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CHAPTER 1

Luisa Moreno, Charlotta Bass, and the Constellations of Interethnic Working-Class Radicalism

One person can’t do anything; it’s only with others that things are accomplished.

—Luisa Moreno¹

[W]hole communities became witness to the importance of what appeared to be singular causes.

—Robin D.G. Kelley²

In Los Angeles during the Second World War and the immediate postwar period, Black and Mexican-American activists, artists, and youth cultures deployed the strategy of spatial entitlement as a way of advancing democratic and egalitarian ideals. Spatial entitlement entails occupying, inhabiting, and transforming physical places, but also imagining, envisioning, and enacting discursive spaces that “make room” for new affiliations and identifications. Locked in by residential segregation and territorial policing, locked out of the jobs, schools, and amenities in neighborhoods of opportunity, and sometimes even locked up in the region’s jails and prisons, Blacks and Mexicans in Los Angeles turned oppressive racial segregation into creative and celebratory congregation. They transformed ordinary residential and commercial sites into creative centers of mutuality, solidarity, and collectivity. Precisely because they experienced race as place, changing the racial realities of their society required them to challenge its spatial order as well.

Spatial entitlement encompasses sonic spaces as well. Sound travels even when people cannot. Individuals in separate spaces can savor the same sounds. The sonic realm is not merely a matter of frequency and vibrations in that it also entails the construction of social “soundscapes.”³ Scholars of the blues, salsa, and banda music have long argued that among displaced and dispossessed populations, music serves as a home from which listeners can never be evicted.⁴ Blacks and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles were not only visible to one another in the physical spaces they shared but also audible to one another in sonic spaces that they inhabited separately as well as together. Popular music performed publicly but also consumed privately through radio and recordings produced a shared sonic space that promoted mutual identifications and prefigured subsequent political affiliations. As Michael Bull and Les Back remind us, “sound makes us rethink our relation to power.”⁵

For Blacks and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s, the physical and sonic spaces of the city were places of containment and confinement. They were not only isolated from white residential and commercial spaces but also constantly pitted against each other in desperate competition for scarce resources. Yet the tactics of spatial entitlement enabled them to perceive similarities as well as differences, to build political affiliations and alliances grounded in intercultural communication and coalescence in places shaped by struggles for spatial entitlement. I use the spatial metaphor of “constellations of struggle” to trace these activities. Stars in constellations are related to one another because taken together they reveal patterns, but they also have independent existences. The spatial and racial politics of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s created constellations of struggle that tell us a great deal about how alliances and affiliations coalesce into coalitions, even though participants did not necessarily think of themselves as creators of a common cause.

Two historically important yet less-studied activists, Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno, deployed spatial entitlement as a mechanism for fighting racial subordination and spatial exclusion in this era. They laid claim to physical and symbolic spaces in forging networks 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.

Early in 1949, Charlotta Bass was ecstatic. As editor of the most enduring Black newspaper in Los Angeles, she was invited to attend the Women’s Asiatic Conference in Peking. “It never dawned on me,” she wrote, “that I would ever have the opportunity even to consider a visit to that part of the world.”⁶ The invitation reflected the international attention she had garnered after nearly three decades of social justice work among the multiracial members of the working class in Los Angeles. From the time she began editing the California Eagle (often called just “the Eagle”) in 1912, Bass’s writings and activism transformed the political import of Black Los Angeles to both local communities of color and international organizations. Well known for her public campaigns against racially restrictive covenants in housing and persistent efforts on behalf of Black community development and empowerment, Bass also championed the rights and dignity of Mexican Americans. She served as a member of the sponsoring commission for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, which was organized on behalf of a group of young Mexican Americans falsely accused of murder, and she campaigned forcefully against the racial brutalities exacted upon Mexican American zoot suiters during the summer of 1943. Congress of Industrial Organizations activist Alice McGrath recalled that even before the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión took up the cause, the California Eagle was “one of the first papers to recognize and publicize the racist and discriminatory nature of that case.”⁷

When Bass arrived at the airport for her trip to China, she was detained. In an organized effort, officials delayed the processing of her paperwork for so long that she missed her flight.

“After a night’s wrestle with sleep, I awoke the next morning . . . with a renewed determination to make the California Eagle a bigger and better newspaper . . . and as I settled down to the production of the next issue . . . I whispered to it, ‘I can’t go to China, but you can. And you will tell the people how disappointed I was.’”⁸

Bass’s resolve to enable her newspaper to travel where she could not—to use discursive space as a response to the constraints placed on her movement inside physical space—constituted an exercise in spatial entitlement. Her decision to disperse the disappointing news of repression took its place in a long tradition among aggrieved community members who have used the press to expose injustice. For years she had been articulating the connection between domestic racism and international imperialism and also among the seemingly particular grievances of besieged communities. Six years earlier, at the time of the violence of the Zoot Suit Riots, Bass, like many of her contemporaries, had come to believe that those opposed to equality in America “shared ideals, goals, and tactics with enemies abroad.”⁹ To miss an opportunity to share these insights with a pan-Asian audience was a loss that held singular significance for Bass. She had something to say about interethnic identification and affiliation, and it was an expression honed by sustained, radical engagement with working-class struggle. Halted by city officials, Bass was forced to articulate from a liminal space between the enduring mobility of her words (via the California Eagle) and the sudden imposition of immobility on her body (in her physical detention).

In another context, geographer David Harvey has argued that the politics of space lie in the contradiction between mobility and immobility. Following him, I argue that it is in this 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.¹⁰

At nearly the same moment, Luisa Moreno, one of the most visible Latina labor and civil rights activists in the United States from the 1930s to 1950, was facing deportation for her own interethnic activism that she had begun two decades previously. Moreno had organized Latino, Black, and Italian cigar rollers in Florida, cannery workers in California, migrant workers in the Rio Grande Valley, and pecanshellers in San Antonio. In her work from 1935 to 1947 in Los Angeles, she had encouraged cross-plant interethnic alliances and women’s leadership inside several area food-processing firms. Rather than emphasize the primacy of the individual, Moreno distinguished herself as an educator, agitator, and mobilizer by focusing on the relationship between individuals and their communities.¹¹

In 1950, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was thirteen years old, and averaged five—often highly publicized—trials per year in California.¹² Its focus on un-American and subversive activities was based on the assumption that the Communist Party had infiltrated social programs such as those started by the New Deal and also influenced the strategies and intentions of social justice workers and organizations. The HUAC perceived the particular accumulation and deployment of Moreno’s experience, coupled with her sustained commitment to collective action among Black, Brown, and working-class white women, as sufficient justification for her deportation that year. Moreno’s sentiment on the question of her eviction from the United States was that the HUAC could “talk about deporting me . . . but they can never deport the people that I’ve worked with and with whom things were accomplished for the benefit of hundreds of thousands of workers—things that can never be destroyed.”¹³ Like Bass, Moreno focused her activism on challenges deployed in what often appear to be the interests of singular racial groups, but both women kept a steady emphasis upon the common oppressions suffered by Mexican-American, Black, and Jewish communities in Los Angeles and later San Diego. This sensitivity to interethnic unity stemmed from more than abstract ideals: it emerged from the spaces that members of these groups shared at work places, in neighborhoods, on public transit vehicles, and in their leisure time pursuits in recreational, artistic, and cultural venues.

