Becoming Los Angeles, a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. Waldie's particular concern is commonplace Los Angeles, whose rhythms of daily life are set against the gaudy backdrop of historical myth and Hollywood illusion. It's through sacred ordinariness that Waldie experiences the city's seasons. In his exploration of sprawling Los Angeles, he considers how the city's image was constructed and how it fostered willful amnesia about the city's conflicted past. He encounters the immigrants and exiles, the dreamers and con artists, the celebrated and forgotten who became Los Angeles. He measures the place of nature in the city and the different ways that nature has been defined. He maps on the contours of Los Angeles what embracing--or rejecting--an Angeleno identity has come to mean. (Angel City Press)

D. J. Waldie is a cultural historian, memoirist, and translator. In books, essays, and online commentary, he has sought to frame the suburban experience as a search for a sense of place. Often using his Southern California hometown of Lakewood as a starting point, Waldie’s work ranges widely over the history of suburbanization and its cultural effects. He has published five non-fiction books, each dealing with different aspects of everyday life. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out, Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles, and Close to Home: An American.

Carribean Fragoza is a journalist, fiction writer, and artist from South El Monte. She is the founder and co-director of the South El Monte Art Posse (SEMAP), a multi-disciplinary arts collective, and  co-editor of Boom California, a publication of the University of California Press. Carribean is the co-editor of East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, published February 2020 by Rutgers University Press. Her short story collection Eat the Mouth that Feeds You will be published by City Lights in the Spring of 2021. Carribean is the coordinator of the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award at Claremont Graduate University, and she lives in the San Gabriel Valley in LA County.

D.J. Waldie discusses "Becoming Los Angeles" with Carribean Fragoza