"In this brilliantly designed and executed ethnographic study, Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga reveal the complex and contradictory forces seeking to shape the reputation of a high poverty Latinx neighborhood. While the imperatives of racial capitalism promote an ethos of development based on courting outside investment and disavowing the area’s Black and Brown populations and cultures, a counter-aesthetic emerges from the grass roots grounded in welcoming signs and symbols of diversity as desirable. Scholars and policy makers have long understood how urban inhabitants stage battles over resources, rights, and recognition; Korver-Glenn and Mayorga make it clear that contests over reputation play essential roles in those conflicts as well."

George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

"Urban sociologists have studied processes of gentrification in great detail over the past several decades, but as Sarah Mayorga and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn point out, most low-income neighborhoods do not gentrify. How does racial capitalism and the resistance to it play out in the neighborhoods with more typical socio-economic trajectories? Sarah Mayorga and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn address this important question with an expertly written deep and multifaceted ethnography covering the span of a decade. In addition to being essential reading for sociologists interested in neighborhood change and the modalities of racial capitalism, this book will be a highly engaging addition graduate and undergraduate urban sociology courses."

Nora Taplin-Kaguru, Bryn Mawr College