Los Angeles has attracted intense attention as a "world city" characterized by multiculturalism and globalization. Yet, little is known about the historical transformation of a place whose leaders ...proudly proclaimed themselves white supremacists less than a century ago. In The Shifting Grounds of Race, Scott Kurashige highlights the role African Americans and Japanese Americans played in the social and political struggles that remade twentieth-century Los Angeles.
Meticulously researched and beautifully written,Fit to Be Citizens?demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful ...examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
In the early part of the twentieth century, migrants made their way from rural homes to cities in record numbers and many traveled west. Los Angeles became a destination. Women flocked to the growing ...town to join the film industry as workers and spectators, creating a "New Woman." Their efforts transformed filmmaking from a marginal business to a cosmopolitan, glamorous, and bohemian one. By 1920, Los Angeles had become the only western city where women outnumbered men. In Go West, Young Women, Hilary A. Hallett explores these relatively unknown new western women and their role in the development of Los Angeles and the nascent film industry. From Mary Pickford's rise to become perhaps the most powerful woman of her age, to the racist moral panics of the post–World War I years that culminated in Hollywood's first sex scandal, Hallett describes how the path through early Hollywood presaged the struggles over modern gender roles that animated the century to come.
For decades, most American Indians have lived in cities, not on reservations or in rural areas. Still, scholars, policymakers, and popular culture often regard Indians first as reservation peoples, ...living apart from non-Native Americans. In this book, Nicolas Rosenthal reorients our understanding of the experience of American Indians by tracing their migration to cities, exploring the formation of urban Indian communities, and delving into the shifting relationships between reservations and urban areas from the early twentieth century to the present.With a focus on Los Angeles, which by 1970 had more Native American inhabitants than any place outside the Navajo reservation,Reimagining Indian Countryshows how cities have played a defining role in modern American Indian life and examines the evolution of Native American identity in recent decades. Rosenthal emphasizes the lived experiences of Native migrants in realms including education, labor, health, housing, and social and political activism to understand how they adapted to an urban environment, and to consider how they formed--and continue to form--new identities. Though still connected to the places where indigenous peoples have preserved their culture, Rosenthal argues that Indian identity must be understood as dynamic and fully enmeshed in modern global networks.
This sweeping, vibrant narrative chronicles the history of the
Mexican community in Los Angeles. Douglas Monroy unravels the
dramatic, complex story of Mexican immigration to Los Angeles
during the ...early decades of the twentieth century and shows how
Mexican immigrants re-created their lives and their communities.
Against the backdrop of this newly created cityscape,
Rebirth explores pivotal aspects of Mexican Los Angeles
during this time-its history, political economy, popular
culture-and depicts the creation of a time and place unique in
Californian and American history. Mexican boxers, movie stars,
politicians, workers, parents, and children, American popular
culture and schools, and historical fervor on both sides of the
border all come alive in this literary, jargon-free chronicle. In
addition to the colorful unfolding of the social and cultural life
of Mexican Los Angeles, Monroy tells a story of first-generation
immigrants that provides important points of comparison for
understanding other immigrant groups in the United States. Monroy
shows how the transmigration of space, culture, and reality from
Mexico to Los Angeles became neither wholly American nor Mexican,
but México de afuera , "Mexico outside," a place where new
concerns and new lives emerged from what was both old and familiar.
This extremely accessible work uncovers the human stories of a
dynamic immigrant population and shows the emergence of a truly
transnational history and culture. Rebirth provides an
integral piece of Chicano history, as well as an important element
of California urban history, with the rich, synthetic portrait it
gives of Mexican Los Angeles.
This book recovers and explores the forgotten world of urban Nisei girls’ ethnocultural networks in California. By the 1920s Nisei girls’ clubs had taken root in Los Angeles and provided a key venue ...in which young urban women could claim modern femininity, an American identity, and public space. These groups served as a bulwark against racial discrimination, offering a bridge between the immigrant community’s expectations of young women and the lure of popular culture. Through their youth organizations, second-generation Japanese American women gained access to recreation, cultural education, social skills, and leadership training, attending religious youth conferences and making field trips to museums and businesses. Clubs promoted friendship, teamwork, and social service among young women, while also facilitating their pursuit of courtship and romantic love. Tracing the everyday activities of urban girls highlights the roles they have played in bridging the cultures of their ethnic community and mainstream society, whether introducing new foods and rituals to family and neighbors or dancing in kimono at civic events. Their social bonds would endure beyond their teenage years and would prove valuable during the World War II incarceration and postwar rebuilding. Both before and after the war, Japanese American women’s ethnocultural networks provided vital support, understanding, and a measure of agency for youth who faced racial and economic barriers to full participation in American society.
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In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz ...Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions.
