and others called for the recognition of the trans-border polity that linked Latinas/os in the United States to a broader field of social, economic, and political affiliations. To deny these relationships in favor of a limited path to naturalization, Moreno and others warned, would not only reduce Latinas/os to a laboring caste within the United States; it would also deform American democracy at its source, its definition of “the people.”27
Moreno’s vision of relationships of Latinas/Latinos to the “social, economic, and political affiliations” of other aggrieved groups constitutes a keen awareness of what David Harvey calls a “cartographic imagination”: an understanding of how lives in one place are affected by the unseen actions of distant strangers elsewhere.28 Moreno had personal knowledge of and political experience in many “else-wheres,” making every place she worked in significant for its mutual others.29 This flexible cognitive mapping of relations between places no doubt assisted Moreno in recognizing how Blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles could form relations between races. They did not need uniformity to have unity. They did not need to be identical to share similar identities.
When Moreno testified before the HUAC in September 1948, she displayed a determination to hold the United States accountable to its own stated ideals, echoing the deployment of moral arguments in the political movements that constituted abolition democracy and eventually led to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. “Citizenship . . . means a lot to me,” Moreno declared when she was threatened with deportation, “but the Constitution of the United States means more.”30 Moreno knew, just as Carter G. Woodson had known when in 1921 he argued publicly and compellingly that “the citizenship of the Negro in America [was] a fiction,”31 that in the absence of the most basic of human and civil rights, citizenship would mean very little.
Charlotta Bass shared a similar view, as evidenced by her sustained commitment to an uncompromising vision of total freedom for the oppressed. Born in Sumter, South Carolina, in the late 1870s, Bass was the sixth of eleven children. She moved to Rhode Island at the turn of the century, then in 1910 migrated to Los Angeles to improve her health. Soon after arriving, Bass sold subscriptions for the Eagle, a Black newspaper founded by John Neimore in 1879. Bass became the editor and publisher of the Eagle in 1912, upon the deathbed request of Neimore. She held those positions for more than forty years. In 1914, Bass hired and subsequently married Joseph Blackburn Bass, a Kansas newspaperman, who edited the paper until his death in 1934.
Bass ran for several elected offices, including the Los Angeles City Council, Congress, and the U.S. Vice Presidency. She was also a founding member of California’s Independent Progressive Party. Moreover, she established, participated in, and led numerous civil rights organizations, and in these she met and befriended prominent activists such as Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Bass was always active at the national level, but she used her positions as journalist, candidate, and activist to expose and oppose racism and injustice in Los Angeles.32
Both Moreno and Bass made white accountability and intercommunal affinities central components of their activism, long before their work on the SLDC. In her important and generative work, Regina Freer has argued that Bass’s activism in defense of Chicanos on the issues of police brutality and repatriation “implicitly challenged racialized definitions of citizenship, revealing the speciousness of hyper-sanctioned cultural purity and authenticity of the 1940s and red-baiting in the 1950s.”33 Indeed, from the time she began editing the Eagle in 1912, Bass’s writings and activism made black Los Angeles relevant to both local communities of color and international organizations. After joining the SLDC, she campaigned forcefully against the racial brutalities exacted upon Mexican-American zoot suiters during the summer of 1943.34
FIGURE 3. Charlotta Bass and Paul Robeson, circa 1949.
LOS ANGELES’S UNIQUE RACIAL POLITICS
Los Angeles became one of the first cities outside the South where antidiscrimination and civil rights struggles incorporated a mosaic of racial and ethnic groups. Of her time in LA working-class communities, Communist organizer Dorothy Healey remembered that “a strong sense of national identity held these workers together, but did not prevent them from making common cause with others.”35 Because several events in LA during the period under consideration had spatial implications for minority communities, this “common cause” takes on particular significance.
African-American citizens had no choice but to settle within the narrow corridor situated just to the south and east of downtown Los Angeles. Mexicans were also limited to specific neighborhoods: in 1940, most still lived in Central, South, and East Los Angeles. Neither Mexicans nor Blacks could purchase homes in other areas because of racially restrictive covenants supported by real estate companies, developers, and banks. The Federal Housing Administration made the adoption of racially restrictive covenants a condition for the insurance of new construction, while savings and loans associations refused to lend money to people of color who wanted to buy in white residential areas. Therefore, Mexican Americans and African Americans were forced to reside several miles away from the burgeoning industrial neighborhoods of Maywood, Pico Rivera, South Gate, and Vernon. Even if there had been no racial discrimination in hiring in wartime industries, many residents in Black and Chicano neighborhoods could not easily work the high-skill, high-wage jobs available in shipbuilding, aircraft assembly, or munitions because very few of the mass transit red cars could transport them to these sites: “There were no runs after dark, and bus, taxi, and jitney drivers were reluctant to drive into or out of South LA at night.”36 White resistance to residential integration kept most African Americans and Chicanos in urban areas while postwar jobs, which historically had been disproportionately in the suburbs, continued to flow into outlying regions.37
Although rooted in national patterns of economic racism already familiar to people of color, Los Angeles’s structures of exclusion manifested in unique ways and produced Conflicted racial experiences for Blacks and Mexicans who arrived in the city during the Second World War. Los Angeles was different from most major cities of the WWII era in that it did not develop an industrial core surrounded by an industrial suburban network. Instead, the working class worked in the industrial suburbs, but did not necessarily live or vote there. Immigration, patterns of segregation, location of defense industries, and city planners’ organization of space scattered the multiethnic working class in fragmented suburbs and produced spatial patterns in wartime and postwar Los Angeles that furthered the hegemony of business owners and their efforts to maintain LA as an open-shop city.38 While wartime manufacturers in oil, movies, apparel, automobiles, rubber, and aircraft were drawn to the region’s climate, land availability, and supply of workers and consumers, they also found the weakness of most Southern California unions to be a desirable condition for establishing industry. Aircraft manufacturing and allied industries were not centrally located, but instead surrounded the central city in “suburban industrial clusters.”39 Aircraft manufacturing had pioneered the economic foundation on which postwar community builders—promoting the ownership of low-cost, mass-produced homes in communities that reflected the principles of modern community planning—could flourish. Federal agencies encouraged, and city planners and contractors capitulated to, the establishment of new housing developments near suburban employment. Through the 1950s, then, suburbs were nearly all residential, whereas shopping and office work were much more concentrated in central business districts or downtowns. But this pattern would change after 1960 and leave urban Blacks and Chicanos in the 1960s and 1970s almost uniformly poor and also left them isolated from high-wage jobs, houses that appreciated in value, and convenient transportation routes.
The second Bracero Program, initiated during WWII in response to acute labor shortages in agriculture, brought thousands of temporary Mexican workers to harvest crops on land throughout the West and Midwest. Although the government planned to terminate the program
