The School of Los Angeles
Magazine
SUMMER 2024
ISSUE 01
Issue 01, Winter 2024
Table of Contents
Who Gets to Live in Los Angeles?
Students Investigate Development, Public Art, and Community Organizing in Historic South Central
Students in Mr. Throckmorton’s senior ecology elective get their feet wet—literally—to engage with the history of Los Angeles, revitalization, land stewardship, and the present-tense crisis of gentrification.
Issalin Lopez, Class of 2017 and one of the first students to attend SLA, may or may not have been inadvertently inebriated during her admissions interview for eighth grade. She reflects on how her educational journey informs the work she does now.
A Conversation with Artist in Residence, Gabo Lugo
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, educated at Berklee College of Music, and a Grammy-nominated songwriter since he was seventeen years old, Gabo Lugo sits down for a wide-ranging conversation on art making and the industry.
Dr. Kenneth Rodgers, Jr.
President and Head of School
Dear SLA families and friends,
Welcome to the inaugural edition of The School of Los Angeles Magazine. The most vital aspect of any school is the stories it makes possible, day to day, year to year. There are remarkable stories unfolding both within and far beyond the walls of our campus, and these pages will serve as a space to share more deeply in all the threads that make ours such a vibrant community.
The programming highlighted in this first edition—our new media lab and our very first Artist in Residence, the place-based fieldwork conducted in the L.A. River basin as part of our Upper School ecology course, and the launch of City Week, which provides students across all grades with experiential learning opportunities rooted in Los Angeles—was made possible thanks to your generous contributions to the SLA Annual Fund. We’re grateful for everything our families and friends contribute to make our School unique, and we hope you’ll celebrate in the stories shared here—and the many more to come.
Sincerely,
Dr. Kenneth Rodgers, Jr.
President and Head of School
Who Gets to Live in Los Angeles?
For SLA’s inaugural City Week, grade nine students engaged with a provocative and deceptively simple question: “Who gets to live in Los Angeles?” From sitting in community with neighborhood organizers in Expo Park to walking the grounds of the Watts Towers, students grappled with the question of whom or what is actually served by civic and commercial developments in the City of Angels.
It’s the kind of bright, hot Los Angeles day when the shade starts to seem like an impossibly scarce resource. Even in the middle of a major city park, there’s very little to be found. SLA’s ninth grade students have spent the morning going from bus to train to bus again, traveling from the heart of Hollywood to Exposition Park near the University of Southern California in Historic South Central. Now they are under the beating sun in a large swath of green grass. Nearby looms a gigantic reproduction of the Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars film franchise, soon to be the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, alongside BMO Stadium where two of L.A.’s professional soccer teams play—massive construction projects that have contributed to the fundamental changes ongoing in the neighborhood. In ironic juxtaposition to the stadium, a small sign stands out at the edge of the public lawn: NO SOCCER IN THIS AREA.
Carlos Miguel Linares, who has lived in the neighborhood since he was a child, remembers playing soccer in the park as a kid. In a largely concrete and asphalt stretch of the city, the park was an oasis. But as it has come to stand as a destination for tourists and a wealthier consumer base, it functions less and less as a space for neighborhood residents, including the mostly Latinx families who used to play soccer here.
No Soccer signs displayed in Expo Park
SLA students had come to Expo Park to sit in community with members of the Flower Drive Tenants Association, of which Linares is a member and organizer. He made an immediate impression. “Carlos and I were sharing our indigenous languages,” says Allison Gomez-Luis, Class of 2027. “I speak a Mixtec dialect and he spoke a Zapotec dialect. It’s like I met a long lost cousin but I didn’t know him at all. Our families grew up five minutes from each other near Oaxaca.”
This was Tuesday during the inaugural edition of City Week, an experiential learning initiative designed to help students connect the work they’re doing in the classroom to their own role in the city and the world around them. As part of the humanities curriculum, these ninth graders were pursuing the answer to a deceptively simple question: Who gets to live in Los Angeles?
Mr. Albright and Mr. Rosales introduced students to the organizers of Flower Drive—families living just a block east of Exposition Park who are fighting to stay in their homes. Señora Ines, who has lived on this street since 1969, began by gathering students on her corner and sharing the contrasting stories of the 3800 and 3900 blocks of Flower Drive. When tenants on the block to the south began to face harassment from their new landlord—in the form of aggressive cash for keys offers and direct bullying by agents of the owner—they turned to an established local nonprofit for help. Unable to defend the tenants’ actual interests, the nonprofit merely negotiated the terms of their displacement.
