Jesse Katz (The Opposite Field), longtime Los Angeles journalist, tackles a true story featuring a daunting number of characters and spanning years and tragedies in The Rent Collectors. With admirable clarity and compassion, Katz unravels a complex narrative that has no easy answers.
In the MacArthur Park neighborhood of L.A. in 2007, a teenaged gang member under orders fired five shots at a street vendor, in retaliation for the vendor refusing to pay "rent" to the gang. The intended victim was badly wounded by four bullets; the fifth bullet struck and killed a nearby 23-day-old infant. The shooter, Giovanni Macedo, was in turn the victim of a botched murder attempt at the hands of fellow members of his gang, the Columbia Lil Cycos, as punishment for his error.
Katz's thorough account details Giovanni's personal and family history; the history of MacArthur Park; the cultural and economic predicament of L.A.'s immigrant street vendors; the background of the Columbia Lil Cycos, the larger 18th Street alliance, and the Mexican Mafia; the lives of Giovanni's victims; and California's law enforcement, judicial, and prison systems. The sprawling story is riveting and propulsive in this telling. The Rent Collectors deftly probes systemic ills; Katz shows that Giovanni was at the mercy of inexorable and deeply problematic societal forces. Immigration, legal, and prison systems fail, frustratingly often, to reward behaviors society deems "good" or to address adequately the "bad."
Abstaining from painting heroes or villains, Katz offers instead a plethora of thoughtful, nuanced profiles and a zoomed-out view of immigrant L.A., its street vendors, its gangs, and its intricacies. The result is relentless, multi-faceted, and incisive. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia