ABSTRACT
Cities exist, subsist, and are known in relation to one another and to other places. Cities can only be comprehended in relationship to other places. The way one district within a city is dependent on another for certain goods and services is homologous with the ways in which one city is dependent on another place for certain goods and services. Trajectories between cities and other places and trajectories within cities are both relational, quite obviously, but the former have received a kind of privileged place within geography and the latter have been relatively ignored. The lines of relationality between Latin America and Los Angeles are deep and enduring, from the great deportations of the 1930s to the influx of refugees from Central America in the 1980s. Distal relationships of inequality within cities are certainly not novel: think of the people jammed into the favelas of Rio as compared to their cohorts who live expansively on the flatlands near the beach.
