While tourists, and even many Angelenos, conjure Hollywood Boulevard, or Olvera street as best representing the city’s significance, there are countless street corners, buildings, parks, and other spaces whose cultural and political history is part of LA’s fabric, but in danger of being obscured by the glamor and glitz that conventional guidebooks direct tourists toward.

Now, a new book called A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, written by Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng, attempts to document those obscure and intimate histories. The authors “show how everyday people are exploited and disenfranchised by capital and the state; how those same people sometimes mobilize to create alternative forms of power; how racism, sexism, class differences, and homophobia lead to struggle and conflict; how dominant ideas are memorialized in landscapes; and how Los Angeles has been a constant site of struggle between nature and people.”

Uprising host Sonali Kolhatkar spoke recently with two of the co-authors: Laura Pulido, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC and visiting professor of Black Studies at UCSB, author of “Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles,” Wendy Cheng, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies and Justice and Social Inquiry and Arizona State University.

Watch a video of the interview here:

Martina Steiner recorded this interview.