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

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.

Author(s):  
Frank Andre Guridy

George Sánchez’s 2004 article “What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews” brings to light the fascinating history of the cultural and political dimensions of what he calls “radical interracialism” in the mid-twentieth century. As I delve more deeply into the racial, ethnic, and recreational history of Los Angeles, I find myself strongly indebted to the work of Sánchez and his cohorts of ethnic studies scholars working on Los Angeles. Sánchez’s research on the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights during the 1940s and ’50s has uncovered what Luis Alvarez calls a “counter-history of Los Angeles”: a narrative of the city’s and county’s history that disrupts the dominant understandings of decentralization, privatization, and apartheid-like segregation. To Sánchez, Boyle Heights was a “particular site of ethnic cooperation in the midst of racial segregation and political conservatism.” Recalling the neighborhood’s history during this period, he writes, “better situates our own search for neighborhoods of diversity that truly worked together in the past and our hope of a multiracial Los Angeles that can work together in the future.” Following his lead, I examine Sánchez’s formulation of “radical interracialism,” as articulated in his essays on Jewish cross-racial interaction in Boyle Heights and its political manifestation in the ascendance of Edward Roybal, the first Mexican American to serve in the Los Angeles City Council since the late nineteenth century. In these essays, Sánchez historicizes the making of cross-racial linkages on both cultural and political levels. Inspired by his research, I take up his challenge by embarking on my own search for radical interracialism in an unlikely yet ubiquitous urban institution—a sports stadium, whose hidden history of racial integration and public culture counters the social hierarchies inscribed in the neoliberal ballpark of the urban gentrifying present.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-49
Author(s):  
Dana Osborne

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.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-11
Author(s):  
Adam Rogers

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 201 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-545
Author(s):  
Janusz Zuziak

Lviv occupies a special place in the history of Poland. With its heroic history, it has earned the exceptionally honorable name of a city that has always been faithful to the homeland. SEMPER FIDELIS – always faithful. Marshal Józef Piłsudski sealed that title while decorating the city with the Order of Virtuti Militari in 1920. The past of Lviv, the always smoldering and uncompromising Polish revolutionist spirit, the climate, and the atmosphere that prevailed in it created the right conditions for making it the center of thought and independence movement in the early 20th century. In the early twentieth century, Polish independence organizations of various political orientations were established, from the ranks of which came legions of prominent Polish politicians and military and social activists.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Piitz

This applied thesis is focused on the full cataloguing and contextualizing of a collection of one hundred and sixteen postcards at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) depicting scenes of Toronto a the beginning of the twentieth century. Twenty-seven publishers representing international, national and regional manufacturers are identified with their imprint on the verso of the postcard. The applied thesis includes a literature survey discussing a rationale for the cataloguing of postcards, as well as a brief overview of the history of postcards and the history of the urbanization of the City of Toronto. A description and analysis of the AGO postcards provides information about the production cycle of postcards, the scope of commercial photography and the dissemination of photographic imagery in Toronto. The thesis also examines the way images were altered in the production cycle and the manner in which photographers and publishers exchanged photographs intended for postcard production.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Piitz

This applied thesis is focused on the full cataloguing and contextualizing of a collection of one hundred and sixteen postcards at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) depicting scenes of Toronto a the beginning of the twentieth century. Twenty-seven publishers representing international, national and regional manufacturers are identified with their imprint on the verso of the postcard. The applied thesis includes a literature survey discussing a rationale for the cataloguing of postcards, as well as a brief overview of the history of postcards and the history of the urbanization of the City of Toronto. A description and analysis of the AGO postcards provides information about the production cycle of postcards, the scope of commercial photography and the dissemination of photographic imagery in Toronto. The thesis also examines the way images were altered in the production cycle and the manner in which photographers and publishers exchanged photographs intended for postcard production.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elisabeth Goidanich ◽  
Carmen Rial

Abstract: The objective of this study is to interpret supermarket stores as privileged spaces for the observation of social relations. The article is based on an ethnography of shopping conducted in the city of Florianópolis, Brazil, by observing middle class housewives during their daily shopping in supermarkets. These stores are seen as places, in opposition to that proposed by Augè (1995), who affirms that supermarkets are non-places produced by supermodernity. The article discusses the history of supermarkets, their role in the cultural and social transformations of the twentieth century, as well as ethnographic data, and shows that it is possible to identify many social interactions inside Brazilian supermarkets.


2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Jaime Correa Ramírez

La referencia constante al civismo es uno de los rasgos más distintivos de la historia urbana de Pereira. Al igual que en muchas ciudades colombianas, la ideología del civismo asume la necesidad de establecer una especie de simbiosis entre la ciudad, sus espacios públicos y sus ciudadanos, tanto en lo material como en lo espiritual. En el caso de Pereira se busca identificar los aspectos más relevantes del discurso cívico que desarrollaron entidades como la Sociedad de Mejoras y el Club Rotario a través de diferentes medios escritos, poniendo especial énfasis en los valores morales que debían exhibir los ciudadanos cívicos o los "ciudadanos de bien" de la ciudad, en el proceso de transformación y modernización vivido a lo largo del siglo XX.Palabras clave: discurso, civismo, prensa, clubes y sociedades, historia local, siglo XX.The discourse of civism in Pereira, or The “sacredness” of public matters during the 20th century AbstractThe constant reference to civism is one of the most distinct characteristics of the urban history of Pereira. Similar to many Colombian cities, the ideology of civism assumes that there is a need to establish a kind of symbiosis between the city, its public spaces, and its citizens, in material as well as spiritual matters. In the case of Pereira, the author seeks to identify the most relevant aspects of the civic discourse which developed entities like the Improvement Society and the Rotary Club, through different written means, putting special emphasis on the moral values which the civic citizens (or ciudadanos de bien) must have exhibited in the process of transformation and modernization experienced throughout the 20th century. Keywords: discourse, civism, press, clubs and societies, local history, twentieth century.


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