BOYLE HEIGHTS A COMMUNITY OF TRADITION AND TRANSITION The history of Boyle Heights goes back to the founding of the Pueblo of Los Angeles in the 1780s, when it was considered undesirable land east of the Los Angeles River because of the hardship associated with crossing the River’s banks. Initially used for vineyards and sheep pastures, it became a residential development named Boyle Heights in the 1870s to commemorate one of the founding landowners. At the same time, the first bridge linking Boyle Heights to the rest of the City was built.1 In the years that followed, six other bridges were constructed. A construction and development boom in the City of Los Angeles began a long tradition of the presence of an immigrant workforce in Boyle Heights. In the late 1890s, European Jews began to settle in Boyle Heights, becoming some of the neighborhood’s first residential landlords. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants became the new source of cheap labor and moved to the area.2 African Americans moving away from injustices in the South settled in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood accessible to them because of the employment and housing opportunities there. In the early part of the 20th Century, Russian and Mexican immigrants fleeing domestic unrest joined the other ethnic groups living in the neighborhood. FIGURE 1: ANTINAZI MARCH ON BROOKLYN AVENUE (NOW CESAR CHAVEZ AVE), NOVEMBER 1938.
Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times photographic archive, UCLA Library. Copyright Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library.
BOYLE HEIGHTS
Starting in the 1930s, repatriation campaigns targeting Mexican-Americans and the forced removal of Japanese-Americans after the start of World War II dramatically changed the population of Boyle Heights. The Bracero Program, which brought Mexican contract workers to fill the voids in cheap labor left by interned Japanese-Americans and in agricultural jobs left by the deported Mexican-American workers, increased the Mexican immigrant population in Boyle Heights. In the mid-1940s, tensions erupted in Los Angeles in a series of “Zoot-Suit Riots” in which white servicemen attacked young Mexican males because many of them were wearing what the servicemen considered unpatriotic attire.3 Although not considered racially-motivated at the time, the riots were very much rooted in the race politics of the era and were inflamed by economic and social disparities as well as anti-war sentiments. The riots inspired a new generation of civil rights leaders including Cesar Chavez and Malcolm X. Although approximately one third of the City’s Jewish population lived in Boyle Heights in the 1940s, social tensions and the new opportunities in other parts of the City led to a drastic reduction in their share of the Boyle Heights population in the 1950s. The construction of the I-5 Freeway and the East Los Angeles Interchange in the 1960s demolished existing housing and dissected the neighborhood, further eroding the ethnically diverse community which had called Boyle Heights home for decades. FIGURE 2: HOMES AT THE INTERSECTION OF BESWICK ST AND PRADO ST, ADJACENT TO THE INTERSTATE 5 FREEWAY
Photo Credit: José Fernández
A COMMUNITY OF TRADITION AND TRANSITION
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