Immigrant Children in a Pol(ICE) State

Guided by the following questions: (1) What are the experiences of immigrant children attending schools in communities experiencing police brutality and anti-immigrant sentiments? (2) How do middle school children of immigrants visually represent their experiences with legal violence? and (3) What are children’s visions of freedom and community safety in this context?, this article highlights the understudied preadolescent children of immigrants through a 2-year study of a multidisciplinary theater class at a local elementary school in South Central Los Angeles. Data includes child interviews, class observations, artwork, and performance videos, from recently arrived Mexican and Central American children aged 10 to 13 years. Findings reveal how children come to understand policing, reinforcing concepts like “good cop/bad cop,” conflating local police and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, but also imagining alternatives for community safety outside of police systems. This work contributes to the fields of immigration, abolitionist education, and ethnic studies, among others, offering new ways of supporting immigrant children through the use of arts-based tools.

Teaching in the Hood, About the Hood: A Case Study of Teachers in South Central Los Angeles

This study examines how three teachers working at a South Central high school teach critically about race and place. While building on the “spatial turn” in social science, the article draws on Critical Race Spatial Analysis to advance literature at the intersection of race, place, and pedagogy. Additionally, the article utilizes cognitive mapping to understand the teachers’ senses of place and then, through a combination of interviews, observations, and document analysis, examines how they integrate racial-spatial ideas into their teaching. Positing a “critical pedagogy of race and place,” the study concludes with implications for future research and teacher education.

Migration to the “First Large Suburban Ghetto” in America

In this article, I argue that Korean immigrant merchants were active agents who opened small businesses in South Central Los Angeles in order to overcome a range of disadvantages faced in American society. From a structural point of view, Korean immigrant merchants constituted a middleman minority group that played the dual role of “oppressed and oppressor” in the suburban ghetto. Although these merchants made efforts to maintain civil relations with their African American customers, they were often treated with hostile attitudes largely because of the exploitative relationship that existed between the two groups. However, I maintain that Korean American journalists and scholars have not only misunderstood the identity of the middleman minority as an innocent buffer but have also erroneously estimated that race relations with African Americans in Los Angeles were better than those in other areas of the United States.

Strategy: Communications and the Switchboard of Struggle

This chapter documents how indymedia uses communications to help congeal otherwise isolated and dispersed points of insurgency, conducting stories of shared struggle across space at multiple scales, from the hyper-local (within cities and neighborhoods) to the regional, national, and global. Specifically, it looks at how indymedia links movements and people in three distinct ways: (1) across local spaces, linking different communities together to build a stronger localized movement; (2) across geographic spaces, on a particular theme such as labor or immigrant rights; and (3) across space and theme, in an attempt to forge a global social movement. It also shows the shortcomings of this new strategy and political mode of action, which eschews leadership and therefore cannot build long-term political power. The chapter first considers the way the network operated as a connective tissue in the case of farmers in South Central Los Angeles to offer a rubric for this strategy of action. It then looks at different ways that this connective strategy operates at the local, national, and global levels, on- and offline.

Justice for Samuel Faulkner

The sixth chapter spans the decades between the 1920s and the 1960s. In these years, as Los Angeles took center stage in the nation’s landscape of jails and prisons, the population of African Americans incarcerated in Los Angeles shot from politically irrelevant and slightly disproportionate to politically dominant and stunningly disproportionate. It has remained so ever since. Chapter 6 tracks the origins of the incarceration of blacks in Los Angeles. In particular, it details why and how black incarceration so disproportionately followed the expansion of L.A.’s African American community. Moreover, by exhuming the first recorded killing of a young black male by the LA PD, which occurred in South Central Los Angeles on the evening of April 24, 1927, this chapter details why and how police brutality so closely accompanied black incarceration in the city. It is a brutal history attended by persistent—and, in time, explosive—black protest, tracking how community members fought police brutality between 1927 and the outbreak of the Watts Rebellion in 1965. Indeed, race, policing, and protest became inextricable as Los Angeles advanced toward becoming the carceral capital of the United States.