Latino Demographic Growth: Gone Today, Here Tomorrow?

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City. By Mike Davis. London and New York: Verso, 2000. 172 pages. $19.00 (cloth).

Mike Davis's articles and books have generated a consistent share of both enthusiasts and detractors. Davis's polemical second effort, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles,received widespread acclaim as it urged us to look at Los Angeles from a vantage point that the L.A.-boosters had traditionally masked. ¹ With a keen blend of literatures and disciplinary viewpoints, City of Quartz challenges and exposes the underbellies of the political, social, and economic heavyweights that groomed the image and shape of Los Angeles. Davis's "bestseller," Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, sparked harsh reactions about the author's source materials from readers at the opposite end of his progressive ideological location. ² Whereas Ecology of Fear makes striking arguments about the interrelation of Southern California's natural and social disasters with the severe inequality embedded in Los Angeles's municipal planning, many of Davis's critics disengaged from his most important arguments to focus on the verity of his anecdotes and relatively trivial errors in fact-checking. Amidst this controversy, Ecology of Fear provides a unique combination of ecological and socio-political history, which concludes that many of the social and political forces guiding Los Angeles have made its natural disasters more fatal.

Davis's first text, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class, faintly hinted at the emerging importance of Latinos in U.S. cities, perhaps creating an impetus for his latest effort. Davis retells the history of the U.S. working class as one mired in ethnic and racial division across two centuries, ultimately preventing the emergence of an unhindered U.S. left. ³ In discussing the internal and external limits to organized labor in the U.S., Davis addresses how the social and political structures of nativism and racism have historically divided U.S. workers and buttressed the power of capital. At the end of Prisoners of the American Dream, Davis invests his hope for social change in the United States in organizing the black working class, and with some hesitation, Latino workers as well. Davis writes, "My thesis is that, if there is to be any popular left in the 1990s, it will develop in the first instance through the mobilization of the radical political propensities in the Black--and, perhaps, Hispanic--working classes" (311, emphasis added). Perhaps. . . hmmm? Placing this tentativeness aside, a comprehensive discussion of the historical significance of Latinos does not emerge in Davis's later work centering on Los Angeles--where Latinos have been forecast to be the largest ethnic/racial population for decades. As such, with Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City, Davis provides a response to the critique that his previous musings on Los Angeles have given short shrift to the Latino contributions to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río Porciúncula--that is, the city of Los Angeles. Any book about Los Angeles--historical or otherwise--needs Latinos. And more broadly speaking, as Davis now argues in Magical Urbanism, Latinos belong "in the center of debate about the future of the American city" (9).

Latino contributions to urban centers, often fueled by migration and the global relations between the U.S. and Latin America, range from the revitalization of neighborhoods and local economies to a sense of displacement by previous non-Latino as well as Latino residents. According to Davis, "Latinos are bringing redemptive energies to the neglected, worn-out cores and inner suburbs of many metropolitan areas" (51). Magical Urbanism, then,is a sweeping meditation on the social, political, and geographic impact that Latinos bring to urban spaces and imaginaries. Davis's exploration pivots on the notion that Latinos are unique...