Title: Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the great migration to the Great Depression
Author: Monroy, Douglas
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Latino Studies | United States History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: 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.   [brief]
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Title: Mexican ballads, Chicano poems: history and influence in Mexican-American social poetry 
Author: Limón, José Eduardo
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | American Studies | Latin American History | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems combines literary theory with the personal engagement of a prominent Chicano scholar. Recalling his experiences as a student in Texas, José Limón examines the politically motivated Chicano poetry of the 60s and 70s. He bases his analyses on Harold Bloom's theories of literary influence but takes Bloom into the socio-political realm. Limón shows how Chicano poetry is nourished by the oral tradition of the Mexican corrido , or master ballad, which was a vital part of artistic and political life along the Mexican-U.S. border from 1890 to 1930.Limón's use of Bloom, as well as of Marxist critics Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, brings Chicano literature into the arena of contemporary literary theory. By focusing on an important but little-studied poetic tradition, his book challenges our ideas of the American canon and extends the reach of Hispanists and folklorists as well.   [brief]
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Title: Border matters: remapping American cultural studies
Author: Saldívar, José David
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Popular Culture | Literature
Publisher's Description: Border Matters locates the study of Chicano culture in a broad social context. José Saldívar examines issues of representation and expression in a diverse, exciting assortment of texts - corridos , novels, poems, short stories, punk and hip-hop music, ethnography, paintings, performance, art, and essays. Saldívar provides a sophisticated model for a new kind of U.S. cultural studies, one that challenges the homogeneity of U.S. nationalism and popular culture by foregrounding the contemporary experiences and historical circumstances facing Chicanos and Chicanas.This intellectually adventurous, politically engaged study applies borderlands and diaspora theory to Chicano cultural practices in a way that permanently changes our understanding of both the Chicano experience and the meaning of cultural theory. Defying national (and nationalistic) paradigms of culture, Saldívar argues that the culture of the borderlands is trans-national, constituting a social space in which new relations, hybrid cultures, and multi-voiced aesthetics are negotiated.Saldívar's critical readings treat culture as a social force and reveal the presence of social contexts within cultural texts. Border Matters maps out a new terrain for the study of culture, reshaping the way we understand migration, national identity, and intellectual inquiry itself.   [brief]
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Title: "Mi raza primero!" (My people first!): nationalism, identity, and insurgency in the Chicano movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978
Author: Chávez, Ernesto 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Chicano Studies | Sociology | Politics | Social Problems | Immigration
Publisher's Description: ¡Mi Raza Primero! is the first book to examine the Chicano movement's development in one locale - in this case Los Angeles, home of the largest population of people of Mexican descent outside of Mexico City. Ernesto Chávez focuses on four organizations that constituted the heart of the movement: The Brown Berets, the Chicano Moratorium Committee, La Raza Unida Party, and the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo, commonly known as CASA. Chávez examines and chronicles the ideas and tactics of the insurgency's leaders and their followers who, while differing in their goals and tactics, nonetheless came together as Chicanos and reformers. Deftly combining personal recollection and interviews of movement participants with an array of archival, newspaper, and secondary sources, Chávez provides an absorbing account of the events that constituted the Los Angeles-based Chicano movement. At the same time he offers insights into the emergence and the fate of the movement elsewhere. He presents a critical analysis of the concept of Chicano nationalism, an idea shared by all leaders of the insurgency, and places it within a larger global and comparative framework. Examining such variables as gender, class, age, and power relationships, this book offers a sophisticated consideration of how ethnic nationalism and identity functioned in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.   [brief]
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Title: Race, police, and the making of a political identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945
Author: Escobar, Edward J 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | California and the West | Latin American History | Latino Studies | Social Problems | Politics | Californian and Western History | Urban Studies | Criminology | Criminology
