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By Root 1635 0

The monthly trips to Western Union made by the Salvadorans living here are almost certainly the largest source of cash income in El Palón; these packages of hundreds of dollars have changed the appearance and quality of the Salvadoran village’s housing and given it electricity and television. Members of the Salvadoran enclave on West Adams have helped each other migrate here, find rental apartments, get jobs, save money, set up small businesses, hire additional employees, and buy houses. This village-linked network and hundreds of others just like it, which connect adjoining streets and blocks to remote peasant districts in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico, have turned southern and south-central Los Angeles into a quilt of arrival cities. This rough-and-tumble parcel of city blocks not only turns Central American villages into better places, it also very efficiently turns their sons and daughters into functioning Americans.

It was in 1991, a few months before the riots turned this neighborhood into a storm of smoke and gunfire, that Mario Martinez made the journey from El Palón to Los Angeles. His two aunts, Victoria and Marta, had come in the early 1980s to escape the violence in the village. Victoria had done well for herself doing menial jobs and saved enough money to pay to have Mario brought into the country by an immigration agent. Mario, almost penniless, moved into her house in Inglewood (which also was hit hard in the rioting). In a troubled and depressed city, he joined a perpetual mass of brown-skinned men who worked as casual day laborers, doing odd jobs in building, moving, whatever he could find. The more established among his fellow Salvadoran villagers soon found him jobs in their shops and factories and rented him apartments. He sent money to his parents and siblings back in El Palón and saved enough to bring his teenaged daughter (from a short-lived relationship in El Salvador) into the United States.

In the late 1990s, he found a job at a Korean-owned shop that made neon signs. He proved a natural at the crafts of neon-bending, plastic-forming, and typography and was not bad at sales. The Koreans took well to him and tutored him in the business; he saved some money, fell in love with Bibi, a Guatemalan woman from the neighborhood, married, and settled into the backyard apartment of a subdivided bungalow just north of Adams Boulevard, owned by a successful Salvadoran friend. After a few years working at the shop, he strolled home one warm evening and was struck by the realization that the streets around him were now lined with crude storefronts of restaurants, small factories, import-goods shops, and upstart businesses, all owned by fellow Latin Americans. His fellow villagers, he discovered, were badly in need of signs.

So he scraped together $1,500 and, in 2000, rented the cheapest storefront he could find on a riot-damaged intersection a half-dozen blocks from his house and hung out a bright-colored banner announcing “JM Plastic & Sign Co.—Custom Design—Banners—Magnetics.” He had no bank loan or business plan, only credit extended to him by vendors and materials suppliers, most of them Central American arrivals themselves. He was helped by a city post-riot reconstruction scheme, which eased zoning and business-incorporation rules, making it cheaper and easier to set up a small firm. He bought a second-hand computer for $150 and started making the rounds of Latin American storefronts.

They were innumerable. In the decade after Los Angeles burned, swaths of the city’s core turned from poor neighborhoods, populated by black tenants who rented from absentee white landlords, into Latino arrival cities, whose residents struggled to buy their ghetto homes. Such notoriously dysfunctional neighborhoods as South Central, Crenshaw, Watts, and Compton turned into Spanish-speaking enclaves populated by new village arrivals who were even poorer than the previous black occupants. But there was a difference in perspective and strategy. While poor black Angelenos were struggling to escape their neighborhood