Power of place

Dolores Hayden's book The Power of Place  is more like an instructional manual than it is an actual narrative-like text. In her book, Hayden looks at how multiculturalism is conceived and how it helps historians study history by making the invisible visible and focusing on social history.
In section 2 (Los Angeles: Public Pasts in the Downtown Landscape) Hayden looks at the vast amounts of people that make up the city of Los Angeles. She points out that Los Angeles has a very diverse group of citizens with "the second largest Mexican, Armenian, Filipino, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan city in the world, the third largest Canadian city, and has the largest Japanese, Iranian, Cambodian and Gypsy communities in the United States." With the large amount of people it is apparent that they have been able to form their own communities within this giant city and have an individual history of their own and when all of these different cultures and languages blend together it makes for a unique community that is distinctly Californian. Hayden also mentions that because of the extreme diversity of this city, no one has been able to write a comprehensive social history on the urban landscape of Los Angeles. Hayden writes that "many influential writers have been unable to perceive the importance of the city's nonwhite population, unable to recognize that people of color occupy any significant part of the urban landscape. Such writers may go downtown but never or rarely to East LA and South Central. The focus of their landscape analysis becomes houses, swimming pools, cars, and pop culture." With a city that is almost 40% nonwhite the fact that the impact made from those that make up that population has gone largely ignored is evidence that the true nature of the city has not been analyzed. It would be difficult to understand an established culture anywhere without looking at the contributions of the people that live there. Places such as a Chinatown and areas with Mexican inspired architecture would not exist without the presence of the people that were there. Even more alarmingly is that these "nonwhites" who have gone largely unnoticed are the people that bear the largest responsibility for establishing and creating that city before nonwhites had the opportunity to come over.
Hayden has created several programs to make sure that these are being studied and looked at so we can establish a more realistic view of the history of the city. In her section on "The Invisible Angelenos", Hayden makes the attempt and the argument that we need to study these people that have remained invisible in the social history work completed on Los Angeles in order to get a more comprehensive view of the effects they have made on that city.