since
the 1965 uprising to the present and future,4 our team
would need to know what that meant for the residents
today. However, as we began this project, Pilar and I
were strangers to residents in Watts. As graduate stu-
dents at Otis and UCLA, respectively, we both expe-
rience privilege in terms of our education, skills, and
access to resources. But we are also Latina and Afro-
Latina mujeres, poor, underpaid, and overworked peo-
ple of color. We are immigrants and citizens, Angelinos
and artists who love Watts and believe in social jus-
tice through the arts. While our social locations are
complex and sometimes fluid, we did our best to be-
come a part of the community by joining the “I Heart
Fig. 1: Detail of Emoji Map. Photo courtesy of Pilar Castillo.
Watts” community group, attending events sponsored
by the Women of Watts, working with kids and teach-
ers at Markham Middle School, supporting the groups’
larger goals, listening to the new friends we made, EM consisted of a process of cutting out paper
and using our skills to serve the community of Watts emojis and pasting them onto a map of Watts, a method
within and beyond the scope of our mural project. to support community members in sharing as much as
While we did the work of becoming allies to the they liked and omitting whatever they wanted. Folks
community through listening, laboring, and attend- could place sites and landmarks onto their life maps
ing events, we still struggled with the task of identify- and, at the same time, locate personal histories and
ing specific spaces, artworks, and memories that were map out memories in space. In this way, we could learn
significant to residents, partially because some res- about important sites and intimate memories in Watts
idents were still leery of us as outsiders and scholars at the leisure of the participant. Furthermore, EM en-
in training. Others were more recent residents with- courages residents in this multilingual community to
out experiences or memories from the 1960s. Addi- share memories beyond written or spoken language
tionally, asking community members questions about and to express their personal histories in pictographic
their families, their careers, or their relationships to emojis. Through emojis we could engage children and
their community was not a simple thing. These ques- adults of many ages, languages, and reading levels. In
tions were layered with politics and sometimes mis- this way, listening to and learning from a broad group
understandings about race, poverty, life, and death. expanded the breadth and depth of the mural proj-
Keeping in line with our creative goals and desire to ect and, in turn, informed the design of the mural by
do better than imperial scholars and academics before reflecting life back to our participants. Participants
us, we decided to move into a visual, rather than oral, could choose from hundreds of emojis to share their
historical narrative with a mapping activity. Because stories, including images of stacks of books, police
our other methods were unsuccessful, we decided to cars, single and multifamily housing, churches, guns,
create a map that would help us gather stories on pa- paint pallets, soccer balls, and the Watts Towers. With
per and specifically identify places where meaningful such an array of emojis, each map was entirely unique
events occurred. That was the birth of EM. and individualized (fig. 1).

84  Reflections/Reflexiones Diálogo

 Making Space and Marking Race: Emoji Mapping and Liberatory Cartographies in South Los Angeles
ROLLING OUT AN EMOJI METHODOLOGY
On March 12, 2016, Pilar and I, along with dozens
of others from the I Heart Watts group, helped orga-
nize the first annual I Heart Watts Community Picnic.
It was at this picnic that we debuted our idea of EM to
residents of Watts. Motivated by our desire to engage
the community, to learn more about their lives, and
to have some fun together, Pilar and I set up a booth
for children and adults with coloring pages and Emoji
Maps. The coloring pages were popular with most of
the kids; however, EM proved to be an instant success
with youth and adults. Not only were teens and adults
comfortable sharing stories in this way; they were re-
living memories, locating significant sites, and plac-
ing meaning in space. Multiple picnickers remarked
on their emotional response to creating an Emoji Map,
and several noted the significance of identifying spa-
tial patterns on the map by observing frequency of
events and sites of life. Several others invited us to their
community groups to share EM with their members,
as they believed it would benefit their groups as well.
That day, we spent several hours with families, parents,
and children, putting Emoji Maps together and build-
ing our relationships.
