LOS ANGELES — A GENERATION ago, this West Coast metropolis became a “third world city.” At least in the rhetoric of certain East Coast thinkers.

A 1991 book by David Rieff cited visitors who were stunned by “seeing nothing but brown faces, hearing nothing but Spanish on the streets.” The arrival of coffee-colored Latino masses (like me and my Guatemalan-American family), together with the spread of Mandarin and Korean logograms on street signs, led Mr. Rieff to call this the “capital of the third world.”

As a native of the city, I was offended to hear it tagged with such a denigrating label. But in recent years, and for different reasons, I’ve come to believe that a metropolis of the “developing world,” to use a more polite expression, is being born here.

Its center is not in East Los Angeles, or any other Latino neighborhood; nor in our recently christened “Little Bangladesh.” The third world exists everywhere here — in the spread of inequality.