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Life & Times Transcript

10/20/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

It has to go somewhere, but how would you like Los Angeles's trash in your back yard?

Joshua Stehlik>> The city needs to figure out how it can equitably distribute landfills and waste management facilities throughout the city as opposed to over-concentrating them in low income neighborhoods.

Val Zavala>> And then, the tradition came from south of the border, but, boy, did it change since it got here. A lighthearted look at quinceaneras.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> More recycling, less trash. Who can argue with that? But what happens when certain communities, usually poor ones, must bear the burden of trash dumps? Well, now one community in the north San Fernando Valley is putting its foot down for its children's sake. Sam Louie went to Sun Valley to get both sides of the story.

Sam Louie>> Each day, more than two thousand tons of garbage from Los Angeles makes its way to the Bradley landfill. Neighbors say this has to stop. The owners of the landfill say they need to expand. The landfill is in Sun Valley, an industrial pocket sixteen miles northwest of Los Angeles.

Kit Cole>> So what's happening at the landfill right now is the waste is coming in from businesses and it's getting deposited in the landfill.

Sam Louie>> Kit Cole is the spokesperson for Waste Management, the company that owns the Bradley landfill.

Kit Cole>> The waste that comes to this facility comes from commercial and business folks, folks who run their own restaurants, small businesses, offices. So the waste that comes to this facility is much like the waste that you would see in your own kitchen trash.

Sam Louie>> Cole says that, if dumping continues at its current rate, the landfill may soon run out of space.

Kit Cole>> The waste that comes in today is quickly filling the landfill to its permitted height.

Sam Louie>> The landfill was supposed to close in April of 2007, but now the owners are asking the city of Los Angeles to let them stay open past April under new conditions. They also want to increase the height of the landfill by another forty-three feet. That has triggered an effort to block the expansion.

Joshua Stehlik>> We're talking about an additional three and a half million tons of garbage that would come into the community as a result of that.

Sam Louie>> Joshua Stehlik is with Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County, a nonprofit law firm helping local residents fight the landfill's expansion. He says the community has tolerated the landfill for more than forty years and were looking forward to the April closing date.

Joshua Stehlik>> Waste Management proposed a forty-three foot height expansion, which would be an overall height expansion. As you can see, the landfill is already well above ground level, so this would be adding another essentially four story building of trash on top of the current landfill.

Sam Louie>> Stehlik is working with clergy, schools and other neighborhood groups in Sun Valley to get their voices heard.

Joshua Stehlik>> The issue is whether Sun Valley is the place to increase that capacity and we say no, it's not. Sun Valley has done its fair share in terms of dealing with the city's trash.

Sam Louie>> He estimates that Sun Valley is about seventy percent Latino with nearly a quarter of its residents living below the poverty level. He believes, for too long, poor residents, especially children, have had to suffer the consequences of living in the middle of an industrial zone.

Joshua Stehlik>> Studies have shown that the childhood asthma rate in Sun Valley is twice the national average. The community is most concerned about the cumulative impacts of all of these toxic businesses on the air that people here breath day in and day out.

Sam Louie>> Asthma is a disease that affects twenty million Americans. According to the American Lung Association, it's the leading cause of school absences in California and, here in Sun Valley, that's especially noticeable. At Fernangeles Elementary School located several miles from the landfill, it's estimated that between ten and fifteen percent of the students suffer from asthma.

Maria Sooy>> If you can't breath, you can't pay attention.

Sam Louie>> Maria Sooy is the school's counselor. Sooy says it's gotten so bad that there are days when children are not allowed to play outside.

Maria Sooy>> We need to have lungs in order to process the air to breath and, if you can't breath, you feel uncomfortable. Many of our kids, during asthma episodes, will choke and may throw up.

Sam Louie>> Rafael Ceja is a third grader at the school who suffers from acute asthma.

Rafael Ceja>> When I do my work, when I blow my nose, I go like this. Usually, I don't know what I do next.

Maria Sooy>> It really impacts his ability to pay attention and to learn. He's a little boy who is charming, outgoing and really lots of fun to be around. But if you feel like you're choking all the time, you can't pay attention to the things that you need to pay attention to.

Sam Louie>> Rafael takes asthma medication and is not allowed to play outside during recess.

Rafael Ceja>> I hate it because everybody gets to go outside and I don't and I have to stay indoors.

Sam Louie>> But can the community blame the landfill for the asthma?

Joshua Stehlik>> I don't think we can pinpoint that the childhood asthma rate is the result of the landfill. I think the view that we need to take is that this is an impacted community. We know that folks' health here have been adversely impacted presumably by the over-concentration of industry here.

Sam Louie>> Landfill officials are quick to point out that they're doing their part in keeping the environment safe.

Kit Cole>> I can see how folks have concerns, but when they come over and they tour our facilities, they realize the facility is extremely heavily regulated by local state and federal government officials. We have inspectors on site it seems like almost constantly.

Sam Louie>> But it's not just a height extension they're asking for. Waste Management also wants to add a recycling station and a garbage transfer station.

Kit Cole>> The small trucks come in that are out in your neighborhood and on the streets every day. Those small trucks come in, they dump the trash that they have in their load and then that trash is pushed into a large semi truck and then taken to a landfill that's further away.

Sam Louie>> Opponents are not against recycling, but they say Sun Valley is the wrong place for it.

Joshua Stehlik>> If we allow seven thousand tons per day of trash to come in on a daily basis to the transportation materials, the recycling facility, that clearly undermines the long-term ability of Sun Valley to attract other types of cleaner businesses, with cleaner jobs and less impacts on the surrounding neighborhoods.

Kit Cole>> But there's not a whole lot of recycling happening with businesses, so building this recycling center at this site really fits in well with the city of Los Angeles wanting to have more recycling available to businesses.

Sam Louie>> They say enough is enough. They're tired of the smell and believe the expansion plan has a foul stench.

Joshua Stehlik>> Our position is that Sun Valley has done its part. The city needs to figure out how it can equitably distribute landfills and waste management facilities throughout the city as opposed to over-concentrating them in low income neighborhoods like Sun Valley.

Kit Cole>> It's not going to make the community better by making this industrial area a ghost town.

Sam Louie>> The Los Angeles City Council will be deciding on the Bradley landfill's future in the coming months. If the expansion and recycling center are approved, Waste Management has promised to contribute up to four million dollars to help the community, but community leaders are wary of the offer, saying they can't put a price tag on the health of their citizens. I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> It's an historic change in our universities. Women now outnumber men and experts predict that, by 2010, women will be sixty percent of the college student body. But it's not just numbers that have changed. The experience women have at college has also changed dramatically over the decades. Vicki Curry talked with Lynn Peril, author of the new book, "College Girls".

Vicki Curry>> Lynn Peril, you've written this book called "College Girls" which looks at the history of higher education for women in America. Can you give me a little bit of a brief history of women's education?

Lynn Peril>> Well, to begin with, Harvard University, 1636, all men, first university in the United States, and I think most of the other men's big Ivy's were also founded before the American Revolution. Higher education for women doesn't happen for about another two hundred years.

Now academics disagree on what is exactly the first women's college, but we know this. We know at Oberlin in 1833, co-education and integrated education. Of course, the college that most people think of when they think of the first women's college is Vassar, 1865. So those are probably two of the early women's colleges or experiments in higher education for women that I like to point out.

But the idea of higher education really took hold with, for example, Mary Lyons' Mount Holyoke Seminary at the time that was meant to give women a real education, not just in things like a few ABCs, the ability to read bible verses and then do a little sewing and whatnot, but an actual education.

Vicki Curry>> And yet even with this movement for women's education, there was still a lot of debate about what women should study and what they should be taught in college.

Lynn Peril>> Absolutely. The big question was, should it be the same liberal arts education that men studied or should it be something different, something that was more specifically oriented toward women? This runs through almost the entire history of women's higher education.

There are all sorts of interesting and, from our point of view, hilarious articles in Ladies Home Journal, for example, which were there to explain this brand new phenomenon, the college girls to American citizens from like the 1890s up through the 1910s. They had articles about what college girls wore, what they ate, the parties they had, the pageants they had, you know, picture spreads, the whole thing. They would also have occasionally articles about whether or not college women was best for our girls.

One of the arguments made was that women didn't really need a liberal arts education because they were going to be wives and mothers. There are also some really great articles in there that talk about how women who went and studied the male liberal arts curriculum could suddenly no longer remember how to bake bread. I had to unlearn everything I learned at college in order to be able to bake a loaf of bread again.

Vicki Curry>> The subtitle of your book is "Bluestocking, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now". What's a bluestocking?

Lynn Peril>> Well, I actually wanted to call the book "Bluestockings and Sex Kittens" and the publisher just said, "Well, nobody knows what a bluestocking is." Bluestocking is a derogatory term used mostly during the nineteenth century for an educated or literary woman. The term actually comes from the eighteenth century. It's specific to a salon in London run by a woman who invited a man who didn't have the fancy evening dress that he needed and came in his blue worsted stockings.

Eventually, that whole little group was known as bluestockings. Then eventually somehow the term comes to be affixed to its female members, but they were like smart women known for their wit and charm and intelligence. Eventually somehow, in the nineteenth century, this becomes attached to the idea of a pedantic woman who sacrifices her womanly charms to being an intellectual. So it's a very negative term.

