History ever repeats
Natashia Deón sets a tale of American injustice against 1930s Los Angeles
As well as being an author, Natashia Deón is a practicing criminal defense attorney, and she suspects her legal career might influence the social justice issues that permeate her books, including “The Perishing” (Counterpoint, $26), which was released Tuesday. Deón says attorneys are witnesses to plenty in the courtroom.
“You also see the history of our nation, of our city, of people that led them to those moments, those bad judgment moments,” she says, “or even the judgments that lead us to be a perfect victim for someone.”
Deón was born and raised in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t the Santa Clarita-based author’s intention to write a book about her hometown. “It just occurred to me that it should be about L.A.,” she says on a recent phone call, “and explore the different ways that L.A. has changed and grown, even from the time when I was young, in the ’80s running around L.A., and how it looks today.”
A tale of immortality and the cyclical nature of human history, “The Perishing” is largely set in early 1930s Los Angeles but flashes back and forward to bear witness to injustices that have marked the city’s history. It was inspired by a nightmare of Deón’s.
“I woke up and it was so real to me that I began Googling details,” Deón says. That searching led her to the real-life Chinese massacre of 1871, in which 19 immigrants were killed. The event turns up in a chapter of “The Perishing.”
Deón pored over history books. She delved into the water wars and the life of William Mulholland, the history of Black Angelenos, Prohibition and the histories of Americans who were White but not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. She looked to tell a story about 1930s Los Angeles that wasn’t solely about Hollywood’s Golden Age.
“I was wondering what everybody else was doing,” she says.
Deón also thought of writing the book as a “nontraditional continuation” of her debut, “Grace,” which concerns a runaway slave in the 1840s. “I wanted it to be after slavery,” she says, adding that she wanted to see what America looked like in a place that “wasn’t ravaged by the Civil War.”
Los Angeles in the 1930s offered an ideal setting.
“I wanted to see what that was like, what kind of hope that brought to people there and what that meant specifically for Black people who came to Los Angeles for opportunities, the same way that other people had,” she says.
She takes readers into ethnically diverse Boyle Heights, explores downtown in the waning days of Prohibition and brings readers on newspaper assignments with Lou, a young female reporter tasked with covering death in the city as she tries to unravel her own mysterious past.
Locals will recognize references to wellknown L.A. spots, and there are cameo appearances from real-life Angelenos, too. One is Charlotta Bass, who was the publisher of the California Eagle newspaper and went on to become the first Black woman to run for vice president of the United States. “I knew that I wanted to tell her story because she was so essentially Black and an activist in Los Angeles and represented so much of the journey for Black people from the South to the West,” says Deón.
Another L.A. icon who makes it into the story is Aimee Semple McPherson, who founded Angelus Temple in Echo Park, which, as Deón points out, is likely the first megachurch in the city. “She had a complicated life,” Deón says. “I wanted to explore her, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a Christian woman and what it means to lead a movement.”
With “The Perishing,” Deón draws comparisons between the Los Angeles of the past and the one we know today. In the novel, polio appears as a stand-in for COVID-19, and racism, xenophobia and sexism permeate the city regardless of the period. “Most problems we have are patterns, whether that’s us as individuals or us as a society or us as a nation,” says Deón. “In order to change any pattern that causes us distress or that we don’t want, we have to see the patterns.”
In her research, Deón noticed the patterns. “There are so many things that mirror each other and we keep coming back to the same solutions,” she says. “I wanted to expose the pattern so that, if we choose, we can make better choices that benefit the nation.
“I hope the book, in that way, fosters hope that we can actually change things,” says Deón, “because there is so much hopelessness around the issues that we’re told are so important, that make us fearful and make us feel like nothing will ever change.
“But it can change,” she says.