Boyle Heights and the Fight against Gentrification as State Violence
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2950574 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kean O’brien, Leonardo Vilchis, Corina Maritescu |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 71 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 389-396 |
| Publication date | 2019-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/aq.2019.0033 |
| OpenAlex | W2953947090 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Boyle Heights and the Fight against Gentrification as State Violence Kean O’Brien (bio), Leonardo Vilchis (bio), and Corina Maritescu (bio) The history of the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles is a chronicle of Los Angelinos struggling against all odds to build community. Over generations, Jewish, African American, Mexican, and Japanese people were pushed to become one community in Boyle Heights, through racially restrictive covenants banning property sales to people of color. Boyle Heights is now a predominantly Mexican neighborhood with a history of anticapitalist, antiracist resistance: against the Vietnam War, against the gang and crack epidemics, against state brutality. This is the place where the coalition of antiwar Chicano activists including the Chicano Moratorium and the “Brown Berets” (who organized student walkouts in the late 1960s) held an antiwar march in 1970 attended by over thirty thousand people. Over the last twenty years, many women residents of Boyle Heights came together through the organization Union de Vecinos and fought to end violence from gang members and from police in their neighborhood, literally negotiating ceasefires between members of rival gangs. These struggles have created a strong sense of identity for the people of Boyle Heights, who want to enjoy the fruits of their labor over the decades. But the city has a different idea for this neighborhood: after women risked their lives for this tightly knit community, once the neighborhood became “safe,” Los Angeles real estate developers, administrators, and politicians had a newfound interest in its development and began laying down plans for a new arts district, which will result in mass displacement. According to research from Union De Vecinos, over the last twenty years, more than $3 billion has been invested into Boyle Heights by the city and the state, resulting in the displacement of twenty-five hundred families at the hands of development. The Housing Authority actively pushed out families whose members had been formally criminalized or penalized via immigration status, credit, and police records. After decades fighting for their community, Boyle Heights residents are losing their businesses, their neighbors, and their homes, watching with grief as their neighborhood becomes a gentrified ghost of years past and a vulnerable [End Page 389] market for speculative development. And so the resistance continues today, against police brutality, immigration raids, and mass displacement, as Boyle Heights residents fight to protect their neighborhood from being disappeared by the state. This project of aggressive arts-oriented development in Boyle Heights began with a $36 million “revitalization” project for the Sixth Street Bridge, started in 2015, which would connect the “new arts district” in Boyle Heights with the existing Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles, itself once a thriving multiethnic community that was turned into a gentrified “arts district” through arts-oriented development. The redevelopment has also included an expansion of the Metro public transit line, and the arrival of more than a dozen new art galleries, which took over factories and warehouses that closed after struggling to pay their increasing rents. These galleries were promoted and supported by local politicians, speculated on by investors, and rightly understood by the community to be an advance offense of gentrification. The community saw that Boyle Heights had been slated for specifically arts-oriented gentrification, and therefore an interruption in the arrival of outsider art, artists, and speculators was critical if the community was to stand a chance at protecting the neighborhood against successive waves of gentrification, like real estate development. In real estate parlance, an arts-centered neighborhood is a “beautiful up-and-coming” neighborhood, and a “beautiful up-and-coming” neighborhood is a lot harder to defend. Boyle Heights residents banded together to ask that these artists and gallerists leave their neighborhood. When artists invested in housing rights joined the fight, an alliance was born: B.H.A.A.A.D (Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement), made up of members from Union de Vecinos, Defend Boyle Heights, Los Angeles Tenants Union, School of Echoes, and multiple affinity groups of L.A. Artists. B.H.A.A.A.D. named a boycott of the nascent Boyle Heights “arts district” and all its galleries, calling for galleries to close their doors and leave
Criminology · Economic growth · Gentrification · Negotiation · Political science · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · State (computer science · Gender Studies · History · Law · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2024 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |