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.
Michael Dear, Eric Schockman y Greg Hise (eds.) (1996) Rethinking Los Angeles. London: Sage. Allen Scott y Edward Soja (eds.) (1996) The city: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the end of the twentieth century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Michael Dear (ed.). (2002) From Chicago to L.A.: Making sense of urban theory. London: Sage.
