Cowboys and Indians

Photo by Ted Soqui

It was one of those seemingly endless Los Angeles school-board meetings, even more contentious than usual because the elected officials were bickering over whether to put a huge construction bond on the November 8 ballot. A representative of the PTA came to the microphone to say the bond should move forward. And then the parent did something most unexpected. He pulled out a petition with a drawing of a pirate on it — and pleaded with the board to save, of all things, the Southwest Museum. “We really need your help on this,” he told the board members, some of whom nodded gravely.

Meanwhile, along Marmion Way, one of the main freeway bypasses between the woodsy Mount Washington homes of elected officials and their downtown offices, a poster appeared with a drawing of a pirate and a warning that the historic Southwest Museum is being plundered. “Come to the meeting!” it said, but the poster disappeared well before the meeting day.

Just this week, at a City Council candidates’ debate a stone’s throw from the Spanish Colonial–style museum tower just northwest of the Pasadena Freeway, a room packed with voters yawned at promises of leadership and boasts of experience and accomplishments but cheered wildly at the two would-be councilmen’s vows to stand up for the Southwest.

“There’s this perception that only downtown Los Angeles can have museums,” complained José Huizar, who promised to block the institution’s operators — the Autry National Center — from moving a century’s accumulation of Native American baskets, arrowheads, kachinas (and, it must be admitted, human bones) from the leaky, bug-ridden Mount Washington tower to the modern and airy Autry facility in Griffith Park, or any new annex that might be constructed there.

“I join [City Councilman] Ed Reyes in saying that this is cultural piracy!” Huizar added.

His chief rival, Nick Pacheco, was no less adamant, noting that back when he was on the City Council, he authored two motions to protect the museum. How is it, he asked, that, in the two years since he left the council, nothing further has been done?

“The one who swings the biggest bat on this issue is the mayor,” Pacheco said, invoking the name of Mount Washington resident Antonio Villaraigosa — and pressing the mayor to take the lead.

Raiders' target: Ready to strike at heart of L.A. culture

The Southwest Museum? Cultural piracy? The words have become fixtures on Northeast L.A. blogs and listserves, in neighborhood-council meetings, and in the recent wave of art galleries and coffeehouses that have sprung up in this historic and newly trendy part of town. And, apparently, downtown in school-board meetings. Elsewhere in L.A., the Southwest has yet to re-emerge in public discussion, five years after the fate of the venerable but dowdy institution’s future was supposedly put to rest by the merger with the Autry.

But get ready. Absent some mediation from cooler heads, the angry and provocative charges bandied about at the time of the merger — that the cowboys (the Autry) are once again ripping off the Indians (the Southwest) — are poised to go citywide.

And this time they could get louder, in part because the political nexus of Los Angeles has shifted to this part of town, until recently a backwater, but now the home of some of the city’s most powerful figures. Like Villaraigosa.

Administrators of the now-vacant City Council office that Villaraigosa once filled, and that Huizar, Pacheco and others are trying to win, have slated an August 25 closed-door meeting to defuse the situation. But it will be tough. Huizar is only one of several candidates and elected officials who have promised to block any building permits for new Autry construction in Griffith Park, where a display and storage facility for the Southwest collection is to go.

In some ways, it’s a battle for possession of the city’s cultural heritage.

For decades, cultural Los Angeles has run east-west, from MOCA and the Music Center to LACMA and the Getty. Museum-support dollars — and campaign contributions — flowed downtown from the estates of Brentwood and Beverly Hills. The blue bloods of Pasadena also sent their bucks downtown and to the Miracle Mile and the Westside, but the historic arts and cultural institutions of the Arroyo Seco languished.

Now, some political and community leaders are arguing that cultural L.A. should also run north-south, moving up from the Watts Towers and taking in African-American landmarks like Central Avenue and the Dunbar Hotel, and the museums of Exposition Park, into downtown, to take in not just the Music Center but the new galleries and performance spaces. And then, on the way to Pasadena, through the Arroyo, past the remarkable home of Charles Lummis and the Victorian mansions of Heritage Square.

And, at its fulcrum, in Mount Washington — the Southwest Museum.

Between the lines of the argument come layers of ethnic politics and social complexity. The high-culture pipeline from downtown to the Westside is tailor-made for a car trip down Wilshire Boulevard or across the 10 and the 405. A north-south axis, in the eyes of its proponents, embodies a Los Angeles comfortable with public transit, since each of the icons on the north-south route is walking or shuttle distance from a Blue Line or Gold Line stop. The Southwest may not have much parking, but it’s got a Metro station that was placed there expressly to support the museum. Plus, the new axis arguably accords respect to blacks and Latinos, who have long been left out of the city’s elite-culture circuit.