The data we gathered from those Emoji Maps of-
fered us more details about the demographics of the
community and indicated significant areas to resi-
dents, which signaled to us where and how life took
place in Watts. I noticed that the maps of several older
adults highlighted certain streets, while younger res-
idents emphasized other areas, indicating possible
generational differences. We found this temporal/ex-
periential differentiation important to the project,
as we were able to identify some of the changes and
trends over time. Additionally, several ­ individuals
shared family histories, personal losses, and love sto-
ries, all of which were site specific and quite per-
sonal. What proved to be especially significant to me
was more than the data we gathered; it was the way
that children and adults found this activity personally
meaningful and affirming. Taking on a life of its own,
EM became a method for telling stories about life and
for locating streets and intersections where lots of liv-
ing took place. It became a way for everyday people to
do their own human geographies and share personal
narratives in ways that were comfortable and empow-
Diálogo Reflections/Reflexiones 85
ering. By sharing personal, familial, geographic, and
communal stories in this way, residents engaged us as
authorities and experts of their stories and their com-
munity. Although useful for the Watts 50th Anniver-
sary Commemorative Mural Project, EM seemed to
serve its own function, which, for me, was a great suc-
cess in working with community and the arts. Looking
once again to McKittrick, EM encourages participants
to practice alternative relationships with the city such
“that the landscape does not simply function as a dec-
orative background, [and] opens up the possibility for
thinking about the production of space as unfinished,
as [a] poetics of questioning” (xxii–xxiii).
About two dozen individuals participated in EM
the day of the picnic, and after they completed their
maps, many reflected on the power of visually locat-
ing life experiences and observing site-specific pat-
terns. While the activity was visual and participatory,
residents organically engaged in dialogue with their
friends, kids, and partners to reflect on the histories
they wanted to share. They asked questions of each
other to verify locations or dates, collectively shared
their knowledge with us, and exchanged stories about
life. These were unexpected elements of the activity, yet
they were very significant to us. Reflecting on the maps
was meaningful to many participants, as they noted
patterns between sites and major life events, which en-
couraged further analysis and introspection. We both
benefited by learning about different local histories
and also bonded with residents and friends.
One couple in their late fifties made a joint map
and shared with us how they first met at Markham Ju-
nior High School as children. They also marked their
places of employment and their favorite restaurants
and even honored the losses of loved ones with me-
morial candle emojis. They mapped their everyday life
experiences and major life moments on this map, al-
lowing us to hear their stories from their own voices,
not imposed ones. Thus, EM became an anticolonial
cartographic place-/space-making activity and meth-
odology. By centering residents’ lived experiences on
a map, collectively, we necessarily re-created mean-
ings of space, opposed white spatial imaginaries, dem-
onstrated concepts of spatial neutrality, and resisted
historic, systemic, and symbolic spatial violence that
residents in Watts have long endured. We did this by
Kaelyn D. Rodríguez Volume 21  Number 2  Fall 2018
creating alternative spatial narratives that celebrate
and honor the lives of residents and empower the com-
munity to define its history based on their own mem-
ories. I believe that in doing this, we achieved part of
our goal in practicing innovative, interdisciplinary
methods that allow us to gather data and engage the
community with decolonial epistemologies. Greater
still are the implications for employing cartography to
visualize how environmental and spatial racism takes
place, as well as the potential for using EM in the fu-
ture to do oppositional geographies in historically
looted communities. I discuss some of these theoret-
ical and methodological possibilities later.
MARKHAM MIDDLE SCHOOL:
MAPS WITH EMOJIS
In addition to building relationships with resi-
dents and supporting community events with I Heart
Watts, Pilar and I knew that connecting with the youth
at Markham Middle School was paramount since it
was the future site for the Watts 50th Anniversary
Commemorative Mural. Additionally, Markham Mid-
dle School is important because it is one of a handful of
local institutions that survived the 1965 and 1992 com-
munity uprisings. We also took into account its prox-
imity to the scars of serious destruction just two blocks
over in the wake of mass fires during the rebellion of
August 1965. This site is significant to the genealogy on
which we built and the histories from which the mural
project springs, and the school is important because it
serves local youth and as a place where families gather,
which meant our work will be seen often by the school
staff and local families. With support from Princi-
pal Luis Montoya, and in collaboration with Keysha
Blanks, a seventh-grade art teacher, Pilar and I cre-
ated a workshop series that would discuss the history
of the Watts Rebellion and the significance of the arts
in South LA before and after the rebellion. Our goal
to uplift the arts and empower the youth would span
from 1965 to the Watts 50th Anniversary Commemo-
rative Mural Project of 2017.
Pilar and I specifically designed this workshop
series for students at Markham Middle School with
the goal of encouraging students in the arts by con-
necting them to some of the local art/histories. Fur-
thermore, our aim was to share the 50th Anniversary
86  Reflections/Reflexiones Diálogo
Mural Project and our emoji methodology with them
to encourage their creativity and expressions of self-
identity. The three workshops built on each other to
encourage a sense of continuity. For purposes of this
article we specifically focus only on the second work-
shop, where we introduced EM to the students. During
that session we introduced concepts of space and place
with art histories as a way to consider connections be-
tween history and everyday lives. In the lesson, I intro-
duced them to three artists of color, Mark Bradford,
Betye Saar, and Fred Wilson,5 all of whom used maps
or globes in their work to point to space, place, and
power structures. We then discussed one of the colo-
nial practices of cartography used by some European
imperial powers to visualize conquest and control over
subjugated peoples. We offered examples of historic
ways that African, Asian, and American continents are
often depicted out of scale in maps and globes to rein-
force Western claims to space and supremacy (­Perkins
et al. 389).
After the lesson, we invited the students to make
Emoji Maps about their lives and experiences in Watts.
Pilar and I asked the students to cut out the paper emo-
jis and place them on our mounted maps of the neigh-
borhood while we showed them examples of what their
map might look like. With music playing in the back-
ground, the students began EM. Pilar and I helped the
students locate their favorite places to eat, their homes,
and the Alma Reaves Woods Library on Compton
and 103rd Street. They used the symbols to describe
where they go to school and where they play, worship,
eat, and live. In addition to permanent shops or sites
in the community, the students mapped out personal
histories; they mapped sites where they saw or heard
gunshots, where they met their friends, or where they
saw the police. By fixing memories to space, students
added depth and nuance to their community through
sharing their experiences.
CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT AND REFLECTION
Engaging the workshop series through a his-
torical lens empowered us to center our pedagogical
and epistemological foundation in a philosophy that
comes from the personal, the local, and the self. Put-
ting our work in conversation with the likes of Emma
Pérez, Natalia Molina, and Edward Said, this project
 Making Space and Marking Race: Emoji Mapping and Liberatory Cartographies in South Los Angeles
expands on an interdisciplinary body of scholarship
that deals with space, race, knowledge production, sit-
uated knowledge, and memory studies through rec-
lamation. In The Decolonial Imaginary, Emma Pérez
urges us to examine “the process of, not the origins”
(xvi), and to take seriously violence we face when a fic-
tive past becomes the knowledge used to negotiate the
other culture’s difference. Building from the work of
the scholars before us, we placed our work within the
struggle for liberation pedagogy. While there are al-
ways areas for improvement, I believe our approach
worked well because we spoke to histories that were
unknown to the children, yet when we discussed the
conditions of those histories, they became personal
and familiar. In connecting some of those histories
with their Emoji Maps, the students could see and de-
termine for themselves a past and a present that they
live in.
As we finished the activity, I asked the students
to reflect on how it felt to make their maps, and I was
deeply moved to hear multiple students say they felt
proud and happy. They elaborated that reflecting on
their lives and community gave them a stronger sense
of self, and they were happy to see their lives take place
in this way. While adults and elderly people from the
community picnic remarked that EM had meaning for
them, I was surprised to hear similar feedback from
children. Their comments underscored powerful con-
nections that we, even as children, have to the environ-
ment in which we live. I was grateful and humbled to
see and hear the power of spatial dynamics and map-
ping uplift and empower these students.
In working with these students, I was surprised
more than once—and in those instances I recall learn-
ing the most from students—when they expressed
their emotional response to the activities and discus-
sions. Hearing them reflect on the EM activity was
such a profound moment: their responses were pow-
erful in that they seemed to gain an empowering per-
spective for themselves, for their community, and for
their relationship to it. In EM, the students made place,
they sited/cited memories, and they celebrated them-
selves, not as consumers or cultural capitalists but as
children and residents of Watts. They saw their lives
play out in space and recognized the power and pride
in knowing oneself and one’s community.
Diálogo Reflections/Reflexiones 87
OVERALL THEORETICAL POSSIBILITIES
I have discussed EM at two different community
functions, highlighting the ways that it was used, who
participated, and how they responded to it. In this sec-
tion I build on those interactions by contextualizing
their possibilities with the theoretical contributions
of Katherine McKittrick and George Lipsitz. Further-
more, as the method of EM was designed to support
the Watts 50th Anniversary Commemorative Mural
Project, I also offer a brief visual analysis of Watts Still
Rising in the context of the data yielded from EM. It is
worth mentioning that EM was created as the Watts
Mural Project was developing and was not used exclu-
sively in designing the formal elements or design of the
mural. Nevertheless, I will point to the elements from
the mural that were informed by Emoji Maps.