Vicki Curry>> But then you also mention "Sex Kittens" in your subtitle and I would say that, probably even to this day, we still have the idea of the boring, educated woman versus the sex kitten.

Lynn Peril>> Right. Also, the idea that you have to think of the idea of the bluestockings and the intellectual woman has this kind of -- like they're scary to men. They're frightening. They're no fun to be around. So how better to sort of like twist that on its head and sort of like de-tooth that image than by sort of turning the intellectual harpy into a sexy, submissive pussycat by turning her into this eroticized image of the sex kitten?

I found it very interesting that this kind of happened early on in college girl history. There are some images in the book, all from 1902, that start out with a card that features a group of young women having a forbidden dormitory feast known as a spread. They're all gathered around their little chafing dish which is a forerunner of the fondue pot and they have a little teapot. The title on the card is "A rare group making a rarebit", rarebit being, you know, the cheese sauce that you make in the dish and eat on toast. They're trying to signify that these are young, beautiful women. Good, fine.

I found another set of cards and it's the same models in the same setting, but now something's different. The teapot is gone. There's a bottle of wine. And instead of being in their little shirtwaists and skirts, they're in their nightgowns. Same idea. They're having a forbidden midnight spread and now the gist of the story is will they be found out by the chaperone or, as she's referred to in one of the titles of the card, the Old Cat.

So as the cards progress and, of course, the Old Cat does come and catch them, their nightgowns are slowly slipping further and further off of their shoulders. So by the end card, there's like one girl just like holding her little nightgown up here like this and her shoulders are entirely bare. Not much to us today, but in 1902, ha, cha, cha. So sort of right from the get-go, we've got this other image of the college girls being this kind of sex pot.

Vicki Curry>> So after doing all this research, it seems like we've come quite a long way and yet maybe not. What's your take on it?

Lynn Peril>> Well, that's exactly what I think. I mean, it is amazing. Fifty-eight percent of college graduates today are female and yet there are traces of all these ideas that are still -- you know, they scratch the surface and they're kind of right there.

For example, I saw a program on "60 Minutes" or "20-20", one of the news magazine programs a couple of years ago, about young women attending the Harvard Business School and how, when they were out and they met men at a bar or wherever, they made sure not to mention that they were in the Harvard Business School because it was, I believe they referred to it, the kiss of death.

So in other words, you still don't want guys to know that you're too smart. There's still this fear of a too-smart woman. Of course, there's famously Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard, who said that perhaps the reason there were so few women in engineering and the sciences was due to innate sex differences. So it's like these old ideas that still kind of disconcertingly bubble through.

Vicki Curry>> Well, Lynn Peril, author of "College Girls: Bluestocking, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now", thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Lynn Peril>> Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you.

Val Zavala>> Every school kid learns that all men are created equal. Okay, men and women. But we don't end up equal. In fact, these days we're living in a world of contrast and conflict. Well, now one photographer has traveled the country taking pictures of average Americans and making connections that most of us would never have seen. His name is Mark Laita and his work is on display at the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles.

Mark Laita>> My name is Mark Laita. I'm a photographer. The name of the project is "Created Equal". I'm trying to show how, you know, we're all really the same. If you really peel off all the stuff we've picked up from our careers and from our environment and our upbringing and all that stuff, basically we all boil down to being the same thing. Paired up in these images, you start seeing that we're all connected rather than very separate. That's why they're all lit exactly the same and the background is exactly the same. The camera angle and everything is exactly the same.

I've been doing it since 1999. It's been about seven years now. I've been to every state, the lower forty-eight states, and I just tried to find somebody interesting that kind of represents each state. My wife says it's kind of like looking for a rare butterfly in the rainforest or something because that's kind of what I'm doing.

I'm not looking for just like people that are easy to find, but typically people that are really hard to find, you know, like the Klansmen or polygamists or pimps or, you know, prostitutes or bikers or altar boys. You know, things that aren't necessarily like at the shopping mall waiting for you. Those are the kind of shots I really was looking for, not the easy ones.

We take the exact same equipment everywhere and we've set up in coalmines or auto garages, restaurants, you know, peoples' back yards, you name it. This little mini studio that we have, we're literally able to do it now in about six minutes. My assistant and I will set up super fast, we'll shoot, and the whole thing is over and done in ten minutes.

We're definitely not styling anybody. He was sitting on the bench of an abandoned building with a bottle of liquor in his hand and I said, "Can I photograph you?". We shot the coalminers like literally thirty seconds after they got off their shift. They come out on a train and, boom, we shoot them. People love being photographed, I think. They feel honored. You know, they feel like, wow, somebody's really finally respecting me.

