Courtyard Sisters: Settler Fantasy and Experiment at the International Institute of Los Angeles, 1914–1940

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Dominguez
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Colonial Revival ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Young Women's Christian Association ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
Institutional Landscape ◽  
The City

Abstract This article examines the history of the International Institute of Los Angeles, one of dozens of immigrant-serving agencies to open nationwide under the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) during the 1910s. Close reading of this branch reveals how related processes of domestication, democratization, and assimilation of immigrant groups buttressed the settler colonial making of the city. Through a study of the organization’s fieldwork, cultural programs, and architectural footprint, the author argues that the Institute preserved the racial fantasies of Anglo Angelenos with its efforts to Americanize women and girls in a Spanish Colonial Revival space. This article reframes the city’s institutional landscape during the interwar period, showing how social reformers helped maintain and police boundaries of belonging in western metropoles.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

The semiotics of the deictic field: Reckoning language and experience in East Los Angeles

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-49
Author(s):  
Dana Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
East Los Angeles ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Single Speaker ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
Formative Experiences ◽  
The City

AbstractThis analysis examines the ways in which a single speaker, Ana, born in mid-century East Los Angeles, organizes and reflects upon her experiences of the city through language. Ana’s story is one that sheds light on the experiences of many Mexican Americans who came of age at a critical time in a transitioning L.A., and the slow move of people who had been up until mid-century relegated largely in and around racially and socioeconomically segregated parts of L.A. These formative experiences are demonstrated to have informed the ways that speakers parse the social and geographical landscape along several dimensions, and this analysis interrogates the symbolic value of a special category of everyday language, deixis, to reveal the intersection between language and social experience in the cityscape of L.A. In this way, it is analytically possible to not only approach the habituation and reproduction of specific deictic fields as indexical of the ways that speakers parse the city, but also to demonstrate the ways in which key moments in the history of the city have shaped the emergence and meaning of those fields.

What Color is My City?

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-11
Author(s):  
Adam Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
White Light ◽  
Sodium Vapor ◽  
Light Emitting ◽  
Lighting Technology ◽  
Artificial Lighting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gold Sodium ◽  
White Light Emitting Diodes ◽  
The City

The city of Los Angeles is converting its streetlights from orange-gold sodium vapor technology to cold, white light-emitting diodes. It’s a transition that will change the color of the city at night, in a place with a long history of experimentation with artificial lighting technology. That means not only that the city will appear different, but it will no longer correspond to memories of its coloration, or to its depictions in famous films.

scholarly journals A history of the city written in a map – cartography as the mirror of socio-political events in Gdańsk in the years of 1918–1939

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Bień
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Political Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Made In

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> A cartographic map of Gdańsk in the years of 1918&amp;ndash;1939 was very different from the other maps of Polish cities. The reasons for some differences were, among others, the proximity of the sea, the multicultural mindset of the inhabitants of Gdańsk from that period, and some historical events in the interwar period (the founding of the Free City of Gdańsk and the events preceding World War II). Its uniqueness came from the fact that the city of Gdańsk combined the styles of Prussian and Polish housing, as well as form the fact that its inhabitants felt the need for autonomy from the Second Polish Republic. The city aspired to be politically, socially and economically independent.</p><p>The aim of my presentation is to analyze the cartographic maps of Gdańsk, including the changes that had been made in the years of 1918&amp;ndash;1939. I will also comment on the reasons of those changes, on their socio-historical effects on the city, the whole country and Europe.</p>

The Los Angeles earthquakes of July, 1920

1921 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
Stephen Taber
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Southern California ◽  
History Of ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The City ◽  
Tectonic Movements

Summary More than a hundred earthquakes have been recorded in southern California during the period February-September, 1920. These earthquakes have originated along several different faults in the vicinity of Los Angeles, but all of them are believed to have resulted from the adjustment of stresses set up in the region by the same general tectonic movements. The series of shocks felt in Los Angeles on July 16th originated along faults which cut Miocene and Pliocene rocks in the northern part of the city. The three strongest shocks on July 16th had epicentral intensities of between VI and VII in the Rossi-Forel scale; and they were felt over areas of from 500 to 2500 square miles. The known seismic history of southern California and the magnitude of the post-Pleistocene movements both indicate that the seismicity of the region is relatively high. There are many faults in the vicinity of Los Angeles; some of which are known to be active, while others are suspected of being active. Fortunately those within the city are short, while the longer ones are seven to thirty miles away, and are therefore less dangerous in so far as Los Angeles is concerned.

City of Inmates

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Colonial Form ◽  
Supreme Court Rulings ◽  
The City

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation’s carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

Skateboarding and the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory J. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Sociology ◽  
Cognitive Maps ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This chapter offers a brief history of the subculture and introduces readers to skateboarding practices. There is a detailed description of tricks and a discussion of how skateboarding forces a reexamination of classic urban sociology by focusing on the specific history of the growth of Los Angeles. In doing so we come to appreciate not only how skateboarding changes one’s perception of urban space, but also how skaters’ cognitive maps of the city offer a critique of classic Chicago School sociology.

From Bahianas to the King of Pop …

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Line ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Brazilian Music ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bossa Nova ◽  
The City

This chapter traces the history of Brazilian music in Los Angeles, covering the journey of the collation of rhythms known as samba into the rest of the Americas, to the emergence of bossa nova as a major cultural force, to the post-bossa Brazilian sound in the United States. It argues that as music moves, it operates according to its own logic. Influences are fluid: a bossa nova rhythm can morph easily into a second line, a two step can slide into a samba, and writing music is, thankfully, a far more interesting way to write history than history writing. But it is undeniable that, since the late 1930s, the language, swing, and palette of Brazilian music have influenced the world and changed music in the city of Los Angeles profoundly, while very few of us noticed.

St. Augustine: First Urban Enclave in the United States

1983 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Deagan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early History ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Cultural System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Documentary Studies ◽  
The City

Archaeological and documentary investigations into the early history of St. Augustine, Florida, as an urban enclave in the Spanish colonial mold, have focused upon the city itself and the processes operating in the development and maintenance of its unique cultural system. The interaction between the data gathered by intensive, systematic archaeological testing and the detailed documentary studies has resulted in a clearer understanding of just what both classes of data actually reflect in an urban context.

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