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    Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles
    Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles
    Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles
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    Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles

    By Gaye Theresa Johnson

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    In Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity, Gaye Theresa Johnson examines interracial anti-racist alliances, divisions among aggrieved minority communities, and the cultural expressions and spatial politics that emerge from the mutual struggles of Blacks and Chicanos in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the present. Johnson argues that struggles waged in response to institutional and social repression have created both moments and movements in which Blacks and Chicanos have unmasked power imbalances, sought recognition, and forged solidarities by embracing the strategies, cultures, and politics of each others' experiences. At the center of this study is the theory of spatial entitlement: the spatial strategies and vernaculars utilized by working class youth to resist the demarcations of race and class that emerged in the postwar era. In this important new book, Johnson reveals how racial alliances and antagonisms between Blacks and Chicanos in L.A. had spatial as well as racial dimensions.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateFeb 15, 2013
    ISBN9780520954854
    Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles
    Author

    Gaye Theresa Johnson

    Gaye Theresa Johnson is Associate Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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      Book preview

      Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity - Gaye Theresa Johnson

      THE GEORGE GUND FOUNDATION

      IMPRINT IN AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

      The Goerge Gund Foundation has endowed

      this imprint to advance understanding of

      the history, culture, and current issues

      of African Americans.

      The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the African American Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the George Gund Foundation.

      Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity

      AMERICAN CROSSROADS

      Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, Dana Takagi, Laura Briggs, and Nikhil Pal Singh

      Spaces of Conflict,

      Sounds of Solidarity

      Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement

      in Los Angeles

      Gaye Theresa Johnson

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      Berkeley·Los Angeles·London

      The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Lisa See Endowment Fund in Southern California History and Culture of the University of California Press Foundation.

      University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

      University of California Press

      Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

      University of California Press, Ltd.

      London, England

      © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Johnson, Gaye Theresa.

      Spaces of Conflict, sounds of solidarity : music, race, and spatial entitlement in Los Angeles / Gaye Theresa Johnson.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-520-27527-0—ISBN 978-0-520-27528-7

      eISBN: 9780520954854

      1. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Race relations—History. 2. Minorities—California—Los Angeles—Social conditions. 3. Minorities—Political activity—California—Los Angeles—History. 4. Community development—California—Los Angeles—History. 5. Popular music—Social aspects—California—Los Angeles. 6. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Social conditions.

      I. Title.

      F869.L89A2533 2013

      979.4’94-dc232012039813

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      22   21   20   19   18   17   16   15   14   13

      10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

      In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

      For Mary Ella and Theresita, for Shanti and Fauna,

      for Clyde . . . with thanks.

      For Juanita and Hymon, for abiding love and faith.

      For Chuck and our Cayeloncita, for always.

      Contents

      Introduction: The Future Has a Past

      1.Luisa Moreno, Charlotta Bass, and the Constellations of Interethnic Working-Class Radicalism

      2.Spatial Entitlement: Race, Displacement, and Sonic Reclamation in Postwar Los Angeles

      3.Cold Wars and Counter WAR(s): Coalitional Politics in an Age of Violence

      4.Teeth-Gritting Harmony: Punk, Hip-Hop, and Sonic Spatial Politics

      5.Space, Sound, and Shared Struggles

      Conclusion: In This Great Future. . .

      Acknowledgments

      Selected Bibliography

      Index

      Introduction

      The Future Has a Past

      The unmistakable roots of the universal solidarity of the colored peoples of the world are no longer ‘predictable’ as they were in my father’s time—they are here.

      —Lorraine Hansberry¹

      This is a book about interracial antiracist alliances, about divisions among aggrieved minority communities, and about the cultural expressions that emerge from shared urban spaces. Examining Afro-Chicano politics from the 1940s to the present, I reveal the radical antiracist and egalitarian cultural politics that helped nurture and sustain working-class alliances, intellectual advances, and cultural practices that challenge traditional boundaries of race, space, and region. These politics have resulted in critical interethnic challenges to structures of dominance in Los Angeles, making this story relevant to the history of diverse urban political cultures in every American city.

