No longer represented only by Hollywood and the commercial fashion industry, Los Angeles in recent years has received international media attention as one of the world's new art centers. From the ...appearance of local artists in major European exhibitions to widely reported multimillion-dollar museum endowments, Los Angeles has entered the world cultural stage.
Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angelesplaces this celebrated arrival in the richer context of art controversies and political contests over modern art and art spaces in the twentieth century. The Ferus Gallery's pop-infused "L.A. Look" and "finish-fetish," now synonymous with Los Angeles's postwar modernist aesthetics, emerged from a dispersed art community that struggled in the 1950s to find a toehold in a local scene reeling from the censure of the McCarthy era. The Watts Towers have long faced neglect despite their international fame, while Venice Beach, Barnsdall Park, Griffith Park, and Olvera Street proved highly contentious sites of urban cultural expression.
Challenging historical accounts that situate the city's origins as an art center in the 1960s,Art and the Cityargues that debates over modernism among artists and civic leaders alike made art a charged political site as early as the 1910s. The legacy of those early battles reverberated throughout the century. Because of a rich tradition of arts education and the presence of Hollywood, Los Angeles historically hosted a talented population of contemporary artists. However, because of the snug relationship between urban aesthetics and capital investment that underscored the booster goals of the civic arts movement, modern artists were pushed out of public exhibition spaces until after World War II.Art and the Cityuncovers the historic struggles for cultural expression and creative space that are hidden behind the city's booster mythology.
Black Los Angeles started small. The first census of the newly formed Los Angeles County in 1850 recorded only twelve Americans of African descent alongside a population of more than 3,500 Anglo ...Americans. Over the following seventy years, however, the African American founding families of Los Angeles forged a vibrant community within the increasingly segregated and stratified city. In this book, historian Marne L. Campbell examines the intersections of race, class, and gender to produce a social history of community formation and cultural expression in Los Angeles. Expanding on the traditional narrative of middle-class uplift, Campbell demonstrates that the black working class, largely through the efforts of women, fought to secure their own economic and social freedom by forging communal bonds with black elites and other communities of color. This women-led, black working-class agency and cross-racial community building, Campbell argues, was markedly more successful in Los Angeles than in any other region in the country.Drawing from an extensive database of all African American households between 1850 and 1910, Campbell vividly tells the story of how middle-class African Americans were able to live, work, and establish a community of their own in the growing city of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is a global metropolis whose history and social narrative is linked to one of its top exports: cinema. L.A. appears on screen more than almost any city since Hollywood and is home to the ...American film industry. Historically, conversations of social and racial homogeneity have dominated the construction of Los Angeles as a cosmopolitan city, with Hollywood films largely contributing to this image. At the same time, the city is also known for its steady immigration, social inequalities, and exclusionary urban practices, not dissimilar to any other borderland in the world. The Spanish names and sounds within the city are paradoxical in relation to the striking invisibility of its Hispanic residents at many economic, social, and political levels, given their vast numbers. Additionally, the impact of the 1992 Los Angeles riots left the city raw, yet brought about changing discourses and provided Hollywood with the opportunity to rebrand its hometown by projecting to the world a new image in which social uniformity is challenged by diversity. It is for this reason that author Celestino Deleyto decided to take a closer look at how the quintessential cinematic city contributes to the ongoing creation of its own representation on the screen. From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film starts from the theoretical premise that place matters. Deleyto sees film as predominantly a spatial system and argues that the space of film and the space of reality are closely intertwined in complex ways and that we should acknowledge the potential of cinema to intervene in the historical process of the construction of urban space, as well as its ability to record place. The author asks to what extent this is also the city that is being constructed by contemporary movies. From Tinseltown to Bordertown offers a unique combination of urban, cultural, and border theory, as well as the author's direct observation and experience of the city's social and human geography with close readings of a selection of films such as Falling Down, White Men Can't Jump, and Collateral. Through these textual analyses, Deleyto tries to situate filmic narratives of Los Angeles within the city itself and find a sense of the real place in their fictional fabrications. While in a certain sense, Los Angeles movies continue to exist within the rather exclusive boundaries of Tinseltown, the special borderliness of the city is becoming more and more evident in cinematic stories. Deleyto's monograph is a fascinating case study on one of the United States' most enigmatic cities. Film scholars with an interest in history and place will appreciate this book.
