A Craigslist ad for an apartment in their building animated their commitment to each other. The “affordable luxury apartment” in the listing’s photos was renovated with distressed-wood floors and pristine white walls and staged with mid-century-modern furniture. Figuring Boyle Heights as a place to leave rather than a place to live, the ad called the neighborhood “an ideal location for commuters … minutes from Downtown.” It even rebranded the building with a new name: “Mariachi Crossing.” The new landlord, Melissa Reyes put it later, was “trying to make money under the name of the mariachis, at the same time he was displacing mariachis,” leveraging the neighborhood’s past to erase its present.8 Taking on both the community’s iconography and the position of the most vulnerable members of their association, the tenants began referring to themselves as Los Mariachis de Union de Vecinos. The people who gave the neighborhood its culture would not willingly be displaced.

A solicitation deck for Dunleer Investments, founded by Turner, confirmed they’d found their target.9 It listed key features of their building to entice investors: it was “non-rent controlled” (a phrase both underlined and italicized), in a neighborhood “slated for new ‘metro-centric’ development,” and had a projected rate of return of 20 percent. The deck promised potential clients access to a “rapidly gentrifying” submarket—a self-fulfilling prophecy of speculation—and identified not just asking rents for the property, but kinds of renters: “millennial tenants … [who were] willing to pay” for good design in “jeans and coffee.” For those tenants, it insisted, “housing is less of a financial decision, more of a lifestyle decision.” For the current tenants, the document was evidence that they stood in between the new owner and his plans: displacement and replacement for profit.

But as they continued to meet, the Mariachi tenants came to understand rights not as upper limits but as instruments. “Tenants’ rights” became ingredients in the organizing adage of “turning what you have into what you need to get what you want.” The association learned about California’s protections for undocumented people, which prevent landlords from turning over information on immigration status. “I learned that even though I don’t have papers, I have rights,” one member of the association said. They learned about the First Amendment right to organize and California’s statutes against retaliation for organizing, which make tenants associations not only legal, but a strategic form of protection in court. They learned about the warranty of habitability, implied in most every state and enshrined in California, which ties a tenant’s obligation to pay rent to a property’s livability: an apartment free of pests and structural issues, heat that heats, lights that light, drains that drain. Withholding rent is often legally protected if basic living standards are not met.