      Relationships between African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles from World War II to the present have been characterized by both Conflict and coalition, by antagonisms and alliances. The histories of these two groups have been linked in the City of Angels (and all across the nation) by parallel but not identical histories of labor exploitation, housing segregation, and cultural demonization. Yet while sharing the experiences of containment and confinement, Black and Brown people have also been continually pitted against one another, manipulated by a white power structure to compete with each other for jobs, housing, prestige, and political power.

      Sharing struggles, spaces, and sounds has enabled Black and Brown people to work together for social justice in Los Angeles over the decades. This is a story of both continuity and rupture. Although racism persisted, resistance always existed. Different eras posed different problems and provoked different solutions. The racial order and racial landscape of today’s neoliberal global city is very different from that of the high-employment, high-wage metropolis of the 1940s and 1950s. Yet in the midst of enormous changes and transformations, Black and Brown residents of Los Angeles used the physical places they inhabited and the discursive spaces they imagined to assert their common humanity and forge shared struggles grounded in mutuality and solidarity. The political histories of these aggrieved communities entailed the creation of cultural forms that served as key conduits for the collective aspirations of disaffected youth in every generation. The key point underlying this book is that contemporary multiracial struggles for social justice did not emerge in a vacuum. Furthermore, the agents of these struggles deserve to hear and tell a better story about themselves as people and as a collective seeking freedom—a better story than the one that now dominates the discourse on Black–Brown relationships. In other words, the just future envisioned by radical social actors and multiracial movements has a past.

      I advance here a concept that I call spatial entitlement, a way in which marginalized communities have created new collectivities based not just upon eviction and exclusion from physical places, but also on new and imaginative uses of technology, creativity, and spaces. In many instances overlooked by social historians, everyday reclamations of space, assertions of social citizenship, and infrapolitical struggles have created the conditions for future successes in organized collective movements.² Spatial entitlements created new articulations, new sensibilities, and new visions about the place of Black, Brown, and working-class people on the local and national landscape. They were also diagnostic of authority: following Lila Abu-Lughod and Robin D.G. Kelley, I suggest that spatial entitlement illuminated the complex interworkings of historically changing structures of power.³ Understanding it in this way renders everyday acts of resistance and survival demonstrative of more than just the courage of freedom seekers.

      The variety of strategies enacted by working-class youth to imagine and articulate new modes of social citizenship have been underestimated as a site and mode of scholarly inquiry. In the face of persistent repression, particularly in the meaningful spaces of interracial congregation, these actions can be studied as a barometer of the power relationships between oppressed and oppressors. Taken together, they constitute a philosophy of action that allowed the futures of Black and Brown people to be considered using the same lens of possibility. Spatial entitlement provides a means for understanding how working-class communities and individuals secure or create social membership, even when the neighborhoods and meaningful spaces of congregation around them are destroyed.

      Spatial entitlement requires an alternative understanding and construction of the meaning of citizenship. Traditionally, citizenship is defined in terms of social membership in a particular society or national identity. In this regard, Rogers Smith has argued that citizenship laws literally constitute—they create with legal words—a collective civic identity. They proclaim the existence of a political ‘people’ and designate who those persons are as a people, in ways that often become integral to individuals’ senses of personal identity as well.⁴ Excluded from these collective identities, aggrieved people have fashioned alternative expressions of collectivity and belonging.

      The United States’ use of citizenship as a qualifying category of national belonging reveals an unsavory legal history. Time and again, rather than endowing citizenship with affirmative characteristics of national membership, the United States has historically defined its citizens not as much by who they are, but rather by who they are not: at both federal and local levels, a desire by whites to sustain racial and class privilege has been the driving force behind legislation authored to exclude people based on race, gender, origin, and legal status. When these exclusions constitute the conditions for citizenship, the civic myths that inevitably arise as nations define why persons form a people can become what Smith argues are noble lies . . . [that] cloak the exploitation of citizens by their leaders [and] demonize innocent outsiders. And they may also be ugly, ignoble lies. And they are often likely to be so. . . ."⁵ These lies have been the basis for the exclusion of generations of racial outsiders.

