| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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not think it would be possible to find elsewhere in Los Angeles a cluster of cell phone stores like the one around the subway station.
I went into the pharmacy on the corner of 8th Street and Alvarado. It reminded me of being back in a pharmacy in Central America. They had great customer service—much better than the kind of service I get at Rite Aid in my neighborhood in Sacramento. It seemed to be a “mom and pop” operation, where you know that the people serving you are the owners. Next, I went into Langer's delicatessen across the street. When I walked into the restaurant I could see three waitresses—two Caucasians and one Latina—standing by to serve customers. As I walked in, the Latina waitress quickly noticed me and served as my hostess, taking me to my seat and speaking to me in Spanish.
As I left the restaurant and walked to the subway, I saw some street vendors. Women were selling mangos, chicharones,5 CDs, and clothing. There were paleteros6 and shoe shiners near the subway, too, but they did not have the park vendors' colorful carts, and they seemed uneasy, as if they felt they did not have a claim to this place.
This book tells the story of the MacArthur Park neighborhood, a place that transformed from an urban jungle to an urban village. A place that was transformed by the construction of a large-scale redevelopment project. Yet, instead of seeing the destruction of this immigrant milieu, the Mesoamerican immigrants' milieu flourished in the face of large-scale redevelopment. By understanding how this anomaly occurred and identifying the underlining mechanisms that led to these unique outcomes, city-planning theorists and practitioners can better harness the conditions for planning in multicultural constituencies.