South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South L.A.

South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South L.A. is a mixed-methods portrait of Latino immigration, African American displacement, and Black-Brown solidarity as South Los Angeles (a.k.a. South Central) undergoes a “spatial transformation”: Black residents adjusting to their first-generation Latino immigrant neighbors; a younger Latino generation forging quotidian, cross-racial bonds; and an emergent Black-Brown progressive politics facing down renewed threats of disinvestment, police violence, and gentrification. In this neighborhood study involving over 200 interviews with first-generation immigrants, second-generation Latino millennials, established Black neighbors, a racially diverse group of local leaders, and groups of Black and Latino men who frequent South L.A.’s precious few parks and gardens, two of the field’s luminaries argue that everyday homemaking over two generations has transformed a neighborhood too often misunderstood as racially divided, violent, and declining.

Based on the experiences of their focal sample of first- and second-generation Latinos, authors Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor argue that everyday processes of homemaking in South L.A., especially in the second generation, have produced a Latino-majority community that sees its fate as linked to that of African Americans through a common struggle against racism and shared pride of place. This is not a story of ethnic succession, but one of racial sedimentation as new generations of Angelenos grow up side by side, drawing on a rich history of Black activism and culture, to forge fragile, but potentially powerful, Black-Brown political solidarities focused on recruiting high-quality jobs, securing genuine public safety, and bringing affordable housing to this new frontier in L.A. gentrification.

This dynamic empirical portrait undergirds their contributions to the race relations and immigrant integration literatures, two fields whose canons are themselves being transformed. In the former, the authors contest static mainstream and academic portrayals of South L.A. as violent and conflict-ridden. Truer of the 1980s and 1990s, when many first-generation Latino respondents reported “shutting in and shutting out” in response to gang violence and police brutality, cordial but tense relations between Latinos and African Americans over jobs and street crime prevailed. The current situation is better understood as “racial sedimentation,” in which the conflicts of the past lie below the surface, informing ongoing tensions, while new cross-racial relations are being forged in the second generation, born of everyday interactions in shared spaces: at work and in local parks and gardens, romantic relationships, culture, and coalitional politics. Endorsing Gordon Allport’s seminal work, “Essentially, contact does make a difference” (p. 247); but how contact makes a difference depends on the place where it occurs. Here we see the value of a multi-generational study that is well suited to capturing these changes, which unfold over time.

In the immigrant integration literature, the authors break from theories of segmented or downward assimilation and transnational circularity, portraying Latino immigration, especially in the second generation, as permanently settled; connected to, but not identified with the sending country; and pursuing educational, occupational, and housing opportunities in South L.A., not the suburbs. Inspired by the work of Italian sociologist Paolo Boccagni, they offer their signature concept of “homemaking” or attaching to neighborhood and seeking belonging, arguing that immigrants adapt to the new environment and simultaneously adapt the environment to themselves. The result is a renewed focus on place that moves our understanding of immigrant integration “toward a place-based identity that feeds into a sense of common struggle and potentially coalitional politics from the bottom up” (p. 12).

The book’s chapters begin with a historical profile and quantitative empirical portrait of South L.A. drawn primarily from census data, tracing Black outmigration and Latino immigration, mostly from Central America, resulting in a massive demographic shift from 80 percent African American in 1970 to 66 percent Latino in 2016. While both groups face ongoing economic challenges, the story is one of settling in: forming families, having children, and buying homes.

In Chapter Three, we learn of the first-generation Latino immigrant experience of settling into South L.A. At first, relations with Black neighbors are cordial, but superficial, undermined by language barriers, street crime, and anti-Black racism in the sending communities and in L.A. Still, the portrayal is dynamic, stressing that these perceptions shift, especially when prompted by residents’ more progressive, second-generation children.

This second generation is the focus of Chapter Four, the heart of the book, where the authors report “deep affinity and respect” (p. 9) for Black neighbors and Black culture, forging an identity that is steeped in shared struggle and neighborhood pride, blurring the color line. They contrast their findings to the those of María Rendón, who finds a brightening of the color line in L.A. neighborhoods beset by gun violence. This difference, however, may be the result of the characteristics of their second-generation sample who are overeducated compared to their neighborhood, since respondents were drawn from the personal networks of the University of Southern California-based research team.

Chapter Five examines the parks and gardens where mostly Black and Brown men gather in like gender, age, and language groups. While integration across groups is rare, these spaces are vital for the men that use them for solace, male sovereignty, community belonging, and nascent civic activity. The authors focus on coexistence by portraying these spaces as critical to ameliorating the everyday racial hostility that prevailed in an earlier period.

The final chapter spotlights local advocacy and activism. While South L.A. is majority Latino, political representation remains almost exclusively Black. The social service sector and educational institutions have been forced to adjust more rapidly, by accommodating bilingual or Spanish-dominant residents and simultaneously alienating Black parents who feel that after generations of struggle, their gains are being taken away. Meanwhile, former pillars of civic life, like the Black church and traditional Black-led organizations, have shifted in favor of groups that have a more explicit focus on Black-Brown solidarity and progressive politics. The picture is an emergent political culture focused on integrating the new Latino majority and a desire to preserve South L.A. as the heart of Black L.A.

The book concludes with the story of a failed application to designate South L.A. as an Obama-era Promise Zone, followed by a coalitional effort to challenge the application standards themselves. This final vignette illustrates the power of Black-Brown solidarity to participate more equitably in L.A.’s economic growth by securing quality jobs and housing and to transform politics not by conforming to a distant federal official’s standards, but by confidently demanding that national government, indeed all of us, accommodate this new reality of South L.A.: one where residents “define themselves, their home, their future” (p. 264).

This book is mandatory reading for scholars in sociology, urban studies, geography, political science, and for all those who seek to understand the transformation of Black and Brown L.A.