Abstract
In the mid-2000s, the City of Angels became ground zero for a national debate over immigration that gripped the United States.
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Following the introduction of a draconian bill in the House of Representatives that would have criminalized undocumented immigrants and further militarized the U.S.–Mexico border, working-class people, immigrant or otherwise, and their allies took to the streets of major metropolises. Due to a variety of factors, Los Angeles warranted significant attention. As labor scholars Victor Narro, Kent Wong, and Janna Shadduck-Hernández note, On March 25, in Los Angeles, close to one million immigrants, largely without guidance from labor or community leaders and organizations, responded to the announcements on Spanish language television, radio, and newspapers, and participated in one of the largest mobilizations in U.S. history.
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Furthermore, this mass uprising also took place as Los Angeles became the vanguard of so-called majority-minority spaces in America, signaling anxieties over the decline of the white population. 3 At the center of this discourse lay vexing debates about identity and power in Los Angeles and what they portended for national politics if not the very character of nation.
This moment also raised generative conceptual questions for historians of Los Angeles: how are majority-minority spaces merely spatial and temporal constructs? To what extent are categories of identity, which are often constituent parts of those majority-minority spaces, static? What are the forces that construct and deconstruct them? How does power become asymmetrically structured and contested? How do such structures shift depending upon the social landscapes in which the City of Angeles inhabits: from the U.S.–Mexico–Pacific borderlands to an outpost of the American nation-state? And lastly, how do communities of different backgrounds challenge structural inequality and cultures of xenophobia?
With varying levels of attention to issues of racial formation, urban development, and public policy, the three books under review grapple with such questions. The authors transport the reader to frontier Los Angeles and its subsequent emergence as an industrial metropolis, extending a longer historiography of race and class formation in the city. Fundamentally, the authors seek to denaturalize a narrative of the dominance of a powerful merchant class that characterized some of the earliest writings on the city as well as works that challenged it generations later. In doing so, these monographs continue to use Los Angeles as a laboratory to understand race relations as a complex set of uneven and fluid negotiations.
Writing about the history of Los Angeles, a past dominated by the transformation of region into a capitalist metropolis, is necessarily enmeshed with the ways in which the figures leading that charge retrofitted historical narratives for their ultimate benefit. 4 Some of the earliest historical and popular writing about Southern California was bound up in linear booster fables of progress solely engineered by people of European descent, whether benevolent Spanish friars in the eighteenth century, American fortune-seekers in the nineteenth, or savvy merchants and industrialists in the early twentieth. Initial works by inveterate historians who were often financed or heavily promoted by local chambers of commerce homogenized indigenous people, immigrants, and other unruly figures as the romanticized, if not backward, foils to European settler colonists. 5 In the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II, major global events that indelibly reconfigured the physical, built, and human geography of Los Angeles, the indefatigable Progressive Era journalist Carey McWilliams penned one of the first histories of the city to take seriously the nexus of different races and cultures set amid the backdrop of the rise of agrarian and industrial capitalism: Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946). 6
Subsequently, the seismic social changes of the 1960s—from the Black Freedom Struggle to global movements for Third World decolonization, from Women’s Liberation to the “urban crisis”—shaped another generation of historians and historical writing and their pursuit to understand the roots of power relations in the city. For example, two years after proletarian African American residents of the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts took to the streets in protest of economic neglect and police violence, urban historian Robert Fogelson published The Fragmented Metropolis (1967). 7 His work excavated the city’s history of industrialization and suburbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two major factors that sowed the seeds of structural inequality generations later. Shortly after, the turn toward social history, a genre that privileged the quotidian experiences of everyday, oft-marginalized people, inspired the production of case studies of different ethnic groups and the worlds they created. Richard Griswold del Castillo’s The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1890 (1979), among others, began a tradition of finely textured histories that took readers into the homes and communities of ethnic groups to understand the complexity of cultural identity as tied to larger fields of power from citizenship to urban development. 