“Let us sing to our city a new song…”

Dana Gioia, poet and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, recites his poem about Los Angeles, an homage to “the restless, the hungry, the stubborn, the scarred” who built the city of his birth.

When we came across Dana Gioia’s poem “Psalm for Our Lady Queen of the Angels” in his recent collection titled “Meet Me at the Lighthouse,” the demonization of immigrants in America was in full swing, especially in Los Angeles.

Although Gioia’s poem was first published in 2020, it seemed to arise in 2025 directly from L.A.’s summer streets where federal troops were on patrol. “Psalm for Our Lady Queen of the Angels” is a poem that honors not only los pobladores, the 44 Mexicans (with one Spanish native) from Sinaloa and Sonora who founded modern-day Los Angeles in 1781, but also their descendants even unto the present day — “the restless, the hungry, the stubborn, the scarred” —including Gioia’s ancestors.

In a recent episode of LMU Magazine’s Off Press podcast, Gioia spoke passionately of Los Angeles, the city of his birth, and the generations of pobladores, including his parents, upon whose backs la ciudad de Los Ángeles was, and continues to be, built. He read his poem during that podcast, and with his permission we decided to complement it with a view of El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical District, where the founding of Los Angeles is commemorated.

—The Editor