FIGURE 1. Demonstrators marching along Broadway in Los Angeles demand the repeal of the Smith and McCarran Acts, circa July 19, 1950.

Studying these women as part of the same frame of interracial antiracist struggle in Los Angeles reveals a critical moment not visible when we study them separately. The rhetorical strategies of interethnic affiliation and identification created by and around these women’s mutual endeavors significantly shaped the narrative of the Black–Brown political alliance and its cultural corollaries for years to come. Bass and Moreno were principal architects of midcentury cross-racial politics. That these women of color were likely the most influential local activists in these LA communities at this time is a fact that cannot be overestimated. They made critical interventions against structures of racism, imperialism, and spatial oppression over several decades, and both were among the most visible participants in the infrapolitics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle within the Black and Brown communities of Los Angeles.

Even without material evidence of their interactions, it strains common sense to assume that Bass and Moreno never met. In 1943, the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee (SLDC) was formed in Los Angeles by an interracial, intergenerational—and at times, trans-national—coalition of labor leaders, journalists, and community activists in defense of Mexican youths falsely convicted of murder. Both women were active on the SLDC and in its relevant communities at the same time. Undoubtedly, each was aware of the other’s work to generate new political sensibilities and identities among the women and men in their respective communities. Both engaged in affirmative declarations of the rights of minority communities in order to convey their disappointment in the difference between the rhetoric of American universality and the realities of home-front inequality.

This chapter argues that Bass and Moreno, in the same moment and city, envisioned and enacted a plural, egalitarian, democratic, and intercultural “America,” in concert with artists, intellectuals, and activists and that this vision and practice deployed spatial and cultural politics that have tended to be overlooked or underestimated in the historiography of this period and these struggles. To understand their significance in this context, it is helpful to consider this story within my theoretical framework of a constellation of struggle, which delineates the array of activism, histories, and identities that each woman symbolically brought to her activity with the SLDC. “Constellations” suggest mobility, as well as the ability of these activists to re-form around different nuclei of causes and struggle. The constellations of struggle that coalesced around the SLDC were foregrounded by the radical critiques raised by Black and Brown working-class communities in Los Angeles. Civil rights struggles in and for both communities had long made their mark on the national landscape of civil rights struggles and created a genealogy of empowerment critical for the articulation of social membership in the post-WWII era. A constellation of struggle is likewise a feminist intervention in the androcentric characterization of this time as the era of the GI generation.¹⁴ Looking at constellations enables us to take seriously the intersection between women’s embodied social identities and the larger historical developments of the moment.

The particular timing of the SLDC politics precipitated an intensification of persecution against Bass and Moreno by government and city officials. By the end of the decade, The California Eagle would no longer be in Bass’s hands and Moreno would be deported. For these reasons and many more, the coalitional politics of the SLDC mark an important historical moment. And though this interracial mobilization arose out of the violence of the Sleepy Lagoon case, its consequences created a far more important legacy: new language about and strategies for the assertion of humanity and social entitlement. The particular alliance politics practiced by Bass and Moreno set a crucial precedent for the committee’s strategic interracial mobilization and for subsequent spatial and sonic politics in Los Angeles.

EACH IN THEIR OWN CONTEXTS

The full import of the constellations of struggle brought by each activist to the SLDC is best understood by considering their respective histories of activism and community sensibilities, including the community activism that engendered and resulted from their work.

Moreno was born into an elite Guatemalan family and traveled as a teenager to Mexico City, where she worked as a journalist and pursued her talents as a poet. Vicki Ruiz conjectures that it may have been Moreno’s “sense of adventure and certainly . . . a streak of rebelliousness” that may have underpinned her early rejection of her family’s privilege. In any case, Moreno’s renunciation of her family’s wealth “permanently strain[ed] her relationship with her parents and siblings. . . .”¹⁵ After a few years in Mexico’s artistic circles, she migrated to New York with her husband in 1928 and became a mother the same year. Her experience as a garment worker living in Spanish Harlem provided the impetus for her political awakening: In 1930, Moreno joined the Communist Party. Her activism in Spanish Harlem’s Centro Obrero de Habla Española, a leftist community coalition, led her to mobilize her peers on the shop floor into a small-scale garment workers’ union called “La Liga de Costureras.” In 1935, she accepted a job organizing Latino, African-American, and Italian cigar rollers in California as an American Federation of Labor (AFL) organizer. In 1938, after resigning from the AFL to join its newly established rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), she joined the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA).¹⁶ That year, Moreno also helped organize El Congreso del Pueblos que Hablan Española (Congress of Spanish-speaking people), held in April of 1939. It was the first national civil rights assembly for Latinos in the United States; it attracted over a thousand delegates representing over 120 organizations. El Congreso addressed employment, housing, education, health, and immigrant rights; they fought for workers’ and women’s rights while advocating for Latino studies curricula and bilingual education.¹⁷ This event was particularly extraordinary, since Moreno and other congress leaders rejected the as-similationist strategies proposed by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC); instead, they insisted that whites accept blame for the racial and ethnic stratification that had evolved in the Southwest.¹⁸

FIGURE 2. Luisa Moreno at the 1949 California CIO Convention.

The twofold demand for the full spectrum of human rights, as well as white historical accountability, illumines a long-shared philosophy among Blacks and Browns in the United States about the nature of their rights as human beings. For example, in the struggle for emancipation, slaves in the mid-nineteenth century created what W.E.B. Du Bois named “abolition democracy.”¹⁹ In the years leading up to the victory of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Blacks articulated a radical political perspective that demanded freedom in its entirety—nothing less than the material realization of all of the rights supplied to elite whites. In so doing, they critiqued a democracy compromised by its racist institutions and created a legacy that “opened the door for subsequent claims for social justice by immigrants and their children, religious minorities, women, workers, and people with disabilities. From voting rights to affirmative action, from fair housing to fair hiring, the 14th Amendment is an enduring and abiding force for social justice in US society.”²⁰ These shared histories of radical critique among Blacks and Mexican Americans helped make it possible for them to view their related but nonidentical struggles as part of the same constellation.

El Congreso’s call for equality in labor, housing, education, and health, as well as for the positive and consistent representation of their history and worth as human beings in school curricula constitute an audible echo of the radical tenets of abolition democracy. Moreover, Luisa Moreno and Josefina Fierro de Bright co-authored an unprecedented resolution indicting “the discriminated status of women within the Mexican community as well as without . . . [demanding] the full recognition of women’s equality, independent of their relationship to men.”²¹ This resolution upended stereotypes of the docility of women in the face of a culture of machismo, recuperating women’s activism and dispelling stereotypes about their passivity:

Whereas: The Mexican woman, who for centuries had suffered oppression, has the responsibility for raising her children and for caring for the home, and even that of earning a livelihood of herself and her family, and since in this country, she suffers a double discrimination as a woman and as a Mexican.

