'California Love': New Podcast Explores Growing Up Both Black and Brown in LA

“California Love,” a new podcast released last month by LAist Studios, is an audio memoir from writer Walter Thompson-Hernández about growing up in Los Angeles — and coming back. He left L.A. and became a New York Times writer, traveling the world, writing about race, identity and belonging. Thompson-Hernández joined The California Report Magazine host Sasha Khokha from his home in Los Angeles to talk about this “love letter” to L.A.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

On L.A. as a Lens to Explore Belonging

I’ve always asked questions about what it means to belong. As a child of a Black father and a Mexican mother, I’ve been in this space where I have questions about identity. I have questions about race, questions about the environments I grew up in. As a New York Times writer, I was really interested in asking people who belong to different subcultures similar questions, asking people what it means to both belong and not belong. But eventually, I had this yearning to come back home and learn more about myself at home, about my family, my mom and also about the city of L.A.

On Blurring the Lines Between Journalism and Memoir

This is my first time working in the podcast space. So for me as a journalist, the lens has sort of always been on someone else or a community around the world. It was such a new experience for me to really center my own experience as both a narrator and as a subject. I really had to confront a lot of things in my own life. I had to ask myself questions about what it meant to grow up in L.A. in a certain time. It’s both a piece of art, but it’s also an experience that really combines a lot of elements of sound and sound design and journalism. It also feels like an audio memoir at the same time.

On the one hand, as a journalist, it was this investigation into a certain time period in my life that was really formative for me as a teenager. I was reconnecting with old friends and even an old nemesis. On the other hand it was a really tough experience because it really forced me to to confront a certain time period in my life that was relatively traumatic. It was really important for me to reckon with the past and make sense of a time that was really formative in my own life.

On Why Thompson-Hernández’s Story is Also the Story of L.A.

My story, in terms of how I identify as both a Black and brown person in L.A. who grew up in the ’90s, I hadn’t really seen the stories that we’ve presented in this show. I’ve never seen a story about graffiti told from the experience of someone who was both a graffiti artist and also someone who can document it. Or about the party line that all us teenagers used to call growing up. Or about the Compton Cowboys in this way.

I think oftentimes people who come to L.A. to tell stories are transplants, and tell stories about the city that to me feel really voyeuristic. People are just parachuting into a city that I love and respect so much and extracting information and knowledge from communities of color. I think for me, as a person of color, it’s very important to create something that really resonated with the people who I love the most — my friends and my family.

I think it’s really cool that when you hear my show, you really don’t hear a sort of traditional podcasting voice. I sound like someone who everyone knows. I sound like someone’s cousin, someone’s neighbor. That was a goal. I think we succeeded because of that.

On Making an Episode About the ‘P Line,’ an Anonymous Phone Chat Room Frequented by Youth in the ’90s

The P Line was one of the early forms of communication [for us], predating social media and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. The P Line was a place where we could go to escape. People who could become someone else and lead this double life.

It was essentially a safe space. Growing up in L.A. at that time, there was a lot of gang violence in the streets, a lot of turmoil and tension. For a lot of us, it was either being in the streets or being at home on the P Line. And a lot of us chose the P Line.

On Making an Episode About his Mom, Eleuteria Hernandez, Who Migrated From Mexico to the U.S. as a Teenager

Oftentimes, we only know our parents as our parents. We forget that before us, they had these rich lives. I really wanted her to talk about her migration experience and what that meant for her. These were questions she and I have never really discussed. There’s oftentimes fear for folks who migrate here, like a culture of silence. Speaking about the process of migration or leaving home can really lift up old traumas. I’m really grateful that she was able to to open up to me in a way that was really honest.

My mom’s relationship to me was really interesting because she had me when she was about 21. She was a junior at UCLA. I really felt like both of us sort of grew up at the same time. She was a mom. She was a sister. She was a friend. She was a mentor. She was a father. She was so many different things to me.

It was really important to remember how I started writing, what inspired me. The books that I read were essentially her books. For a young boy to see that and to experience her grad school life at such a young age, it normalized that experience for me. It really let me know that women of color and people of color can be in grad school and can get Ph.D.s.

On the “Compton Cowboys” Episode, and Exploring the History of L.A.’s Black Cowboys

The Compton Cowboys are a group of 10 childhood friends who ride horses in a horse ranch in Compton called the Richland Farms. They have a really special story. I grew up about five minutes away from Compton. But I didn’t grow up with the images of Black men and women on horses until I saw them riding around in Compton.

I think on the surface, we see Black men and women on horses and we imagine that they ride horses for love and for practice and very competitive reasons. Those are all true. There’s also something deeper. Black men and women in Compton often have to ride horses to stay alive, to not get policed, to not experience discrimination by Compton’s police department. Part of that is really creative and beautiful. But also it’s kind of tragic. Trying to understand that in the context of this larger Black Lives Matter movement is really important for me. It lets me know that over time and space, Black folks have had to find creative ways to survive. And in Compton, Black folks often have to ride horses to do that.

On How He Hopes “California Love” Will Resonate for People Outside L.A.

I’m really hoping that a show like “California Love” can unpack a lot of the stereotypes and tropes about a city like L.A. — palm trees and Hollywood and the beaches. All those sorts of areas exist. But there [are] so many layers. And my version of L.A. is mostly people of color. And it’s folks who have immigrated to this country. It’s Black folks who have been in L.A. for four to three generations now, who have also been displaced. This show for me was really a love letter to both my friends and family who have chose to stay in L.A. despite gentrification, despite the increase in housing costs. It was also for a lot of my friends or family who have been forced out of L.A., forced out of their homes and communities. There is a lot of nostalgia in this show and there’s also a lot of grief and sadness — and joy. I’m hoping that people can experience all of that in a way that’s both hyper-specific to L.A., but also universal.

On What He Loves Most About L.A.

To me, L.A. is this crash site for so many different worlds and experiences and languages and cultures. If you grew up in L.A., you’ve essentially grown up in it in a really global city. So to me, living and understanding L.A. is really a way of understanding the world.

There’s a lot of hope for folks in my generation. A lot of us have lived outside of L.A., [or] traveled a bit. A lot of us are bent on coming back home and preserving the community experience that we all had growing up. I’m hoping this show can inspire us to keep on doing that.

To hear more about “California Love” tune in for an Instagram live on Thursday, Aug. 20  at 3:30 p.m. with Walter Thompson-Hernández and Tonya Mosely, host of the KQED podcast “Truth Be Told.” Check out the event page here.