Hobos in Heaven

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Men ◽  
Convict Labor ◽  
Local Jail ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The City ◽  
Male Incarceration

Chapter 2 moves deeper into the U.S. era, chronicling how, between the 1880s and 1910s, authorities in Los Angeles redirected and expanded the city’s carceral capacity. They did so while targeting a particular population: poor white men, namely those popularly disparaged as “tramps” and “hobos” for migrating constantly, working little, and living and loving beyond the bounds of the nuclear family ideal. By 1910, when white men comprised nearly 100 percent of the local jail population, Los Angeles operated one of the largest jail systems in the country. And, as the city rapidly grew during these years, Los Angeles authorities operated a large convict labor program. In turn, white men sentenced to the chain gang cut roads, beautified parks, built schools, and so on. Chapter 2 details the rise of white male incarceration at the turn of the twentieth century and unveils the little-known history of how incarcerated white men built the infrastructure of the growing city. From Sunset Boulevard to the paths winding around Dodger Stadium, city residents still walk, ride, and run on the imprint of their labors.

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.

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.

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.

Family Structure in Los Angeles, California: 1850–1900

1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Barbara Laslett ◽  
Katherine Nash
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social History ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Life Patterns ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

In an overview of recent research on the history of the family, Tamara Hareven (1991) points out that this field of study took its inspiration from developments in historical demography and from the “new social history” of the 1960s. Family historians, like other social historians, had “a commitment to reconstructing the life patterns of ordinary people, to viewing them as actors as well as subjects in the process of change” (ibid.: 95). The flowering of research in this field has provided us with a more detailed understanding of the relationship between social change and family life than was previously available. We have learned, among other things, that rather than a single trajectory of change from extended family life before industrialization to the nuclear family afterward, changes in family organization have rarely been invariant, linear, or unidirectional.

Where are the Women in the History of Aging?

1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Chary Feinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Aging Process ◽  
White Men ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Female Slaves

Many Historians of the social aging process have focused primarily on the experiences of aging white men. A prime example is provided in the seminal work of David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978). In tracing the reversal in societal attitudes toward the aged, from gerontocratic to gerontophobic, Fischer argues that the authority of the elders in the eighteenth century was very great (1978: 220). Clearly, he was not referring to women for, as Fischer himself acknowledges, “no one would claim that colonial females exerted much political power.” And obviously, he was not including black male and female slaves or poor white men. Nor does his general theme of exultation apply to aging colonial widows who were treated with a contempt which deepened all the more by their womanhood. Some were actually driven away by their neighbors, who feared an increase in the poor rates. The legal records of the colonies contain many instances of poor widows who were … forced to wander from one town to another (Fischer, 1978: 63).

scholarly journals Apartheid's Immorality Act and the fiction of heteronormative whiteness

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Carolin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
History Of ◽  
Apartheid Regime ◽  
Political Turmoil

This article traces both the centrality and fragility of the figure of the heterosexual white male to the moral and ideological core of the apartheid regime. Through a comparative reading of Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and Gerald Kraak's Ice in the Lungs (2006), the article examines how apartheid's Immorality Act functioned as the legislative mechanism to produce and police heteronormative whiteness. The randomness and unpredictability of sexual desire in both historical novels expose the tenuousness of this idealised heteronormative whiteness that lay at the centre of the apartheid project. Situated within the moral panic and political turmoil of the 1970s, the novels identify sex as a powerful lens through which to read the history of apartheid. While Mda's satirical novel focuses on transgressive interracial sexual desire, Kraak's realist text explores same-sex desire and intimacy. My reading of the two novels engages with the political history of apartheid's sexual policing and insists on the inextricable entanglement of its heteronormative and racial supremacist provisions. The traditional ideological centrality of the vulnerable white woman is displaced in the novels by white men whose transgressive sexual desires for black women (in Mda's novel) and other white men (in Kraak's) refuse the certainty and naturalness of heteronormative whiteness. 

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