They're not always the exact formula. Some of them are very simple and basic and the connections that are made between the two are very superficial. You know, like here's a picture of a woman in a beauty shop with curlers and a man with his jerry curls, you know, curlers in his hair. That's as basic as the connection is. It's simple and cute whereas some are very heavy. I like to see the outrageousness of a white supremacist with a black Baptist churchgoer. I mean, that's outrageous. Or the pedophile with the little Trick or Treat girl.

You can almost like somewhat mix them up and pair them differently and they still kind of work, you know. Their concept is that people are people and that's true (laughter). You can almost stick anybody with anybody and they'll all work. So this isn't stuff that's made up and isn't existing. I didn't like create these things that don't really exist. They're all here in the United States.

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Val Zavala>> It's a rite of passage for young women in the Mexican American community, something they look forward to for years. It's called a quinceanera from "quince", or fifteen. And sometimes this fifteenth birthday bash will rival a wedding, as commentator, Cris Franco, explains.

Cris Franco>> It's Saturday morning in California and, like me, tens of thousands of Latinos are on their way to a quinceanera. That's quinceanera, for you non-Spanish speakers. That's a special birthday celebration for a fifteen year old girl. As you can tell by my penguin suit, it's no ordinary birthday party.

[Film Clip]

Cris Franco>> Celebrated in all Spanish-speaking countries, it's a Sweet Fifteen party, a Debutante Ball and a Catholic ritual all rolled into one big breath.

[Film Clip]

Cris Franco>> I should know. I have four sisters, so I've seen a lot of quinceaneras. Here's my sister, Louisa, from a few decades back.

[Film Clip]

Cris Franco>> We ate cake. My sister, Marta, provided the entertainment. Later on in the evening, we got into our good clothes and we danced. That was it. Total cost of under fifty dollars. But today, many more Espanos are breaking the bank by throwing their daughters a quinceanera bash that would make Donald Trump blush.

Jerry>> A dress costs anywhere between two hundred and five hundred dollars. The cake? Cakes can run anywhere between two hundred fifty up to six hundred dollars. Limousines? Those run pretty expensive per hour. Power Point presentations are getting popular now.

Cris Franco>> Like Francisco and Marisella who've been saving for eleven years to give their only daughter, Yasmin, a first-class quinceanera. Fourteen thousand dollars? Survey says, fourteen thousand dollars. They see it as a way of thanking God for giving Yasmin to them for fifteen years.

From dance lessons to party favors to a Mariachi band, the banquet, this is all part of the immigrant dream. A classic, white, good for one day only, quinceanera dress can be bought right off the rack at any of the flourishing dress shops catering to this growing trend. Yasmin's was hand-made to order, as were those worn by her Maids of Honor. And as the fifteenth quinceanera rises, so does their popularity.

[Film Clip]

Cris Franco>> It's partially due to a resurgence of religious values and a heightened sense of cultural pride now being experienced by second and third generation Espano.

[Film Clip]

Yasmin>> They say that it's like becoming a woman, that in a way it's like giving thanks to God.

Cris Franco>> Now some of the girls said that their parents offered them a car instead of a quinceanera. Would you still choose the party over the car?

Yasmin>> Yeah.

Cris Franco>> Why?

Yasmin>> Because it's a once in a lifetime chance, you know. You only turn fifteen once and a car you could get at anytime.

Cris Franco>> I think it's wonderful that this graceful old world tradition has crossed the border, but I question the practicality of having any young family spending fifteen, sixteen or twenty thousand dollars on what was originally meant as a religious celebration. Might not their hard-earned money be better spent on a down payment for a home or, say, for their children's higher education? How long have your parents been saving for this?

Yasmin>> Since I was a little girl.

Cris Franco>> Well, Yasmin will probably attend college. She's an honor student and will be eligible for many scholarships. Plus both her parents work and she only has one brother. But this isn't the case with most familias, so why are these super diva quinceaneras proliferating? I think it's because they become much more than just an acknowledgement of a girl's emergence into adulthood. It's a way for recently arrived families to show that they've truly arrived in America and how better than incorporating old world Latino traditions with America's new world tradition of over-extending ourselves financially?

Jerry>> If this is going to mean something to them, I say spend twenty thousand dollars. Girls walking the path to God, I think it's worth every cent of it.

Cris Franco>> What are you going to do when she gets married? He says he'll let the husband pay (laughter). Although it might defy logic and all financial advice, California quinceanera boom is in full force. And lots of parents point out that, although they offer their girls the option between a car and a quinceanera, many still opt for the party. The reasoning is simple. You can buy a car anytime, but you turn fifteen only once. Very true, my dear. Very true.

Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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