Like any world metropolis, Los Angeles is complex. Writers and movie makers have tried to generalize about the L.A. experience, but their generalizations have always turned out to be overly broad  .  Nathaniel West, for example, was right when he said that Los Angeles is a place where dreams usually die and where innocence is quickly extinguished.  But he was wrong, too. Los Angeles celebrates creativity. Dreams flourish. L.A. always seems to be in the midst of cultural experiments, where civic leaders try to invent precedent-setting futures.  It is impossible to produce a unifying, coherent description of Los Angeles. "[We] are a city without a defining narrative," says Los Angeles Times staff writer David Ulin.

What may unify the area's residents is the fact that they are engaged in a high stakes period of cultural change, which creates winners and losers.  It is a period that is marked by the presence of all kinds of individual and ethnic diversity.