Editing a university magazine in Los Angeles has always struck me as good luck. In addition to LMU alumni, faculty, staff, and students, Los Angeles itself is a character in our story — a big, well-developed, character that is involved in more plots, sub-plots and story arcs than you can count. If I were to leave my post for a similar job with another university, it would have to be in a city that is vibrant, complex, storied, ambitious, and wounded, like this one.
Place and how it shapes us, in fact, has always fascinated me. Family, school, religion, accidents, deaths — they all form or change us. Psychologists can tell us how and why. But the impact of place seems more amorphous, yet undeniable.
I recently raised this subject over lunch with Mike Mulvihill, professor emeritus of civil engineering. We both were brought up in strong Catholic families in big American cities with large Catholic populations and many Catholic institutions. My world was Philadelphia’s East Coast, European, parochial-minded Catholic micro-environment; Mike’s was L.A.’s sunny, dispersed, ever-changing region where Catholicism blended the traditions of migrant Easterners, Southerners, Westerners, and Mexicans and Mexican Americans. How differently were Mike and I shaped? Neither of us could answer the question. But this neither of us could deny: “I know it when it shows itself.” The impact of place — my very urban, inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood with row homes, no lawns, and a massive church as big as a cathedral as its anchor — reveals itself to me often, even if I can’t always describe how or why.
In an earlier installment of this column, I pointed out that Los Angeles drew the Jesuits to this area. With a base in the Bay Area, they looked south to a region that from 1890 to 1910 was rapidly expanding. Los Angeles needs our Jesuit education, they concluded. Perhaps that was the product of a missionary impulse; but the Catholic Church had already been planted here. I would bet that their intention was more complex than just the search for converts. Commitment, purpose, and probably some ambition — a common Jesuit trait — must’ve all played a role. Was arrogance also at play? Some might say so. Yet, it’s a fact that St. Vincent’s College, L.A.’s first Catholic institution of higher education, was struggling, to the point of closing in 1911. So, the Jesuits came, and they put down roots.
My peers in the university magazine editing business sometimes ask me why L.A. as place plays such a big role in this magazine. Location is one of the LMU’s strategic advantages — that’s the easy answer. But I believe — or at least imagine, or hope — there’s a deeper reason: As a person can commit to a place and put down roots, so can an institution. This university’s commitment to L.A. isn’t explicitly codified in its three-part mission statement. Yet, to me, it’s the unwritten fourth promise. If that commitment is real, it’s because of the institution’s culture. And culture ultimately comes down to people.
Among the reasons that give me reason to believe are two annual events.
First, the annual Christmas tree-lighting. Alumni Mall, LMU’s central plaza — “plaza” being a Spanish word — teems with people from the nearby neighborhood: grandmoms, grandpops, moms, dads, and kids and kids and more kids. The community comes to our home for a push-the-furniture-to-the-walls-and-roll-up-the-carpets kind of party.
Second, Salsa Fest, a product of LMU’s radio station, KXLU and its weekend Spanish-language bloc of programming, Alma Del Barrio. For more than 50 years, Alma Del Barrio has been committed to broadcasting the community’s music into the L.A. region. Now, once a year, the campus is flooded with our listeners, most of them, no doubt, with no or little other connection to the university than the percussion, horns, and vocals they hear from LMU over the airwaves every Saturday and Sunday. There’s no admission fee, no request for donations; instead, LMU tells L.A., “Come on over, we’re throwing a party.”
In 2019, Salsa Fest, an LMU commitment to L.A.’s exquisitely complex cultural world, fell on Pentecost Sunday, and it never felt more like a religious experience. Afterward, I wrote about it:
“And the people from many lands — Cubans, Peruvians, Salvadoreans, Mexicans, Brazilians, Hondurans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, and many more — came and heard the same language: Salsa. And they all understood it.”
Some estimates suggest that more than 240 languages are spoken in Los Angeles today, almost all of them immigrant tongues. I sometimes imagine that this place that drew the Jesuits more than a century ago, with its nearly innumerable voices, feels a bit like Pentecost.
