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Foodie tourism and protests: LA’s gentrification battles play out in Netflix's Gentefied

There’s a moment in Gentefied when a Latinx character finds out that the wealthy white patron about to offer them work is working with the people undermining her family’s life in the Los Angeles enclave of Boyle Heights. It’s a dilemma that the show’s co-creator, Marvin Lemus, experienced for himself after moving to nearby East Hollywood after college.

“An elotero [corn on the cob vendor] would come by every day – it felt so much like home in a way that I hadn’t experienced in a while,” Lemus told the Los Angeles Times. “But I started to realize that even though this is how I grew up, even though this feels like the home I was seeking, I am a part of the change that’s coming into this neighborhood. I’m in a different tax bracket. I’m in a different situation than the family of four living in the studio apartment next door. It messed with me.”

The Netflix show centers on boomer patriarch Casimiro (Joaquín Cosio) and his three twentysomething grandchildren as they try to maintain their family restaurant while moving their own lives forward.

Chris (Carlos Santos) has a gift for cooking but is weighed down by accusations that he’s “not Mexican” (it doesn’t help his case with Latinx colleagues that while he can understand Spanish, he can’t speak it); despite being a voracious and far-reaching bibliophile, Erik (JJ Soria) struggles to overcome the constraints of machismo and self-dismissal; and Ana (Karrie Martin) learns that being a queer working artist on top of an activist comes with its own set of political landmines.

‘They may love all our shit, but they don’t love us’

Besides being hit with rent hikes from an unscrupulous landlord, the restaurant becomes a source of tension for Ana and her family when they advertise themselves as part of a “food tour” catering to white patrons looking to indulge in some food tourism. Ana’s girlfriend, local activist Yessika (Julissa Calderón), sums up the problem: “They may love all our shit, but they don’t love us.”

That conflict has become all too familiar in Boyle Heights, which has been known since the 1940s as a mostly-Latinx enclave. The neighborhood has attracted attention in recent years as civic groups joined with residents and business owners to publicly stand against the prospect of gentrification.

“Gentrification is a violent threat. When we feel it we may react in an angry way, through fear,” activist Xochitl Palomera told the Guardian in 2016. “Boyle Heights is not going down without a fight. We know what we’re up against and we’re not afraid. Our roots run deep here.”

In 2017 the coalition group Defend Boyle Heights drew attention for its aggressive pushback against art galleries and coffee shops opening in the area.

A year later the group organized against another show set in the neighborhood, the acclaimed Starz drama Vida, which follows two sisters who return to East Los Angeles after inheriting an apartment building and a lesbian bar from their deceased mother.

“Shame on these TV actors, actresses, and producers for sucking the life out of our community just so hipsters can watch the show and continue to romanticize Boyle Heights as some exotic ethnic enclave,” said Defend Boyle Heights on its blog. “We are calling on ERR’ONE to show up to the filming locations with masks, signs, and whatever instruments y’all want to make some NOISE and kindly tell them to GET THE FUCK OUT OF BOYLE HEIGHTS! We will no longer let Hollywood turn our acts of resistance into Gentrification porn for all others to see but not engage in real movement building and resistance. As Defend Boyle Heights we will continue to fight and save our hood from everyone who wishes to benefit off our pain and struggle.”

In September 2019, it was just as critical of the claims from Lemus and his team that Gentefied would be “a love letter” to Boyle Heights.

“They cannot come into Boyle Heights and appropriate our struggle against gentrification and then claim love for the very community they are stealing from,” the group said on its Facebook page.

According to the Times, executive producer America Ferrera helped facilitate meetings between the show’s production team and community groups.

“I’ve spent my whole life, and certainly my whole career, trying to understand,” she said. “What claim do I have to be Latina if I’m a Valley girl raised in Woodland Hills and all my friends were Jewish and I went to 32 bar mitzvahs and not a single quinceañera? Am I really allowed to say I’m Latina?”

Much like in real life, the conflict surrounding the fictional Mama Fina’s restaurant escalates into a protest – one that showrunner Monica Macer said drew support from unaware passers-by when they filmed in the neighborhood.

“People were like beeping their car horns, like showing their solidarity against gentrification,” she said. “You got a sense of the community empowerment.”

‘Everything’s changing: the food, the people’

Though screentime is carefully spread among the four leads, Martin gets to work with the widest range of material: in one episode director Marta Cunningham makes Ana the centerpiece of an Austin Powers-like musical dream sequence; Ana’s relationship with Afro-Dominican homeless advocate Yessika (Julissa Calderón) gets not only a backstory, but the kind of fair treatment that is sadly still lacking for same-sex love stories across the media spectrum.

The show, which originated as a webseries before being first picked up by Netflix in 2019, is billed as a Mexican American story. In the wake of the service’s heavily-criticized decision to cancel One Day At A Time, its arrival is certainly welcome. But new viewers should be advised that this isn’t a one-size-fits-all story; it might get recommended for viewers who have already tried Club de Cuervos because just about everyone speaks Spanish, but it’s a different type of comedy.

While tying a show around a boomer and three millenials certainly makes sense, there are no core characters representing Generation X, so there’s a stretch of the neighborhood’s history that feels uncovered.

When the show does put the family in the background, though, it doesn’t falter: An intercalary episode focusing on musician Javier (Jaime Alvarez) is an unexpected highlight. Even as he laments, “Everything’s changing: the food, the people,” it’s his story that gives viewers a chance to see Mexican-born characters engage in full bilingualism, and the musical performances will hopefully give white foodie viewers some much-needed perspective.