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Racial formation and gentrification in Los Angeles

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Racial formation and gentrification in Los Angeles

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Racial Formation and Gentrification in Los Angeles

By Alfredo Linares Huante
Department of Sociology
University of Southern California
851 Downey Way
Hazel & Stanley Hall 314
Los Angeles, CA 90089
huante@usc.edu

December 2018

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................... 4
Chapter One: Introduction .................................................................................. 6
Chapter Two: Racialized Spatial Imaginaries in Los Angeles (1973-1993) .. 27
Chapter Three: Gente-fication and Gentrification as Racial Projects ........... 68
Chapter Four: The Relational Gentrification of Mexican American Women
Activists .............................................................................................................. 107
Chapter Five: Conclusion................................................................................. 127
References .......................................................................................................... 132

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Acknowledgements
“I owe Sallie Mae but owe my people way more”
-Rapsody

This work would not have been possible without research support from the
Latino Center for Leadership Development and the Tower Center at Southern
Methodist University, the UCLA James and Sylvia Thayer Research Fellowship, the
Palmer Endowed Fellowship and the Oakley Endowed Fellowship at USC.
To faculty and mentors who pushed me to pursue my research interests and
practiced great mentorship and support before, throughout, and after the dissertation
process, thank you: Dr. Leland Saito, Dr. George Sanchez, Dr. Manuel Pastor, Dr. Leo
Estrada, Dr. Daniel Solorzáno, Dr. Lorie Frasure-Yokley, Dr. Tracy Lachica
Buenavista, Dr. Dimpal Jain, Dr. Pedro Nava, and Dr. Arshad Ali. To my friends and
colleagues who made the writing process manageable and helped me expose and
navigate the hidden curriculum of graduate school: Dr. Iris Lucero, Dr. Joanna Perez,
Dr. Daniel Olmos, Dr. Jazmin Muro, Dr. Kushan Dasgupta, Dr. Jennifer Candipan, and
all the amazing scholars who have populated the UCLA RAC those beautiful Fridays at
More Hall. The friendship and support of our amazing budding- scholars was especially
valuable at the back end of this dissertation, thank you dearly: Dr. Kimberley Miranda,
Dr. Natalia Toscano, and Dr. Gustavo Garcia. To my therapist who helped me weather
the, at times turbulent, waves of emotions that characterize the present day graduate
school experience.

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Sincere gratitude and love to my family that has continued to support me
throughout my various educational endeavors. My parents, who continuously reminded
me to keep my feet on the ground no matter how high in the clouds my head may have
floated. My brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews who kept me motivated to
continue on. Without the caretaking help of my parents, my sisters, and my nieces—
especially Rosy, Enedina, and Jasmine, this dissertation would not have been possible,
Christine and I are indebted to each of you. To my grandmother whose love left a
strong impression on all her grandkids despite the distance and borders, Maria Maura
Perez Herrera. To my good friend since childhood, my cousin Orlando Linares. To all
the Linares family- thank you for your support. The love and support from the
transformative spaces incubated and fostered by the Kalpulli Xikalli, and particularly
the Gonzales familia, was critical in reminding my family and I of our commitment to
all our relations— thank you, we love you, and we look forward to continuing to make
relations with you all. And, of course, to all the people and scholars that have come
before.
Finally, thank you to Christine. Thank you for Janitzio and for the deep labor
and deep love you’ve continuously provided our relationship and our family. Janitzio
and I are proud of you and your commitment to making the world a more loving and
caring place for all families. I love you. Janitzio, thank you for being here and for being
you. You are my heartbeat.

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Chapter One: Introduction

In the 1980’s Chicano historian Rodolfo Acuña’s offered the following
observation with regard to the relationship between Los Angeles’ civic leadership
and Eastside barrios:
"For the moment, the community east of the river appears safe. A
lull in the economy-- in part due to high interest rates and inflation-
- has tempered federal subsidies to construction and lessened the
pressure to develop the periphery. Population density and the
proximity to the downtown core make it almost inevitable
that…Boyle Heights land will be used more intensely...The
division of labor has increased and a subclass of undocumented
workers within the subclass of Mexican Americans now occupies
the Eastside. Whether it is to the benefit of the ruling elite to
maintain this reserve labor pool in a concentrated area has not been
definitely determined." (Acuña, 1984: 268-270)

In this concluding section of his 1984 book A Community Under Siege: A
Chronicle of Chicanos, East of the Los Angeles River, 1945-1975, Acuña
wondered whether existing land uses in Boyle Heights would be revisited by city
officials in ways that would complement escalating downtown redevelopment he
identified at the time. He was not alone in making these observations. Pointing to
the center of a Los Angeles map, the Los Angeles Times quoted a Boyle Heights
priest who asserted that “‘Because they have built up so much [in downtown],
they’ll have to move this way’ moving his fist from west to east.” Until then, the
priest argued, Boyle Heights had been “‘a pearl that nobody [had] noticed, a land
of opportunity’” (Sahagun 1983). These observations regarding the future of
power relations between Los Angeles civic leaders and the barrio serve as a

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fitting introduction to a contemporary analysis of these power relations threaded
throughout this dissertation.
A site of increasing public and private investment, Boyle Heights stands in
the urban spotlight as the next community to undergo gentrification in Los
Angeles. Ongoing redevelopment of downtown Los Angeles has sustained an
eastward direction towards the Los Angeles River bringing gentrification
concerns to the collective Boyle Heights doorstep. Without a clear distinction
between neighborhood improvement and gentrification, residents and activists
remain cautious of new amenities such as the Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension
and related infrastructure improvements.
As the anchor of a series of city-led structural investments in Boyle
Heights, ridership along the line has fallen short of projections as it reaches its
tenth year in operation. Linking downtown and the Eastside by traversing Boyle
Heights, the light rail was considered a particularly powerful magnet for
gentrification. Yet, even as ridership struggles, the improved streetscapes and the
rail line stops provide a coveted amenity to existing and potential residents.
Today, passengers take the Eastside Metro Gold Line from Union Station
eastward along 1st Street to the Little Tokyo Station before crossing the Los
Angeles River entering “the flats” of Boyle Heights where passengers stop at the
Pico Aliso Station to find prominent Chicano art galleries alongside upscale
White-owned art galleries that have found refuge in the barrio’s cheap rent. This
area adjacent to the Los Angeles River has been a unique battle ground for anti-
gentrification activists who view the series of high-end art galleries as catering to

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the largely white art population while, simultaneously driving up rents for
economically vulnerable Boyle Heights residents. As the Gold Line continues east
along 1
st
Street, the light rail travels underground while at street level small
businesses and community organizations flank each side of the street. These
various organizations work together to keep the fabric of Boyle Heights in tact
amidst ongoing changes in the built environment. Operating for just under ten
years, the light rail is a symbolic representation of downtown civic leader’s
commitment to invest in Boyle Heights. Yet, for barrio residents the rail line
functions as a temporal marker indicated when gentrification became most
“present” in the community. As pursuits for authenticity draw people and capital
to the historic neighborhood questions regarding who will benefit from increasing
redevelopment remain popular topics of discussion at the local and regional scale.
The present juncture facing the ethnic Mexican barrio of Boyle Heights poses a
unique opportunity to understand how neighborhood change occurs over time and
how such processes are rationalized or challenged by public officials, residents,
and activists.
Analyzing gentrification in Boyle Heights is timely and relevant as local,
national, and international coverage has closely documented the ways private and
public investment has impacted the working class, immigrant community.
Particularly subject to journalistic coverage are the accounts of community based
resistance to symbols of gentrification that emerge in the barrio. Documenting
ongoing examples of gentrification in communities of color, however, have
exploited racial dynamics for attention without interrogating the power relations

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undergirding discussions and debates surrounding race and racism. As the LA
Times remarked after persistent coverage of gentrification in the barrio “at its
core, gentrification is an economic force, not a racial one,” (Times Editorial 2017)
an assertion that simultaneously dismissed claims by anti-gentrification protestors
and evaded an opportunity to promote public discussions of race and racism in
urban policy through a mainstream public medium. Such assessments regarding
the absence of critical analyses are not exclusive to journalistic accounts of
gentrification, but gentrification scholarship as well (Slater 2006). Establishing
and elaborating on the ways gentrification is a racial force—or as I argue, a racial
project—as much as it is an economic force, drives the research in this
dissertation.
Understanding how gentrification advances is pertinent for urban studies
not only for the sheer percentage of the U.S. population residing in cities but also
for the present shifts in racial demographics. Contemporary projections of a
shrinking, aging white population across the United States continue to drive
preparations for an immense labor market exit as baby boomers retire. As a result
of this large-scale departure, social scientists argue, the future vitality of the
nation — a robust labor market, population growth, and a sizable middle class—
is predicated on the expansive incorporation of racial minorities into the labor
market, as well as broadening access to education and homeownership. For some
scholars such integration precedes the ensuing arrival of diversity, racial equality,
and, ultimately, the end of racism. Los Angeles, however, has experienced a
majority-minority demographic composition for a quarter-century and faces rising

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racial inequality. How racism persists in a majority-minority city provides insight
into racial formation processes at the local scale and positions Los Angeles as a
bellwether for many U.S. cities with growing racial minority populations.
Disproportionately impacting vulnerable communities, gentrification is central to
interrogating how nascent racial hierarchies are spatialized in the city.
This research centers on the historic and contemporary relationship between
the City of Los Angeles and the barrio of Boyle Heights to reveal how
gentrification processes directly engage local legacies of racial segregation and
histories of race-based movements. To do so, I ask two sets of questions: (1) How
do local residents interpret or define processes of gentrification? How do long-term
and new residents alike seek to rationalize or resist gentrification? (2) To what
extent does contemporary gentrification in Boyle Heights reveal new racial and
class formations in the community? The city? If so, who benefits? I answer these
questions by documenting existing residents’ (immigrant and U.S. born)
experiences of gentrification and comparing them to, both, Latina/o and white
newcomers to develop a relational understanding of gentrifiers and gentrification
processes.
As a mixed-method study, my dissertation draws from archival material,
participant observations, digital ethnography, and semi-structured interviews.
Archives of Los Angeles city planning documents and their appraisals of Boyle
Heights during and after the Chicano movement historicize contemporary
experiences with gentrification. This archival work was enriched by the narratives
of interviewees in my project who were, by way of their current tenure, activism,

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and/or work in the neighborhood, viewed as meaningful contributors to local
gentrification conversations. Participant observation and digital ethnography
complemented interviews to more fully document how community members
responded to various gentrification-related news stories, reports, and/or events.
Together, these methods centralize the experience of working class, immigrant
and U.S.-born Mexican residents. Centralizing these perspectives reveals the
mechanisms of oppression that maintain domination and can inform a re-
conceptualization of the gentrification processes.
Gentrification as a topic of scholarly inquiry and public debate has
increased exponentially since the term was coined half a century ago. Over this
time, processes identified as gentrification have increased in cities across the U.S.
and the globe. Paralleling the neoliberalism of urban political economies,
gentrification remains a pertinent issue in many corners of the globe. Yet, despite
the overall rise in discourse on the subject, gentrification remains contested as
cities attempt to reconcile exploding populations and ongoing housing shortages.
Rather than dwelling on the ways Los Angeles gentrification processes mirror
those in other cities, this dissertation re-conceptualizes how race is conventionally
understood within gentrification literature and how Latinos in Los Angeles fit
within it. Contributing a nuanced understanding to gentrification allows local
policy makers, politicians, and activists understand the way gentrification
maintains a localized expression that is often overlooked.
Boyle Heights, one of the handful of Latino barrios found east of the Los
Angeles River. Among Boyle Heights’ estimated 150,000 residents, half are

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resident born and half foreign born. Among foreign born residents, about 35
percent are unauthorized, non-citizen residents, compared to 20 percent at the
County level and 15 percent at the State level. The majority, 94 percent, of barrio
residents are Latino and, specifically, Mexican origin. Most residents in the area
are renters with only about a quarter of them owning their homes. The median
income of residents hovers at about $33,000 compared to that of $55,000 at the
Los Angeles County level. This brief overview of Boyle Heights highlights the
concentration of marginalized residents in this particular barrio compared to the
city and county as a whole.
A collection of three chapters, this dissertation forges new pathways in
gentrification and race scholarship by identifying the ways contemporary
neighborhood change is always in conversation with racial formation. The central
thesis of my dissertation contends gentrification in a majority-minority area
challenges conventional notions of gentrification and advances local-informed
analysis of Latina/o racial formation. My research contributes to racial formation,
Latina/o urbanism, and gentrification scholarship taking place in Latina/o urban
spaces. A potential limitation of this study is the in-depth focus on Boyle Heights.
By focusing on Boyle Heights, only one of a handful of Eastside barrios, limits
generalizability of my arguments to neighboring ethnic enclaves surrounding Los
Angeles’ downtown that similarly face threats of gentrification. Places such as
Chinatown, Little Tokyo, and Highland Park are all areas that may have not only
provided a comparative case study but also supported the arguments made in this
paper. Specifically, such comparative analysis may better capture the ways views

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of and responses to gentrification travel between barrios or other ethnic enclaves
as well as longtime residents’ responses to neighborhood change.
Contemporary Cities
As Acuña’s noted his observations in the 1980s, Los Angeles made strides
in redeveloping the downtown core. Joining cities across the U.S., Los Angeles’
elites were particularly interested in transforming the area into a site of
residential, workplace, and entertainment. For Mayor Bradley, this transformation
was a fitting response to, what he called the “urban cancer,” of blight threatening
downtown. Striving to save the city from blight, downtown redevelopment took
precedence by the 1980s (Bradley 1975). Such shift in policies contrasted city
urban planning commission which had only earlier that year expressed their
discontent with, what they viewed as, inefficient uses of city resources to
redevelop downtown. Arguing “any sizable build-up of downtown Los Angeles is
frowned upon” the planning commission remained “adamant that downtown
planning efforts address themselves to social problems, such as skid row and
downtown housing, rather than extending any aids to private investment creating
additional high-rise commercial buildings.” The tensions between both the city
planning commission and the department and Bradley would persist until pro-
growth tenets of the Bradley administration would take hold during the 1980s
(Deener, Erie, Kogan, and Stuart 2013). Indeed, the contemporaneous drive to
make Los Angeles a global city would develop a bifurcated economy with a
growth in high wage and high skill jobs as well as a similar growth in low-wage,
low skilled jobs. The hour glass economic structure would persist as Los Angeles’

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rise as a global city during the last quarter of the twentieth century (Scott and Soja
1998).
The dot com boom and the “rise of the creative class” (Florida 2002) at the
turn of the twenty-first century in places like New York and Los Angeles acted as,
as proponents of the creative class thesis, incubators for the most creative and
talented people. As a result, cities attracted these groups and eventually achieved
heightened status as global cities. Urban policies and practices seeking to attract
this population had the effect, however, of exacerbating patterns of inequality
after the Great Recession. Today’s cities are not simply sites of the “creative
class” but also characteristic of a “winner-take-all urbanism” (Florida 2017)
which only generate advantages for the most well-off sectors of the urban
economy and leaves working class and service sector as well as creatives
increasingly behind. This is particularly the case in cities like Los Angeles
experiencing tight housing markets and sluggish housing supply. By hoarding the
spoils of the value generated by cities, elites are disproportionately the
benefactors of global cities and those best able to weather rising housing costs.
The cumulative effects are scenarios where those with the ability to pay are
granted the widest access to the city’s real estate and, ultimately, the ability to
stay in those neighborhoods. In contrast, blue-collar, service sector workers, and,
increasingly, the lower-middle class, are faced with prospects of displacement.
The hour glass economy in cities became common in cities across the U.S. and
the world (Lees, Shin, and López-Morales 2016). During this macro-scale urban

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transformation, gentrification has been utilized to advance urban policies and
practices that have disadvantaged working class urban residents.

Gentrification in Late Capitalism
The rise of gentrification, then, is squarely situated in the larger story of
the revitalization of cities and the closely related tight housing markets. The tenets
of the creative class thesis captured the imagination of urban leaders and policy
makers seeking to lessen ailing political economies with “walkable, pedestrian-
friendly streets, bike lanes, parks, exciting art and music scenes, and vibrant areas
where people could gather in cafés and restaurants” (Florida 2017). Yet without
parallel efforts to combat poverty and keep housing prices affordable, attracting
highly skilled, creative workers to large cities only increased urban inequality.
Gentrification literature has, in large part, sought to understand how this
inequality is advanced through neighborhood change.
Since being coined in 1960s London by sociologist Ruth Glass (1965),
gentrification scholars have continuously debated the parameters of the term,
seeking to grasp the complexities and nuances embedded in the re-investment of
capital in previously disinvested urban areas. This early definition of
gentrification described the process of middle and upper-class populations
moving into blighted, working-class neighborhoods engaged in the upgrading of
Victorian housing stock—a process that would eventually replace the working
class residents all together. Such early definitions focused on the rehabilitation of
old housing stock as a key characteristic of the gentrification process. Today,

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characteristics associated with contemporary gentrification are more expansive.
Among those elements included are:
a. An encroaching arts district/ art galleries into working-class
communities.
b. Infrastructure improvements (e.g. transportation).
c. Proximity to downtown redevelopment.
d. Displacement, evictions, etc.
e. Rising rents.
f. A significant presence of old housing stock.

This broader conceptualization of gentrification has, in turn, encouraged scholars
to identify fundamental processes to define the term. In this case four, core
elements are proposed.
1. The reinvestment of capital.
2. Social upgrading of the area by incoming high-income groups.
3. Landscape change.
4. Direct or indirect displacement of low-income groups.

(Davidson and Lees 2005)
While these four elements provide the essential processes of gentrification,
scholars have also considered the macro-level trends that influence these
characteristics. For example, the contraction of the middle-class nationwide, the
transformation of the labor market, concern over cities as mass entertainment
centers and increasing economic precarity for working-class residents. At the
micro scale, gentrification scholarship has been interested in examining a variety
of metrics to measure indicators of gentrification. Among factors utilized to do so
are racial turnover, educational attainment of a neighborhood, median household
income or changes in home values, while, still others, rely primarily changes on
census data over time. As scholarship on gentrification has grown exponentially

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across theoretical and methodological approaches, there is nevertheless a general
consensus that gentrification has become prevalent across urban centers across the
U.S. at the turn of the 21
st
century.
In this way, whether one considers gentrification taking place in a
neighborhood depends on the ways it is defined. Individuals may not consider
gentrification in Boyle Heights as an impressive concern because, some claim,
large scale (direct) displacement of long-time residents does not exist. For
example, in response to claims of gentrification, councilmember Jose Huizar,
representative for Boyle Heights and a couple of neighboring barrios opined “I
just don't see this mass-scale gentrification happening” (Mejia and Saldivar 2016).
For Huizar, without changing demographics or large scale displacement,
gentrification would not register as a threat to constituents. For this dissertation,
gentrification is considered closer to Neil Smith’s definition as “the process by
which central urban neighborhoods that have undergone disinvestments and
economic decline experience a reversal, reinvestment, and the in-migration of a
relatively well-off middle- and upper middle-class population.” (1998: 198). By
deemphasizing displacement, my analysis can better capture the ways
neighborhood change is interpreted, rationalized, and challenged by individuals
deemed to benefit from neighborhood change as well as those who are victimized
by the process.
Another dimension of gentrification research seeks to understand who
gentrifiers are. While the prevailing gentrification narratives centralize the hipster
archetype (often racialized as white) entering a working class neighborhood to

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secure affordable housing or maybe an art studio. This narrative with the white
hipster in the leading role occupies the forefront of our collective imagination and
influences how many of us come to understand gentrification in urban settings.
However, less is understood about how white gentrifiers navigate majority-
minority neighborhoods. Or relatedly, how fitting are terms such as gentrifier to
racial groups, such as Latinos, for example?
Theories of urban and neighborhood change increasingly examined
questions of gentrification and revitalization over the last few decades (Schwirian
1983, Gotham 2001). Broadly interested in the movement of people and capital
back to the city, the literature has, on the one hand, evaluated the ways capital
accumulation drives uneven development and capitalist urban revitalization (Smith
1996 and 2002) and, on the other hand, sought to explain why preferences for urban
living have risen (Caulfield 1994; Ley 1996; Florida 2002). Focusing on the causes
and consequences of urban transformation, this turn in urban and neighborhood
change literature has not prioritized questions regarding how these processes
implicate local racial hierarchies in communities of color and, particularly, in
majority minority cities such as Los Angeles. Gentrification scholarship has largely
focused on white populations and their roles in this neighborhood change process.
In light of this tradition scholars of color have moved to frontload critical theories
of race in neighborhood change literature seeking to understand how racial
hierarchies influence the gentrification process at the local level (Powell and
Spencer 2003, Boyd 2008, Kirkland 2008, McFarlane 2009, Betancur 2011). Powell
and Spencer (2003) note, a racial analysis is particularly relevant in gentrification

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studies in U.S. cities as those affected are disproportionately people of color. This
dissertation contributes to this literature.
Mainstream gentrification scholars Lees, Slater, Wyly (2007) have noted the
lack of scholarship examining urban change issues at the intersection of race and
gentrification stemming primarily from interests in the experience of middle class
people of color who are involved in gentrifying communities of color. Emphasis on
gentrifiers of color, while insightful, leave understudied other dynamics of race and
class present in processes of gentrification. Grounded in critical theories of race
gentrification studies stand to benefit from interrogating existing racialized social
structures and accounting for how neighborhood changes affect (or not) normative
spatial arrangements
Challenging the conventional gentrification story, Los Angeles offers a
unique opportunity to understand how majority minority cities may offer new
insights to a complicated process and, in turn, offer potential insights for cities
slated to face increasing populations of people of color. With its sizable majority
minority population, what changes when one considers Los Angeles among the
often citied U.S. cities associated with gentrification such as New York, Chicago,
Philadelphia, and San Francisco? Seeking to explore the class and racial
implications of gentrification asks scholars to closely examine the two “middles”
subject of urban and race scholarship. The middle class pervasively viewed as
evaporating in cities across the nation central to urban scholars seeking to curb the
shrinking size of this population. The second middle is the growing Latina/o and
Asian population subject of race scholarship seeking to locate these growing

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group within the nation’s traditional Black/white racial hierarchy. The nexus of
these two “middles” is relevant in helping understand how gentrification takes
place in Los Angeles and how it might take place with cities facing imminent
majority minority populations.
The Racial Project of Gentrification
Gentrification and critical race scholarship have each prospered over the
late twentieth- and early twenty-first century their respective progress has largely
occurred in conceptual isolation. Critical theories have identified racism and in a
post-Civil Rights era (Bonilla-Silva 2010, Omi and Winant 2014[1994]),
however, less is understood how theories unfurl at the local scale. Similarly, while
gentrification literature has underscored the ways urban transition perpetuates
economic inequality in communities of color (Brown-Saracino 2009; Less, Slater,
and Wyly 2008; Patillo 2007), race remains fundamentally understood as static
throughout these process. My dissertation argues that gentrification, understood as
a racial project, engages in processes of place-making as well as race-making and,
in doing so, sheds light on the ways that Latina/o and Chicana/o, identity is
rearticulated in ways that reveal a nuanced racial hierarchy.
I utilize Omi and Wiant’s (2014) concept of racial projects to re-
conceptualize gentrification and its relationship to communities of color. Doing
the ideological work of racialization, racial projects interrogate the ways racial
meaning at the individual level is extended to social relationships and groups, and,
for this study, relationships at the urban scale. As a racial project, then, place-

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making attributed to gentrification is best understood as, simultaneously, involved
in race-making.
Where dominant theories in the sociology of race and ethnicity center on
macro-level and individual level dynamics, this dissertation contributes to meso-
level analysis of processes like gentrification to uncover how racism, and by
extension racial hierarchies, adapt in majority-minority contexts. Centralizing race
as a social construction contributes to conventional urban studies on gentrification
that consider race as preexisting sociological ‘fact’ of social life resulting in static
conceptualizations of racial groups and their experiences with gentrification
across cities. Rather than foreclosing opportunities to understand how racism
adapts, this study seeks to advance gentrification scholarship by examining how
neighborhood change engages in (re)constituting local racial hierarchies.
That race and racism adapt to maintain White supremacy has long been a
central thesis in critical race theories (Bell 1992; Omi and Winant 2014; Bonilla-
Silva 2010). Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich (2009) posit majority-minority
populations will give way to a new racial order mirroring racial hierarchies in
Latin America. These tripartite hierarchies consist of Whites at the top, “honorary
Whites” in the middle, and “collective Black” at the bottom. According to the
authors, this racial structure remains fundamentally organized around the same
Black-White poles yet works to differentiate in more nuanced ways. The authors
argue, for example, brown-skinned Latinos might be included in the “collective
black” stratum and lighter-skinned Latinos positioned as part of the middle
“honorary White” stratum viewed as a tentative position aligned with Whites.

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Also influencing a racial group’s location within this tri-racial hierarchy are ever-
expanded notions of Whiteness through phenotype, class status, homeownership,
education, citizenship, and/or culture (Murguia and Saenz 2002; O’Brien 2008;
Pulido and Pastor 2013).
The significance of research advanced in this dissertation contribute to
sociological theories of racial formation as well as qualitative studies of
gentrification. Motivated by analyses of racial inequality which link macrosocial
conditions to processes at the microsocial scale, my work reveals the social
interaction between social structure and individual actors. In a post-Great
Recession context that has further driven income and wealth inequity along racial
lines, how race and racism unfurl in contexts of state-led gentrification
necessitates a race-conscious inquiry. The co-constitutive racial and economic
anxieties resulting from the present political economy in Los Angeles remain
underexplored by urban sociologists. Moreover, the racial transition of historic
places, such as Boyle Heights, is often examined by sociologists in isolation from
legacies of activism, community history and racial formation unintentionally
resulting in impressions of gentrification as singular events to be measured rather
than protracted processes informing and informed by localized racial social
structures to be transformed.
Dissertation Overview
The following dissertation is an in-depth, multimethod qualitative study of
Boyle Heights. A collection of three chapters, this research project forges new
pathways in gentrification and race scholarship by identifying the ways

23
contemporary neighborhood change maintains an ongoing conversation with
racial formation processes. Organized into three substantive chapters, the
dissertation explores this conversation by examining the macro, meso, and micro
scales at which racial projects interface with questions of neighborhood change in
Boyle Heights.
The first substantive chapter, “Racialized Spatial Imaginaries in Los
Angeles: 1973-1993,” looks at how city administrators and planners came to view
Boyle Heights as a site of potential redevelopment given its racially-informed
history as a site of exclusion. Specifically, this chapter answers the question: how
did Los Angeles’ first African-American Mayor of Los Angeles and his
administration pursue pro-growth conditions during their twenty-year tenure?
This chapter demonstrates that in Latino barrios of Los Angeles, local
state agencies gained public support by utilizing progressive rhetoric and
strategies that emphasized citizen participation while insidiously advancing pro-
growth policies. I draw upon archival material from the Tom Bradley
administration (1973–1993), the Calvin S. Hamilton Collection, the Southern
California Regional Planning Collection, and Eastside weekly newspapers— the
Eastside Sun and Belvedere Citizen— to analyze how city administrators
imagined the historically segregated Boyle Heights barrio and rationalized its
inclusion into the city core. Initially supporting barrio land use policies that
affirmed the Chicano Movement tenets, Mayor Tom Bradley’s interest in central
city redevelopment helped re-conceptualize the historic core of downtown L.A.,
including Boyle Heights, as a future site for middle class employment and

24
residence. Appropriating values and language of the Chicano Movement that
prioritized “community control” of city-led planning projects in the barrio,
Bradley worked to gear planning efforts towards supporting, rather than
contrasting, the mayor’s efforts for central city redevelopment. Findings highlight
two competing racial imaginaries—the local state imaginary and the barrio
imaginary—that represent two competing value perspectives of Boyle Heights.
While racialized imaginaries affirm the evolving nature of race and racism, they
also exemplify how history-informed analysis sheds light on city officials’
rationalization of policies that lead to gentrification over time. Finally, this macro-
scale analysis reveals how narratives of citizen-led planning combined with
notions of free market to rationalize racial inequality. Absent such analysis,
contemporary interpretations of gentrification are read as single events initiated
solely by hipsters seeking to gentrify a working class community.
Chapter Three of the dissertation utilizes media analysis to argue towards
theorizing gentrification as a racial project. I examine how gentrification
functions as a racial project and supports new forms of racialization to maintain
uneven development along racial lines. How racial formation processes unfurl at
the local scale expands conventional understanding of racial formation theory and
practice while, simultaneously, illustrating the centrality of urban geography in
race-making. Interrogating the ways gentrification is interpreted by residents and
outsiders reveals how the color-lines in the barrio are reorganized around whether
groups and/or individuals support or challenge gentrification. This chapter finds
new race and class formations are developed by casting the barrio itself and

25
significant portions of the Mexican American population as “honorary white.”
Barrio residents favoring gentrification within the community are racialized by
pro-growth coalitions as “honorary white,” while anti-gentrification activists are
viewed as labeled as “silly” and “terrible” minority. The subsequent racialization
of Latina/os pit residents in opposition to each other and do so in ways that reify
extant power relations. As a result, conventional descriptions of gentrification as
racial and class transition towards wealthier white residential community
insufficiently capture how the construction of race remains ongoing as majority-
minority populations rise. Despite colorblind and post-racial ideologies espoused
in majority-minority cities like Los Angeles, this racial demographic landscape
has fostered emerging racial formations alongside gentrification resulting in an
increase in racial, political, and economic inequality. Demonstrating the ways
whiteness and Latino identity are re-constituted in relation to gentrification
illustrates the importance of place in understanding local racial hierarchies and
also underscores how localized gentrification studies point to nuances otherwise
overlooked in multi-site studies.
Chapter Four examines how gender shapes perceptions and experiences of
gentrification. In this chapter, I examine how women of color perceive themselves
in relation to neighborhood change. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and
interviews with anti-gentrification activists this paper seeks to locate immigrant,
Mexican women within gentrification scholarship. Gentrification is contextual
and advances in ways specific to place, how women of color across cities
experience neighborhood change in relation to their positionality within the urban

26
hierarchy can better centralize vulnerable populations in responses to
gentrification and displacement. Understanding the position of women of color in
the context of gentrification contributes to growing literature evaluating the social
location of gentrifiers. Where inquiries into the role of white gentrifiers in and
motives for participating in neighborhood change have become prioritized, race
and class tensions reveal a more gradated or relational gentrification process for
women of color in a majority minority context.

27

Chapter Two: Racialized Spatial Imaginaries in Los Angeles
(1973-1993)

Introduction

Development in downtown Los Angeles has maintained a significant pace
and scale during the last two decades. Increasing commercial and residential
density in the central business district (CBD) has expanded. Similar to other urban
centers, communities of color surrounding the CBD have become sites of
gentrification as affluent renters and homebuyers to Los Angeles transform
predominantly immigrant enclaves. One such neighborhood community is Boyle
Heights, an ethnic Mexican barrio. Located on what has historically been
considered the "non-white" side of the Los Angeles colorline, the Los Angeles
River, Boyle Heights’ disproportionate stock of historic and affordable housing
has rendered the neighborhood an increasingly coveted site for real estate
investors and upper middle-class first-time homebuyers. The recent opening of
the Edward Ross Roybal Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension—a light rail
connecting the Latino Eastside with revitalizing downtown L.A.—has ushered a
heightened level of public and private development investment into the
historically disinvested barrio. Proponents of prevailing economic development
logic argue the light rail is an economic boon for residents and business owners
alike, promising “trickle-down” economic activity directly and/or indirectly into
the barrio.

28
Concerns over gentrification and displacement crystalized in early 2014
when a widely- circulated flyer created by a local real estate company asked
affluent downtown Los Angeles residents "Why rent in downtown when you can
buy in Boyle Heights?" (Sulaiman, 2014). To entice potential homebuyers, it also
offered a bike tour through the “charming, historic, and bikeable neighborhood,”
generating anti-gentrification discussions and organizing efforts by barrio
residents. Ultimately, the tour was cancelled and the real estate company issued
an apology to the Boyle Heights community. The flyer, according to one barrio
resident, reflected an imminent gentrification “wave” coming from downtown Los
Angeles. Through these descriptions, both the barrio resident, intentionally, and
the real estate agent, unintentionally, embodied a historically contentious
relationship between downtown Los Angeles and the Chicana/o barrio. The
unequal power relations between the two micro-geographies allude to a history of
racialized exclusion, political disenfranchisement, and economic austerity towards
Boyle Heights by the local state—one that has generated two distinct and
competing imaginaries regarding the future of the barrio. These historically
grounded, racialized spatial imaginaries help researchers not only consider how
urban inequality has developed over time, but how these urban inequalities are
exacerbated in relation to localized racial formations.
Blight, Urban Renewal, and Boyle Heights, California
Part of the legacy of disinvestment and exclusion, present manifestations
of gentrification are the result of long-term political projects and are best
understood through an analysis attentive to historic and evolving relationship

29
between the local state and the ethnic barrio—a relationship contextualized by
redevelopment and ideologies of colorblind racism. An increasing commitment to
revitalize Los Angeles’s downtown set the groundwork for investments in the
historic downtown area and surrounding historic neighborhoods, including Boyle
Heights. Where Chavez Ravine and Bunker Hill transformed under the auspices
of urban renewal’s police power through eminent domain, Boyle Heights would
not be subject to property seizures predicated on slum eradication; rather,
redevelopment ostensibly sought to rehabilitate rather than demolish sites of
“blight” (Teaford, 2000).
More than physical deterioration of housing, blight became viewed by
City Hall as “an interaction between social, economic, educational, and physical
factors” (Joyce, 1976). A combination that led to “disease, crime juvenile
delinquency, blighted lives and hazards to health, safety and morals . . .
[imposing] a great strain of the community’s economy” (Roybal, 1959). However,
some areas were considered “worth saving” from “the menace of urban blight”
(Roybal, 1959) and required re-imagining these places otherwise abandoned by
the state as worthy sites of public and private investment. During Tom Bradley’s
tenure as mayor, policies that sought to address blight actually intersected with
popular planning models as well as with efforts to revitalize downtown Los
Angeles through appeals for white, affluent residents to return to the city. The
eastwardly location of Boyle Heights—in the shadow of LA’s intensifying and
expansive downtown—offers a unique opportunity to explore how the present
threat of gentrification emerged during this historical moment.

30
During the period under Tom Bradley’s mayorship, from 1973 to 1993, I
focus on the perceptions and narratives emerging from two projects involving
Boyle Heights. Elected as the first African-American mayor in a white-majority
city and supported by the “rainbow coalition” of Black and Jewish voters,
Bradley’s tenure is largely defined through pro-growth policies that fostered
central city development as well as the city’s first rail and subway system (Davis,
1990; Elkind, 2014). At the onset of Bradley’s mayorship, city planners viewed
Boyle Heights as a barrio “worth saving” from blight and preserving for existing
immigrant, working residents (Escobedo, 1973). By the end of his tenure,
planners praised the working-class neighborhood as “an excellent model” of, on
the one hand, a historic community maintaining its “attractiveness” and
“cohesiveness” and, on the other hand, a model for redevelopment focused on
attracting middle-class and affluent residents and visitors. The shift in view—
from one predicated on maintaining the existing racial and cultural composition to
one grounded in projecting a different socioeconomic, racial future—accentuates
the transition from use value to exchange value-driven policies and perspectives
that constituted the local state imaginary towards the barrio during Bradley’s
administrative tenure.
Indeed, redevelopment policies that targeted blight unfurled at the local
level, grounded in the historical relationships between a particular racialized place
(the barrio) and the historically white, local state. In dialectical relationship to the
local state imaginary, the barrio imaginary offers insight to how local residents
understood and responded to policies as racialized and political actions in line

31
with a larger legacy of exclusion. Importantly, the insights and concerns revealed
through the barrio imaginary bear striking resemblance to those expressed against
gentrification in the present-day barrio.
Framework
Urban redevelopment theories such as the critical political economy
(Feagin, 1998) and growth machine concept (Logan and Molotch, 1987) have
contributed much to understanding inequality in the urban landscape. Where the
former centralized the role of government in driving particular land-use policies
that maintained unequal power relations, the latter argued for a consensus
surrounding urban “growth” which allied otherwise competing institutions and
actors across private and public realms. While these concepts have informed our
understanding of how urban redevelopment has reshaped cities along racial lines,
Gotham (2001a) suggests our understanding of urban redevelopment and its
influence on contemporary phenomena remains understudied. Conversely,
contemporary phenomena such as gentrification are too often conceptualized
“without a history” (Osman, 2016, p. 215). In terms of understanding how history
of urban phenomena affect cities and their residents Gotham (2001b) calls on
urban scholars to examine how “city officials came to imagine urban space, carry
out their conceptions, and rationalize their plans and developments” through the
rhetoric of progress (p. 438). In turn, Gotham’s call for situated understanding of
local government policies and practices complements this project’s effort to
historicize present-day gentrification in Boyle Heights.

32
Towards this end, this paper seeks to understand how, given the historic
racial exclusion of Boyle Heights, pro-growth actors arrived at regarding Boyle
Heights as an area worthy of redevelopment. That is, the barrio transitioned from
a site of use value to one primarily of exchange value, a dialectic that reveals
competing notions of what a place means to its present and potential residents.
Examining the processes and rhetoric employed by local state actors reveal how
history informs a place-specific growth machine ethic that continually supports
the sociopolitical system of white supremacy in Los Angeles.
Although theories of relationships of conflict in urban settings have
adapted Marxist conceptualizations of use value and exchange value to advance
analyses of property commodification (Feagin, 1998; Feagin and Parker, 2002;
Logan and Molotch, 1987), past scholarship has not considered existing racialized
landscapes in urban cities. As such, exchange value, the monetary worth of a
given property in market exchange, and use value, the social, emotional, and/or
practical qualities ascribed to property, have remained conventional terms to
understand urban struggles over property. For Logan and Molotch (1987), these
concepts are operationalized in pro-growth coalitions that pursue and secure
exchange values through concentrated development in some areas while
simultaneously withholding investments in others—often working-class
communities of color. The resulting racialized hierarchy of places created by the
urban growth machine, however, is not adequately explained by pursuits for
growth alone. Through a racialized social structure (Bonilla-Silva, 1997) that

33
centers racism and legacies of racial segregation, the conflict between exchange
value and use values work reifies racial ideologies to maintain racial inequality.
Following this logic, expanding conceptualizations of use value and
exchange value in struggles over land reveal the legacy of racism in places.
Lipsitz (2007) argues two racialized imaginaries emerge from land use conflicts.
The “white spatial imaginary” legitimizes wealth accumulation through the
exclusion of people of color to create homogeneous white spaces and
simultaneously renders them normative. Similar to growth ideologies, Lipsitz
argues the white spatial imaginary views land as primarily exchange value and
mobilizes resources to attain the highest returns by excluding communities of
color while simultaneously passing related social costs onto groups with less
wealth and power. These latter groups compose Lipsitz’s (2007) “black spatial
imaginary,” which, in contrast, advances a use value orientation that creates
conditions leading to "a socially-shared understanding of the importance of public
space and its power to shape opportunities and life chances” for Black populations
(p. 17). As heuristic devices, racialized spatial imaginaries render racial
ideologies and racialization central issues. As a result, these concepts reveal how
legacies of racial segregation are maintained by land-use professionals through
growth logics and practices. Read together, racialized spatial imaginaries and pro-
growth pursuits allow scholars to better understand the way uneven development
is sustained over time.
Los Angeles politicians combined efforts to revamp city and countywide
land-use patterns with the city’s broader contemporary trends—large-scale

34
economic and political transformations driven by wide-spread white flight,
reindustrialization towards low-wage and low-skilled jobs, and a general rise in
the city’s immigrant population. Citywide planning strategies addressed these
challenges through a perspective of colorblindness. As scholars have recently
documented, land use projects are directly and indirectly influenced by ideologies
of colorblind racism (Mele, 2016; Saito, 2009, 2015), a practice that has
unwittingly maintained and perpetuated racial inequality at the urban scale.
Therefore, connecting such practices to their historic precursors reveals how local
city governments perpetuate ideologies of colorblind racism.
Extending this work and building on racialized spatial imaginaries, I
propose that examining such policies and practices over time provides an added
historical dimension. In particular, specific places were precisely targeted to
change their value from use value to exchange value. This work reveals how
contemporary uneven development processes are informed by previous, place-
specific forms of exclusion in Los Angeles. Since “the lived experience of race
has a spatial dimension” (Lipsitz, 2007, p. 13), Boyle Heights’ geographic
specificity is particularly helpful in allowing place-specific history to inform these
changes.
Historical Context
Los Angeles' rise as a modern American city rested on the civic and
cultural practices invested in "whitewashing" the city's Mexican past and
articulating an Anglo futurity (Deverell, 2004; Kropp, 2008; McClung, 2000). As
Los Angeles grew, Anglo boosters, civic leaders, tourists, and residents

35
participated in daily practices based on an imagined map of the city that
understood particular spaces as foreign and unsettled. In turn, whites created and
maintained a social distance from non-white people and spaces (Hise, 2004).
Anglo newcomers were directed to the West side of the L.A. civic center while
ethnic newcomers to the city remained confined to areas like Boyle Heights—that
is, East of the Los Angeles River (Sánchez, 2004). Since the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo in 1848, ethnic Mexicans and Mexican culture has been spatially
contained while incorporated into the racial hierarchy of California, a practice
reflected even in contemporary Los Angeles (Deverell, 2004; Gómez, 2007). For
Los Angeles civic leaders, moreover, the simultaneous racialization of Mexicans
and pursuits for a white Los Angeles ensured the civic center would remain a
locus of power and whiteness.
Emerging in the late-nineteenth century as one of the earliest white
suburbs of Los Angeles, Boyle Heights’ lack of racially restrictive housing
covenants opened the neighborhood to international immigrants during the early
decades of the twentieth century. The resulting diversity of immigrants led Boyle
Heights to be described in city housing surveys as “foreign colonies” during the
early decades (“A Community Survey,” 1919) and by 1939 a “‘melting pot’ area .
. . literally honeycombed with diverse and racial elements” that rendered it a
“hazardous residential territory” to the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)
(“Area Description,” 1939). Home to Jewish populations, Italians, Japanese,
African Americans, and ethnic Mexicans during the prewar period, a postwar