Students in community with organizer Carlos Miguel Linares
This was perhaps one of the starkest, most impactful moments for students. Standing on the street corner with Señora Ines, they gazed south to see that the families who had been there for generations had vanished—or were now living outdoors under the adjacent highway overpass—leaving behind a lonely expanse of dense, empty apartment complexes, stalked by a security guard being paid hourly to ensure that these buildings sheltered no one. “Señora Ines was really powerful,” says Gomez-Luis. “I felt it, looking at all those empty buildings that used to be filled with people. Where I live, right outside my house, I see piles of clothes and children’s toys thrown out on the street where families have just been evicted. It’s a permanent instability.”
Then, to the north, students saw a block vibrant with life, nearly every window proudly displaying signs for the Flower Drive Tenants Association. Ines did not want to negotiate the terms of her eviction, she told the students. She wanted to stay in the community she had grown up in, contributed to, helped to build for nearly her entire life. She had started organizing her block simply by talking with her neighbors, calling meetings, discussing their shared conditions and interests. Eventually, they found out where the new owner of their apartment complexes lived. They staged direct actions outside of his house, disrupting his neighborhood, banging pots and pans and holding signs, demanding he come to the table to meet with them. The tenants had been harassed by unnecessary construction projects, jack hammers turned on just to make noise, and all the while management refused to fix anything. But they held strong and collectively agreed none of them would leave or accept a buyout.
Señora Ines outside her home
On Thursday, the students would travel back to South Central with Dr. Milner to visit Watts Towers, also known as Nuestra Pueblo, the seventeen interconnected sculptural towers constructed by Sabato Rodia over a period of 33 years, from 1921 to 1954. At a height of 99.5 feet, they are a striking example of American folk art sculpture and mosaic. Students toured the sculptures and visited the adjacent art center—which has stood for decades as a crucial institution of the Black Arts Movement and community life—to grapple with questions of immigration, place-based artistic practice, dignity, and gentrification.
“The idea,” said Dr. Milner, “was to explore who has permission to be an artist, and where does art have permission to exist? The tour guide highlighted that the Watts Towers would most certainly not be standing today if they had been constructed in Beverly Hills, the other neighborhood Sabato Rodia considered for a move. And what are the power structures that determine this kind of thing? Homeowners’ associations, city government, state and county regulators. Why would the towers be considered a nuisance in some areas?”
Students explore Watts Towers
The real estate corporation that had acquired the buildings on Flower Drive for a major mixed-use development provided one answer. They view this area, Mr. Albright noted, as “underutilized real estate—with utilization defined in terms of profit maximization.”
Señora Ines brought the students to the back lot of their apartment building, where she and her neighbors hold their weekly meetings. They sit together and eat and hear from other members of the tenants association, other residents who remain on Flower Drive thanks to the collective power they have exercised. Students asked questions they developed with teachers to probe the themes of housing, displacement, and gentrification that affect nearly every part of the city. For the tenants of Flower Drive and those like them, “their question is not who gets to live in L.A. Their question is: How do we struggle to hold onto our homes, our communities, our lives? It’s not theoretical for them,” Mr. Albright said.
At Watts Towers, the students looked back in history to a very different Los Angeles. “Here is this Italian immigrant, divorcée, mason worker, and he’s able to afford a house in Los Angeles, and he’s able to build, by hand, on his property, these impossible structures,” as Dr. Milner puts it.
“He gets pushback and hassle from neighbors, from the city. It’s especially interesting the way the city tries to shut him down for safety, saying these things could fall, they’re not to code. We have all of these mechanisms where under the idea of public safety or civility or normalcy, we constrain action. We also want to zoom out and look across the city. Where does public art exist? If you map our public art spaces onto the city what do we find? What kind of art do you get in heavily trafficked tourist areas? How commercial is that art versus local or cultural or traditional? Where do you find art made by and for residents of Los Angeles?”
Walking Flower Drive
The museum and the tenants association offer distinct vantages on the past and present of the city, and entwine students in different kinds of relationships from which to learn and reflect upon their own place in the community—both of them with their own risks. “We were a little conflicted” about bringing students to Flower Drive, Mr. Rosales shared, “because of the potential for voyeurism, putting a microscope on people’s real lives.” At the same time, if the City Week trips hewed exclusively to museums and historical sites, students could remain safely within a bubble of scholarly distance. In the end, he notes, the visit to the tenants association “challenged the paradigm—here are people who are not subjects of study, but creators of history, agents who are transforming the world around them.”
