Boyle Heights: The Integrated Neighborhood the Freeways Ended

For roughly four decades in the first half of the twentieth century, Boyle Heights was the only genuinely racially integrated urban neighborhood in Los Angeles. That is not a claim about tolerance or enlightened local character. It is a claim about the geography of exclusion.

Racially restrictive covenants covered most of the Los Angeles Basin by the nineteen twenties and thirties: deed restrictions that legally prohibited non-white residents from buying or renting in the vast majority of neighborhoods west of the river. Black families, Jewish families, Japanese American families, Russian Molokan families, Mexican American families were all, in different configurations, excluded from most of the city. Boyle Heights was where the excluded communities landed.

The result was a neighborhood that was genuinely multicultural because it had no other option: Jewish synagogues on Brooklyn Avenue, now Cesar Chavez Avenue; Japanese American Buddhist temples and produce markets on Soto Street; Mexican American community organizations and Catholic parishes throughout. In nineteen forty-two, Executive Order ninety sixty-six sent the entire Japanese American population of Boyle Heights to internment camps. Many returned after the war to find their properties gone.

In the nineteen fifties, four freeways were routed through or adjacent to Boyle Heights: the five, the ten, the sixty, and the one-oh-one. The residential fabric they did not displace, the freeway noise and pollution made difficult to inhabit. The Jewish community relocated to the Westside. The neighborhood that remained is predominantly Mexican American. Mariachi Plaza, where you are now, marks the cultural center of what endured.