Be it Resolved: That the Congress carry out a program of . . . education of the Mexican woman, concerning home problems . . . that it support and work for women’s equality so that she may receive equal wages, enjoy the same rights as men in social, economic, and civil liberties, and use her vote for the defense of the Mexican and Spanish American people, and of American democracy.”²²

In their challenge to the traditional distinction between the public and the private spheres, the demands made by women within the organization constitute important examples of spatial entitlement, as do the demands of the El Congreso as a whole. Women activists chose and utilized the discursive and political spaces they made in the organization to articulate a long-standing grievance relevant to their communities. Indeed, the identification of sexism and a collective inclination to hold the members of the organization and constituent communities accountable to advancing gender justice may not have been successful in another organization, place, or time. Women such as Moreno and Fierro de Bright made strategic choices as they pertained to human rights and to the meaningful spaces their struggles were born of and created. Similarly, this is what makes Moreno’s contributions to El Congreso and the organization’s impact so significant: both focused on the potential to represent and be represented in a variety of spheres on the literal and symbolic landscape of American democracy, or at least what aggrieved communities expected it could be. This expectation and the process of struggle to fashion them into a realizable reality created counternarratives that called into question the relationship of aggrieved minorities to nation and to citizenship, rendering visible the material conditions of work, geography, education, race, gender, and class as they pertain to social membership. In other words, in demanding white accountability and an equal place at the table, they fashioned a counternarrative of citizenship that included aggrieved minorities. They exposed the inequities and material hardships faced by non-whites in a racial hierarchy that granted privileges to white citizens.

The success of El Congreso was a significant milestone in Moreno’s record of activism, but it was the UCAPAWA that remained at the core of her commitment. The union’s dedication to rank-and-file leadership was important to Moreno. Its official commitment to recruiting members across race, nationality, and gender resonated powerfully with her political aims.

This was true of UCAPAWA’s allies as well. The Community Service Organization (CSO) was not a labor union, but it functioned powerfully as a community agency that occupied many of the same spaces where UCAPAWA did its work. The CSO recognized that building multiracial alliances was “the most effective strategy for protecting and advancing their various interests, especially given financial constraints, the absence of any majority minority with enough strength to act alone, and mounting Cold War red-baiting that threatened civil rights activists.”²³ The CSO was responsible for launching the political career of Edward Roybal, who began as a member of the Los Angeles City Council and eventually became a member of Congress. Roybal was elected in 1949 by a multiracial political coalition that “reflected the racial interaction in multicultural neighborhoods and the geographic concentration of liberal-left politics in them.”²⁴ This coalition, nurtured and strengthened by the CSO and its principle organizer, Fred Ross, was comprised of Mexican Americans and Jews in Boyle Heights and was influenced by the civil rights struggles in adjacent communities. Roybal’s subsequent reelection in 1951 and later climb into the U.S. Congress was remarkable, considering his unflagging support of social justice struggles waged by laborers, Communists, and Black, Mexican, and Jewish working-class communities in one of the most conservative postwar eras. Subjected to intense and consistent pressure to capitulate to conservative policymakers, Roybal maintained an unswerving allegiance to equality. His record of support for fair hiring and labor practices, as well as his commitment to desegregation in city jobs and public stance against police brutality targeting Black and Mexican-American youth, secured him key endorsements by the California Eagle and by the Black community as a whole.

Moreno remained with UCAPAWA for the remainder of her career, rising to the position of vice-president in 1941, which marked the first time a Latina would be elected to a high-ranking national union post in the United States.²⁵ Best known for organizing Chicana cannery workers and for her work as cofounder of the Congreso, Moreno championed the interests of Black workers as well. She garnered a little-documented victory in a struggle by UCAPAWA to break discriminatory hiring practices at CalSan. That effort forced factory owners to hire Black women in early 1942, creating a new interracial space from which the constellation of struggle could draw supporters and support.²⁶ Moreno also viewed the sites of struggle as extending beyond the geographic and juridical boundaries of the United States. Alicia Camacho offers a critical understanding of the value of Moreno’s contributions to Latina/ Latino cultural and political identities, arguing:

Moreno 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 once potential workers returned from the war front, U.S. agribusiness “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 and community.

The activist lives of Bass and Moreno are particularly instructive in understanding how, spatial temporal relations can be central to social justice.⁵² Bass and Moreno turned the material and discursive spaces available to them—print media and spaces of Latina congregation to name just two—into crucial terrains of struggle. They were not the first to do so, but they served as crucial links in the chain that connects the sites of struggle foundational to Black and Brown radical traditions. For example, Bass’s determination to use the Eagle to spread the word of her disappointment in 1949 inspires remembrance of two further examples of the ways that information was disseminated in aggrieved communities. First, one of the more understudied uses of space and mobility are those that were employed by Black Pullman porters in the 1930s and 1940s. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who would revolutionize Black social protest under A. Philip Randolph’s leadership, distributed African-American newspapers along their routes and often became conduits of information themselves. Second, a story C.L.R. James related after a meeting with Jomo Kenyatta, first president of independent Kenya, illuminates the role of newsprint as a social space. “In 1921,” James recounted, “Kenyan nationalists, unable to read, would gather round a reader of [Black nationalist leader Marcus] Garvey’s newspaper [The Negro World] . . . and listen to an article two or three times. Then they would run various ways through the forest, carefully to repeat the whole, which they had memorised, to Africans hungry for some doctrine which lifted them.”⁵³ Connecting the unofficial spaces created by Kenyans in the 1920s and Black Americans in the 1940s reflects a trans-historical, trans-generational, and trans-communal tradition among aggrieved communities: identifying traditional vehicles for use in extraordinary projects of intervention. When Bass’s mobility was curtailed, the Eagle became a proxy of sorts, an embodied spokesperson for the repression of spatial mobility. Bass rejected the silencing actions of government officials in this particular case by exercising an alternative means of moving through space, and because her own physical mobility was contained the urgency of her message was heightened. Bass also used the Eagle to forge a politics of interracial solidarity in postwar Los Angeles when those coalitions were systematically—and often violently—suppressed.

Bass’s actions against the use of restrictive covenants to contain undesirable racial groups in particular areas of LA likewise represented an assertion of spatial entitlement in the context of asset acquisition, an articulation of the right to be spatially present and economically secure in the city and the nation. This is an articulation born of Blacks’ and Latinos’ widespread and long-standing inability to claim landed assets or permanent residence in a particular location. This struggle was a multifaceted undertaking that relied on intimate knowledge of the material effects of economic exclusion and debilitation. As one historian explains, homeownership is a fundamental source of wealth, and the ability to choose residential locations:

[It] plays a crucial role in determining educational opportunities . . . because school funding based on property tax assessments in most localities gives better opportunities to white children than to children from minority communities. Opportunities for employment are also affected by housing choices, especially given the location of new places of employment in suburbs and reduced funding for public transportation. In addition, housing affects health conditions, with environmental and health hazards disproportionately located in minority communities.⁵⁴

Bass refused to accept the idea of restrictive covenants as the sole burden of African Americans, explaining “since [this] question concerns such minorities as Asians, Mexican-Americans, Indians, the Jewish, Italian and Negro people, our discussion of the Negro people’s struggle against restrictive covenants applies to the struggle of all minority groups.”⁵⁵ In rejecting the issue as a single-group problem, Bass also revealed—and challenged—a sinister by-product of postwar spatial racism: interethnic tensions between Black and Brown peoples.

For example, Watts was fairly racially balanced among whites, Blacks, and Mexican Americans. Originally part of a large Mexican land grant, the area that became Watts was first subdivided in the 1880s. Mexican laborers moved into the area to work on the Southern Pacific Railroad, forming the village of Tujuata. When Watts was incorporated in 1907, Tujuata disappeared. Blacks who moved into the area settled in a district called Mudtown, which, as part of Watts, was annexed by Los Angeles in 1926.⁵⁶ Later, the Federal Housing Administration sought to contain Blacks who were part of the increased WWII and postwar migration to Los Angeles and used the system of racially restrictive housing covenants; these covenants continued legally until 1948 (and de facto thereafter)⁵⁷ to designate Watts a “Negro area.” Between 1940 and 1960, therefore, the Black population of Watts increased eightfold. After WWII, returning Mexican veterans became resentful about the striking changes that had occurred during their absence, and in some cases they threatened to band together to expel the “Negro invaders.”⁵⁸

Writing in 1947, Lloyd H. Fisher observed that there was “for the Negro and Mexican, inequality in income, employment opportunity, educational opportunity and housing, for the white, ignorance, prejudice, insecurity and a thousand and one personal frustrations. Add to these an irresponsible press, the policies of real estate agencies and mortgage companies and a prejudiced police force.” In Fisher’s formulation, these social forces heightened residential tensions between Black and Brown people, particularly as returning Mexican veterans—resentful over city officials’ selection of Watts as “an area of Negro segregation”—perceived the influx of Blacks into portions of Watts as a threat to employment and residential opportunities.⁵⁹

The forced removal of Japanese Americans, restrictive covenants, industrialization, suburbanization, and migration patterns all affected the spatial geography and cultural politics of minority experiences, but they also gave rise to an interrogation of official postwar narratives of democracy. Bass rejected the divisiveness engendered by economic racism. She considered how civil disobedience and other forms of legal resistance might expose and question such practices.

Regina Freer locates the beginning of Bass’s housing activism in the California Eagle’s organized response to a Black woman’s eviction from her home by her racist neighbors in 1914: Bass led a discussion with Black club women on the issue, and “‘that evening a brigade of a hundred women marched to the Johnson home. The women were ultimately successful in getting the sheriff to help Mrs. Johnson back into her home.”⁶⁰

Bass remained involved in Black homeownership rights from this point forward, but her historic battle against restrictive covenants took full shape in the 1940s, as Black migration to Los Angeles increased and as white xenophobia received legal sanction through city officials’ containment of the growing Black community into 5 percent of the city’s residential space. Bass’s efforts and those of the LA National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) waged the restrictive covenant issue all the way to the California Supreme Court. Bass and her contemporaries in this struggle maintained pressure on local and federal authorities, in part shifting their focus to a fight for public housing and rent control because of their belief that aggrieved minority groups had the right to occupy the literal and figurative space of Los Angeles.

The strategic philosophies of Luisa Moreno’s activism likewise provide us with understandings of the way that space can be used to both suppress and empower workers and women. Moreno’s work in the cigar rollers union in Texas, with the SLDC in Los Angeles, and with El Congreso in the Southwest constitutes a recuperation of the dignity and humanity of working-class women, namely Brown and Black women, and more broadly, the Mexican-American community. Her demand that Black and Brown women take themselves, and be taken, seriously suggests a symbolic spatial assertion that bell hooks articulated in her seminal book Feminism: From Margin to Center.⁶¹ Moreno’s legitimation of the production of valuable knowledge from the margin made it “much more than a site of deprivation . . . it [was] also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.” Moreno modeled one of the basic themes of Chicana feminism—leadership that empowers others—decades before people articulated it in those terms.⁶² Moreno, like Emma Tenayuca, Dorothy Healey, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ella Baker identified this discarded source of knowledge as a space of possibility, one that hooks later described as a “radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.”⁶³ Further, as I explore later in this chapter, Moreno’s work with El Congreso recalls an important intersection between the philosophies of liberation shared by Black and Brown people in the United States.

In their mutual and separate struggles, Bass and Moreno produced spaces of what bell hooks calls “radical openness”—a space that “affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.”⁶⁴ In this way, these women foregrounded Afro–Chicano struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, through which young people sought to legitimize cultural identities reflecting symbolic and material histories of interracial interaction.

Black and Brown women activists of this period in Los Angeles have received far less attention than their male counterparts. As female activists, Bass and Moreno refused traditional domesticity at a time when the available categories of acceptable womanhood were dominated by discourses of political and domestic containment, in both local and national contexts. Yet women like Bass and Moreno helped to shape the civil rights struggle and subsequent social movements in the region; their activism helped to define Black and Mexican-American languages and epistemologies of resistance. As historical actors engaged in fair housing, integration, labor, and youth struggles, they crafted counter-narratives that emphasized Black and Brown humanity and entitlement. Catherine S. Ramirez has observed that until recently, “only a handful of writers or artists acknowledged the roles that women, especially Mexican-American women, played in the Sleepy Lagoon incident and trial.”⁶⁵ Studying the impact of these women together reveals a significant and overlooked combination of strategic resistance that was fundamental to the success of the SLDC.

THE SLEEPY LAGOON DEFENSE COMMITTEE

While the SLDC was not the most radical coalition of the 1940s, the antiracist legacy engendered by its members and their respective communities provides an inheritance that informed both the histories and the futures of interracial struggle among Mexican-American, Black, and Anglo working-class people in Los Angeles. Cochaired by Luisa Moreno, labor organizer Bert Corona, and writer/activist Carey McWilliams, the SLDC included among its members and supporters labor organizer Josefina Fierro de Bright, Congress of Industrial Organizations activist Alice McGrath, and Charlotta Bass. For two years, the SLDC fought for the release of twelve young Chicanos convicted of murder by an all-white jury in People v. Zamora. In this “highly publicized and deeply flawed trial,” twenty-two Chicanos were originally charged with criminal conspiracy in the murder of José Díaz, a twenty-two-year-old farm worker whose body was found at the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir in southeast Los Angeles. Díaz, on his way home from a neighbor’s birthday party early on the morning of August 2, 1942, was seen leaving with two young men who were never questioned during the investigation or the ensuing trial. One “expert witness” (who was actually a member of the LA County Sheriff’s office) testified that Mexicans possessed a “blood thirst” and a “biological predisposition” to crime and killing. The evidence, he argued, was in the history of human sacrifices among the youths’ Aztec ancestors.⁶⁶ Moreover, presiding judge Charles W. Fricke allowed attorneys to make routine racist references toward Mexicans while arguing for the prosecution. At the end of the trial, three of the defendants were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison; nine were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to five years to life in prison, five were convicted of assault and released for time served, and five were acquitted. It was the largest mass conviction in California history.⁶⁷ In the original and appellate cases, the juries were all white. The defendants began serving their sentences in January 1943.⁶⁸

The Los Angeles police used Díaz’s murder to launch a widespread attack on what they perceived as unruly Mexican-American youth. More than 600 youths were arrested, most of them Mexicans. The press consistently referred to Díaz—as well as his assailants—as gang members. During the trial, labor activist LaRue McCormick established an ad hoc committee to publicize the events surrounding the case. After the defendants were sentenced, the committee reorganized as the SLDC. Carey McWilliams recalled:

I wanted to make it clear that the committee would have to be broadened, because there was no way of raising the money that was needed with that committee; it was too narrow. You’d have to have some labor people on it, some prominent Jewish businessmen, and motion picture people, and some blacks, one or two blacks.⁶⁹

The SLDC worked not only toward an appeal for those convicted but also to expose anti-Mexican discrimination in the Southwest. The constellations of historical struggle that informed the strategies of the SLDC also worked to produce something particularly significant: Black and Brown people’s articulation of rights to social membership and human dignity. Significantly, these articulations illumine the role of culture in both the oppression and the freedom of marginalized communities. The possibility of interethnic economic and political mobilization was rooted in evidence of shared oppression among the mixed working classes in California, and examples of its shared vision and legacy for this period abound. The activism I am describing is one link in a long chain of interethnic economic and political mobilization that these groups have shared.⁷⁰

As a result of the development of the first substantial generation of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, identity politics in the barrio had undergone several changes. By the end of World War II there was a new sense of entitlement and national citizenship felt by a generation of American-born Mexicans who had served in the war, and who had seen their parents suffer from housing, educational, and hiring discrimination because of racist city or national policies. The SLDC began its work in the wake of the mass deportations of Mexicans in the 1930s. Like some of the other political and labor activism of this decade, the SLDC drew upon an increase in Chicano political activity that occurred just before its founding. George Sanchez has argued that this “upsurge . . . involved at its core an attempt by the children of the immigrant generation and those who had arrived in the United States as youngsters to integrate themselves into American society. . . . [I]t was the second-generation experience that shaped most profoundly the emergence of Mexican-American activism, linking workers’ rights to civil rights.” Furthermore, this kind of “labor and political activity often served as the greatest ‘Americanizing agent’ of the 1930s and early 1940s.”⁷¹

World War II marked a similar change in attitude about the role of African Americans as national citizens. Not unlike Chicanos, Black intellectuals and working people after the War “articulated and acted upon a suspicion about the relationship between World War II and white-supremacy widely held in their community.”⁷² To fight for democracy and freedom abroad was a battle that held particular irony for aggrieved minorities in the United States, where struggles to achieve the same goals seemed just as intense. In Los Angeles, it was significant that the city was transformed during this period by the immigration of over 70,000 African Americans between 1940 and 1946.⁷³ It would be transformed again in the following decade, when more Blacks migrated to California than to any other state.⁷⁴

In this context, women were central to the efforts linking workers’ rights to civil rights.⁷⁵ Bass and Moreno encountered this historical moment attuned to the economic, migration, cultural, and political histories of their respective constituencies, each bringing with her a constellation of people, politics, places, and strategies of resistance garnered from decades of action and vision.

SONIC POLITICS OF TRANSFIGURATION

The politics of spatial entitlement enacted by the constellations of struggle in which Bass and Moreno participated had important sonic dimensions. Space, sound, and racial politics were powerfully intertwined with the music associated with this political moment and with zoot culture more specifically, which included Black, Brown, and Jewish working-class popular cultures. Zoot suit culture became a culmination of intersecting constellations of decades-long struggles over style, the body, and public space.

The zoot suit outfit became popular in ghetto and barrio spaces in part because of the physical intervention it made in physical places. Young men wearing pancake hats with feathers in them, large and long jackets with flowing lines, and pants with forty-two inches of fabric at the knees invaded public space; this clothing was also propelled by the stylized strut of the zoot suiter. Repression of the zoot suit came about because of the perceived threat to propriety and public order posed by the outfit’s effect on the private space of the body and the public space of the street.

SLDC activists mobilized an older generation of Black, Brown, and Jewish parents and community leaders into a symbolic alliance with a younger generation. By linking human rights to zoot suit culture, this alliance was undergirded by an intergenerational understanding of the ways that the federal government, court systems, and local police used Black and Brown cultural expressions as a means to justify oppression and containment (even though many older participants roundly denounced zoot suit culture). From this implicit understanding emerged powerful and unapologetic articulations of the link between zoot culture and the Mexican community. As the SLDC maintained in a press release:

It was not just these boys who were on trial. The Mexican people were being tried. And the trial took place not only in the courtroom but in the press with its barrage of lies against the “Mexican pachucos” and “zoot suiters,” and before the Grand Jury where a sheriff’s report characterizing the Mexican people as bloodthirsty wildcats was submitted. . . . Yes, these boys were convicted. So was the Mexican community. Neither is guilty. The blot against both must be removed.⁷⁶

Zoot culture had deep roots in Black communities. The zoot suit was associated with Black urban youth in cities like Detroit, New York, and Chicago when it first appeared around 1940. The Autobiography of Malcolm X recounts the importance of X’s first zoot suit and suggests that the style had racial connotations as the preferred choice of hip black men and entertainers.⁷⁷ In Los Angeles, Jewish, Black, Filipino, and primarily Mexican youth made the zoot suit popular.⁷⁸ Garment fabrics were rationed during WWII; therefore, its purchase on the black market by makers of the zoot suit was considered treasonous. But it was the “calo” slang adopted by pachucos, the clean lines and flamboyant colors, the flaunting of expensive style on working-class bodies, and the culture of music that appealed to interracial audiences that infuriated many whites, who identified pachucos in LA as traitors and criminals.

A number of Black musical styles converged to create the sonic politics of zoot culture, what Robin Kelley calls “the wonderful collision and reconstitution of Kansas City big band blues, East Coast swing music, and the secular as well as religious sounds of the black South.”⁷⁹ Jump blues evolved in the 1930s from Harlem bands like those of Cab Calloway and the Kansas City groups of Count Basie. It was pioneered by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five and pervaded both early rhythm and blues and doo-wop. Johnny Otis, a Greek American raised in an African-American Berkeley neighborhood was the person principally responsible for bringing jump blues to the East Side with his 1948 shows at Angelus Hall.⁸⁰ Chicanos heard the difference between swing and jump blues, with its more raw “honking” saxophone sound and stronger drum beat, by hearing artists like Roy Milton, Joe and Jimmy Liggins, and Johnny Otis on the thriving ballroom circuit in East LA, downtown, and on Central Avenue. Jump saxists like Chuck Higgins (“Pachuko Hop,” 1953), Joe Houston, and Big Jay McNeely became the influences of 1950s honkers like Lil’ Bobby Rey and the Masked Phantom Band and Danny “Chuck Rio” Flores.

The same year that Johnny Otis played the Angelus Hall, one of the most popular bands in East LA was the Pachuco Boogie Boys, led by Raul Diaz and East San Francisco Bay transplant Don Tosti. Their 1948 hit “Pachuco Boogie” celebrated and publicized the street speech and style encoded in calo narratives, long a part of the pachuco and zoot suit style. This song in particular, but also songs by the Armenta Brothers and Lalo Guerrero, such as “Chucos Suaves” and “Marijuana Boogie,” made jump blues and honking popular in East LA. Indeed, a distinct sound, “Chicano honking,” emerged that combined jump blues and calo.

It is not just that the interactions between Mexicans and Blacks in music resembled the alliances created in the political coalitions led by Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno, but that music became a shared social space that enacted on the quotidian level of everyday life the parallels and affinities that flowed from the linked fate that Blacks and Mexicans suffered because of white supremacy. The aggressive festivity, celebratory self-activity, and collective creativity permeating popular music served as an alternative space where the identities of race took on new meanings.

Sometimes, the music had direct connections to political mobilizations. Musicians and cultural actors offered direct critiques of common problems and gave practical and symbolic support to community mobilizations. For example, on July 2, 1944, Boyle Heights native and Verve founder Norman Granz staged a benefit concert to help fund the SLDC. Nearly 2,000 people attended the inaugural Jazz at the Philharmonic Concert, where the imagined solidarities across racial lines took material form in music made by Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet, J.J. Johnson, Les Paul, and Nat King Cole. As musicologist and jazz historian Scott DeVeaux notes, the performers that night presented music that was “firmly aligned with racial politics . . . with all proceeds donated to the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Fund.”⁸¹

Music that raised money for political purposes and that asserted and punctuated the self-activity and solidarity of the coalition that supported the Sleepy Lagoon defendants manifested one form of spatial contestation and entitlement. Another manifestation came from the citations of street life that pervaded the music composed and performed by Lalo Guerrero and the Pachuco Boogie Boys. Their songs countered the image of pachucos as treasonous and unpatriotic by celebrating a sociopolitical and cultural identity that Blacks and Chicanos shared. The songs “Pachuco Boogie,” “Chucos Suaves,” and “Marijuana Boogie” contained lyrics, but they were also nonlinguistic communications that projected “an alternative body of cultural and political expression that considers the world critically from the point of view of its emancipatory transformation.”⁸² Like the concomitant political struggles waged in their constituent communities, these sounds had a legacy most immediately heard in the music of Thee Midnighters (“Whittier Boulevard”), Cannibal & The Headhunters (“Land of 1000 Dances”), and The Salas Brothers, all of whom forged their own East LA sound on these foundations.

Young Black zoot suiters created “a fast-paced, improvisational language which sharply contrasted with the passive stereotype of the stuttering, tongue-tied Sambo,” enabling them to “negotiate an identity that resisted the hegemonic culture and its attendant racism and patriotism.”⁸³ In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison wrote of the protagonist’s first encounter with zoot suiters, calling them “the stewards of something uncomfortable.”⁸⁴ Indeed, it was through the experiences of participating in zoot suit riots in Harlem that Malcolm X began his transformative political education. Here we can even see a sonic politics of the vernacular. As Kelley explains, “in a world where whites commonly addressed them as ‘boy,’ zoot suiters made a fetish of calling each other ‘man.’”⁸⁵ He observes that for many Black youths, this subculture allowed them to break with “the rural folkways (for many, the ‘parent culture’) which still survived in most black urban households, and the class-conscious, integrationist attitudes of middle-class blacks.”⁸⁶

Similarly, Mexican-American youths stood in symbolic opposition to the assimilationist aims of their middle-class counterparts. Both groups “received similar treatment from law enforcement, judges, juries, and the general Anglo public.”⁸⁷ Through zoot culture, however, Black and Mexican working-class youth crossed boundaries to form alliances and assert their humanity in the face of this degrading treatment. Moreover, the practices of commercial popular culture offered opportunities to develop skills that could be utilized in political mobilizations. As Mark Anthony Neal argues in his cogent analysis of the relationship between Black culture and Black politics in his work on the Chitlin’ Circuit:

that same network that was used in order to promote shows would be the same network that would be used when Martin Luther King came to town and was giving a speech . . . would be the same network that would be used to get folks to come out to a church for an organizational meeting.⁸⁸

In their respective activism, Bass and Moreno had drawn this conclusion many times, over many struggles. Activism was not only aimed at responding to immediate crises but was also a means of building the skills needed for deepening a democratic culture of deliberation and decision making. It required expanding the sphere of politics beyond the voting booth by creating physical and discursive spaces that could support and sustain constellations of struggle. Regina Freer identifies important elements in this work by describing Bass as emblematic of women who “combined ideologies that elsewhere competed, chose multifaceted allies in their struggles” and asserted an entitlement to opportunities that they defined as basic to their humanity and citizenry.⁸⁹

The Zoot Suit Riots made the interrelationship of Black and Chicano social realities painfully clear. Both groups were losing on the labor front: by the 1945 CIO Convention, plant closures had undercut gains by those who had challenged racism on the shop floor and expanded job opportunities for Blacks in wartime defense industries. The convention proceedings noted that “Negro, Mexican, and all minority groups in California are becoming the first post-war casualty.”⁹⁰

Violent attacks by whites on Mexican and Black zoot suiters the summer after the Sleepy Lagoon trial underscored the lack of legal remedies available to Blacks and Mexicans who were trying to defend themselves. Mainstream reporting on the Sleepy Lagoon case reinforced existing racial stereotypes, and comments by law-enforcement officials characterized Chicano zoot suiters as the “predictable results of the primitive and backward culture of the ‘Mexican colony.’”⁹¹ As George Sánchez demonstrates through the story of Pedro García—the American-born son of Mexican immigrants who was beaten and left unconscious by servicemen in the company of police witnesses—the physical and ideological violence exacted by white vigilantes made clear to many second-generation Chicanos that “much of their optimism about the future had been misguided.”⁹²

