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.
Immigrant neighborhoods of the early twentieth century have commonly been viewed as segregated, homogeneous slums isolated from the larger "American" city. But as Mark Wild demonstrates in this new ...study of Los Angeles, such districts often nurtured dynamic, diverse environments where residents interacted with individuals of other races and cultures. In fact, as his engaging account makes clear, between 1900 and 1940 such multiethnic areas mushroomed in Los Angeles.Street Meeting,enriched with oral histories, reminiscences, newspaper reports, and other sources, examines interactions among working-class Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Italians, African Americans, and others, reminding us that Los Angeles has been a multiethnic city since its birth. This study further argues that these ethnic interactions played a crucial role in the urban development of the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century.
In this revealing look at home care, Cynthia J. Cranford illustrates how elderly and disabled people and the immigrant women workers who assist them in daily activities develop meaningful ...relationships even when their different ages, abilities, races, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds generate tension. As Cranford shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security. Cranford analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and she argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics. What comes through from Cranford's analysis is the need for deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. To support both flexible care and secure work, she argues for an intimate community unionism that advocates for universal state funding, designs culturally sensitive labor market intermediaries run by workers and recipients to help people find jobs or workers, and addresses everyday tensions in home workplaces.
Los Angeles in the 1930s returns to print an invaluable document of Depression-era Los Angeles, illuminating a pivotal moment in L.A.'s history, when writers like Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, ...and F. Scott Fitzgerald were creating the images and associations--and the mystique--for which the City of Angels is still known. Many books in one, Los Angeles in the 1930s is both a genial guide and an addictively readable history, revisiting the Spanish colonial period, the Mexican period, the brief California Republic, and finally American sovereignty. It is also a compact coffee table book of dazzling monochrome photography. These whose haunting visions suggest the city we know today and illuminate the booms and busts that marked L.A.'s past and continue to shape its future.
Sidewalking Ulin, David L
2015., 20151006, 2015, 2015-10-06
eBook
InSidewalking, David L. Ulin offers a compelling inquiry into the evolving landscape of Los Angeles. Part personal narrative, part investigation of the city as both idea and environment,Sidewalkingis ...many things: a discussion of Los Angeles as urban space, a history of the city's built environment, a meditation on the author's relationship to the city, and a rumination on the art of urban walking. Exploring Los Angeles through the soles of his feet, Ulin gets at the experience of its street life, drawing from urban theory, pop culture, and literature. For readers interested in the culture of Los Angeles, this book offers a pointed look beneath the surface in order to see, and engage with, the city on its own terms.
Laura Pulido traces the roots of third world radicalism in Southern California during the 1960s and 1970s in this accessible, wonderfully illustrated comparative study. Focusing on the Black Panther ...Party, El Centro de Acción Social y Autonomo (CASA), and East Wind, a Japanese American collective, she explores how these African American, Chicana/o, and Japanese American groups sought to realize their ideas about race and class, gender relations, and multiracial alliances. Based on thorough research as well as extensive interviews,Black, Brown, Yellow, and Leftexplores the differences and similarities between these organizations, the strengths and weaknesses of the third world left as a whole, and the ways that differential racialization led to distinct forms of radical politics. Pulido provides a masterly, nuanced analysis of complex political events, organizations, and experiences. She gives special prominence to multiracial activism and includes an engaging account of where the activists are today, together with a consideration of the implications for contemporary social justice organizing.
On summer nights on downtown Los Angeles's Bunker Hill, Grand Performances presents free public concerts for the people of the city. A hip hop orchestra, a mariachi musician, an Afropop singer, and a ...Chinese modern dance company are just a few examples of the eclectic range of artists employed to reflect the diversity of LA itself. At these concerts, shared experiences of listening and dancing to the music become sites for the recognition of some of the general aspirations for the performances, for Los Angeles, and for contemporary public life.
InSound, Space, and the City, Marina Peterson explores the processes-from urban renewal to the performance of ethnicity and the experiences of audiences-through which civic space is created at downtown performances. Along with archival materials on urban planning and policy, Peterson draws extensively on her own participation with Grand Performances, ranging from working in an information booth answering questions about the artists and the venue, to observing concerts and concert-goers as an audience member, to performing onstage herself as a cellist with the daKAH Hip Hop orchestra. The book offers an exploration of intersecting concerns of urban residents and scholars today that include social relations and diversity, public space and civic life, privatization and suburbanization and economic and cultural globalization.
At a moment when cities around the world are undertaking similar efforts to revitalize their centers,Sound, Space, and the Cityconveys the underlying tensions of such projects and their relevance for understanding urban futures.
City governments are rapidly becoming society's problem solvers. As Sara Hughes shows, nowhere is this more evident than in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto, where the cities' governments are ...taking on the challenge of addressing climate change. Repowering Cities focuses on the specific issue of reducing urban greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and develops a new framework for distinguishing analytically and empirically the policy agendas city governments develop for reducing GHG emissions, the governing strategies they use to implement these agendas, and the direct and catalytic means by which they contribute to climate change mitigation. Hughes uses her framework to assess the successes and failures experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto as those agenda-setting cities have addressed climate change. She then identifies strategies for moving from incremental to transformative change by pinpointing governing strategies able to mobilize the needed resources and actors, build participatory institutions, create capacity for climate-smart governance, and broaden coalitions for urban climate change policy.
Do racial minorities in the United States assimilate to American values and institutions, or do they retain ethnic ties and cultures? In exploring the Japanese American experience, Lon Kurashige ...recasts this tangled debate by examining what assimilation and ethnic retention have meant to a particular community over a long period of time. This is an inner history, in which the group identity of one of America's most noteworthy racial minorities takes shape. From the 1930s, when Japanese immigrants controlled sizable ethnic enclaves, to the tragic wartime internment and postwar decades punctuated by dramatic class mobility, racial protest, and the influx of economic investment from Japan, the story is fraught with conflict. The narrative centers on Nisei Week in Los Angeles, the largest annual Japanese celebration in the United States. The celebration is a critical site of political conflict, and the ways it has changed over the years reflect the ongoing competition over what it has meant to be Japanese American. Kurashige reveals, subtly and with attention to gender issues, the tensions that emerged at different moments, not only between those who emphasized Japanese ethnicity and those who stressed American orientation, but also between generations and classes in this complex community.
Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital ...city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration.ButCity of Inmatesis also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.
