“acquired an addiction” for the low-cost foreign laborers. This transformed the face of agricultural work. Blacks, along with Mexicans, East Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, and Anglos had long constituted farm labor, many since the first development of agribusiness in the state. But many of these laborers were now replaced by large numbers of Mexican immigrant workers. Lobbyists managed to establish Mexicans as more or less the permanent faces of California agricultural labor well beyond the 1940s. By the passage of a series of public laws, the Bracero contract system was legally extended through 1964, but its effects are still visible today in the majority of Mexican and Central-American pickers and packers in the California agricultural industry.
After WWII, Mexican immigrants settled permanently in communities throughout the Southern California basin. LA received the heaviest in-migration, and, consequently, recent immigrants dominated community life.40 But urban Mexican Americans would pay a high price in the postwar restructuring of the city’s ethno-racial order: in Chapter 2, I examine the spatial consequences of the forced removal of several thousand Mexicans from Chavez Ravine to make way for a housing project that was never built but later became the site of Dodger Stadium.
Anglo immigrants from other states brought their own experiences of economic depression into this unique pattern of racial labor relations in Los Angeles. During the Depression, “nothing bothered Okies more than California’s system of racial and ethnic relations. They were shocked by signs reading ‘no white laborers need apply.’”41 But African Americans and Mexicans often suffered material consequences from the racialization of labor in Los Angeles in ways that poor whites did not. The reality was that although some Mexicans and Blacks benefited from increased job opportunities, Anglo immigrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas typically secured better jobs and ascended more rapidly to well-paid, skilled positions. Matt García demonstrates this phenomenon in 1941 in his description of the Ventura County Limoneira Company Strike. According to García, the pickers and packers, who at the time were mainly Mexicans, demanded a modest increase in pay after a decade of low wages. The company responded by evicting the nearly 700 Mexican employees (organized as the AFL-affiliated Agricultural and Citrus Workers Union, Local 22342) and replaced them with migrant farm workers from Oklahoma and Arkansas. García goes on to show that Mexican workers were actually rehired after a four-month strike that was not only tragically unsuccessful but also came with a terribly insulting consequence: White laborers were replaced by the original Mexican laborers, but only after the latter would accept the same wages they had previously worked for.42 These were the kind of tactics that shaped patterns of racism in Los Angeles: business anti-unionism helped to ensure a steady supply of cheap white labor, but cheap white labor feared the even cheaper Mexican and Black labor.43 This ongoing competition for jobs, the large number of Southern white immigrants to the area, and the systems supportive of segregation that were already in existence spawned a reorganization and reinvigoration of the Ku Klux Klan. In the immediate postwar years, the Los Angeles Klan pursued a campaign of intimidation aimed at keeping African Americans out of “white” neighborhoods.44
FIGURE 4. Members of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, Local 700, picket at Phelps-Dodge Cooper Products plant in Los Angeles to demand higher wages and improved benefits, circa 1948.
Antagonism was not limited to Black–white or Mexican–white Conflicts in labor and housing. J. Max Bond observed in 1936 that whereas certain factories categorized Mexicans as “colored,” African Americans not only worked with them but were also given positions over them. In other plants, he found that Mexicans and whites worked together. Further research indicated that white workers often accepted African Americans and objected to Mexicans; still another pattern was found in other plants, with white workers accepting Mexicans but objecting to Japanese workers.45 These compounded racial encounters extended to interracial residential neighborhoods and influenced cultural productions and racial sensibilities. The multiplicity of racial and ethnic groups living in close proximity was a factor that made LA unique.
In an autobiographical account of life in East LA after WWII, author Luis Rodriguez shows how Mexicans and Blacks shared both physical places and discursive spaces. He recounts:
For the most part, the Mexicans in and around Los Angeles were economically and socially closest to Blacks. As soon as we understood English, it was usually the Black English we first tried to master. Later . . . Blacks used Mexican slang and the cholo style; Mexicans imitated the Southside swagger . . . although this didn’t mean at times we didn’t war with one another, such being the state of affairs at the bottom.46
Rodriguez’s account illustrates how complicated relationships were between Blacks and Mexicans. There were many interethnic and class antagonisms in multiethnic postwar LA. Yet even with the rivalries that residential segregation, labor discrimination, and migration produced, the unjust practices of business, education, and housing authorities provided more reasons for coalitions between workers than for antagonisms.47 The contradictions between the national wartime and Cold War rhetoric about freedom on the one hand and racial exclusion in education, hiring, and housing on the other helped some Blacks and Mexicans to see themselves in overlapping struggles for cultural and political equality.
SPATIAL ENTITLEMENT
These struggles, the interrelated and collective articulation of the rights of people of color, also existed in an alternative public sphere, one driven by Black and Chicano aspirations to survive and create meaningful futures. Given the efforts by LA city officials to suppress and control working-class expressive culture, actual physical spaces where assertions of dignity and community entitlement were articulated become even more significant. These spaces contained indispensable networks of information and affinity and creatively invited reflections on social issues in valuable ways. I argue that it is in the space between mobility and containment that many Black and Brown people in Los Angeles struggled to preserve their neighborhoods, to enjoy the freedom to congregate, and to create the mutual spaces of political and cultural expression that inspire collective success.
The parallel and mutual activism of Bass and Moreno produced a politics of spatial entitlement with important gendered dimensions. Space has a significant impact on many aspects of women’s lives, from social relationships to economic opportunities.48 Lisa Pruitt argues that scholars of feminism have relied too heavily upon history alone as “a lens through which to reveal disadvantage and justice.” Rather, she says, scholars should engage “not only history, but also geography,” as “spatial aspects of women’s lives implicate inequality and moral agency.”49 One need only peruse the historical record of women’s activism to observe that women-centered knowledge of oppression and spatial containment has resulted in some of the most effective strategies of resistance, even though many of those stories have been marginalized in the historical record. For example, Emma Temecula’s activism exposed the terrible economic and physical brutality that Mexican and immigrant workers in Depression-era San Antonio faced “at a time when neither Mexicans nor women were expected to speak at all.”50 Her organizing work among multiracial groups of pecan shellers and women garment workers on San Antonio’s West Side helped to generate new working-class identities and subsequently established a consistent and ardent visibility for the people who formed the foundation of the city’s industries. This generated new spatial meanings for San Antonio, which was one of the few places in the nation where Black, Brown, and white people lived and worked together. It brought the histories and present-day struggles of seemingly divergent groups into a mutual spatial relationship, and fashioned a model of interracial activism from which scholars and activists have drawn for generations. The West Side of San Antonio became a “real, material place [where] spatial-social relations shape both the opportunities and constraints for the production of a socially just world.”51 Around the world, women have resisted spatial and ideological immobilization, and this has had significant impacts upon justice
