Planning the Barrio: Racial Order and Restructuring in Neoliberal Los Angeles

Scholarship examining the legacy of early twentieth-century zoning and real estate practices on present-day urban landscapes has provided significant insight into the ways public officials appraised communities of color at the national and city scale. However, less is known about how local policy makers evaluated communities of color through the social movements of the 1970s and austerity policies of the 1980s. Analyzing Los Angeles City planning and administrative archives from the 1970s to 1990s, I assess how local policy makers arrived at regarding historically racialized and disinvested places such as Boyle Heights as potential sites of investment during the last quarter of the twentieth century. I find that city policy makers briefly categorized Boyle Heights as fit for preservation grounded in its socioracial composition and, later, designated the barrio as ancillary to intensifying efforts to revitalize downtown. Following the evolution of appraisals of land use during this period of transformation historicizes contemporary gentrification processes.

The Love Story against Displacement

Fotonovelas, or photo-based comics, are a form of popular visual culture with a long history within Latin America and US Latinx communities. In 2016, I was part of a cross-disciplinary team of scholars from University of California, Los Angeles, who partnered with the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC)—through an Urban Humanities Initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Based in Boyle Heights, ELACC is a community-driven development organization focused on building affordable housing for local residents and improving quality of life in the neighborhood. Given the lack of engagement of residents in large-scale development projects, ELACC urged us to develop an urban humanities pedagogical and political tool for a campaign promoting just transit-oriented development (TOD). Our team draws on the fotonovela medium in a community-driven TOD campaign due to its ability to bridge multiple epistemological and praxis divisions in urban struggles, community organizations, and marginalized communities. I present the resulting fotonovela and examine how it politicizes narratives that challenge current urban development processes.

Art and the Aesthetics of Cultural Gentrification : The Cases of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles

The art world has been linked to gentrification. Such art is associated with a modernist aesthetics based on abstraction, individual experience, and exchange value. This chapter identifies a different kind of art based on an aesthetics of engagement in the historic immigrant neighbourhoods of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. This aesthetics is linked to ethics, collective interaction, and the participatory community development of specific places. Furthermore, gentrification is often only understood as an economic process. The concept of cultural gentrification is presented to demonstrate how transformations in the symbolic sphere can trigger a loss of belonging. Art that is borne from the specific culture of a place, however, can open up new potential in combating gentrification.