Boyle Heights is experiencing unfettered and unprecedented transformation. The Mexican American neighborhood, located just east of Downtown Los Angeles, was once characterized by its taquerías and quinceañera shops. Today, the barrio is glittered with new boutique coffee spots, bars, and record stores. These commercial adornments can be understood as omens of gentrification . They’re signals that what has been a predominantly low-income black and brown neighborhood is on its way to becoming a hub for young, affluent white folks.

In 2007, Uribe coined a term to describe the movement that his bar and other new Chicano-owned establishments represented. He called it “gentefication,” a combination of the word “gentrification” and the Spanish word for “people” (“gente”).

Primera Taza Coffee House once served “Café Chicano” instead of Cafe Americanos in Boyle Heights, but since losing their lease moved to LA's Arts District . In Mariachi Plaza sits the wine bar Eastside Luv. At ESL (which stands for both Eastside Luv and English as a Second Language), you can buy a house-made sangria and sign up to participate in MariachiOke, which is like karaoke but with a catalog of traditional Mariachi songs. On the bar’s website , owner Guillermo Uribe describes ESL as a “bar where you can be as Mexican as you want and be as ‘American’ as you want plus everything in between.”

Recently, the barrio has seen an influx of upwardly mobile, college-educated, Mexican Americans. Usually, these well-to-do Chicano arrivistes are drawn to the area not only because of its relatively low rent and proximity to the city center, but also by its connection to their cultural heritage. With this new breed of settlers comes a new genre of commerce: one that—like its forbearers—sits at the crossroads of two commitments: first, to its Mexican American roots; second, to the dominant, Scandinavian aesthetic of the urban creative class.

Typically, the progenitors of gentrification are white, but what about when they’re not?

In a 2014 interview with Los Angeles Magazine, Uribe said, “I started to see the potential of improving the community from the inside out. If gentrification is happening, it might as well be from people who care about the existing culture. In the case of Boyle Heights, it would be best if the gente decide to invest in improvements because they are more likely to preserve its integrity.”

In essence, the aim of gentefication is to allow Latinx communities, usually low-income, evolve without having their roots diluted into whiteness. On the surface, this evolution may seem to be a purely aesthetic one—swapping out traditional signage for sleek logos in sans-serif, blanching colorfully muraled walls into sterile white minimalism, making the town look less like Tijuana and more like Berlin.

Beyond aesthetics, however, the mission of gentefication is to bring much needed financial development to Latinx neighborhoods without displacing the people who have lived there for generations and need it the most.

Evelyn Santos and Barney Santos co-founded an organization dedicated to putting the goals of gentefication into action. The aptly named Gentefy started as a content strategy company, striving to bring old Latinx local businesses into the modern day. Today, Gentefy tries to spearhead gentefication efforts through education, consulting, and entrepreneurial incubating.

What the cofounders identified was a supply and demand shift—as Millennial Latinxs got older, their tastes evolved, but longstanding legacy businesses did not evolve with them. Because of this, Chipsters (Chicano Hipsters) and Gen X Latinxs spend their money outside of the community in more predominantly white neighborhoods like Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Downtown LA, where traditional gentrification had already taken fuller, says Barney Santos. Gentefy used contemporary branding to make these legacy businesses more attractive to these young Latinxs.