Mike Davis is a prolific and gifted writer whose oeuvre is getting bigger and more impressive by the day. Catapulted to fame—although not so much to fortune—by his classic Los Angeles jeremiad City of Quartz (1990), he has almost single-handedly reinvented the way we see and tell stories about our cities at the turn of the century; and in the process reinvigorated urban studies, too long split between dry empiricism and abstruse high theory. Davis has re-energized both flanks at once, his racy prose somehow managing to mix Robert Park with Blade Runner, Karl Marx with Chuck D., Nathanael West with Art Pepper, Thomas Pynchon with Maria-Elena Durazo, the Book of Revelation with the Haymarket uprising, Walter Benjamin with Route 405. His combination of imaginative flair and hard-edged take has made the study of cities popular in a way they’ve never been before—though the broad connexions he makes between theories and fields and events, and an indomitably maverick spirit, have on occasion raised hackles in the more conformist stretches of the academy. In Ecology of Fear (1998), Davis’s denunciations of LA’s boosterist politics and real-estate shysters—building luxury homes on the edge of deep abysses, in fire zones, on seismic faults—gave ‘natural’ disasters a distinctive class slant which brought him big trouble with the city establishment. High-tech liberals and press jackals accused him of deliberately distorting the city’s image into a dark dystopia calculated only to drive economic growth out of the Angeleno basin into the hinterland. Instead, it’s driven Davis himself into the hinterland—Hawaii, actually—where he now lives for part of the year. His latest book Magical Urbanism reflects this shift in domicile. It completes his LA trilogy, but is much more than a study of LA. It is a book about people who have left their native lands and are reinvigorating US big cities as their home away from home; who live across borders—and across barriers—and who are staking out new ground, somewhere in between. Within the pages, and between the lines, we glimpse Davis as well. Here his voice sounds like a latter-day Friedrich Engels, documenting The Condition of the Working Class in America, circa 2000—though his jacket-picture has him looking more like an exotic Polynesian wildman. Magical Urbanism is really magical realism and magical Marxism rolled into one, a book of embraces, in the tradition of Eduardo Galeano and García Márquez, fusing barbarism with sensual dreams, romance with politics, grittiest fact with wildest fantasy.

Davis begins with a dose of sober realism; in fact, with an ‘epochal event’—an urban watershed largely unnoticed and certainly uncelebrated. At some point during 1996 Latinos surpassed African-Americans as the second largest ethno-racial group in New York. As Davis observes, ‘Thanks to a booming Spanish-surname population, no borough except Staten Island any longer has a majority ethnicity.’ Meanwhile, California’s millennium celebrations coincided with white non-Hispanics becoming the state’s minority for the first time since the Gold Rush. In cities like New York and Los Angeles—to say nothing of Houston, San Diego, Phoenix and San Antonio—Latinos have become the ‘majority-minority’ group, dramatically ahead of demographic projections. Within a few years, Dallas and Fort Worth will follow suit, while in Chicago, with a 27 per cent representation, Latinos hold the balance of power in most city elections; by 2020, their numbers in the windy city will have doubled and they will become Illinois’s largest minority. Latin-Americanization of big and medium-sized US cities, says Davis, is the culmination of mass emigration to El Norte and the result of higher fecundity rates among Latina women than their Anglo counterparts. José is now the most popular name for baby boys in California and Texas, and there are more Salvadoreans in Los Angeles than in San Salvador, more Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York than in San Juan and San Domingo.

What surprises Davis most about these trends is their relative invisibility in ‘high-end urban studies’, where most of the ever growing literature on how globalization reshapes the metropolis ignores ‘its most spectacular US expression’. He wants to put Latinos where they clearly belong: ‘in the centre of debate about the future of the American city’. Equally, he thinks that anyone who cares about the fate of our cities should be glad at the ‘redemptive energies’ Latinos bring to worn-out and shunned metropolitan areas. Their tropism toward big cities contrasts markedly with the ‘crabgrass prejudices’ of middle-class Anglos, who have fled in droves to the outer suburbs and edge cities; Latinos have given the kiss of life to moribund urban cores and to older, inner suburbs. But they have also put inordinate strain on standard census categorization. Broad labels such as ‘Latino’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Chicano’, chosen long ago for bureaucratic expediency, are unable to encompass the real heritage and commingling of émigré Latin American populations. Ethnic identity is a complex, fluid process which escapes traditional binary models.