Our River, Our Future
At the intersections of biology, geography, civics, and urban planning, the L.A. River has a complex story to tell about where we’ve come from and where we’re headed. Students in Mr. Throckmorton’s senior ecology elective get their feet wet—literally—to engage with the history of Los Angeles, revitalization, land stewardship, and the present-tense crisis of gentrification.
The journey from SLA campus to the L.A. River is an obstacle course of densely knotted neighborhoods, highway overpasses and underpasses, and the complicated semi-public infrastructure of the Griffith Park Recreation Center. Blue signs emblazoned with that ubiquitous heron in silhouette point the way from the tennis courts to the river. Follow those signs and they’ll lead you down a pedestrian walkway—a dirt trail that at first seems to be going nowhere at all.
Mr. Throckmorton with a group of SLA seniors at the L.A. River
Eventually, with a little faith, you will reach an enclosed bridge crossing over ten lanes of the I-5 North and South. Traverse that, and you finally reach the river. Or, rather, a vast trench of concrete that contains a 32-mile stretch of the L.A. River, including the approximately 11 miles that run through the city of Los Angeles.
The basin system around the river was constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers after the Los Angeles flood of 1938. After years of bending the river to the needs of a booming city built in a desert, the concrete bunker was the culmination, at least in a poetic sense, of the subjugation of the land to the city’s propertied interests. For decades the ecological health of the river was allowed to languish—while the neighborhoods along the waterfront became the nexus of gentrification in L.A.
The civic history and ecological health of the river are inseparable—and that’s how Mr. Throckmorton, chair of the STEM Department, sees things. Test the river, parse its contents, and you get a temperature check on the ecological health of the city as a whole—a snapshot of how we behave as a community: our pollution levels, our waste, even the quality of the air we breathe.
Mr. Throckmorton has brought his class of eleven seniors to the L.A. River as part of the elective course, Ecology: A Fieldwork-Based Approach to Ecological Restoration of The L.A. River, now one of the most popular electives in the Upper School. It’s a rare thing for a senior-level science class to spend significant time critically examining what it means to be a part of ongoing settler-colonialism, but it’s core to Mr. Throckmorton’s aims for his course, which was inspired in part by the Los Angeles River Revitalization Plan. In 2007, after decades of passivity, the city of Los Angeles approved a $1.3 billion master plan that aimed to reimagine and revitalize its eleven-mile stretch of the river, transforming it into an eco-friendly urban commons. The plan was always pitched as part environmental cause, part urban planning project.
But land revitalization is a concept that demands a critical lens. “The illusion of land revitalization,” said Mr. Throckmorton, “is that it implies to some people that we can go back to something; that we can somehow name ourselves stewards of the land and continue another people’s practice. But it implies to others that we can make better commercial use of an area of our city. On the one hand it’s a myth that we can reset nature back to some previous period, and on the other hand it’s actually a desire to just take from the river more effectively.”
The revitalization plan was controversial from the start among many communities who saw it as just another development project. Then, in 2017, Frank Gehry partnered with L.A. River Corp “to ensure that the 51-mile Los Angeles River integrates design and infrastructure that bring people and nature together.” More controversy ensued. The true intent of the project was muddied. Were we saving the river? Commercializing vulnerable residential communities on the Eastside? Some combination of the two? The most fundamental question of all was: Who or what is revitalization for?
“We read the proposal for river restoration,” says Maria Guenther-Iannotti, Class of 2024. “And it could have focused far more on the people who live in these areas of the city—questions of homelessness and gentrification. Meaningfully restoring the land is not just restoration to make something look better, but actually taking into account the neighbors, people, the needs of the community.”
“Gentrification along the river is getting worse,” adds Olivia Fuson, Class of 2024. “We want to utilize neglected park spaces, we want to create a sustainable garden for locals in the community, help to cultivate recreational green spaces. We want to get local schools involved. But beautification usually happens in order to attract middle-class families. It seems like the City wants to bring in a different population rather than keep and sustain the populations who are already here.”
Students explore the L.A. River in search of soil samples
Mr. Throckmorton thought these civics questions, these urgent concerns of the city, should not be confined to the realm of humanities courses. He also saw an opportunity to structure the science curriculum at SLA, grade-to-grade, into a more purposeful program. “I looked at the work we were doing in the humanities, and I wanted to ensure that students could look back at their SLA science education and see a clear throughline. STEM programs are often so disconnected from discipline to discipline, and the idea that there is an intentionality to the science curriculum was very important to me. I wanted senior year to culminate in something. I wanted students to be able to identify and apply the tools they had developed and understand why they had developed them.”
