Immigrants and the Revitalization of Los Angeles: Development and ...

the opening of a new subway station there. After a five-year absence, I returned there in 2000 to find that, six years after the station had opened, the neo-Mesoamerican culture and the neighborhood's endogenous institutions actually seemed stronger. My ensuing puzzlement led me to look into what first appeared to be a mystery. My interest in the question deepened as I continued to delve into the matter and as I advanced through my professional training in urban planning until I decided to propose it as my PhD dissertation research. The complexity and evolutionary change I detected there led me to adopt complex adaptive systems as my conceptual framework. I found it useful and evocative to apply Sartre's concept of “the gaze”—that is, his idea that our awareness that we are constantly being regarded and judged by others is important to our self-awareness and self-assessment and guides our decisions. I sensed that processes of co-evolution might help explain the neighborhood's survival and growing strength. I realized that, to explore those processes, I would need to go beyond documents and statistics, to conduct and analyze in-depth interviews with persons who had had important and varied roles in the revitalization. And, I came to see that MacArthur Park is a global ethnopole, a fact that is not only relevant to my research question but also makes my case study, itself, potentially relevant to such communities around the world and to planners and others who are dealing with them.

I grew up in MacArthur Park. I immigrated to Los Angeles from Guatemala when I was six years old, and, like many other Central-American immigrants, I made MacArthur Park my home as I transitioned into American society. I grew up among the gangs, violence, drugs, police harassment, inadequate housing, and overcrowded public schools. I must admit that I chose to leave Los Angeles and travel north to begin my university studies because I disliked the neighborhood I grew up in. I disliked the sense of mistrust that we had for the city's institutions; the cops, the social workers, the politicians—everything that represented an outsider to the community. Actually, I also disliked many of the institutions that grew out of the neighborhood: the gangs, the street vendors, the miqueros, the paralegals trying to make a buck from the immigrants