of the Treaty of Cahuenga (which ended the Mexican War in California) and twice served as a state senator. Until the mid-nineteenth century, many Afro-Mexicanos received land grants, which established them as a landed elite: among them they controlled vast amounts of land in the San Fernando Valley, Topanga Canyon, Eastern San Gabriel Valley, and Simi Valley; by 1820, Maria Rita Valdez was granted Rancho Rodeo de Las Aguas, which is now Beverly Hills.21 Beyond California, Afro-Mexicanos founded Albuquerque, San Antonio, Nacogdoches, Laredo, and the Presidio de La Bahia.22
The early contributions of Afro-Mexicanos in California are singularly extraordinary, but also represent an enduring legacy of a particular embodied radicalism. The African-, Native-, and Mexican-American revolutionary anarchist and labor activist Lucy Parsons gained fame among workers during the Chicago Haymarket strike of 1886 and fought against poverty, racism, capitalism, and the state her entire life. Vicente Guerrero, born to an impoverished Black indigenous family in Mexico, taught himself to read and write as he trained troops in the Sierra Madre Mountains. He contributed to the writing of Mexico’s constitution, freed its slaves, and endorsed the education and elevation of its poor and people of color, serving as Mexico’s first president of African and Native American descent.
Africans, African Americans, Mexicans, and Indians have co-created communities with radical legacies for centuries.23 As early as the mid-1500s, marronage communities near Veracruz such as San Lorenzo de los Negros, San Lorenzo Cerralvo, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Morenos de Amapa, and Yanga functioned as nuclei of the African legacy in Mexico, but also as sources of rebellion and resistance.24 From 1560 to 1580, a group of escaped Black miners from Zacatecas joined with free Chichimec Indians northwest of city and waged rebellions against the settler communities for two decades. As Cedric Robinson has demonstrated, maroon societies in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Texas supplied a radically alternative picture of slavery, race, class, and history by establishing communities that “frequently acquired the multicultural and multiracial character that liberal historians of the early twentieth century had expected of the whole nation.”25
Once Mexico outlawed slavery in 1836, Blacks inhabiting regions in ambiguous reach of Mexican law demanded their freedom: Prefiguring the Dred Scott case, in 1846 a woman known only as “Mary” became the first Western slave to win her freedom through the legal system. Mary was brought to San Jose by her owner. When she learned that Mexican law prohibited bondage, she sued for her liberty by arguing that her enslavement was void.26
African-American artists, intellectuals, athletes, and ordinary citizens have historically identified Mexico and the border region as places of refuge from racism and inequality in the United States.27 In 1937, Nannie and Carl Hansberry deliberately challenged the legal system of restrictive covenants in Chicago, which precluded the sale of property to Blacks by white owners. With the help of several white realtors and Supreme Liberty Life Insurance President Harry H. Pace (who did not disclose the race of the home loan borrowers to white property owners in the area) the Hansberrys secretly bought two properties in white neighborhoods on the East and South sides of Chicago. Their daughter Lorraine (future author of the prize-winning play A Raisin in the Sun) described the area around their home on Rhodes Avenue as “a hellishly hostile white neighborhood in which literally, howling mobs surrounded our house.” After a prolonged court battle, the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld the legality of the covenant and forced the family to vacate their home. Although the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision on a legal technicality, this turn of events did not curb white hostility toward the Hansberry children, who were, as Hansberry recounted,
spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. . . . The fact that my father and the NAACP “won” a Supreme Court decision, in a now famous case which bears his name in the law books, is—ironically—the sort of “progress” our satisfied friends allude to when they presume to deride the more radical means of struggle. The cost, in emotional turmoil, time and money, which led to my father’s early death as a permanently embittered exile in a foreign country when he saw that after such sacrificial efforts the Negroes of Chicago were as ghetto-locked as ever, does not seem to figure in their calculations.28
In 1944, Carl Hansberry moved to Mexico to make a home for his family, but died of a cerebral hemorrhage before they could join him. The tragic example of Hansberry and his family demonstrates the severe social and psychological costs of the brutal racism exacted upon Black Americans, and the prominent position that Mexico occupied in the mid-twentieth-century Black imagination.
Novelist Richard Wright’s travels in the 1940s led him to write that in Mexico, “people of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority.”29 During his own stay in Mexico, Langston Hughes reported, “here, nothing is barred from me. I am among my own people . . . for Mexico is a Brown man’s country.”30 Willie Wells, three-time U.S. Negro League batting champion remarked, “not only do I get more money playing here, but I live like a king. . . . I am not faced with the racial problem. . . . I’ve found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. . . . Here in Mexico I am a man.”31
When Lorraine Hansberry attended the University of Guadalajara, she followed a strong tradition of Black American education in Mexican institutions: between 1930 and 1960, African-American artists Charles Alston, John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Sargent Claude Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, John Wilson, and Hale Woodruff reinvigorated the concept of the “New Negro” by studying in Mexico or with Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco.32
Hughes’s and Wells’s characterizations of Mexico demonstrate something worth noting here, that the desire for a homeland free of Jim Crow has sometimes generated descriptions of race relations in Mexico that are too generous and uncomplicated. Racism was and remains powerful in Mexico, though it has evolved differently from the United States at different historical moments. Yet for these early-twentieth-century Black artists and athletes, the identification of the border and Mexico as an escape from U.S. racism prevailed despite Mexico’s attempt in the 1920s to limit Negro emigration.33
Coalitions among oppressed minorities in California have always been present, even when they have not always ended in victory. As early as 1903, Japanese and Mexican beet workers collaborated against unfair working conditions in Oxnard. The Longshoreman’s Union that emerged from the Los Angeles General Strike of 1934 was racially integrated, as were the farm workers’ unions of the 1930s. In the latter part of that decade, Mexicana employees at CalSan protested discriminatory practices in the hiring of African Americans, so that by the early part of 1942, factory owners were forced to relent under union pressure and hire close to 30 Blacks. As third world nationalism was at its height in Los Angeles, Réies López Tijerina and the Black Panthers co-authored a peace pact; César Chávez and Bobby Seale made visible efforts to demonstrate mutual support for each activist’s constituents, and it was working-class women’s organizing that inspired the coordinated efforts of Ralph Abernathy and Corky Gonzalez for the Poor People’s March to Sacramento and Washington, DC, in 1968.34
I have chosen to write about Blacks and Chicanos in Los Angeles because they have long been pitted against each other in debates about civil, economic, and immigrant rights. These narrow depictions undermine collective memories of interracial solidarity by denying existing material and ideological connections between these communities. It is important to acknowledge the power of racial and economic divisions between these two groups, but given all the efforts to divide them, instances of unity and cross-pollination become all the more important.
Five chapters reveal the spatial struggles and cultural expressions that comprise a rich record of Black–Brown affiliation in Los Angeles since the 1940s. In Chapter 1, I examine two historically important yet still understudied activists, Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno, who deployed spatial entitlement as a mechanism for fighting racial subordination and spatial exclusion in this era. They laid claim to