I assert here that EM is a community activity with
a decolonial imperative to directly oppose the tradi-
tion of the field of geography, which asserts the con-
creteness and neutrality of place. In Demonic Grounds,
Katherine McKittrick reminds us that the geographic
placement of subaltern bodies is often and histori-
cally dependent on the social, racial, economic, and
sexed hierarchies that also inform the broader struc-
tures: “The production of space is caught up, but does
not guarantee, long-standing geographic frameworks
that materially and philosophically arrange the planet
according to a seemingly stable white, heterosexual,
classed vanished point” (xv). As she explains, we can-
not escape the historical reality that the development
of districts and neighborhoods are carefully designed
and functional in reproducing long-standing power
structures. In other words, cities do not grow organi-
cally; rather, they are built within a social and cultural
context and a particular power structure.
Therefore, I submit that EM’s intervention is even
greater, as it disrupts what George Lipsitz calls white
spatial imaginary, a logic that assumes the neutrality
of space and blames Black people—and other people
of color—for the persistence of social and economic
inequalities. As we disrupt the idea that space is in-
herently neutral, we can oppose the falsehood that a
person’s position in life is a direct result of the per-
son’s decisions, work, or merit. In fact, in How Rac-
ism Takes Place, George Lipsitz quotes Robert Bullard,
who states in Confronting Environmental Racism that
Kaelyn D. Rodríguez Volume 21  Number 2  Fall 2018
“race has been found to be an independent factor, not
reducible to class” (21). In other words, a person’s social
or economic position, location, or language is some-
times less significant to the person’s life experiences
than race. Thus, by unpacking a lifetime of experiences
in a neighborhood, we can begin to observe how life
takes place in Watts.
SPATIAL IMAGINARIES AND
DIFFERENTIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Moving away from McKittrick’s critique of the or-
der of geography, I submit that in asking the students
to assert their own views of space, which were varying
and nonhierarchical vantage points of their commu-
nity—the students sited places and events on the map
that were significant to their lives. This is an impor-
tant discursive move for opposing dominant episte-
mologies of space, which centers children and employs
Lipsitz’s Black spatial imaginary. In terms of use of the
latter in our EM workshop, two points must be dis-
cussed: First, the majority of the students working
with us at Markham Middle School are not Black but
Latina/o/x.
While the Black spatial imaginary describes space
and power relations about Black communities, it is
also “flexible, fluid and relational, [since] the contours
of anti-Black spaces are relevant to all communities
of color” (Lipsitz, How 12). In other words, as a theo-
retical concept that is capable of application to other
communities of color—especially in Watts, a histori-
cally Black community with a current Latinx major-
ity population—we can do what Natalia Molina calls
relational racial work. Molina makes the case for this
approach: “A relational treatment of race recognizes
that the construction of race is a mutually constitutive
process and demonstrates how race is socially con-
structed, hence fighting against essential notions. Fur-
thermore, it attends to how, when, where and to what
extent groups intersect. It recognizes that there are lim-
its to examining radicalized groups in isolation” (552).
This is deeply important for working across racial dif-
ference without diminishing or erasing Black people or
the Black history of this now majority-Latinx commu-
nity. I believe this is especially important to note be-
cause the same localization of Black people in Watts
that turned “racial segregation into creativity and cel-
ebratory congregation” (Johnson 1) in the 1940s, 1950s,
88  Reflections/Reflexiones Diálogo
and 1960s is the same localization that Latinx com-
munities experienced in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Furthermore, many of the conditions of life in South
LA were shared and not distinct across racial differ-
ence between Black and Latinx residents. And in doing
relational racial analysis, we do not ignore the ten-
sions that sometimes arise between Black and Latinx
communities or acknowledgment of those issues; in-
stead, we focus on the very real history and concept
that Black and Latinx communities have lived together
for decades, shared spaces, and in fact, share histories
and futures.
