South Central Is Home: Race and the Power of Community Investment in Los Angeles

Abstract

South Central Is Home is an indispensable historical engagement of the collective power of community members of the urban racialized landscape that is South Central Los Angeles, from the late 1960s to the turn of the twenty-first century. It is a “relational interracial history” (p. 6) written with corazón (heart), that positions the humanity of South Central residents at the forefront of the study. Rosas departs from the bleak portrayals that predominate of one of America's most diverse and densely populated metropolitan areas. A South Central local herself, Abigail Rosas seamlessly weaves a narrative that centers the lives of everyday historical actors in the community while providing an incisive investigation of the structural shifts that directly impacted their lives and their neighborhood. Rosas makes this possible through examining commonplace neighborly interactions, resident participation in War on Poverty programs such as Head Start, community health clinics, and the patronage of an African American community bank. Through these foci the author reveals everyday forms of community activism, the dynamics of interracial relations, and the formation of a sense of belonging and home making for Black and Brown residents. She captures the historical agency of community members and the modes in which they navigated and negotiated their relationships with each other, built community, and practiced solidarity.Masterfully employing a rich archive of historical documents and oral histories, Rosas contributes significantly to the vital historical scholarship focused on interracial relations and multiracial realities in the United States. She argues that by placing Black and Brown subjectivities as relational to one another, we complicate how we analyze their politicization. Utilizing a relational community formation framework, the author identifies the interconnected racial scripts of race, poverty, and space that impacted both Black and Brown South Central residents (p. 13). The labor and emotional work of finding common ground and collectively investing in their community is central to the book. Rosas compellingly situates women as leaders at the vanguard of the “nascent building of relational community formation,” especially in her discussion of the impact of the War on Poverty–sponsored Head Start program.Critically, the author pushes past the tired competition and tension paradigm that has plagued dominant discourse and complicates it by arguing that the shared experiences of racialization, structural change, vulnerability, and everyday interaction inspired a “relational community identity.” This identity in turn cultivated a shared investment in opposition to multiple forms of injustice, including underrepresentation and discrimination. While Rosas certainly does not deny that tensions did exist in the community, her aim is to discuss the diversity of experiences of South Central residents that she describes as muted, tense, collaborative, and also sites of possibility. Rosas homes in on the structural impacts of deindustrialization, racial discrimination, increased law and immigration enforcement, the decline of the welfare state, and the limits of multiculturalism that directly impinged on urban interracial relations. She compellingly reveals that “everyday acts of community investment and solidarity—have power because they go against the grain of expectations of people living in interracial spaces and communities” (p. 19).South Central Is Home provides an essential historical context and genealogy to the current moment of widespread social and political upheaval against the structural inequalities of poverty, police violence, mass incarceration, and political disenfranchisement taking place across the country. Throughout her study, Rosas elucidates how everyday people forged coalitions and practiced solidarity to create and advocate for their community. Tracing the complex genealogy of multiracial coalition and Black and Brown solidarity in Los Angeles is a pivotal contribution. The author's exploration of the emergence of community health clinics, in particular, illuminates the efforts of community organizations such as PICA (People in Community Action). a multiracial coalition that consisted of seventy-five organizations as well as the Brown Berets and the Black Panther Party. Here is where a direct link to multiracial coalition and solidarity within local social movement organizations could have strengthened South Central Is Home. These community coalitions and struggles are pivotal to understanding the multiracial landscape of Los Angeles, and Rosas brilliantly brings them to our attention and invites us to further explore them. A nod to the multiracial coalitions forged within the welfare rights movement that began in the early 1960s or between the Chicano and Black power movements, for instance, would only further illustrate the legacy of community investment and care between Black and Brown people in Los Angeles.South Central Is Home demonstrates the unrelenting power of everyday people seeking to live dignified lives and their willingness to challenge the structures of power to navigate the shifting racialized terrain of one of America's greatest urban centers together in community. It serves as a potent reminder of our shared genealogies of struggle and the continuous need to come together to dream and create the world we want to inhabit collectively.