The situation of Los Angeles's Korean Americans touches on some of American society's most vexing issues: ethnic conflict, urban poverty, immigration, multiculturalism, and ideological polarization. ...Combining interviews and sociohistorical analysis, Abelmann gives these problems a human face and clarifies the factors that render them so complex.
Tracing the evolution of an extraordinary biracial coalition in Los Angeles behind Mayor Tom Bradley, this book shows how 'crossover' politics and racial violence coexist in urban America. ...Challenging the pessimism about biracial coalitions in general, it compares their relative successes in Los Angeles to their disheartening failures in New York.
Unlike the more forthrightly mythic origins of other urban centers-think Rome via Romulus and Remus or Mexico City via the god Huitzilopochtli-Los Angeles emerged from a smoke-and-mirrors process ...that is simultaneously literal and figurative, real and imagined, material and metaphorical, physical and textual. Through penetrating analysis and personal engagement, Vincent Brook uncovers the many portraits of this ever-enticing, ever-ambivalent, and increasingly multicultural megalopolis. Divided into sections that probe Los Angeles's checkered history and reflect on Hollywood's own self-reflections, the book shows how the city, despite considerable remaining challenges, is finally blowing away some of the smoke of its not always proud past and rhetorically adjusting its rear-view mirrors.
Part I is a review of the city's history through the early 1900s, focusing on the seminal 1884 novelRamonaand its immediate effect, but also exploring its ongoing impact through interviews with present-day Tongva Indians, attendance at the 88th annualRamonapageant, and analysis of its feature film adaptations.
Brook deals with Hollywood as geographical site, film production center, and frame of mind in Part II. He charts the events leading up to Hollywood's emergence as the world's movie capital and explores subsequent developments of the film industry from its golden age through the so-called New Hollywood, citing such self-reflexive films asSunset Blvd.,
Singin' in the Rain, andThe Truman Show.
Part III considers LA noir, a subset of film noir that emerged alongside the classical noir cycle in the 1940s and 1950s and continues today. The city's status as a privileged noir site is analyzed in relation to its history and through discussions of such key LA noir novels and films asDouble Indemnity,Chinatown, andCrash.
In Part IV, Brook examines multicultural Los Angeles. Using media texts as signposts, he maps the history and contemporary situation of the city's major ethno-racial and other minority groups, looking at such films asMi Familia(Latinos),Boyz N the Hood(African Americans),Charlotte Sometimes(Asians),Falling Down(Whites), andThe Kids Are All Right(LGBT).
The hidden history of the Nayarit, a neighborhood
restaurant that nourished its community of Mexican immigrants with
a sense of belonging as they made their own places in Los
Angeles. In 1951, Doña ...Natalia Barraza opened the Nayarit,
a Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, Los Angeles. With A Place at
the Nayarit , historian Natalia Molina traces the life's work
of her grandmother, remembered by all who knew her as Doña
Natalia--a generous, reserved, and extraordinarily capable woman.
Doña Natalia immigrated alone from Mexico to L.A., adopted two
children, and ran a successful business. She also sponsored,
housed, and employed dozens of other immigrants, encouraging them
to lay claim to a city long characterized by anti-Latinx racism.
Together, the employees and customers of the Nayarit maintained
ties to their old homes while providing one another safety and
support. The Nayarit was much more than a popular eating spot: it
was an urban anchor for a robust community, a gathering space where
ethnic Mexican workers and customers connected with their
patria chica (their "small country"). That meant
connecting with distinctive tastes, with one another, and with the
city they now called home. Through deep research and vivid
storytelling, Molina follows restaurant workers from the kitchen
and the front of the house across borders and through the decades.
These people's stories illuminate the many facets of the immigrant
experience: immigrants' complex networks of family and community
and the small but essential pleasures of daily life, as well as
cross-currents of gender and sexuality and pressures of racism and
segregation. The Nayarit was a local landmark, popular with both
Hollywood stars and restaurant workers from across the city and
beloved for its fresh, traditionally prepared Mexican food. But as
Molina argues, it was also, and most importantly, a place where
ethnic Mexicans and other Latinx L.A. residents could step into the
fullness of their lives, nourishing themselves and one another.
A Place at the Nayarit is a stirring exploration of how
racialized minorities create a sense of belonging. It will resonate
with anyone who has felt like an outsider and had a special place
where they felt like an insider.
Los Angeles rose to significance in the first half of the twentieth century by way of its complex relationship to three rivers: the Los Angeles, the Owens, and the Colorado. The remarkable urban and ...suburban trajectory of southern California since then cannot be fully understood without reference to the ways in which each of these three river systems came to be connected to the future of the metropolitan region. This history of growth must be understood in full consideration of all three rivers and the challenges and opportunities they presented to those who would come to make Los Angeles a global power. Full of primary sources and original documents, Water and Los Angeles will be of interest to both students of Los Angeles and general readers interested in the origins of the city. “This is an invaluable new source book by two preeminent authorities on Los Angeles history.” -STEVEN P. ERIE, University of California, San Diego “Energized by a conviction of geography as destiny, this innovative docudrama of primary sources reveals the process whereby the Colorado River system propelled the urbanization of the American West. Water and Los Angeles constitutes a breakthrough fusion of environmental, engineering, urban, and political perspectives.” -KEVIN STARR, University of Southern California “This book offers an accessible, readable account of the importance of rivers to the development of modern Los Angeles.” -SARAH SCHRANK, Professor of History, California State University, Long Beach “Through a history of Los Angeles and the three rivers that helped to create it, this volume crosses several areas of scholarship to create an original and valuable contribution to research and teaching.” -NICOLAS G. ROSENTHAL, author of Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles WILLIAM DEVERELL is Professor of History at the University of California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. TOM SITTON is a curator emeritus of history from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Together, they are authors of California Progressive Revisited and Metropolis in the Making.
Tracing the history of intercultural struggle and cooperation in the citrus belt of Greater Los Angeles, Matt Garcia explores the social and cultural forces that helped make the city the expansive ...and diverse metropolis that it is today.As the citrus-growing regions of the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys in eastern Los Angeles County expanded during the early twentieth century, the agricultural industry there developed along segregated lines, primarily between white landowners and Mexican and Asian laborers. Initially, these communities were sharply divided. But Los Angeles, unlike other agricultural regions, saw important opportunities for intercultural exchange develop around the arts and within multiethnic community groups. Whether fostered in such informal settings as dance halls and theaters or in such formal organizations as the Intercultural Council of Claremont or the Southern California Unity Leagues, these interethnic encounters formed the basis for political cooperation to address labor discrimination and solve problems of residential and educational segregation. Though intercultural collaborations were not always successful, Garcia argues that they constitute an important chapter not only in Southern California's social and cultural development but also in the larger history of American race relations.In this social and cultural history of the segregated citrus-growing areas of Los Angeles County, California, Garcia shows how interethnic relations between Anglos and Latinos evolved over time and how the arts and community groups contributed to these changes.Tracing the history of intercultural struggle and cooperation in the citrus belt of Greater Los Angeles, Matt Garcia explores the social and cultural forces that helped make the city the expansive and diverse metropolis that it is today.As the citrus-growing regions of the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys in eastern Los Angeles County expanded during the early twentieth century, the agricultural industry there developed along segregated lines, primarily between white landowners and Mexican and Asian laborers. Initially, these communities were sharply divided. But Los Angeles, unlike other agricultural regions, saw important opportunities for intercultural exchange develop around the arts and within multiethnic community groups. Whether fostered in such informal settings as dance halls and theaters or in such formal organizations as the Intercultural Council of Claremont or the Southern California Unity Leagues, these interethnic encounters formed the basis for political cooperation to address labor discrimination and solve problems of residential and educational segregation. Though intercultural collaborations were not always successful, Garcia argues that they constitute an important chapter not only in Southern California's social and cultural development but also in the larger history of American race relations.
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