8 George Sanchez’s Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (1993) continued this intellectual pursuit and became foundational, particularly for historians of race in Los Angeles interested in understanding cultural change, adaptation, and resistance over time. 9 His work came to prominence alongside the postmodernist Los Angeles School of Urbanism, which focused on the paradoxes of the city in late capitalism such as the hybridity of culture and the fragmentation of space. 10 Mike Davis and his City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) were the most popular ambassadors of the L.A. School in its portrayal of the city’s networks of power. 11
Shaped by these intellectual curiosities, namely, the configuration of the alchemy of identity and power within shifting foundations of economic and physical structure, and in the midst of the dramatic demographic change outlined above, the latest generation of Los Angeles historians began a new corpus of work. Alongside or building upon case studies that sought to understand those issues through the lens of a discrete racial or ethnic groups, including the work of Lon Kurashige, Josh Sides, and Linda España-Maram, a spate of new monographs used the city’s multiethnic character to provide a more nuanced understanding of racial and spatial formation. 12 Explicitly comparative and relational in scope, other works by Mark Wild, Natalia Molina, Laura Pulido, Scott Kurashige, Shana Bernstein, and Wendy Cheng revealed how racial identities and attendant spatial practices and politics were mutually constitutive. 13 Their works demonstrated how, for example, issues of citizenship, relative proximity to whiteness, and unique histories of racialization informed the goals and strategies of movements for equity or justice. They substantiate through careful case studies how the management of space and people is fundamentally tied to racial discourses of power. They point to how locality complicates national axes of race relations, revealing that majority-minority spaces, whether in the Mexican American/Chinese American neighborhoods of the San Gabriel Valley or the black/Japanese American community of Crenshaw, are nothing new. Lastly, they illustrate how the power and privilege of any group is fluidly relative to each other. It is within this historical moment that the three books under review were researched and eventually published. Like their predecessors, they grapple with questions about race, space, and power, but with a renewed vigor to put to rest the legacy of booster histories.
David Torres-Rouff’s Before L.A. (2013) covers the earliest period of Los Angeles. His greatest intervention lies in the rich prehistory of the modern city he produces, for, as he points out, a danger of writing about the city, ironically even in the hands of the L.A. School, is “beginning . . . with a late-nineteenth-century Los Angeles that springs forth fully formed from its preurban ether” (p. 17). The chronological ambit of Before L.A., from 1781 to 1894, was pregnant with conflicts of identity, space, and land use policy due to, among other major factors, the transition in power from Spanish to Mexican to American regimes. Organized around themes that range from the highly interpersonal (kin networks and marriage) to the structural (public policy and land management), as well as the violence that often accompanied both, Before L.A. reflects earlier social histories on racial communities. However, more than just the classic neighborhood or ethnic case study, Torres-Rouff illustrates how different iterations of the nation-state shaped Los Angeles as a distinctly borderlands territory where identity was palpably fluid. At varying moments, the primary determinant of identity and concomitant power could be skin color, indigeneity, nationality, or economic class.
Across six chapters, Torres-Rouff traces the ascendance of Americans of European descent as the powerbrokers and commercial elite of Los Angeles. However, this was far from a linear story of enlightened progress as booster tracks suggested a century earlier. Reflecting a larger concern in both historical writing and ethnic studies scholarship about settler colonialism, he demonstrates how the decline of the indigenous Tongva was not a foregone conclusion, but part of a larger struggle with the earliest Spanish settler families, or pobladores. Later, white settlers from the United States displayed remarkable adaptation to the existing racial order. Although their history of marrying into the families of Californios, the mixed-race landowning elite, is well-documented, Torres-Rouff particularly highlights the power women possessed in incorporating their new husbands into society. 14 White Americans and Californios thus shared in both the labors of the family but eventually municipal government and, when that was not tenable, the execution of extralegal justice. Slowly, however, spatial development away from the city center plaza and the attendant assignment of greater resources away from non-white communities hastened segregation, hardened racial lines where they had once been malleable, and shut out the possibilities for political compromise.
