Readers of The Scrapbook will recall the recent item about L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, where some locals mounted a campaign against an art gallery, claiming it represented an intrusion of gringo culture into the predominantly Hispanic community (see “White Out,” March 6, 2017). The activists are back at it, this time doing their best to drive out a coffeehouse that poses a gentrification threat.

The Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement led the effort against the small and short-lived nonprofit art gallery PSSST, confronting the gallery’s patrons, yelling at the artsy interlopers to go away, spray-painting the building with racist slogans such as “F— White Art.” We noted at the time the threat posed by art: “First come the art galleries and, before you know it, the local bodega has been replaced with an artisanal boucherie.” And yet, even though a gallery has been successfully hounded from its digs, the vanguard of the hipster hordes has come on nonetheless—in this case in the form of that most insidious of white culture stalking horses: the coffeehouse.