Event: Time Travel in L.A.’s Historic Filipinotown

Back in 2002, Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti helped designate the neighborhood south of the 101 Freeway and north of Beverly Boulevard, between Glendale Boulevard and Virgil Avenue, as Historic Filipinotown, lovingly known to its residents as Hi Fi. Still, many L.A. residents have little knowledge as to what makes Historic Filipinotown “Filipino” or “historic.”

Our friends over at Public Matters have been hard at work this past year, partnering up with the Pilipino Workers’ Center, UCLA’s Center for Remap, and Hypercities to bring Hi Fi’s hidden stories to the surface. A key player in telling these stories has been PDUB Productions, a group of local teenagers who underwent a video boot camp before jumping directly into their field work: meeting the neighborhood’s longtime residents and documenting its historic sites and events. The results of these groups’ collaborative work are the Mobile Hi Fi Tours. Using digital technology to explore Historic Filipinotown’s buried past, these tours offer a mobile media experience akin to time travel.

On Saturday, September 26, at Pilipino Workers’ Center, PDUB Productions will launch the Mobile Hi Fi Tours from 1 to 6 p.m., followed in the evening from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. by a barrio fiesta style fundraiser for PWC, which includes cultural performances and an outdoor PDUB Production screening under the stars.

For more information on the project, visit PDUB. To reserve a spot on the Hi Fi walking tour here, and on the Jeepney tour here. You can buy a ticket for PWC’s fundraiser barrio fiesta here.

And if you can’t make it out to any of the festivities on Saturday, come out to Good Girl Dinette in Highland Park (one of Jonathan Gold’s 99 essential Los Angeles restaurants) on Wednesday, September 23, and tip generously. All proceeds from tips will go toward the PWC fundraiser as well.