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Los Angeles-based journalist Jesse Katz—a Pulitzer Prize winner who is the son of the late former Portland Mayor Vera Katz and the visual artist Mel Katz—comes home to read from his newest book on Monday, July 29. WW news reporter and fellow Pulitzer winner Nigel Jaquiss will introduce Katz and engage him in conversation around The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA (Astra House, 320 pages, $28).
The Rent Collectors tells the true story of Giovanni Macedo, an 18-year-old man who accidentally killed a 23-day-old baby, Luis Angel Garcia, in the MacArthur Park neighborhood during a botched initiation killing to join the Columbia Lil Cycos street gang in 2007. After gangs declared open season on the Lil Cycos as retribution for Macedo’s crime, he in turn survived a botched execution in Mexico. As the story unfolds, Macedo tries to atone for his crimes by bringing the Lil Cycos to justice. The Rent Collectors refers not only to the gangsters who extort financially vulnerable people, like the man Macedo was ordered to assassinate, but also to the legal fines the city heaps on the same targets for not having all of their immigration paperwork together.
New York Times critic Ben Ehrenreich praised Katz’s writing in his review of The Rent Collectors, commending him for avoiding simplistic, othering tropes as he reported on immigrant communities.
“Katz is acutely attentive not only to the flesh-and-blood personalities that make his story so compelling, but to the structures that both shape and confine them,” Ehrenreich wrote. “The state emerges as a character too, a predatory giant, blind and bumbling, creating the very conditions that it tasks itself with correcting.”
GO: Jesse Katz in Conversation with Nigel Jaquiss, Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 503-228-4651, powells.com. 7 pm Monday, July 29. Free.