So why was I still nervous about maybe never getting one? Adulthood snuck up on me. I didn’t need a college degree for that job. Sensory pleasure, and an inkling that such feelings could be linked to identity, difference, and belonging, shaped my crosstown bus commute in 1999. The promo CDs, limited-edition vinyl, and free concert tickets made it seem like I had struck gold. We grew up in DIY spaces and helped each other find work in the music industry, in Burbank and Hollywood. I got the job through friends I’d made seeing live music in the heyday of an art-punk adolescence.
This was in 1999, just before Lars Ulrich of Metallica took Napster to court (in a case that would force the music-file-sharing company into bankruptcy), and I was the e-commerce manager for an online record label located at the corner of Pico and Cloverfield. The 704 took me to a cubicle where I logged inventory at my first and only job of the first dotcom boom. It was reprieve from the spiritual void of bumper-to-bumper. I lived in Silverlake in the late 1990s, and occasionally walked the few blocks to Sunset and caught the 704 bus to Santa Monica to get to work. Streetscapers, El Corrido de Boyle Heights ( The Ballad of Boyle Heights) at Soto Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue, Los Angeles, 2021. How, in 21st-century Los Angeles, can we continue to nurture the hardy roots of rasquachismo, to yield new and more inclusive Latinx-urbanist aesthetics?
