The Brief

News that Loyola Marymount University offered a class titled “Bad Bunny and Resistance in Puerto Rico” spread quickly.

“LMU posted a Reels on Instagram. My mom sent it to me and she goes, ‘you need to take this class right now!’” said Carolina Acosta, a junior at LMU who took the class last year.

Acosta was born and raised in Puerto Rico and her mother lives in San Juan, the capital. She’s majoring in entrepreneurship with the goal of earning a bachelor’s in business administration.

She was skeptical about taking the class.

Bad Bunny attends the Los Angeles Premiere Of Columbia Pictures' "Bullet Train" at Regency Village Theatre on Aug. 1, 2022 in Los Angeles.

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Jon Kopaloff

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2022 Getty Images

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“I didn't really think it was going to be about the island itself,” she said. “And then I remember my first day talking about it. I was just like, wow, it's [about] a lot more than the artist.” The class taught her aspects of Puerto Rico’s history and culture that she didn’t learn while growing up there.

Talking to students who are taking the class now and who took the class in past semesters opens a window into how this class engages college students and has transformed some students’ views of their college work and what they want to do after college.

That impact is by design.

‘There's so much to cover, and so much to talk about’

Bad Bunny has a lot of firsts under his belt. He’s broken streaming records on Spotify and his concert tours break ticket sales.

(Editor's note: He also knows how to enter a WWE ring.)

But the doors of academia have opened because of the cultural impact of his song lyrics and videos; how he leads his personal life; and how he challenges established ideas of race, gender, sexuality, and U.S. territorial dominance over Puerto Rico.

“I want to make my students feel engaged in their learning. I want them to feel connected to the curriculum and I want them… to want to come to class,” said professor Vanessa Díaz.

Díaz first taught the class at LMU last year. She drew inspiration from a similar Wellesley College first offered two years ago.

Díaz’s doctorate is in cultural anthropology. Her dissertation is titled "Manufacturing Celebrity and Marketing Fame: An Ethnographic Study of Celebrity Media Production." She worked as a red carpet reporter for People Magazine.

The three-month class begins with the basics about the artist Bad Bunny and his career. Then students learn about Puerto Rico’s history as a colony, modern day natural and political crises, resistance movements, and how reggaeton comes on the scene using innovative as well as toxic elements of Caribbean identity.

Student Ana Garcia speaks during class at Loyola Marymount University.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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Díaz said she’s seen those topics engage these young adults because of how profoundly some of these issues affect their lives. Number one on that list: how gender and sexuality are represented in popular media.

“My students’ generation are much more likely to identify as queer, or non-binary, or kind of fluid in these different ways,” she said.

For instance, the class watched how Bad Bunny bends images of gender and sexuality in his music video for “Yo Perreo Sola.” It's given students plenty to talk about, including whether the singer should or shouldn’t be considered a queer icon.

“I just remember week two of the course just immediately being like, ‘Oh, my God, this course is kind of going to change my entire perspective,’” said Ashley Buschhorn, a senior majoring in journalism who’s taking the class this semester.

That perspective, she said, has been shaped by being a “white American from Texas” who grew up with people of Latin American descent but who didn’t know how colonialism shaped those cultures.

“As a queer person I've seen the ways that queer groups in Puerto Rico have been oppressed, and ... discriminated against,” Buschhorn said.

The class lectures and readings on gender and sexuality led Buschhorn to think about if she in any way is contributing to violence against women and queer people in Puerto Rico and how she could help stop that violence.

Students Ana Garcia and Ashley Buschorn pose for a portrait at Loyola Marymount University.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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And subsequent discussions about Bad Bunny as a political activist and crafty manipulator of authentic and manufactured personas has helped Buschhorn think about the work she wants to do after graduation: documentary filmmaking.

“I think that's something that this class kind of directly combats is that you can't look at something just [through] one perspective. In this class there's probably five different perspectives that you have to look at something through,” she said.

Higher education’s student engagement problem

Colleges and universities in the U.S. are facing many challenges, among them how to engage growing proportions of students who are from non-white backgrounds with classes that combine academic rigor and speak to students’ various lived experiences. Increased student engagement is good for the student and good for the college.

Ana Garcia is a senior majoring in marketing. She knew a lot about reggaeton but very little about Puerto Rico before taking this class. In the class she learned there was solidarity across social classes in Puerto Rico when a major hurricane hit the island the same year as the 2017 Mexico City earthquake, which she lived through.

“I took it from a very personal experience that I saw this first hand, and just like seeing what it was for Puerto Ricans to go and do the same thing and a very different point of their history,” she said.

Garcia and most of the rest of the class enjoyed an epic class opportunity that connected theory to practice. Professor Díaz was able to secure funding to pay for the students to attend the Bad Bunny concert on March 14 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

The assignment was to create a video-reflection based on the lessons in the class.

Parallels to ethnic studies classes in high schools

The Bad Bunny class is a course in both Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies and Film, Television, and Media Studies. It’s a class that looks at media, race, and representation.

“People want to know about what's happening in the world and they want to know about why artists, musicians, etc. feel so much need to put that into their art,” said Emily Penner, a UC Irvine professor who studies K-12 student engagement.

The class syllabus for Díaz’s Bad Bunny class, Penner said, shed light on parallels with the high school ethnic studies classes she looks at in her research. Some of those hallmarks include curriculum as counter narrative (the challenging of dominant views), intersectionality (the overlap between topics such as race and gender), and students as intellectuals, which can be the most transformative part of the student experience.

“Anything that students can bring to the table to demonstrate their prior knowledge and their expertise, I think always is useful for orienting students toward what they're about to do for the rest of the semester,” Penner said.

