A City Reauthored:

“Los Angeles is a mixed metaphor the world loves to unfold.”

— Wanda Coleman

Gentrification & The L.A. Imagination

A meditation on memory, representation, and the quiet violence of urban transformation—told through marathon routes, classroom screens, and the remaking of Los Angeles from the inside out.

Sometime Ago in Santa Clarita (2001)

I first encountered the word gentrification during my first year at CalArts—not as a policy term or academic concept, but as something narrated by someone who assumed they were observing it from the outside.

In a graduate seminar, a classmate screened footage she had recorded while living in Echo Park in the early 2000s—back when the neighborhood was still majority Central American and Mexican, still visibly working-class, and not yet publicly rebranded as an “arts district.” The footage was presented as documentary material, but what became clear was that the project was less about the neighborhood than about the filmmaker’s own authority to interpret it.

She had filmed the family next door from her window, without their consent, treating the household as an ethnographic site. The father rebuilt car transmissions in the yard; the children played among the parts. She described this not as labor or resourcefulness but as cultural spectacle. When she mentioned that the family had slaughtered a goat in the yard—something she did not film but felt compelled to narrate—it became clear that the project depended not on understanding the family, but on framing them.

The clip she screened showed children breaking open a Barbie piñata at a birthday party. Her interpretation positioned the scene as “symbolic rebellion,” a form of subconscious anti-white sentiment directed at the doll and, by extension, whiteness itself. The analysis was not just speculative—it was extractive. Rather than ask what the moment meant to the family, she imposed a meaning that confirmed the thesis she already needed to prove.

In that classroom, what I lacked in academic vocabulary I still recognized intuitively: the dynamics of looking, naming, narrating, and owning. The family was not being documented; they were being converted into intellectual property. They were not participants in the film—they were its unknowing material. While she spoke, my thoughts drifted back to 1989, my first year of high school.

1989: Before I Had Language for the Structure

I did not yet have a framework for this power dynamic in 1989, my first year of high school, when I joined the inaugural cohort of Students Run L.A. The program was designed to help “at-risk youth”—a phrase that functioned less as description than as branding—train for and complete the Los Angeles Marathon as a symbolic act of transformation. The premise was simple: if you could run 26.2 miles, you could imagine a different life for yourself.

But the reality was more complex. My school, South Gate High, was not composed of the profile the program marketed. Most of us were already runners—cross-country or track athletes. I was not in a gang. I was enrolled in Honors and AP classes. One sister was already in college and another was on her way. I joined the team because a girl I liked asked me to. None of this fit the narrative framework of “unlikely redemption.” And yet we were still used to validate it.

We all trained. We all ran. We all finished the race. But only some of us were ever treated as proof of the program’s mission. The rest of us fell outside the story being told—evidence that the narrative required selective representation to function.

The First Time I Overheard the Future of the City

During the marathon the following year, I ran through Echo Park and then Silver Lake—neighborhoods still rough-edged, radically different from what they would later become. Along Sunset Boulevard, I found myself a few strides ahead of a group of white runners who weren’t talking about the race but about the houses above us. Most were aging and weathered, their facades marked by years of economic strain.

Then one of the men said, almost casually: “Imagine if we bought these places and fixed them up.”

At the time, the remark barely registered. But decades later, I understand it differently. I may have been running past the quiet origin of what we now call gentrification—before it was discourse, before it was policy, when it existed only as a private fantasy of ownership. It wasn’t yet investment strategy; it was simply desire. What if this were ours?

Gentrification often begins not with developers or zoning boards but with imagination—the instant someone decides that a place already belonging to others can be remade in their image. What I overheard that morning was the first stage of cultural and spatial re-authorship. Long before the city changed, the idea of change had already taken hold.

Looking back, the timeline makes sense. Those neighborhoods did change—first slowly, then all at once—from gang territory, Latino working-class life, and pockets of bohemian resistance into what they are now: curated enclaves of the Bohemian Bourgeoisie. What I heard that day was not yet a plan or a market; it was a seed of entitlement, a vision of ownership waiting to be rationalized. Maybe gentrification always begins that way—not with money, but with imagination. With someone looking at a place that isn’t theirs and deciding it should be.

