Trouble in East Los Angeles: Los Angeles' Model City Program, 1969-1973

The Model Cities Program was launched as a part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty in 1968; its purpose was to provide increased financial resources and improve living conditions to urban communities. The Model Cities Program intended to bring city officials and local communities together to discuss unresolved issues that had been affecting city neighborhoods. Los Angeles became a participant of the program, particularly its eastern neighborhoods that contained a significant Latinx/Hispanic population. However, the efforts to improve East Los Angeles’s Latinx neighborhoods failed due to the poor organization and lack of centralization in leadership. Public projects were not completed and never received the entirety of proposed funding grants. My research intends to explore the progression of the Model Cities Program in East Los Angeles in the years 1969 to 1973. In particular, I will analyze the consequences of its flawed organization and local community members' perception of the program’s failure. I draw on media publications and city records ranging from the period. These sources reveal how the program gradually shifted away from productive planning and became ineffective; this prompted community criticism. I argue that the issues of Los Angeles’s Model City Program encouraged local Latinx communities throughout the city’s eastern neighborhoods to reconsider their relationships with institutional organizations. These communities instead chose to focus their efforts on community-established services and projects.