Rhetorical resistance to ideological and physical racism in the wake of the Sleepy Lagoon case and the Zoot Suit Riots powerfully supported the efforts of the SLDC and furthered the platform of antiracism. Letters to the Eastside Sun by East Los Angeles teenagers about the riots reflect the importance of cultural spaces; they did not position themselves primarily as wageworkers or as citizens, but as people who “sought to carve out their own social space, not in terms of exercising union leadership, but by defining a youth culture.”⁹³ Mexican, Anglo, and Black activists and reporters such as Chester Himes and Al Waxman countered mainstream press reports with their own in the Eastside Sun and the California Eagle, reframing the violence by linking official national rhetoric to uphold the principle of the self-determination of oppressed peoples to the need to extend rights to America’s minority communities.⁹⁴ This strategy was clearly visible in a letter from the Committee to trade unionists asking them to adopt a resolution asking Governor Earl Warren to pardon those convicted: “In its first rounds,” wrote Cary McWilliams and Bella Joseph, “[the Sleepy Lagoon case] represents a fascist victory.”⁹⁵

Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno expanded on this ideological identification of the Sleepy Lagoon case as an example of incipient fascism. Bass likened the LAPD’s response to Hitler’s race theories and harshly criticized the Sheriff’s Department for urging the Grand Jury to consider the “biological basis” for the criminal behavior of Mexican youth and their “desire to kill.”⁹⁶ In a speech contending that police attacks historically targeted “minority communities—Mexican American and Negro”⁹⁷—Moreno astutely identified the Grand Jury testimony as “a reflection of the general reactionary drive against organized labor and minority problems, [sowing] all sorts of division among the various racial, national, and religious groups among the workers.”⁹⁸ In a statement that underscored the importance of leisure and recreational spaces in the cartography of white supremacy in Los Angeles, Moreno protested the harassment of youth who patronized mixed-race bars and clubs.⁹⁹ Bass used her writings in the Eagle to change community understandings of this case and others during the war. In successive weeks, the newspaper carried two-inch headlines across page one, such as “TRIGGER-HAPPY COP FREED AFTER SLAYING YOUTH” and “POLICE BRUTALITY FLARES UP AGAIN.”¹⁰⁰ Her efforts galvanized other journalists to make similar connections. Lynn Itagaki identifies the journalism of Chester Himes as emblematic of this line of argument, noting:

Referring to the Nazi storm troopers, [Chester Himes called] the servicemen who were instigating the riots a “reincarnation” or “continuation of the vigilantes, the uniformed Klansmen,” conflating the foreign enemy with American white supremacists. Himes satirizes the uneven Conflict between the servicemen and the Mexican Americans as a “great battle” which engaged the “combined forces of the United States navy, army, and marine corps” to defeat “a handful of youths with darker skins.” He decried the military’s apparent focus on fighting groups of citizens at home rather than concentrating their energies abroad.¹⁰¹

By deflecting blame onto white officials, Bass and Moreno rejected a divisive tactic long used by LA city officials, media, and moral pundits: to discredit workers and communities of color by assigning to them ideological and biological predispositions for “un-American” behavior.¹⁰² Bass and Moreno turned this argument on its head through a spatial remapping that associated white supremacy at home with fascism overseas.

In his journalism and editorial observations, Himes noticed that many Black Americans chose to look the other way as violence escalated. He admonished them publicly in his seminal 1943 article in The Crisis, warning “Perhaps you don’t know what it is all about. If you are a Negro, you should know. But if you are one of those Negroes who profess not to know (and no doubt there are plenty of you), I will be only too happy to inform you.”¹⁰³ His critique was rooted in the highly visible coverage of the riots by mainstream press as both a Negro and a Mexican “problem.” Stuart Cosgrove recounts that in June of 1943:

the press singled out the arrests of Lewis D English, a 23-year-old black, charged with felony and carrying a “16-inch razor sharp butcher knife”; Frank H. Tellez, a 22-year-old Mexican held on vagrancy charges, and another Mexican, Luis “The Chief” Verdusco (27 years of age), allegedly the leader of the Los Angeles pachucos. . . . The arrests of English, Tellez and Verdusco seemed to confirm popular perceptions of the zoot suiters widely expressed for weeks prior to the riots. Firstly, that the zoot suit gangs were predominantly, but not exclusively, comprised of black and Mexican youths.¹⁰⁴

The tremendous collective support for these youths by people from diverse communities was due in part to the discourses and practices of spatial entitlement that educated audience about the common condition of Black and Brown working-class youth. But it was also the result of the language crafted by the SLDC to create a common investment in their defense. In its first publication, the Committee declared itself an interethnic alliance:

Interest in the work of the Committee is grwoing[sic]. At the last meeting there were four additional unions represented by delegates, two additional Negro groups and one additional Jewish organization. These people are bringing fresh energy and new ideas. It is very encouraging to those of us who have been working with the Committee to know that we have only begun to gather around us the people who are friendly to our purpose . . . and who will do something about it.”¹⁰⁵

In its publications over the next two years, the Committee expressed itself in antiracist language that highlighted trans-national, trans-communal, and trans-movement understandings of the links between imperialism and racism. In a preview of the international problems that domestic racism could provoke for foreign policy elites, Radio Berlin and Radio Tokyo broadcast the news of the conviction over shortwave radio to Latin America with reports that “implied that nowhere in the USA was there to be found a friend of the Mexican or Mexican American.”¹⁰⁶ The SLDC published letters of support from the Latin American Labor Delegates (delegations from Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Colombia, and Costa Rica were among the signatories) and petitions from various groups that were “indicative of every national descent . . . from the Transport Workers Union in New Orleans, from a college professor, from a group of men in Naval training, from soldiers convalescing in a Midwestern hospital, from a group of Negro youth, from Japanese Americans at Manzanar.”¹⁰⁷ Growing international support of SLDC efforts was made patently clear in a telegram sent by the Latin American labor delegates in 1944 that proclaimed:

We, the undersigned Latin American Labor Delegates to the ILO Conference being held in Philadelphia, wish to express to you, the members of your committee and all those who have so generously supported its fine work, our gratitude and that of our peoples for what you have done on behalf of the twelve Mexican-America. [sic] Boys unjustly convicted of murder in the so-called Sleepy Lagoon Case. This case has been used by the Fifth Column in our countries to stir up “Anti-Yankee” sentiment in order to undermine hemisphere unity in the war against Fascism. The fact that your committee has not only fought to right a great injustice against these innocent boys but has also exposed the anti-war forces responsible for their conviction enables us to prove that the anti-Latin American prejudice which colored their trial is not shared by the majority of the people of your country. Our thanks and congratulations to you and to all who worked with you.¹⁰⁸

The SLDC argued that their support came from “people all over the country, of every race and color, of every national origin of different political beliefs.”¹⁰⁹ This rhetorical strategy—grounded in the specific linkage between fascism abroad and racism at home—broadcast a politics of antiracist interethnic alliance that was intricately connected to struggles for spatial entitlement in Los Angeles youth culture and political coalitions. The Committee also argued that its activities constituted a contribution to the furtherance of the Good Neighbor Policy. This belief finds support in the enthusiastic praise and commendation accorded the work of the Committee by many organizations and individuals in Mexico and throughout Central and South America.”¹¹⁰ Just as strategies of spatial entitlement sought to expand the sphere of politics by enacting new social relations in seemingly unexpected places, appeals to international supporters in a time of war attempted to expand the playing field for U.S. white supremacy—to subject it to withering critique from the global majority of non-white people whose aid the United States needed in the war against fascism.

