Analysis Of Los Angeles Notebook And Richard Rodriguez's Disappointment From California

California is a place of great disappointment for many people(s). It has disappointed people all the way back to the 1850s during the gold rush, and it is even said to have happened further back, when California was mostly populated by Native Americans. Joan Didion, author of “Los Angeles Notebook”, and Richard Rodriguez, author of Disappointment From California, both agree on this point. In Disappointment From California, Rodriguez describes how different California is from many outsiders ideas of it. He sees how it can be a disappointment, and there is a lot of disrepair in his own expensive neighborhood even, but he also describes how it is also a place of great opportunity for the hard working. Didion, however, sees the disappointment as not being so manmade, but more of a thing of nature. She describes how a certain aspect of nature can drastically negate the quality of life in California, and even in

He describes how his city is in disrepair thanks to a lack of money, and people during the gold rush would head to California to get rich quick, and they would very commonly be disappointed even upon arrival (Rodriguez 222, 223). San Francisco, for instance, has people that at the very least appear to have a lot of money, buying new multi-million dollar houses and having them renovated every couple of years for no real reason whatsoever, while the streets have potholes, landscaping for city property has fallen to the wayside, even schools and public parks are rundown, since nobody is willing to spend their money on the important things that actually help the city (Rodriguez 221, 222). He, as a middle aged man, sees this as an absolute disappointment in the people of California, and he even lives there. You can only imagine how he would he would feel coming from out of state to try and live in California, to only find how many hypocrites (as far as money is concerned) live in the