Jesse Katz’s The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA checks many boxes: undocumented immigration, out-of-control population density, resigned/sympathetic law enforcement, gang warfare, and a lot of crime. In that sense, it’s a riveting anthropological dig into the core of Los Angeles’s urban tinderbox. Yet, at its core, the book is something more intimate: a heartbreakingly human and universal story of loneliness and the sometimes pathological need to fit in and find community.
In this ambitious reported account of a 2007 murder in MacArthur Park, Katz—a contributor to Alta Journal and a former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine—has crafted an epic and essential story about a side of Southern California from which many of us have been conditioned to avert our eyes. Juggling a number of narrative threads, Katz finds a rhythmic groove that connects these disparate elements while stripping each down to its essence, revealing struggle in many of its modes. At the center of this is a young man named Giovanni Macedo, who was conceived in a MacArthur Park apartment in 1988, and the extreme measures he takes to find meaning in his life.
As The Rent Collectors begins, Giovanni is still in the neighborhood, a teenager living with two siblings and their mother, an overworked undocumented immigrant who has little energy to provide the attention her children crave. Giovanni observes the MacArthur Park sidewalks where immigrant vendors sell goods to keep their families fed and housed. It’s a community that has seen better days, marked by flophouses and despair and known for its abundance of crack cocaine and fake IDs. “No other place in Los Angeles,” Katz reports, “thrummed with its subversive energy or labored under the weight of so much trauma.”
Giovanni also tracks the Columbia Lil Cycos, the street gang that controls the neighborhood. The Cycos are members of the 18th Street Gang, a conglomeration that, at the time, covered many parts of the city. Katz quotes LAPD officer Edgar Hernandez on the extent of its influence: “Like McDonald’s or Starbucks,” Hernandez says. A gangster named Oso runs the crew on the streets, while inside the prison system, Puppet, a leader in the Mexican Mafia, pulls the strings.
The Cycos are the tainted sun by which Giovanni’s story is illuminated, and Katz meticulously carves space for the complexity of everyone, including the gang members, who are both brutal and sympathetic, professional monsters with various degrees of humanity when they are off the clock. They chose this path, but, Katz points out, gang life exists as a viable option because there are so few others. This is due at least in part to the systemic failure of state and local leadership to find real solutions to issues facing the immigrant population.
One way the Cycos exert authority is by shaking down the mostly undocumented vendors, many of whom regard the fees for their patches of sidewalk as the price of doing business. For the gang, it’s easy money, often bringing in $25,000 to $50,000 per week.
Giovanni perceives the gang as his gateway to a better life. By way of initiation, he is ordered to kill a vendor unwilling to pay. “For dirtying himself in the name of an enterprise that flouted all checks on its power—he might at last earn the one thing he craved: respect. It was an easier word to say than love,” Katz explains.
But when Giovanni botches the job and kills a three-week-old baby, the Cycos turn on him. They need to make him disappear. A gangster named Tricky—engaged in his own quest for acceptance from the Mexican Mafia—believes that making this call will impress Puppet.
Somehow, Giovanni survives. But while briefly living on the lam, he begins to understand another set of possibilities. Indeed, The Rent Collectors’ most poignant moments come when the action ends and contemplation takes over. Giovanni is eventually caught and sentenced to prison, where Katz follows his evolution from insecure teen to empathetic young adult who owns up to his transgressions, repairs the relationship with his mother, and wonders whether he’ll ever get a second chance.
The Rent Collectors is a brilliant, beautiful sprawl of detective work, a deeply reported and rendered nonfiction epic that requires us to look closely at the ramifications of decades of failed immigration policy, as well as the human loss it continues to leave in its wake. It is also, in its way, refreshingly undespairing, a heartbreaking gut punch of a book that leads inevitably to Giovanni’s redemption—which, it turns out, is damn near close to an actual happy ending.•
Erik Himmelsbach-Weinstein is the director of communications for the California Native Vote Project. He spent more than five years as the senior director of video for sports and features for the Los Angeles Times and has worked as an editor at Spin, Los Angeles Reader, and Orange Coast. His work as a documentary writer-producer has appeared on VH1, ESPN, the Food Network, and NBC.
