Coincidentally, I wrote the following essay about Rose Hills Memorial Park exactly a year before my Dad died suddenly of a heart attack. From there, the theory of the place, as Michel Foucault's heterotopia and Edward Soja's Third Space, became my lived reality. It's a commonly special place for many of LA's families; a moving reflection of the city and its people.
 |
| New construction (May 2018) |
Rose Hills Memorial Park: Heterotopia Case Study (May 2014)
Heterotopia is a place that is realistically temporal in the way it can "suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relations designated, mirrored, or reflected (Foucault, 1967)" there - a place that speaks to other places by engaging with multiple imaginations and agencies. As opposed to utopia, an ideal that is unrealistically static, heterotopia accommodates the dynamics of life and movement over time. In this essay, I will attempt to identify and define characteristics of heterotopia using the case study of Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, CA. As a classic example of Foucault's heterotopia, the cemetery "is a space that is connected with all the emplacements of the city or the society or the village, since each individual, each family happens to have relatives in the cemetery (Foucault, 1967)." The study of Rose Hills in contemporary Los Angeles County illustrates key characteristics of heterotopia: displacement of time, disruption of space, simultaneous reflection and contestation of reality, resistance to the dominant culture, and being within the site and between sites (Peterson, 2006).
Rose Hills Memorial Park was established in 1914 and is currently the largest cemetery in North America. Rose Hills is a 1,400-acre cemetery along a hill corridor running East-West along the south edge of the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County, serving generations of local residents. The form and placement of Rose Hills follows the history of post-industrial public health policy that advocated for the distancing of burial sites from urban living quarters to rural, park-like sites on the outskirts of cities (Johnson, 2008). "In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there emerged an obsession with death as an illness (Foucault, 1967)." Rose Hills is a particularly interesting example because of its capacity and role in the San Gabriel Valley to reflect and memorialize, in one place, the multiple origins and traditions from which their clients have come.
Beginning with the construction of Roman Catholic-style buildings in the early 1900s and the subsequent addition of Spanish mission-style churches and modern protestant chapels, Rose Hills continues to develop and build today. Most recently, these burial sites have become increasingly popular with Chinese-American immigrant families who live in nearby San Gabriel Valley. "In the 1980s, waves of Chinese immigrants poured into the San Gabriel Valley and the cemetery found itself at the center of the largest Chinese diaspora in the country... the cemetery began a massive transformation to compete for an increasingly lucrative Chinese funeral business that has seen some family "estates" go for six figures (LA Times, 2014)." Today, Rose Hills offers Chinese cultural advisors for traditional ceremonial guidance in addition to new "neighborhoods" that are designed with principles of Chinese superstition and feng shui, positioned on hillsides facing west toward the Pacific.
"The cemetery built walkways so that mourners wouldn't have to step on graves and risk bad luck. Grave sites are laid out in arcs instead of lines. Staff planted a peach tree as a symbol of immortality and sank a mosaic of lotus into a wall, a symbol of prosperity (LA Times, 2014)."
Rose Hills has modified their staff and policies to accommodate clients with Chinese-speaking consultants and by allowing for non-western burial traditions including on-site feasting, large-scale procession, and paper-burning. Rose Hills is a special collection of Los Angeles memory, located at its edge. As a place that holds and reflects the memory of local residents spanning the past century, Rose Hills is a site that disrupts both time and place - where memory spans back in time and across the globe, held simultaneously in one anachronistic field.
Increasing population growth and urbanization in the past century has transformed Los Angeles County, from once rural small towns on the outskirts of the city to a continuous built sprawl connected by clogged highways. Rose Hills is adjacent to a regional park network and hill corridor parallel to the San Gabriel Valley just east of Downtown LA. The hill corridor is carved out by housing development on its edges and is among the few open spaces in the County that maintains an oak woodland landscape, home to coyotes and deer. The cemetery is shaped by the needs of its nearby residents who live in the urbanized present world. Nearby yet apart, the site offers a relief and disruption to urban patterns. At the regional scale, Rose Hills is a temporary disruption in the urbanized fabric of San Gabriel Valley, a disruption similarly offered by nearby regional parks. Simultaneously, at a neighborhood scale, the home of the dead reflects very clearly the distinct, cultural conclaves that make up San Gabriel Valley. As Los Angeles grows, Rose Hills Memorial Park grows.
While reflecting the world of the living - in its building styles, churches, temples, miniaturized neighborhood designation and estates - the site maintains an aesthetic for the dead that is simultaneously contrary to living in Los Angeles; Rose Hills and its clients maintain reference to the cemetery of mid-19th century England. Advocated in industrial England by reformers lead by John Claudius Loudon, modern cemeteries began to form outside of dwelling spaces and took on a regimented construction with single, rectangular graves set apart from one another. "Loudon was implacably opposed to the custom of burying many bodies close to one another in one grave or within catacombs or family vaults. Each body should rest in 'free soil' and, if within the same plot, with at least six feet depth between each body... An overall systematic arrangement of sectors and subdivided plots assists the management of the site and facilities mapping, registration and record keeping (Johnson, 2008)." Rose Hills, despite its adaptive moves over time, has conserved the order of the modern English cemetery.
While traditional ceremonies and burial practices are adapted over time, adaption is also practiced by its clients. For example, despite Chinese traditional practices of communally housing remains in one place over multiple generations, Chinese-American single-plot burial in Rose Hills is commonly adapted. In this case, adaptation goes both ways - the institution of the cemetery accommodates traditional burial ceremony while clients maintain the traditions of the modern English cemetery institution. In Rose Hills, grave markers are typically laid flat and hills are constructed to maintain the rural memory and spatial typology of the modern park cemetery. In contrast, the cemetery typology in Chinese tradition can take the form of small, clustered houses that hold multiple generations of a family's remains under one roof; a sort of family vault above ground. Rose Hills can be seen as a site for resistance against a dominant culture; rather than a place of pure contestation or pure assimilation, the order of the cemetery is negotiated.
Through his writings on Third Space, Edward Soja gives life to the in-between quality of experience in his framework on understanding space: "Lefebvre goes on to argue that double-illusion is not always composed in such rigidly antagonistic opposition... he argues that each illusion often embodies and nourishes the other. 'The shifting back and forth between the two, and the flickering or oscillatory effect that it produces, are thus just as important as either of the illusions considered in isolation' (Soja, 1996)." In his trialectic framework, three spaces are acknowledged in producing the dynamic in-between: 1) perceived, 2) conceived, and 3) lived. Under the lens of heterotopia, Rose Hills becomes an increasingly set of relations that holds nearly infinite possibilities in one place. The site simultaneously reflects and contests reality on multiple scales: regional, local, and individual, while being perceived, conceived, and lived by multiple agents. An in-between quality of being within and between sites makes for an idiosyncratic understanding of this heterotopic scene - crossing boundaries between life, death, space, and time.
Rose Hills is a place that is realistically temporal, shaped by negotiating forces of perception, conception, and life in the spatial form of burial practice. The cemetery functions as heterotopia through reflection, inversion, suspension, and neutralization of relations between other people and places. "From the moment when people are no longer quite sure that they have a soul, and that the body will resurrect, it becomes perhaps necessary to give much more attention to these mortal remains, which are ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in words (Foucault, 1967)." Rose Hills carries the particular dynamics and relationships that come from those who live in San Gabriel Valley and greater Los Angeles County; Rose Hills comes to express moving layers of which the concept of heterotopia attempts to hold.
References
Johnson, P. (2008) The modern cemetery; a design for life, Social & Cultural Geography 9: 777-788.
Johnson, P. (2006) Unravelling Foucault's 'different spaces,' History of the Human Sciences 19: 76-89.
Michel Foucault (2008, orig. 1968) Of Other Spaces. From Deahene and L De Cauter (eds.) Heterotopia and the City, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 13-39.
Soja, Edward W. (1996) The Tralectics of Spatiality and Exploring the Spaces that Difference Makes, in Thirdspace (Chapter 2 and 3). Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell pp. 53-105.
