Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

Héctor Tobar’s contribution to this collection is a reflection on his time during the 1990s as a new father and journalist. He covered stories about impoverished and often violent south-central Los Angeles, which is de facto segregated. Most of the population here is Black and Latino. Middle-class, mostly white residents populate the hills around LA, while the flatland is a sprawling 100 square miles of impoverishment to which Tobar can look down from his home. There are two Los Angeles.

One day, he goes to report on the murder of a nine-year-old who died several days after his family was ambushed by a gang in a neighborhood near south-central LA. Their car had broken down, and the gang members mistook them for a rival gang, pumping the car with bullets, injuring most of the family, including children, and eventually killing young Hector Martinez.

Tobar visits a makeshift memorial where the child was shot, where he witnesses no “outrage”: “No one railed against the murderous demons who had perpetuated the crime, or against the neighborhood’s poverty, and the grimness and hopelessness from which one murder, and hundreds of other murders, had been born” (160). Residents seem to accept that this is their lot in life.