Where Torres-Rouff leaves off with the origins of Los Angeles’s white merchant class, David M. Struthers picks up with The World in a City (2019). Covering the first quarter of the twentieth century, Struthers outlines the various oppositional politics to the hegemony of the city’s economic elite, and also the nation-state itself. Struthers’s work follows the path hewn by previous historians concerned with local resistance to structures of oppression but distinguishes itself from its predecessors for two significant reasons. Whereas much of scholarship on twentieth-century Los Angeles rightly centers World War II as a major pivot point, Struthers work examines the significance of the Great War and its chilling effects on political organizing. Furthermore, in terms of conceptual interventions, The World in a City explicitly draws upon anarchist theories about affinity to explain the roots of interracial solidarity. Shaped by the scholarship that situates Los Angeles within a larger borderlands ecosystem, of which Before L.A. is fully a part, Struthers’s identifies a “culture of affinity” through shared critiques of capitalism, racism, and nationalism through Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) revolutionary activism.
Struthers’s work is significant because he inscribes labor and class struggle into the history of Los Angeles and its implications for organizing across diverse groups of workers. The World in a City is one of the first texts to fully examine the implications of pre–World War II Los Angeles as a hub for industrial and agricultural laborers. Due to the demographics of these workers—white “Anglos,” African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Italians, and Eastern Europeans—“racial diversity and mobility opened possibilities for labor and radical organizing” (p. 3). Using the analytical lens of affinity allowed Struthers to produce a portrait of both heterogeneous activism in the IWW, fragmented by ethnicity and language, and shared politics directed against structures of capitalism and, particularly for the PLM, the power of the Mexican nation-state. His approach recalls the granularity of earlier social histories as he illustrates how activists translated their lofty goals into daily solidarity; for example, “joining a union, organization, or association; donating money; protesting; cooking meals; buying guns; sheltering fugitives; subscribing to a newspaper; striking; not scabbing; or even giving a supportive greeting on the street” (p. 5). The significance of these micro-level actions that took place outside of the hierarchical infrastructure of the Socialist Party and the American Federation of Labor (which notoriously antagonized Asians for the better part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) lay not so much in successful campaigns or the creation of new institutions, but rather how they engendered interracial solidarity.
Before L.A. concludes at the end of the nineteenth century with the ascension of a white commercial elite who left their segregated imprint on the city and thus eclipsed earlier generations of racial mixture and malleability. However, even afterward, The World in a City illustrates how the infusion of new labor migrants from Asia, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and other parts of the United States created a city in flux. By the 1920s, although manifestations of identity—race, ethnicity, nationality, and color—may have become intersecting axes rather than overlapping circles, critiques of capital and nation could generate mixed spaces and movements. This took place through the development of a radical, multilingual press and within union halls or socialist libraries, but also street corners and leisure sites. Furthermore, the exigencies of segregation placed disparate groups in close proximity to each other, leading to shared action such as the 1903 Oxnard sugar beet strike comprised of Japanese and Mexican workers. Despite localized success in relation to management, the larger opportunity to transcend the organized labor’s legacy of racism failed due to both the seasonal nature of immigrant labor and the national American Federation of Labor’s intransigence in accepting and organizing Asian workers. In the midst over the fight for Japanese exclusion, organizers sought to appeal to internationalism as a way to obviate against racial prejudice since racism and exclusion strengthened the power and legitimacy of the state, yet anti-Asian sentiment proved difficult to extinguish. Radicals put internationalism to the test in the 1911 PLM and IWW raids into Baja California as a part of the Mexican Revolution. Although the raids demonstrated the “potential of militant cosmopolitan revolutionary action,” they illustrated the peril of bringing together activists with an “impulse for internationalism yet little understanding of the distinct cultural and ideological differences in their shared revolutionary movement” (p. 156). The greatest successes came in organizing from below in response to localized working and political conditions based on multiracial coalitions generated by the IWW and PLM, yet even they could not withstand the anti-leftist zeitgeist that World War I wrought. Indeed, despite the valiant efforts of working-class Angelenos, the city’s aggressive pro-business reputation would come into full form by the 1920s.
