RaveSlate... enchanting ... offers a welcome narrative for our demoralizing political moment. As liberal alliances are torn apart by gentrification, isn’t it soothing to imagine a version of urban renewal that isn’t led by white tech workers who call the police for trespassing when neighbors of color enter their own homes? Picking up Barrio America, I was heartened by the largely upbeat argument Sandoval-Strauz puts forth ... It takes a full 160 pages of the book for Sandoval-Strausz to get to the part of the story where migrantes start showing up in large numbers—the book, until that point, is largely about what pushed white people out of the cities to begin with ... not the tidy narrative of immigrant exceptionalism we’re often offered: It’s something more disturbing, more interesting, and more important ... Sandoval-Strausz does a masterful job here of weaving together interviews with current and former residents of the barrios, along with language from newspapers and government reports from the past 60 years, to piece together how racial logic operates ... Sandoval-Strausz approaches Dolejs and others with enough patience to unpack how various threads of white supremacy evolved across time ... He goes on some especially long detours, and at times, it’s easy to get lost in the vastness of the narrative—not because the writing is dry, but because the ambition of the book is grand.
