soul.”120 For the rest of their lives, she and her husband Gray Bemis suffered poverty and displacement in Mexico and Guatemala. It is significant that the government could counter Moreno’s challenges to the racialized spaces of U.S. society by physically removing her from those spaces.
Bass’s persecution and Moreno’s ultimate deportation at the urging of the Tenney Commission demonstrate the severe costs exacted upon radical grassroots activists and cultural workers in the postwar era. But they also show us what is possible when people dedicate themselves to a politics of struggle that scales ideological walls containing different spheres of activism. Despite her deportation, Moreno and other immigrant labor leaders “managed to root a new ethnic identity among the Mexican-origin population in Los Angeles . . . [who] immediately involved themselves in directions which reformulated the boundaries of Chicano culture and society.”121 Forced deportation across one border did not diminish Moreno’s influence on reformulating the boundaries of Chicano physical and discursive spaces in Los Angeles. The connective resistance integral to the politics of Bass and Moreno alike expanded the notion of “local” politics, which made the struggles of Mexican youth, Chicana cannery workers, and Black property owners in Los Angeles relevant to Black and Brown struggles everywhere. And yet “Bass’ politics were a direct engagement with the particular demography, geography, politics, and economics of Los Angeles and African-Americans’ expectations of what life should be like”122 in this particular city. Both women created and expanded meaningful space for coalitional movements, not only in terms of material spatial struggles, as in the fight to acquire and maintain assets through fair housing, but also in terms of symbolic space in history. This is why examining these women together reveals critical interventions in structures of racism, imperialism, and spatial oppression over several decades.
The SLDC brought Moreno and Bass into dialogue with the politics of oppression across race, but it also led them to broader conclusions about the connections between domestic racism and the corporate globalism solidified during WWII. The retaliation that both women endured because of their activism was part of the particular strategies of divisiveness wielded by Los Angeles city officials during this period. In this instance, the failure to build a sustained multiracial movement out of the SLDC had more to do with white racism than reluctance or distrust on the part of Black, white, or Chicano communities represented in the struggle for equal rights in WWII Los Angeles.123 Nonetheless, the intersecting efforts of Moreno and Bass on behalf of the communities affected by the case allowed both to identify the cross-racial and intracommunal effects of economic disenfranchisement and structural racism for their own and future struggles.
The history examined here suggests the significance of activism among aggrieved minority groups in Los Angeles during the 1930s and early 1940s for later struggles.124 Mexican and African-American women’s activism in the 1930s and 1940s advanced cultural pluralism, integration, and intercultural understanding prior to some of the more renowned interracial activism of later periods, which is important in several respects.
First, it reveals the significance of gender to the history of interracial politics and culture. In her history of the Mothers of East Los Angeles, Mary Pardo argued that because of men’s and women’s differing social obligations to their families, group solidarity and local collective action can emerge in particularly powerful ways from neighborhood networks clearly organized by gender.125 Several labor and feminist historians have shown that the success labor struggles, from sit-down strikes to unofficial boycotts, have depended on community support largely driven by women.126 Women’s activism in the politics of education, desegregation, and gender and racial equality set the stage for new kinds of urban activism in postwar Los Angeles. Civil rights struggles among women of color incorporated a mosaic of racial and ethnic groups, contributing to new sensibilities about horizontal antagonisms, identities, and alliances. To properly understand the varying forms of radical activism in aggrieved communities, we must look beyond official histories to take into account the unofficial spaces where women and minority groups fashioned their own representation. The efforts of the SLDC, the coalescence of activists and the communities that were implicated in their activism, as well as the broad antiracist efforts that characterized Black and Chicano concerns in WWII Los Angeles offer an important example of the ways ordinary people illumined contradictions in U.S. immigration policy, racial restrictions, and official democracy. It was women who often took the lead in revealing these contradictions.
Second, across significant moments in which the politics and people of Black and Brown communities intermingled, and in which each constellation of struggle coalesced, a cross-racial and intercommunity legacy formed and became foundational for future interracial struggles in Los Angeles. While scholarship has explored this rich early history, few works underscore the relationship between the formation of interracial alliances in the 1930s and 1940s, patterns of segregation and inequality during WWII, and the repression of interracial spaces in the 1940s and 1950s. Bass’s and Moreno’s strategic deployment of community-centered consciousness and interracial politics of struggle provide rich instruction about the protracted struggles that involve Black and Latino working-class people, as well as for cultural, grassroots, and intellectual workers. In other words, Moreno and Bass are significant links in a continuous chain of Brown–Black coalitions.
Understanding the significance of this inheritance means valuing the potential contained in coalitional politics even when the gains are not immediate or apparently radical. These politics have resulted in critical interethnic challenges to structures of dominance in Los Angeles, making this story relevant to the history of diverse urban political cultures in every American city. To generate an imaginary from the constellations of struggle Bass and Moreno created in Los Angeles means understanding injustices in their full historical and social context, making resistance a part of public discourse, rejecting strategies of division, employing tactics of unity, and changing the language of oppression into a discourse of struggle and cooperation. This not only influences current sensibilities but also leaves a legacy of resistance from which others may benefit. It remains a powerful way to tell those in power how disappointed we are.
Chapter 2 considers how despite the evisceration of some communities and the meaningful spaces at their core, spatial resistance among Blacks and Browns resulted in more than trans-local solidarities stemming from dispersal, estrangement, and marginalization. Expressed spatial entitlements, particularly through music, created new articulations, new sensibilities, and new visions about the place of Black, Brown, and working-class people on the local and national landscape.
NOTES
1. Ruiz, Vicki L. “Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism” In: Ruiz, Vicki, and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Eds.), Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 175.
2. Kelley, Robin D.G. “Building Bridges: The Challenge of Organized Labor in Communities of Color.” New Labor Forum 5 (Fall/Winter 1999): 42–58.
3. See Samuels, David W., Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, Thomas Porcello, “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 330. Thanks to Josh Kun and Kara Keeling for alerting me to this work as well as to the piece by Bull and Back cited below through the co-authored introduction to the special issue “Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies” of the American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 2011): 445–459.
4. Fuentes, Leonardo Padura. Voices of Salsa: A Spoken History of the Music. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003. Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. New York: Verso, 1998.
5. Bull, Michael, and Les Back, “Introduction: Intro Sound.” The Auditory Cultures Reader. Oxford, United Kingdom: Berg, 2003, p. 4
6. Bass, Charlotta A. Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper. Los Angeles: self-published, 1960, p. 156.
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