The World in a City

This book examines interracial labor and radical organizing in Los Angeles, California, and the United States/Mexico borderlands between 1900 and 1930. Domestic and transnational migration to Los Angeles—including from Europe, Asia, and Mexico—created one of the most racially diverse regions in the United States. Uneven regional economic development drove continued labor mobility for many working-class residents. The book documents a thread of working-class culture in which interracial solidarities formed to oppose capitalism, racism, and often the state itself. These solidarities flourished most frequently among workers with the most precarious employment and living situations, fueled by the ideals advanced in anarchism, socialist internationalism, the syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). This book uses the anarchist notion of affinity to frame its understanding of interracial organizing as the mobility of workers often made coalitions and solidarities short lived. Affinity frames the individual cooperative actions that shaped the social practices of resistance often too unstructured or episodic for historians to capture. This approach maintains focus on the continuity of organizing practices while tracing changing solidarities, associations, and organizations that formed and dissolved through struggle, repression, and factionalism. The radical practices that germinated in and near Los Angeles produced some of the broadest examples of interracial cooperation in U.S. history.