Urbanists love to celebrate the victorious campaigns that have been waged against city highways over the years. From the successful crusades against the Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York and Inner Belt in Boston and Cambridge decades ago, to those against the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco and Park East Freeway in Milwaukee more recently—the glory gets told and retold, often to good purpose. As other cities consider similar efforts, the tales can both inspire and instruct.

But the history of urban highway revolt is far more checkered than this highlight reel suggests. As UCLA historian Eric Avila reminds us, in a recent issue of the Journal of Urban History, plenty of anti-freeway crusades have failed over the years, leaving residents to live in the shadows of the roads they never wanted. Such stories are often "invisible" to us, he writes, because the people living in these areas too often lack a political or mainstream cultural voice:

What we don't know, however, is the story of the losers, the urban men and women who fought the freeway, unsuccessfully, on the conventional terms of political struggle, who weren't able to pack up and move on, and who channeled expressive cultural traditions to register their grievances against the presence of unwanted infrastructure.

Avila focuses on the diverging fates of Beverly Hills and Boyle Heights in metro Los Angeles. Armed with all the studies and consulting reports its wealth could amass, Beverly Hills defeated a highway project in 1975 that would have run through its center. With no such resources, the heavily Hispanic area of Boyle Heights watched six freeways slice through the neighborhood over the years, including two massive interchanges less than two miles apart.

That's not to say Boyle Heights residents didn't protest the plans. As early as 1957, outspoken locals challenged the freeways they saw as set to "butcher our town." But many residents with means fled to the suburbs instead of staying to fight. And poorer residents accepted relocation assistance with a reluctance that highway officials later misinterpreted as endorsement—even suggesting that these people honorably decided "that they should not stand in the way of progress."