| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space. By William David Estrada. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. xviii, 357 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-292-71754-1. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-292-71755-8.)

This welcome book offers a history of the Los Angeles Plaza as it evolved from a vital political and socioeconomic colonial center to its post-conquest incarnations as a multiethnic slum, reinvented tourist district, and, finally, reclaimed Latino cultural site linked to contemporary urban redevelopment. Influenced by the political geographers Edward Soja, Michael Dear, and David Harvey, William David Estrada argues that his study "explores changes in the spatial and social dimension over a long time span and how these changes reflect the larger story of the city" (p. 7). He traces 220 years of physical change by evoking ancient Latin American and Spanish colonial urban forms while explaining how Anglo American settlement literally upended the shape of Los Angeles. By choosing to dwell outside the core of the city, removed from the activities of church and state, Anglos imposed "an inverted urban spatial design," and according to Estrada, "this spatial shift contributed to the geographic fragmentation of Los Angeles along racial and class lines" (p. 26).

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