Publisher's Description: In June 1943, the city of Los Angeles was wrenched apart by the worst rioting it had seen to that point in the twentieth century. Incited by sensational newspaper stories and the growing public hysteria over allegations of widespread Mexican American juvenile crime, scores of American servicemen, joined by civilians and even police officers, roamed the streets of the city in search of young Mexican American men and boys wearing a distinctive style of dress called a Zoot Suit. Once found, the Zoot Suiters were stripped of their clothes, beaten, and left in the street. Over 600 Mexican American youths were arrested. The riots threw a harsh light upon the deteriorating relationship between the Los Angeles Mexican American community and the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1940s.In this study, Edward J. Escobar examines the history of the relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Mexican American community from the turn of the century to the era of the Zoot Suit Riots. Escobar shows the changes in the way police viewed Mexican Americans, increasingly characterizing them as a criminal element, and the corresponding assumption on the part of Mexican Americans that the police were a threat to their community. The broader implications of this relationship are, as Escobar demonstrates, the significance of the role of the police in suppressing labor unrest, the growing connection between ideas about race and criminality, changing public perceptions about Mexican Americans, and the rise of Mexican American political activism.   [brief]
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Title: Whitewashed adobe: the rise of Los Angeles and the remaking of its Mexican past
Author: Deverell, William Francis
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Chicano Studies | American Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Chronicling the rise of Los Angeles through shifting ideas of race and ethnicity, William Deverell offers a unique perspective on how the city grew and changed. Whitewashed Adobe considers six different developments in the history of the city - including the cementing of the Los Angeles River, the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1924, and the evolution of America's largest brickyard in the 1920s. In an absorbing narrative supported by a number of previously unpublished period photographs, Deverell shows how a city that was once part of Mexico itself came of age through appropriating - and even obliterating - the region's connections to Mexican places and people. Deverell portrays Los Angeles during the 1850s as a city seething with racial enmity due to the recent war with Mexico. He explains how, within a generation, the city's business interests, looking for a commercially viable way to establish urban identity, borrowed Mexican cultural traditions and put on a carnival called La Fiesta de Los Angeles. He analyzes the subtle ways in which ethnicity came to bear on efforts to corral the unpredictable Los Angeles River and shows how the resident Mexican population was put to work fashioning the modern metropolis. He discusses how Los Angeles responded to the nation's last major outbreak of bubonic plague and concludes by considering the Mission Play, a famed drama tied to regional assumptions about history, progress, and ethnicity. Taking all of these elements into consideration, Whitewashed Adobe uncovers an urban identity - and the power structure that fostered it - with far-reaching implications for contemporary Los Angeles.   [brief]
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Title: The children of NAFTA: labor wars on the U.S./Mexico border
Author: Bacon, David 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Labor Studies | Ethnic Studies | Latin American Studies | Immigration | Politics | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Food, televisions, computer equipment, plumbing supplies, clothing. Much of the material foundation of our everyday lives is produced along the U.S./Mexico border in a world largely hidden from our view. Based on gripping firsthand accounts, this book investigates the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on those who labor in the agricultural fields and maquiladora factories on the border. Journalist David Bacon paints a powerful portrait of poverty, repression, and struggle, offering a devastating critique of NAFTA in the most pointed and in-depth examination of border workers published to date. Unlike journalists who have made brief excursions into strawberry fields and maquiladoras, Bacon has more than a decade's experience reporting on the ground at the border, and he has developed sustained relationships with scores of workers and organizers who have entrusted him with their stories. He describes harsh conditions of child labor in the Mexicali Valley, the deplorable housing outside factories in cities such as Tijuana, and corporate retaliation faced by union organizers. He finds that, despite the promises of its backers, NAFTA has locked in a harsh neoliberal economic policy that has swept away laws and protections that Mexican workers had established over decades. More than a showcase for NAFTA's victims, this book traces the emergence of a new social consciousness, telling how workers in Mexico, the United States, and Canada are now beginning to join together in a powerful new strategy of cross-border organizing as they search for economic and social justice.   [brief]
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Title: The price of poverty: money, work, and culture in the Mexican-American barrio
Author: Dohan, Daniel 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Sociology | Social Problems | Urban Studies | Latin American Studies | Chicano Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: 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 Poverty offers 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?   [brief]
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Title: In the shadow of the eagles: Sonora and the transformation of the border during the Porfiriato 
Author: Tinker Salas, Miguel
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | United States History | Latin American Studies | Ethnic Studies | California and the West
Publisher's Description: In the Shadow of the Eagles considers the historical roots of Mexican border society. The Mexican northwest, and Sonora in particular, has often captured the public's imagination; it has been portrayed as a region of untold mineral wealth, insurgent Apaches and Yaquis, self-reliant cowboys, miners, and smugglers. During the nineteenth century, however, the Sonoran region was transformed from a distant frontier outpost to a bustling and influential border state. This transformation gave rise to a dynamic relationship between Sonora and the southwestern United States. In this innovative synthesis of Mexican, border, and western history, Miguel Tinker Salas traces the social and economic history of the Sonora border region and shows the role played by the United States in the economy of Mexico.Drawing on extensive research in Mexico City, Sonora, Arizona, and California, Tinker Salas contributes original discussions of the development of regional credit practices, the elite's use of violence as a political tool to preserve autonomy, the effects of class, race, and gender in Sonoran society, and the influence of the railroad and mining on the border economy. Balancing theory with original empirical data in a strong, readable narrative, In the Shadow of the Eagles recasts our understanding of regional Mexican history and expands our ideas about the borderlands.   [brief]
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Title: MeXicana encounters: the making of social identities on the borderlands
Author: Fregoso, Rosa Linda
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Chicano Studies | California and the West | Film | Women's Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Latin American Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: meXicana Encounters charts the dynamic and contradictory representation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in culture. Rosa Linda Fregoso's deft analysis of the cultural practices and symbolic forms that shape social identities takes her across a wide and varied terrain. Among the subjects she considers are the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez; transborder feminist texts that deal with private, domestic forms of violence; how films like John Sayles's Lone Star re-center white masculinity; and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os and how it can subordinate gender and sexuality to masculinity and heterosexual roles. Fregoso's self-reflexive approach to cultural politics embraces the movement for social justice and offers new insights into the ways that racial and gender differences are inscribed in cultural practices.   [brief]
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Title: Migrant daughter: coming of age as a Mexican American woman
Author: Tywoniak, Frances Esquibel 1931-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Women's Studies | Chicano Studies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Taking us from the open spaces of rural New Mexico and the fields of California's Great Central Valley to the intellectual milieu of student life in Berkeley during the 1950s, this memoir, based on an oral history by Mario T. García, is the powerful and moving testimonio of a young Mexican American woman's struggle to rise out of poverty. Migrant Daughter is the coming-of-age story of Frances Esquibel Tywoniak, who was born in Spanish-speaking New Mexico, moved with her family to California during the Depression to attend school and work as a farm laborer, and subsequently won a university scholarship, becoming one of the few Mexican Americans to attend the University of California, Berkeley, at that time. Giving a personal perspective on the conflicts of living in and between cultures, this eloquent story provides a rare glimpse into the life of a young Mexican American woman who achieved her dreams of obtaining a university education. In addition to the many fascinating details of everyday life the narrative provides, Mario T. García's introduction contextualizes the place and importance of Tywoniak's life. Both introduction and narrative illustrate the process by which Tywoniak negotiated her relation to ethnic identity and cultural allegiances, the ways in which she came to find education as a channel for breaking with fieldwork patterns of life, and the effect of migration on family and culture. This deeply personal memoir portrays a courageous Mexican American woman moving between many cultural worlds, a life story that at times parallels, and at times diverges from, the real life experiences of thousands of other, unnamed women.   [brief]
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Title: Proletarians of the North: a history of Mexican industrial workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933
Author: Vargas, Zaragosa
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | United States History | Latino Studies | Chicano Studies
Publisher's Description: Between the end of World War I and the Great Depression, over 58,000 Mexicans journeyed to the Midwest in search of employment. Many found work in agriculture, but thousands more joined the growing ranks of the industrial proletariat. Throughout the northern Midwest, and especially in Detroit, Mexican workers entered steel mills, packing houses, and auto plants, becoming part of the modern American working class.Zaragosa Vargas's work focuses on this little-known feature in the history of Chicanos and American labor. In relating the experiences of Mexicans in workplace and neighborhood, and in showing the roles of Mexican women, the Catholic Church, and labor unions, Vargas enriches our knowledge of immigrant urban life. His is an important work that will be welcomed by historians of Chicano Studies and American labor.   [brief]
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Title: Rethinking the borderlands: between Chicano culture and legal discourse 
Author: Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl Scott
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: American Studies | Chicano Studies | Literature | Language and Linguistics | Law | Social and Political Thought | Rhetoric | Postcolonial Studies | United States History | United States History
Publisher's Description: Challenging the long-cherished notion of legal objectivity in the United States, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones argues that Chicano history has been consistently shaped by racially biased, combative legal interactions. Rethinking the Borderlands is an insightful and provocative exploration of the ways Chicano and Chicana artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers engage this history in order to resist the disenfranchising effects of legal institutions, including the prison and the court.Gutiérrez-Jones examines the process by which Chicanos have become associated with criminality in both our legal institutions and our mainstream popular culture and thereby offers a new way of understanding minority social experience. Drawing on gender studies and psychoanalysis, as well as critical legal and race studies, Gutiérrez-Jones's approach to the law and legal discourse reveals the high stakes involved when concepts of social justice are fought out in the home, in the workplace and in the streets.   [brief]
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Title: Memories of Chicano history: the life and narrative of Bert Corona
Author: García, Mario T
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | United States History | Latino Studies | Chicano Studies | Autobiography | Californian and Western History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Who is Bert Corona? Though not readily identified by most Americans, nor indeed by many Mexican Americans, Corona is a man of enormous political commitment whose activism has spanned much of this century. Now his voice can be heard by the wide audience it deserves. In this landmark publication - the first autobiography by a major figure in Chicano history - Bert Corona relates his life story.Corona was born in El Paso in 1918. Inspired by his parents' participation in the Mexican Revolution, he dedicated his life to fighting economic and social injustice. An early labor organizer among ethnic communities in southern California, Corona has agitated for labor and civil rights since the 1940s. His efforts continue today in campaigns to organize undocumented immigrants.This book evolved from a three-year oral history project between Bert Corona and historian Mario T. García. The result is a testimonio , a collaborative autobiography in which historical memories are preserved more through oral traditions than through written documents. Corona's story represents a collective memory of the Mexican-American community's struggle against discrimination and racism. His narration and García's analysis together provide a journey into the Mexican-American world.Bert Corona's reflections offer us an invaluable glimpse at the lifework of a major grass-roots American leader. His story is further enriched by biographical sketches of others whose names have been little recorded during six decades of American labor history.   [brief]
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Title: Refried Elvis: the rise of the Mexican counterculture 
Author: Zolov, Eric
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Popular Culture | Chicano Studies | Latin American Studies | Contemporary Music
Publisher's Description: This powerful study shows how America's biggest export, rock and roll, became a major influence in Mexican politics, society, and culture. From the arrival of Elvis in Mexico during the 1950s to the emergence of a full-blown counterculture movement by the late 1960s, Eric Zolov uses rock and roll to illuminate Mexican history through these charged decades and into the 1970s. This fascinating narrative traces the rechanneling of youth energies away from political protest in the wake of the 1968 student movement and into counterculture rebellion, known as La Onda (The Wave). Refried Elvis accounts for the events of 1968 and their aftermath by revealing a mounting crisis of patriarchal values, linked both to the experience of modernization during the 1950s and 1960s and to the limits of cultural nationalism as promoted by a one-party state.Through an engrossing analysis of music and film, as well as fanzines, newspapers, government documents, company reports, and numerous interviews, Zolov shows how rock music culture became a volatile commodity force, whose production and consumption strategies were shaped by intellectuals, state agencies, transnational and local capital, musicians, and fans alike. More than a history of Mexican rock and roll, Zolov's study demonstrates the politicized nature of culture under authoritarianism, and offers a nuanced discussion of the effects of cultural imperialism that deepens our understanding of gender relations, social hierarchies, and the very meanings of national identity in a transnational era.   [brief]
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Title: A courtship after marriage: sexuality and love in Mexican transnational families
Author: Hirsch, Jennifer S
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Latino Studies | Chicano Studies | Sociology | Gender Studies | Latin American Studies | Immigration | Sociology
Publisher's Description: From about seven children per woman in 1960, the fertility rate in Mexico has dropped to about 2.6. Such changes are part of a larger transformation explored in this book, a richly detailed ethnographic study of generational and migration-related redefinitions of gender, marriage, and sexuality in r . . . [more]
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Title: Gendered transitions: Mexican experiences of immigration
Author: Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | Latin American Studies | Gender Studies | Chicano Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The momentous influx of Mexican undocumented workers into the United States over the last decades has spurred new ways of thinking about immigration. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's incisive book enlarges our understanding of these recently arrived Americans and uncovers the myriad ways that women and men recreate families and community institutions in a new land.Hondagneu-Sotelo argues that people do not migrate as a result of concerted household strategies, but as a consequence of negotiations often fraught with conflict in families and social networks. Migration and settlement transform long-held ideals and lifestyles. Traditional patterns are reevaluated, and new relationships - often more egalitarian - emerge. Women gain greater personal autonomy and independence as they participate in public life and gain access to both social and economic influence previously beyond their reach.Bringing to life the experiences of undocumented immigrants and delineating the key role of women in newly established communities, Gendered Transitions challenges conventional assumptions about gender and migration. It will be essential reading for demographers, historians, sociologists, and policymakers."I've opened my eyes. Back there, they say 'no.' You marry, and no, you must stay home. Here, it's different. You marry, and you continue working. Back in Mexico, it's very different. There is very much machismo in those men." - A Mexican woman living in the United States   [brief]
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Title: L.A. city limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the present
Author: Sides, Josh 1972-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | African American Studies | Urban Studies | Californian and Western History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass - embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South - is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, L.A. City Limits critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis. Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities - and limits - quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North.   [brief]
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Title: Los Angeles and the automobile: the making of the modern city
Author: Bottles, Scott L
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: American Studies | Californian and Western History | Urban Studies | United States History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: More comprehensive than any other book on this topic, Los Angeles and the Automobile places the evolution of Los Angeles within the context of American political and urban history.
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Title: Hazardous metropolis: flooding and urban ecology in Los Angeles
Author: Orsi, Jared 1970-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | California and the West | Urban Studies | Water | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Although better known for its sunny skies, Los Angeles suffers devastating flooding. This book explores a fascinating and little-known chapter in the city's history - the spectacular failures to control floods that occurred throughout the twentieth century. Despite the city's 114 debris dams, 5 flood control basins, and nearly 500 miles of paved river channels, Southern Californians have discovered that technologically engineered solutions to flooding are just as disaster-prone as natural waterways. Jared Orsi's lively history unravels the strange and often hazardous ways that engineering, politics, and nature have come together in Los Angeles to determine the flow of water. He advances a new paradigm - the urban ecosystem - for understanding the city's complex and unpredictable waterways and other issues that are sure to play a large role in future planning. As he traces the flow of water from sky to sea, Orsi brings together many disparate and intriguing pieces of the story, including local and national politics, the little-known San Gabriel Dam fiasco, the phenomenal growth of Los Angeles, and, finally, the influence of environmentalism. Orsi provocatively widens his vision toward other cities for which Los Angeles may offer a lesson - both of things gone wrong and a glimpse of how they might be improved.   [brief]
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