36
Boyle Heights became a Mexican-majority barrio by the middle of the twentieth
century (Sánchez, 2004).
Building on a legacy of activism (Bernstein, 2011; Sánchez, 1993), Boyle
Heights became a bastion for the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles during the
early 1970s by embracing a positive racial consciousness that continues to
influence political engagement on the Eastside (García Bedolla, 2005). In
addition, during the second half of the twentieth century Boyle Heights and other
Eastside barrios were marked as racialized spaces and foreign designations,
which led them to became important destinations for newer Mexican immigrants.
This heightened visibility immediately after the Chicano Movement would not,
however, lead to improved socioeconomic conditions for Latina/os, generally, and
Chicana/os, specifically, by the end of the Bradley administration in the early
1990s (Maciel and Ortiz, 1996). Through the period of urban restructuring, even
as the post-Civil Rights era gave way to L.A.’s first African American mayor and
his unprecedented, racially diverse administration, marginalization of Boyle
Heights continued. This paper examines how it did so.
Methods
Seeking to understand how Boyle Heights became perceived as a site of
use value and then, later, exchange value is best discernible and examined through
city planning records pertaining to the barrio. To do so, I consulted a series of
archival collections containing relevant records: the Tom Bradley administrative
papers, Southern California regional planning collection, and the Calvin S.
Hamilton collections. In examining this archival material, I noted all references

37
and records involving, wholly or in part, Boyle Heights. In doing so, two of the
largest and earliest planning projects involving Boyle Heights were the Boyle
Heights Community Plan and the Eastside Economic Development Council
(EEDC). Spanning roughly the duration of Tom Bradley’s mayorship (1973–
1993), these two projects provide insight to how city government perceived Boyle
Heights and enacted policies and practices based on this perception of the barrio.
Through the way these two projects were pursued in relation to concurrent
projects, a white spatial imaginary emerges.
Pursuing a mixed-method study that used more than one type of data
(Smalls, 2011), I sought to complement the city archives by examining and
analyzing local Eastside weekly newspapers, namely The Eastside Sun and The
Los Angeles Times. While city documents provide insights to views of local
professionals and their analysis of the barrio’s needs, these archives could not
actually illustrate the ways local community members understood and responded
to city government and planning projects in particular. Using a barrio imaginary
framework to analyze this set of material, though, this local newspaper data
provides depth to the analysis of change in use values over time in Los Angeles.
This complementarity research design, then, accentuates contrasting views in
land-use between local government officials.
Results
I found two overarching and competing imaginaries—the local state and
the barrio imaginaries. The local state imaginary builds on local histories of
racism that have rendered communities like Boyle Heights as outside of city

38
concern. Despite an early push for citizen-centric planning efforts in marginalized
areas the barrio remained oppressed and calcified at the bottom of the urban
hierarchy. This analysis is predicated in the two projects examined here: The
Community Plan and the Eastside Economic Development Council.
With the memory of the 1965 Watts Riots looming over the city, efforts to
reform the citywide Los Angeles planning practices aimed to re-envision one
coherent city capable of incorporating historically neglected ghettos and barrios.
Pulling various cities and neighborhoods together through land use policies and
practices were led by Planning Director Calvin Hamilton. For Hamilton,
improving city service to barrios and ghettos in part through citizen-centered
planning seemed particularly significant. Incorporating residents of previously
marginalized places began with, but required much more than, participatory
planning. A 1970 Free Press report, The Mexican-American People: The Nation’s
Second Largest Minority, outlined the work of incorporation at hand:
The challenge is to impart a new thrust to the future—to create the
conditions in which Mexican American people can become ever more
active participants in our society, can develop their individual abilities
without hindrance, and are free to make personal choices with regard to
their cultural identity. (Rochín and de la Torre,1996, p. 55)
Despite these progressive planning goals set early during Bradley Administration,
subsequent land-use and economic policies acting on barrio residents’ planning of
their community were ever-lower priorities during his tenure as downtown
redevelopment and rail construction became an enduring focus.

39
Absent meaningful city-led efforts to incorporate historically marginalized
places and groups are read as attempts to contain and rearticulate (Omi and
Winant, 2014) local civil rights efforts seeking improved state services. For
example, the Bradley administration partially met demands by appeasing Chicano
Movement participants through targeted citizen-centered planning while
simultaneously advancing redevelopment projects in and surrounding Boyle
Heights. In turn, the local state imaginary is revealed through the ways the
Bradley administration rationalized and practiced the superficial inclusion, and
actual exclusion, of Chicanos from the city’s future, effectively making a legacy
of Mexican containment. Rather than being solely an outcome of growth machine
logics, though, this exclusion required historically specific and locally grounded
logics that supported an exchange value approach to Boyle Heights.
For the barrio imaginary, skepticism and doubt towards the local state
persisted despite pursuits for the kind of social and political inclusion expressed in
the Mexican American People report. As the local state requested citizen
participation, barrio residents attempted to reconcile this with a history of
exclusionary policies and practices enacted by the local state towards barrios.
Indeed, residents often highlighted the state-led removal of communities of color
through numerous freeway construction projects—Chavez Ravine, Bunker Hill,
and to a lesser extent Boyle Heights. Emphasizing this history allowed the barrio
imaginary to highlight unequal power relations between the barrio and the local
state in order to demand greater accountability from the latter. In this way, despite
the good intentions of the local state imaginary in opening new pathways for

40
citizen participation in the planning process, barrio residents remained an
oppressed group through the everyday practices and policies of urbanism.
The Boyle Heights Community Plan
Community plans conceived by the planning department were intended to
guide growth in neighborhoods up to twenty years into the future by assessing
existing land uses and their impact on the local housing supply, job availability,
transit systems, and other related amenities necessary to accommodate an
increasing population. Progressive planners argued that involving residents in the
comprehensive planning process helped them better understand and address needs
at the local level and, subsequently, improve the citywide General Plan. While
community plans ultimately had little power in curbing the growth machine and
have been minimized as “populist planning experiment[s]” (Davis, 1990, p. 189),
they remain relevant in preserving records of not only the local state efforts in
increasing citizen-led planning, but also community relations during an important
period for race-based social movements in Los Angeles.
Affirming existing community fabric in the barrio, this section argues the
community plan exemplifies how the local state imaginary affirmed existing use
values, even if only symbolically, in the barrio. This also suggests the Bradley
administration arrived at such evaluation, in part through a larger strategy to
disassociate the city planning department and City Hall from infamous urban
renewal projects undertaken in nearby Mexican barrios. Despite the
powerlessness of the community plan, affirming the use value of Boyle Heights

41
served as an important model for the planning processes seeking to establish
community-centered approaches inclusive of barrio residents’ needs.
Part of the national progressive planning movement of the 1970s,
community plans for the barrio function as archives of the local state imaginary.
In this case, the community plan emphasizes the importance of the barrio’s
existing community fabric and extant social networks of marginalized immigrant
and Chicano groups. While for Chicana/os in racially segregated Los Angeles this
oppression remained anchored in a colonial legacy, community plans wedged a
potentially new space for civic inclusion as part of the broader Chicano
Movement a few years prior. Indeed, after completion of the community plan and
its approval in 1979, both the city planner and the planning director agreed,
“Many residents are socially, historically, and emotionally tied to the community”
and rendered Boyle Heights “the only viable economic alternative as to where
they can afford to live.”
1
The community plan, then, becomes a document
affirming the place-specific value to residents and maintained a relevant position
for residents seeking inclusion into the political process at the local level. In a
context of state-led urban restructuring that often produced “spatial and cultural
separation of people from their production and from their history” (p. 314), the
Boyle Heights Community Plan marked a stark contrast.
Tasked with assessing a community's existing land uses and projecting the
growth of its residential population, Chicano city planner Raul Escobedo sought
to make the community plan more than a technical planning report. As a native to
the East Los Angeles area, Escobedo’s critical, “bottom up” perspective

42
demanded attention and recognition from his colleagues. Escobedo’s perspective
recorded in his report is relevant for highlighting the practical and emotional
investments that make up the use values of the barrio. Specifically, Escobedo's
description and evaluation of the barrio placed residents within a historical
context through which to consider relevant planning methods. For example, the
Boyle Heights Community Plan explained:
Living in a certain community which has been subjected throughout the
years to differing degrees of economic and racial discrimination, socially
insensitive policy making, implementation of such projects as freeways
and public housing projects, the unresponsiveness of public agencies to
correct community deficiencies, needs, and even the total lack of political
representation also tend to bind people by inspiring common fear and
mistrust.
2

Escobedo’s use values included in the community plan complement Logan and
Molotch's (1987) view that neighborhoods are constituted through "diffuse
sentiment and concrete needs" (p. 110). In this regard his description stands alone
among more exchange-value evaluations of Boyle Heights by city planners.
Further documenting the barrio’s use values, the community plan also
contains records of residents’ critiques of the local state and their views of public
services. For barrio residents, their relationship with City Hall was ambivalent at
best. Noting a history of neglect by City Hall, residents simultaneously made
appeals for assistance for various city services and vocally expressed doubt these
concerns would be heard. According to Escobedo, the community plan’s section

43
on “Public Discussion of City Government” noted that barrio members held a
“general attitude of mistrust” toward the city and the planning department “due to
fear and misunderstanding about City powers, responsibilities and a history of
‘City’ projects which have had negative impact on the community.”
3
Indeed, the
community remained concerned that such projects would continue to result in loss
of housing. Within the community plan, Escobedo cited residents’ views that the
local state was “not seriously interested in” and had done “very little to minimize
displacement of housing and/or promote the conservation of housing in the
community.”
4
The community plan serves as a record of residents’ use values
through concerns for accessible and relevant housing, while related place-making
processes support what Logan and Molotch (1987) identified as six factors
composing the “tenacity of neighborhood sentiment” (p. 101): the daily round,
informal support networks, security and trust, identity, agglomeration benefits,
and ethnicity (pp. 103–110).
Raul Escobedo’s Influence on Community Planning
Writing to a local weekly as a strategy to draw residents to community
planning meetings not only compelled residents to consider the planning process
as an important political process but also urged residents to imagine a different
future for the segregated barrio of Boyle Heights—one included in the civic
sphere in a meaningful and relevant manner. In his weekly editorials to the
Eastside community newspaper, Escobedo appealed to increase the community’s
participation in planning discussion meetings. Convinced that Boyle Heights
played a critical role as a gateway city for low-income populations, Escobedo

44
attempted to assure residents that challenges facing the neighborhood stemmed, in
part, from its place “in the midst of industrial, urban and transportation growth”
(Escobedo, 1973). According to the Chicano planner, these larger processes did
not seem particularly beneficial for Boyle Heights residents and, as a result, he
recommended the Planning Department and City Hall work “to enhance and
provide the necessary services so people can live in a healthy, safe and attractive
environment” (Ecobedo, 1974).
Moreover, Escobedo encouraged residents to make their stances and
perspectives known to political representatives, reminding them that their
contemporaries had recently “been able to stop freeways, fight industrial pollution
and constructively secure needed services by making their views known to the
right people” (Escobedo, 1974). Interestingly, however, as he directed community
members to “the right people,” Escobedo inadvertently re-centered the city as the
primary place where residents could find solutions to challenges facing their
community, even as the civic center continued to evoke suspicion among Eastside
residents. One resident expressed:
In the past City Hall has helped force over 25 percent of our community to move
out due to freeways, Bunker Hill, Dodger Stadium, County Hospital, Cal State,
and Industrial expansion, not to mention illegal and discriminatory deportations.
City Hall has either pushed these through or let the state do it. (Muñoz, 1973)
Offering non-conventional approaches to planning by stressing neighborhood
participation and bringing local language in line with objectives set by the
Planning Department projected a significant citizen-centered planning ethic even

45
if the department continued practices—at a citywide scale—that favored
exchange values.
Stressing the use values of the Boyle Heights barrio presented important
documentation of neighborhood priorities, yet the community plan had
noteworthy limitations. Davis (1990) argues that despite the resident-centered
spirit of community plans, the city councils’ pro-growth majority often curtailed
implementation of approved community plans rendering them “dead letter from
the beginning” (p. 168). Participation from residents rarely translated into
transformative outcomes in development projects favoring extant residents.
Siminoski (1978) asserts the Los Angeles General Plan utilized citizen
participation towards decidedly symbolic ends in ways that were structured to
have residents accept particular city priorities defined by the Planning Department
prior to holding public meetings. Despite these limits, participation in community
plans reveals the important relationship between the city and local barrios as well
as their subsequent power relations.
By including Boyle Heights’ legacy of racial, political, and economic
isolation into the community plan, Escobedo challenged the dominant local
imaginary by re-inserting the state’s principle role in excluding the community
and maintaining the oppression of vulnerable residents. The results of inserting
such use values is expressed in a press release by Calvin Hamilton which notes
Escobedo’s recommendation to city planners. Although the efforts to preserve the
Boyle Heights’ historic housing stock for economically vulnerable immigrants
was initially “not a very popular idea” among the department, this endeavor

46
eventually gained currency as community involvement in the planning process
increased.
5
Moreover, the local state imaginary’s agreement of use values through
the approval of the plan also contributed to the document’s relevance.
Nonetheless, the absence of a meaningful strategy to complement and secure
long-term resident participation in the planning process community plans
inadvertently prioritized pro-growth interests and exchange value threats in the
area, rendering the community plan dead, as Mike Davis (1990) attests.
Such use value perspectives and language utilized by Escobedo, however,
were increasingly in tension with shifting attention to the emerging neoliberal era
as the Civil Rights era slid further into the past. Preserving historic, affordable,
single-family housing for economically vulnerable residents—primarily Mexican
immigrants—was a short-lived and privileged position within the local state
imaginary. Indeed, subsequent projects by the Bradley administration would drop
their conditional support for use value perspectives towards the Boyle Heights
barrio and instead prioritize Boyle Heights’ exchange value potential as central
city development burgeoned. Rather than have Boyle Heights’ future anchored in
its capacity to remain a home for immigrant, working-class residents, the barrio’s
future pivoted precisely on its ability to contribute to economic revitalization.
The Eastside Economic Development Council (EEDC)
Recasting Boyle Heights as a site of exchange value emerged when the
Eastside Economic Development Council sought to revisit and redefine the
barrio’s relationship to the downtown core from exclusion to inclusion. Among
other social issues, the onset of the 1980s in Los Angeles had brought a drastic

47
reduction of city revenue streams, rising immigration, and a persisting housing
crises. These social forces worked collectively to inhibit Hamilton’s long-term
planning vision that had directed the planning department for almost two decades.
Instead, Hamilton and his planning team focused on addressing the most pressing,
short-term planning challenges, often focusing on downtown.
Where previous plans projected to distribute the city’s growing population
among high-density centers spread out across the city, the political and economic
conditions of the 1970s coupled with Bradley’s political aspirations rendered
downtown the primary focus for redevelopment. As a result, Hamilton, in a report
to the Mayor and planning department, noted, “Residential areas such as those in
proximity to downtown Los Angeles will undoubtedly be re-evaluated in terms of
their investment potential.”
6
Such reevaluated areas, then, brought the city’s
attention and resources to historic barrios that surround downtown, including
Boyle Heights.
Nearly a decade after the adoption of the Boyle Heights Community Plan
in 1979, Bradley sought to explore the exchange value of the broader Eastside
during a time when federal aid earmarked for working-class neighborhoods and
residents disproportionately benefitted suburbs and the private sector. Nearing the
end of his fourth term as Mayor of Los Angeles in 1988, Bradley’s State of the
City address announced the formation of economic development councils for the
minority communities of South Los Angeles and East Los Angeles.
7
In this
context of shrinking federal aid, the administration’s economic imperative in
appraising the Eastside’s exchange value is not immediately surprising. Yet

48
recasting Boyle Heights in ways that emphasized its exchange value required
mobilizing public support from a barrio with an established history of activism
that would not easily endorse state-led projects without scrutiny. Indeed,
obtaining local support required specific rhetorical strategies from the Bradley
administration. Such strategies framed development as amenable to anti-growth
activists in the suburbs as well in the barrios.
Through examining the Eastside Economic Development Council’s
documents, I argue the Bradley administration not only advanced an exchange
value using rhetorical strategies but also undermined the very participation it
ostensibly sought from community members, rendering language and rhetoric
critical in helping “align [local state leaders] imaginings with growth coalitions”
(Wilson and Grammenos, 2000, p. 368). In contrast to the community plan’s
emphasis on preserving existing housing and culture, the local state built on
racialized perceptions of the barrio as inherently blighted and, by extension,
culturally and politically underdeveloped, to dismiss local residents’ demands for
community control over development projects.
The EEDC project area covered by the Eastside Economic Development
Council (EEDC) included Northeast communities such as Lincoln Heights, El
Sereno, and Boyle Heights, all predominantly Latino communities that held
lower-status or low-priority positions within the local state imaginary’s spatial
order of Los Angeles. Where community plans helped build a community’s
inventory of land uses, EEDC worked to identify sites for economic development
and study potential opportunities for development—that is, to facilitate privatism

49
(Squires, 1991). That the EEDC considered the Eastside a homogeneous area
speaks to the geographic area’s historic social distance from the civic center
through racial segregation and the resultant working-class barrio.
As planning and economic restructuring placed the Eastside barrio in a
new form of proximity to the revitalizing urban core, the local state imaginary—
adjusting to Boyle Heights residents’ skepticism expressed in the community
plan—sought local support by pledging resident’s discretion in development
projects. Specifically, Bradley expressed to eastside communities that his
administration would ensure a commitment to “community control over economic
change” hoping to ease prevailing unease in the neighborhood. While aiming to
assuage local concerns of large-scale development impinging on the barrio, the
Bradley administration’s focus on local participation also helped the local state
imaginary place the onus of economic “progress” on communities of color by
pinning any lack of economic growth on barrio resistance to state-led growth
policies. As a result, the administration framed what could and could not be
considered a progressive economic development within Eastside barrio. In this
way, the EEDC’s emphasis on local community participation was rendered
perfunctory and undermined any meaningful contributions by community
residents.
Among the EEDC’s three committees, the community relations committee
best reveals the ways the local state symbolically prioritized the barrio while
excluding it in practice. This committee was tasked with garnering community
support for development in a slow-growth climate led by white homeowners. The

50
slow-growth movement had gained considerable political ground throughout the
70’s and created much tension with Bradley’s pro-growth development pursuits
including the EEDC.
8
During Bradley’s State of the City address in 1988 a
looming re-election pressed Bradley to appeal to slow-growth supporters to secure
his reelection by citing his support for limits on hillside building, mini-mall
moratoriums, and rigorous environmental review for large developers. While
Bradley understood the slow-growth movement as an important part of his
political survival strategy (Fulton, 2001), historic communities of color remained
part of his pro-growth ethic.
Community Relations and Maintaining a Status Quo Under Mayor Bradley
Simultaneously assuaging slow-growth advocates and pursuing pro-
growth development required Bradley to maintain careful rhetorical positions
arguing communities of color could be preserved even as the city pursued
“sensible growth” and “managed, quality economic growth.” For Bradley, this
was particularly necessary in neighborhoods, such as barrios, “that [had] been left
behind or fallen short of their real potential.”
9
This rhetorical move allowed the
Mayor to rally slow-growth supporters and quell local barrios’ concerns over
urban redevelopment and displacement. The Boyle Heights Community Plan had
promised local residents community participation in the planning process while
ten years later the EEDC similarly promised community control over local
economic development.
Transforming the Eastside’s land uses generative of exchange value
centralized the need to attain community support from barrio residents—this task

51
fell squarely on the community relations committee. Bradley’s promises of
"community-supported development projects" and "community control over
economic change," in considerable part, responded to prevailing doubts against
the city government expressed in ongoing activism in the barrio and recorded in
planning documents such as the Boyle Heights Community Plan.
10
In this context
of skepticism from Eastside residents, seeking to deliver on the administration’s
promises of community control subsequently pressured the community relations
committee with the double-sided task of bringing community residents’
perspective into EEDC while also clearly articulating the EEDC’s functions to
residents.
As liaisons for the EEDC, those tapped by Bradley to form the community
relations committee viewed their role critical for maintaining rapport with barrio
residents as well as advocating effective citizen planning. Soon after the EEDC
was established, the community relations committee chairman stressed the
group’s preference to centralize community relations at the "'front end' of the
process rather than waiting until the work of E.L.A. Economic Development
Council is completed."
11
He went on to explain the committee's strategy in
seeking to place community members and groups at the center of the larger
EEDC. He also emphasized the importance of community relations within EEDC,
stating that "many community groups may be wary of the council's objectives and
actions and we must therefore earn their trust.”
12
Demonstrating a strong interest
in prioritizing the barrio’s concerns early on in EEDC’s work foreshadowed the

52
committee members’ commitment include marginalized voices into local
economic development processes proposed by the EEDC.
The community relations committee demonstrated its dedication to getting
residents involved through their work with different local groups. Seeking a
diverse committee, the heads of the group recruited Asian Americans from local
barrios and invited scholars from nearby colleges to join the community relations
committee.
13
For the community relations committee, expanding “membership of
the [EEDC] to include more representatives of community groups” increased
contributions from “constituencies who traditionally are . . . not encouraged to
participate in the planning process.”
14
In addition, committee members pushed the
EEDC to consider the broader economic impact of its research by engaging
existing controversies in the barrio and, ultimately, improve relations between
city planners and residents. For example, the members argued the “council should
take policy stands on broader issues that affect the economic well being of the
community (ex. [opposition] to ELA prison, etc.”
15
Such strategies to gain
community support and engage with the EEDC were important in understanding
the committee’s outreach efforts to achieve a “community consensus concerning
the types of economic activity the community considers desirable.”
16

As their progressive vision for community-centered economic
development strengthened, the community relations committee’s voice was
promptly within the EEDC. Despite an organizational commitment to community
control of development, competing objectives within the EEDC and the Bradley

53
administration buttressed privatism in the face of public commitment to
addressing economic concerns relevant to barrio residents.
Two years into EEDC’s research, the community relations committee
remained unsatisfied with the degree of citizen involvement and unconvinced the
council had sufficiently met its goal of community participation, much less its
promise of community-control. "More representation from community
organizations and other grassroots interests” was necessary in the EEDC, the
committee maintained, to increase local participation and trust.
17
Bradley agreed
that communities communities like the barrio had, for too long, remained over
looked. In an unexpected speech to the planning department Bradley asked the
audience to focus materials away from wealthier areas and instead look to a more
even distribution of departmental expertise. “When you don't know an answer to
someone's question, don't shine 'em on, don't shuffle 'em off to someone else
down the line. Find out the answer. We need to restore public confidence in this
department and this city" (Clifford, 1991, p. B8). To achieve this trust, Bradley
argued, required breaking the historic pattern of “allocating scarce resources only
to the loudest voices” and instead directing attention to communities like South
Los Angeles and the Eastside (Clifford, 1991). In this way, the mayor’s public
position that favored re-building trust with the barrio contrasted his
administrative actions through the EEDC that minimized the very community
concerns he asked planners to prioritize.
Viewed by the press as signaling a “new direction in development,” the
speech resulted did not result in material gains for the community relations

54
committee as the overall EEDC remained steadfast in pursuing economic
redevelopment in the Eastside barrios. A few months after Bradley’s speech to the
planning department as EEDC’s charge ended, the community relations
committee chairman Fernando Torres-Gil continued to stress the importance of
community involvement in Eastside communities. The "past [city] development
[had] been viewed with skepticism by local residents,” he argued, which simply
“[underscored] the need to establish credibility with the local community if the
[EEDC] is to succeed.”
18
Despite the community relations committee’s appeals to
the rest of the EEDC, however, the final recommendations to the mayor remained
committed to pursuing a privatism, in part, by silencing residents’ perspectives
and concerns for the barrio’s future by excluding them.
Promises of community control over development, jobs, and “targeted
development” reveal not only the rhetoric deployed by the Bradley administration
in pursuing exchange value of the Eastside but also illustrate the way ahistorical
statements were critical in framing and advancing the ongoing marginalization of
the barrio. For example, in a letter to EEDC member Fernando Torres-Gil,
Bradley cited deindustrialization as the primary reason for the "ignored and
neglected" state of the Eastside.
19
These statements elided careful consideration of
lasting effects of racial segregation and historical economic disinvestment in these
communities. Indeed, ahistorical narratives were strategic tools for the local state
imaginary to re-frame communities of color opposed to threatening development
as irrational. Centering the out-migration of the industry sector created a narrative
void of systemic racial discrimination, as well as the subsequent disinvestment of

55
the area and its residents. In the public eye, the Bradley administration positioned
itself as the best response to the barrio’s marginalization and powerlessness,
downplaying the city’s complicity in furthering a legacy of barrio neglect.
Ahistorical narratives gained traction as he continued to frame barrios on
the Eastside as “just beginning their climb” on the “ladder of economic
progress.”
20
This rhetorical framing betrayed the ways his administration
participated in silencing local residents’ concerns throughout the EEDC project as
well as actively undermining efforts to include political movements in planning
processes set to shape future development in the barrio. This framing of the barrio
was also predicated on notions of meritocracy and economic liberalism,
positioning the state to intervene through privatism. Directly and indirectly this
exclusion re-inscribed historic understandings of barrio residents’ perspectives
and concerns, viewing them instead as “misguided welfare advocacy that chokes
the city’s ability to develop progressively” (Wilson and Grammenos, 2000, p.
367) or, still worse, not worth considering at all. Together, the local state
advanced a process reifying unequal power relations between the city and the
barrio, withholding structures of opportunity from Chicana/os and Latina/os in
the barrio.
That working-class barrios remained a distant priority to the Bradley
administration is indicative of the ways power relations remained unchanging
through the election of an African American mayor and through the multicultural
1980s. In short, these were social facts indicative of the local state imaginary’s
commitment to whiteness writ large. As Mills (1997) reminds us, “Whiteness is

56
not really a color at all, but a set of power relations” (p. 127). The power relations
explored through two projects examined above illustrate how the Chicano city
planner drafting Boyle Height’s Community Plan and the community relations
committee within the EEDC functioned as barrio mediators in which to bring
their cultural sensibilities to bear on local state projects. Despite the resulting
affirmations, however short-lived, contained in the Community Plan, the
undermining of the community relations committee in the EEDC ultimately
prioritized the legacy of the local state by rendering the barrio as inconsequential.
Meanwhile the barrio maintained civic participation and discussions aiming to
respond to past state transgressions and anticipate the ways local state policies and
practices affected their daily round (or the place-specific routines and practices
developed over time to achieve an “effective array of goods and services” (Logan
and Molotch, 1987, p. 104).
The Barrio Imaginary
A barrio imaginary prioritized narratives and stories grounded in the daily
round towards developing relevant community strategies and practices leading to
a more just future. Critical race scholars have considered the experiences of
people of color significant to understanding racial subordination (Bell, 1992),
particularly as “the collective experience of day-to-day life in a country
historically bound to racism, reveals something about the necessity and the
process of change” (Matsuda, 1987). For Eastside barrios, seeking protection
from urban renewal while also calling for an end to the legacy of racially
motivated disinvestment and an end to inadequate political representation

57
illustrate the barrio’s everyday pursuit for justice. The legacy of racial
segregation also designated the barrio a site of geographically organized
vulnerability by maintaining exchange value threats in the hands of outside pro-
growth interests (Logan and Molotch 1987, p. 131). This lack of control propelled
residents of Boyle Heights to pursue inclusion—however tenuous—into the
increasingly diverse local polity. For the barrio imaginary, Tom Bradley and the
rainbow coalition electorate became an opportunity to break from the traditional
local state imaginary.
The Eastside Sun became an important site for discussing the relevance of
local policy strategies as well as their implications to Boyle Heights and
neighboring barrios. Discussing community and general plans, the weekly
complemented administrative documents by highlighting local articulations and
portrayals of the local state. The weekly, then, forms part of the local imaginary
documenting barrio perspectives in relation to the state and, in particular, the
response to Tom Bradley as mayor.
In the context of the barrio imaginary, Bradley’s mayoral election in 1973
signaled a potential end to political exclusion. Responding to Bradley’s win in the
1973 mayoral race, Angel T. Solis, editor of the Spanish language section of The
Eastside Sun, asserted, “With Tom Bradley the hopes of the oppressed are reborn.
The poor will have, at last, a mayor” (Solis, 1973). Solis’ optimism towards
Bradley’s election demonstrates local support for long anticipated political
inclusion. Yet, this appeal for inclusion remained conditioned on preserving the

58
existing cultural and social landscape in the barrio. Indeed, for the Bradley
administration the welcoming climate in the barrio was not without tension.
Fresh memories of urban renewal projects in adjacent barrios and
increasing central city development continued to simultaneously emphasize the
past and potential future of “Chicano removal” in the barrio imaginary. As one
writer to The Eastside Sun reminded readers, “[the Eastside has] been subjected
for decades to gerrymandering of the most classic and gross nature . . . Not only
has the Chicano been left out of how his life has been governed, he has been left
out of the planning for the future of the area” (Muñoz, 1973). For Muñoz, seeking
to redevelop downtown and surrounding areas had resulted in increasing “land
grabs” that would bring direct displacement of working-class barrio residents as
well as the dismantling of the barrio social fabric. Positioning these the scale of
such displacement within a colonial framework, Muñoz argued such land grabs
were “second only to the Indian and Mexican Wars of the 19th century” (Muñoz,
1973).
In 1974, in a letter to The Eastside Sun editor, the spokesperson for the All
Nations Neighborhood Center in Boyle Heights, Francisco Mendoza, argued the
“master plan is only one thing that we have to defeat or change for the benefit of
not the rich, but for the working people in our community” (Mendoza, 1974).
Mendoza went on to say participation in planning meetings could lead to “more
jobs, better schools, and higher quality produce in the neighborhood” (1974).
Finally, Mendoza argued these amenities were in contrast to projects such as
street widening, which he felt did not offer improvements in quality of life overall

59
and resulted in “time being wasted” (Mendoza, 1974). Planning documents such
as the local community plan and the citywide general plan were considered
malleable documents potentially working in favor of working-class barrio
residents particularly by supporting the extant social fabric and building on the
“agglomeration of complementary benefits” of the barrio (Logan and Molotch,
1987, p. 108).
Not only did residents consider their participation in planning generative
of potentially meaningful outcomes, community leaders tapped by the mayor
similarly considered their roles as significant, particularly when asked to generate
and facilitate community input. However, despite the good intentions of councils
such as the Eastside Economic Development Council (EEDC), the Bradley
administration’s pursuits for exchange value fell short of curbing the drift towards
exchange value.
Within the EEDC, the barrio imaginary is located in the community
relations subcommittee composed of community members with an insider’s
perspective of barrios such as Boyle Heights—it works to expand the EEDC’s
exchange value in a way that would help enhance existing use values. If the
EEDC missed opportunities to enhance use values in the barrio, the community
relations committee made intentional efforts to bring barrio history into
conversations regarding the Eastside’s future. The community relations
subcommittee maintained that during the 1980s the Eastside nurtured a “history of
activism most recently illustrated with opposition to the Vernon hazardous waste
incinerator and the proposed state prison in East L.A.” in marked contrast to, what

60
they noted were, prevailing assumptions of the area as a “politically powerless
community.”
21
Complicating the image of the barrio within the local state
imaginary, members of the subcommittee offered alternatives to exchange values
predicated on the disruption of existing use values.
The EEDC remained committed to a growth ethic and perpetuated deficit
portrayals of the barrio by eliding community activism in summaries to the
Mayor, indirectly highlighting how such omissions are important for exchange
value pursuits. Dismissing the history of activism and closely related racial
segregation secured the concept of community participation as a rhetorical tool
rather than a genuine effort by City Hall. Proposing a consideration of the local
histories of barrios within an economic evaluation by the local state imaginary
also helps highlight the agency exercised by members of the subcommittee and
the EEDC’s minimization of experiences of communities of color. These
processes work together in highlighting the ways institutional practices within
City Hall achieved absorption and insulation towards coopting and, ultimately,
undermining, meaningful political participation by barrio residents. Such
practices generated skepticism and distrust among residents and against the local
state.
Centralizing the daily lives and cultural practices of residents, the barrio
imaginary reveals what barrio residents considered at stake as downtown
development fueled concerns over displacement. The discussions in the pages of
The Eastside Sun elaborate on summaries in the Boyle Heights Community Plan
by permitting editors, columnists, and community leaders to expand on their

61
stances regarding issues of urban planning, political representation and
community building. Moreover, these discussions contemplated the potential
opportunities as well as the limits of participating in the planning process allowed
residents to build a case for their stance while directly or indirectly evoking the
same history of political exclusion they experienced as collective barrios. The
local state imaginary and its efforts to gain support for development projects
exploited the concerns of barrio residents by promising community control, while
simultaneously undermining their input in assessing the economic potential of
their communities. Not surprisingly, such actions by the local state imaginary
reified barrio residents’ skepticism and distrust. Without worthwhile inclusion of
the barrio imaginary, views of the Bradley administration as “on its own or in
coordination with the private sector [as] planning to ‘recycle’ [the Eastside]:
removing housing, displace low-income residents and bring in new development”
(Muñoz, 1973) were prescient.
Without Community, Only City Plans Remain
Bringing critical theories of race and archives to bear on exchange value
and use value helps urban sociologists understand the how the growth logics and,
specifically, gentrification remain informed by racial ideologies. Racialized
spatial imaginaries, as heuristic tools, help make sense of the overlapping and
reciprocal effects of land uses and the social relations they (in)directly seek to
manage in the urban context. The two racialized spatial imaginaries examined in
this study reveal the ways present concerns over gentrification in the Boyle
Heights barrio are embedded in a colonial relationship between two local

62
populations. Similarly, from a historical analysis, the chronological events
analyzed here underscore the importance of policies and practices that precede
current gentrification processes and how local political leaders rationalize
decisions that preserve uneven power relationships between these two
populations. Indeed, these temporal dimensions foreground a history of
gentrification (Osman 2016) which anchors and guides how this urban
phenomenon unfurls in this particular urban landscape. Finally, racialized spatial
imaginaries help us understand the multi-scale social processes that realized the
first Black mayor of a white-majority city while also witnessed the ongoing
political and economic exclusion of barrios amidst the demographic
transformation of Los Angeles to majority-minority city.
Notwithstanding the ensuing racial diversity that accompanied Bradley’s
arrival as mayor, the administration’s focus on downtown development during the
majority of his tenure undermined meaningful relationships with communities of
color like the Eastside and South Los Angeles. In the case of Eastside barrios, the
appraisals and evaluations undertaken through the Community Plan and the
EEDC demonstrated local state strategies to hoard political and socioeconomic
resources away from barrio residents. Despite the veneer of racial progress in
representation and rhetoric, the administration ultimately remained committed to
perpetuating the political exclusion of Mexicans in Boyle Heights by casting
residents unfit for incorporation into the political fabric—a practice consistent
with the city’s American history seeking to contain Mexicans at the lower rungs
of the local racial order.

63
Paradoxically, disappearing barrio residents from the planning process
acted contrary to deliberate and early efforts by city planning director Calvin
Hamilton to prioritize citizen participation in the citywide planning. Indeed, when
community plans were initiated in 1965, early on in Hamilton’s career as planning
director for Los Angeles, their goal for countywide citizen participation was
unprecedented. The Watts riots during the summer of 1965 developed this civic
initiative into a larger effort to understand and prevent further “urban unrest” for
residents and politicians alike
.22
Citizens considered this citizen-led, bottom-up
planning approach to community plans as an “opportunity for . . . citizens as a
whole to discover their city and to help deal with its problems and possibilities
and . . . put them on the cutting edge of a meaningful new experiment in
democracy and urban participation.”
23
Supporting these citizen-planning
programs upon his mayorship, Hamilton argued, Bradley focused on downtown
development at the cost of efficient, planning for long neglected communities and
the city overall.
24

Not surprisingly, then, the racialized outcomes produced in the vacuum of
meaningful citizen planning were repeated in the Los Angeles Civil Unrest of
1992. The Civil Unrest prompted many at the time to reflect on Bradley’s
redevelopment strategies and his administration’s disproportionate attention to
downtown and affluent communities. Even if Bradley had “‘opened the doors to
formerly white bastions’” at City Hall, his administration, however diverse,
perpetuated the state-led political and economic isolation of working-class
Mexicans and African Americans (Clifford et al., 1992). Benefits received by

64
communities of color as a result of revitalizations efforts during Bradley’s term
were viewed as “mostly crumbs” in proportion to jobs lost through
deindustrialization, leading city leaders and scholars to underscore the uprising’s
origins in “the strained relationship between local government and its neediest
constituents” (Clifford et al., 1992). Amid this disregard of working-class
communities of color, nonetheless, downtown redevelopment and density
continued to rise, rendering adjacent barrios like Boyle Heights targets for
gentrification.
The local state imaginary reveals how local governments make and
rationalize decisions regarding the future of working class communities and the
extent to which local residents are involved or excluded at a particular historical
juncture. Rather than isolated events the local state imaginary tethers together
these decisions in a temporal tapestry undergirded by the historical and uneven
power relationship between Los Angeles’ civic polity and the Mexican
population. Practices regarding aspiring and actual development of the barrio,
resultantly, have supported this uneven power relationship through subsequent
policies and practices that have simultaneously intensified downtown
development and included Boyle Heights conditioned on a middle-class, non-
Mexican futurity.
The barrio imaginary, on the other hand, reveals the ways local residents
understood the city’s threats and how they maintained their own oppositional
relationship to the city. Reflecting on civic leaders’ preoccupation with downtown
at the expense of the barrio, Muñoz contended “rather than seeing Los Angeles as

65
a ‘hundred small towns in search of a city,’ the Chicano sees it as a beautiful
metropolis in search of a government” (1974). In this way, interpretations of city
development threatening the barrio social fabric, such as these, remain direct
responses to urban renewal, or “Chicano removal”—highlighting the
retrenchment of skepticism and distrust aimed at the city that formed the core of
the barrio imaginary. The place-based memory that informed the barrio imaginary
and fed political consciousness continued to the end of Tom Bradley’s tenure.
Such perspectives evoked the barrio’s collective memory of urban renewal
programs that vanished barrios like Bunker Hill, La Loma, Palo Verde, and
Bishop (the latter three barrios collectively known as Chavez Ravine). For Boyle
Heights residents, redevelopment from downtown has persistently threatened to
“‘[wipe Boyle Heights] from the face of the earth’” (Sahagun 1983).
Reevaluated as a site of exchange value, Boyle Heights continues to face ongoing
threats to its working class, immigrant community through soaring rents fueled
significantly by an unprecedented waves of private and public investments.
Gentrification, as a transformational project remains contingent on city officials recasting
Boyle Heights as part of downtown Los Angeles— a project that a new light rail and
bridge connecting these two neighborhood scale geographies successfully advances.
Racialized spatial imaginaries in interrogating the blurred interaction between “object-
centered” and “people-centered” (Gans 2015) approaches, reminding scholars of the
important understanding how power relations are maintained amidst demographic,
political, and economic change (Hwang 2016).

66
Through these two racialized spatial imaginaries, urban sociologists bring
together “object-centered” and “people-centered” (Gans, 2015) approaches to
understand the perfunctory and rationalization processes involved in pursuing
exchange value—namely to attract unprecedented city and private investments—
in a historically neglected barrio community. These relational processes help
urban and race scholars better understand the ways whites retain power even in
urban places where they are not the majority.

Notes

1
“Boyle Heights Community Plan.”
2
The Environmental Impact Report for the Boyle Heights Community Plan. Tom
Bradley Administrative Papers 293. Box 3086. Folder 5.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
“Planning for the '80's” 1981. Southern California Regional Planning Collection.
Internal
Documents, Box 5, Folder 25. Huntington Library.
7
"Mayor Tom Bradley State of the City," Tom Bradley Administrative Papers
293, Box 948, Folder 14. (City of Los Angeles University of California Los
Angeles, Special Collections, April 18, 1988).
8
Slow growth advocacy was “strongest on the mostly white West Side in such
neighborhoods such as Westwood…and Westchester” (Reinhold 1987). See also
Davis 1990.
9
"Mayor Tom Bradley State of the City."
10
Ibid.
11
"Report to Mayor Tom Bradley on the Status of Economic Development in East
Los Angeles", ed. UCLA Special Collections "Eastside Economic Development
Council", Tom Bradley Administrative Papers 293.Box 1195, Folder 8. (City of
Los Angeles 1991).
12
Fernando Torres-Gil, "Summary Minutes," ed. Letter to the Members of the
Community Relations Committee (Los Angeles Tom Bradley Administrative
Papers 293, Box 1195, Folder 9, 1989).
13
Ibid.
14
“Eastside Evaluation” Notes on yellow paper. Tom Bradley Administrative
Papers 293. Box 1196. Folder 4.
15
Ibid.

67
16
“Draft” Tom Bradley Administrative Papers. 293. Box 1196. Folder 4.
17
"Report to Mayor Tom Bradley on the Status of Economic Development in East
Los Angeles “
18
Rosa Martinez, "Memo to Tom Bradley Re: Eastside Economic Development
Council," ed. Los Angeles. University of California, Tom Bradley Administrative
Papers 293.Box 1195, Folder 9 (UCLA Library Special Collections, November
1991).
19
Tom Bradley, "Letter to Fernando Torres-Gil," Tom Bradley Administrative
Papers
293. Box 3059, Folder 1. (Los Angeles 1988).
20
"Mayor Tom Bradley State of the City," Tom Bradley Administrative Papers
293, Box 948, Folder 14. (City of Los Angeles University of California Los
Angeles, Special Collections, April 18, 1988).
21
"Report to Mayor Tom Bradley on the Status of Economic Development in East
Los Angeles "
22
“Citizen Participation in Planning: The Los Angeles Goals Program” 1968.
Southern California Regional Planning Collection. Internal Documents, Box 3,
Folder 13. Huntington Library.

23
“The Los Angeles Goals Program: Okoumene- Los Angeles Style” 1968.
Southern California Regional Planning Collection. Internal Documents, Box 3,
Folder 13. Huntington Library.
24
Hamilton, Calvin S. 1995. “Seven Decades of Planning and Development in
Los Angeles.” Interview by Edward A. Holden. UCLA Library, Center for
Oral History Research.

68

Chapter Three: Gente-fication and Gentrification as Racial
Projects
Introduction
In May 2015, Los Angeles Times journalist Hector Tobar authored an op-ed, Viva
Gentrification! In it he argued that despite its negative effects (e.g. displacement)
on historic Latino barrios, gentrification functions as a critical desegregation tool
against the “insidious and often ignored spread of racial segregation” (Tobar
2015) in the region. Because Los Angeles is a Latino-majority city, Tobar
contends that white newcomers to the barrios are non-threats to Latino culture
overall and as such should be viewed as harbingers of diversity rather than signs
of immanent displacement. Moreover, Tobar adds that white newcomers offer
“diversity” to the barrio as well as benefits through investments made in property
and businesses. Ultimately, for Tobar, gentrification acts as a desegregation tool
that will result in the decline of racism and the colorblind city. Tobar’s op-ed,
then, crystalizes how discussions about gentrification (in)directly engage
dominant notions of race and racism as static while, simultaneously, advancing
new racial schemas. Gentrification scholarship benefits from critical theories of
race to reveal how gentrification utilizes prevailing and emerging racial
ideologies, especially as majority-minority demographics in urban cities, such as
Los Angeles, increases.
Racial formation is considered among the most prominent critical theories
of race challenging prevailing views of the U.S. as a colorblind society. Racial
formation theory, according to Omi and Winant (2014), posits race as a dynamic

69
concept shaped by sociohistorical processes that have, in turn, uniquely defined
our history and society. Seeking to understand how this concept continues to
shape the present racial order, racial formation theory analyzes how race is
(re)defined to reproduce or oppose existing social structures. Racial projects,
these authors argue, are “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or
explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute
resources along particular racial lines” (Omi and Winant 2014:56). In this way,
racial projects link representation and social structure. Additionally, such projects
do the ideological work of racialization—the conceptualization of race applied
beyond the corporeal scale towards groups and/or social dynamics. Racial
formation, then, is composed of an accumulation of racial projects that operate at
the micro- and macro-scales of society. The concept of racial projects can be
particularly informative in helping researchers understand gentrification and how
this process restructures not only neighborhoods but racial hierarchies.
Conceptualizing gentrification in Los Angeles as a racial project, then,
asks us to consider how the process is understood and negotiated in relation to the
historical racialization of Mexicans and whites. Local history and local
demography are particularly significant in informing and shaping the ways racial
boundaries are constructed and attributed meaning. Racial boundaries and their
spatial representation, in turn, are mobilized in conversations of gentrification
which support or challenge neighborhood change.
The majority-minority demographic composition in Los Angeles heralds
similarly anticipated racial realities in urban centers across the nation, presenting

70
new racial formations. Bonilla-Silva (2009) argues the racial order emerging in
majority-minority places is reorganizing to mirror stratification in Latin America
through tripartite hierarchy with whites on top, honorary whites in the middle, and
collective black on the bottom. While new racial structures remain fundamentally
organized around the same black-white poles, brown skinned Latinos might be
included in the “collective black” stratum and lighter skinned Latinos positioned
as part of the middle “honorary white” stratum. Also influencing Latinos’ location
within this hierarchy are expanded notions of whiteness through phenotype, class,
education, citizenship, and/or culture. Studies testing this thesis have generally
supported its timeliness, bringing the thesis to bear on quantitative (Forman, Goar,
Lewis, 2002; Murguia and Saenz 2002; Pulido and Pastor 2013) and qualitative
approaches (O’Brien 2008).
This paper examines how three racial projects deployed through
gentrification collectively reflect an emerging racial stratum outlined by the
“Latin Americanization of race” concept. First, white newcomers living and/or
working in the barrio see themselves and fellow whites as harbingers of diversity
rather than harbingers of gentrification. Despite being a numerical minority, white
residents in Boyle Heights, and Los Angeles generally, disproportionately benefit
from political, economic, cultural, and symbolic power. Therefore, the ways that
whites define and negotiate their racial identity sheds light on how this group
rationalizes and legitimizes their role in the gentrification of a working class
barrio.

71
Secondly, gentrification in the working-class barrio is viewed as a threat to
Mexican identity and class status. Understood by some residents as the return of
educated, upwardly mobile Mexican-Americans returning to working class
barrios, gente-fication is understood by local residents as a challenge to
conventional definitions of gentrification by, in part, turning to their own ethnic
community for alternative pathways for investment and development. Viewed as
a form of "racial uplift" (Boyd 2005), some barrio residents frame gentrification
as a vehicle towards achieving social mobility, often engaging in narratives of
assimilation and colorblind racism that distance themselves from working-class
residents. Latinos who subscribe to this interpretation of gente-fication do not
view whites as threats to the existing community fabric, align themselves with
dominant pro-growth strategies at the city scale, and perpetuate the ongoing
racialization of a working-class immigrant to, ultimately, locate themselves in a
"honorary white" position within the local racial hierarchy. Latinos making
appeals to whiteness in this way often solicits an affirmation by whites who, in
turn, respond to these signals by differentiating among Latinos in the barrio and
subsequently acting on these differentiations. As suggested by the tri-racial
hierarchy thesis whites will favor minorities aligned with their views over those
considered part of the collective Black.
Finally, this study documents how whites and middle-class Mexican
residents engage in racializing working class and Latino immigrants. Primarily
through the latter group’s opposition to gentrification. Working class and
immigrant residents’ skepticism over potential benefits of unprecedented

72
investment into the community are readily minimized if not outright dismissed by
whites and middle-class Mexican residents. Narratives of the perpetually foreign
Latino (Davila 2008) and the Latino threat (Chavez 2013) deployed at national
scale are also utilized at the local scale (Davila 2004) in ways that render working
class, immigrant communities as not merely against gentrification but also
against, racial progress. The marginalization of this population works to advance
their racialization and place them in the collective Black stratum.
As a racial project, the gentrification process reorganizes and redefines
race in ways that maintain the sociopolitical system of white supremacy (Mills
1997), even as white populations decline. Scholars have argued whiteness will
open its ranks to allow people of color to maintain power much like it did during
the postwar era (Alba 2009; Warren and Twine 1997). In Boyle Heights, and Los
Angeles generally, gentrification discussions reflect laissez-faire racism in ways
that actively work together to forge a Latin American-like racial
hierarchy. Questions of gentrification in the historically racialized barrio are
located within a racialized social structure and, by extension, participate in
constructing this emerging tri-racial hierarchy. Whether “othering” working class
immigrants or appealing to whiteness, Mexican-origin residents in the barrio not
only engage in debates regarding the politics of city life but also position each
other and whites in a ternary racial hierarchy.
Why Los Angeles? Why Boyle Heights?
Located about three miles from the Los Angeles’ civic center, Boyle
Heights’ proximity has brought the barrio into the purview of downtown

73
revitalization. Boyle Heights is divided between foreign- and native-born
residents, 95 percent of which are Latino. The neighborhood’s inexpensive
housing has largely served renters over the last forty years with homeowners
making up only a quarter of its housing stock (U.S. Census 2010). In the context
of a persistent nationwide housing affordability crisis, renters have been identified
as disproportionately cost-burdened (State of Housing 2016) and precarious to
rising rents. Latino and black populations were hit hardest by the housing crisis
(Kochhar, Fry, and Taylor, 2011), however, immigrant status rendered Latinos
doubly at risk of foreclosures (Rugh 2014; Rugh and Hall 2016), spatially
marking the foreclosure landscape in the city (Tumpson Molina 2015; 2016).
Such context put gentrification and its impact on the barrio in stark relief. Taking
seriously Pulido's articulation that "landscapes are artifacts of past and present
racisms” (2000: 16), the dynamics explored in this paper illustrate the ways
racism has adapted over time and continues to shape gentrification in Boyle
Heights. Indeed, its proximity to the city center has historically organized policies
and practices of exclusion, which makes its present inclusion particularly
significant.
Keeping ethnic Mexicans spatially contained and placing them at the
lower rungs of the racial hierarchy has represented an ongoing project for Los
Angeles civic leaders since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 (Deverell
2004; Molina 2006; Gomez 2007). Los Angeles' rise as a prominent American
city was largely attributed to cultural and civic labor’s investment in
"whitewashing" the city's Mexican past and articulating an Anglo futurity

74
(Deverell 2004; Kropp 2006). As Los Angeles’ racial landscape took shape Anglo
boosters, civic leaders, tourists, and residents participated in daily practices based
on an imagined map of the city that considered particular spaces as foreign and
unsettled, necessitating the fabrication of social distance between themselves and
these spaces (Hise 2004). As a result, Anglo newcomers were directed to the west
side of the L.A. civic center while ethnic newcomers to the city remained
confined to areas like Boyle Heights–that is, east of the L.A. River (Sanchez
2004). The persistence of racialization of Mexicans in the Los Angeles landscape
situates the unique history of Boyle Heights and the Mexican barrio.
Emerging in the late nineteenth century as one of the earliest white
suburbs of Los Angeles, Boyle Heights’ lack of racially restrictive housing
covenants opened the neighborhood to international immigrants during the early
decades of the twentieth century. The resulting diversity of immigrants led Boyle
Heights to be redlined and subsequently regarded as “a foreign colony” by local
housing surveys during the early decades and by 1939 a “‘melting pot’
area…literally honeycombed with diverse and racial elements” that rendered it a
“hazardous residential territory” to the Home Owners Loan Corporation (“Area
Description” n.d.). Home to Jewish populations, Italians, Japanese, African
Americans, and ethnic Mexicans during the prewar period, a postwar Boyle
Heights became a Mexican-majority barrio by the middle of the twentieth century
(Sanchez 2004). Building on a legacy of activism (Sanchez 1993; Bernstein
2011), Boyle Heights became a bastion for the Chicano Movement in Los
Angeles during the early 1970s. In embracing an affirmative racial consciousness,

75
these movements constituted a racial ideology that continues to influence political
engagement on the eastside (Garcia Bedolla 2005). This political movement
coupled with its status during the last quarter of the twentieth century as a primary
destination for Latin American immigration the dominant Angelino imaginary
persisted in regarding Boyle Heights as a racialized and foreign place.
The post-1965 influx of Mexican immigration into Los Angeles was met
with anti-immigrant sentiment which steadily fueled a “Latino threat” narrative
during the 1970s and through the 1990s (Chavez 2013; Massey and Pren 2012).
Although Latino newcomers to Los Angeles arrived in areas of the city previously
habited by white residents (e.g. Santa Fe Springs, Norwalk, etc.) many continued
to settle in established barrios (e.g. Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, etc.) (Rocco
1996). The sheer volume of immigrants transformed the Los Angeles landscape
and positioned Latinos to become the city’s largest ethnic group, one which
remains spatially contained. The hypersegregation of Latinos, generally (Wilkes
and Iceland 2004), and the increasing “racialized underclass” status of Mexicans
Americans, specifically (Massey 2009), render barrios as important urban areas
providing insight into local process of racial formation, particularly as these
places undergo racial and class transitions. The majority-minority status of
Latinos in Los Angeles has increasingly highlighted the heterogeneity of Latinos
and its largest subgroup, Mexicans (Alba, Jimenez, and Marrow 2013; Pulido and
Pastor 2013).
While Latino, as well as Asian, immigrants were absorbed into expanding
low-wage and low-skilled industries the, simultaneous, growth in high-technology

76
industries bifurcated the local political economy. As these two industries
competed for downtown real estate, Mayor Tom Bradley would dedicate a
majority of his twenty-year tenure to direct citywide urban restructuring to appeal
to high-wage, high-skilled workers, particularly in downtown (Scott and Soja
1998; Soja 2014). The focus on the central business district would take a couple
of decades to come to fruition, and in addition to its status as a bustling residential
and business center, transform the city core into a populous residential area.
Although critics would later assess Bradley’s focus on downtown redevelopment
as proceeding at the cost of working class communities, to eventually pave the
way for the 1992 uprising (Davis 1991), central city developments would
nonetheless bring new, wealthier residents to downtown and surrounding
communities.
Gentrification in neighborhoods surrounding downtown has continued to
intensify. In Boyle Heights, local residents have formed various coalitions seeking
to curb the rate gentrification. One salient example of such coalitions is one
composed of local residents and activists called Defend Boyle Heights. They have
garnered coverage for utilizing militant aesthetics, protests, and boycotts to target,
while not exclusively, white-owned art galleries and coffee shops they claim
advance gentrification (Carroll 2016). Most recently, a Los Angeles Times’
Editorial Board ran an Op-Ed admonishing the group for their focus on white
businesses arguing that the group was misled in their emphasis on race, claiming
“at its core, gentrification is an economic force, not a racial one” (The Times
2017). Such examples of minimizing race enshrine the conventional race-neutral

77
perceptions of gentrification which, in Los Angeles, advance narratives of the
post-racial city described by media journalists such as Tobar.
Framework
Critical Theories of Race and their Relevance to Gentrification Literature
Gentrification has been defined as “the process by which central urban
neighborhoods that have undergone disinvestments and economic decline
experience a reversal, reinvestment, and the in-migration of a relatively well-off
middle- and upper middle-class population” (Smith’s 1998:198). Since being
coined in 1960s London (Glass 1964), the term has expanded individual level
processes to include national and international macro-level policies advancing
neighborhood change (Zukin 1987; Hackworth and Smith 2001; Lees, Slater, and
Wyly 2008; Brown-Saracino 2010). Displacement of longtime residents in
gentrifying neighborhoods has also become central to some definitions (Davidson
and Lees 2005; Boyd 2008). Understood as the heart of what renders
gentrification a “dirty word” (Smith 1996:38), displacement’s role in
gentrification scholarship has remained a site of much controversy since the turn
of the century (Vigdor 2002). Where some scholars argue claims of direct
displacement of long-term residents linked to gentrification are unsubstantiated
(Freeman 2006), other scholars have advanced a broader conceptualization of
displacement to target the political and cultural transformation set in motion by
gentrification (Betancur 2011; Hydra 2017).

78
Importantly, however, as a concept to understand neighborhood change in
American cities, gentrification underemphasized the existing and distinct, racial
social structures defining the urban landscape. In contrast to economic and racial
inequality in European nations, racialized notions of poverty and meritocracy
have endured in the U.S. to maintain racial inequality in America (Alesina and
Glaeser 2004). In this way, racism and racial inequality are fundamental aspects
of urban life (Bullard and Feagin 1991) and, by extension, integral to
gentrification processes. As a result, gentrification scholarship is particularly
impactful when remaining attentive to the permanence of race and racism in the
U.S. context (Bell 1992). Overtime, the simultaneous reading of the mutations of
racism as well as gentrification remain critical to understanding how communities
of color are impacted.
Race scholars have argued that a “new racism” emerged during the post-
Civil Rights era that has efficiently reproduced racial inequality through covert,
hegemonic, and apparently non-racial ways (Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith 1997;
Bonilla-Silva 2010; Omi and Winant 2014). Contemporary "hegemonic forms of
racial rule" (Omi and Winant 2014: 23) in urban places and practices reposition
gentrification as a process concerned not only with uneven development,
corporatism, and displacement but also with maintaining the sociopolitical system
of white supremacy (Mills 1997). Bringing critical theories of race to bear on
gentrification studies is crucial as rising racial diversity in urban centers rise
alongside growing racial inequality in urban places (Florida 2017).

79
Gentrification as a Racial Project
While early gentrification scholarship focused on the role of in-movers,
during the last two decades studies have increasingly examined the impact of
gentrification on longtime residents as well as the role of people of color as
gentrifiers. Studies of gentrification in communities of color have examined
historically African American neighborhoods (Taylor 2002; Lloyd 2004; Pattillo
2007; Boyd 20008; Hyra 2008; Freeman 2011; Hydra 2017) and Latino
communities (Perez 2004; Davila 2004; Betancur 2011; Wherry 2011) throughout
the U.S. Moreover, studies have more closely examined the way local racial
hierarchies influence how gentrification unfolds at the street level. For example,
middle class African Americans in gentrifying communities distinguish
themselves from working class community members in ways that advance the
latter’s displacement; even if middle-class African Americans eventually face
displacement themselves (Taylor 2002; Pattillo 2007; Boyd 2008). The nuances
of racial hierarchies and the importance of context has continued to gain
prominence among gentrification studies. Critical approaches to theories and
empirical studies help researchers understand not only the persistence of racial
inequality and the new, more elusive, forms of racism but also serve to develop a
more complex understanding of racialization and its transformative process over
time. Scholars with a focus on gentrification in Black neighborhoods, however,
leave to other scholars to explore how gentrification is experienced among racial
groups that fall into the “racial middle” (O’Brien 2008), such as Latinos. In
Chicago, for example, majority-Hispanic and majority-Black neighborhoods are

80
least likely to gentrify compared to Asian and White communities (Hwang and
Sampson 2014).
Subsequent studies have found Hispanic communities are positively
associated with gentrification, however (Hwang 2015). More recently in an
examination of neighborhood socioeconomic ascent across U.S., Owens and
Candipan (2018) found Hispanic communities experiencing ascent were likely to
encounter a wave of White, high socioeconomic status in-movers. While the
proportion of White in-movers were about a fifth of the neighborhood population
these newcomers’ socioeconomic status dwarfed that of the local population.
Such discrepancies in socioeconomic status, the authors note, can have a
substantial effect on local political and cultural fabric disproportionate to the
newcomers’ size (p. 21). These findings, together, underscore not only mixed
findings regarding Hispanic communities, but also highlight the ways Latinos
remain simultaneously racialized (Chavez 2013) and an aspirational model
minority in the national imagination (Davila 2008).
In a period of ongoing state-led gentrification—where national and local
government policies work in tandem with developers to support gentrification
(Davidson and Lees 2005)—such dynamics do not supersede a consideration of
race and class at the neighborhood scale. Specifically, white gentrifiers remain in
the most privileged and powerful position in local hierarchies. In Los Angeles, for
example, despite a majority-minority context, the median net worth of a white
household in the city has ten times the wealth of their Mexican and African
American counterparts (De La Cruz-Viesca et al. 2016). Coupled with race-

81
neutral land-use policies that, despite their good intentions, result in racialized
outcomes (Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith 1997; Saito 2009); these factors work in
concert to maintain, simultaneously, a white futurity and sustain powerlessness in
communities of color. Indeed, neoliberal cities, in their appeal to middle-class
residents, implicitly target white residents who are disproportionately more likely
to inhabit this class standing and who easily accommodate to mainstream cultural
tastes. In this way, just as racism is maintained and advanced at the macro, meso,
and micro-levels so are the unevenly distributed negative and positive effects of
gentrification processes.
Methods
For the present study, I draw from in-depth, semi-structured interviews of
activists, residents, and professionals in Boyle Heights as well as from
ethnographic fieldwork over the last five years in the barrio. In the course of
volunteering with anti-gentrification collectives that frequently overlapped with
existing affordable housing and arts organizations, I contacted individuals who
had been involved in some form of protest over the gentrification of Boyle
Heights. Given the strong social justice, immigrant, and Chicano, Latino identity,
most individuals were often against gentrification and the displacement of current
residents and therefore represent majority of my data. Despite interviewees taking
a stance against gentrification and displacement some were positioned as gente-
fiers or gentrifiers by other groups in the community. While the question of who
is and who isn’t a gentrifier was a site of contestation, it nevertheless remained an
important boundary local residents and artists sought to define. Since discussions

82
of gentrification in the community were ongoing social media outlets (primarily
Facebook) became a critical tool to complement fieldwork and provided a virtual
extension to my field site. Scholars have noted that digital ethnography remains a
burgeoning and essential site for social scientists to observe social interactions
taking place alongside the physical world (Murthy 2008, Baker 2013). Following
numerous local organizations on social media allowed me to track social media
posts related to discussions of gentrification or anti-gentrification directly related
to Boyle Heights. Often, these individuals and collectives I located on posts were
also those I observed or engaged with during my fieldwork. For this paper, I use
comments directly related to definitions of gentrification or gente-fication
typically referencing a related news story. Finally, I also utilize local and national
media coverage of gentrification in the barrio as such reports generate discussions
among community members. Importantly, media coverage itself offers insight to
dominant interpretations and understandings of gentrification and its impacts on
working class residents. Together, these methods allowed me to develop a more
rounded assessment of how gentrification is racialized and how this process is
perceived (or not) to generate racialized outcomes and reconstruct racial
identities.
Gentrification as whiteness
In bringing critical racial theories into discussions of gentrification,
including whites into this analysis of racial processes, adds another dimension to
their role beyond the enduring trope of the white hipster as the archetypal
gentrifier. White residents and white-owned businesses in the area are interesting

83
in their reproduction of gentrification and racism. Rather than simply benign,
mundane stories of whites’ interactions with barrio residents, I demonstrate how
gentrification related events and discussions are dominated by ideologies of color-
blind racism and, as a result, reveal the ways whites reproduce whiteness and
gentrification to maintain power.
Gentrification as a racial project includes whites and whiteness in
processes of racial construction of local communities. Most people can appreciate
that the prevailing trope is that of the white hipster (Greif, Ross, and Tortorici
2010), yet we know little about how perceived gentrifiers navigate their racial
identities in relation to racialized places. Although some scholars have sought to
examine how newcomers understand their social position within a context of
neighborhood change (Caulfield 1994; Brown-Saracino 2009) the racialization of
whiteness in these urban dynamics remains understudied. Similarly, the
racialization between newcomers and existing residents is not often studied at the
intersection of race-making and place-making.
As multi-generational Mexicans in Boyle Heights debate the perimeters of
gente-fication and extent of class solidarity in the face of social mobility through
gentrification, the average Mexican household in the city still holds one cent of
wealth for every one dollar of wealth held by whites. Such stark wealth inequality
not only stresses the prevalent systemic racism persisting in the face of ever-
increasing diversity of the city, but also reaffirms ongoing material benefits
accorded to those racialized as “white” and part of the dominant race (Bonilla-
Silva and Dietrich 2009). Places that have remained racially segregated since the

