1960s

The 1960s are remembered in the novel as an era when countercultural freedom and the violence of social change occupied the same landscape. Heroin users recall a seemingly casual freedom that the Manson murders helped end; meanwhile, the decade’s urban history of forced displacement resurfaces in Channel View Estates, where a new development stands on a neighborhood cleared for redevelopment. The period persists not as a sealed past but as a conflict over who belongs, who is moved, and who gets to name the change.

The Promise and Limits of Psychedelic Freedom

The novel’s language of the psychedelic sixties evokes a world of loosened conventions, but it also questions whether that freedom could be separated from dependence and risk. Hope Harlingen recalls that she and Coy understood heroin as an escape from the middle-class cycle of choices that did not feel like choices. They reduced life to the immediate business of finding drugs, and compared shooting up to the older generation’s dinner-hour cocktails. Their recollection makes the era’s liberating self-image inseparable from addiction: what felt like release also narrowed the world around a single need.

Hope remembers the drug culture as less dramatic than its reputation suggested. The heroin circulating in California was so heavily diluted that, as she put it, it ought to have welcomed its users; she and Coy could be happy and foolish, slipping through bedroom windows and driving into conventional neighborhoods to ask strangers to use the bathroom before injecting. The anecdote makes transgression look strangely casual, even dependent on a residual trust between people who otherwise inhabited different worlds. Hope believes that trust ended when Charles Manson and his followers made such encounters impossible. The murders thus mark a rupture in ordinary social openness, not only a notorious crime: one more West Coast tradition, in her account, was lost, alongside the decline in the quality of the drug supply.

Land, Removal, and Redevelopment

The decade’s history is also written into Los Angeles land use. Tariq Khalil explains that before World War II, much of South Central was still a Japanese neighborhood; Japanese Americans were sent to camps, and Black residents moved in afterward, in his bitter comparison, as the next people to be displaced. When his own neighborhood is threatened, the repetition makes redevelopment part of a longer history rather than an isolated change. He describes it as another turn in a pattern of removal and revenge, with freeway construction already having taken its toll.

Aunt Reet, whose knowledge of property extends from the desert to the sea, supplies a wider frame for that pattern. She understands land through more than deeds and contracts: its history includes family grievances, changing watercourses, and stories that formal records leave out. The novel’s account of Los Angeles accordingly connects the displacement of Mexican families from Chavez Ravine for Dodger Stadium, the removal of American Indians from Bunker Hill for the Music Center, and the bulldozing of Tariq’s neighborhood for Channel View Estates. These examples turn development into a recurring struggle over whose history can remain visible on the land.

Channel View Estates and the Present Past

When Doc drives to Channel View Estates, the development is advertised as “A Michael Wolfmann Concept.” Its signs lead prospective buyers from Artesia into a tract still expanding across the haze: model units stand near the road, completed houses lie farther in, and the skeletons of new construction push toward unincorporated land. Doc parks on contractor hardpan where street signs have been installed but the streets are not yet paved. The unfinished grid makes the neighborhood’s transformation tangible: the built environment is already being imposed before its streets are complete.

The houses borrow the look of Spanish Colonial towns such as San Clemente and Santa Barbara, with red-tile roofs and small balconies, while overlooking a neglected branch of the Dominguez Flood Control Channel. The setting layers imitation prosperity over a landscape already altered by fill, regrading, and industrial debris. At the edges of Doc’s windshield, Black pedestrians appear bewildered, perhaps searching for the neighborhood and homes that have been taken from them. The development’s marketed promise and their apparent disorientation occupy the same view, making the new suburb an image of both aspiration and dispossession.

Memory, Power, and Continuity

The decade remains active in the novel because its conflicts recur in later conversations and landscapes. By the 1970s, Doc sees little reason to trust easily: the caution produced by life in psychedelic-sixties Los Angeles has not given way to a more hopeful present. In a later confrontation, Crocker Fenway describes the struggle over Channel View Estates as a long contest between residential owners and developers, while Doc reduces Crocker’s environmental language to a defense of property values. Crocker answers with the language of belonging and permanence, claiming that land, water rights, oil, and cheap labor have always belonged to people like him. The exchange exposes the unequal power beneath competing accounts of who is entitled to remain in place.

The novel’s movement between personal recollection, inherited urban history, and Doc’s visit to the new development gives the 1960s no clean ending. Its remembered freedoms have been curtailed by fear; its histories of removal reappear in the next round of construction; and the promise of a new community is built over the traces of an old one. The era’s significance lies in that unresolved connection between cultural change and control of the ground beneath it.