When the Narrative Needs You, and When It Doesn’t

A few months before the 1990 Marathon, our Students Run L.A. group appeared in a local news broadcast. The segment followed a familiar formula: at-risk teens redeemed through athletics. When the reporter said “teen moms,” the camera cut to two of my classmates jogging together. When she said “gang members,” it cut to a friend of mine, his face half-shadowed in the early morning light. Both portrayals were false. One of the girls labeled a “teen mom” had a 4.0 GPA and was already applying to colleges. But accuracy wasn’t the goal. The story didn’t need truth; it needed types.

For the cameras, we weren’t runners—we were symbols. Every shot was arranged to confirm the program’s redemptive script: troubled youth transformed through discipline and hope. The segment required a narrative arc, and we were cast in it, whether we fit or not. Those who didn’t align with the storyline were simply edited out. The story worked best when our realities stayed quiet.

I remember telling my friend afterward that he’d been misrepresented, that they’d turned him into something he wasn’t. He shrugged it off—happy just to be on TV. But even that felt like part of the story: how easy it is to accept distortion when visibility is the only reward.

It was the same logic I would later recognize at CalArts—the conversion of lived experience into narrative capital, the substitution of legibility for complexity. The audience doesn’t want the whole truth; it wants coherence. Representation becomes performance, and performance becomes proof.

That day, I learned something I would keep relearning for years: the powerful are not the ones who appear in the frame, but the ones who decide what the frame means. To be seen is not the same as being understood. Sometimes, visibility is just another form of disappearance.

Present Day Highland Park, Los Angeles (2025)

I live now in Highland Park, where my wife and I moved in 2008—just before the neighborhood crossed the threshold from working-class enclave to branded “creative corridor.” A week after we arrived, Café de Leche opened. In a gentrifying neighborhood, a café is never just a café; it’s a signal. It marks not only what is coming, but who it’s coming for.

Even then, we sensed the shift. We were still able to buy a home; most families like ours would not be able to a few years later. What followed from 2008 to roughly 2014 was a brief and fragile coexistence: Filipino and Mexican families, multigenerational renters, swap-meet storefronts, and a handful of artists who worked with the community rather than on top of it. It was imperfect, but alive—loud, multilingual, full of contradiction.

That balance is long gone. The neighborhood has been transformed not only economically, but semantically. Its meaning has been replaced. Where bohemian once described a life lived in defiance of convention—a refusal of wealth, comfort, and conformity—it now names a style. “Boho” has become shorthand for curated authenticity: houseplants, vinyl, reclaimed wood, artisanal clutter. The politics have been stripped away; the aesthetic remains for sale.

The transformation isn’t only about who lives here—it’s about who gets to define the place for others. Highland Park hasn’t simply been remade; it has been narratively overwritten. What dominates now isn’t bohemia but consumption: capitalism disguised as taste. The Bohemian Bourgeoisie doesn’t love a place; it acquires it. They don’t enter a community; they curate it. They don’t inhabit a neighborhood; they brand it.

This isn’t the Highland Park I knew in the ’90s, when I’d drive up from South Gate for house-party punk shows that spilled into the streets. It isn’t the early-2000s Highland Park where I showed work in small, borrowed-gallery spaces held together by extension cords and cases of Tecate. It isn’t even the 2008 Highland Park where you could still buy a $4 Salvadoran breakfast without irony.

Now it’s Teslas on Monte Vista, “creative professionals” pushing $1,500 strollers, apolitical parents curating their children’s lives for social media. Saturday marionette shows followed by overpriced brunch in minimalist cafés whose menus are all typography and no prices. The neighborhood has become a backdrop—a lifestyle palette—an atmosphere to be consumed rather than a place to belong to.

And that private fantasy I overheard in 1990—What if this were ours?—didn’t stay private. It evolved. It grew into policy, real estate strategy, coffee-shop culture, “arts districts,” lifestyle journalism—a nationwide aesthetic of acquisition disguised as discovery. The thought became a blueprint. The blueprint became a market. The market became a way of life.

