South Central Is Home: Race and the Power of Community Investment in Los Angeles by Abigail Rosas (review)

In South Central Is Home, Abigail Rosas challenges the stereotypical portrait of this Los Angeles community made famous by 1990s pop culture and the violence that followed the 1992 acquittal of Rodney King’s police assailants. Long seen as a symbol of black urban poverty amid deindustrialization, gang culture, the War on Drugs, and a flagging welfare state, South Central is a far more complex place, one that illustrates how African Americans and Latinos can build a fragile but real community that many people, including the author, call home. Careful to eschew a romanticized portrait of a class-based, interracial coalition, Rosas describes “a relational community formation in which the collective efforts of African Americans and Latina/os―even if such efforts are small, 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). In other words, people did not always get along, but they found some level of belonging through an array of actions as simple as neighborly exchanges and patronage of a black-owned bank to more involved early-childhood programs and community health clinics. These efforts “represent the ways in which Mexican immigrant South Central residents quickly learned that, like their African American neighbors, they faced a similar racialization by living in South Central together,” Rosas writes. Their realization thus “inspired a relational community identity . . . that energized them to understand that they experienced and shared a vulnerability which required their individual and community investment” (p. 6). Such a nuanced analysis places the author in good company among scholars of black-brown coalition-building, social justice movements, and community formation in the modern United States.

Organized into seven chapters, the book traces the transformation of South Central from a predominantly African American community to one in which Latinos now represent a majority, and how both groups negotiated that change. Starting in the first decades of the twentieth century, Rosas establishes black placemaking in the neighborhoods along Central Avenue, including the establishment of Broadway Federal Bank, the California Eagle newspaper, and a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). By the 1960s, the community faced many challenges posed by poverty and discrimination, which culminated in the 1965 Watts uprising. The response to the riots took many forms, but included War on Poverty programs such as Head Start and health clinics, which local activists made their own. Residents used these spaces to build tentative ties with each other, including with recently arrived Latinos, about whom longtime African American residents had mixed feelings. Volunteering in the classroom became a bridge to interracial understanding. The latter occurred in a demographically changing city that elected black mayor Tom Bradley five times and a vision of a multiracial city that could belie the grimmer realities laid bare by the 1992 violence. One of the businesses burned out that year was Broadway Federal, whose black owners chose to rebuild and hire more Latinos to reflect a changing community. By the end of the book, South Central remained in flux. Residents had largely rejected elite attempts to rename the area South Los Angeles or SoLA, while Latino efforts to represent the area on the City Council continued to fall short. But it seemed only a matter of time before a Latino would win office, in what would be the latest turning point in the relational community formation of South Central.

Overall, Rosas offers a sophisticated, albeit uneven, portrayal of how one multiracial community navigated its changing demographic makeup amid ongoing challenges of poverty and discrimination. The book’s second half, in particular, shows how residents made sense of these changes. The richly documented experiences of individuals such as Leticia Zarate, Magdaleno Ruiz, Dolores Rosas, and Ruth Smith (a pseudonym) through...