New tour takes visitors into LA’s ganglands

Tourists looking for a thrill in Los Angeles can now take a bus tour of the city’s most dangerous ganglands. For $65, LA Gang Tours takes visitors around the city, pointing out gang graffiti and stopping at sights like the Los Angeles Riverbed, Florence Avenue, and the Pico Union Graffiti Lab.

It seems tourists are always drawn to places with a dangerous auras and violent pasts, places that are the complete opposite of our comfortable lives at home. The question is, do we go to these places, places like the slums of Mumbai, the townships of Johannesburg or the streets of South Central LA, because we want to understand what life is like for the people there, or do we go to gawk or just so we can say “I’ve been there”? And do these tours actually help the communities that are put on display, or do they make them a spectacle?

LA Gang Tours was created by Alfred Lomas, a former gang member, who says the tour will create 10 part-time jobs for ex-gang members who will lead tours and share their own stories. He says his goal is to help residents of South Central,”to give profits from the tours back to these areas for economic growth and development, provide job/entrepreneur training, micro-financing opportunities and to specialize in educating people from around the world about the Los Angeles inner city lifestyle, gang involvement and solutions.”I’d actually be curious to take the tour, which is scheduled to run once per month. It sounds like, in this case, the tour may be run in a way that takes a more anthropological, rather than exploitative, look at the community. The tour bus is unmarked, and out of respect for area residents, riders on the tour are not permitted to take photos or video.

While in Cape Town, I had the opportunity to tour Robben Island, the prison where political “criminals” were held during apartheid. When the tour guide, himself a former prisoner, was asked why he would do this – lead tours and relive the pain of his imprisonment every day – for a living, he responded with two reasons. One, he said, was because he wanted people to know what happened. The second was that every boatload of tourists that came to the island meant one more person who would have a job.

Perhaps it’s naive to think that welcoming a bus-full of tourists once a month could help solve the many problems of the area. But if offering the tours keeps one more ex-gang member employed running tours and out of gang life, well, at least it’s a start.

[via Chicago Tribune]

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Slum Tourism

Having produced one of their very first travel pieces, I was very pleasantly surprised to see the recent deal between Current TV and Yahoo. Good for them. I have to confess that I rarely watch Current on channel 102 here in NYC, since so many of the pieces are agonizingly hard to watch, especially if you’re like me and don’t really like hip-hop all that much. That said, there are many gems among the hours of programming they feature, and I’ve always hoped they’d do a deal with someone like Yahoo or Google so you could select and watch specific pieces that get rated or passed around on the Web. So here’s kudos to Current and hopes that they keep on gong strong.

And here’s to Current as well for doing a great little story on Slum Tourism. When I was in Bombay, India two years ago, I made a special trip as a journalist to the Dharavi slums on the outskirts of town. This was a soul-slapping experience. The rancid sprawl of this slum, Asia’s largest ,went on forever and ever, as if it was a rank, wrecked city all to itself. And amazingly, while I was there interviewing one of the city’s administrators about the state of the slum, I ran into several tourists, walking around and shooting photos of people who lived in the slum. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but what I saw was exactly what they talk about here: slum tourism.

Is this an awful sign of the growing divisions of wealth in the world or an unsurprising reflection of human nature … that is, there have always been forms of slum tourism around, where the rich leave the comfy confines of their lives to “see how the other half lives.” I tend to believe the latter, but I could be wrong.