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15. The Isla Vista Adventure
By Carmen Lodise
Before I moved to Isla Vista, I had never lived anyplace
more than three years in a row. Yet, I've lived here most of the
last 18. It's not that I don't ask myself why now and then.
After all, Isla Vista is crowded and noisy. People litter its
streets like they don't really care and rents are out-of-sight
for what you get. And the powers-that-be (the UCSB Administration
and the County of Santa Barbara) don't give a damn about the quality
of life here.
The reason I stay is that Isla Vista is in many ways quite an
extraordinary town. First, you get to meet so many fascinating
people--most of who come to I.V. because of the University. Secondly,
I like getting on my bike, riding down the street and running
into my friends--just like in a small town anywhere.
Thirdly, it's unruly. Most I.V. residents are living on their
own for the first time and are often pushing the limits of what's
acceptable. Combine this with the "occupying force"
attitude of the police, the hands-off attitude of the UCSB Administration,
and the inappropriateness of County (rural) government, and you
have a very special situation--I.V. has always felt like liberated
territory, and I hope it always will.
 But
what I like most about Isla Vista is that it is so easy to get
involved in community-building, and how rewarding this is. When
I moved here, I discovered that all you had to do was talk your
friends into doing something that made sense and then put in a
lot of hard work implementing it. Plus, all the discussions were
at the perfect level--we were thinking globally and acting locally
long before John and Yoko popularized the phrase. It was the perfect
cure for my severe case of alienation, brought on by the studied
realization that the so-called Land of the Free had become a racist,
sexist, militaristic nation. I rolled up my sleeves and went to
work.
 The
vision of the community as a laboratory was a good guide as long
as we were working in the vacuum the County and University created--the
total absence of a community infrastructure. Following the tumultuous
period of 1968-70, there was a lot of cooperation between the
County, UCSB, and I.V.'s community activists. But the planning
and organizing began to create a momentum of its own, and when
I.V.'s residents decided that independent cityhood was the logical
next step in community development, it led us back into conflict
with the local power structure.
The UCSB administration and the County were thrown off balance
by the events of 1970, as the whole world discovered the ghetto
they had consciously cooperated to build. For a few years, these
forces of reaction were willing to throw us some money to run
a few programs in order to keep us busy, but they weren't about
to let us get out from under their control.
The creation of these support organizations did make Isla Vista
a better place in which to live, and the Park District and CETA
jobs sustained the community-building spirit into the 1980s. However,
as Isla Vista enters the 1990s, the community has lost the original
goal in which each organization worked to empower its constituents,
so that in a networking of constituencies, they could empower
the whole town. Community agencies now, for the most part, just
provide good services. And whereas I.V. was once the area's fountainhead
of innovative community programs of recycling, growth-control,
cottage industries, auto-reduction, etc., this beacon has pretty
much fallen silent.
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