scholarly journals Playing Across Borders: Transnational Sports and Identities in Southern California and Mexico, 1930––1945

2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 360-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joséé M. Alamillo
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Southern California ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Transnational Ties ◽  
Mexican Community ◽  
Mexican Government ◽  
American Society ◽  
Mexican American Identity

This article examines the local and transnational dimensions of sports in Southern California through the activities of the Mexican Athletic Association of Southern California (MAASC) from the Great Depression to the end of World War II. This amateur athletic organization promoted sports in the barrios and colonias throughout Southern California and forged transnational ties with the Mexican government and its sports federation. MAASC and its related activities reflected two competing historical trajectories that have been subjects of debate in Chicano historiography. MAASC sports simultaneously reinvigorated transnational ties with Mexico that emphasized a Mééxico de afuera identity and contributed to the making of a Mexican American identity that connected immigrants to Southern California and American society in general. Ultimately, both impulses helped to instill a new political confidence among MAASC members to challenge the Los Angeles Department of Playground and Recreation's paternalistic approach toward the Mexican community.

Assimilative Tendencies and Curricular Crosscurrents

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gleason
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
American Society ◽  
Zoot Suit

Besides its massive impact on the institutional side of Catholic higher education, World War II affected the thinking of Catholic educators. We have already touched upon this dimension in noting how the war and postwar growth required them to expand their horizons and redouble their efforts in research, fundraising, and administration generally. Here we look more closely at how Catholics were affected by the great ideological revival of democracy that accompanied the war. This kind of influence was sometimes explicitly noted by Catholic leaders, as when Archbishop Richard Gushing of Boston called attention to the “neo-democratic mentality of returning servicemen and the university-age generation generally”; others recognized that it created problems since the Catholic church was so widely perceived as incompatible with democracy and “the American way of life.” We shall postpone examination of controversies stemming from this source to the next chapter, turning our attention in this one to the assimilative tendencies reflected in Catholics’ new appreciation for liberal democratic values, and to the major curricular concerns of the era which were also affected by the war. In no area did the democratic revival have a more profound long range effect than in the impetus it lent to the movement for racial equality and civil rights for African Americans. The publication in 1944 of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma marked an epoch in national understanding of what the book’s subtitle called “the Negro problem and modern democracy.” Myrdal himself stressed the importance of the wartime context, which made it impossible to ignore racial discrimination at home while waging war against Nazi racism. At the same time, increasing black militance, the massive migration of African Americans to northern industrial centers, and above all the great Detroit race riot of 1943—reinforced by the anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit” riots in Los Angeles the same summer—suddenly made the improvement of race relations an imperative for American society as a whole. By the end of the war, no fewer than 123 national organizations were working actively to “reduce intergroup tensions,” and the civil rights movement began a steady advance that led directly to the great judicial and political victories it won in the fifties and sixties.

Caged Birds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Ground Zero ◽  
Mexican Community ◽  
History Of ◽  
Immigrant Detention ◽  
The U.S

The fifth chapter continues to chart the rise of Mexican and Mexican American incarceration in the United States. Like Magon’s rebellion, it is a tale that unfolded in Los Angeles and across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Like the history of immigrant detention, it is a story about the collision of deportation and incarceration. But in particular, Chapter 5 examines how, during the 1920s and 1930s, the politics of controlling Mexican immigration to the United States directly prompted the criminalization of unauthorized border crossings and, in turn, triggered a steady rise in the number of Mexicans imprisoned within the United States. Home to the largest Mexican community within the United States, Los Angeles was ground zero for the politics and practices of Mexican incarceration in these years.

Organizing Capital and Controlling Race and Labor

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-76
Author(s):  
Jessica M. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Southern California ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Los Angeles Times ◽  
Porfirio Diaz ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Labor System

This chapter explores how, as Los Angeles capitalists embarked on investment ventures and urban-imperial expansion across Mexico, they extended concepts of race and labor forged in Los Angeles to build networks for investment and to control their Mexican workforce. They channelled a history of working with California’s Mexican American elite into productive partnerships with president Porfirio Díaz and other Mexican elites. Los Angeles investors also applied ideas about race and labor developed in Southern California to their investments in Mexico. These ideas were also linked to their perspective on race and American empire-building around the globe. Anglo-American investors in Los Angeles believed that a hierarchy of race justified their labor system in Southern California as well as imperial exploits around the globe. These investors included William Rosecrans; Harrison Gray Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times; Senator Thomas Bard; and oil baron Edward Doheny. They believed that Mexican land, resources, and labor could be drawn into Los Angeles’s commercial orbit in the form of a racialized labor system and “informal” empire.