Olivia Fuson, Class of 2024
The Ecological Fieldwork course, then, serves as a kind of culmination of STEM curricula at SLA. Students investigate and employ their understanding of fundamental biological concepts, current scientific literature, and contemporary projects relating to ecological restoration. They engage with the Los Angeles River as a primary case study and collect and analyze ecological data from the water and surrounding soil. In the long run, Mr. Throckmorton hopes to have years of collected data so that students can begin to discern trends in the ecological health of the river, and thus better understand the results and consequences of environmental regulation and revitalization projects.
After an afternoon spent beneath the beating sun, crisscrossing the riverbed in galoshes, gathering samples of silt and water and insects—exploring the archipelagos of stones and knolls of tall grass and trees, teeming with both life and the discarded refuse of the city—the students gather in the shade of an overpassing footbridge. In a loose semicircle they pass around a roll of painter’s tape to label their vials, and before long they are abuzz comparing their findings, holding the captured river water up to the light and peering through its contents, speculating on what they will find when they run their tests back on campus.
“We need to be more connected to nature to continue as a people,” says Fuson. “It’s cool to test our water—the water that is directly part of our ecosystem. You can see the effects of pollution, what we throw in the water. The river has a story to tell, and when we study it, we’re actually studying the place we live.”
Alumni Profile:
Issalin Lopez
Issalin Lopez has claim to a status in the annals of SLA that belongs to only a handful of people. She is one of the true O.G.s—here when the School first opened its doors in the fall of 2012, a member of the founding eighth-grade class, and a member of the Class of 2017, our very first batch of graduates. She delivered the commencement address for her graduating class and led the way for many in our community as a first-generation college student—most especially for her own family, which now boasts three SLA graduates and a younger sibling currently enrolled.
During the 2011–12 school year, Issalin was living with her family and attending school in San Francisco. Her mother was planning a move back to Los Angeles, and a staff member at an after-school enrichment program Issalin was enrolled in tipped them off to a similar, scrappy start-up endeavor in L.A. that was planning to break ground as a full-time secondary school in the fall.
Her interview was poorly timed—the type of thing that could have gone sideways, but now seems to fit very comfortably in the lore of SLA’s earliest days. Just a couple hours prior to her sitdown with SLA’s admin, Issalin had been at the dentist, getting a cavity filled. “I think I was probably a little high on laughing gas,” she recalls. “My tongue was totally numb. I couldn’t really talk. I definitely couldn’t pronounce the word ‘Episcopal.’” It was a completely new experience for Issalin, as well—the first of many firsts through which she and her classmates would forge a path for those that followed, piloting nearly every aspect of School programming.
Now Issalin works on the other side of the desk, serving as the Associate Director of Multicultural Recruitment and Admission at Deerfield Academy, one of the oldest boarding schools in Massachusetts—and she has an acute and deeply personal understanding of what it means to make the admissions process more welcoming. During all four years as an undergraduate at Kenyon College—where she majored in psychology and spent a semester studying abroad in Sydney, Australia—Issalin worked in the admissions office. She started out as a tour guide and prospective student overnight host, and by her senior year she was conducting interviews, info sessions, and helping run open house events.
“When I was a prospective student, I had a fantastic overnight experience at Kenyon,” Issalin says. “I loved my host. I honestly think it’s the reason I decided to enroll. So I wanted to pass that on, to help alleviate the stress and anxiety that other students—especially first-generation students—might be feeling.” In fact, she was home for winter break several years ago (a little earlier than expected, thanks to the pandemic) and was sitting right beside her younger brother when he, too, learned he had been accepted to Kenyon.
Issalin interviews all types of applicants for Deerfield (though none that she knows of have been high on laughing gas). She travels the country to various school fairs, and hosts events, info sessions, and panels. But she is most proud of the work she does partnering with community-based organizations that support students of color and students from working-class backgrounds—some of the same national organizations that SLA partners with. And, to come full circle, Issalin is now an advisor to students in Deerfield’s Upper School.
“It’s Not Music,
What We Are Making.”
A Conversation with Artist in Residence, Gabo Lugo
Innovator, educator, percussionist, noisemaker. Whatever you want to label him, Gabo Lugo, SLA’s first Artist in Residence, occupies space in some of the most creative scenes in music today.
Since selling his first beat when he was still in high school, Gabo has thrived in the international music scene—contributing to the sounds of hip hop, trap, and R&B. He has written and produced for international artists from Young Miko to Bad Bunny, and has been nominated for multiple Grammy and Latin Grammy awards.
