South Central Farmers and Shadow Hills Homeowners: Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles∗

This article draws from the recent relational turn in geography to develop a model of relational racialization. It argues that racism functions through the legal and discursive production of linked, interdependent, and unequal places. By comparing two social movements in Los Angeles, the South Central Farmers and the Shadow Hills homeowners, I examine two spatial discourses through which race is relationally reproduced: unequal abilities to mobilize the entitlements of “property rights” and unequal claims to represent hegemonic forms of local heritage. When materialized and naturalized in land use policy, these discourses re-create racial disparities in wealth and poverty and reproduce the qualitative nature of the physical places on which racism depends.