by breaking neighborhoods into race classifications by letter. As Waldie states, “The Montana Land Company made it clear that lots were protected by restrictions of an all-inclusive nature written into deeds covenants, these restrictions prevented the sale of lots to Negroes, Mexicans, and Jews.” (Waldie, pg 73) The HOLC and FHA were perhaps the Affirmative Action for white people, thus creating chocolate cities and vanilla villages. (Avila lecture, 2/7/02) Under Capitalism, everything could be marketed and sold, even history. (Avila, lecture 1/15/02) The romantic mythologies about characters like “Ramona,” in the novel by Helen Hunt Jackson, intrigued people. This novel became an attraction for tourist and was highly commercialized. The simple story about a young girl’s life in Los Angeles appealed to cities, pageants, and other young girls that were named after her. Another myth of Los Angeles includes the pursuit of fame and fortune in Hollywood. Many aspiring actors and actresses came out to Los Angeles to make their debut. What they found was a Hollywood dream gone sour. Nathaniel West’s, “The day of the locust,” is about broken Hollywood dreams. The fictional characters in the book are from the mid-west and east coast and are in pursuit of a Hollywood dream. West uses these characters to represent the many non-fiction characters that were confronted with the realities of the Los Angeles film industry, saying, “She went on and on, telling him how careers are made in the movies and how she intended to make hers. She mixed bits of badly understood…with other bits out of the fan magazines and compared these with the legends that surrounded…screen stars and executives. Possibilities became probabilities and wound up as inevitabilities.” (West, pg164) This totally illustrates the attitude of the want-to-be’s and would-be’s that came to Ho...