This collective pressure to expand the scope and stakes of space by bringing outside pressure to bear upon city officials and law enforcement agencies responsible for the incarceration of these youth eventually led to a dismissal of the charges in 1945. It was a serious victory for coalitional politics. Yet the physical brutality, psychic damage, and other widespread racist consequences this had on Mexican Americans in Los Angeles would subsequently have a legacy of its own. Dismissal of charges was not necessarily a victory for the young women who were defendants in People v. Zamora. As Catherine Ramirez notes, some of these girls and young women “remained incarcerated and wards of the state long after their male companions were exonerated and released from prison.”¹¹¹

When one considers the magnitude of change created by the activism of Bass and Moreno, as well as the lessons learned through both the failures and successes during their careers, the force of their impact upon the SLDC becomes more visible. Edward Escobar’s important study on race and police in Los Angeles distinguishes the SLDC from other organizations of its time, in part because its strategies made whites across the United States aware for the first time of discrimination against Mexican Americans in the Southwest. The SLDC’s mission was to reveal the ways in which Mexican Americans were systematically victimized by racial prejudice by arguing that the defendants were casualties of a biased criminal justice system.¹¹² Escobar suggests, however, that the SLDC campaign “could only have a limited effect on the growing zoot suit hysteria in Los Angeles,” in part because their focus remained confined to publicizing the trial to raise funds for the defendants’ appeal and was not on “discussing generalized discrimination against Mexican Americans.”¹¹³ Escobar’s observation is accurate, if it is restricted to the effects of the SLDC’s main effort: to publish a pamphlet entitled “The Sleepy Lagoon Case.” But if one considers the number of communities represented by the members of the SLDC—and therefore the constellations of struggle that were affected—his conclusion becomes too narrow to account for the SLDC’s effect on future attempts at interracial solidarities. Moreover, examining the ways in which these respective communities engaged the project of countering anti-Mexican hysteria brings the power of the SLDC into sharper light. Its critical strategy was an important ideological weapon against the sharpening demarcations of race, class, and community that emerged in the 1940s, manifest in segregated social and residential spaces, the growth of privatized redevelopment, and the kind of urban renewal that prized white entitlement over economic and social inclusion. Activists knew they were in for a long and protracted struggle that would exact many costs on them. “When a person, an organization, even a newspaper gets the courage and fortitude that is going to require to put this old world into such condition that it will be a fit and happy abode for all the people,” Bass wrote in 1946, “they must first be prepared to have their heads cracked, their hopes frustrated, and their financial strength weakened.”¹¹⁴

The Tenney Commission, the California legislature’s equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Committee, denounced the SLDC as a Communist front organization, later reporting that its meetings were facilitated by “trained rabble-rousers [who] orated of [sic] police brutality against minority groups, of the unfair treatment of the Mexican and the Negro population and of racial discrimination and segregation.”¹¹⁵ As a direct result of Bass and Moreno’s work on the Sleepy Lagoon case, as well as other activities, Senator Tenney targeted both of them during Commission hearings. “Now [that] there was no more Sleepy Lagoon or Pachucos to blame,” Moreno reasoned, “politicians scrambled to find Communists.” Tenney further used the case and red baiting to support segregation, oppose miscegenation, and to divide the Mexican community in Southern California.¹¹⁶

Bass was defiant. In her acceptance speech for her nomination as vice-presidential candidate of the Progressive Party six years later, she declared, “I will continue to cry out against police brutality against any people, as I did in the infamous zoot suit riots . . . when I reached scared and badly beaten Negro and Mexican American boys . . . [N]or have I hesitated in the face of that most Un-American Un-American activities committee—and I am willing to face it again.”¹¹⁷ This was Bass’s second run for elected office. In 1945, she ran for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council, hoping to represent the 45 percent African-American Seventh District. She lost this race, but she went on to run for Congress against future mayor Samuel Yorty in 1950. Regina Freer has pointed out that although Blacks held elected positions in Chicago and New York as early as the 1920s, Los Angeles did not elect its first Black city councilperson until the 1960s. This made Bass’s local runs for office remarkable and made her run for national office in 1952 all the more significant: she was the first Black woman to run for vice president. Freer writes:

At the Progressive Party’s national convention, Bass was nominated by Paul Robeson, with W. E. B. Du Bois seconding the nomination. The Progressive Party’s slogan in 1952—”win or lose, we win by raising the issues”—reflected Bass’s own orientation toward electoral politics as a forum (sometimes successful, sometimes marginalized) for political education.¹¹⁸

Far from being a departure from grassroots politics, Bass’ electoral political activism was an extension of the working-class politics that had previously been confined to areas outside the formal arena. It was an effort to expand the discursive space available for antiracist action.

Luisa Moreno faced more permanent personal consequences for her activism. In 1950, she was deported as a result of the Commission’s successful campaign to label her a “dangerous alien.”¹¹⁹ The FBI offered Moreno an opportunity to secure U.S. citizenship in exchange for testifying against Harry Bridges, an Australian-born International Longshoremen Labor Union leader who had been charged with being a communist. Moreno refused to be “a free woman with a mortgaged 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.

7. Alice McGrath, interviewed by Michael Balter, 1987, Transcript: The Education of Alice McGrath. Oral History Transcript, Oral History Program, University of California at Los Angeles, p. 93.

8. Bass, Forty Years, p. 157.

9. Rapp, Anne Barbara. “A Marginalized Voice for Racial Justice: Charlotta Bass and Oppositional Politics, 1914–1960” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005), p. 114.

10. David Harvey locates “the politics of space . . . in the contradiction between mobility and immobility.” He contends that because capital exists in immobile, spatially fixed forms, “such as factories, worker skills, social and physical infrastructures,” as well as in mobile forms, such as currency, it is between these two states that space becomes most contested. Harvey, David. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge, 2001.

11. Ruiz, “Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism,” pp. 175–192.

12. Garcilazo, Jeffrey M. “McCarthyism, Mexican Americans, and the Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign-Born, 1959–1960.” Western Historical Quarterly, 32, no. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 273–295.

13. U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, “Closing INS Report (Los Angeles District) on Luisa Moreno,” December 6, 1950; Murdoch, Steve. “Kenny Papers.” Our Times, September 9, 1949, file 53.

14. Catherine Ramírez has drawn attention to the term “GI Generation” as an androcentric label of this period. Ramírez, Catherine. The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, p. 17.

15. Ruiz, “Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism,” p. 177.

16. Ruiz, Vicki L. “Una Mujer sin Fronteras: Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism” in Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 1 (2004): 4.

17. García, Mario. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989; García, Mario. Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

18. Gutiérrez, David Gregory. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 111–114.

19. Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Harper, 1995.

20. Lipsitz, George. “Abolition Democracy and Global Justice.” Comparative American Studies: an International Journal 2, no. 3 (2005): 273–274.

21. Camacho, Alicia R. