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The October Surprise converged artists, activists and community members to celebrate our neighborhoods and strengthen creative, grassroots power, using site-specific installations, interventions, art, monuments, performance and other events. Projects were situated throughout the neighborhoods of Northeast Los Angeles the weekend of October 8, 9 and 10 with documentation and discussions held at the Arroyo Arts Collective’s Gallery @ Avenue 50. For details about the project, please visit www.theoctobersurprise.org or call 323-449-9019.
Reseeding Los Angeles, a site-specific community history project by Deborah Thomas and Linda Anne Hoag, took place the weekend of October 8-11 as part of October Surprise: Creative Interventions and Underground Politics in Northeast Los Angeles, a grassroots neighborhood event featuring artist and other activist installations and projects in and around Highland Park (www.theoctobersurprise.org). Reseeding Los Angeles, in which we gave away individually designed packets of chia seeds, is based on an encounter which took place in 1769 between the first group of Spanish explorers who "discovered" the Los Angeles area and the Tongva, its indigenous people. After renaming the Los Angeles River, the explorers first met the Tongva at the present-day intersection of North Broadway and North Spring in Lincoln Heights. On the following day, the Tongva returned with a gift of chia seeds for the Europeans. Claiming that they did not have a container for the seeds, the explorers repeatedly refused the gift. The Tongva then threw the seeds up in the air and on the ground.
For further information contact Deborah at deborahbthomas@earthlink.net or 626 794-3627 or Linda at lahoag@earthlink.net or 323 223-1752.
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We
wondered how history might have been altered if the explorers had graciously
accepted the seeds and respected the culture that was thriving in the
neighborhood. As a symbolic act of reparation, we gave out packets of 