      The 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford case demonstrates that such ignoble lies require extraordinary measures of maintenance and justification. In Scott, Chief Justice Taney was forced to execute several legal contortions in order to distinguish the difference between the denial of rights (particularly the franchise) to free Blacks and the denial of rights to white women and minors. In order to preserve the myth of racial inferiority, Taney declared that unlike Blacks, women and minors were U.S. citizens as well as state citizens, entitled to privileges and immunities clause protection. Such women and children were, Taney said, part of the political family of those who form the sovereignty. Blacks were outside the family.⁶

      In the past three years, the United States has passed a series of anti-immigration laws that function to discriminate and exclude with increasing sophistication and malice. Laws such as Arizona’s HB 1070,⁷ Georgia’s HB 87,⁸ Alabama’s HB 56⁹ hijack the language of civil rights to exclude racialized subjects from national membership by proclaiming them a threat to the civil liberties of white citizens. Even when these laws have been overturned or modified at the federal level, which is increasingly rare, the de facto consequence remains, evidenced by anti-immigrant racism: populations perceived to be expendable or unwanted can be excluded not just from citizenship rights but human rights as well.

      Legal scholar Patricia J. Williams has argued that since citizenship rights have been a crucial terrain of struggle against the totalizing domination of racialized capital, we cannot abandon them as a category of analysis. Williams insists that for Black Americans and others, the discourse of rights embedded in citizenship can still be deployed against the social system that they are supposed to uphold.¹⁰ Spatial entitlement recognizes that for Black and Brown communities in LA, expressions of collective entitlement to national membership have been an important site of resistance over time. The history of this resistance contains significant lessons for understanding not just how these claims are made, but why, as a cumulative political practice, they form a counternarrative to privileged constructions of public life.¹¹

      My discussion of spatial entitlement values the ways in which freedom seekers have attempted to claim human and social rights and recognizes the philosophies of freedom and equality that connect local articulations to international movements. Within this framework, the struggle for social membership and human rights by and among local populations becomes something larger, more just, and more complex than a conventional discussion about citizenship. The spatial articulations these struggles enact become a multireferential practice that holds that imagination and freedom struggles at the center of some of its strongest foundational elements.

      Struggles for social justice in Los Angeles involved changing the meaning of existing spaces and creating new ones. African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles recognized that ghetto and barrio segregation could also produce unique and creative forms of congregation.¹² The city streets that served as commercial conduits could also become sites for festive celebration and display. Dance halls, night clubs, and youth centers could be transformed into laboratories for the creation of new identities and identifications. Moreover, spatial entitlement was not confined to physical spaces. When housing segregation, police containment, and transit racism made it difficult to move across urban spaces, young Black and Brown people used the discursive spaces of popular music to create shared soundscapes. They did not have to be in each other’s physical presence to enjoy the same music at the same time as it was broadcast to them on radios in living rooms, bedrooms, neighborhood hangouts, and automobiles. These strategies and affinities speak to the power of popular music and of popular culture to envision and create new political possibilities.

      Studying the ways that entitlements of space and social membership were enacted through popular culture reveals the history and the promise of shared cultural politics among Black and Brown communities. Spatial entitlement has enormous implications for the study of Black and Brown working-class opposition, because it redresses inattention to the profound role that space plays in everyday life, as well as the cumulative role that everyday life plays in the development of mass movements. Kelley’s analysis of Black working-class resistance on public transportation is instructive here. Segregated public spaces in mid-twentieth-century Birmingham were daily visual and aural reminders of the semicolonial status Black people occupied in the Jim Crow South. As such, they constituted important sites of contestation and struggle, and such struggles offer some of the richest insights into how race, gender, class, space, time and collective memory shape both domination and resistance. Furthermore, these struggles remind us that Birmingham whites encountered public space as a kind of ‘democratic space’ where people of different class backgrounds shared city theaters, public conveyances, streets, and parks. But for Black people in the same era, white-dominated public space was vigilantly undemocratic and potentially dangerous.¹³ Black working-class opposition on Birmingham’s streetcars and buses during WWII, as well as many of the spatial entitlements examined in this book, can help us to understand how marginalized historical actors have worked under injurious conditions to produce, elaborate upon, and defend emancipatory identities.

      There is an old saying, popular among Black church congregations, that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has even put on its shoes. Contemporary conservative news sources have been a relentless source of characterizations that depict the relationship between Black and Brown communities as little more than eternally tense, inherently competitive, and sometimes mutually violent. At times this has been the only audible discourse in discussions about the futures of these communities, and it has been more lie than truth. While in the record of Black–Brown interactions there have been devastating examples of intergroup tension, there are far more examples of mutually meaningful Black–Brown antiracism struggles and radical creative affiliations.

