What You Want To See

by Tessa Fier

It’s September again. On the way to class, I step on beadsized figs, fruit of an Australian tree. A parakeet calls through the warm, subtropical air and I think of how Joan Didion said that Los Angeles is not California, and how she was wrong — that parts of Los Angeles are California, but that our campus is not one of those parts.

For Didion, the real California was the land of pioneers and full rivers and agricultural fortunes and Eden-like abundance. To me, California is the smell of eucalyptus leaves and spruce siding and the sea breeze swept in from the San Francisco Bay and warmed by the golden hills. This is to say that there are the stories we tell ourselves about a place, and the uncomfortable truth of what really happened there.

For example: The pioneers were not pioneers at all, but settler-colonizers. A half-century after Didion’s proclamation, it is evident from the parched ground and miles of almond trees and salmon-less rivers and mustard-covered hills that the California of the Central Valley’s boom years destroyed the California that came before it and doomed the one that followed.

The men who founded the University of California system knew the value of the right story, knew that survival on the American frontier required the alchemical ability to turn stories into reality, and reality into history. So perhaps it is unsurprising that the first campus opened a mere nineteen years after a state legislator wrote that the prophesied public university would be, “the Great Light of the Pacific, diffusing its glorious radiance along the shores of Western America,” and that its creation would then be woven into the historical narrative as though this had been the land’s true purpose all along.

For a while, telling the right story was not so hard. The mostly-white young people who came to study in Westwood had no reason to question the premise, as they walked under the Romanesque arches of Royce, that they, the sons and daughters of orange farmers and the American Revolution, were the rightful inheritors of millenia of European civilization.

But in our era there is no singular story UCLA can tell to attract 139,400 applicants to its campus. And so it rewrites, and embellishes, and reconstitutes itself in 139,400 ways to show you what you want to see, whether that be a laidback college town or cosmopolitan center, an academic sanctuary or party school, a place where you can row like the boys at Yale or surf like the ones in San Diego. It is a school that celebrates the colonizers and colonized, bloody expansion and pacified philosophy, agricultural engineering and environmental research.

There are too many stories now, stacked atop such a small campus. They conflict, repelling each other, and as the pressure builds the narrative pulls apart at its seams.

Outside Bunche, spotted gums grow past the cloudless sky and a long-limbed hibiscus drops its petals on the pavement. Fliers by the elevators advertise studies in D.C. and courses on foreign migration flows, urban environmentalism, political technocracy, and

development theory. Next to the water fountains are aerial images from the 20th century showing rolling hills dotted with orchards, the foundations of Moore and Kerckhoff, the dark English lawns between Royce and Powell, and the rapid encroachment of Westwood’s development.

The campus is where these narratives are contested, where the stories peel themselves away from the land and glimpses of its past are exposed. The California that UCLA tries to make disappear is buried here, beneath stories of Milan and New Haven, Italian architecture and Indonesian textiles, grasses from Ethiopia and squirrels from Europe.

Here are parts of the California story that UCLA does not tell: Humans first came to the Los Angeles Basin 11,000 years ago, and by A.D. 0 descendants of the Chumash and Gabrieleño people inhabited the region. In 1771, the first mission was established in present-day Montebello, and in 1810 the first dam was built on the Los Angeles River.

In 1843, a large tract of land, boundaried by the present-day boulevards of Sawtelle, Beverly Glen, Pico, and Sunset, was privatized by the governor as the Rancho San Jose de Buenos Ayres. By California’s admission to the union in 1850, the Indigenous population of California had declined to 150,000 from an estimated 300,000 pre-colonization. Besides the eventual creation of a public university, one of the new legislature’s highest priorities was passing a barrage of anti-Indigenous legislation that laid the groundwork for the state’s genocidal project.

In the twenty years between California’s statehood and the creation of the first UC, the Indigenous population of California declined from 150,000 to 30,000, and the Indigenous population of the Los Angeles Basin from 3,693 to 219.

In 1919, the same year UCLA was established on the site of the Normal School in Downtown LA, department store entrepreneur Arthur Letts Sr. purchased Rancho San Jose de Buenos Ayres (now called Wolfskill Ranch); he passed the land to his son-in-law Harold Janss in 1922. When, in 1925, the University Regents chose Westwood as the site of their new campus, Janss In-

vestment Corp sold them the land at a steep discount.

UCLA is a land grant institution in two senses, reaping double benefits from the colonial violence that birthed neatly-boundaried tracts of enclosed and virgin land — land to be conquered and tamed. The land-grant system

design by Cassandra Sanchez

initiated by Lincoln provided funding for the purchase of land, but the land was cheap because the Rancho system and racial capitalism were and still are based on the sanctity of white private property. The year before I enrolled, UCLA auctioned off the last of its un-commemorated buildings and re-christened it as

Kaplan Hall. This reveals nothing except that Renee and David Kaplan had enough money, and fondness for UCLA, to make it happen.

But other names on our buildings tell a new side of the UCLA story, showing what the institution has valued at different times. The list includes: The Rockefeller of southern California electricity. A philosophical proponent of imperial ‘civilizing missions.’ A real estate developer and committed conservationist. A Spanish colonizer and Catholic proselytizer. The billionaire founder of DreamWorks. Ronald Reagan.

In Fowler, you can visit collections of ‘African artifacts’ donated by an entrepreneur whose company is now part of a $60 million British pharmaceutical conglomerate. The website notes his generosity in donating artifacts from Sudanese burial sites he ‘discovered.’ Speaking of ‘discovery,’ you can see pre-Columbian art from Peru housed in a building not dissimilar in style from the Genoese churches of Columbus’ youth. What he would not have recognized, but is indirectly responsible for, are the tropical pea trees, one from Brazil and one from Southeast Asia, whose yellow and pink blossoms blanket the courtyard steps every spring.

Recently UCLA has started planting more California native oaks. They commissioned the Judy Baca mural La Memoria de la Tierra: UCLA for their centennial celebration. But the mural does not show what it took to divert the river and privatize the land, and the oak trees grow far apart in neat-edged holes in the pavement that blankets campus from the tennis courts to Ackerman.

This school reels in dysfunction. It has become all too easy to tell stories, and correspondingly harder to foresee their consequences. In the digital age, UCLA barely needs a cohesive narrative; instead, a jumbled mess of icons and idolatry — #daddygene, the Bruin bear and John Wooden’s inspirational quotes, to name a few — distract from the institution’s inherent violence with merch, memes, and an aesthetic Instagram feed. We see what we want to see, and press forward in stubborn resistance to the truth. But this is not a new problem: the frontier, after all, is whatever the settler wants it to be.