of political and cultural resistance among Blacks and Mexican Americans. Charlotta Bass’s attempt to move across space to participate in an international congress of women meeting in China and Luisa Moreno’s efforts to stay in the United States by resisting deportation provide a generative point of entry into the politics of space and sound.
Bass and Moreno advanced cultural pluralism, integration, and intercultural understanding in the 1930s and 1940s, prior to some of the more renowned interracial activism of later periods. Moreover, the strategies of cultural pluralism these women employed shaped and reflected unprecedented neighborhood and workplace sensibilities that incorporated a mosaic of racial and ethnic groups, a precursor of urban activism in the 1950s in Los Angeles. This chapter delineates the relationship between the formation of interracial alliances in the 1930s and the repression of interracial spaces in the 1940s and 1950s. It also fills a gap in recent scholarship on Los Angeles: a gender analysis in the history of interracial politics.
Chapter 2 reveals how Los Angeles African Americans and Chicanos managed to deploy cultural resources to survive in the midst of racial backlash and the evisceration of working-class neighborhoods during the urban renewal period in Los Angeles. It is here that I explicate in more detail my theory of spatial entitlement. Though both African Americans and Mexican Americans achieved broader geographical opportunities for housing and employment in the postwar era, and though both subsequently observed a modicum of progress in integration and employment, both were also witness to pointed and devastating disregard for their communities, even when the physical space of their neighborhoods expanded. I show how as the boundaries of segregated Black and Brown neighborhoods were expanding incrementally, the social agencies and institutions that served these areas were under persistent attack by city and federal policies in the postwar era. Facing the evisceration of historically Black and Brown neighborhoods under urban renewal, and restricted from accessing the rights of full citizenship, Black and Brown youth claimed alternative, often discursive spaces in which important democratic and egalitarian visions were fashioned. These spatial claims were manifest in temporary locations and ephemeral pronouncements that proclaimed the relevance and rights of Black and Brown people in Los Angeles.
In Chapter 3, I show how third world internationalism—often mischaracterized as simply ethnic nationalism—among Blacks and Chicanos culminated differently in LA than in other parts of the country for demographic and historical reasons, and resulted in a moment of radical transformation in the meanings of race and community, despite the material and ideological divisions engendered by the disbursement of funds in LA from the War on Poverty. This chapter underscores themes of solidarity among working-class minorities, such as coalitions between Réies López Tijerina and the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party; between La Raza groups and the LA Black Congress; and among working-class organizations and churches in South Los Angeles. It also examines the divisions engendered by local and national developments in the realms of racial and cultural politics. I use the music and performances of WAR and The Mixtures to demonstrate the complexity of interracial politics and memory in the midst of changing racial and spatial identifications. I show how some of the most significant articulations emerged from interethnic coalitions, which held city officials and the federal government accountable for the rights of poor people and workers.
Chapter 4 examines Chicano, Latino, and Black punk music, arguing that the emergence of a multifaceted resistance in the 1980s is akin to what Louis Althusser (in another context) has called “teeth gritting harmony.”35 In the 1970s and 1980s, supply-side economics exacted devastating fiscal damages upon working-class people. In response, a radical new cultural form emerged. Punk music and its subcultures created new categories of identity through dreams of colorless solidarity, but in the process predicated these categories upon a color-blind anarchy that demanded the subversion of all other forms of identity before it. One of the most illustrative examples of the articulation of the right to retain spatial and cultural identities rooted in meaningful history is registered in the cultural creations of Black and Latino punk musicians and their audiences from the late 1970s to the 1990s.
These punk subcultures reveal more than the damaging effects of economic downsizing and deindustrialization upon communities of color: they reveal new social identities adopted under the press of damaging social realities. These punk musicians and participants created a liminal space where new social relations were possible.
In Chapter 5, I show how the militarization of urban space, anti-immigration policies, loss of assets, and disenfranchisement all contribute to what I term “spatial immobilization” among the black and Latino urban poor.36 I explore the ways that Black–Brown-led movements have countered that immobilization since the 1990s, and I consider the spatial entitlements expressed and enacted by cultural workers and social activists.
Struggles for freedom and equality currently engaged by multiracial social justice movements emerge from the enduring historical relevance of Black–Brown spatial struggles and coalitional politics. It is a past whose legacy has too much power to remain unacknowledged and unexamined, particularly as evidence of what cultural workers and community activists have already accomplished on the road to a just future.
History has shown that the record of interracial coalitional politics can be as demoralizing as it is powerful. The social problems and internal tensions that plague us in separate struggles can feel—and be—more complex when we form movements and share dreams with other collectives. If we wish to envision and enact a future in which mutual and separate struggles will come to just fruition, we have to rewrite the story we’ve been told about who we are and about our value to each other. Many of the activists and cultural workers whose stories comprise this book testified brilliantly to that future in their practice of coalitional politics, but those of us who are subjected to the constant characterization of Black–Brown relations as unproductive have forgotten that this future has a past.
The roots of universal solidarity, as Lorraine Hansberry wrote, are here. They are realized in the actions and cultural productions of freedom seekers around the world. Even when struggles for human dignity and social justice take place in one locale in which all participants work and live, they increasingly take on radical practices exchanged across figurative and regional borders. The articulation of spatial entitlements by cultural workers, activists, and ordinary people flow from the knowledge that meaningful space is essential for the survival of communities, but also for the discursive practices encoding the stories that define and redefine who people are, where they fit into the world, and what they envision for the future. Like the practice of beat juggling, this book benefits from the rich repository of histories and cultural productions enacted by Black and Brown people, tries to find where expressive culture links up with radical struggle, and presents one version of a critical historiography of Black–Brown spatial struggle and cultural expression in postwar Los Angeles.
NOTES
1. McKissack, Pat, and Fredrick L. McKissack. Young, Black, and Determined: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. New York: Holiday House, 1998.
2. Kelley, Robin D.G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press, 1996, p. 56; James C. Scott describes infrapolitics as circumspect struggles “waged daily by subordinate groups [which] like infrared rays, [are] beyond the visible end of the spectrum. That [they] should be invisible . . . is in large part by design—is a tactical choice born of a prudent awareness of the balance of power.” Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 183.
3. Abu-Lughod, Lila. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women.” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 55; Kelley, Robin D.G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press, 1996, p. 8.
4. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 30–31.
