'Hope everyone pukes on your artisanal treats': fighting gentrification

April 19, 2016 5:21 PM

A Guardian article on the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights details the efforts of "an eclectic coalition of residents, business owners, feminists, Maoists and other activists" to fight against gentrification -- and against capitalism itself:

Marco Amador, who co-founded a collective space called Espacio 1839, said the battle was not just against gentrification. “It’s about how capitalism works. We’re not just fighting realtors, we’re fighting American capitalism.”

Los Angeles renters, on median, put 47% of their income toward housing, according to a study released last year by the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the first 11 months of 2015, the median sale price for homes in Boyle Heights rose 11.5% compared with the same period a year earlier.

Boyle Heights residents have stopped a realtor from conducting a bike tour of the area (with "artisanal treats" at the end), disrupted an avant-garde mobile opera performance, already stopped plans for a shopping and medical plaza development near a Metro station and gotten a mariachi-themed 5K fun run canceled. (There's a Boyle Heights Bridges Runners' Group that hosts Amigas Who Run, "an action of solidarity with women athletes and activists worldwide.")

Some residents and entrepreneurs see the changes in the neighborhood as the evolution of a community. Others push for the "gentefication" of the area: Eastside Luv wine bar owner Guillermo Uribe says:

I started to see the potential of improving the community from the inside out. If gentrification is happening, it might as well be from people who care about the existing culture. In the case of Boyle Heights, it would be best if the gente decide to invest in improvements because they are more likely to preserve its integrity.

Eastside Luv opened right next to the Las Palomas cantina, which closed after more than 50 years in business.

posted by sobell (37 comments total)

“Some of the things she said were: ‘This park is for brown people’ and ‘This is not a park for white people. You are white people.’

I bet this is going to pop up in racist Facebook comment arguments for years, completely divorced from its context and possibly from its city.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:31 PM on April 19, 2016 [5 favorites]

The Beegees come from my suburb! Many great musical performers do. We have many amazing venues here for artists. Being a trendy hotspot attracted developers to put up apartment blocks. The problem was that the music is still thumping at 3am, which is fine by me, but not for people who put down half a million for a skyline apartment.

So the complaints came in and the police show up with decibel meters, and surprise, the clubs were exceeding noise restrictions. But we've been pumping out noise for decades and everyone likes it! complained the club owners. The very reason people thought it would be cool to live here is now being complained about.

The solution was the Valley Music Harmony Plan.

The Fortitude Valley's Special Entertainment Precinct exempts entertainment venues within the area from the amplified noise requirements.

Basically, if you move here, don't complain about the noise, you should have known what you were getting into.

As an unrelated aside, another feature of the special entertainment precinct is variable speed limits. Like a school-zone, at certain times when school children are on their way to school or back home, the speed limit is different. In the morning and the afternoon. Except it's between 10pm and 3am, and isn't for the safety of children, it's for drunks that stagger out into the road.
posted by adept256 at 5:53 PM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

I appreciate the plight of those who are trying to preserve a cost of living that is survivable let alone affordable (especially those on fixed incomes) but driving away "outsiders" with overt threats and physical intimidation seems counterproductive in the least. Yes, preserving community heritage is important but treating individuals with some minimal level of respect is also important. Eventually, something really bad is going to happen when someone gets carried away. I should be able to attend a Trump rally wearing a liberal t-shirt and not be threatened with physical violence.
The community's best bet is focusing on zoning and regulation, as they mentioned and finding community leaders that understand effective resistance that cooperates on the planning of the their community development. Too many times, the locals dig in with hostile opposition that loses a broader sympathy with the public just to be steamrolled by big companies with deep pockets.
Think strategically rather tactically and the changes might not be as bad.
posted by Muncle at 6:02 PM on April 19, 2016

I would dare any of these activists to find one property owner who is interested in stopping the gentrification of the neighborhood, but at the cost of not being able to sell their property at a profit.

Really, just one.

I think that people should be able to live where they want. I just don't understand anyone who disagrees with this notion, and I find it especially disheartening when activists threaten violence against people visiting a neighborhood. Of all the social justice topics discussed on MetaFilter, anti-gentrification activists are the ones I understand the least, as their implied proposed policies are the most antithetical to any principle of freedom to live as one wants.