Sarah S. Elkind’s How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy (2011) begins in that historical moment to investigate the sheer depths of power that the city’s merchant class exercised. Elkind presents a tightly executed argument that centers the alliances between municipal government and organized business elites in the first half of the twentieth century. Elkind deftly draws upon urban as well as environmental studies to highlight how business interests, encapsulated in the powerful Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce (as well as smaller merchants associations and realty boards), gained legitimacy in local government, essentially extending the arc that is evident in the previous monographs. Somewhat reminiscent of how political machines provided municipal services when rapidly growing Gilded Age city governments could not, the Chamber of Commerce swooped in to address any number of policy issues. Chamber staffers not only conducted research on issues but also generated policy recommendations and outright laws that the Los Angeles City Council adopted. Despite wielding such power, city government officials positioned the Chamber of Commerce as the proverbial voice of the people, while their presence in policymaking became so ubiquitous that political discourse at midcentury did not even treat business groups as special interests. As a result, outrageously, “the city council also looked to the business alliance to provide ‘public’ reactions on the very policies that the chamber had initially proposed” (p. 2). Meanwhile, “federal agencies undertaking major public works for cities and counties looked to these same groups when they needed public input” (p. 2). Business interests achieved their hegemony not only through these tender ties with city government but through the complicity of voters who, dependent on industrial employment, supported the policies of the Chamber of Commerce. In essence, “business groups recast private enterprise, localism, and fragmented government authority as the best guarantors of American democracy” (p. 4). Whereas old booster narratives may have treated the rise of the commercial class as a natural progression, Elkind demonstrates how they specifically exploited environmental policy, a weak labor movement (by traditional standards that Struthers would likely reject), and a suspicion of federal power as a means to political authority.
Elkind scrutinizes how the Chamber of Commerce generated and leveraged their influence in the realm of land management policies in relation to oil drilling, air pollution, flood control, and access to water and power. Taking to that iconic Southern California space—the beach—Elkind demonstrates how “contested and malleable the concept of ‘public interest’” could be in the hands of the government–business alliance (p. 9). As contentious debates over lucrative oil drilling took place, business interests successfully lobbied the municipal government to oversee public ownership of beaches, not for strictly environmental reasons, but to protect industries such as real estate and tourism. The Chamber of Commerce honed its capacity for research and policy recommendations in the sphere of air pollution. As smog afflicted the city, the chamber urged the city council to establish an air pollution control board which set the discourse about airborne contaminants. Although that board may have compelled businesses to conform to certain anti-smog regulations, they were enacted in a way to ultimately stave off anti-industry critiques. Divisions within the business community manifested themselves over the construction of the Whittier Narrows Dam. The pro camp was comprised of industrial and agricultural regions that looked forward to flood control and protection; those opposed feared that a dam would pose the threat of residential displacement and lowered property values. The former faction, due to their closer ties to the federal Army Corps of Engineers, prevailed. Her final case studies on the privatization of power utilities at Hoover Dam and negotiations over water management focused on how the localism of city environmental politics influenced national trends. In both cases, the privatization of critical utilities occurred due to mounting wariness over federal power within the context of criticisms against perceived excesses of the New Deal in contrast to the well-oiled machinery of the business–local government alliance that had been cultivated for a generation.
From an intellectual point of view, the preceding monographs continue efforts to question and unsettle some of the oldest stories about Los Angeles exceptionalism. Striking a balance between ground-level action and larger structures of power, while attentive to multiple axes of power and identity, no category or institution or narrative is taken at face value. From an applied standpoint, however, depending upon one’s perspective, the fine research within each of these books paints a disheartening portrait. In each book, we find stories of the triumph of moneyed interests often at the expense of democratic participation and, in Torres-Rouff and Stuthers’s texts, stories of hardened categories of identity that superseded a previous history of multiplicity, hybridity, compromise, and shared mobilization. However, the processes embedded in each text—of creating and contesting space—could do much to inform contemporary discourse about the questions that the opening scenes of immigrant protest and demographic change stimulated. As policymakers, organizers, and residents themselves find fruitful opportunity for political change through the city’s multiethnic workforce who may be tied more to the local worker center than the union local or reside in multiethnic neighborhoods where new waves of immigration confront the legacies of segregation, it could be worthwhile to look back at what drove and challenged politics in the early twentieth century. 15 As power relations become less-clearly defined, but no less contentious, in this late capitalist economy of gigs and gentrification, understanding how the cozy relationship between business and government came to be could help inform struggles against inequality. Regardless of one’s approach to these important new texts, they warrant our attention for better understanding Los Angeles as a space of conflict, but also experimentation and genesis whether in terms of the boundaries of identity, physical space, or political action.