Review: Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, by George J. Sánchez

Abstract

Nearly three decades after exploring the history of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood through the lens of twentieth-century Mexican migration and settlement, George J. Sánchez has invited us to revisit those same streets and their residents through the lenses of world history and U.S. immigration and civil rights history writ large. The result is a coherent, sweeping, dazzling array of new understandings: of the ways Los Angeles urban policies pushed multiple marginalized groups into a shared space; of how political and economic transformations around the globe intersected in one specific place through human relationships; and of how those relationships, in turn, shaped major social movements in ways we had not previously appreciated.The first half of the book, which spans the early nineteenth century through the 1950s, recovers and recasts the neighborhood’s multi-ethnic past. Popular accounts imagine a simple story of “ethnic succession,” from a predominantly Jewish to an entirely Mexican neighborhood. Indeed, a leading historian of L.A. Jewry had earlier concluded that, “[Jewish] Boyle Heights evoked little nostalgia upon its demise.”1 Sánchez convincingly argues the opposite as he recounts the specific dynamics of warmth and tensions in relationships amongst Boyle Heights’ Jewish, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Black residents—each in their own way refugees from violence and economic convulsion around the world. Through Sánchez’s eyes and exhaustive archival work, we come to understand Boyle Heights as a major center of Black community life; see Japanese American internment as a transformative experience in American Jewish history because it pushed Los Angeles’ Jewish residents and institutions to connect their struggle to others’; and appreciate the ways that Mexican and Jewish labor activists played formative roles in each other’s early political empowerment. Drawing on his 2004 article, Sánchez shows that the Jewish exodus from the neighborhood in the 1950s was shaped by the relentless forces of state-sponsored segregation yet was at once a site of internal community struggle about the nature of Jewish identity and its relationship to radical politics and to other neighboring communities.Sánchez’s work on the Civil Rights period and beyond revisits the highlights of Los Angeles Chicano history with an emphasis on the role of contingency and lived experience in a multi-racial city. We now see the East L.A. student walkouts of 1968 as inspired more by student leaders’ interest in the Watts Riots than Chicano nationalism. We learn, in detail for the first time, about daily life during this iconic neighborhood’s shift from majority Mexican American to majority undocumented immigrant, and how the former came to embrace the latter’s cause. And we gain a window into recent struggles over “gentefication” as college-educated Latinos faced rejection from some local activists when they returned to the neighborhood to start businesses.As an historian of the Mexican American past, I am grateful for this endlessly rich social history to inform ongoing struggles and give deeper meaning to present-day political coalitions. As the granddaughter of Beverly Millman, a Jewish American teen who moved to Boyle Heights with her parents in the early 1940s but joined her community’s “exodus” to other neighborhoods just a few years later, I am grateful for this chance to place my own family in America’s story anew. It is fitting that Sánchez, who has transformed the field of Chicano History through graduate mentorship, would now perfect its promise of offering usable pasts for both families and communities to construct more humane futures.