Also, for some bizarre reason, none of these activists seem to propose eliminating property tax. Without property tax, gentrification of property owners (albeit not renters) becomes near-impossible.
posted by saeculorum at 6:04 PM on April 19, 2016 [10 favorites]

I think that people should be able to live where they want.

Yep. That's why people who want to live in the neighborhood they grow up in oppose gentrification. Because you get pushed out because of others' choices.

The "principle of freedom to live as one wants" has to apply equally. There is conflict for this reason.
posted by eyesontheroad at 6:14 PM on April 19, 2016 [35 favorites]

Yep. That's why people who want to live in the neighborhood they grow up in oppose gentrification. Because you get pushed out because of others' choices.

The "principle of freedom to live as one wants" has to apply equally. There is conflict for this reason.

What you describe sounds like you'd prefer natives be more equal than others. And at the cost of other natives who might profit better from the homes they no longer have use for. Gentrification is the problem you hope for and count your blessings. Because without it, you may be sentenced to live in the neighborhood you grew up in.
posted by 2N2222 at 6:34 PM on April 19, 2016 [12 favorites]

Boyle Heights is an amazing and very real place and is among many communities in LA that should be deeply protected as part of the fabric of LA.

This kind of political stance and activism isn't really new for Boyle Heights or east LA at all. There's been an interesting as well as long and fairly effective history of labor rights, socialism and/or communism rooted there, and there still is.

What's new is that people with money are now noticing it and more and more wanting to use their money to make even more money for themselves, even if it's that the cost of a living, working community that's an essential part of the nervous system of Los Angeles and Chicano history.

And the gentrifiers may have a a serious fight on their hands this time. This isn't the first time Boyle Heights has had to defend itself.

I ended up in that neighborhood a lot when I was a young, fresh raver kid in the early 1990s. A lot of different party crews in LA would often one of the countless special event quinceañera/wedding halls in the area if they couldn't find a good warehouse or whatever. And the best warehouses frequently were found in or just due west from Boyle Heights along the railroad lines and warehouses covering most of south-east-side LA.

And even back then it was made pretty clear to me multiple times there that - even when invited - my welcome as a goofy but earnest white suburban kid ranged from barely, threateningly tolerated to deeply warmly welcomed depending on when and where, and it was directly pointed out that it was only because I somehow passed the neither-asshole-nor-snitch test.

I didn't really realize until much later in life after having lived in a variety of LA's latino, Hispanic and Chicano cities and neighborhoods where I had really been, or what that had meant, which is hard to explain except I was in a sort of a fugue of youth and adventure and baggage and wandering.

Or what it meant to people to invite me there, how much I didn't fit in at all, how jarring I likely was culturally, linguistically. I first heard of (and heard) Pablo Neruda somewhere near Boyle Heights. The first time I tasted menudo or chorizo, too. And in hindsight I understand more of what it means to have a conversation interrupted by questions or translations, even if I was usually mostly happy trying to just listen and follow along with my limited Spanish.

The thought of Boyle Heights turning into some kind of neo-urban white, yuppie or otherwise techno-elite urban playground is extremely depressing to me.
posted by loquacious at 6:41 PM on April 19, 2016 [13 favorites]

It's not like the first wave of gentrification consists of people particularly rich at that time, or have a ton of options. It's usually the young, upwardly mobile folks who still need to live in the city to have a career and take advantage of that upward mobility so are looking for someplace cheap.

You can't fix a structural problem by threatening the people at the mercy of the flow of it. By all means fight the developers trying to use dirty tricks to take over places that don't want to leave, but making sure the newcomers are excluded from the community seems to make sure that there are fewer and fewer people who actually care.

Nevermind the fact that bigotry on a personal level is disgusting, even if less threatening than racism, no matter the institutional power behind it.
posted by Zalzidrax at 7:02 PM on April 19, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think that people should be able to live where they want.

That's a noble goal. A good start would be to reverse LA's zoning changes that mean it's now zoned for 6 million fewer people than in 1960 (source) - especially in the wealthy neighbourhoods that fought for the downzoning.

Compared to massive and systemic policy changes like that, I can't really get worked up about a few Boyle Heights activists.
posted by ripley_ at 7:22 PM on April 19, 2016 [10 favorites]

I bet this is going to pop up in racist Facebook comment arguments for years, completely divorced from its context and possibly from its city.

This is hilarious. Some racists want a segregated park and you're concerned about other hypothetical racists taking it out of "context."

The only relevant context is that a group of activists including Maoists of all people (not even socialists or communists who say "well, Mao wasn't so bad...") want local immigrants of the wrong race to encounter a "total disaster" and say "stay outta my fucking hood."

This exact same thing is going on with Trump supporters, who have the same possessive attitude toward the country as a whole, and ally with violent right-wing nuts instead of violent left-wing nuts. Disliking gentrification and capitalism doesn't excuse such a movement; certain poor whites dislike the effects of neoliberal capitalism, whether or not they identify it as such, but their racism and violence doesn't get a pass. Neither should this.
posted by Rangi at 7:25 PM on April 19, 2016 [20 favorites]

Like if the best we can expect is a deadlocked race war, that's kinda shitty.
posted by Zalzidrax at 7:30 PM on April 19, 2016

Without property tax, gentrification of property owners (albeit not renters) becomes near-impossible.

California has effectively already done this and the results have been disastrous for the actual functioning of the government by limiting revenues, and has propelled housing costs up because selling a property resets the tax rate.
posted by reluctant early bird at 7:42 PM on April 19, 2016 [7 favorites]

I would dare any of these activists to find one property owner who is interested in stopping the gentrification of the neighborhood, but at the cost of not being able to sell their property at a profit.

There are neighborhoods and cities in LA where this happens. Parts of Venice Beach are like this, especially in the rent controlled blocks.

Boyle Heights and various parts of East LA are like this, too. There are a lot of properties in these lower income neighborhoods or cities in LA that are either owned by a family or by working class landlords in the community, or by absentee landlords and/or slumlords who would rather keep their property taxes and maintenance costs down.

Because renting to proper labor/blue collar workers is often more hassle free. They'll fix their own plumbing because they don't want the rent to go up. They will make do.

Because there are still some people who are satisfied with "enough" and don't seek "as much as possible."

I also directly experienced this in Santa Ana during the art district gentrification project that happened there starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s that was rather successful.

This is actually something I was going to try to work in my earlier comment, something that I regret, now.

Which is naively being part of that gentrification as a wanna-be art tourist or whatever looking for cheap rents and good times with fellow weirdos. Even though some of us meshed well with the local culture, we were the incidental or accidental white vanguard that diluted the local culture to make it more comfortable to, well, the gentrifiers.

And the local, native artists that I met actually did point this out to us and try to explain it to us that they knew it was happening. It was discussed many times even while it was happening all around us.

And during this there were major holdouts. Entire buildings and businesses right on the same block as the buildings being flipped into art studios and co-ops, then, later, condos or full teardowns and condo towers.

One of the places I lived in Santa Ana was an old concrete tilt-up industrial building where half of it had been converted to quasi-legal live-work art studios and the other half of it still hosted a few very gritty car repair businesses, where the only real division was a chain link fence with wood slats and some landscaping polyweave fabric as a barrier. The water and sewage system was still shared for the whole 400-odd foot long and 40-ish foot narrow structure. I remember this distinctly because I had a bunch of motor oil, metal shavings and sludge spew out of the floor drain of the unit I shared with someone because a shop next door was trying to pour a bunch of oil down the drains.

Not even the co-owners of that building could agree on whether to sell out or stay. One sold out. One stayed. They split the building in half with some kind of lease structure and arrangement.

Here's a much more clear if tangential example of someone refusing to sell out to the highest bid:

I was honored to be a friend with an artist, sculpter, painter, architect named Sergio O'Cadiz. You can google him and find some interesting stuff. Among many other things, he is known for doing the Neo-Aztec sculptural facade and concrete molds of the Santa Ana City Hall and other civic buildings.

He studied at the University of Mexico in Mexico city and had some fame as a painter, visionary and arcologist.

We'd hang out and chain smoke and drink coffee and tequila or beer and argue about art and aesthetics, and I really miss those experiences, particularly at his house on the northern edge of Santa Ana and the border to the City of Orange.

He's actually the first person who ever pointed out to me the perils of a technocracy. I dismissed it and counter-argued it at the time, and it's taken me something like 15+ years to understand what he said.

He built his own house. He designed it. It was like some kind of Craftsman and Asian-informed heavily wood-beamed Latino/Hispanic Frank Lloyd Wright kind of thing. Arched decks and bridges over stone and water, heavy drought-tolerant trees and gardens. Leaf and litter and cats. Even the advanced decay as I saw as a latecomer to his home was artistic, the piles of paintings from sitting room to kitchen, unemptied ashtrays, piles and piles of books on design and art and architecture.

Many of the oil pantings crowding Sergio's home were decades old projects, 20 "hands" later, 30, 40. Dozens and dozens were touched and painted weekly or monthly even as he slowed down.

His property was nearly 3 acres, a carbuncle jammed in spite between two disparately developed half-mile block sized single story, single family developments.

He was offered multiple millions for the property at different points and even though he was basically broke, barely living off of residual commissions and sales.

Because where would he move, and why? And why should he care about that kind of money at his age, with a home he built with his own hands around him drowning in delicate art and value beyond money.

I'm tangenting deeply, here, because there are esoterically valuable places like this in Boyle Heights and the surrounding areas, and in similarly classed neighborhoods all over LA.

Because there is a cultural cost and loss to this kind of gentrification far above and beyond the cost of rent or the demographics of the neighborhood.

And this is precisely what they're fighting for and about. It's not just about cheap rent.

It's about culture and a sense of home and community.
posted by loquacious at 7:46 PM on April 19, 2016 [25 favorites]

It's about culture and a sense of home and community.

... a culture and sense of home from telling people they can't/shouldn't live somewhere, and that if those outsiders happen to have been born in Gerty, Oklahoma, that's just too darn bad, because the culture in Boyle Heights is too darn fragile and ephemeral to stand up to a the privilege and cultural supremacy of an Oklahoma farm girl, and why would they want to move away from their home in Gerty, where they know their family, friends, and city as it has been for all of history, anyway?

That's really what you want?

I understand there is a cost to gentrification. I regret that, but I don't know what to do better. Insularity is the scariest thought of all for me - but maybe that's because I identify more with the outsider. This reminds me of one of the oddest set of statistics I've read in my life - that most people never move (and further, fewer people are moving now than in recent history):

Among all respondents to the Pew Research Center survey, 57% say they have not lived in the U.S. outside their current state: 37% have never left their hometown and 20% have left their hometown (or native country) but not lived outside their current state.

It's amazing that for a country based on immigration, there's not actually that much movement once people get in the country.

I've always thought it'd be a useful government policy to massively subsidize moving in order to allow people to effectively respond to poor state policy (Bad schools? Move to a new state. Too high taxes? Move to a new state. Too much unemployment? Move to a new state).

Perspective is an odd thing.
posted by saeculorum at 8:06 PM on April 19, 2016 [10 favorites]

I live about six blocks away and I sure can't figure out where in east LA has "white people" walking dogs, unless he thinks Whittier or Montecito Heights is east LA.
And considering how many LA neighborhoods have changed from Jewish to African-American to Latino in even the last 25 years, I don't think Boyle Heights is any different from the Fairfax district or South Central.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:53 PM on April 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

I went to a really interesting talk on gentrification last year, and the guy who gave it (who has done community organizing in Brooklyn for quite some time) made a point of focusing on the prime movers, which are the developers and real estate industry people who drive the changes at the political and big-money levels. The individuals, families, and small-business owners have a lot less to do with it and have a lot fewer choices in any direction.
posted by restless_nomad at 9:00 PM on April 19, 2016 [5 favorites]

The opera driven off, if I recall correctly, included MeFite Speicus.

It's kind of a shame that news coverage keeps focusing on the headline-grabbing actions of the Maoists, who are fucking morons, but that's an easier narrative than the deeply ambiguous narratives of internal migration and gentrification within LA.

