Fortunately or not I did not grow up in the same city but, primarily, in two cities, Los Angeles and Madrid, Spain, although I did live in one other place. More than picking and describing the markers and boarders found in one of them I will speak of those that I found to be in contrast between the two cities.
While I was born in Madrid, before the year I moved to Los Angeles with my mother where she would obtain her PhD. My father followed shortly after. Despite being quite young I do have many memories of the time I spent in the west coast city, especially from four years old onward. We would stay for seven years, after which we moved to Brookfield, Wisconsin; but, as I have mentioned, I will not include my experiences in Brookfield and what they meant to me in what follows. After the nine years in the US of A I moved back to my birthplace with both my parents and now a younger sister, named Sara. (Both my name and my sister’s were chosen based on the premise that whatever names we received ought to be spelt and similarly pronounced in both English and Spanish.) I lived in Madrid nine years before I moved to Syracuse to begin my university studies.
In LA, my family and I lived in the UCLA housing complex behind which was, as I remember it, a very loud and very huge freeway. That border could be said to be the first to mark my memory. Yet, since I was a child living in a big city (very close to Santa Monica, a place called Marvista, which translates literally to Seaview in English), I naturally had boarders all around me. Opposite to the freeway was the street we lived on, Sawtelle, which was again another boarder. In the automobile-based Los Angeles it is only consequent that the two predominant boarders that I remember were both roadways of one type or another. This makes for a blatant contrast to Madrid, as it was, for the most part, and still is a highly pedestrian city. While a child cannot, even at the ages when I was living in Madrid, wonder alone on the streets of LA (due to the historical urban development and design of the city), at least where I lived, it is a common sight in Madrid.
Madrid, as well as all of the Spanish towns and cities that I have visited, is a place where public space is very much occupied and used constantly by many. I recall reading a sign the first time I returned to LA that struck me as utter nonsense, and an obvious abuse of civil freedom. I was fifteen years old and had much more liberty to move about the city, with the help of my cousin who not only drove but also had a car of his own. Having dodged the transportation limit, my cousin and I were able to visit places, such as Hollywood, and walk the street, something that was entirely natural for me given that I had been living in Madrid for six years. It was on one of these walks that I encountered said sign on the wall. It read: No Loitering. After learning what the word loitering meant shock set in. I asked my cousin ‘Is this a private place?’ and he replied ‘No’. I did not understand. How could it be that a citizen cannot loiter in a public place? I could not understand what possible reason could be behind such a measure, such a boarder. Much consumed, or rather, influenced, by the liberal tradition in Europe of which the US of A is the offspring, I was completely baffled at my discovery. For all the questions that I asked my cousin simply was not able to even come up with a speculative answer to any of them, he did not even seem to have given it any thought in the past, nor at that moment for that matter. I came to think that the reason for my cousin’s lack of preoccupation was cultural: that one is simply not on the street if not going somewhere. What I could not answer for myself, however, was whether culture preceded the sign or the sign culture, that is, whether people simply behaved that way from the start and then came the sign, or whether people behaved that way because of the sign.
That is all for now.
