LAUSR

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