"That's why people who want to live in the neighborhood they grow up in oppose gentrification. Because you get pushed out because of others' choices. "

Kinda. But that only makes sense when you look at a lot of the other constraints in LA, which include a chronic housing shortage, and rent control — which is great for folks that already have housing, but exacerbates the cost of finding a new place. If LA weren't so fucked on housing in general, gentrification wouldn't be as big a pressure.
posted by klangklangston at 9:58 PM on April 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Which is naively being part of that gentrification as a wanna-be art tourist or whatever looking for cheap rents and good times with fellow weirdos. Even though some of us meshed well with the local culture, we were the incidental or accidental white vanguard that diluted the local culture to make it more comfortable to, well, the gentrifiers.

Do white people really think Mexicans are that exotic?

You folks should have seen Boyle Heights was better when it was a place to be avoided at all costs, and families lived there because nobody would buy their houses. Well, families and the few pioneers with eyes open to discover the hidden gem.

Don't worry. Southern California has many Mexican neighborhoods, and has had them for as long as there have been Mexicans. Want to kind some real unsung Mexican communities? Go to Palmdale or Wilmington. Or take a drive to Pacoima. You'll still be welcomed, more or less, get to see the panaderias and little children elaborately dressed for their First Communions. Outsiders who want to go native are rarely turned down.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:08 PM on April 19, 2016 [4 favorites]

That mobile opera, which sounds kinda interesting, but also maybe kinda precious and pretentious from the descriptions that I've read, might have been improved somewhat by some unexpected real-life gritty performance-art intervention experiences. Chased by a brass band, I would pay extra for that.
posted by ovvl at 10:14 PM on April 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

White people certainly do love to freak out if you tell them they can't live wherever they want. As if the people living there already should be delighted to be kicked out.

I bet they called Geronimo a disgusting bigot too.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:13 AM on April 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

Okay, sure. But if you're an artist (so you need to live in a particular handful of cities AND you don't make any money) and you're white, what neighborhood are you supposed to live in? I have no interest in displacing residents of color of a neighborhood who have lived there their entire lives. But when I was in New York, I lived in Washington Heights with the rest of the musicians because we sure couldn't afford to live further downtown, or in Brooklyn. I'm not being facetious here - I really don't know what to do about this.
posted by fast ein Maedchen at 5:00 AM on April 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

Won't someone please think of the artists???????!
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:39 AM on April 20, 2016

White people certainly do love to freak out if you tell them they can't live wherever they want. As if the people living there already should be delighted to be kicked out.

As they should freak out, just like anyone else.

The thing is, it's kind of hard to kick homeowners out who don't want to leave. Particularly in CA as mentioned above, a law that left leaning folks here routinely regard as destructive has been especially discouraging gentrification in a fairly unique way. People don't get "kicked out" by gentrification in any meaningful way. The law specifically encourages people stay in the places they've owned, sort of like rent control for property taxes. To the detriment of proponents of government provided services everywhere.

I bet they called Geronimo a disgusting bigot too.

What a curious angle to work. Because what well meaning people seem to desire, beyond the Mexican people of Boyle Heights not losing their homes to wily outsiders, is a neighborhood their descendants can somehow be guaranteed residence where they grew up, by virtue of growing up there. A sort of system like that has been done before, and most people realize it's not quite the privilege you might think it would be.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:44 AM on April 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

Okay, substitute "artist" for "profession whose existence offends you less but still necessitates living in a big city while not making any money." My question still stands.
posted by fast ein Maedchen at 5:49 AM on April 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

People don't get "kicked out" by gentrification in any meaningful way.

I think you meant to put the scare quotes around "people" instead.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:11 AM on April 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is hilarious. Some racists want a segregated park and you're concerned about other hypothetical racists taking it out of "context."

It's not as if I like it, or approve of it. If I was there, it would apply to my arty white ass personally. I hate it, I hate everything about this. It's coming from a context of real pain and anger and powerlessness. And it will make things worse.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:14 AM on April 20, 2016

A sort of system like that has been done before, and most people realize it's not quite the privilege you might think it would be.

This hypothetical reference to, what, segregated ghettos? has nothing to do with this situation, and your bringing it up is a distraction.