      Writing a cultural history of post-war Black–Brown struggles and cultural expressions in Los Angeles shares some of the same methods and aspirations as beat juggling, which involves using a turntable as an instrument. A new sound emerged from hip-hop turntablists in the 1990s that reflected the musical dexterity and competence that DJs must command for their craft. Beat juggling indicated unprecedented advances in digital technology, and helped create a soundscape appropriate for the needs of its listeners. Beat juggling isolates drum and snare hits, vocal phrases, or sound effects by the recording artist and flips or combines the sounds with a cross fader; turntablists take what is already contained in a record to create new rhythmic patterns. At times, DJs work together, using two or three turntables each. Together they form a sort of band, with each DJ responsible for a different sound. For example, one DJ will isolate the drums behind a particular song, another will manipulate a record to make a bass line, and yet another will be responsible for a horn riff. One sound alone, or the work of one DJ or sound in this form of beat juggling, means very little until it is joined with other sounds and results in a collective sonic production. When multiple DJs beat juggle in one performance, they must manage multiple turntables and cross faders to break down beats on records and then recreate them. The records they choose when creating these new rhythmic and melodic patterns are as diverse and complex as the styles developed to execute the movement necessary to perform these physical manipulations quickly and accurately. A turntablist has to know records, to have a mental archive not only of songs, but also of phrases, tempos, lyrics, and instrumentation. Turntables have pitch controls to alter the tempos and tones as well, so DJs must be masters of both mixing and memory.¹⁴ The musical productions that emerge from this practice can use eclectic combinations of jazz, soul, rock, hip hop, blues, and funk, resulting in a fusion not only of musical styles, but also of sonic patterns associated with different time periods and diverse social spaces. A listener might hear the sounds of Herbie Hancock, Mongo Santamaria, Cannonball Adderley, Isaac Hayes, Al Green, Public Enemy, and the Eagles all in one song. Beat juggling must anticipate audiences’ collective memories and produce an appealing textual combination of those memories. The practice encodes and communicates centuries of musical memory, minimizes the distance between diverse geographical spaces, collapses the time elapsed between different albums and songs, and interpolates a wide range of life experiences into a new beat. In this book, instead of turntables, records, and cross faders, I use the history of Black and Brown people in Los Angeles, spatial studies, music studies, and a desire to see the freedom dreams of interracial struggles met with equity and social justice.

      The Black and Brown expressive cultures I examine have served as concrete social sites where new forms of social relations are envisioned, constructed, and enacted. These overlapping cultural forms emerged not just as practices containing the memory and history of specific ethnic groups, but also as artistic creations representing the mutual influence and locally shared experience of LA’s Black and Chicano communities. In this context, music serves as a rich discursive terrain for examining the emerging consciousness that helped shape the personal identities and political struggles of these communities.

      My inquiry into Black and Brown Conflict and coalition in Los Angeles builds on the work in George Sánchez’s Becoming Mexican American,¹⁵ Laura Pulido’s Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left,¹⁶ Daniel Widener’s Black Arts West,¹⁷ Luis Alvarez’s The Power of the Zoot,¹⁸ and Anthony Macías’s Mexican American Mojo.¹⁹ As a book on Los Angeles that examines multiracial resistance and cultural production, my work is in step with these exemplary studies. But I also try to push the theoretical framework of interracial politics further by offering new perspectives about space and representation that utilize historical and cultural examples with enormous relevance to the present.

      My history of interethnic affiliations and coalitions between African Americans and Chicanos in Los Angeles blends evidence about expressive culture with the story of social movements. I argue that while the institutional records of interethnic alliances in politics in Los Angeles are sparse, the rich repository of evidence contained in the memories of cultural workers and activists offers important insights into the infrapolitics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle within these two communities of color. Recognizing the value of antiracist struggles requires a belief in the significance of cultural politics, both as a tool of scholarly inquiry and as a means of community mobilization. This book focuses on cultural histories and memories because I believe that they are an invaluable terrain, where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested. By arguing for a new framework with which to view the history of excluded populations in urban areas, I emphasize the significance of studies that interpolate race, memory, class, gender, and popular culture to understand social change. Because Blacks and Chicanos in Los Angeles were engaged in struggles with and in opposition to other minority groups, the history I offer challenges traditional perspectives on the history of Los Angeles, as well those about its future.

