Visible But Unseen: The Material Cultures of Los Angeles’s Indoor Swap Meets
Standing at the intersection of Vernon Avenue and Alameda Street in Los Angeles’s industrial southeast, it is hard to miss the thudding banda and norteño music emanating from El Faro Plaza (Figure 1). On any given Sunday afternoon, Latinx families stream from overflow parking lots and a nearby light rail station toward the warehouse complex which houses a large indoor swap meet (a multitenant indoor market) blending commercial, sacred, and public elements, with its restaurants, shrine to the Virgen de Guadalupe, and stage from which bands and DJ’s regularly perform (Figure 2).
Figure 1. El Faro Plaza, viewed from Alameda Street, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy Google, 2017.
Figure 2. Shrine to the Virgen de Guadalupe with mechanical bull in foreground at El Faro Plaza, Los Angeles. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2014.
As I followed those families into the building during my first visit, in 2014, music pulsed from speakers on the stage, beneath a long awning on the building’s northern side. Beneath the overhang was a fountain, a “jumper” (or inflatable bounce house for children’s play), a mechanical bull, and seating for patrons dining at a handful of restaurants lining the building’s edge. Past the restaurants and within a cavernous building were hundreds of small vendor booths (Figure 3). Masseuses, acupuncturists, and doctors operated practices adjacent to income tax preparers and auto parts stores. Shops selling lingerie were within eyesight of those selling baptism clothes and Catholic literature. Just across East 45th Street was the rival Alameda Swap Meet, an even larger assemblage of warehouse buildings arrayed in a horseshoe around a large plaza (Figure 4).
Figure 3. Interior corridor at El Faro Plaza. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2014.
Figure 4. Outdoor plaza at the Alameda Swap Meet, Los Angeles. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2015.
While both swap meets contained visual referents to Mexico and most of the customers spoke Spanish, many vendors were Korean. When several told me they preferred speaking Spanish to English, I realized I had walked into a local and global crossroads. Little did I know that this visually Latinx business type was also where the city’s Korean, Black, and Latinx communities had come together during the 1980s and 1990s to create one of the most important cultural products of that decade: West Coast hip hop.
Figure 5. Indoor swap meets in at their peak in 1991, juxtaposed against population by U.S. Census data for “Race” in 1990. Most indoor swap meets were situated within lower-income neighborhoods with predominantly Latinx (or “Hispanic,” according to the U.S. Census) and African American residents. Cartography by Alec R. Stewart.
Hundreds of indoor swap meets like the Alameda Swap Meet and El Faro Plaza have operated in Greater Los Angeles since the first opened in 1983. The multitenant bazaars are distinct from outdoor swap meets and flea markets in that they operate six or seven days per week, booths are leased by the month rather than by the day, and their vendors sell new merchandise, sourced from downtown wholesalers, rather than secondhand goods. With relatively easy access to capital from fledgling Koreatown banks, and information disseminated through Korean-language newspapers, Korean immigrant investors opened over a hundred of the markets, mostly within predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, between 1983 and 1992 (Figure 5).
Figure 6. Bonito Swap Meet façade in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2016.
Figure 7: The Valley Indoor Swap Meet is housed within the one-time Sears department store at Indian Hill Mall, Pomona, California. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2016.
All manner of repurposed large-floorplate spaces host the bazaars, whether storefronts in Downtown Los Angeles and MacArthur Park, defunct department stores in Compton and Pomona, or auto and aerospace plants in South-Central and the San Fernando Valley (Figures 6 and 7). Amidst the deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s, the markets filled voids in the region’s retail and employment landscapes, generating jobs and providing vital services to in underserved sections of the metropolis (Figure 8). Like other immigrant-owned enterprises, which Thomas Vitiello, Thomas Sugrue, A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, and other urban historians claim have been responsible for saving America’s inner cities and suburbs, indoor swap meets blunted the worst effects of the “urban crisis” by reinvigorating moribund factories and shopping centers with hundreds of small mom and pop businesses. In aggregate, these businesses numbered in the tens of thousands, constituting economic and community anchors within lower-income communities of color.
Figure 8. Korean massage therapists at an Alameda Swap Meet booth offer momentary relief from shopping. In the background, a check cashing business provides vital financial services to swap meet patrons seeking to cash paychecks, prepare income taxes, and send remittances to families residing outside of the United States. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2014.
