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In Eastern Coachella Valley, Santos and Juana Barajas discuss immigration policy that funneled them into low-wage jobs and the challenges they have faced as entrepreneurs.
After being criminalized for decades, street vending in Los Angeles has finally gained legitimacy thanks to an active community of fearless street vendors and their allies.
While Mexican immigrants continue to be demonized and characterized as “criminals,” “drug dealers,” “rapists,” “illegal aliens” and “invaders” by American leaders and millions of citizens, they have essentially become “foreigners in their own land.
Since April 2014, port truck drivers have held 16 strikes at the L.A./Long Beach ports, often demanding to be reclassified as regular employees.
After the Great Depression, the federal government backed mortgage lending as a route to homeownership and wealth accumulation, but redlined minority communities.
For decades, many immigrants — primarily women — have been criminalized for supporting their families with street vending income.
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As an independent contractor, Daniel “Seko” Uaina drives merchandise for some of the largest corporations in the world yet he struggles to make ends meet.
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Watch the broadcast TV version of "City Rising."
A housing rights movement is on the rise, not just in California, but across the nation, as the right to property, home, community and the city take center stage in a local and global debate.
“They’re working several jobs in order to make ends meet in addition to going to school. They come in hoping that financial aid will cover everything and they find out it will not.”
Despite the promises of revitalization and free market exchange for neighborhoods, gentrification is an invading force that has developed out of a history of discriminatory laws and practices in the United States.
From the late 1800s, Santa Ana has gone from being a historic urban center in wealthy white and conservative Orange County to a large center with a Mexican, working-class and immigrant identity.
