Review: Building Downtown Los Angeles: The Politics of Race and Place in Urban America, by Leland T. Saito

Book Review| November 01 2023 Review: Building Downtown Los Angeles: The Politics of Race and Place in Urban America, by Leland T. Saito Leland T. Saito. Building Downtown Los Angeles: The Politics of Race and Place in Urban America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 266 pp. Paperback $28.00. Carol Lynn McKibben Carol Lynn McKibben CAROL LYNN McKIBBEN is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. She has been teaching courses in California history, urban history, and immigration history for the Department of History and Urban Studies at Stanford University since 2006 and is currently an affiliate lecturer with the Bill Lane Center for the American West. She has also engaged in numerous community-based research projects on the Monterey Peninsula for thirty years. Her first book, Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey, 1915–1999 (2005), placed women at the center of a transnational migration story that focused on the ways migration reshaped Sicilian fishing families as they moved back and forth from villages in Sicily to Monterey, California, and, at the same time, altered the character of that city over the course of the twentieth century. Her second book, Racial Beachhead: Diversity and Democracy in a Military Town (2012), showed how federal investment and the diversity of personnel stationed at nearby Fort Ord transformed a small community, Seaside, into an important center of civil rights activism in California. Her most recent book, Salinas: The History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City (2022), tells the story of community building and struggle in a multiracial city. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (4): 129–131. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.4.129 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Carol Lynn McKibben; Review: Building Downtown Los Angeles: The Politics of Race and Place in Urban America, by Leland T. Saito. California History 1 November 2023; 100 (4): 129–131. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.4.129 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search Urban America can be characterized by extremes. Cities such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and almost every other major urban center in the country are locations of great wealth and terrible poverty, populated by millionaires and billionaires but also by many thousands of the unhoused and immigrants at every socioeconomic level who come from everywhere in the world. Los Angeles epitomizes this incredible urban American diversity as well as the brutal dichotomy between rich and poor, showcasing breathtaking development alongside severe inequality and neglect of poor and minority neighborhoods and communities. Beginning in the 1970s, urban renewal projects in cities across America were meant to address some of the problems wrought by extremes of poverty and wealth, particularly in downtown areas, but they often failed miserably in their goals of revitalization. Instead of renewal, development projects made things worse, damning whole areas as “blighted” because they were made up... You do not currently have access to this content.