Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [43]
By the middle of this century’s first decade, the rapid investment and mobility of the Central American arrival city had become the dominant force in L.A.’s politics and economy. On one hand, the demand for inner-city home ownership by Central American villagers created a boom in home-sale revenues for older African American families, whose homes had held little value in the three decades after the Watts riots of 1965 but who suddenly found a steady demand for their homes. This, in turn, caused the black outer suburbs to see a rise in demand, ownership, and investment and a new start for many black families who had been trapped in a cycle of tenancy, underemployment, and dependency for decades.
At the same time, the new arrival cities developed their own very effective political structures, adding to the networks of Latino organization in the more established barrios, which had been slowly gaining influence for decades. This culminated in the election of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a product of the East Los Angeles Latino immigrant power network and the first arrival-city child to end up running one of America’s major cities. His father had been a poor Mexican villager who had crossed the U.S. border in the 1950s in an early postwar wave of rural-to-urban migration, settling in City Terrace, one of the first fully functioning arrival cities of East Los Angeles. Villaraigosa rose through the economic, educational, and political networks in the arrival city of East L.A. to become a favored vehicle for the political aspirations of the new inner-city arrivals, an emblem of the new political dominance of the village-born. He joins such figures as Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leaders of arrival-city movements who have risen to occupy the highest offices.
Inside the Adams Boulevard neighborhood, Mario’s sign business has given him tens of thousands of dollars in savings, even after sending large sums back to El Palón to keep his parents and siblings aloft and spending a small fortune to get his daughter naturalized in the United States. So Mario and Bibi have decided, at long last, to try to buy a house. They are determined to stay in this block, surrounded by fellow arrivals, building up the neighborhood. The only thing unusual in this is that Mario has waited so long to become a homeowner: For the greater part of two decades, he has been a tenant in the apartments and backyard houses of other migrants, who entered the property market with far less money than he has now.
The reason has everything to do with the changing U.S. approach to immigration. Because he arrived from El Salvador after 1990, he was ineligible for naturalization under a federal law (the 1987 NACARA Law) that granted amnesty to about 200,000 people who arrived from conflict-ridden Central American countries. Despite being a successful businessman, the husband of a naturalized immigrant, and the father of a young American citizen, he has not yet found a way to become a legal American himself (he is currently pursuing an asylum request, based on the still-simmering conflict in his village). In the past, the United States has granted amnesties to large numbers of illegal migrants, transforming them from informal, non-taxpaying