Meet the People Who Are Revolutionizing Beach Access in L.A.
The Changing Face of the Los Angeles Coastline
Today is a special day on the sand near lifeguard Tower 27, somewhere between the crowded, westernmost stretch of Route 66, the Santa Monica Pier, and the world-famous Venice boardwalk. A nearby beach path overflows with tourists who have ditched their cars for bikes, roller skates and skateboards, for a little taste of the California Dream. But that's no different from any other weekend.
What makes today special is that it's 8-year-old Elijah Russell's last day of summer surf camp. He huddles with other boys his age, listening to a counselor's praise as each boy receives a participation award. When the ceremony ends, Elijah hops to his feet and throws his body over the counselor, hugging and tackling him, as little boys do. "This is the best time," says Elijah, whose hair is now more sand-filled than anything else. He smiles, showing his newly forming two front teeth, looking comfortable as he steps over surfboards to tell his story. "I like boogie boarding, surfing ... (camp) taught me how to manage my own board and how to get off waves before the wave comes."
Elijah is about 10 miles from his home in South LA, and he can count the number of times he's been to the beach on his fingers. He is one of several dozen children from the Algin Sutton Recreation Center in South LA, 5 miles south of USC, who arrived earlier on a school bus paid for by the Surf Bus Foundation. Marion Clark is the president of the nonprofit that began in 2003 with the sole mission of bringing LA youngsters from urban neighborhoods to the ocean. "Our goal is to see transformative change," she says. "How does a kid shift in four key areas: self-esteem, motivation, endurance and trust. If you really want to be able to measure that you need really five to 10 days of immersion. So, surf camp."
At first glance, Clark looks like the poster child for beach life. "Tourists will stop me and ask if they can take my picture because I look like Southern California," she says, sitting cross-legged on the sand in a blue wetsuit and red rash guard. Her hair is a sun-bleached shade of blonde. Her body looks sculpted by the ocean's currents. Clark does not want to be the poster child for Southern California beach culture; in fact, she says it makes her a little sad that she would fit the stereotype of a beachgoer in such a culturally diverse city as Los Angeles.
To underscore her point, she peers at the children running around Tower 27. They are boys and girls like Elijah. All of them are from Los Angeles, but not a single one of them is white.
In the stretch of sand around lifeguard Tower 27, beach veterans in bikinis and boardshorts mix with burnt-faced tourists. But many of Marion's kids are seeing the ocean this week for the first time. "They were surprised," she says. "They didn't know it's salty, that you can't drink it."
The barriers preventing children like Elijah from experiencing the coast aren't just physical. They're cultural, too.
Through the years, issues such as the lack of affordable transportation and stark differences in housing prices on the coast compared to the inland cities "have caused people of color—and Hispanic people in particular—to not internalize the beach as a place of their own," says Cassie Comley, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon who's researching Latino participation in surf culture. Developments such as the 2016 opening of the Metro's light-rail Expo Line to Santa Monica are important, as they help bridge the gap between the neighborhoods and the beach.
In the Expo Line's first summer, research by the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability found that the crowds on Santa Monica beaches reflected the demographic diversity of California as a whole, with white and Latino communities almost equally represented among beachgoers and smaller percentages of African Americans and Asians.
The lack of diversity remains in the lifeguard towers. Only four Hispanic lifeguards patrol the Santa Monica and Venice beaches. Two of them, Mexican-born brothers Fabian and Carlos Herrera, became lifeguards thanks to Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). They, too, are observing changes: "A lot of the patrons here are Hispanic. In other beaches, that's a different story, but we get lots of Latinos." Just a few miles up the coast, at Zuma Beach, the same UCLA study found that beachgoers were still overwhelmingly white.
And while the presence of an efficient, affordable Metro line is a game changer for Santa Monica and Venice, as the trains take traditionally excluded LA communities to the coast, the Herrera brothers and Marion Clark are diversifying the beach by introducing these groups of people to the water.
"My hope is that they help their parents—who maybe can't swim—feel more comfortable coming to the beach and watching them play," says Clark of the kids who take part in her surf camps. "That everyone feels this is as much their home as the park in their neighborhood."
Connecting LA
The downtown Santa Monica Metro station is busy on a hot summer weekend. It's approaching noon on a Saturday morning when three Metro LA employees quickly set up a canopy next to the ticket machines, preparing to assist the intensifying crowds pouring out of the trains.
"Expo has changed our life in the past year," says Lorena Mendez, a cheerful Guatemalan woman from South LA who's waiting to cross the street en route down Colorado Avenue until she reaches the beach. She's there with her two children and a friend who's originally from El Salvador. Her son is playing with a purple Metro PCS balloon. "We don't own a car, so with Expo we've gotten to know places that we said, 'Wow, I'd love to live here!' but obviously there's no way we could afford it."
"For those of us who live on a low income, the metro is super comfortable and very convenient," says Mendez in Spanish. Before the Expo line extension, her family visited the beach once or twice per year. Now, "without exaggerating", they come to Santa Monica four times per month. The metro has made it much easier for them to make the journey to the coast. Before, they would have to get on bus No. 720, which is "slower, more crowded and sometimes it stops and leaves passengers halfway, so you have to get on another bus and pay again".
Both Mendez and her friend, Lisette, who prefers not to share her family name, work in a garment factory south of downtown LA. They wouldn't wish their job on anyone, but they say they give it their everything and tease each other to establish who has the bigger muscles thanks to all the manual work they do.
To them, the beach is a bit "like being back home and going to the river." It's a place to relax, to forget about all the problems, about work, about house chores and duties. On an average day near the pier, Mendez and her friend enjoy playing in the sand with the kids, going into the water and doing pull-ups because, they joke, they're a bit too gorditas. They also like playing football, and say that having easier access to the beach allows them to play more, which has spiked their self-confidence. "Expo lets us take advantage of the best while we're in this country," says Lisette.
Behind them, outpours of individuals and families with beach gear emerge from new trains. There's a Hispanic family from South LA. The two kids are holding a heavy garden shovel and a bright yellow pail; they're excited they'll soon be playing in the sand. There are two African American men from Palmdale who have made their way to Santa Monica using exclusively public transportation and are about to head to Venice on their DIY tandem bike. Next to them, a Latino mother from Compton and her 15-year-old son are pulling a wagon with a big cooler, three folding chairs and an old beach umbrella; they are ready for a picnic near the pier.
"I first found out on Google about the Expo line going all the way to Santa Monica," says John Rodriguez-Arciniega, the 15-year-old from Compton. "My mom didn't know about it and I told her, 'We have to take it!' It's convenient, you save money on gas and parking. We take the Blue Line from Compton to Pico, and from Pico we take Expo all the way to Santa Monica beach."
For many people coming from urban neighborhoods, the extension of the Expo Line two blocks away from the Santa Monica Pier has changed the way they interact with the beach, solving one of the main concerns plaguing low-income Angelenos and Hispanic communities in particular. As the 2017 UCLA report on beach access found, in fact, these two groups—both more likely to reside farther away from the coast (see map below)—named the lack of public transportation options as one of the barriers affecting their decision to go to the beach.
But with the burgeoning crowds of inexperienced beachgoers, some of the lifeguards in Santa Monica and Venice have begun to notice a growing number of safety issues. As Clark explains, "Lack of access is not just getting to the beach. It's access to bathing suits, access to understanding what a rip current is, that a lifeguard is here to help you."
