Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [41]
This is partly a difference of culture—whereas white and black Americans aspire to have a big front lawn outside the city, Latin Americans, when they get some money, prefer to set up stakes in the urban core. But it is also a function of the arrival city. As villagers building networks of personal and economic support to create pathways into the city’s central economy, Central Americans are not just getting by and searching for work but building full and coherent arrival cities. They did so in the 1990s to an extraordinary degree, turning most of the inner core of the city, plus all of its east and most of its southeast, into an arrival-city expanse. Anyone who was in L.A. at the time of the riots would not recognize the city today. Florence and Normandie, the district in South Central L.A. that had been the flashpoint of the 1992 riots, saw its Latino-born population rise from 25 percent in 1990 to 45.4 percent in 2000 and even higher in the next decade, a home-buying influx that allowed its existing city-wary residents to move to the better-off black suburbs, causing the black population of Florence and Normandie to fall by a third, from 76 percent to 53 percent.3 The colonization of L.A.’s core by Central American arrivals added the demographic influence of these neighborhoods to the established Latino barrios of East L.A. and downtown and to Spanish-tongued neighborhoods, like Rampart and Silverlake, all of which had been overtaken by ex-villagers in the 1970s and ’80s and had come to develop prosperous middle classes. There were, Mario Martinez discovered, a lot of people looking for signs.
Today, Mario still runs his sign-making shop out of the tiny storefront at the corner of Adams and Hauser boulevards. But this dusty and barren corridor has turned into a busy place, packed with small factories and shops, its sidewalks alive with constant activity. “I chose the location of my business based on what I could afford, which was hardly anything,” he says, “but now I can’t even contemplate leaving this location—it’s in the middle of everything.” His shop is surrounded by those of other successful former villagers: a plumbing-supply shop, a tile-making shop and ceramics workshop, a computer technician’s office, a large artisanal bakery, a display-case manufacturer who teams up with him. Mario has expanded, in a quiet way. He spent $8,000 on a large-format printer, which creates full-color photographic signs that are popular with restaurants and markets here. He has two full-time assistants plus his wife, Bibi, who quit her job with The Salvation Army to work with him. Their village-upstart shopfront business has gained prominence through networks of Latinos who have led him to some impressive contracts: Mattel, the toy company, hired him to build a series of illuminated display signs for collections, at $3,000 a case. The business boom came with an expanding family: Mario and Bibi now have a seven-year-old son, Jonathan, who is culturally more American than anyone in his parents’ generation around him. While he speaks Spanish at home, he has never been to El Salvador and knows little of its culture.
What happened to Mario Martinez and his L.A. neighborhood is being echoed across the Western world, in the outskirts, the low-rent suburbs, the housing-project districts, and the abandoned inner-city enclaves of North America’s and Europe’s cities. The final great wave of rural–urban migration, as it moves the final half of humanity from village to city, is transforming the cities of the wealthy West as much as it is changing the urban fabric of Asia, South America, and Africa. Most Westerners do not understand that what is taking place in their cities is a process of rural-to-urban migration. The incomes and absolute poverty levels are different, but the frustrations, opportunities, remedies, and dangers are exactly the same.