What We Did This Summer
The weather was mild in Paris and hot in Mexico. The forecast for Los Angeles? ¡Caliente, por supuesto!
Helen and Joyce spent the past couple of months exploring the globe, facing head-on the heat of cultural assumptions, and talking with community members—locally and abroad—on how inhabiting spaces together contribute to a shared understanding of the meaning of being both “local” and “visitor”.
HELEN
I was wondering why beads of sweat were rolling down my back and then I realized it’s the middle of summer. That’s how preoccupied I’ve been! After wrapping up translation work on the Korean (re)Location interviews—with vital support from Mary Choi, Ina Kim, and Ireh Kim—I took my parents to Paris and London. It was my 80-year-old dad’s first time in Europe.
Back in LA, I dove head-first into a project called K-Town Is OK. The “OK” stands for “Oaxacan Korean”. Former LA City Councilman Gil Cedillo snubbed Koreatown residents as “puro Oaxacan Koreans” in a private 2021 conversation that was leaked on Reddit in October 2022. You may think this meant a pure melding of Oaxacans and Koreans but Cedillo was actually saying there was nothing but Oaxacans living in Koreatown, as a response to Nury Martinez, another former council member, who quipped that she saw “a lot of little, short, dark people” in K-Town. In one fell swoop, they disparaged people who originate from Oaxaca, the state of Mexico known to have a high percentage of indigenous groups, while dismissing Koreans as invisible and irrelevant.
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Community storyteller Jimmy “J.T.” Recinos and I decided to turn the moniker “Oaxacan Korean” into a defiant celebration of the diversity of cultures and experiences that make Koreatown—the most densely-populated community in Los Angeles County*—such a vital and thriving neighborhood. Featuring the residents, businesses, and lovers of Koreatown, our ongoing collaboration will be rooted in storytelling and community engagement. We are currently meeting with a wide range of folks from the neighborhood. So many delicious snacks and coffee drinks, so little time!
For more info, you can visit ktownisok.com or follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
*2000 US census data
JOYCE
I, too, had beads of sweat rolling down my back, but it was due to the heat and humidity in the Mexican state of Guanajuato which, incidentally, is 500 miles northwest of Oaxaca.
I had the opportunity to co-direct an international cultural exchange program with art therapists in the city of San Miguel de Allende. This Summer has proven to be filled with new discoveries of culture, connections, and creativity.
The program was a two-week immersive experience with American art therapists from Loyola Marymount (LMU) and Mexican art therapists from the Instituto Mexicano de Psicoterapia de Arte (IMPA), coming together to learn about and practice art therapy through cultural humility, multiculturalism, and community engagement. While in existence for 20 years, during the pandemic (in 2021 and 2022) we offered a virtual program and invited art therapists from Israel. You can read more about that here.
I learned from my Mexican friends about sobremesa, which translates to upon the table, where we continued after we finished our meal, full from delicious food and drink, to share more hours of laughter and stories. “A check would never be brought by the waiter prematurely until we are good and ready to leave,” my friends told me. This slowing down in the midst of directing a very intense program was everything I needed, and made me realize how important community gathering is. You can check out some photos and reels of the Art Therapy in San Miguel de Allende program by following LMU MFT Art Therapy on Instagram.
Of course, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do some sightseeing while in Mexico. On my day off, I tagged along with my former students to Cañada de la Virgen, an Otomi archaeological site. To walk the sacred path of indigenous peoples from over a thousand years ago was awe-inspiring. The pyramid itself was a calendar that tracked the path of the moon!
Summer swelters on as the Professor and the Artist really get our hands dirty with the thematic analysis of our (re)Location interviews... Maybe we’ll take a little pause to grab a cold one and a movie in an air-conditioned theater.