How Los Angeles Is Becoming a ‘Third World’ City
How Los Angeles Is Becoming a ‘Third World’ City
By HÉCTOR TOBARJULY 6, 2015
LOS ANGELES — A GENERATION ago, this West Coast metropolis became a “third world city.” At least in the rhetoric of certain East Coast thinkers.
A 1991 book by David Rieff cited visitors who were stunned by “seeing nothing but brown faces, hearing nothing but Spanish on the streets.” The arrival of coffee-colored Latino masses (like me and my Guatemalan-American family), together with the spread of Mandarin and Korean logograms on street signs, led Mr. Rieff to call this the “capital of the third world.”
As a native of the city, I was offended to hear it tagged with such a denigrating label. But in recent years, and for different reasons, I’ve come to believe that a metropolis of the “developing world,” to use a more polite expression, is being born here.
Its center is not in East Los Angeles, or any other Latino neighborhood; nor in our recently christened “Little Bangladesh.” The third world exists everywhere here — in the spread of inequality.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/opinion/welcome-to-hooverville-california.html?_r=2
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