Because most swap meet vendors were initially recruited through Korean-language information networks, Korean vendors found themselves doing business with Black and Latinx customers. With divergent customer service norms, these multiethnic shopping environments contributed to interethnic tensions which culminated in a series of anti-swap meet boycotts prior to the 1992 Rodney King Rebellion. At the same time, they also functioned as arenas of possibility and mixing, where boundaries of various kinds were challenged by acts of transgression. Asian and Latinx vendors forged relationships across ethnic and class lines with their Black and Latinx customers. Vendors pushed the limits of their booths by hanging merchandise on the wire grate exterior walls and letting it spill into the aisles. Loudspeakers blaring norteño music from CD booths tested acceptable noise limits (while providing an informal soundtrack at many swap meets). Frequent public events including band and DJ performances, church services, and political rallies drew revelers into food courts and makeshift plazas, transforming overtly commercial spaces into carnivalesque public realms. All the while, non-descript building walls conceal these many activities from the street, shielding from view what Mary Douglas has labeled “matter out of place” in the white bourgeois imagination: immigrant bodies, people of color, and heterogeneous aesthetics of abundance.[1]
“Indoor swap meets provided solutions to the concurrent crises of economic disinvestment, rapid demographic change, and systemic racism endemic within inner cities and suburbs during the 1980s and 1990s.”
Hidden in plain sight and protected from it, indoor swap meets have for over four decades exemplified a form of multiethnic immigrant urbanism that has served as a crucible for new artistic genres and forms of political speech. In 1986, for example, Cycadelic Records in the Compton Swap Meet became one of the first stores willing to distribute the mixtapes of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, and Ice Cube, whose graphic depictions of everyday violence and police brutality made them progenitors of West Coast reality (or “gangsta”) rap. Because the store’s Korean immigrant owners supported these and other emerging hip hop artists, their store is now credited as a birthplace of the genre. Numerous rap artists have paid tribute to swap meets over the years, from Sir Mix-a-Lot and Tupac Shakur to Kendrik Lamar, who filmed his 2015 music video, “King Kunta,” at the Compton Swap Meet shortly before it was converted into a Walmart.
Figure 9. Music video for Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta,” shot at the Compton Swap Meet (now closed), dir. Director X, 2015. Courtesy YouTube.
Similarly, Sam Quinones has observed that the first recordings of Spanish-language drug ballads, or narcocorridos, were also sold from swap meet record booths before this folk music about the transnational lives of rural Mexicans became widely popular. Like early West Coast hip hop DJs and rappers, the first major narcocorrido artists found themselves locked out of mainstream distribution channels and record stores because their violent lyrical content violated highbrow taboos.
Figure 10. At Del Amo Plaza, an indoor swap meet in Rancho Dominguez, California, on the Compton border, t-shirts riff on NWA’s 1987 debut album, Straight Outta Compton, and express a place attachment to neighboring Long Beach. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2016.
The indoor swap meet’s status as a locus of both hip hop and narco culture is reflected in its goods and material culture, including the t-shirts referring to iconic hip hop artists and drug lords, the embroidery and airbrush shops that produce custom apparel, and the flashy jewelry known as “bling” sold at its jewelers (Figures 10 and 11).
Figure 11: A Korean American man makes custom “grillz” at Mr. Bling's “Grillz Talk” Location at Del Amo Plaza in Rancho Dominguez. Photo by Alec R. Stewart, 2016.
Defined by the materiality of their goods, indoor swap meets as a business type and social institution thus exerted significant cultural force throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Their flexible site plans, heterogeneous merchandise and services, and the openness of immigrant entrepreneurs to new hybrid forms of music empowered subaltern groups to exercise their voices as emergent citizens. At the same time, these markets provided decent livelihoods for thousands of immigrant entrepreneurs and afforded countless families opportunities to define their identities with the latest fashions. As spaces of work, shopping, leisure, and cultural production, indoor swap meets helped patrons, vendors, and artists alike assert their claims to economic and social citizenship. In this way, indoor swap meets provided solutions to the concurrent crises of economic disinvestment, rapid demographic change, and systemic racism endemic within inner cities and suburbs during the 1980s and 1990s.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic dealt a devastating blow, indoor swap meets were slowly disappearing. Slackening immigration, corporate re-investment by Walmart and other big box retailers in places like Compton, and the rise of electronic commerce began eroding the business model in the mid-2000s. More recently, skyrocketing real estate prices and gentrification have incentivized the redevelopment of swap meet sites, leading to a growing wave of closures. Memories of Southern California’s once-robust indoor swap meet landscape, meanwhile, live on in the minds of former vendors and shoppers, and in the lyrics of hundreds of hip hop tracks and music videos.
Note
[1] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966).
