Boyle Heights is a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, located east of the Los Angeles River. It is one of the city's most notable and historic Chicano/Mexican American communities, and is home to cultural landmarks like Mariachi Plaza and events like the annual Día de los Muertos celebrations.

Historically known as Paredón Blanco (Spanish for "White Bluff") during Mexican rule, what would become Boyle Heights became home to a small settlement of relocated Tongva refugees from the village of Yaanga in 1845. The villagers were relocated to this new site known as Pueblito after being forcibly evicted from their previous location on the corner Alameda and Commercial Street by German immigrant Juan Domingo (John Groningen), who paid Governor Pío Pico $200 for the land.

On August 13, 1846, Commodore Stockton's forces captured Los Angeles for the United States with no resistance. Under American rule, the Indigenous were relocated, and the Pueblito site was razed to the ground in 1847. The destruction of Pueblito was reportedly approved by the Los Angeles City Council and largely displaced the final generation of the villagers, known as Yaangavit, into the Calle de los Negros ("street of the dark ones") district.

The area was renamed for Andrew Boyle, an Irishman born in Ballinrobe, who purchased 22 acres (8.9 ha) on the bluffs overlooking the Los Angeles River after fighting in the Mexican–American War for $4,000. Boyle established his home on the land in 1858. In the 1860s, he began growing grapes and sold the wine under the "Paredon Blanc" name. His son-in-law William Workman served as early mayor and city councilman and also built early infrastructure for the area.

To the north of Boyle Heights was Brooklyn Heights, a subdivision in the hills on the eastern bank of the Los Angeles River that centered on Prospect Park.

From 1889 through 1909 the city was divided into nine wards. In 1899 a motion was introduced at the Ninth Ward Development Association to use the name Boyle Heights to apply to all the highlands of the Ninth Ward, including Brooklyn Heights and Euclid Heights. XLNT Foods had a factory making tamales here early in their history. The company started in 1894, when tamales were the most popular ethnic food in Los Angeles. The company is the oldest continuously operating Mexican food brand in the United States, and one of the oldest companies in Southern California.

In the early 1910s, Boyle Heights was one of the only communities that did not have restricted housing covenants that discriminated against Japanese and other people of color. The Japanese community of Little Tokyo continued to grow and extended to the First Street Corridor into Boyle Heights in the early 1910s. Boyle Heights became Los Angeles’s largest residential communities of Japanese immigrants and Americans, apart from Little Tokyo. In the 1920s and 1930s, Boyle Heights became the center of significant churches, temples, and schools for the Japanese community. These include the Tenrikyo Junior Church of America, the Konko Church, and the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple; all designed by Yos Hirose. The Japanese Baptist Church was built by the Los Angeles City Baptist Missionary Society. A hospital, also designed by Hirose, opened in 1929 to serve the Japanese American community.

By the 1920s through the 1960s, Boyle Heights was racially and ethnically diverse as a center of Jewish, Mexican and Japanese immigrant life in the early 20th century, and also hosted significant Yugoslav, Armenian, African-American and Russian populations. Bruce Phillips, a sociologist who tracked Jewish communities across the United States, said that Jewish families left Boyle Heights not because of racism, but instead because of banks redlining the neighborhood (denying home loans) and the construction of several freeways through the community.