The Tortilla-Mercedes Divide in Los Angeles

The Tortilla-Mercedes Divide is the social and economic separation between the more affluent White and poorer Mexican populations in greater Los Angeles. The Divide has existed for over a century and is probably at least as strong today as in the past. Although some social processes are working to weaken the Divide, during the last three decades these processes have been counterbalanced by demographic, cultural, and economic trends that tend to exacerbate the Divide. The growing income gap between Whites and Mexicans is particularly pronounced. Mexican-White residential segregation is moderately high and has been rising slightly. Developing closer personal contact between Whites and Mexicans, improving the employment skills of Mexicans through education, and reducing the in-flow of less educated immigrants might conceivably diminish the Divide. As of the present, efforts in these directions have not been effective.     

Between the cosmopolitan and the parochial: the immigrant gentrifier in Koreatown,Los Angeles

This paper questions the currently lopsided relationship between the cosmopolitan and the parochial, in which the former is favored both conceptually and empirically. In response, we propose a relational framework for bringing them into conversation, simultaneously recasting and re-animating longstanding debates via three framing devices – the process of relationality/territoriality, disposition, and spaces of encounter – embedded in and through the subject of the immigrant-gentrifier in Koreatown, Los Angeles, itself a novel category that has hitherto eluded systematic research. We present the results of 25 interviews of Korean immigrant-gentrifiers and 10 key informant interviews. The results constitute a parochial critique that emerges as a series of conflicted paradoxes but also productive tensions: between an ostensibly transnational process compromised by a profoundly homegrown, parochial set of investors and outlooks; between a set of dispositions that seek inner-city diversity and density, yet simultaneously sheltered from its spillover costs; and spaces of encounter marked by a gap between the promise of truly open spaces and the reality of guarded and self-segregated ones. Ultimately, this paper does double duty – conceptually rebalancing the cosmopolitan-parochial relationship, but in doing so empirically elevating the emergence of the understudied immigrant-gentrifier category.     

被遗忘的工人郊区化——以洛杉矶大都市区为例(1920-1940)

美国郊区史研究的主流观点认为,中产阶级白人是郊区最早的居民,也是数量上占绝对优势的群体,甚至郊区就是中产阶级白人居住区的同义语。这种观点不仅在美国,而且在我国学术界也有很大影响。然而,根据近年的研究,许多大都市区也有数量可观的工人郊区,这一点洛杉矶最为典型。1920—1940年间,工人郊区曾是这里最主要的郊区模式,工人是此时洛杉矶郊区化的主要参与者,其动力是郊区的工业化进程、廉价住房市场和交通技术的进步。通过对人口统计数据中居民的职业、受教育情况、族裔、住房等信息的分析,可以揭示这种异于传统的郊区化模式。研究此前被认为不存在或被忽略的工人郊区的历史,有助于更全面地理解郊区化进程,丰富对大都市区发展历史的认识,也部分说明了环境不公正形成的历史原因。     

The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles

In her 2005 article, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and thePolitical Uses of the Past," Jacquelyn Dowd Hall called on scholarsto complicate the story of civil rights by looking beyond atraditional narrative that begins in 1954, ends in 1965, focuseson the South, and features Martin Luther King, Jr. as the leaderof a single-voiced chorus of interracial activists who overcameracial barriers nonviolently. The recent wave of histories aboutarts movements in African-American communities (e.g., Pointfrom Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists’ Group ofSt. Louis, by Benjamin Looker, 2004,     

Materializing Inequality: The Archaeology of Tourism Laborers in Turn-of-the-Century Los Angeles

This article traces the historical marginalization of tourism workers in Southern California, a region made popular in the late 1800s for its numerous leisurely activities. Workers employed in Southern California’s hotel industry continue to face discrimination, low wages, and dangerous and environmentally hazardous work conditions, policies that originated during the development of the region’s tourism industry. Using California’s most popular tourist site from 1893 to 1936, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway, as a case study, this article examines the historical spatial, ideological, and legal factors that have contributed to the contemporary stratification of Los Angeles’ hotel laborers. It concludes with an emphasis on how archaeological and archival research can be used to help modern day tourism laborers gain the attention and benefits they so direly deserve.     

The Paradigmatic City: Postindustrial Illusion and the Los Angeles School

In the 1980s a group of geographers known informally as the Los Angeles School proclaimed Los Angeles as the paradigmatic metropolis of the late-twentieth century. The postmodern/flexible specialization model Los Angeles School adherents developed to explain Los Angeles and validate its paradigmatic status is critiqued theoretically and empirically. The unfortunate timing of their claims of Los Angeles' suzerainty over the Pacific Rim is discussed, and the development and status of its propulsive industrial sectors, such as armaments, aerospace, entertainment, finance, and real estate, are examined. The armaments industry receives special attention because of its critical role in postwar Los Angeles' growth and subsequent decline and because the Los Angeles School devoted considerable research and even praise to this particular type of government "warfare" spending as a key constituent of the area's technopole. The entertainment industry is not sufficient to extract Los Angeles from its continuing crisis. At the moment, Los Angeles lacks any credible plan for overcoming the contemporary malaise. The difficulties in the Los Angeles School's analysis are held to stem from their theoretical synthesis of postmodernism and flexible specialization, a natural but unfortunate Ptolemaic perspective expressed in the belief that one's particular locale is paradigmatic and a lack of recognition of the malignant aspects of defense-spurred economic development.     

Of floods and droughts: The uneven politics of stormwater in Los Angeles

Stormwater is a complex political and geographical problem. It is at once bound to land-use decisions, tied to geographical features such as lakes and rivers, and capable of flowing across different political boundaries and jurisdictions. In this paper, I empirically focus on how disparate understandings of stormwater are forged through different institutional arrangements and the ways multiple actors interact across scales of governance in Los Angeles. The results indicate four discourses influence decisions on urban stormwater management and are articulated through different forms of knowledge and power in environmental governance. The discourses diverge over contrasting perspectives on infrastructural interventions, the role of economic approaches, and the need for new institutions and rules. I suggest that disagreement may not deter integration and collaboration across different scales of governance, but without addressing conflict over key discursive claims about how stormwater governance should proceed, broadly accepted outcomes may remain elusive. With current trends in environmental governance moving towards hybrid forms that bring together groups that transcend traditional organizational structures, this paper reveals how more sustainable outcomes are being devised through current configurations of knowledge and power.     

Sunshine and the Open Shop: Ford and Darwin in 1920s Los Angeles

By 1910, Los Angeles was already notorious as national capital of the open shop. During World War I, the Chamber of Commerce launched an ambitious campaign to attract eastern investment to new manufacturing districts southeast of downtown. With the arrival of hundreds of branch plants in the 1920s, Los Angeles' business leaders—quoting Ford and vulgarizing Darwin—embraced a sweeping vision of Urban Eugenics based on scientific factory planning, proprietary industrial suburbs, mass-produced bungalows, and a racially selected workforce. Even Mother Nature was a scab.     

The Paradox of Contemporary Immigrant Political Mobilization: Organized Labor, Undocumented Migrants, and Electoral Participation in Los Angeles

This article illuminates a paradox in the contemporary political mobilization of new Americans. While labor unions are taking an increasingly active role in the successful mobilization of foreign‐born residents in electoral politics, a substantial number of these newly mobilized Americans are undocumented migrants and residents, and thus are members of a growing and permanently disenfranchised working class. While this marginalized labor force benefits capital, an expanding long‐term, non‐citizen population presents a serious challenge to democratic politics. In this article, I discuss a case study which demonstrates both sides of this paradox. Facilitated by broader Latino political mobilization, their membership in progressive labor unions, and labor's shifting political strategy, many undocumented residents of Los Angeles are participating in candidate endorsements, campaign rallies, and "get out the vote" efforts, even though they are unable to vote on election day. Their actions portend future reconfigurations of the boundaries which surround citizenship and suffrage.     

Sex in the City: The Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963–79

In Los Angeles, Hollywood in particular, straight‐themed pornography and gay male nightlife became more visible and, moral reformers believed, of grave public concern between the early 1960s and the early 1970s. As a result, defining the limits of sexual freedom became a problem for urban public officials, who resolved the dilemma by casting heterosexual sex entertainment as disruptive of neighbourhood quality of life, making it a question of property values and crime, and reframing gay nightlife as an issue of privacy and the right of public assembly. The article considers battles over commercial pornography and battles over gay male rights and culture. As the civil rights and black power movements commanded, then lost, the attention of liberals, sexual libertarians and a mobilised gay rights movement forced urban politicians to reconsider the place of sex and sexual identity in public life. A new generation of urban liberals faced a difficult challenge: to respond to their constituents' libertarian views of sex and sexuality while not appearing to endorse civic disorder and economic decline. They had to defend both privacy rights and property rights.     

Labor resistance and municipal power: Scalar mismatch in the Los Angeles Green New Deal

In 2019, the Mayor of Los Angeles announced the Los Angeles Green New Deal (LAGND), an ambitious plan to shift the city's power system to 100% renewables by 2045. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP)—the electricity provider for the city and the largest municipally-owned utility in the United States—began a consultation process with local stakeholders and energy system modelers to determine possible scenarios to accomplish this goal. While the LAGND was lauded by environmentalists and progressives both within Los Angeles and beyond, it has been heavily opposed by the IBEW 18, the union that represents nearly all employees at LADWP. IBEW 18 has staged protests, created political advocacy organizations, and funded anti-decarbonization political candidates. This paper draws on 20 semi-structured interviews and other secondary materials to understand the union's oppositionand to demonstrate some of the unique challenges that municipal-scale Green New Deal (GND) plans face. We argue that the tensions between the mayor's office and unionized utility workers can be explained, at least in part, by three instances of scalar misalignment—or mismatch—that arise from trying to undertake a GND plan at the city level. These include mismatch between: (1) the scales of political activism and engagement between the mayor and the union, (2) the aims of the GND narrative and the limits imposed by the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles, and (3) the current and future geographies of the electric power system and related infrastructure and its path dependencies.