Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Mike Davis, an LA-based writer and urban critic of Irish descent, at a restaurant in the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Davis remarks how the world needs a new civil rights movement “like we need sunshine, and […] fresh air.” He praises the gang truce that has just taken place in the city, seeing it as a “sign of / a generation that won’t commit suicide.” However, the East Side is engaged in “the worst Latino gang / war in history.” Just last weekend, 17 Latino kids died, many of them the children of recent immigrants who wouldn’t otherwise be involved in gang violence.
Davis’s observation that Los Angeles needs a new civil rights movement suggests that the civil rights movement of the 1960s failed to make good on the promises of equality it set out to accomplish. The current state of Los Angeles, which is suffering from heightened racial tensions and a corrupt police force, is evidence of those unfulfilled promises.
Themes
And yet, nobody is publicly decrying the violence as an emergency. Davis observes how “this city is at war with / its own children,” who it fails to confront and talk to about the violence. Davis compares the current situation with gang-affiliated youth to his own white childhood growing up in Southern California. His parents hitchhiked to California from Ohio. Davis grew up among “Okies” and Dust Bowl refugees, everyone received a free junior college education, and employment was plentiful. Kids could go to the beach and race their cars. He describes the civil rights movement as a struggle to secure those privileges for everyone.
Davis’s observation that LA “is at war with / its own children” conveys the way the system has turned its back on children growing up in high-violence, gang-affiliated areas and allowed them to turn to lives of crime themselves. The city will later punish these children for engaging in crimes it could well have prevented, had it done what it did for “Okies” years ago. “Okies” refers to migrant agricultural workers who traveled to California during the westward mass migration during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Many of these people were from Oklahoma, hence the term “Okie,” which is derogatory. Davis brings up these classes of people from history to show how underprivileged classes of white people have historically been given more assistance than their Black counterparts.
Themes
Davis notes how now, even white kids are losing these privileges, since the only permitted activity is mall shopping. Helicopters patrol the beaches, and cruising is said to “lead[] to gang warfare.” These days, people go out to the desert to live in armed compounds and “tear up the Joshua trees,” instead of to find peace and freedom in the desert.
Davis situates Los Angeles’s current state within a broader culture of despair. He sees that young people no longer have hopes or idealized visions of the future. Now, they just want to “tear up the Joshua trees” and feed their despair. Davis’s remarks also show how oppression and violence in one community doesn’t stay contained to that community—it spreads outward, affecting even the most privileged people. This is why, he suggests, it’s important for everyone to care about oppression: it may one day affect someone who thought it didn’t matter to them.
Themes