Generations of Segregation

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-241
Author(s):  
George J. Sanchez
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Film Making ◽  
The City

Los Angeles was built by immigrants from the U.S. South, Asia, and especially Mexico. After 1900 the city grew as a rail terminus, Pacific port, and tourist destination. It became a focus of film making and petroleum production, and developed booming defense industries during World War II and the Cold War. Marketed as the city of dreams, continuing immigration made it increasingly Mexican while Mexicans faced residential segregation that constrained educational chances, economic opportunities, and political participation. Fragmented urban administration allowed Realty Boards and County officials to limit Mexican-American (and African-American) citizenship despite national civil rights policies promoting integration and participation. When defense, energy, and other industries declined in the turn to globalization, African American (1973-93) and Mexican American (2005-13) mayors offered images of opening while enduring segregation constrained education, employment, and life opportunities for Mexican-Americans and African Americans. New immigrants from Mexico, Central America and beyond faced lives of marginality.

Mexican Folk Music and Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Southern California: The Ramona Pageant and the Mexican Players

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-60
Author(s):  
KENNETH H. MARCUS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
Historical Dramas ◽  
Cultural Agency

AbstractIn an environment of racial tension and conflict in Southern California during the first half of the twentieth century, the Ramona Pageant and the plays by the Padua Hills Mexican Players offered Mexican American performers a vital role in perpetuating cultural memory through music and dance. The Ramona Pageant, which began in Hemet, California in 1923 and is still in operation, remains one of the longest-running pageants, or historical dramas, in U.S. history. Similarly, the Mexican Players were founded during the Great Depression in 1931 in Claremont, California and performed continuously for more than forty years. This article argues that Hispanic musicians achieved a degree of cultural agency in these plays through the performance of Mexican folk music, especially canciones (love songs) and corridos (narrative ballads), which were essential elements in the “soundscape” of the Southwest. Although Anglos created and directed the plays, they did not create or perform the music. In spite of the plays’ largely romanticized portrayals of California's Spanish and Mexican past, they provided some of the few prominent forums in Southern California for Mexican American musicians and dancers during the first half of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Our Car Culture Is Not a Problem

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-64
Author(s):  
Colin Marshall
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Single Family ◽  
World War ◽  
Residential Architecture ◽  
Car Culture ◽  
Single Use ◽  
Family House

The author tells of how he once loved the Case Study houses, commissioned from several modern architects by Arts & Architecture magazine in the years after World War II with the goal of developing a new style of housing in southern California, and why he eventually came to see those houses as part of what holds Los Angeles and other Californian cities back from classically urban levels of density and functionality. He argues that the “house culture” instilled by the Case Study houses and other single-use, single-family-house-oriented forms of residential architecture have caused more problems for the Californian city than even its oft-criticized “car culture.”

scholarly journals Discourse as a language contact phenomenon: evidence from Mexican-American bilinguals

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
Judyta Pawliszko
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
English Language ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Ethnography Of Communication ◽  
Contact Phenomenon ◽  
Linguistic System ◽  
Discourse Strategies ◽  
American Society

This article is the result of a study conducted within the theoretical framework of ethnography of communication. One of the main purposes of this study was to examine discourse strategies among Mexican-American bilinguals residing in the Los Angeles area. The examination of strategies used in oral and written conversations demonstrates the existence of numerous stylistic features. Mexican-American bilingual discourse is characterized by the use of code-switching, culturally-motivated borrowings from English and, in general, the dominance of the English language in conversation. Undoubtedly, these discursive phenomena stem from socioeconomic and cultural forces and the prestige of English as the dominant linguistic system of the American society.

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