As SLA’s first Artist in Residence, Gabo has spent a semester teaching Upper School students the ins and outs of Ableton Live—a digital tool for music production, sampling, and beat making—in our brand new media lab. During the early weeks of the fall semester, he sat down with Dr. Rodgers and the entire School community for a wide ranging conversation on all things music industry, the state of the art, and the future of sound in a digital age.
Gabo performing for the School communityThe Interview
Dr. Kenneth Rodgers, Jr.
So I just want to start with your musical journey. Take us back to Gabo the middle schooler. Where are you? What are you doing relative to music?
Gabo Lugo
I’m the son of a ballet dancer and a sound engineer. So I grew up in a studio. By the time I got to middle school, I was already making beats and trying to show them to everyone. And in my middle school—it was a music school—there was this legend going around that once, before I studied there, Daddy Yankee came and took a guy to help him play piano and they all became famous. So everybody in my school was making beats because one day Daddy Yankee might show up and sign one of us. So since seventh grade, I’ve been preparing demos and bringing them to studios, showing them to everyone. By that point, I had already studied violin, a little bit of piano, played percussion professionally—that’s where I was at musically in middle school. Then by the time I got to high school, one of my demos got picked up by Tego Calderón, who gave me my first real opportunity. That track got nominated for a Latin Grammy, and it all started from there.
KR
Do you think you became a better beat maker because you went to a music conservatory?
GL
The word better is tricky. Can we define that before I answer the question? Is the better producer the one who makes the most money, or the one who’s more culturally relevant, or the one who’s most critically acclaimed?
KR
I meant it in terms of just skill sets, your ability to create. Was that significantly improved because you went to college?
GL
I think it just made me a different kind of producer—because of the focus on instruments. I don’t want to imply that if you don’t play any instruments, you can’t make a lot of music. I think that’s just going to make you a different kind of producer, not necessarily a better or a worse one.
KR
So you make these beats by yourself most of the time—just in a room going crazy, alone. When you feel like the track is done, you send it off to the label or the artist or their team, and they record lyrics over your beat, add melodies, do different things. And when you hear it back, what is the experience of listening to something you created after it’s gone through the hands of other artists? Do you feel like it’s even still yours?
GL
The way I used to listen to music, because I grew up in Puerto Rico, we speak Spanish, but I was listening to a lot of music in English, so I just tuned out the lyrics of everything I heard. I just kind of felt energy, and was looking for interesting textures. I didn’t understand what was going on. So to a certain degree, that’s still how I operate, where voices just become sources of energy—but I’m not really processing what they’re saying. I think if I think too much about what they’re saying, it would be a huge turn off most of the time.
KR
I often hear folks of a certain generation say that there’s no real music anymore. There’s no good music anymore. Musicians now do everything by themselves on these computers. We’ve lost the essence of music, of making music together, the concept of a band, universal language, et cetera. What do you say to that?
GL
So this is an idea I’ve been struggling with for the longest time, since I was very little. I grew up in a musical environment and the way I learned music didn’t match the way I was using music. All the music that I enjoyed listening to or making—it didn’t sound anything like what people were teaching me. And I’ve been struggling with this idea—and after many years of the struggle, I’ve come to the realization that they were right. It’s not music, what we are making. It’s not music in the traditional sense of the word. And I think that’s the best way to think about it.
KR
It’s not music. So what is it?
GL
We just need to find a different name for it. We’re still calling it music. A good example would be—follow me with this one—with performing arts, first there was theater, and then they started filming the theater, and then they started doing tricks with the cameras, making the footage slower, faster, backwards. And filmed theater became movies. They didn’t keep calling it, “theater.” And something similar has been happening to music since the beginning of the 1900s. The first moment that sound got recorded, music passed from an ethereal medium that was tied to time and space to being part of the plastic arts. Now you have this recorded thing, you can play it over and over. You can manipulate the recording, you can record over it, remix it, reverse it. And thus the art of manipulating the recordings was born. And that’s what I do. Even though I used to play a lot of instruments, I don’t consider myself a musician in the traditional sense of the word.
KR
My last question: how realistic would you say it is to develop a career in the music industry?
GL
How many songs get uploaded to Spotify every day? It’s in the millions or hundreds of thousands of songs. So I don’t want to say it’s not realistic, but I think you do have to be a little delusional—just have this delusional confidence in yourself that you have something to bring to the table. So yeah, we are the delusional ones.
KR
Any advice for students in middle school and high school?
GL
Be delusional. Love it.