The Atlantic, February 20,2020: Gentefied: The Netflix Show That Makes Gentrification Personal
A grounded story about urban displacement zooms in on the lives of one fictional Los Angeles family and those in their orbit.
Boyle Heights has indeed been experiencing rapid gentrification, which some attribute to the influx of upwardly mobile Latinx artists and professionals, including some who grew up there.
To be sure, many of Gentefied’s obvious culprits of gentrification are White, and the show sometimes slips into caricature to make a point about outsiders’ arrogance. (In one scene, for example, a White male landlord yells at a Mexican store owner because she dislikes the mural he commissioned: “This is my building, and I’m making it better for you!”) But the production devotes more attention and care to the moments when Latinx characters challenge one another about the stakes of their neighborhood’s changes and their own roles in them.
The slipperiness of that “us” is what animates Gentefied, which is at its best when pairing these weighty considerations with community-specific humor instead of leaning too heavily into its stated mission to teach audiences about a complicated social phenomenon.
