By Anrea Scarpino
I teach composition and writing classes at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and my students are generally a pretty hip lot. CSUDH is an urban commuter university located near Compton (of 90’s rap fame) and my students write papers about being shot, about working two jobs to pay for school, about having a beloved family member kidnapped and ransomed in Mexico. They have seen a lot, may already have children, and work incredibly hard. It’s an immensely satisfying and humbling job to stand in front of my students twice a week.
And that was particularly true this past week when things took a turn for the absurd. On Tuesday, my upper-division composition class had written a short essay on a quote that describes Los Angeles as a city constructed by and for the automobile. No other city in the world, I would argue, has the love affair with cars that Los Angeles has, and this is a subject my students understand quite well. We talked about LA’s lack of public transportation, its ever expanding highway system, how people drive even when they’re doing an errand close to their house. One student said, I have a grocery store across the street from my house and I still get in my car and drive there. Another spoke in depth about his THREE cars, one used only for transporting his kids to and from sports events (they’re a sweaty lot), one for work, and one for special events. Other students nodded. Cars are status symbols, one said. You can’t be seen without one.
That’s when I dropped this bomb on them: I told them when I first started teaching at CSUDH, I researched how I could get to school on the bus. I was going to tell them that the bus route would have taken 2 hours and involved something like 8 transfers, but I couldn’t even get that far. The class erupted in laughter. And not polite, my-teacher-is-making-a-joke, laughter. Uproarious laughter. Students hit each other, they were laughing so hard. One girl doubled over in her desk. In all my years of standing in front of a classroom, I have never said anything as funny as my admission that I wanted to take the bus to school.
Cut to Thursday. For Thursday’s first year writing course, I brought two versions of the song, “Hot in Herre” to discuss in class, the original sung by Nelly (of course) and a cover by a folk musician named Jenny Owen Youngs. I played both versions, and we discussed what the song is about, who the target audience for each version is, what the purpose is. Despite hearing that, as a 30-something, my students consider me middle-aged, and that only people who go to poetry readings listen to folk music, I pressed on without offering much commentary. Then I asked the students what they knew about each musician. One woman who sits in the back of the class immediately raised her hand. Nelly’s from the country, she said. I looked at her, puzzled. Nelly? Is from the country? He’s actually from St. Louis, I replied. She nodded her head, Yeah, the country. Now, I’ve been to St. Louis many times and it is decidedly NOT the country. There’s an arch, for God’ sake. And close to 3 million people live there.
Cut to Saturday night. I’m trying to understand what my students have taught me about growing up in Los Angeles, that it would make sense to think of a city like St. Louis as “the country,” to drive your car across the street to buy a gallon of milk, to find riding the bus hysterically funny. They’re hip, smart people who live in one of the world’s biggest cities, a place with incredible diversity, and yet, at least this week, they’re mired in a very narrow construction of the world. Of course, aren’t we all? It’s difficult to see outside of our experience, to understand another person’s way of life. I’m no better at it, I’m sure. I just live in a world with a slightly different set of experiences and values. Cars are king in their world, public transportation a non-issue, and anything east of Los Angeles just pastureland. Until, I guess, you reach New York.
Andrea Scarpino is the West Coast Bureau Chief of POTB
Visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com
Planet of the Blind 
Folks who live in SF, LA or NYC (and don’t often venture out of those places) frequently don’t understand what the rest of the country is like at all. I studied briefly in Spain, with a lot of Americans from the coasts. They literally thought living in Ohio was all farmland and cows–it was actually kind of insulting.
On the other hand, it’s not like people in the heartland really get the coasts either. I always found it ironic that so many of the people so outraged by 9/11 would have been so uncomfortable in liberal, multi-ethnic NYC. And me, I just hate how big it is.
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I wonder if they just think that because Nelly had an album called “Country Grammar”, so the idea that he’s from “the country” has stuck in their heads?
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