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]
Similar Items

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]
Similar Items

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]
Similar Items

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]
Similar Items

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]
Similar Items

Title: The city: Los Angeles and urban theory at the end of the twentieth century
Author: Scott, Allen John
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Urban Studies | Geography | Sociology | California and the West | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Los Angeles has grown from a scattered collection of towns and villages to one of the largest megacities in the world. In the process, it has inspired controversy among critics and scholars, as well as among its residents. Seeking original perspectives rather than consensus, the editors of The City have assembled a variety of essays examining the built environment and human dynamics of this extraordinary modern city, emphasizing the dramatic changes that have occurred since 1960. Together the essays - by experts in urban planning, architecture, geography, and sociology - create a new kind of urban analysis, one that is open to diversity but strongly committed to collective theoretical and practical understanding.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The fragmented metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930
Author: Fogelson, Robert M
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Urban Studies | California and the West | Geography | United States History
Publisher's Description: Here with a new preface, a new foreword, and an updated bibliography is the definitive history of Los Angeles from its beginnings as an agricultural village of fewer than 2,000 people to its emergence as a metropolis of more than 2 million in 1930 - a city whose distinctive structure, character, and . . . [more]
Similar Items

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.
Similar Items

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]
Similar Items

Title: Behind the label: inequality in the Los Angeles apparel industry
Author: Bonacich, Edna
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | Social Problems | California and the West | Labor Studies | Economics and Business | Urban Studies | American Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: In a study crucial to our understanding of American social inequality, Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum investigate the return of sweatshops to the apparel industry, especially in Los Angeles. The "new" sweatshops, they say, need to be understood in terms of the decline in the American welfare state and its strong unions and the rise in global and flexible production. Apparel manufacturers now have the incentive to move production to wherever low-wage labor can be found, while maintaining arm's-length contractual relations that protect them from responsibility. The flight of the industry has led to a huge rise in apparel imports to the United States and to a decline in employment. Los Angeles, however, remains a puzzling exception in that its industry employment has continued to grow, to the point where L.A. is the largest center of apparel production in the nation. Not only the availability of low-wage immigrant (often undocumented) workers but also the focus on moderately priced, fashion-sensitive women's wear makes this possible. Behind the Label examines the players in the L.A. apparel industry, including manufacturers, retailers, contractors, and workers, evaluating the maldistribution of wealth and power. The authors explore government and union efforts to eradicate sweatshops while limiting the flight to Mexico and elsewhere, and they conclude with a description of the growing antisweatshop movement. Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: William Mulholland and the rise of Los Angeles
Author: Mulholland, Catherine 1923-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: William Mulholland presided over the creation of a water system that forever changed the course of southern California's history. Mulholland, a self-taught engineer, was the chief architect of the Owens Valley Aqueduct - a project ranking in magnitude and daring with the Panama Canal - that brought water to semi-arid Los Angeles from the lush Owens Valley. The story of Los Angeles's quest for water is both famous and notorious: it has been the subject of the classic yet historically distorted movie Chinatown, as well as many other accounts. This first full-length biography of Mulholland challenges many of the prevailing versions of his life story and sheds new light on the history of Los Angeles and its relationship with its most prized resource: water. Catherine Mulholland, the engineer's granddaughter, provides insights into this story that family familiarity affords, and adds to our historical understanding with extensive primary research in sources such as Mulholland's recently uncovered office files, newspapers, and Department of Water and Power archives. She scrutinizes Mulholland's life - from his childhood in Ireland to his triumphant completion of the Owens Valley Aqueduct to the tragedy that ended his career. This vivid portrait of a rich chapter in the history of Los Angeles is enhanced with a generous selection of previously unpublished photographs. Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Jewel of the desert: Japanese American internment at Topaz 
Author: Taylor, Sandra C
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Asian American Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In the spring of 1942, under the guise of "military necessity," the U.S. government evacuated 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast. About 7,000 people from the San Francisco Bay Area - the vast majority of whom were American citizens - were moved to an assembly center at Tanforan Racetrack and then to a concentration camp in Topaz, Utah. Dubbed the "jewel of the desert," the camp remained in operation until October 1945. This compelling book tells the history of Japanese Americans of San Francisco and the Bay Area, and of their experiences of relocation and internment.Sandra C. Taylor first examines the lives of the Japanese Americans who settled in and around San Francisco near the end of the nineteenth century. As their numbers grew, so, too, did their sense of community. They were a people bound together not only by common values, history, and institutions, but also by their shared status as outsiders. Taylor looks particularly at how Japanese Americans kept their sense of community and self-worth alive in spite of the upheavals of internment.The author draws on interviews with fifty former Topaz residents, and on the archives of the War Relocation Authority and newspaper reports, to show how relocation and its aftermath shaped the lives of these Japanese Americans. Written at a time when the United States once again regards Japan as a threat, Taylor's study testifies to the ongoing effects of prejudice toward Americans whose face is also the face of "the enemy."   [brief]
Similar Items

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]
Similar Items

Title: Tokyo life, New York dreams: urban Japanese visions of America, 1890-1924 
Author: Sawada, Mitziko 1928-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Japan | Asian American Studies
Publisher's Description: Tokyo Life, New York Dreams is a bicultural study focusing on Japanese immigrants in New York and the ideas they had about what they would find there. It is one of the first works to consider Japanese immigration to the East Coast, where immigrants were of a different class and social background from the laborers who came to the West Coast and Hawaii. Beginning with a portrait of immigrants' lives in New York City, Mitziko Sawada returns to Tokyo to examine the pre-immigration experience in depth, using rich sources of popular Japanese literature to trace the origins of immigrant perceptions of the U.S.Along with discussions of economics and politics in Tokyo, Sawada explores the prevalent images, ideologies, social myths, and attitudes of late Meiji and Early Taisho Japan. Her lively narrative draws on guide books, magazines, success literature, and popular novels to illuminate the formation of ideas about work, class, gender relations, and freedom in American society. This study analyzes the Japanese construction of a mythic America, perceived as a homogeneous and exotic "other."   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The rhetoric of confession: shishōsetsu in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction 
Author: Fowler, Edward
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature | Japan | Literary Theory and Criticism | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: The shishosetsu is a Japanese form of autobiographical fiction that flourished during the first two decades of this century. Focusing on the works of Chikamatsu Shuko, Shiga Naoya, and Kasai Zenzo, Edward Fowler explores the complex and paradoxical nature of shishosetsu , and discusses its linguisti . . . [more]
Similar Items

Title: The Japanese conspiracy: the Oahu sugar strike of 1920 
Author: Duus, Masayo 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Asian American Studies | American Studies | United States History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: In early 1920 in Hawaii, Japanese sugar cane workers, faced with spiraling living expenses, defiantly struck for a wage increase to $1.25 per day. The event shook the traditional power structure in Hawaii and, as Masayo Duus demonstrates in this book, had consequences reaching all the way up to the eve of World War II.By the end of World War I, the Hawaiian Islands had become what a Japanese guidebook called a "Japanese village in the Pacific," with Japanese immigrant workers making up nearly half the work force on the Hawaiian sugar plantations. Although the strikers eventually capitulated, the Hawaiian territorial government, working closely with the planters, cracked down on the strike leaders, bringing them to trial for an alleged conspiracy to dynamite the house of a plantation official. And to end dependence on Japanese immigrant labor, the planters lobbied hard in Washington to lift restrictions on the immigration of Chinese workers. Placing the event in the context of immigration history as well as diplomatic history, Duus argues that the clash between the immigrant Japanese workers and the Hawaiian oligarchs deepened the mutual suspicion between the Japanese and United States governments. Eventually, she demonstrates, this suspicion led to the passage of the so-called Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924, an event that cast a long shadow into the future.Drawing on both Japanese- and English-language materials, including important unpublished trial documents, this richly detailed narrative focuses on the key actors in the strike. Its dramatic conclusions will have broad implications for further research in Asian American studies, labor history, and immigration history.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Is Taiwan Chinese?: the impact of culture, power, and migration on changing identities
Author: Brown, Melissa J
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | China | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The "one China" policy officially supported by the People's Republic of China, the United States, and other countries asserts that there is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it. The debate over whether the people of Taiwan are Chinese or independently Taiwanese is, Melissa J. Brown argues, a matter of identity: Han ethnic identity, Chinese national identity, and the relationship of both of these to the new Taiwanese identity forged in the 1990s. In a unique comparison of ethnographic and historical case studies drawn from both Taiwan and China, Brown's book shows how identity is shaped by social experience - not culture and ancestry, as is commonly claimed in political rhetoric.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Caught in the middle: Korean merchants in America's multiethnic cities
Author: Min, Pyong Gap 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Sociology | Ethnic Studies | Urban Studies | American Studies | California and the West | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: In this unflinching exploration of one of the most politically charged topics of our time, Pyong Gap Min investigates the racial dynamics that exist between Korean merchants, the African American community, and white society in general. Focusing on hostility toward Korean merchants in New York and Los Angeles, Min explains how the "middleman" economic role Koreans often occupy - between low-income, minority customers on the one hand and large corporate suppliers on the other - leads to conflicts with other groups. Further, Min shows how ethnic conflicts strengthen ties within Korean communities as Koreans organize to protect themselves and their businesses.Min scrutinizes the targeting of Korean businesses during the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1990 African American boycotts of Korean stores in Brooklyn. He explores Korean merchants' relationships with each other as well as with Latin American employees, Jewish suppliers and landlords, and government agencies. In each case, his nuanced analysis reveals how Korean communities respond to general scapegoating through collective action, political mobilization, and other strategies.Fluent in Korean, Min draws from previously unutilized sources, including Korean American newspapers and in-depth interviews with immigrants. His findings belie the media's sensationalistic coverage of African American-Korean conflicts. Instead, Caught in the Middle yields a sophisticated and clear-sighted understanding of the lives and challenges of immigrant merchants in America.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Re-imaging Japanese women
Author: Imamura, Anne E 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | Cultural Anthropology | Women's Studies | Politics | Japan
Publisher's Description: Re-Imaging Japanese Women takes a revealing look at women whose voices have only recently begun to be heard in Japanese society: politicians, practitioners of traditional arts, writers, radicals, wives, mothers, bar hostesses, department store and blue-collar workers. This unique collection of essays gives a broad, interdisciplinary view of contemporary Japanese women while challenging readers to see the development of Japanese women's lives against the backdrop of domestic and global change.These essays provide a "second generation" analysis of roles, issues and social change. The collection brings up to date the work begun in Gail Lee Bernstein's Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (California, 1991), exploring disparities between the current range of images of Japanese women and the reality behind the choices women make.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Encountering Chinese networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese corporations in China, 1880-1937
Author: Cochran, Sherman 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Economics and Business | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: Big businesses have faced a persistent dilemma in China since the nineteenth century: how to retain control over corporate hierarchies while adapting to local social networks. Sherman Cochran, in the first study to compare Western, Japanese, and Chinese businesses in Chinese history, shows how various businesses have struggled with this issue as they have adjusted to dramatic changes in Chinese society, politics, and foreign affairs. Cochran devotes a chapter each to six of the biggest business ventures in China before the Communist revolution: two Western-owned companies, Standard Oil and British-American Tobacco Company; two Japanese-owned companies, Mitsui Trading Company and Naigai Cotton Company; and two Chinese-owned firms, Shenxin Cotton Mills and China Match Company. In each case, he notes the businesses' efforts to introduce corporate hierarchies for managing the distribution of goods and the organization of factory workers, and he describes their encounters with a variety of Chinese social networks: tenacious factions of English-speaking compradors and powerful trade associations of non-English-speaking merchants channeling goods into the marketplace; and small cliques of independent labor bosses and big gangs of underworld figures controlling workers in the factories. Drawing upon archival sources and individual interviews, Cochran describes the wide range of approaches that these businesses adopted to deal with Chinese social networks. Each business negotiated its own distinctive relationship with local networks, and as each business learned about marketing goods and managing factory workers in China, it adjusted this relationship. Sometimes it strengthened its hierarchical control over networks and sometimes it delegated authority to networks, but it could not afford to take networks for granted or regard them as static because they, in turn, took their own initiative and made their own adjustments. In this book Cochran calls into question the idea that the spread of capitalism has caused business organizations to converge over time. His cases bring to light numerous organizational forms used by Western, Japanese, and Chinese corporations in China's past, and his conclusions suggest that businesses have experimented with new forms on the basis of their historical experiences - especially their encounters with social networks.   [brief]
Similar Items