“Gentefied” makes its case for the present-day Boyle Heights as much through image as through character and dialogue. In its camera eye, the neighborhood radiates light and thrums with energy. It is neighbors sitting in lawn chairs on a sidewalk, the kaleidoscope of packaged selections at a bodega, a pepper being coaxed out of the earth in a backyard garden. The production feels connected to the place, sidewalk and soil.

The show’s voice is distinctive and assured, both figuratively and literally. It slips naturally among English and Spanish and Spanglish the same way its stories slip among worlds — from the Boyle Heights streets to the gallery world, from immigrant women sewing piecework to immigrant line cooks chiffonading herbs.

Its tone takes longer to establish. Sometimes it wants to be a sharp-elbowed satire, as in an episode that sends up “food tours” in which epicurean hipsters wander the neighborhood as if on safari. Sometimes — more effectively — it’s a working-class family dramedy, conscious of the cascading effects of small financial setbacks and the code-switching involved in moving across cultures. (When Ana and Erik have a run-in with a white bank manager, she reminds him, “Use your white voice!”)

Maybe most important for a show about neighborhood-building, “Gentefied” has a handle on even its smaller characters. A mariachi musician, introduced as comic relief, gets his own episode that reveals him as a soulful artist trying to keep his integrity; Ana’s mother evolves from a hectoring nemesis to a toughened survivor.

In all these stories, the climate for immigrants in America is ever felt. A flashback to a scene in a jail waiting room, with Bill Clinton on TV celebrating a crime bill, segues into another waiting room today, with Donald Trump touting his proposed wall.

“Gentefied” can be blunt. But just when you think it has stacked the deck for one argument, it reshuffles. In a standout episode, Ana paints a mural of two men kissing on the wall of a bodega, commissioned by the building’s white art-dealer owner. She ends up in the middle of a battle between some of her neighbors, who are put off by the image (and thus her own gay identity), and the gentrifying industry in which she still wants somehow to succeed.