84
early twentieth century evoke stories and logics that engender unique racial
projects to maintain white supremacy in a spatialized tri-racial order. In Boyle
Heights, such context has led some residents to view whites as harbingers of
diversity in a Latino-majority city while others consider white individuals as
prominent symbols of gentrification and, by extension, a threat to the culture of
Mexican barrios.
In May 2014, pictures of a real estate flyer circulated by Boyle Heights
organizations, business owners, and residents alike made its way to the top of
many social media newsfeeds. Crystalizing fears of displacement in big, bold, red
letters, the flyer asked, “Why rent in Downtown when you can own in Boyle
Heights?” Offering a bike ride through the Mexican barrio to showcase its historic
housing stock, the real estate agent sought to creatively recruit potential home
buyers from downtown. With phrases such as “2 seconds from the [downtown]
arts district,” “Charming, historic, walkable, and bikeable neighborhood,” “Put as
little as $40k with decent credit,” “Artisan treats and refreshments provided”
spotting the flyer, it was read by local residents as a signal to white middle-class
residents to purchase a home in the working class barrio and gentrify the
neighborhood.
Residents responded to the initial flyer by rewriting the question of the
flyer to read “Why rent in Boyle Heights when you could gentrify another
working class neighborhood?” In addition, this modified version of the flyer
encouraged locals to attend the advertised bike ride to protest what they viewed as
an unwelcome pro-gentrification effort into the barrio. Despite the real estate

85
agent later admitting she didn’t aim to “racially profile” clients, the flyer was
interpreted as catering to white residents in downtown and with a still fresh
foreclosure crisis disproportionately affecting Latino and Black families the
hardest, the racialized outcomes were viewed as having a similar impact (Romero
2014).
Evoking the history of Boyle Heights and downtown as unequal
geographies, the realtor’s flyer in the context of a racialized geography engages
explicitly and implicitly gentrification as a racial project. Los Angeles’ downtown
redevelopment has racialized the area, in the views of barrio residents, as a white,
exclusionary space. As development expands it threatens, through gentrification,
to expand into the barrio. Scholars have noted that Boyle Heights residents’ views
of downtown civic center as a white space forms part of the barrio imaginary
which has, over time, accrued memories of state-led urban renewal targeting
working class barrios. This place-specific history contributes a dimension of
temporality for existing research that has demonstrated race-neutral pursuits for
redevelopment reify the normalcy of whiteness, suggesting race and place are
ever present in the most “colorblind” and innocuous of efforts in the urban setting
(Saito 2009). The flyer, the reaction it received, and subsequent events
demonstrate the ways whiteness is an ongoing process and supported by the state.
After generating a strong response from Boyle Heights residents, the bike
tour was promptly cancelled, and an apology was issued by the realtor. The
apology, written by the real estate agent on a public Boyle Heights Facebook
page:

86
I see now that [the flyer] has unintentionally struck a very sensitive nerve
in the Boyle Heights community. I sincerely apologize if I've offended
anyone. People need to realize that Boyle Heights is inevitably going to
change due to [its] proximity to Downtown and regardless of my little
flyer. It's a true gem of a neighborhood with beautiful properties many of
which are left severely unmaintained and/ or vacant. What is wrong with
helping good, socially conscious folks purchase these properties, restore
them, live in them, and rent them? Would you rather the neighborhood
get bought out by large developers that will tear down old homes and
build hideous apartment buildings in their place?
Boyle Heights doesn't have to be the next Silverlake, Echo Park,
or Downtown. It's time to create a NEW MODEL FOR
GENTRIFICATION. One that has positive connotations for a change! A
change that benefits the long term residents, boosts existing small local
business, but also welcomes the new comers.
This all starts with community involvement. More people need
to come to neighborhood council meetings and actually get involved in
this conversation. We can collectively come up with creative ways to use
this new influx of money and people to create a new social model.
(Haffar 2014)
Couching her argument in meritocracy of “helping good, socially conscious folks
purchase [unmaintained and/ or vacant] properties, restore them, live in them, and
rent them?” the realtor positioned herself to defend the role of realtors in
maintaining the existing racial inequality produced by gentrification. Through
abstract liberalism and its equal opportunity framework, Bonilla-Silva (2010)

87
argues, functions to defend white privilege. Here, dismissing the historic
disinvestment that produced and maintained a deteriorating housing stock as well
as the impact of the housing crisis on barrio communities (Tumpson Molina 2016)
allows the realtor to reposition herself and her clients’ role in supporting existing
inequality. By contrasting her role to that of corporations she intentionally
assuages any remaining doubts regarding her role in gentrification by producing
an image of smaller scale, friendlier form of neighborhood change.
The racial imaginary is most salient in the way the statement contrasts
Boyle Heights to other places including Silverlake, Echo Park, and downtown all
of which are considered gentrified predominantly by whites. While the realtor
encourages a “new model” of gentrification that will benefit exiting business
owners and newcomers, yet, leaves local residents’ concerns about displacement
and rising rents unaddressed. Again, the role of ahistoricism is evident in the last
paragraph, which frames local residents as politically apathetic when, in reality,
the barrio has remained one of the more politically active places in Los Angeles.
The flyer, its response, and the subsequent apology help illustrate the way
racial imaginaries are constituted and negotiated often without mentioning race or
racism. Examining the apology in its entirety captures the way the apology,
sincerely offered, is partially rescinded with each subsequent paragraph
continuing to collectively support “blaming the victim.” Overall, the statement
absolves the realtor of her role in advancing gentrification as well as the systemic
racism contributing to the loss of affordable housing for the most vulnerable and
powerless groups in the barrio. Absent the consideration of these factors the

88
apology conveys a sense of false empathy. That is, a superficial effort by whites
to sense the challenges of people of color while remaining “grounded in white
experience” (Delgado 1996: 71). The resulting social distance is rationalized and
perpetuated by maintaining power relations and material gains away from people
and communities of color, particularly those barrio residents’ views which don’t
align with hers on the “inevitability” of gentrification.
More than an event providing insight to the ways racial geographies and
ideologies of colorblind racism are sustained, the flyer and its responses
demonstrate how it functions as white social capital. Serving to create and
maintain racial hierarchies (Lewis 2004), the flyer acts as an instrument of
domination, deploying white social capital signals on the normalcy of a real estate
market which, in a post- housing crisis, disproportionately benefits this group.
Often hidden, white social capital might invite a response seeking to reaffirm the
prevailing colorblind ideology by presenting “stories of the world that make
sense” and secures their dominant position (Lewis 2004:632). For example, a
white homeowner of Boyle Heights shared the following, in response to the
realtor’s posting:
I wanted to email you and say I’m sorry you had such a negative run in
with some people in the community of Boyle Heights. It sounds like you
tangled with a small but vocal minority who are angry and scared about
diversity and change coming to the neighborhood…I wanted to
encourage you not to give up on the neighborhood… My husband and I
are white… When we bought our place we decided on Boyle Heights
partly because it was the only neighborhood in L.A. [where] we could

89
afford a decent house at the time and also because we were familiar with
and like the area… Our neighbors have told us many times that they are
happy that a “nice young family” moved into our place and then they
proceed to tell us all the history of the area.
(correspondence on file with author)
Offering this personal narrative to the realtor reveals how whites respond to each
other in ways that rationalize their positionality and minimize the concerns of
existing residents. Bonilla-Silva (2010) argues such testimonies provide rhetorical
functions to support the racial status quo by eliding critical examinations of their
own racial status within the barrio. While the author of the letter self-identifies as
white, the lack of critical examination of their racial status within the barrio
suggests their whiteness is understood only as a benign identity. In this way, the
correspondence can be viewed as mobilizing a situational sense of groupness
which emerges, in this case, when whiteness becomes visible and distinctly
associated with privilege in the context of gentrification. As Lewis (2004)
reminds us, despite whites’ heterogeneity they constitute a social group which
seeks to maintain their social position grounded in a defense of material
advantages. Such a defense, as mentioned previously, predicates on a market-
based rationalization of racial inequities (Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith 1997).
Finally, by supporting the realtor’s notion that those who don’t view
gentrification as beneficial to the barrio, characterizing them as “a small but vocal
minority who are angry and scared about diversity and change coming to the
neighborhood” they engage in differentiating between “bad” Mexicans from
“good” Mexicans. Those barrio residents who protest gentrification are part of the

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collective black. For the author they are not only a “vocal minority” “angry and
scared” but, as the subject line refers to them, “horrible.” In contrast, those
welcoming neighbors who don’t share critical views of their whiteness in the local
political economy are taken to be honorary whites. By describing her whiteness as
part of “diversity,” she signals a racially “progressive” stance towards
colorblindness yet does so without accounting for the economic chasms that
maintain the sedimentation of racial inequality. Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich (2009)
predict whites will seek to discern between members of the collective black and
honorary whites in a tri-racial order and, in addition, will consider the latter in a
more favorable manner. While the number of white newcomers to Boyle Heights
may seem too small for consideration, the concern stems from the process of
transition of the barrio under prevailing notions of gentrification. That is such
white supremacy as a sociopolitical progression, works by extending white status
or a white-like status to shift community resources and streetscapes away from the
vulnerable groups which have historically built and maintained it and, instead,
towards wealthier white newcomers.
Gente-fication and the construction of an “Honorary White” Barrio
Gentrification debates in a Latino majority context reveal how race and
class inform each other to generate a ternary racial hierarchy which places some
Latinos as part of the “honorary” white stratum and other Latinos in “collective
Black” stratum. In Los Angeles, discussions and debates regarding gentrification
become discursive vehicles in which social distance between upwardly mobile
Mexican Americans and working class, immigrant co-ethnics is increased. The

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resulting social distance is compounded by distance established by whites as
examined in the previous section. As a form of Latino-led gentrification, gente-
fication is part of the racialization processes of Mexican Americans in the barrio
and their location within the ternary racial hierarchy.
Overwhelmingly inhabited by working class, immigrant and native born
Mexican-origin residents during the postwar period, Boyle Heights has long been
associated with this demographic population. The Chicano Movement in Los
Angeles, for example, has long maintained a spatial connection to the Eastside
barrios where many Mexican-origin immigrants and native-born residents
resided. As a result, the race-based political identities constructed during this
period, namely Chicano, were imbued with a working class identity and politic.
This intersection of racial identity and working class consciousness located
spatially within the Eastside barrios interfaces with residents’ competing readings
of gente-fication to become part of the racialization processes.
While gente-fication is broadly understood as a response by Latinos to
conventional notions of gentrification led by white newcomers, two definitions of
gente-fication prevalent in Los Angeles and Boyle Heights, specifically, are
examined in this section.
The first describes how Latinos, often former residents, return to the
barrio to invest in local businesses and real-estate towards producing the
ostensible outcome of providing economic and racial uplift for all residents. The
second definition, in contrast, views gente-fication as primarily concerned with
protecting the most vulnerable community residents—a position which considers

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investment (aspiring or real) by middle-class Latinos as part of the larger threat of
gentrification and displacement. While both definitions of gente-fication are
responses to conventional notions of white-led gentrification, each engages in a
racialization which places some Latinos in the “honorary white” stratum and
some in the “collective Black” stratum. As a result, each definition has the
outcome of increasing the social distance between Latinos within the barrio—
indicative of a citywide process. This social distancing highlights the material
implications of racialization that is often overlooked in debates and discussions of
gente-fication and gentrification more broadly.
Consistent with the thrust of the Latin Americanization of Race thesis, my
intent in this section is not to predict who will fit into each stratum and in which
context, but rather to reveal the ways racialization in a majority-minority urban
setting is increasingly complex while racism remains persistent and subtle. A
more thorough analysis seeking to understand the ways gentrification debates and
discussions interact with race and class requires deliberate racial theorization.
Without critical theories of race, social distance among Latinos is overlooked as
an important site of race-making oriented towards preserving existing power
relations.
Gente-fication as an Economic and Racial Progress
Among both definitions, gente-fication as economic and racial uplift is the
primary way it is understood in response to conventional gentrification led by
whites. Here, investment in the barrio by ostensibly culturally sensitive Latinos is
perceived less threatening as it suggests a slower, kinder gentrification process.

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For example, one local business owner, believed “’it would be best if
the gente decide to invest in improvements because [gente] are more likely to
preserve its integrity’” (Herbst 2014). Such preservation of Boyle Heights’
“integrity” involved envisioning that the area remains “owned predominantly by
Latinos” (Herbst 2014). In this view, choosing to return to the barrio involves re-
imagining the barrio itself. Collectively, then, upward mobility, class status, and
spatiality are all invoked, explicitly or implicitly, in the racialization of gente-
fication.
Moreover, this definition of gente-fication is recognized as a convergence
between the back-to-the-city movement and the rise of a Mexican American
middle-class. Rather than follow the traditional path into middle-class suburbs
farther east into neighboring San Gabriel valley, gente-fication in Boyle Heights
capitalizes on the proximity to downtown— in doing so, Latino spatial mobility
patterns established over the last half century are re-imagined. As one local
business owner mentioned, “making it doesn’t mean moving out” (Medina 2013).
Gente-fication as a Latino-entrepreneur-driven process prioritizes narratives of
free-market and seizes dominant values of meritocracy and individualism,
viewing entrepreneurship as a principle pathway towards curbing threats of
gentrification and displacement. Residents and non-residents who subscribe to
this definition of gente-fication not only view gente-fication as an alternative to
white-led gentrification, but also an economic boon to all residents.
Within this context, those who view gentrification as having negative
effects on vulnerable residents, are considered not favoring progress and uplift.

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Such views were particularly brought to light in early 2014 after a popular Boyle
Heights Facebook page shared an image of a white banner which had appeared
overnight in front of a vacant storefront in the neighborhood. A spray painted
message in red and black on the banner read “Boyle Heights Says No! To
Gentrification.” The image generated an extensive discussion on social media,
with Latino residents, and non-residents expressing their views on the
significance (or lack thereof) of the banner’s statement. One individual argued
that “a banner is not going to do anything. We NEED[sic] to start buying up
property. Investing into our community” (M.C. Catalán). In another comment,
one prominent community organizer advised anti-gentrification protesters that
“complaining about [gentrification] only gets you so far” and, instead, suggested
they become “involved in [the] community and help existing residents and
business empower themselves” (J. Garcia). Finally, D. Ortiz argued “It's all just a
bunch of talk unless the people who live in Boyle Heights become real
stakeholders and begin to invest in their own community. By invest, I mean
owning their own homes or starting up a business.”
Nevertheless, with about a quarter of the neighborhood owning their
homes, the overwhelming majority of renters often face some kind of barrier to
homeownership- a reality that has characterized the neighborhood since the 1960s
(Boyle Heights 1970). Yet, abstract liberalism elides a structural analysis by
pitting the threats of displacement on working class residents themselves. At least
half of whom, in Boyle Heights, are immigrants. Collectively, these responses
illustrate how entrepreneurship and homeownership, are viewed as the primary

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pathway to curb gentrification. Responses to the banner’s message are reflective
of common reactions to anti-gentrification activists in the barrio and reveal the
values of economic and racial uplift reinforced by gente-fication—specifically,
values such as the free-market, individualism, and meritocracy. Additionally, the
constellation of values while not explicitly labeled gente-fication, are nonetheless
embedded in this broad conceptualization. As a response to white-led
gentrification and to barrio anti-gentrification activists, gente-fication fosters
social distance among Latinos in the barrio. This growing chasm is not only
evident in comments on social media but is similarly displayed in media coverage
of gentrification in the barrio, reflecting views that affirm dominant values while,
simultaneously, admonishing anti-gentrification protesters.
Disproportionately covered by Latino journalists, newspaper coverage of
gentrification and related protests in Boyle Heights has the effect of creating
social distance among Latinos in the barrio. Protests over white-owned
businesses in Boyle Heights such as high-end art galleries and new coffee shops
are often covered by the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times in ways that
amplify principles of laissez faire ideology. For example, after protesters targeted
a white-owned coffee shop as yet another example of changes in the community
provoking displacement, newspaper coverage minimized resident concerns and
centralized Latino residents and businesses who disapproved of protests. One
such local Latino business owner argued the coffee shop “[has] a right to run a
business” and that protesters were misguided particularly because they were free
to “buy cheap coffee or expensive coffee.” (Vives 2017). Another Latino business

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owner added “I understand forced displacement, but I definitely welcome [the
coffee] shop. This is not some big corporation entering. This is really mom and
pop” (Do 2017). Views of free market principles were contrasted by descriptions
of anti-gentrification protesters as “ill-informed,” “inappropriate” and “militant.”
(Vives 2017). One Latino journalist went so far as to call protestors “hypocrites,”
“cowards,” and “silly” (Lopez 2017). Anti-gentrification protestors seeking to
underscore the ways white-owned art galleries (Medina 2016) and coffee shops
(Times Editorial 2017) were part of systemic racism and white supremacy were
minimized and summarily identified as reverse racists who “hurt their cause by
making it about race, rather than economics” (Times Editorial 2017). Newspaper
coverage of gentrification in Boyle Heights, collectively, serves to amplify values
of free market competition, meritocracy, and individualism which converge to
rationalize ongoing racial inequality— a process consistent with laissez faire
ideology (Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith 1997). Moreover, by minimizing claims
made by anti-gentrification protesters and casting them as fallacious and even
“reverse racists,” newspaper coverage implicitly mobilized racial stereotypes
advanced by prominent institutions over the last fifty years to deem the barrio and
its residents as undeserving and often dangerous. Relatedly, Latino journalists
covering gentrification in Boyle Heights defined the boundaries of gentrification
discourse by limiting racism to individual prejudice and rejecting structural
analysis of racism and, by extension, considered illegitimate those Latinos
skeptical of gente-fication’s potential for economic and racial uplift.
Among the cumulative impacts of discussions and views on the racial and

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economic boost of gente-fication is the association to middle class Mexican
American’s standing and status. Although middle class status is not the primary
nor singular factor in the racialization of Mexican Americans as “honorary
white,” it nonetheless serves as a racial fault line to distinguish from Latinos part
of the “collective Black.” In addition to the upward mobility implied in gente-
fication, its endorsement by successful, middle class journalists and Latinos
reinforces its link to middle class status and, ultimately, “honorary whiteness”. As
a result, middle class status informs—if implicitly— whether gente-fication is
deemed appropriate or challenged by various local stakeholders.
Previous research has documented the ways macro-narratives across
various institutions represent the upward mobility or middle class standing of
Latinos as more whitewashed, and therefore a more consumable, minority culture
(Davila 2008). Gente-fication in this context, then, complements similar macro-
scale narratives which depict an expanding Latino middle class leading to
assimilation into whiteness (Alba 2009; Frey 2014; Warren and Twine 1997).
This framing of Latino class-based ascent legitimizes the desirability of the
barrio, even as racialization persists for Mexican Americans— often hindering
full incorporation to mainstream middle class America (Chavez 2013; Davila
2008; Feagin and Cobas 2013; Ortiz and Telles 2017; Pulido and Pastor 2013;
Telles and Ortiz 2008). Through gente-fication, then, narratives of assimilation
contribute to the legitimization of land uses, business, and real estate practices
that disproportionately cater to middle class sensibilities of Latino and White
consumers at the expense of working class, immigrant residents.

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As narratives of gente-fication and Chipsters (Chicano hipsters) continue
to play prominent roles in descriptions of neighborhood change in the barrio, the
questions persist related to middle class Mexican Americans and their social
distance from working class, immigrants of Mexican origin. Research has
demonstrated that middle class Latinos in the U.S. continue to face racism despite
attempts to assimilate but also demonstrate an internalization of the “white racial
framing” which, subsequently enables them to enforce practices of “hegemonic
whiteness” to secure Whites’ dominant position in the racial social structure
(Lewis 2003: 52). More than simply internalizing U.S. racial norms,
Delgado(2014) contends middle class Mexican Americans’ social distance from
other Latinos reflects a strategy employed by this group to navigate the fluid
racial hierarchy they experience in daily life, to gain access to white-coded
resources and to deflect racialization—an aggregate result that continues place
middle class status distinct and part of “honorary white” (p. 687). Wittingly or
not, both cases result in widening social distance between middle class and
working class groups as a material side-effect. This is particularly critical as it
signals a potential political and cultural shift in Boyle Heights.
As indicated earlier, the social mechanisms discussed build up to a ternary
racial hierarchy. These mechanisms are evident in the social distancing between
“honorary white” Latinos who, in this case, rationalize racial inequality in the
context of a free market and ostensible racial uplift, and Latinos who view
gentrification as structural racism placing them in the collective Black stratum.
Latino journalists here, then, are understood as institutional actors, part of “gente-

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fication as racial and economic progress” at the expense of immigrant and
working class individuals protesting structural racism represented by
gentrification. Doing so underscores processes of a ternary racial hierarchy where
the fluidity of whiteness permits a select group of Latinos to retain extant power
relations in a majority-minority context. The result is a distancing along
gentrification and anti-gentrification lines, where the former is aligned with white
hegemony.
Gente-fication as Working Class Solidarity
In contrast to gente-fication as racial and economic uplift, the second
definition relates primarily to working class solidarity. Anti-gentrification
activism grounded in this notion of gente-fication targets conventional white
gentrifiers as well as middle-class Latinos. This solidarity is motivated by distrust
towards responses to gentrification that support hegemonic whiteness. As a result,
this definition is oppositional to economic and racial uplift gente-fication. In this
way, ethnic entrepreneurship is not viewed as the purveyor of barrio-wide
protection against cultural and political displacement and therefore unsupported.
Instead, racial and economic advancement is accomplished through social
activism and, particularly, by securing inexpensive housing for economically
vulnerable immigrants to prevent displacement. Gente-fication as working class
solidarity reveals the ways anti-gentrification activists, conventionally considered
social pariahs, participate in racialization processes by identifying themselves as
part of the “collective Black” and in opposition to Latinos they view as white-like
or “honorary white.”