Gentrification happens. Poor people of color get displaced by a deliberate and well-known process. What we are discussing is whether A. There is any way to resist it and B. If poor POC have the right to try to resist it.

I don't know the answer to A but I do believe B. Sounds like you do not. Consider why you think that.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:16 AM on April 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Let's take the "unique cultural fabric" bit out of it for a second and treat this as a pure class issue. Say the residents were actually homeless and lived in a tent city. Now some developers want to raze the tent city and build luxury condos. Don't they at least have a responsibility to ensure the homeless have somewhere to go? Albeit a more extreme example, that is the essence of the issue here - the current residents can afford to stay where they are; they can't afford to move. Why should having more money de facto entitle you to do whatever you like to people? What is so godawful about wherever the gentrifiers currently live? If they want to experience the "unique culture," why can't they just visit and spend money at the existing local businesses?
posted by AFABulous at 7:55 AM on April 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

Do white people really think Mexicans are that exotic?

The people I'm referring to in this thread aren't Mexican, they're Americans that are Chicano or Hispanic.

And, yeah, the differences and culture are actually exotic, different and widely misunderstood. Calling them Mexicans is a symptom of this.

I'm not saying people can't live wherever they want, or that reverse racism is good.

I'm trying to point out and describe why there's justifiable outrage about the process of gentrification, and how it's not nearly as simple as "white folks with money made it unaffordable to live here".

Because there's usually covert (or overt) civic, legislative and economic collusion and pressure driving the intentional gentrification of a neighborhood specifically for the purposes of profit, not because anyone involved has any real desire to build a liveable, walkable city or other noble-sounding bullshit.

And just because someone can afford to live anywhere they want, while bringing whatever disruptive and tone deaf activities they want into a neighborhood doesn't mean that there won't be anger or pushback about it or that they should be immune from criticism.

And, yeah, a bicycle tour through Boyle Heights led by a real estate agent targeted at the young and upwardly mobile that ends with "artisinal treats" is pretty fucking tone deaf, naive and clueless.

Boyle Heights will put up a hell of a fight. They've been through this kind of shit show before, and they won't go quietly.
posted by loquacious at 9:05 AM on April 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

... but driving away "outsiders" with overt threats and physical intimidation seems counterproductive in the least.

Realistically, though, what other options do they have? Fear of crime and violence is (along with broader demographic trends) all that kept Boyle Heights-like neighborhoods all over the country affordable and available to working and poor people in the past. It's a powerful weapon, and maybe the best one available to them, given that they have the full compliment of state and developer forces resources arrayed against them (arguably themselves forms of economic violence and intimidation).

Wealthy whites seem uniformly surprised to meet anger and pushback in gentrifying neighborhoods but, as loquacious notes, these places have almost always been through it before, or the residents are there because they were pushed out of somewhere else. There's a blithe, privileged ignorance (or outright contempt) for the histories of these neighborhoods by many of the newcomers, and about the economic brutality that is baked into the history of almost every American city. This feels like just one more foreshadowing of a reviving unwillingness by poor and working Americans to go along quietly with that.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:25 AM on April 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Here's the original story about the opera.
The real estate bike tour was in 2014.
LA Times story from March that seems to have "inspired" the Guardian story.
posted by Ideefixe at 11:21 AM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

The only relevant context is that a group of activists including Maoists of all people ... want local immigrants of the wrong race to encounter a "total disaster" and say "stay outta my fucking hood."

If they were real Maoists they would send all of those arty hipsters back to Oklahoma to work on the collective farms.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:11 PM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

If they were real Maoists they would send all of those arty hipsters back to Oklahoma to work on the collective farms.

The fact that anyone is historically clueless, insensitive, and tone-deaf enough to name their group "Red Guards" in 2016 is pretty impressive, even for American Maoists^*. And I say that as someone who is largely sympathetic to the protesters' goals here.

^{In the mid-late 90s, I would sometimes read the Revolutionary Worker for its baffling and unintentionally hilarious book and film reviews, which were often along the lines of: "The Little Mermaid - Mao was not mentioned in this film." The whole post-Cultural Revolution/Great Leap Forward, Bob Avakian Mao cult seemed entirely divorced from political reality, and I guess these folks are carrying on that tradition.}
posted by ryanshepard at 12:56 PM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

"The Little Mermaid - Mao was not mentioned in this film."

