In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the ...U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth.
Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles's urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.
"Koreatown, Los Angeles tells the story of how one ethnic neighborhood came to signify a shared Korean American identity. At the turn of the twentieth century, Los Angeles's Korean population stood ...at about 186,000--the largest concentration of Koreans outside of Asia. Most of this growth took place following the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which dramatically altered US immigration policy and ushered in a new era of mass immigration, particularly from Asia and Latin America. Over the following decades, Korean immigrants continued to build community in LA, and in 1979, a group of Koreans sought city development funds to turn the area around Olympic Boulevard near downtown Los Angeles into a full-fledged "Koreatown." As Korean immigrants seized the opportunity to purchase inexpensive commercial and residential property and transformed the area to serve their community's needs, other minority communities in nearby South LA--not
Bohemian Los Angeles brings to life a vibrant and all-but forgotten milieu of artists, leftists, and gay men and women whose story played out over the first half of the twentieth century and ...continues to shape the entire American landscape. It is the story of a hidden corner of Los Angeles, where the personal first became the political, where the nation’s first enduring gay rights movement emerged, and where the broad spectrum of what we now think of as identity politics was born. Portraying life over a period of more than forty years in the hilly enclave of Edendale, near downtown Los Angeles, Daniel Hurewitz considers the work of painters and printmakers, looks inside the Communist Party’s intimate cultural scene, and examines the social world of gay men. In this vividly written narrative, he discovers why and how these communities, inspiring both one another and the city as a whole, transformed American notions of political identity with their ideas about self-expression, political engagement, and race relations. Bohemian Los Angeles, incorporating fascinating oral histories, personal letters, police records, and rare photographs, shifts our focus from gay and bohemian New York to the west coast with significant implications for twentieth-century U.S. history and politics.
Making Los Angeles home Alarcón, Rafael; Escala, Luis; Odgers, Olga
2016., 20160308, 2016, 2016-03-08
eBook
Making Los Angeles Home examines the different integration strategies implemented by Mexican immigrants in the Los Angeles region. Relying on statistical data and ethnographic information, the ...authors analyze four different dimensions of the immigrant integration process (economic, social, cultural, and political) and show that there is no single path for its achievement, but instead an array of strategies that yield different results. However, their analysis also shows that immigrants' successful integration essentially depends upon their legal status and long residence in the region. The book shows that, despite this finding, immigrants nevertheless decide to settle in Los Angeles, the place where they have made their homes.
A critical look at the realities of community policing in South Los Angeles
The Limits of Community Policing addresses conflicts between police and communities. Luis Daniel Gascón and Aaron ...Roussell depart from traditional conceptions, arguing that community policing—popularized for decades as a racial panacea—is not the solution it seems to be.
Tracing this policy back to its origins, they focus on the Los Angeles Police Department, which first introduced community policing after the high-profile Rodney King riots. Drawing on over sixty interviews with officers, residents, and stakeholders in South LA’s “Lakeside” precinct, they show how police tactics amplified—rather than resolved—racial tensions, complicating partnership efforts, crime response and prevention, and accountability.
Gascón and Roussell shine a new light on the residents of this neighborhood to address the enduring—and frequently explosive—conflicts between police and communities. At a time when these issues have taken center stage, this volume offers a critical understanding of how community policing really works.
Kids at Work Estrada, Emir
2019, 2019-07-16, Letnik:
7
eBook
How Latinx kids and their undocumented parents struggle in the informal street food economy
Street food markets have become wildly popular in Los Angeles—and behind the scenes, Latinx children ...have been instrumental in making these small informal businesses grow. In Kids at Work, Emir Estrada shines a light on the surprising labor of these young workers, providing the first ethnography on the participation of Latinx children in street vending.
Drawing on dozens of interviews with children and their undocumented parents, as well as three years spent on the streets shadowing families at work, Estrada brings attention to the unique set of hardships Latinx youth experience in this occupation. She also highlights how these hardships can serve to cement family bonds, develop empathy towards parents, encourage hard work, and support children—and their parents—in their efforts to make a living together in the United States. Kids at Work provides a compassionate, up-close portrait of Latinx children, detailing the complexities and nuances of family relations when children help generate income for the household as they peddle the streets of LA alongside their immigrant parents.
Moral laboratories Mattingly, Cheryl
2014., 20141003, 2014, 2014-10-03
eBook
Moral Laboratoriesis an engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray into the anthropology of morality. It takes us on a journey into the lives of African American families caring for children ...with serious chronic medical conditions, and it foregrounds the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as possible only in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in day-to-day existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Cheryl Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching stories to elaborate a first-person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality.
Los Angeles is the epicenter of the American gang problem. Rituals and customs from Los Angeles' eastside gangs, including hand signals, graffiti, and clothing styles, have spread to small towns and ...big cities alike. Many see the problem with gangs as related to urban marginality - for a Latino immigrant population struggling with poverty and social integration, gangs offer a close-knit community. Yet, as Edward Orozco Flores argues inGod's Gangs, gang members can be successfully redirected out of gangs through efforts that change the context in which they find themselves, as well as their notions of what it means to be a man. Flores here illuminates how Latino men recover from gang life through involvement in urban, faith-based organizations. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Homeboy Industries, a Jesuit-founded non-profit that is one of the largest gang intervention programs in the country, and with Victory Outreach, a Pentecostal ministry with over 600 chapters, Flores demonstrates that organizations such as these facilitate recovery from gang life by enabling gang members to reinvent themselves as family men and as members of their community.The book offers a window into the process of redefining masculinity. As Flores convincingly shows, gang members are not trapped in a cycle of poverty and marginality.With the help of urban ministries, such men construct a reformed barrio masculinity to distance themselves from gang life.Edward Orozco Flores is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago.
Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two impoverished California communities-one made up of recent immigrants from Mexico, the other of U.S.-born Chicano citizens-this book provides an ...invaluable comparative perspective on Latino poverty in contemporary America. In northern California's high-tech Silicon Valley, author Daniel Dohan shows how recent immigrants get by on low-wage babysitting and dish-cleaning jobs. In the housing projects of Los Angeles, he documents how families and communities of U.S.-born Mexican Americans manage the social and economic dislocations of persistent poverty. Taking readers into worlds where public assistance, street crime, competition for low-wage jobs, and family, pride, and cross-cultural experiences intermingle,The Price of Povertyoffers vivid portraits of everyday life in these Mexican American communities while addressing urgent policy questions such as: What accounts for joblessness? How can we make sense of crime in poor communities? Does welfare hurt or help?
Before L.A David Samuel Torres-Rouff
09/2013
eBook
David Torres-Rouff significantly expands borderlands history by examining the past and original urban infrastructure of one of America's most prominent cities; its social, spatial, and racial divides ...and boundaries; and how it came to be the Los Angeles we know today. It is a fascinating study of how an innovative intercultural community developed along racial lines, and how immigrants from the United States engineered a profound shift in civic ideals and the physical environment, creating a social and spatial rupture that endures to this day.
