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

and best use” of the land really meant the economic interests of the city's political elite and the CBD's economic elite.

The redevelopment literature is awash with studies focusing on the detrimental effects redevelopment has had on marginal neighborhoods. Most such studies present grand structuralist narratives focused on the political and economic relationships within cities. Others focus on agency, mainly to show that low-income groups have managed to organize resistance to large redevelopment projects. Such resistance leads either to stopping the large projects or to disrupting the communities.

The Mesoamerican immigrant neighborhood of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles may be unique in not following the patterns outlined previously, and that difference—that anomaly—makes this case study potentially important. How was that low-income immigrant neighborhood able to absorb a large-scale redevelopment project—centered around a new subway station—and actually make the redevelopment work to the benefit of the neighborhood? This book takes a revelatory case study approach to tell the story of how the changing Mesoamerican neighborhood adapted to the city's redevelopment pressures and actions. I argue that a process of co-evolutionary adaptation occurred between the Mesoamerican endogenous institutions and the city's redevelopment/revitalization institutions. Using a complex adaptive systems conceptual framework to understand changes in the neighborhood and in the institutions affecting it, the book describes how agents and institutions both endogenous and exogenous to the neighborhood evolved as they adapted to each other. The process of neighborhood change has not been framed this way previously. Researchers have missed much of the complexity and power of the political and economic dynamics in immigrant neighborhoods, as well as the potential that such dynamics hold for revitalizing cities.

At its core, this study considers how a low-income immigrant community was able to take advantage of a large-scale redevelopment plan. Its main finding reveals that immigrant capital, along with the community-based organizations' (CBOs') grassroots power and the citywide Latino political power, interacted to facilitate the survival of this immigrants' milieu.