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Towards challenging what they view as the structural racism that advances
gentrification, proponents of gente-fication as working class solidarity utilize
social activism to advocate for renter’s rights as well as a means to curb the rise of
businesses perceived as advancing gentrification and displacement. Bringing
structural interpretations to the forefront of gentrification discussions centralizes
immigrant and working class Mexican groups otherwise overlooked in
conventional assessments of benefits and losses resulting from neighborhood
change. In contrast to the perception of gentrification as largely an economic
force, proponents of gente-fication as working class solidarity regard economic-
based rationalizations as extensions of displacement historically experienced in
the barrio. For instance, one local anti-gentrification activist told a reporter
“[activists] think of gentrification as displacement and white supremacy” (Medina
2016). These structural critiques are also evident in the boycott against the white-
owned coffee shop in Boyle Heights. Here, activists fashioned signs which read
“No I.C.E. Coffee,” “White Amerikkkanos To Go,” and “No COPpuccinos.” In
doing so, activists connected the increase in policing and immigration
enforcement in the barrio to the way white-coffee shops, in their view, take
advantage of the removal of working class residents. The work these signs do is
primarily rooted in the framing of whites’ business owners as symptoms of larger
structural processes that, in the protesters’ estimations, repeatedly result in the
displacement of vulnerable residents.
Challenging conventional interpretations of gentrification and gente-
fication reveals how anti-gentrification activists and social movements respond to

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contexts seeking to minimize, at best, erase at worst, their perspectives. Most
noteworthy are the ways anti-gentrification activists engage in the racialization of
Latinos labeled “white” through their class aspirations, their support for
gentrification, or perceived actions against the interests of working class,
immigrants. In many ways, such racialization parallels the racialization of whites
who distinguish between Mexican origin groups supportive of gentrification from
those opposed. As such, this top to bottom approach is complemented by anti-
gentrification activists’ bottom up racialization that highlights the social distance
practiced by “honorary white” Latinos, using it to legitimize their own position.
Carolina, a Boyle Heights resident and Mexican immigrant, questioned
what she saw as uncritical support for gente-fication in discussions of
gentrification of the barrio. She explains:
Now that we call [gentrification] gente-fication and some people decided
[gente-fication] was a good thing, they're comfortable with that. We don't
think about the ways that we ourselves are implicated in the process of
displacement. Gente-fication, to me, seems like it is a little more about
assimilating into these ideas of 'we need progress’… Gente-fication,
progress, and social mobility in the name of what? Sacrificing what? I
feel Latinos are implicated in the process of displacement because
Latinos have money too.
(Carolina 2016)
A recent college graduate, Carolina’s college education would place her in middle
class standing, however, her critique of gente-fication and concern over Latinos’
participation in displacement suggests a more nuanced interpretation. Rather than

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implicitly accepting displacement facilitated by middle class Latinos, Carolina
questions the underlying notions of “progress and social mobility.” For her, gente-
fication, despite claims of community-oriented entrepreneurship, indicates a
break-away from working class and immigrant solidarity. As an immigrant
herself, Carolina expresses her concern for the displacement of immigrants not
necessarily seen as socially mobile or middle class. Carolina’s skepticism towards
middle class co-ethnics and their potential threats to working class solidarity is
not limited to gente-fication and questions implicating Mexican American and
Chicano identity at a broader scale.
Gente-fication as an indicator of Latino, and especially Mexican
American, Angelenos’ arrival to the middle class is particularly contentious in
Boyle Heights. The barrio’s progressive political consciousness coupled with its
local geography (Garcia Bedolla 2005; Acuña 2007) cast the influx of middle
class co-ethnics as a kind of betrayal. After the postwar economic growth and
civil rights legislation bestowing entry to the middle class for some Mexican
Americans, Roman (2013) argues, class ascension generated significant tension in
working class communities who did not benefit from similar social mobility.
Speaking to the class status panic in Chicano cultural production Roman’s (2013)
analysis is relevant to understanding the tensions in responses to gente-fication.
According to Roman class ascension in the Chicano imaginary is considered
cultural and class betrayal. This “double betrayal” is rooted in three related parts:
the negative association between middle-class-ness and whiteness, an idealization
of Chicano community as a working class family, and the homogenization of

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Mexicans in the marketplace (Roman 2013:17). These factors are helpful in
comprehending how community members view and respond to gente-fication,
often raising similar concerns.
New as well as existing organizations are not exempt from criticism from
community members seeking to ground gentrification to a halt. During one recent
protest directed at a historic and Chicano art organization, Self Help Graphics,
one local anti-gentrification coalition named Defend Boyle Heights held banners
that read “El Barrio No Se Vende.” Translated as “the barrio is not for sale,” this
consideration of cultural betrayal helps reveal the sign’s double entendre—“the
barrio will not be sold out.” Like Roman’s assertion that “someone who expresses
cultural differences in pursuit of financial or social capital is often perceived as
someone who is leaving the ethnic group” (2013:18), the actions by local
organizations are scrutinized to differentiate those who are authentic Chicanos or
residents of Boyle Heights. Even those who operate businesses in the barrio are
considered suspicious. For Carolina, the business owner who coined gente-
fication “talks about brown people coming back to the community but he doesn't
live in the community. His greatest contribution has been a bar that has a dress
code!” Pointing to what she considers as hypocrisy in conventional notions of
gente-fication, Carolina notes that the local bar owner’s residence in the nearby
suburbs, the limited local benefits of a bar, and the business’ dress code work
together to cast the bar and the owner as inauthentic and socially distance from
the relevant needs of the working class community; effectively, placing the bar
and its owner as part of the “honorary white” stratum.

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Interrogating the role and status of the middle class in gente-fication
reveals how Mexican barrio residents are prompted to gauge the social distance
between themselves and their co-ethnics along the racial hierarchy. Supporters of
the barrio community and culture through gente-fication, simultaneously, disavow
immigrant and working class struggles by, often, blaming the latter for their own
oppression. Exercising agency, these Latino residents’ perspectives are aligned
with whiteness and are placed in the “honorary white” level of the tri-racial
hierarchy. In addition, whites and the collective Black, such as working class
Latinos, also work together in placing Latinos in the “honorary white” stratum.
For example, a couple Mexican immigrant day laborers, commenting on the
patrons of a local bar, considered the quintessential symbol of gente-fication for
its dress code and cover charge, declare, “They’re not Mexican” while another
added that they resemble “güeros” or whites (Mejia 2015). Other Boyle Heights
residents emphasize a working class solidarity and question uncritical support of
middle class values. As Eduardo argued “Gente-fication, has a negative effect on
the older, immigrant generation that came from Mexico and have Mexican-ized
Boyle Heights…So when we talk about gente-fication, who is the gente? How is
that gente coming together? How are they addressing the negative impact of
gentrification?” His questions highlight the class tensions in gente-fication, while
also seeking to expand gente-fication to include working class immigrants
vulnerable to displacement. These persisting debates, however, occur in a context
where whites and their role in gentrification is similarly discussed and examined
in efforts to curb or stop displacement.

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Conclusion
This study advances gentrification literature by recasting the urban
phenomenon as a racial project. As a such, gentrification reveals the
transformation of places is predicated on the transformation of racial hierarchies.
The majority-minority context of Los Angeles serves as an exemplary case study
of how gentrification is advanced through an ambivalent combination of racial
and "race-neutral" narratives that work together to advance the displacement of
the most vulnerable, working class residents in the neighborhood.
Gentrification as a racial project contributes to the literature by going
beyond the ways people of color merely experience or participate in gentrification
processes to understand how whiteness persists (in traditional and expanded
forms) in the face of diversity or colorblindness narratives that permeate majority
minority cities. Indeed, while macro, state-led practices advance gentrification the
role of micro-scale, local actors remain relevant particularly in a racial analysis.
In this study, I demonstrate how white actors are racialized and viewed as
significant gentrification threats by barrio residents while, simultaneously, whites
consider their involvement and presence in the barrio driven by individual free-
choice, not motivations to gentrify a community. Importantly, despite these
disavowals of their role in gentrification, whites nevertheless benefit from the
process, form solidarity with other whites, and behave differently towards people
of color based on the latter’s support (or lack thereof) of their perspectives. In
doing so, whites reveal how they, “at strategic moments, [form] a self-conscious
group” (Lewis 2004) to affirm their groupness and social, dominant position

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within the local racial hierarchy. The sequence of action from the release of the
flyer, the backlash, apology, and email of support help sketch out the
‘everydayness’ of whiteness embedded in discussions of gentrifiers.
I’ve stressed the ways the specific history of Mexicans in Los Angeles and
the contemporary racialization of Mexicans directly informs the ways race is
constructed in the city. As the largest subgroup of Latinos, and one of the largest
Latino cities such history-informed theorization of the tri-racial hierarchy is
relevant particularly as this city contrasts Latino experiences in places like
Chicago (Betancur 2011, Wherry and Rocco 2011) and New York (Dávila 2004;
2008). In Los Angeles, competing views of Mexicans, and Mexican immigrants,
as the quintessential Latino threat to American culture and values on the one
hand, and emerging middle-class, model minorities on the other, are critical
spaces to understand how gentrification is racialized in the Mexican barrio. Here,
I assert gentrifiers of color create social distance between working class co-
ethnics and, simultaneously, lessen this distance with whites. Latino gentrifiers
move to appeal to whiteness and in a majority-minority city, function as
“honorary white” and, in fact, are considered as such by white and working-class
co-ethnics. These cumulative effects support the formation of a tripartite racial
hierarchy in the barrio, and citywide.

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Chapter Four: The Relational Gentrification of Mexican
American Women Activists

Introduction

Urban scholarship has demonstrated that working class populations are
particularly vulnerable in communities of color experiencing gentrification.
Understanding how women of color in these contexts navigate and challenge their
social location directly contributes to understanding of gentrification in a post-
Great Recession context. This paper sheds light on how Latinas in working class
barrios understand and challenge their relationship to gentrification processes.
Drawing on interviews and ethnographic field work, I highlight the ways
activists make sense of and challenge gentrification in a working class barrio.
While conventional narratives of white newcomers as gentrifiers are present, my
research reveals how respondents question the extent to which they themselves
participate in gentrification. Contextualized in a legacy of activism in the barrio,
women of color underscore an immigrant and working class solidarity even as, in
their view, their college-education and employment affords them a relatively-
privileged social location. As a result, such insights help scholars more carefully
consider the precarious space occupied by individuals considered gentrifiers.
Although higher levels of education are understood as part of overall
middle-class status driving Latino-led gente-fication in the barrio, this
educational attainment is attenuated by macro-economic factors, immigration
status, and reduced returns on undergraduate education. Exploring how anti-
gentrification activists perceive themselves in this process contributes to

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scholarship on gentrification and a fledging sub-focus examining the various
contradictions presented by the social location of gentrifiers. I argue these
narratives by college educated, immigrant, Latina anti-gentrification activists
describes a form relational gentrification.

Literature Review

Localizing Gentrification
Gentrification remains a pressing social problem for urban scholars and policy
makers alike. While affecting urban centers across the nation, scholars have called
for scholarship highlighting the importance of place. Such locally-informed
studies complement conventional gentrification narratives documenting macro-
scale characteristics of the process. Where sweeping characteristics might
overlook nuances that emerge alongside rising racial diversity in U.S. urban cities
local gentrification processes in majority-minority cities may reveal how power
relations impact marginalized groups and how these groups respond in places
experiencing transition. In Los Angeles, women of color and immigrants face
compounded exclusion in the current post-Great Recession context. Examining
how urban transition impacts working class women of color reveals how the
negative effects of gentrification are unevenly distributed within neighborhoods.
Prioritizing local context into accounts of gentrification centralizes the
way social identities and social relations are experienced and constructed in
relation to boundaries of place. More than a place-specific backdrop, local context
reveals the ways power relations are advanced through local histories to maintain
local racial hierarchies. Indeed, comparative studies of gentrification have

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explored how gentrification advances in differently between cities and within
neighborhoods in the same metro area (Lees 2000; Hydra 2008; Brown Saracino
2009; Maloutas 2011, Anderson and Sternberg 2012; Hwang and Sampson 2015).
This scholarship has accounted for the urban scale and micro scale interactions
that influence not only where gentrification happens but also follow historic and
institutional processes towards crafting locally relevant policy responses.
The move towards providing more contextual analysis in gentrification
literature has expanded to include analyses of the gentrifier. Recent calls by urban
scholars have sought to interrogate the archetypical gentrifier and go beyond
narratives of white, upper middle-class gentrifiers in working class communities
of color. Intentionally examining the class dimensions of individuals who seek to
enter neighborhoods undergoing neighborhood transition these calls seek to
demystify the decision-making process undergirding the back-to-the-city
movement (Brown-Saracino 2009; Schlichtman, Patch, Hill 2017). Gentrifiers,
scholars note, include newcomers to the middle-class often navigating a tenuous
relationship between class status and aspirations for “diverse” neighborhoods to
inhabit (Schlichtman and Patch 2013).
The move towards more locally specific understanding of how
gentrification processes play out and who it affects are helpful endeavors towards
understanding how gentrification “actually exists” in places. Such work builds on
African American scholars who have examined the relationship between middle-
class African Americans who return to working class African American
neighborhoods (Taylor 2002, Pattillo 2007, Boyd 2008). Yet discussions of how

110
Latino barrios experiences have largely remained outside of the southern
California region. Qualitative studies of gentrification in Latina/o communities
have largely focused on Chicago (Betancur 2011, Perez 2004), Philadelphia
(Loyd 2006), and East Harlem (Davila 2004). By bringing Los Angeles into the
fold, this paper contributes to this literature.

The Housing Crunch
Since the great recession, housing crisis across the nation has exacerbated
gentrification. Rendering homeownership out of reach for Californians and rental
housing more accessible, neighborhood change and displacement has become a
pressing issue for working class residents as wages lag behind the soaring cost of
living in Los Angeles. Here, places such as Eastside barrios have long retained a
majority rental housing stock accessible to economically vulnerable residents and,
especially, immigrants. In Boyle Heights for example, the barrios’ housing stock
consists of about three-quarters rental housing. The present housing market has
pushed prices out of reach for economically vulnerable residents in Boyle Heights
and similar places in California. The State of the Nation’s Housing report found
only about 60 percent of metro populations could afford to make monthly
payments on their home, while only about a third of residents in California could
do so (Joint Center 2017). In Los Angeles, only 12 percent of residents could
afford housing payments. Overall, renters are severely rent burdened, paying
more than half of their income in rent (Joint Center 2017). Providing the context
in which marginalized groups navigate and challenge ongoing urban transition,

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these housing market trends undergird interlocking power relations perpetuated
by gentrification studies.

Situating Women in the Los Angeles Barrio
Described by city planners as an “intractable problem,” (Planning Report 2015)
gentrification in Los Angeles remains rather elusive as the city’s demographic
characteristics, such as the city’s majority-minority population, do not necessarily
resemble cities often subject of urban transition studies. In the Los Angeles
region, more than one-third of the population are immigrants and, at 65 percent, a
majority are of Mexican origin. With almost three-quarters of the Los Angeles
population people of color, racial inequalities in the field of housing have a
disproportionate impact on women of color (Policy Link 2017). The cumulative
impact of rising housing costs for people of color, whether they own or rent, then
has a particular impact on women of color (Policy Link 2017; Policy Link and
PERE 2017). Women of color face steeper rent burden with about 60 percent
paying more than 30 percent of income on housing in 2015, compared to 36
percent of their male counterparts and 52 percent of white women and 41 percent
of white men (Policy Link 2017).
Disproportionately affecting women of color at the onset of this century,
housing insecurity has intensified in a post-Great Recession context to impact
two-thirds of women of color in 2015. As these transformations in the housing
landscape fuel the gentrification in communities of color women of color are not
only impacted by rises in housing insecurity but also persist as leaders in local
activism to attain and/or regain housing security.

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Examining how urban transition takes place in the post-Great recession
context renders approaches sensitive to the localized constructions of gender,
race, and class significant. The mutually constituted relationship between
difference and place reveals underlying power relations perpetuated by urban
transitions as well as the ways marginalized populations respond to oppressive
conditions. Advanced by feminist and urban theory (Gilbert 1997 and 1999), such
approach positions scholars to account for the daily life of working class women
and abstain from analyses that render neighborhoods, and by extension
experiences of marginalization, static and interchangeable across geographies.
Such advances have been critical in understanding how marginality and place are
co-constituted.
Neighborhoods subject to a history of racial exclusion offer particular
places and identities from which to understand the simultaneous construction of
place and identity. In a study of working class women, Gilbert (1998) reveals how
power through race and gender shapes the uses, types, and extension of social
networks accessible to Black women compared to white women. Pulido (1997)
notes how in women of color activists in segregated neighborhoods privilege
racial identities in their activism against environmental racism. Pardo’s (1998)
study of working class Mexican-American women activists in a racially
segregated neighborhood highlighted how these activists viewed their role as
mothers beyond their homes and extending to the health and safety of the barrio.
Together, these studies provide a foundation to the ongoing examination of
gender, race, and class in urban places. However, while qualitative studies of

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gentrification in communities of color are growing scholarship studies of
Latina/os have largely focused on Chicago (Betancur 2011, Perez 2004),
Philadelphia (Loyd 2006), and East Harlem (Davila 2004). Focusing on the
marginalization of working class women of color this article contributes to
gentrification literature towards understanding how power relations are
operationalized in majority-minority cities where racial hierarchies function in
unconventional ways.
Within the context of local history, this examination of women of color
should be understood as an extension of a legacy of activism within the Eastside
barrio. Since downtown development became the priority over community
planning, city planning had remained out of sync with local residents’ concerns.
Community members continued to fight for safe streets, improved schools, and
adequate city services, even as political leaders advanced policies that regarded
Eastside barrios as blighted and populated by politically apathetic residents.
Examples of this would be the selection of East Los Angeles as an appropriate site
for a prison and Vernon as a suitable location for a hazardous waste incinerator.
Viewed as having direct negative effects on the quality of life in their respective
neighborhoods as well as Boyle Heights, these two projects were subject to
community protests. Led by Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA) and religion-
based community allies, the ensuing social movement that took place during the
mid to late 1980s challenged city and private developers’ policies and practices,
which continued to link communities of color with land uses detrimental to
residents’ health and safety (Pardo 1998). In 1996, this grassroots type of activism

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continued through the organizing efforts by residents of the Pico Gardens and
Aliso Village public housing projects. Here, women demanded the Housing
Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) promise the provision of low-cost
housing units for displaced residents who wished to remain in the housing
community (Becerra 1988). While organizing efforts secured a higher number of
affordable housing units that would have otherwise been constructed by HACLA,
the demolition of the Pico-Aliso public housing community resulted in a net loss
of low-cost housing units. Both MELA and the women of Pico Gardens and Aliso
Village housing project transformed conventional narratives of their
neighborhoods from “blighted” to dignified residential areas populated by citizens
who were on a mission to secure a healthy environment for all families.
Unpacking the experiences of women of color experiencing gentrification
in the post-Great Recession context provides insight to the power relations
constituting gentrification. Specifically, how Mexican American women activists
navigate the current contexts is particularly helpful for a heightened, localized,
understanding of positionality, gentrification, and activism to document and better
understand how marginalized identities converge to shape the experiences of
women of color. This work builds on scholarship examining the self-identification
of Latino millennials which has found their ongoing feels of marginalization,
despite having American citizenship. Understanding the racialization of women-
activists who are millennials and who are undocumented adds another dimension
to understand how their racial location is experienced within the barrio. Social
location further complicated by the ongoing struggle of the contemporary middle-

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class (Florida 2017; Pulido and Pastor 2013) and the feelings, principally guilt,
that are recorded among economically precarious individuals (Quart 2018).

Data and Method

Research Site
Los Angeles, a majority-minority city, is a relevant place to examine the ways
power relations are (re)constructed in an era of reinvestment and revitalization of
the historic urban core. Contrary to claims of advancing racial equality, rising
diversity in urban spaces remains critical to follow as minority representation in
the public and private sector rise, paradoxically, as does racially inequality. As
part of the downtown historic core, the working class community of Boyle
Heights functions as a salient example of rising precarity as unprecedented
investments by private and public investors continue to transform the local built-
environment and social fabric.
Historically considered the gateway to newcomers to Los Angeles, Boyle
Heights has long been known for welcoming immigrants excluded from “white”
Los Angeles. During the middle of the twentieth century when Boyle Heights
transitioned from a multicultural neighborhood to a majority Mexican barrio, the
neighborhood was composed of three-quarters rental housing —a proportion that
remained well into the twenty-first century. For barrio residents, the rental
housing was attainable for working class families and became an integral part of
the neighborhood identity. As downtown redevelopment has increased, ever-
growing fears over the loss of affordable housing has remained particularly

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prominent among current and past residents. Similarly, the prospect of losing such
inexpensive housing has also tapped into the legacy of activism in the community.
For communities east of the Los Angeles Civic center, activism has long
been part of the community ethos and has shaped the ongoing manner in which
people of color have navigated exclusionary and oppressive policies and practices
against residents. Since early twentieth century, inter-ethnic groups in Los
Angeles navigated cultural and racial differences to shape civil rights reform in
America (Bernstein 2011). This legacy persisted though the Chicana/o movement
of the 1970s and remained central to residents’ experience even as neighboring
communities became, comparatively, less politicized. Examining the ways social
networks were transformed into political networks, Pardo’s (1998) examination of
women activists in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles engaged in battles against
environmental racism understood traditional roles as inextricably linked to
fighting for the community’s overall safety. Garcia-Bedolla (2005), found
residents of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles had a stronger collective identity
and were more politically engaged than neighboring middle-class communities.
These studies highlight the role of place in sustaining activism across generations
as well as the role of gender in mobilizing the community in political action even
as Latinas were less likely to consider such activism as “political.” This legacy
helps contextualize contemporary examinations of activism by women of color
residing the community.

