Week Ten • Tehrangeles: Westwood's Little Persia

Last week. Last post. Last location. It's amazing how fast time goes. Ten weeks have already came and went in what seems like a blink of an eye and now I'll be telling of my last adventure throughout the Los Angeles (well, maybe not my last, but the last you'll hear of, haha).

So for my last documented location, I decided to focus on somewhere that was a little more familiar to home. Being half Iranian and living so close to Los Angeles all my life, venturing into the small stretch in Westwood known as Little Persia isn't something new to me. However, this is the first time I'm looking at it in a geographical viewpoint to observe the social differences within this area and how it compared to the others I have traveled to during these past ten weeks.

Welcome to Little Persia or Persian Square or what many of Iranian residents call it: Tehrangeles (a mix of Tehran, the capital of Iran and Los Angeles).

I remember reading an article by Shoku Amirani of BBC News some months ago about how Iranians have made a part of LA uniquely their own. According to Amirani, estimates show that "300,000 to over half a million Iranians in Southern California, with many living in Tehrangeles". I've always wondered why many Iranians congregated in Los Angeles and why particularly in Westwood. I read more of the article and found that it actually helped answer this question I've had for some years now.

According to Amirani, the first Iranian immigrants that arrived in LA were students during the 1960s. 1979 showed the biggest wave of Iranian fleeing the revolution that overthrew the Shah and brought about the Islamic Republic. Many more, afterwards, followed to join their families and to escape the Iran-Iraq war in the early 1980s. In addition, there were a handful simply searching for better opportunities like many other immigrants of different ethnic origins who came to America. Apparently, Amirani also says that climate was also a factor.

Something I've always found interesting ever since I was able to understand the difference was how majority of Iranians living in LA call themselves Persian instead of Iranian. Personally, this always bugged me to an extent due to the fact that people can't be Persian today because the Persian Empire no longer exists. However, in his article, Amirani does a great job in interviewing several Iranian residents to find the reason why they call themselves Persians (something I figured out some years ago due to being around those who identify as Persian than Iranian).

In a nutshell, those in LA (and in any part of the country) calling themselves Persian are disassociating themselves from Iran and the Iranian government. They also identify as such to avoid prejudice from the ignorance of any Americans (which unfortunately is a lot) who related Iranians to terrorist actions. This part of Amirani's article, interviewing a second generation Iranian (who happens to share my name haha) who describes this reason for changing how Iranians identify themselves:

"It's like if you say you're Persian, you're more cultured or posh," says Sara. 

"But if you say, 'I'm Iranian,' people think you're enriching uranium in your garage!"

In addition, another young Iranian American Amirani interview says this about Americans:

"Americans are good people, they are just very uncomfortable with what they don't understand," says one young Iranian American who came to the US in the 1980s.

That says it all. I can't explain it any better than that.





When you walk around Little Persia or Tehrangeles, it reminds you a lot of China Town or Korea Town with how it's very business, shopping, and food oriented only...everything is in Farsi. What I found interesting was the amount of travel agencies and and other buildings offering passport services (I must have counted about 8 of these in just the relatively short stretch from Wilshire and Olympic).










In addition, this area is covered with Iranian/Persian restaurants, ice cream shops and other small food joints (all satisfying Iranian tastes). For example, Iranian kabob and ghorme sabzi galore as well as the well known Saffron and Rose ice cream so family to Iranian tastebuds.

While I personally love kabob and ghorme sabzi (I've been spoiled to love them most when they're homemade), I never could like the Saffron and Rose ice cream (and I've tried it many times haha).

While walking around, I also noticed quite a lot of galleries, bookstores and salons. Wow were there a lot of salons!! Seems Iranian women love to look their best (of course, no harm in wanting to look good, haha).

But what really caught me off guard was in regards to language. I was in no way surprised by many of the locals speaking Farsi. While I cannot understand the language (yet, I'm slowly learning haha), I can still easily recognize it because I'm almost always hearing it when my baba (dad) speaks Farsi with his friends and family. No, what caught my attention was when I came across a homeless man of African American origin asking for money in Farsi. While there is nothing wrong with this picture, it was definitely not something you see or hear everyday (for instance, someone of Chinese descent but speaking Portuguese like you would find in Brazil).

Overall, this small district of Tehrangeles felt like a very capitalistic Tehran which really is what it is. It's America meets Iran in a cultural mash-up (something that was discussed in Professor Wilford's other class, Cultural Geography of the Modern World). While the are is clearly predominated by the Iranian culture, tastes, and language, there lies the something very American about the landscape.

To wrap up this last post, social difference in this Tehrangeles, in my opinion, falls on the dual identity of Iranian and Perisan. Because it is easier for Americans to understand Persian as something gentle and friendly rather than take the effort to learn, Iranian immigrants readily choose the ethnic term in order to evade the prejudice tied with being Iranian (the last thing they want to be seen as is a terrorist or a supporter of the Islamic Republic when they are far from that).

However, I personally choose to continue to identify as Iranian (or well half Iranian) because I believe that the only way to make Americans and other people understand that being Iranian doesn't mean you're manifesting bombs in your garage is by educating them. You have to embrace who you really are and when people look at you differently, to face it and explain that while you're Iranian, you are not in support of the extremists and the Iranian government. After all, Iran isn't the only country with dangerous radicals and an unjust government.