Settler Erasures and Reclaiming Indigeneity in City of Ghosts

Los Angeles has been deeply shaped by settler colonialism resulting in the continual erasure of Indigenous people. Yet, the city was built on Gabrielino/Tongva and Chumash homelands and has become an increasingly important site for American Indian and Indigenous peoples from Latin America. This paper engages with the Netflix animated series, City of Ghosts (2021), which unveils hidden histories of ethnic and racial communities, including Indigenous peoples in Los Angeles, through "ghostly" encounters. Sociologist Avery Gordon reminds us that ghosts allow us to make visible and name relationships that have been rendered invisible as a result of settler colonial practices. Our analysis of City of Ghosts considers what it means to begin with Indigenous L.A. as an analytical focus of departure for narratives about urban place-making that disrupt settler colonial logics. Through a framework that draws on counter narratives, countermapping and Indigenous urbanisms, we provide a more nuanced and complex understanding of the city as an Indigenous space and the hauntings that refuse erasure.