      This story draws from different kinds of archives—those found in the valuable work of Vicki Ruiz, Robin Kelley, and Robert Lee—and also in the practices that Robert Farris Thompson describes as the alternative academies of aggrieved people—their music, dance, and art. While this book begins in 1940, it is important to explicate a partial history of Black–Brown affiliation and struggle, both to establish the past that I spoke of as so vital to the future, but also to delineate a mutual and enduring pattern of resistance among these groups.

      Though there are many cities with important traditions of Afro-Chicano interaction, the development of Los Angeles is an Afro-Mexican story. Afro-Mestizos comprised the majority of those recruited to establish a civilian settlement between the mission in San Gabriel and the Presidio of Santa Barbara by the governor of Alta California in the 1780s. The majority of settlers were recruited from Sinaloa (one third of whose residents were of African ancestry) and Rosario (two thirds of whose residents were listed in the census as mulattoes). Lonnie Bunch’s history of Afro-Mestizo settlement of Southern California reveals the racial composition of these first Angelenos: eight mulattoes, two mestizos, two Blacks, and one Mexicano.²⁰

      For almost fifty years Afro-mestizos were an important component of city and state politics. Pío Pico, an Afro-Mexicano from Rosario, was the last Mexican national to govern California. His brother Andrés Pico represented California at the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga (which ended the Mexican War in California) and twice served as a state senator. Until the mid-nineteenth century, many Afro-Mexicanos received land grants, which established them as a landed elite: among them they controlled vast amounts of land in the San Fernando Valley, Topanga Canyon, Eastern San Gabriel Valley, and Simi Valley; by 1820, Maria Rita Valdez was granted Rancho Rodeo de Las Aguas, which is now Beverly Hills.²¹ Beyond California, Afro-Mexicanos founded Albuquerque, San Antonio, Nacogdoches, Laredo, and the Presidio de La Bahia.²²

      The early contributions of Afro-Mexicanos in California are singularly extraordinary, but also represent an enduring legacy of a particular embodied radicalism. The African-, Native-, and Mexican-American revolutionary anarchist and labor activist Lucy Parsons gained fame among workers during the Chicago Haymarket strike of 1886 and fought against poverty, racism, capitalism, and the state her entire life. Vicente Guerrero, born to an impoverished Black indigenous family in Mexico, taught himself to read and write as he trained troops in the Sierra Madre Mountains. He contributed to the writing of Mexico’s constitution, freed its slaves, and endorsed the education and elevation of its poor and people of color, serving as Mexico’s first president of African and Native American descent.

      Africans, African Americans, Mexicans, and Indians have co-created communities with radical legacies for centuries.²³ As early as the mid-1500s, marronage communities near Veracruz such as San Lorenzo de los Negros, San Lorenzo Cerralvo, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Morenos de Amapa, and Yanga functioned as nuclei of the African legacy in Mexico, but also as sources of rebellion and resistance.²⁴ From 1560 to 1580, a group of escaped Black miners from Zacatecas joined with free Chichimec Indians northwest of city and waged rebellions against the settler communities for two decades. As Cedric Robinson has demonstrated, maroon societies in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Texas supplied a radically alternative picture of slavery, race, class, and history by establishing communities that frequently acquired the multicultural and multiracial character that liberal historians of the early twentieth century had expected of the whole nation.²⁵

      Once Mexico outlawed slavery in 1836, Blacks inhabiting regions in ambiguous reach of Mexican law demanded their freedom: Prefiguring the Dred Scott case, in 1846 a woman known only as Mary became the first Western slave to win her freedom through the legal system. Mary was brought to San Jose by her owner. When she learned that Mexican law prohibited bondage, she sued for her liberty by arguing that her enslavement was void.²⁶

