In April of 1992 a jury in LA comes together to declare a mainly non-guilty verdict on all charges against the police officer that beat Rodney King. In what begins as a peaceful rally against this verdict turns into a three day long riot in the streets of LA. A few years later a woman named Anna Deavere Smith, in an attempt to creatively document these riots publishes a book entitled Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, full of monologues made up entirely of interviews she held with the many different types of people this occurrence affected. Smith has broken down the series of stories she collected into an order that helps one see the process of a riot. She begins with angry stories of police brutality then verging into the fear of those the riots surrounded and then ending with words of hope from the wisest souls of all. Smith took stories that emphasized each of these points and put them next to each other. Since each group of monologues emphasizes one specific point through many sorts of voices. The reader is given comprehensive understandings as to how these riots could have taken place. Many voices speak much more loudly than one.
             One is first presented with interviews that explain the backdrop to these riots. The first section of Smith's book is appropriately entitled "The Territory." In this sense, the
             Word territory pertains to the idea of LA being broken down into parts, racially, socially economically etc. and the strong sense of rule each part wants to have over some section of the city. In the first set of interviews I examined, both the men who spoke were struggling to understand their personal and societal space they are meant to fit into. The first to speak was Rudy Salas Senior, a Mexican American man whose experience being beaten by the police in 1941, as a teenager is only the beginning of the racial oppression he has had to continue to endure. This extreme police brutality has not only ...