Conventional gentrification literature has meaningfully demonstrated how economic inequality is perpetuated in urban settings, but there has been a limited understanding of how racial inequality is maintained. Drawing from participant observation, interviews, and digital ethnography in the barrio of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles that were collected over five years, this study examines how gentrification functions as a racial project and supports new forms of racialization to maintain uneven development along racial lines. Examining the ways that racial formation processes unfurl at the local scale expands conventional understanding of racial formation theory and practice while, simultaneously, illustrating the centrality of place in race-making. This study finds new race and class formations are developed by casting the barrio itself and significant portions of the Mexican American population as “honorary white.” Despite colorblind and post-racial ideologies espoused in majority-minority cities like Los Angeles, this landscape fostered emerging racial formations alongside gentrification processes which have increased racial, political, and economic inequality.
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.
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