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Los Angeles CityBeat newspaper article
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from the LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT, THURSDAY, MAY 31, 2007

Lummis Day: Diversity City

by Mindy Farabee

Los Angeles County is staggeringly diverse, with much of its diversity collected in specific cultural pockets – trek over to the San Gabriel Valley for streets lined with authentic Chinese restaurants; if you're in the market for a new mandir, Artesia's Little India is the place to go. Northeast L.A., however, wants to be known for something entirely different: being a mishmash. And they know just the man to make it happen.

This Sunday, June 3, Northeast L.A. celebrates its second annual Lummis Day, named in honor of Charles Fletcher Lummis, one-time advisor to President Theodore Roosevelt, founder of the city's oldest museum, erstwhile denizen of the neighborhood. Lummis, a towering figure in his day, was also a champion for multi-culturalism long before the word had been invented, advocating passionately and persuasively for Native American and minority rights.

By centering their celebration on his legacy, organizers are conducting an experiment with far-reaching implications. “The idea is to leverage history as community building,” says Eliot Sekuler, a Mt. Washington resident who first conceived of the festival while out walking his dog. On that day, Sekuler waved to his Filipino neighbor like he always did, then wondered why he didn't know the man better.“I love that my neighborhood is a microcosm, but we don't know much about where we come from,” he says.“Lummis was very prescient about saying, instead of repressing one culture versus another, let's see what results from interaction.”

Once a largely pastoral suburb just up the river from a bustling downtown, Northeast L.A. has mutated from a bucolic arts colony to a dense and complex inner-city neighborhood. The area is now overwhelmingly Chicano/Mexican, with liberal dashes of East and Southeast Asian, other Latino strains, Native American, and others, but the ethnic sands are again shifting, as a paler population has come around to snatch up much of Northeast L.A.'s more affordable and historically significant housing.

By pairing the festival with an ongoing curriculum designed for area schools, community leaders want to rethink diversity not simply as close proximity, but as a daily, interactive reality. Even among the artists, the message is eclecticism: among those performing on Sunday are the Chicano-rockers Ollin, known for inventive arrangements and arcane historical references (check out their number about the only Irish troops to defend Mexico during the Mexican-American war).

Ollin co-founder Randy Rodatre says it may be easy to rattle off a list of everything that's gone wrong in L.A. but he'd rather not: “We choose, rather, the art of music so we can examine these dreadful violations of basic human rights in order to teach the new generation the importance of the sacrifices made by past pioneers.”

Music, however, is just one small piece of the day's full schedule. Beginning with an 11 a.m. poetry reading at Lummis's stone and adobe house, the festival continues with a Native American-inspired, puppet-led procession to Sycamore Park where area restaurants will put out a buffet of Mexican, Italian, Filipino, and Thai cuisine and a lively cast of local folk dancers, painters, musicians will entertain crowds until 7 p.m. Last year, the day was supposed to end at 4 p.m., but Sekuler says they had to extend the hours this year. The neighbors wouldn't go home. For more info, see lummisday.org