The second point in discussing the Black spatial
imaginary as a framework offers us theory and lan-
guage for this very instance of “turn[ing] sites of con-
tainment and confinement into spaces of creativity
and community making” (Lipsitz, How 53). Although
segregation is no longer a legal mode of social control
or containment, it still exists and thrives in Los An-
geles just as it did in the twentieth century. After the
1965 uprising in Watts, the construction of the massive
freeway on-ramps and off-ramps was broadly seen as
a form of physical containment or border. Such huge
freeway off-ramps subjected the town to overpolicing
by overtly accommodating tanks and military vehi-
cles that access and contain the area. In fact, in an im-
promptu conversation with an elder of Watts, I was told
that the freeways were specifically built after the 1965
rebellion to support law enforcement’s ability to con-
trol the community through surveillance and persis-
tent presence. The freeway functions as a mechanism
for maintaining segregation in Watts, as do freeways
in other working-class communities of color. Using
EM with the Black spatial imaginary is one way we di-
rectly shift confinement to creativity and community
making. By using geographic maps with personal nar-
ratives, we invert a positivist version of Watts with an
alternative geography that disrupts power structures
and empowers local knowledge.
Furthermore, the concept of Black spatial imag-
inary was useful in the larger mural project, which
functions as a visual history of local resilience and a
vision for the future of Watts. The Watts 50th Anniver-
sary Commemorative Mural locates gardens, public
artworks, and bike paths, but it also visualizes family
farms, the Watts Towers, and the Ted Watkins Memo-
rial Park (fig. 2).
 Making Space and Marking Race: Emoji Mapping and Liberatory Cartographies in South Los Angeles

Fig. 2: Watts: Riots/Rebellion 50th Anniversary Commemorative Mural. Photo courtesy of SPARC.

CONCLUSION: A LOOK AHEAD
All the work we did at SPARC to create the mu-
ral, the work that was done in collaboration with the
DCA, and the work that Pilar and I did as a team were
leading up to the final mural. And while the mural is
beautiful and powerful, it is more than the sum of its
parts. Taking my cue from Shifra Goldman and other
radical art historians and scholars before me, I pur-
posely shift away from a deep discussion of the final
mural as an object and instead emphasize the mural in
its full life, including its process of creation, necessary
community engagement, many collaborations, and of
course its future. As Edouard Glissant states, “The in-
dividual, the community, the land are inextricable in
the process of creating history” (59). And for me, mak-
ing public art is making history, making art history,
and marking geography. With this in mind, and with
this mural project in its final stages, I look to the fu-
ture to see how we can make the hard-copy maps used
for EM meaningful and accessible to the community.
I wonder about the potential impact of sharing EM
as a storytelling method where children and youth,
adults and elders, offer their memories to the commu-
nity and learn from each other. Could we archive the
Emoji Maps we already have, upload photographs, in-
terviews, and/or oral histories with Emoji Maps, his-
torical maps, and contemporary maps of South LA?
What if we made a digital version of EM accessible on-
line so that those who cannot participate in a commu-
nity function can still map their narratives with us?
These are some of the questions I ask as I look ahead
to my work in Watts, my dissertation, and my life in
Los Angeles. While I do not have the answers to these
questions, I refer to the community of Watts, the rich
histories, and the exciting futures that indicate to me
that there is much more ahead.
ENDNOTES
1 The Watts Riots/Rebellion 50th Anniversary Com-
memorative Mural Project was commissioned in
2015 by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Af-
fairs and executed by Professor Judith F. Baca and
the mural team at the Social and Public Art Re-
source Center. For more information, see “Watts:
Riot/Rebellion 50th Anniversary Commemorative
Mural Project,” http://sparcinla.org/projects/watts
-riotsrebellion-50th-anniversary-commemorative
-mural-project/.
2 I would like to thank my advisers, who supported
this article and this research project: Dr. Charlene

Diálogo Reflections/Reflexiones 89
Kaelyn D. Rodríguez Volume 21  Number 2  Fall 2018
Villaseñor Black, Dr. Gaye Theresa Johnson, and es-
teemed Professor Judith F. Baca.
3 Pilar Castillo is a second-year graduate student at
Otis College of Art and Design, an archivist at the
Social and Public Art Resource Center, and a pow-
erful mujer from el caribe. She was my immediate
counterpart in the Watts Reimagined project from
2015 to 2017.
4 After years of police violence and intimidation to-
ward residents, racial segregation, and structural in-
equality on many fronts, unrest occurred in Watts
during August 11–17, 1965. This rebellion was re-
ferred to as the Watts Riots.
5 These three artists have had major influences on Los
Angeles and international arts discourse.
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