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Research Design and Sample

To examine how residents understood and navigated gentrification, I conducted
interviews with ten residents. I sought to gather a sample of residents who were
prominent activists and actively organizing or otherwise participating in anti-
gentrification discussions or actions. Early in my fieldwork it became clear most
respondents would be women of color as they were central voices among
residents and media coverage regarding gentrification and, specifically, critiques
against neighborhood change.
To recruit respondents, I relied primarily on snowball sampling, allowing
me to gain access to activists’ social networks. This practice was helpful as
interviewees often felt more open, resulting in deeper interviews having been
referred by a friend they consider trustworthy. Interviews were conducted in
outdoor public areas or inside local businesses. The interviews generally lasted 60
minutes.
Having volunteered for various local organizations, my connection with
participants rested on our shared experience of navigating a rapidly changing
Latino neighborhood. Having attended various gentrification-related panels and
community events during the fieldwork process, I identified some of my interview
participants through our fledging friendship.
I asked respondents to share what they viewed were significant changes to
their neighborhood. Such broader pathways into the interviews allowed
participants to share what changes they felt merited priority and helped develop a

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discursive landscape of areas activists sought to challenge. I coded the subsequent
interviews to identify themes that emerged in relation to their responses.
Seeking to locate the ways power relations are revealed through identities
in the context of gentrification, this paper primarily utilizes a framework of
intersectionality. In doing so, the author draws from feminist urban geography
and social science scholarship to extend the respective scholarship in ways which
highlight the micro-scale events and their interactions at the micro-scale.

Analysis
The interviews explored themes of neighborhood change, strategies for navigating
shifting social fabric, and the ways in which participants felt themselves to be
gentrifiers in the barrio. I argue these narratives illustrate the ways women of
color experience and respond to gentrification in their neighborhood. Examining
the ways women of color perceive changes in their neighborhood, I argue
contributes to understanding how gentrification unfurls at the everyday scale as
well as how women of color negotiate their marginalized status alongside their
perceived privilege in the barrio. Such insights contribute to nuanced
understanding of gentrification through experiential knowledge and complicate
increasingly popular notions of “gentrifiers of color.”
A prominent aspect of all the narratives were explanations of who they
identified as prompting gentrification in the neighborhood and how it impacted
the community fabric they valued and relied on. Interviewees identified individual
as well as state-actors in advancing changes in their neighborhood, however, but
also emphasized the emotional burden of these changes.

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I feel the pressure. Feel kind of like the gentrification cloud kind of everywhere.
The fact that Boyle Heights is also part of the [City of Los Angeles] and
especially with the Gold Line coming in [to the neighborhood]— so I think the
fact that…city investment is coming in…you feel kind of the neighborhood
changing. Your feel and you see changes happening. Even simple things like
having someone move in next to you who won’t acknowledge your existence
there that’s kind of how we feel gentrification. There are all these changes
happening right before our eyes. People who are literally standing right in front
of us don’t see us, they don’t acknowledge us, and they don’t acknowledge our
existence so how are you going to expect them to hear our voices if they don’t
even see us as they are planning. (Norma, organizer, resident)

Because so many people in Boyle Heights are Latinos that it is noticeable when
a white person, or when someone who’s not brown is walking down the street,
and I think that noticeability is what has been increasing recently. The fact that
now you see more and more white people living in Boyle Heights. It’s kind of
all over the place. It’s not just young hipsters that are moving here, it’s also
young families, these young hippy looking families, but they’re also carrying
their kids…down Boyle Heights. But they definitely are the artsy parents…like
these people that have so much money that they wear it on their clothes. It’s
very noticeable. It’s very noticeable. I feel like people are already getting
displaced, and vulnerable, and the most invisible in a way. I feel like that has
already been happening that has happened in Boyle Heights when the Gold Line
came in. (Carmela, organizer, resident).

I’ve seen it very different, but I have started to see the changes here. Like from
one day to the other. More and more. I wouldn’t say drastic but more visible.
You usually see [white folks] near Mariachi Plaza, because it is closer to
downtown. (Elsa, organizer, resident)

In acknowledging and describing neighborhood changes, participants describe
rising private and public investments and changing race of typical area
households. These descriptions of neighborhood changes note downtown
redevelopment as a distinct source of ongoing changes in the barrio. Particularly
interesting in these responses are participants’ description of visible changes and
their explanation of how these changes are directed or to newcomers and not
intended for longtime residents. These changes result in not only feelings of
invisibility for these residents but also underscores the social distance generated,
in their view, by white newcomers. Narratives of social distance attributed to
white newcomers was a point that was quite stressed among participants—often,

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in ways that went beyond the notion of blaming white hipsters for their mere
presence.

We’re a very tight knit community so little things like not knowing your
neighbor, not saying hi to your neighbor, or knowing that your neighbor doesn’t
care about you or doesn’t even care that you’re there—that is a shift in dynamics
and the culture and the neighborhood because people are used to [knowing] our
neighbors, we grew up with our neighbors, it’s a neighborhood! Having
someone move in next to you, who won’t acknowledge your existence there,
that is kind of how we feel gentrification. (Norma, organizer, resident)

One of the things that happens when these people move in is you get increased
criminalization and that doesn’t allow for community. You’re not going to say
hi to your neighbor and you’re not going to say hi to your neighbor…This white
family next- who very clearly do not fit the typical neighborhood [family] and
what was the first thing that they did? They put up these really high fences that
covered all of their backyard, and very much are keeping everyone out and
keeping themselves in and isolated. And it’s like, I don’t know why, but it’s just
the little changes. (Carmela, organizer, resident).

[white newcomers] have an appreciation for Mexican culture, I guess, but not
for the people. It’s the same thing when White people come into the
neighborhood and they think ‘oh it’s cute’ because there is cultura
(culture)…For me, they like [the culture] they want to eat the food, but then they
don’t’ want to engage the community so, to me, that’s not building community
even through that’s what they say. It’s just very racist. *laughs* It’s just I get
mad when I think about it. (Elsa, organizer, resident)

Participants’ evaluations of comportment of white newcomers to the barrio
highlights not only the perceived transgressions these individuals make, but also
the community-affirming norms and values participants identify. The everyday,
micro-scale observations participants discern are not often identified in
conversations regarding gentrifiers and the ways their daily interactions clash with
existing community fabric. One recent study noted that in Latino-majority
neighborhoods experiencing ascending socioeconomic status had rather small
proportion of white populations. While the observations might seem quite
minimal at first blush, researcher continue to emphasize the importance of
community fabric for communities with high percentages of working class and

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immigrant populations (Betancur 2011). Moreover, recent studies indicate that
while White residents may constitute a small percentage within minority-majority
neighborhoods, their high socioeconomic status may be leveraged to attain
disproportionate cultural and political power (Owens and Candipan 2018). The
disproportionate amount of power that Whites have in relation to their small
numbers in the barrio, is reflected in Norma’s comment:

For me and for folks on the Eastside the way that we see hipsters [is] not a way
of dress, it’s the impact [hipsters] are having in the community. You can wear
your tight pants and your ironic mustache—it’s not about that. It is the fact that
you’re coming in [to the neighborhood] with access, wealth, and income. It is
making my my family feel like we need to protect our home because [hipsters]
are having an impact that [they’re] too ignorant to acknowledge…it’s because
having these folks with access coming to our neighborhoods it’s having a real
concrete impact on people’s daily life.

While observations of white newcomers were closely linked to changes
participants identified occurring in the barrio, their own positionality in relation
to gentrification also became an ongoing struggle for them. Navigating changes in
the neighborhood, advocating for their neighbors, and attempting to secure their
own stability in the barrio as rental housing climb produced a series of
contradictions participants acknowledged.
Norma, having a college education and recently granted temporary
residency, expressed her dissatisfaction with popularly narratives in the barrio that
new housing aimed to cater to recent college graduates who wanted affordable
housing. “It’s like, it isn’t that there is no housing for us (college educated
individuals) it’s that the housing is not affordable. Even for [the college
educated].” While facing barriers to apply for an apartment, Norma describes how
after she was offered the rental unit and quickly became the language broker for

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the rest of the Spanish speaking apartment complex. “We just get a notice on our
door in English notifying residents that ‘your property has been sold, send your
rent check to this [new] company now.’ It doesn’t tell you who to call for
maintenance or who to call if you get locked out of your house. Only who you
send your rent check to. So [my neighbors] all come to my door asking ‘que dice
esto?’ (‘what does this say?’)”
As Norma reflected on this experience, she immediately shared her own feelings
of guilt in being able to remain in the barrio:

It’s crazy, even for me moving into that place. I thought ‘okay here I am
competing against probably a family who could only afford to live here. Me, as
a single person, could provide pay stubs and could email the application.’ I felt
kind of like- I don’t know- an inner gentrifier *laughs*. Like I’m trying to save
my neighborhood but I know me taking the apartment is taking it away from a
family that really needs it. I feel like kind of privilege of not being this typical
renter on the Eastside and I feel guilty too.

Reflecting on her access post-citizenship allowed her, for the first time in her life,
water or electricity services under her name. In light of a set of new privileges,
Norma continued to express her lingering concern that the apartment may have
otherwise been occupied by a more financially vulnerable family. Norma’s
observations of her status and her work to remain in the barrio are areas of
tension underexplored in the literature seeking to render college educated
individuals as gentrifiers and people of color as participating in the gentrification.
Norma’s self-identification as a gentrifier is consistent with the ways individuals
in gentrifying communities express a self-awareness about their position within
the neighborhood. Yet, Norma has lived on the Eastside since immigrating as a
minor to the U.S. This self-identification as a gentrifier is similarly interesting in
that Norma is part of the millennial generation scholars identify as systematically

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excluded from gains in the nation’s economy in the last few decades (Reeves
2017). The reflections regarding how gentrification is experienced on the ground
by immigrant women of color and how seeking to remain in the barrio is attached
to not only emotional duress about doing so but also material labor such as being
a cultural broker for neighbors as Norma’s experiences highlight.

Carmela expressed similar ambivalent feelings in reflecting on her position in the
transitioning barrio.

I feel like because I went to college I am in this privileged position. Because we
have this privilege of a Bachelors and, therefore, more stable incomes we can
[pay rent in] houses that have been [out of range] or displacing longtime
residents. So in that sense I feel very much implicated in it. It’s okay for me to
live here maybe. I’m not sure how. Even with a Bachelor’s degree it’s hard to
find a well-paid job…I’m not saying that you have to have a Bachelor’s degree
to have a stable income, but I’m saying that in this economy it’s like you’re
going to be less stressed out and more economically stable if you do have a
Bachelor’s.

Thinking through her own privilege and her positionality within the barrio,
Carmela’s effort to reconcile these contradictions is clearly displayed. The way
Carmela identifies her own precarity while recognizing her privilege, attempting
to tease out the boundaries of gentrification and her relation to this process. Such
work again highlights the ways these women of color undertake a particular
burden in the mainstream economic marketplace while shedding light on the
unresolved aspects of gentrification debates and discussions which neglect
nuanced positionality of residents. Most importantly, gentrification scholars
interested in the ways that gentrification unfurls to maintain power relations,
nuanced examinations of positionality of residents helps reveal often overlooked,
ways that power is maintained through ambiguous identifications.

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Carmela shared similar feelings of uncertainty before she had moved to a
neighboring barrio of Highland Park. Towards resolving these tensions Carmela
became an organizer for a local anti-gentrification group in addition to, as she
describes, boycotting new businesses she felt were excluding longtime residents.

So I've always been around. I feel like maybe I shouldn't be in Highland Park.
Because I'm potentially displacing another family or occupying space that
rightfully belongs to them. I feel very conflicted about that. So we talked about
it a really long time. So I figured "What is the best way I can be an ally?" I
figured that was not going into these businesses and supporting them. The
reason I moved into Boyle Heights was because I couldn't afford rent there
anymore and the closest community to Highland Park—that didn't have a lot of
white folks, honestly— was Boyle Heights.

For Carmela, Boyle Heights became the only affordable option with a comparable
community fabric. Once more, patterns of self-reflection and ambivalence in
terms of where individuals move even as they attempt to limit their potential
impact on long-term residents. Having been displaced from Highland Park due to
rising rents, Carmela doesn’t see herself a victim of gentrification, but remains
concerned that residing in Highland Park and, eventually, Boyle Heights would
result in direct or indirect displacement of economically vulnerable families.

Conclusion
Boyle Heights’ supply of inexpensive housing for vulnerable populations remains
under the spotlight as Los Angeles’ housing crisis persists. Rising rent burdens in
the context of rising urban inequality render women of color especially vulnerable
to transforming landscapes. This context informs the ways that gentrification is
experienced by residents and the ongoing scales of precarity considered in
approaches to understand neighborhood changes and those advance it. At the risk

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of further complicating an already rather crowded field of gentrification
scholarship, I have sought to contribute perspectives of gentrification in a Los
Angeles barrio and outline the ambivalent emotions that immigrant, women of
color face in striving to remain in the ever-expensive barrio. These narratives,
collectively, highlight how ongoing precarity for this demographic complicates
conventional notions of gentrifiers as middle-class, college educated, and striving
to attain a sense of authentic culture in their communities.

As gentrification scholarship explores the nuances of gentrifiers (Brown-Saracino,
Patch, Schlichtman, Patch, Hill 2017) I illustrate how experiences of individuals
typically considered gentrifiers reveal often overlooked power relations.
Participants’ responses in this paper paper highlight the ways individuals self-
perceive themselves as potential gentrifiers even as they maintain a lesser degree
of power in relation to conventional gentrifiers. Moreover, contextualizing these
experiences helps connect participants’ struggles to remain in the neighborhood as
part of a longer history of struggle in the barrio. Remaining in neighborhood and
participants’ activism to extend that right to community members is part of a
legacy of women of color-led activism in the community. This contextualization
underscores the ways struggles to remain in the gentrifying community are not
necessarily strivings for authenticity but rather extensions of ongoing endeavors
to maintain community fabric in a context of increasing criminalization and
racialization for women, immigrants, and Mexican-origin populations.

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Relational gentrification positions urban actors in relation to others in the
neighborhoods experiencing change. The relational context in which
gentrification is experienced helps reveal the mechanisms that reproduce
inequality at the local scale. This relational approach challenges binary archetypes
of gentrification that pit gentrifiers and non-gentrifiers into competing groups
even as they might, and often do, work together against gentrification.
Throughout this paper, participants repeatedly positioned themselves distant from
White newcomers to the barrio and closest to longtime immigrant, working class
residents of color. Participants’ self-perceived distance to vulnerable groups—
even if characterized by a sense of conflict— may inform participants
perspectives of gentrification and the social actions they were invested in
engaging to curb its effect. These tenuous relationships can help reveal more
about power relations and strategies to challenge them in contexts of
gentrification.
Examinations into gentrifiers is motivated, in large part, by efforts to
reveal the agentic and structural processes which lead gentrifiers to move into
communities with affordable housing stock. Yet most of the inquiry ends with
their intentions and not with the ways their politics “hits the rubber” in contexts of
change.

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Chapter Five: Conclusion
In State of Resistance, Manuel Pastor argues “California is America fast-
forward,” through its “demographic, economic, and social trends” (Pastor 2017).
In this position, he argues, California’s history has much to offer the rest of the
nation as a model of overcoming political attacks targeting the State’s expanding
population of non-white and immigrant residents. California as a model for the
U.S. is also relevant as the State’s population recently became majority-minority,
a racial demographics transition anticipated at the national scale. Los Angeles, as
one of the larger cities involved in California’s trend-setting practice, has
experienced this majority-minority threshold since the 1990s. This majority-
minority population nearing 40 million in Los Angeles similarly offers a window
into the future of other U.S. cities facing “browning” cities and, paradoxically,
rising racial inequality. Compounded by the “winner-take-all” urbanism
characterizing the contemporary political economy, Los Angeles offers a unique
case study for which to examine the relationship between racial formation and
gentrification.
I have argued for rethinking gentrification as a racial project, rather than
solely an economic process. Rethinking gentrification in the context of racial
formation renders both of these processes legible in the urban landscape. The
ways that racial inequality persists in places of significant minority representation
remains an ongoing dilemma as gentrification continues to represent a social
problem to civic leaders and vulnerable residents in urban areas. Qualitative
studies of gentrification have increased understanding of how neighborhood

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change impacts vulnerable populations, underscoring the material impacts of
neoliberal ideologies driving pro-growth policies and practices in urban settings.
Yet, studies of gentrification in increasingly diverse cities will require race
analyses that are not limited to conceptualizations of race as a static variable.
Critical theories of race do not consider changing racial demographics as
automatically leading to racial diversity and racial equality without a re-
articulation of power. For critical race scholars, white supremacy is maintained by
expanding who falls under the purview of whiteness. Whiteness as a set of
practices and beliefs that re-inscribe the primacy of exclusion of marginalized
groups can extend to people of color. Considering that whiteness is reconstituted
to reassert itself in a context of racial diversity, understanding the processes by
which racial ideologies and practices that maintain racial inequality are critical in
finding ways to challenge ongoing domination. Having a majority-minority
population for more than a quarter century, Los Angeles functions as a unique
urban site to study how colorblind racial ideologies and tenets of neoliberalism
work in tandem to rationalize rising racial inequality.
Focusing on Latinos, and specifically a Mexican barrio, this dissertation
expands ongoing academic and public discussions regarding their future inclusion
and exclusion within U.S. polity. How immigrant, Mexican and Latino identities
will continue to shape and be shaped by an exclusionary economic and political
structure remains a critical question. While economic downturn has
fundamentally transformed the urban political economy, the recent reassertion of
anti-immigrant rhetoric at the national underscores a sense of urgency to

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questions of inclusion. The inertia of the present political economy ensures
ongoing exclusion of immigrant, working class, people of color through rising
cost burdens and the deconstruction of housing stability and protections for
renters. This urban context reveals imperative to identify mechanisms which
connect ideologies to policies and practices that generate these inequalities
Therefore, understanding how the Mexican immigrants and U.S. born residents
are discursively and practically included or excluded in the L.A. urban landscape
is at the core of following sociohistorical processes of racial formation. In this
way, as city leaders continue to vie for pro-growth strategies and offer the best
concessions to private investors, gentrification cannot be reduced simply to class
phenomenon with racial implications.
Gentrification as a racial project, then, stands to consider how race is
constituted and reconstituted to maintain unequal racial outcomes. The
fundamental argument that race is malleable must take a more integral place
within present day theorizing of cities—especially as they become increasingly
populated and, by extension, increasingly contested political territories.
Gentrification as demonstrated throughout this dissertation, is foregrounded in the
public imaginary in such ways that can reorganize local populations between
those who support gentrification and those who don’t support the process. The
reconstruction of the local racial hierarchy is one which threatens to remain
overlooked without such centralizing of the construction of race. The presence of
gentrification in urban setting seems likely to continue into the foreseeable future.

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In this dissertation I have argued that Boyle Heights’ present
transformation is directly informed by the history of exclusion enshrined in
exclusionary land use policies. The history of such practices have generated
distinctively racialized spatial imaginaries—one which describes the pro-growth,
free market competition pursuits of the city and is aligned with whiteness and, the
second, which describes the accumulated history of displacement. The two
competing imaginaries are helpful in understanding the political history which
preceded contemporary discussions and debates about gentrification.
Additionally, I have argued that the “browning” of the city threatens to undermine
efforts to enact policies that will lessen racial inequality. The Latin
Americanization of Race Thesis offers a helpful starting point from which to think
about the increasingly complex racial hierarchies and interpret the ways Boyle
Heights residents are responding to gentrification by rearticulating the boundaries
of racial identity among Latina/os in the barrio. Finally, I argue that relational
gentrification can help account for the intersectional ways different subgroups
within gentrifying communities experience, and ultimately challenge,
gentrification in their respective communities. Considering the ways women of
color view neighborhood change and how they locate themselves within this
process is helpful in fleshing out a more comprehensive understanding of the
ostensible benefits of gentrification bestowed on residents who have resources to
whether changes in the community.
Ultimately, these arguments contribute to conventional discussions and
debates regarding gentrification in Boyle Heights. By highlighting a history-

131
informed analysis local racial formation in Los Angeles the analysis I have
applied here can be utilized to understand how gentrification advances racial
inequality in other neighborhoods within Los Angeles as well as communities in
urban centers across the U.S. Interrogating the ways gentrification as a racial
project advances our understanding of urban dynamic remains a central driver of
this dissertation and one that I anticipate will continue to be increasingly to urban
scholars and practitioners and race scholars alike relevant in coming years.

132
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Asset Metadata

Creator Huante, Alfredo Linares (author)

Core Title Racial formation and gentrification in Los Angeles

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 10/29/2020

Defense Date 08/08/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag gentrification,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race,racial formation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Saito, Leland T. (committee chair), Pastor, Manuel (committee member), Sanchez, George J. (committee member)

Creator Email ahuante@gmail.com,huante@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-98907

Unique identifier UC11675625

Identifier etd-HuanteAlfr-6799.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-98907 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HuanteAlfr-6799.pdf

Dmrecord 98907

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Huante, Alfredo Linares

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA