Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles

Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles PDF

Author: Stephanie Lewthwaite

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2009-11-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780816526338

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Beginning near the end of the nineteenth century, a generation of reformers set their sights on the growing Mexican community in Los Angeles. Experimenting with a variety of policies on health, housing, education, and labor, these reformersÑsettlement workers, educationalists, Americanizers, government officials, and employersÑattempted to transform the Mexican community with a variety of distinct and often competing agendas. In Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles, Stephanie Lewthwaite presents evidence from a myriad of sources that these varied agendas of reform consistently supported the creation of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences across Los Angeles. Reformers simultaneously promoted acculturation and racialization, creating a Òlandscape of differenceÓ that significantly shaped the place and status of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans from the Progressive era through the New Deal. The book journeys across the urban, suburban, and rural spaces of Greater Los Angeles as it moves through time and examines the ruralÐurban migration of Mexicans on both a local and a transnational scale. Part 1 traverses the world of Progressive reform in urban Los Angeles, exploring the link between the regionÕs territorial and industrial expansion, early campaigns for social and housing reform, and the emergence of a first-generation Mexican immigrant population. Part 2 documents the shift from official Americanization and assimilation toward nativism and exclusion. Here Lewthwaite examines competing cultures of reform and the challenges to assimilation from Mexican nationalists and American nativists. Part 3 analyzes reform during the New Deal, which spawned the active resistance of second-generation Mexican Americans. Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles achieves a full, broad, and nuanced account of the variousÑand often contradictoryÑefforts to reform the Mexican population of Los Angeles. With a transnational approach grounded in historical context, this book will appeal to students of history, cultural studies, and literary studies

Latino Los Angeles

Latino Los Angeles PDF

Author: Enrique Ochoa

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0816524688

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"Until recently, most research on Latina/os in the U.S. has ignored historical and contemporary dynamics in Latin America, just as scholars of Latin America have generally stopped their studies at the border. This volume roots Los Angeles in the larger arena of globalization, exploring the demographic changes that have transformed the Latino presence in LA from primarily Mexican-origin to one that now includes peoples from throughout the hemisphere. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, it combines historical perspectives with analyses of power and inequality to consider how Latina/os are responding to exclusionary immigration, labor, and schooling practices and actively creating communities. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.

Becoming Mexican American

Becoming Mexican American PDF

Author: George J. Sanchez

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 1995-03-23

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780195096484

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Twentieth century Los Angeles has been the focus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between distinct cultures in U.S. history. In this pioneering study, Sanchez explores how Mexican immigrants "Americanized" themselves in order to fit in, thereby losing part of their own culture.

Mexican American Baseball in Los Angeles

Mexican American Baseball in Los Angeles PDF

Author: Francisco E. Balderrama

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738581804

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Images of Baseball: Mexican American Baseball in Los Angeles celebrates the flourishing culture of the great pastime in East Los Angeles and other communities where a strong sense of Mexican identity and pride was fostered in a sporting atmosphere of both fierce athleticism and social celebration. From 1900, with the establishment of the Mexican immigrant community, to the rise of Fernandomania in the 1980s, baseball diamonds in greater Los Angeles were both proving grounds for youth as they entered their educations and careers, and the foundation for the talented Forty-Sixty Club, comprised of players of at least 40, and often over 60, years of age. These evocative photographs look back on the great Mexican American teams and players of the 20th century, including the famous Chorizeros--the proclaimed "Yankees of East L.A."

Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity

Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity PDF

Author: Edward J. Escobar

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0520920783

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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.

Mexican American Mojo

Mexican American Mojo PDF

Author: Anthony Macías

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-11-11

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 082238938X

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Stretching from the years during the Second World War when young couples jitterbugged across the dance floor at the Zenda Ballroom, through the early 1950s when honking tenor saxophones could be heard at the Angelus Hall, to the Spanish-language cosmopolitanism of the late 1950s and 1960s, Mexican American Mojo is a lively account of Mexican American urban culture in wartime and postwar Los Angeles as seen through the evolution of dance styles, nightlife, and, above all, popular music. Revealing the links between a vibrant Chicano music culture and postwar social and geographic mobility, Anthony Macías shows how by participating in jazz, the zoot suit phenomenon, car culture, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and Latin music, Mexican Americans not only rejected second-class citizenship and demeaning stereotypes, but also transformed Los Angeles. Macías conducted numerous interviews for Mexican American Mojo, and the voices of little-known artists and fans fill its pages. In addition, more famous musicians such as Ritchie Valens and Lalo Guerrero are considered anew in relation to their contemporaries and the city. Macías examines language, fashion, and subcultures to trace the history of hip and cool in Los Angeles as well as the Chicano influence on urban culture. He argues that a grass-roots “multicultural urban civility” that challenged the attempted containment of Mexican Americans and African Americans emerged in the neighborhoods, schools, nightclubs, dance halls, and auditoriums of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. So take a little trip with Macías, via streetcar or freeway, to a time when Los Angeles had advanced public high school music programs, segregated musicians’ union locals, a highbrow municipal Bureau of Music, independent R & B labels, and robust rock and roll and Latin music scenes.

Mexican Americans in Los Angeles

Mexican Americans in Los Angeles PDF

Author: Alex Moreno Areyan

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738580067

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Mexican Americans established and nurtured the foundation, fiber, and fabric of Los Angeles since the first pobladores arrived in 1781. Pride in family, work, community, and religion coalesces into their legacy from East Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley to the port areas of Wilmington and San Pedro. Men and women of Mexican heritage comprised 47 percent of Los Angeles County's Latino population in the 21st century. The modern Mexican American saga is embodied in the success of Congressman Edward Roybal, Congresswoman Lucille Roybal Allard, dynamic civic leader Dionicio Morales, and Los Angeles County supervisor Gloria Molina. Labor leader Cesar Chavez instilled passion and hope, while prizefighters Art Aragon, Paul Gonzalez, and Oscar De La Hoya and actors Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Ricardo Montalban, and Edward James Olmos provided inspiration. The city's first Mexican American mayor in more than a century, Antonio Villaraigosa, was elected in 2005. This book is a distillation of a proud people's contributions to, and achievements in, a great city.

Rebirth

Rebirth PDF

Author: Douglas Monroy

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0520920775

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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.