Southland

Content Warning: This guide and the novel include depictions of racism and racist violence, including violence by police and violence against minors.

The narrator uses the Prologue to describe Angeles Mesa, a neighborhood in the Crenshaw district of South Los Angeles that’s now “feared and avoided, even by the people who live there” (9). This is the area where the novel’s major incident (the mysterious death of four Black kids during the Watts Uprising) took place. Although the area is now home to crime, drugs, and gangs, and is predominantly Black, it used to be a veritable country within the city, a place that people from all walks of life found refuge in when fleeing from economic hardships in other states. Black and Japanese American people, as well as people of other ethnicities, lived together in harmony in Angeles Mesa, and kids could borrow their parents’ guns and shoot squirrels and rabbits. People would commune together and watch sports, and everyone felt safe because “whatever feelings or apprehensions people had [about race] when they came, they learned to put them aside” (11). Now, however, most people have moved away, especially the younger generations. Most of the businesses and houses that survived the uprising now have bars on their doors, including the church.