Organizing Capital and Controlling Race and Labor

Author(s):  
Jessica M. Kim

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.

Author(s):  
Jessica M. Kim

This chapter explores how Los Angeles’s imperial aspirations at the end of the nineteenth century originated with figures such as Civil War veteran and diplomat William Rosecrans, who campaigned vocally for investors in Southern California to invest in Mexico and to tie the two regions together through financial networks. For context, it gives an overview of the Spanish empire in Los Angeles as well as the American ideology of Manifest Destiny that prompted the Mexican-American War. It then explores early investment connections between Los Angeles and Mexico through the figures of Rosecrans, Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, Mexican diplomat Guillermo Andrade, and Mexican American Ignacio Sepúlveda. These individuals were instrumental in creating an investment and trade network based in Los Angeles and extending into Mexico as early as the 1870s. Many of these individuals also advocated for the creation of an “informal” American empire to facilitate investment in Mexico and the growth of Los Angeles.


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.


1921 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
Stephen Taber

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.


Author(s):  
Kara K. Keeling ◽  
Scott T. Pollard

Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature surveys food’s function in children’s texts, showing how the socio-cultural contexts of food reveal children’s agency through examining texts that vary from historical to contemporary, non-canonical to classics, the Anglo-American to multicultural traditions, including a variety of genres, formats, and audiences: realism, fantasy, cookbooks, picture books, chapter books, YA novels, and film. The first chapter tracks children’s cookbooks over 150 years to show how adults’ expectations change based on shifting ideologies of child capability. Subsequent chapters survey canonical authors. Social work theory, British rural and urban cultures, and poverty inform the analysis of the foodways that underlie Beatrix Potter’s animal tales. Investigating Jewish immigration and foodways, food manufacturing, and roadside/programmatic architecture reveals Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen as an immigrant Jewish and natively American work. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books work as a künstlerroman; Mary Douglas’s semiotic analysis and the history of honey and bees show Pooh as a poet who celebrates food. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books contrast with Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark series: differing foodways showcase competing cultural and environmental values. The final chapters examine intersections of geography, history, and food in contemporary texts. Francesca Lia Block’s Dangerous Angels reflects Los Angeles culture. Disney•Pixar’s Ratatouille showcases French haute cuisine in its story of otherness. In One Crazy Summer and its sequels, Rita Williams-Garcia tracks the movement of African American internal diasporas, through southern foodways, soul food, and the Black Panthers’ breakfast program. Refugee Studies demonstrate how food is a primary signifier of the difficulties posed by forced migration in Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again.


1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Elizabeth C. Ramirez

The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of Mexico's “Golden Age.” During this time Mexico received bounteous foreign capital, industry and agriculture flourished, railroads pushed their way south from the United States, the ancient reales de minas of the Spaniards reopened, and smelters began to “belch their yellow fumes into the desert air.” The valuable silver, gold, copper, lead, and zinc flowed north to feed the rapidly expanding commerce and industry ofthe United States, and many domestic products found a ready market abroad. The capital city was cleaned up and modernized, electric lights and streetcars were everywhere, and many new buildings arose, such as the elaborate Palace of Fine Arts. Porfirio Díaz, Mexico's president during these years, surrounded himself with able científicos, a group of brilliant lawyers and economists who “worshipped at the new and glittering shrine of Science and Progress” and who as cultivated men brought, along with Mexico's material improvements, cultural ornaments as well. They encouraged poetry, novels, art, and music, all of which thrived in Mexico City. The theatre was just as much a part of that cultural growth as the other arts. Beyond question the economic and cultural development of Mexico during the regime of Don Porfirio was great.


2005 ◽  
Vol 182 ◽  
pp. 447-449
Author(s):  
Robin Jones

Over the last decade, there has been a growing media interest in the rise to world prominence of Chinese sport, fuelled first by the startling performances of China's athletes in the mid- 1990s, then by their declared interest in staging the 2000 Olympic Games, and ultimately their successful bid for the 2008 Games. As if to underline this, China leapt into second place in the medals tally of the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, thus ensuring that the media took full note of the Middle Kingdom. However, in the corresponding period (and in fact much further back) there has been little serious interest amongst Western authors writing specifically about sport in China. Indeed, of the four hundred or so references in Marrow of the Nation, just a handful are by Western authors.In finely honed detail, Andrew Morris traces the development of sport in Republican China from the early years of the 20th century, drawing a carefully argued distinction between the Anglo-American and the Euro-Japanese influences that had a major effect in shaping China's early sporting identity (although the separation of the two influences, associating Anglo with American and Euro with Japanese, glosses over the importance of European figures in British sporting history). What is striking in unravelling the threads of Chinese history, is the manner in which China “swayed with the winds of foreign influence” as the leaders tried to develop a national and modern sporting consciousness. As chapter two reveals, by the 1920s, there were also clear traces of Soviet influence – fitness and hygiene, new nationalism, new Chinese man, new meanings for sport.


Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández

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.


2003 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian C. Evans ◽  
Sandra L. Cassady

Objective:To describe the underlying conditions that predispose athletes to sudden cardiac death (SCD) and review signs and symptoms that indicate an athlete is at risk.Data Sources:MEDLINE, theLos Angeles TimesandTriathlon Timesarchives, and other sources identified in the references of articles initially located therein. A total of 43 references were included.Conclusions:Most cases of SCD in younger athletes (≤35 years) are attributable to multiple hereditary conditions, with familial hyper-trophic cardiomyopathy being the primary cause, whereas the major cause of SCD in older athletes (>35 years) is coronary artery disease. Health-care professionals evaluating athletes should pay particular attention to past medical and family history. Items in an athlete’s screening that suggest increased risk include a history of chest pain, syncope, excessive shortness of breath, irregular heart rate or murmur, or a history of SCD in an immediate family member.


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.


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