Longtime LAist correspondent, Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, has reported on local stories for decades, traveling and meeting people throughout the region. He says L.A. is made up of history, the elements, construction and pain. That’s the ink used in this new collection of poetry and prose, California Southern: writing from the road, 1992-2025.
Why now: The book captures Southern California events, slices of life and profiles of people at a time of great change in the region.
The backstory: Guzman-Lopez has been a reporter at LAist since 2000, back when it was KPCC. He’s been a performance poet even longer, co-founding the influential Taco Shop Poets in the 1990s.
I have witnessed history and heard people’s joy, aspirations, fears and pain, from Armenians, Cambodians and Jews talking about their own definitions of genocide to the red-carpet inauguration of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
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Los Angeles is the ink I used to write this book: An interview with LAist's Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez performs with the Taco Shop Poets in L.A. in the early 2000s.
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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
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Meanwhile I’ve also had another life for even longer, as a performance poet, co-founding the influential Taco Shop Poets in the 1990s.
California Southern: writing from the road, 1992-2025 is the first collection of writing by LAist correspondent Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/LAist
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In poetry and prose, I’ve tried to describe the feelings of returning to a Mexico that I only spent some of my childhood in, while meeting people, Mexican and not, who share stories about leaving a homeland and trying to find home in Southern California.
The poem Toltec in the City in the book, California Southern: writing from the road, 1992-2025
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For example, the poem near the book’s beginning, Vine a Los Angeles(I came to Los Angeles) melds the Aztec origin myth I learned as a child with a description of the many varied layers of history I discovered in L.A.
The eagle perched on the cactus called me to Los Angeles.
The Templo Mayor lays buried here.
In my city, Mexico City, jaguar heads of volcanic stone became cornerstones for colonial palaces, became podiums for politicians, became baptism wells for el nuevo mexicano.
In my new city adobe forts became foundations for post-war tract homes, as far as the eye can see. They sway like Kansas wheat fields.
It’s here, the Californio city buried under the oil well city buried under the Zoot Suit city buried under the Dunbar city.
Orthodox shuls under Brooklyn Avenue sonidero speakers.
The Eastside minaret blasts narcocorridos. The Eastside minaret blasts Cri Cri. The Eastside minaret Blasts na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na.
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez interviews California Faculty Association official Margarita Berta-Ávila.
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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
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A reporter who is also a poet
As major protests roiled Southern California in recent years, I’ve joined my LAist colleagues to cover them. In 2020, in Long Beach, I was shot by local police at a protest for George Floyd. A foam round hit me in the bottom of my throat. Writing certain sections in the book has helped me process that. Other pieces, like Boom Town National City, capture other traumatic moments that resonate with me.
That piece includes descriptions of a 2018 Border Patrol detention of a woman on a street corner of National City, where I grew up. The woman’s daughters screamed as she was shoved into a van by agents. The screams were captured on video. Those kinds of detentions did not happen frequently at that time. As someone who had been undocumented at about the same age as the girls, their screams and the detention shook me to my core.
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez began working as a reporter for KPCC 89.3 in 2000.
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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
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The piece contemplates how writing may help people deeply impacted by these acts come to terms with them.
Fill your fountain pen with blood, fill it with the rainbow ink sliding down the corner of your eye. Write your own postcard. Write it multiple times. Write it when you love. Write it when you’re lonely. Write it when you feel that you’re returning to your original self, your whole self.
Write it when things happen that make you cry.
And wake up!
Helping build a more perfect and harmonious community
The book ends with a poem that includes phrases from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The agreement was signed by Mexico and the U.S. in 1848 and put an end to a war between the two countries. What is remarkable to me is the language in the treaty to protect the civil rights of the Mexicans who now lived in U.S. territory ceded by Mexico. Today, nearly 180 years after that treaty was signed, the language beckons to action, to work towards the peace that the treaty envisions.
In the name of almighty god animated by a sincere desire to put an end to the calamities of war and establish relations of peace and friendship
