Three Reads to Help You See Los Angeles in a New Way
Some recommendations from our team
Each member of our little team here at Making a Neighborhood does the work we do because we are deeply interested in how cities are made. For years before we all came together to discuss gentrification, neighborhoods, and urban planning, we separately pursued our curiosities about these subjects. Over the course of the next year, we want to occasionally share with you some of the books, articles, and other forms of media we have read or encountered that have shaped our understanding of Los Angeles and of cities in general.
Today we are bringing you three recommendations. We are each focusing on one recommendation at a time because we want to give these recs space to breathe and to give you all time you need to dive into them before we suggest more reading and/or viewing. We would also love to hear what books, articles, and media you have encountered on this subject matter, so feel free to reach out with recommendations for us as well.
A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community (J.T.)
I’ve been fortunate to have Natalia Molina’s 2022 book A Place at the Nayarit beside me over the last few weeks, which is based on her family’s 50 year-old restaurant in Echo Park, where The Echo now holds space for concert-goers and other denizens. The book is an intimate journey through time with her grandmother, Doña Natalia, and her Mexican restaurant’s role in building and maintaining a cultural stronghold not just for Mexican-American but also queer community members in this part of Los Angeles.
A Place at the Nayarit doesn’t feature stories strictly about Doña Natalia, but also about the people and generations whose lives she and her food touched. The Nayarit first opened in Echo Park in 1951, when L.A.’s population was half its current size and the percentage of people in L.A. County who identified as white was 93% (unlike the most recent count, in which less than 33% of county residents identified as such). From Molina’s lens in the neighborhood where she grew up, “When Doña Natalia moved into Echo Park, 79 percent of its population was white…Latinx people, most of whom were Mexican, made up another 16 percent…In addition, there was a small Asian population, including a Filipin[x] community that had lived in southwest Echo Park since the early twentieth century.” Molina also notes that Echo Park was redlined through the 1940s and widely overlooked by city officials in the decades after World War II. As she observes about a relative lack of documentation on the area from the 1950s - 1970s, “City Council meeting minutes–the main record for municipal activity–and the files of representatives of Los Angeles City Council District 13, which includes Echo Park, barely mention [the community].” These and more insights from Molina’s work make me wonder just how one can measure all the ways Latinx and other underrepresented communities have beautified Echo Park for so long despite more disinvestment in their place than not. I look forward to providing a more extensive review of A Place at the Nayarit for readers very soon.
How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood (Samanta)
When I started This Side of Hoover in 2017, I felt a need for a crash course into gentrification and its history. I understood gentrification via lived experience and witnessing its effects on Virgil Village, but I wanted to learn about its causes. I found that in How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by P.E. Moskowitz.
I appreciated the accessible writing that avoided academic jargon and instead clearly laid out the phases of gentrification, its function as a form of and result of systemic racism, and how different cities experience it. The book very starkly explains the deep, and often violent consequences of gentrification beyond new coffee shops and trendy stores.
How to Kill a City uses San Francisco, New York, Detroit, and New Orleans as case studies. Moskowitz does expensive historical research into the systemic forces and policies across decades that have caused each of these cities to face displacement and gentrification, but they also interview people who have experienced it first hand. The book takes a both intimate and big picture approach, resulting in a comprehensive look into this issue. It also ends on a hopeful note by presenting possible solutions for creating more equitable cities.
If you’re confused about how gentrification works and why it happens, I recommend starting with this book.
Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space (Ali)
If you’re looking for something shorter to read, I have long taught Mike Davis’ seminal essay “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space” to my students at the University of Southern California. The first time I taught this essay was in 2013 during a writing course about race and class in Los Angeles, and it hit the students harder than I had anticipated. Many found it to be “aggressive” and “inflammatory,” as Davis pulls no punches when it comes to naming the stark realities of public space as it exists in Los Angeles.
The version of the essay I teach comes from the 1992 collection Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (ed. Michael Sorkin)—which is slightly different from the version found in Davis’ 1990 full-length book City of Quartz—and opens with the line, “The city bristles with malice.” It’s a hard opener, and as someone who long dreamed of living in this city before I ever arrived here, I was drawn the the essay in the first place because it very much challenged me to break through the fantasy version of LA that lived in my mind and pushed me to recognize what policing, privatization, and racist, classist policy were doing and had done to shape this city. The day I first read this essay is the day my real relationship with this city began, because to love a place means to look it squarely in the face and truly let yourself see it in all its fractured and cohesive parts so that you know how to properly fight for its heart.
I could write fifty more pages about this essay, and after Davis’ recent passing, many cited this particular piece as their gateway in his larger body of work and sometimes into urban studies and other various related fields of study. His language in this essay is sharp, precise, and his consistent metaphors thoughtfully reinforce his larger argument about the city. If you don’t already know this essay and you are ready to see this city fully, give it a read.