Professor Vanessa Diaz teaching a class on Puerto Rican culture and Bad Bunny at Loyola Marymount University.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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That prior knowledge doesn’t have to be an exact match with the class topic, in this case Puerto Rico and the pop music icon. Effective teaching will engage students of different races and socioeconomic status. For some students who have taken the Bad Bunny class, what they bring to the table is sometimes challenged and transformed in ways the students didn’t expect.

'I've never had a class teach me about my history'

Political science major Mateo-Luis Planas brought a strong sense of identity to the first day of the Bad Bunny class last year, citing his appreciation for dancing salsa, bachata, and merengue.

“I was born and raised in Connecticut but my entire family's from the island of Puerto Rico,” he said. Many of his relatives still live on the island. He pointed to his grandmother’s pride in the Puerto Rican flag.

“I just thought my grandmother was really happy to be Puerto Rican. But turns out there was a point in history when it was actually illegal and punishable to even have those flags out in your house,” he said.

Puerto Rican history is American history.

“I've never had a class teach me about my history, which is something that the average American has never had to say,” he said.

What engaged him the most is the overlap between centuries-old racial policies in Puerto Rico and how race was and was not talked about within his own family. The Bad Bunny class is leading him to rethink whether law school is the best move for him after college.

“I have the rest of my life to study law,” Planas said, but people in Puerto Rico now need to achieve rights to their land and need a functional government that’s responsive to people’s needs.

Planas now feels he wants to go to the island to help people achieve those goals.

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

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Courtesy Steve Campos

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It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.

The Venice Boardwalk after sunset has generally been a no-go zone for tourists and locals alike, as the beachside bars and restaurants close on the early side and safety is often an issue. Now, a group of artists is out to bring some vibrancy to the creative neighborhood with a series of new installations that will include live evening performances – and even a “Venice Opera House.”

“Let's play with light and let's play with sound and give people a reason to come to the Boardwalk after sundown,” said artist and entrepreneur Stefan Ashkenazy, who is curating the project and owns the buildings housing them. “I mean, let's just be open 24 hours a day.”

The concept doesn’t have an official name yet, but he’s been calling it “See World.”

Artist James Ostrer's space looks out from a bed through the fence to the ocean at Venice Beach.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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William Attaway, a longtime Venice artist, created a gallery space filled with various paintings and sculptures.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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The pair of modern buildings on the Venice Boardwalk at Thornton Ave. – with their big balconies, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and seven open garage-style retail spaces – have sat mostly empty since Snapchat vacated their beachside offices in 2019. Ashkenazy recently bought the building and recruited artists to fill those front-facing spaces with creative work until a full-time tenant comes in.

Over the past several weeks the installations have been created in real-time, in public.

All of the projects are loosely along the theme of “home,” with each artist claiming a “room” in the two buildings that stretch across a full block on the Boardwalk. Several local Venice artists are featured, including William Attaway, whose intricate mosaic work is recognizable on the Venice public restrooms along the beach. Attaway’s space features a floating larger-than-life-sized statue and various works in a mini-gallery. In the next room is Robin Murez’s pieces, featuring carved wooden seats from her beloved neighborhood Venice Flying Carousel.

Ashkenazy is no stranger to wild (and wildly successful) art ideas. He’s the owner of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, a longtime haven for visiting artists, and the founder of the decade-old Bombay Beach Biennale, where artists install all kinds of work in an annual event near the Salton Sea. Many of the artists from that community are featured at the Venice project.

A "Venice Opera House" will host pop-up music events throughout the summer.

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Laura Hertfeldz

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LAist

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny's paintings on the wall of his Venice space.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny and London-based artist James Ostrer have brought some of their work in the Bombay Beach Biennale to the Venice project. Their windows on the Boardwalk both speak to a child-like sense of wonder and creativity.

“I think it's just kind of exploring and playing a little bit, to have the freedom to be able to do that,” Haberny says of his imagined child’s bedroom space, which includes a fort made out of puffy cheese balls. “It's a big space, too.
It's beautiful.”

Ostrer is experimenting with a performance art idea where he sits in bed amongst a room full of his own artwork, which he describes as “happy art with an edge.” Looking out at the ocean from the bed, he’s invited passersby to sit and have chats with him about his work or anything else they want to talk about.

“It’s a very intimate space, so you have a different kind of conversation,” he said. “I use art to channel human creativity, and [talk about] dark things.”

While there are open fences that block off the spaces, they aren’t sealed up at night. Both Ashkenazy and the team of artists seemed open to the idea that anything could happen and that the installations are a conversation with the public – and with that comes some risk.

Greg Haberny (right) works with his assistants on an installation featuring kid-inspired graffiti art and a "cheesy puff" fort.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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“I don't really know if I [would] say worried, but I guess it's just the cost of doing business,” Haberny said. “I don't really make things to get damaged or broken, sure. But I have done [things like] burned all my paintings and then made paint out of ash.”

While he’s felt safe – and even slept overnight in the installation – Ostrer has been collaborating with a local female artist who performs in a pig mask in front of his installation some nights. Watching her perform, he said, has taught him about the vulnerability of women in public spaces like the Boardwalk. “I've started to, on a very fractional level, have seen how scary that is. Because I've sat in the bed behind her performing at the front here… the way in which men are approaching her and shrieking at her … it's shocking.”

Ashkenazy says he will keep the artists in the space, potentially rotating new ones in, until a fulltime tenant takes over.

“This is an experiment … and after acquiring the building, the intention wasn't, ‘let's open a bunch of public art spaces,’ he said. “It is kind of …what the building wanted and listening to what the Boardwalk needed. Let's play, let's have the artists that we love and appreciate have a space to play and engage and give the locals and the visitors to the Boardwalk something to experience.”

A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”