He'd obviously mistaken it for The Little Maomaid.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:03 PM on April 20, 2016

The people I'm referring to in this thread aren't Mexican, they're Americans that are Chicano or Hispanic.

And, yeah, the differences and culture are actually exotic, different and widely misunderstood. Calling them Mexicans is a symptom of this.

It's pretty common to call ourselves Mexicans. Even among those of us who've never been to Mexico and barely understand the language. Referring to ourselves as Hispanic or Latino is kind of rare and usually reserved for more formal occasions when we're with and/or about broader audiences. "Chicano" is one used similarly, but referring to ourselves, and more specifically, those of us who may never have been to Mexico and barely understand the language. I don't hear it too often conversationally. Some scoff at it, but I think that's an older generation. In fact, it might be a good idea to not assume a group of people are Chicanos, unless you actually know they are.

Mexican is good enough, since that is the largely the roots of those Boyle Heights residents, who are also mostly US citizens and probably have been for generations. Somehow, it seems to me exotic when outsiders refer to me as Hispanic, or especially Chicano.

People don't get "kicked out" by gentrification in any meaningful way.

I think you meant to put the scare quotes around "people" instead.

Mmmm... okayyy...
posted by 2N2222 at 1:27 PM on April 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's not like the first wave of gentrification consists of people particularly rich at that time, or have a ton of options. It's usually the young, upwardly mobile folks who still need to live in the city to have a career and take advantage of that upward mobility so are looking for someplace cheap.

Exactly. Gentrification has also tended to be driven first by young artists and gay men. The young artists tend to be broke, need lots of space, and are often accustomed to living in low-income neighborhoods. Historically, gay men tended to cluster together for safety, culture, and proximity to a city; however, with greater acceptance and growth in gay families raising children, this may be less of a factor. In my observation, though, a good sign of a neighborhood crossing over to gentrification is when educated gay men start buying lots of properties.
posted by theorique at 5:00 AM on April 21, 2016

"Realistically, though, what other options do they have? Fear of crime and violence is (along with broader demographic trends) all that kept Boyle Heights-like neighborhoods all over the country affordable and available to working and poor people in the past. It's a powerful weapon, and maybe the best one available to them, given that they have the full compliment of state and developer forces resources arrayed against them (arguably themselves forms of economic violence and intimidation)."

Well, that and pollution, redlining, lack of infrastructure service, racism…

"You folks should have seen Boyle Heights was better when it was a place to be avoided at all costs, and families lived there because nobody would buy their houses. Well, families and the few pioneers with eyes open to discover the hidden gem."

That's kind of a weird point to start the story of Boyle Heights. When it was a Jewish neighborhood, it was because they couldn't buy houses elsewhere, but it was mixed industrial and they built garment factories there. The Jewish people that lived there were predominantly immigrants, and leftists, and so melded well with the immigrant Latino labor force. As the Jewish people left — mostly because of the freeways cutting through — they worked with the Latino immigrants to build Latino power and ownership in the neighborhood, allowing a coalition of Jews and Latinos to finally outlaw redlining.

And right now, a lot of people in Boyle Heights don't have the same kind of options that the Jewish immigrants before them did — it's not like there's a huge post-war boom and Sepulveda is semi-rural.

So it's easy for me to see why people there would be more upset than many neighborhoods about being the target of Anglo-capitalist exploitation, especially since it coincides with progress on a lot of the longstanding structural issues that people there have had to deal with. Not being able to move out when you wanted to, combined with being forced out when you finally want to stay is a bitter pill.

And in a way, it reminds me of where I grew up — a HUD co-op in Michigan. Basically, a housing project, except the residents own it. A few years back, they finally paid off their mortgage and the land is worth a lot more than when it was built. There's definitely a tension between people for whom their share in the place is their biggest asset, many of whom have been there for at least 30 years, and who want to sell out, and folks whose priority is keeping it affordable.

But then, neoliberalism's got us discussing this all in the framework of individual choices, doesn't it?
posted by klangklangston at 10:11 PM on April 21, 2016