With bulldozers behind them, the police swept through the neighborhoods and arrested whoever refused to leave their homes. Dodger Stadium was built in time for the 1962 season. The racism of urban planning displaced Mexican Americans, Chicanos, Mexicans, and Central and South American immigrants, relocating whole neighborhoods to areas east and south of downtown.
This topology of race directed my Costa Rican mother and Colombian father to a community tucked between industrial parks, in the long shadow cast by urban renewal. Our home was a quick drive from the plant where my dad worked, first as a janitor and then on the factory floor as a machinist a safe distance from Mayor Poulson’s cultural core. The racial forces that organize society pressed our lives toward the manufacturing hub of the region, rendering my dad’s labor easily accessible to economic production fit for immigrants.