Sunshine and Noir in Historical Los Angeles:
A Contextualization of Nina Revoyr’s Southland

Nina Revoyr’s novel, Southland, provides a glimpse into the injustice, scandal, and struggle in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the 1990s due to its racial composition. The novel contains a unique cast of characters who, although often times interact with conflict, are forced to live side-by-side one another in their separate attempts to attain the American Dream. Southland takes its readers on a journey through a history full of trials and tribulations, with Los Angeles as its stage; throughout this story, the reader begins to understand that there was much more to this place than what was originally promised by the boosters. Revoyr makes it clear that Los Angeles, or Angeles Mesa to be more precise, during the time of the boosters, was not solely a place where one could find utopia, or sunshine – but also a place that was plagued with dystopia, or noir.

Southland proves to be a story that illustrates how ethnic, racial, and gender differences can play a major role in one’s actions, behaviors, and perceptions of others. This novel uncovers the fact that Los Angeles was a socially stratified city, which was full of inhabitants who were governed according to their differences. Whether one was white, black, or Asian during the 1940s-1960s (especially in Angeles Mesa, as relevant to Southland) determined how others perceived and treated them. In a cyclic rotation, most of the time it also prompted the ways in which that person treated others. In Southland, one of the characters that Revoyr introduces her readers to is Nick Lawson, who was a white police officer around the time of the 1965 Watts Riots. Lawson, as he is mainly referred to in the novel, had a reputation of being racist toward African-American people. He generalized all of them as criminals, and never hesitated