Beauty Beyond the Surface
What Lennox Taught Me About Seeing the World
By George Michael Cousineau
People often assume that taste is shaped by luxury — that if you grow up surrounded by manicured neighborhoods, polished architecture, and pristine landscapes, you’ll naturally develop an eye for beauty. My experience has been the opposite.
I grew up in Lennox, in Los Angeles’ South Bay, during the 1980s and ’90s. It was a place where the soundtrack was airplanes descending into LAX, where utility poles carried webs of electrical wires across the sky, and where stucco buildings, liquor stores, auto body shops, and neighborhood taquerias existed side by side. Just a few miles in every direction were places like Inglewood, Hawthorne, Gardena, Lawndale, and Compton—communities too often defined by outsiders through headlines instead of humanity.
Growing up there taught me something that no expensive education or luxury destination ever could: culture lives where people do.
Our neighborhoods weren’t polished. They were lived in. Telephone poles leaned slightly with decades of history. Alleyways doubled as playgrounds. Murals spoke louder than billboards. Families built businesses from nothing, and every block carried stories of immigration, resilience, struggle, and celebration.
Living Lennox also instilled humility. The challenges many families faced were real. Violence, poverty, and systemic neglect weren’t abstract ideas—they were part of the landscape. But so were perseverance, entrepreneurship, neighborliness, and pride. Those communities taught me that strength isn’t loud. Often, it’s simply showing up every day, taking care of your family, and finding joy despite circumstances.
Those lessons quietly became my aesthetic.
Today, I live in Cinco de Diciembre, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Visitors sometimes comment on the exposed electrical wires crisscrossing the streets, the weathered facades, the uneven sidewalks, or buildings that show their age. Some see imperfections.
The telephone poles remind me of home.
The tangled wires don’t bother me because they’ve never represented disorder. To me, they’re signs of neighborhoods that grew organically rather than being master-planned for tourists. They’re evidence of life happening in real time.
- The chipped paint tells me generations have lived there.
- The corner markets tell me people still shop locally.
- The corner markets tell me people still shop locally.
- The street vendors remind me of Los Angeles before everything became curated.
Cinco de Diciembre isn’t trying to impress anyone. That’s precisely what makes it beautiful.
Growing up in the South Bay gave me an appreciation for authenticity over perfection. I don’t need everything to be symmetrical or sanitized to feel at home. In fact, places that wear their history openly often feel more honest than neighborhoods where every lawn is identical and every building looks newly constructed.
Mexico, particularly neighborhoods like Cinco de Diciembre, possesses a kind of visual honesty. Life spills onto the sidewalks. Families gather on porches. Music drifts through open windows. Conversations happen in the street instead of behind closed doors.
That feels familiar because that’s how I grew up.
There’s also something deeply comforting about communities that haven’t erased every sign of age in pursuit of appearance. Beauty isn’t always found in perfection. Sometimes it’s found in endurance.
The older I get, the more grateful I am that I didn’t grow up believing beauty required polish. Lennox gave me different eyes. It taught me to admire neighborhoods for their character rather than their property values. It taught me that culture isn’t manufactured—it’s accumulated over generations of ordinary people building extraordinary lives.
That’s why Puerto Vallarta feels less like an escape and more like a continuation.
Not because it’s the same, but because it speaks the same visual language.
It’s a language of resilience. Of working families. Of streets with personality instead of uniformity. Of architecture shaped by necessity rather than trend.
When I walk through Cinco de Diciembre and look up at telephone poles laced with wires against the blue Mexican sky, I don’t see clutter.
I see life.
And every now and then, I realize that the little kid from Lennox never really left. He just found another neighborhood that reminds him that culture is rarely found where everything is perfect.
It’s found where everything is real