Los Angeles — The Future Of

When I was growing up, Los Angeles still carried a sense of localism—territorial, sometimes hostile, but rooted in belonging. The city’s dominant culture wasn’t Hollywood but the everyday life of Black, Mexican, Central American, and working-class residents. The irony, of course, is that much of what the world now celebrates as “American culture” was born from those same communities, only to be later adopted, diluted, and sold back by outsiders.

Today, that pattern has shifted. Cultural appropriation has been followed by spatial occupation. The people who once consumed Los Angeles from a distance are now physically entering and transforming the neighborhoods that produced the very culture they admired.

What’s happening in Highland Park, Boyle Heights, Echo Park, and East L.A. is not unique. From Portland to Austin, Denver to San Antonio, the same demographic arrives with the same language of discovery—unaware that what they believe they are finding is precisely what others are being forced to lose.

What’s being erased isn’t only housing stock or storefronts, but something deeper: cultural memory—the ability of a community to narrate its own past in the present tense. Maybe what I’m mourning isn’t just a neighborhood, but a version of Los Angeles where the people who built the culture still had the power to define it.

My children don’t experience Highland Park as a site of cultural replacement. To them, it’s simply home. The coffee shops, the influencer murals, the branded farmers markets—they appear natural, because erasure always looks natural to those who arrive after it happens. That is the quiet mechanism of gentrification rarely discussed: when absence begins to masquerade as progress.

So perhaps the real fight isn’t over housing, development, or zoning—it’s over memory. Over who gets to say what Los Angeles was, and therefore what Los Angeles is. Because if we don’t hold onto the story, someone else will rewrite it in real time—and they will write themselves in as the beginning.

And the people who built this place—Black, brown, immigrant, working-class, undocumented—will once again be cast as the background of a city that would not exist without them.

The story of the city has always been rewritten, but now the revisions are happening faster than memory can keep pace.

The Stakes of Forgetting

The central question is no longer only who gets to live in a neighborhood, but who gets to define what the neighborhood ever was. Every act of redevelopment carries with it a parallel act of redefinition. When the story is rewritten and the original narrators are removed, what remains is not merely a changed landscape but a falsified history—a version of the city purified of its contradictions, its working-class accents, its multilingual noise.

This is why I write: not to halt change, but to resist amnesia. Because the future of Los Angeles will not be decided solely by developers or city planners, but by those who preserve its memory. The archive—formal or informal, institutional or familial—is a site of power. It determines what endures, what disappears, and who is allowed to be remembered as real.

If we do not document the city that existed before the rebranding, the next generation will inherit an illusion: they will assume the current version of Los Angeles was always here. The murals repainted, the storefronts renamed, the accents softened out of earshot—each becomes a quiet erasure disguised as progress.

The danger, then, is not only that they will take the city.
The greater danger is that one day we will forget it was ever ours—
and without memory, even resistance loses its place to return to.

Epilogue — 1994 Los Angeles Marathon

At the Marathon Expo in 1994, I ran into my former cross-country coach—the one who ran the Students Run L.A.program at our school. He introduced me to a young teacher who was leading a new group of runners. When she heard I was part of the original cohort, she immediately asked whether I would speak to her class about how the marathon had “changed my life.”

She asked the expected questions:
What did running teach you?
Did it help you believe college was possible?
Did finishing the race prove something about who you could become?

I answered honestly: it hadn’t changed my plans. I already knew I was going to college. My sisters were already there. Running the marathon was not redemption—it was an extension of the life I already had.

Her enthusiasm faded. She said, somewhat apologetically, “We were hoping for someone with a stronger story. Maybe a former gang member. Someone whose life really turned around.”

She took my number. She never contacted me.

It was a familiar moment: the realization that some lives are considered valuable only when they can be staged as transformation. If you do not match the narrative of struggle-and-redemption, you are not the audience’s idea of what resilience looks like.

There are many of us like that—unusable in the stories built to inspire others. Not dramatic enough to be celebrated. Not damaged enough to be redeemed.

Not the story they came for—only the life that was actually lived.