Displacement and Gentrification

Boyle Heights is an in-depth history of the Los Angeles neighborhood, showcasing the potent experiences of its residents, from early contact between Spanish colonizers and native Californians to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the hunt for hidden Communists among the Jewish population, negotiating citizenship and belonging among Latino migrants and Mexican American residents, and beyond. Through each period and every struggle, the residents of Boyle Heights have maintained remarkable solidarity across racial and ethnic lines, acting as a unified polyglot community even as their tribulations have become more explicitly racial in nature. Boyle Heights is immigrant America embodied, and it can serve as the true beacon on a hill toward which the country can strive in a time when racial solidarity and civic resistance have never been in greater need.

In Bunker Hill Los Angeles: Essence of Sunshine and Noir, historian Nathan Marsak tells the story Bunker Hill, from the district's inception in the mid-19th century to its present day. Once home to wealthy Angelenos living in LA's "first suburb," then the epicenter of the city's shifting demographics and the shadow and vice of an urban underbelly, Bunker Hill survived its attempted erasure and burgeoned as a hub of arts, politics, business, and tourism.

Capturing a lost moment in time, Chavez Ravine offers a compelling portrait of Mexican-American history. Don Normark, the 20-year-old photography student spent the year of 1949 photographing this now legendary Mexican community. Shortly after he left, the residents were evicted from their homes by the government.

Excavation of the Chinatown that was destroyed in the building of Union Station provides a rich picture of the people and life in nineteenth and early twentieth century Los Angeles. Intensive historical research, oral history, and laboratory analyses have been synthesized into a comprehensive reconstruction of a community that was isolated socially, economically, and geographically.

MacArthur Park, a low-income immigrant community in Los Angeles; although plagued by crime and violence well into the 1990s, it was able to turn a large-scale redevelopment plan to its advantage. This book describes and analyzes how that unusual result came about.

Beginning with the early development of LA's Koreatown and culminating with the 1992 Los Angeles riots and their aftermath, Shelley Sang-Hee Lee demonstrates how Korean Americans' lives were shaped by patterns of racial segregation and urban poverty, and legacies of anti-Asian racism and orientalism. Lee argues that building Koreatown was an urgent objective for Korean immigrants and US-born Koreans eager to carve out a spatial niche within Los Angeles to serve as an economic and social anchor for their growing community.

In The Power of Chinatown, Laureen D. Hom provides a critical examination of the politics shaping the trajectory of development in Los Angeles Chinatown, one of the oldest urban Chinatowns in the United States.

John H. M. Laslett offers a new interpretation of the Chavez Ravine tragedy, paying special attention to the early history of the barrio, the reform of Los Angeles's destructive urban renewal policies, and the influence of the evictions on the collective memory of the Mexican American community.

Dodger Stadium is an American icon. Yet the story of how it was built has a dark side. To clear space for the stadium, the city tore down low-income, Hispanic-friendly housing, resulting in a dramatic confrontation between the County Sheriff and the one family--the Aréchigas--who refused to yield their home. In Stealing Home, Eric Nusbaum tells the stories of the people whose homes were destroyed, their conflict with the bureaucrats and money men of Los Angeles--notably Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley, and a well-intentioned activist named Frank Wilkinson--and shows how their lives were overrun by the wheel of history.