      African-American artists, intellectuals, athletes, and ordinary citizens have historically identified Mexico and the border region as places of refuge from racism and inequality in the United States.²⁷ In 1937, Nannie and Carl Hansberry deliberately challenged the legal system of restrictive covenants in Chicago, which precluded the sale of property to Blacks by white owners. With the help of several white realtors and Supreme Liberty Life Insurance President Harry H. Pace (who did not disclose the race of the home loan borrowers to white property owners in the area) the Hansberrys secretly bought two properties in white neighborhoods on the East and South sides of Chicago. Their daughter Lorraine (future author of the prize-winning play A Raisin in the Sun) described the area around their home on Rhodes Avenue as a hellishly hostile white neighborhood in which literally, howling mobs surrounded our house. After a prolonged court battle, the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld the legality of the covenant and forced the family to vacate their home. Although the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision on a legal technicality, this turn of events did not curb white hostility toward the Hansberry children, who were, as Hansberry recounted,

      spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. . . . The fact that my father and the NAACP won a Supreme Court decision, in a now famous case which bears his name in the law books, is—ironically—the sort of progress our satisfied friends allude to when they presume to deride the more radical means of struggle. The cost, in emotional turmoil, time and money, which led to my father’s early death as a permanently embittered exile in a foreign country when he saw that after such sacrificial efforts the Negroes of Chicago were as ghetto-locked as ever, does not seem to figure in their calculations.²⁸

      In 1944, Carl Hansberry moved to Mexico to make a home for his family, but died of a cerebral hemorrhage before they could join him. The tragic example of Hansberry and his family demonstrates the severe social and psychological costs of the brutal racism exacted upon Black Americans, and the prominent position that Mexico occupied in the mid-twentieth-century Black imagination.

      Novelist Richard Wright’s travels in the 1940s led him to write that in Mexico, people of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority.²⁹ During his own stay in Mexico, Langston Hughes reported, here, nothing is barred from me. I am among my own people . . . for Mexico is a Brown man’s country.³⁰ Willie Wells, three-time U.S. Negro League batting champion remarked, not only do I get more money playing here, but I live like a king. . . . I am not faced with the racial problem. . . . I’ve found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. . . . Here in Mexico I am a man.³¹

      When Lorraine Hansberry attended the University of Guadalajara, she followed a strong tradition of Black American education in Mexican institutions: between 1930 and 1960, African-American artists Charles Alston, John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Sargent Claude Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, John Wilson, and Hale Woodruff reinvigorated the concept of the New Negro by studying in Mexico or with Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco.³²

      Hughes’s and Wells’s characterizations of Mexico demonstrate something worth noting here, that the desire for a homeland free of Jim Crow has sometimes generated descriptions of race relations in Mexico that are too generous and uncomplicated. Racism was and remains powerful in Mexico, though it has evolved differently from the United States at different historical moments. Yet for these early-twentieth-century Black artists and athletes, the identification of the border and Mexico as an escape from U.S. racism prevailed despite Mexico’s attempt in the 1920s to limit Negro emigration.³³

      Coalitions among oppressed minorities in California have always been present, even when they have not always ended in victory. As early as 1903, Japanese and Mexican beet workers collaborated against unfair working conditions in Oxnard. The Longshoreman’s Union that emerged from the Los Angeles General Strike of 1934 was racially integrated, as were the farm workers’ unions of the 1930s. In the latter part of that decade, Mexicana employees at CalSan protested discriminatory practices in the hiring of African Americans, so that by the early part of 1942, factory owners were forced to relent under union pressure and hire close to 30 Blacks. As third world nationalism was at its height in Los Angeles, Réies López Tijerina and the Black Panthers co-authored a peace pact; César Chávez and Bobby Seale made visible efforts to demonstrate mutual support for each activist’s constituents, and it was working-class women’s organizing that inspired the coordinated efforts of Ralph Abernathy and Corky Gonzalez for the Poor People’s March to Sacramento and Washington, DC, in 1968.³⁴

      I have chosen to write about Blacks and Chicanos in Los Angeles because they have long been pitted against each other in debates about civil, economic, and immigrant rights. These narrow depictions undermine collective memories of interracial solidarity by denying existing material and ideological connections between these communities. It is important to acknowledge the power of racial and economic divisions between these two groups, but given all the efforts to divide them, instances of unity and cross-pollination become all the more important.

      Five chapters reveal

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