Village Islands in the Metropol

Urban spaces are probably impossible to really encompass if all you do is ethnographic work. You have to get away from the ground if you want to comprehend a place as large as a city. But if you do not spend time right on the ground, you will miss the local textures that make up the warp and the woof of a city, the web of meanings and relationships that are manifested locally but that extend outward (and often upward) in space and time.

Urban places everywhere come to surround older places, wrapping new urban meanings and movement around old structures and older residents.
Those red buckets hold noodles for a street vendor in a cun（村), a walled-village that has come to be surrounded by urban Guangzhou in southern China. It used to be an agricultural village; now its surrounded by new construction and the people inside it are mostly migrant workers, like these guys.

These recyclers have a couple of flat-bed-tricycles that they use to collect cardboard. The man on the left has a son who manages his farm plot in Henan. He goes home during planting season and during harvest, but the rest of the time he lives here. Right here. No roof, just a pallet and a space or two on the former village wall that hold a clothesline, a few handy bags of toiletries; there are plenty of food stands around for cheap eats. When it rains, he decamps to a spot under the overpass a few yards away. The weather is warm, the money is there for the work that he does, and he has a helper. The kid belongs to one of the food vendors; he is usually hanging out with these guys, a little brother, a 小第第。 Street life is open for all to see, friendly, fairly safe, nothing particularly shameful about living out of doors. You make family out of your neighbors, here, sometimes.

Los Angeles is different. Or is it? When you drive around Hollywood you see remnants of the corner store that once was surrounded by orange or lemon groves. How many old residents are here, along with the new immigrant workers from Mexico or the soon-to-be hopefull movie stars that come to town looking for work in "the industry." The street-life in Guangzhou makes these connections more visible here, where streets are for walking and not for driving, than it is in auto-centric Los Angeles, but it is probably there, nonetheless.

I drive by this old corner store, at Fountain and Las Palmas, all the time. But I don't get out and walk around. Its well past time that I did. I want to check my idea that this is, in fact, a hold-over from a quieter and less automotive time (if there ever was such a time in L.A.).

Google StreetView provided the photo to back up my head-note about it. Time to get a picture of my own, and see who lives nearby. I don't think its quite as empty as this photograph suggests.