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110 Andrew Deener fine, I mean, people have a right to complain that I’m killing the neighborhood . . . that my fence has ruined their lives, or the size of my house goes against the idea of Venice [laughs]. Coexistence and community-building are two distinct social processes. Coexistence means that people are willing to tolerate differences between individuals who live nearby. They become accustomed to seeing people of different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds, and they learn to protect their own lifestyles by maintaining a culture of segmentation. As Darcy, a white resident for five years, expressed, “I’ve gotten used to it all. Even the drug dealers say hi to me now. They know who I am and I know who they are, and it’s this mutual, ‘Hey, how’s it going’ thing that we do.” Although they lived close to one another and recognized each other as neighbors, they did not become intertwined in each other’s personal lives. Community, on the other hand, from the perspective of long-standing residents, implied an effort to establish common interest, mutual trust, and/or reciprocity between different people. It requires that people break down categorical distinctions by interacting, communicating, and engaging with one another as they share the local social space. As lifelong resident Lila Riley emphasized to me as we walked through the neighborhood , “These people just need to come out from behind their fences and talk to people. Get to know your neighbor. Hang out. This used to be a fun place to live.” For long-term residents used to a feeling of close-knit social bonds with neighbors, the idea of coexistence was a depressing fact of life in the new insular Oakwood culture, where those who moved in more recently appeared quite content with the idea of peaceful coexistence. The newcomers ’ own lifestyle preferences continued to alter the everyday patterns of Oakwood’s social ecology, as they sought peaceful coexistence in a neighborhood within which residents historically sought to build community. N o t e s 1. Los Angeles is well known as a “fragmented city” due to the piecemeal development of neighborhoods during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis). It is also widely recognized by urban scholars as having a history of racial and socioeconomic segregation (e.g., The Decline of a Black Community by the Sea 111 Massey, and Denton, American Apartheid; Soja, Postmetropolis, 264–97; Beveridge , and Weber, “Race and Class in the Developing New York”; Halle, Gedeon, and Beveridge, “Residential Separation and Segregation”). 2. Neighborhoods long thought to be “black neighborhoods” largely due to historical demographic composition and popular culture media expressions—the most famous of which is Watts in South Los Angeles—increasingly became reshaped by low-income Latino immigrants, who even made up a clear majority of South Los Angeles overall by the early 2000s. Massey and Denton (American Apartheid, 63) note that although Los Angeles seems to have experienced a decline in residential segregation by race between 1970 and 1980, stability of income separation remained. 3. Cunningham, “Venice, California”; Umemoto, The Truce. 4. Cunningham, “Venice, California,” 173–74. 5. African Americans readily migrated from the South to urban centers during this time period as southern farms disappeared and black men and women sought out new lives (see Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis; Stack, All Our Kin, 1). See chaps. 1 and 2 for the impact of this migration on Black Los Angeles. 6. Umemoto, Truce. 7. See chap. 2 for a discussion of the Santa Monica Freeway’s impact on Black Los Angeles. 8. Names have been changed to protect the identity of interviewees. 9. It is important to call attention to the highly gendered experience in Oakwood, per this historical memory. There is a vast literature on the role that women play in African American communities. See Chapman, “I Am My Mother ’s Daughter”; P. Collins, “The Meaning of Black Motherhood” and Black Feminist Thought; A. Davis, “The Black Woman’s Role”; Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States; Hooks, Ain’t I a Woman; Stack, All Our Kin. Since the 1960s and 1970s, a number of distressing community situations led to the exaggeration of a matrifocal phenomenon that spread throughout black neighborhoods in the United States. Such factors contributing to this change were the lack of stable employment , increase in poverty conditions, increase in crime, drug use and distribution , and disproportionate prison sentences for black men. Women often took over...

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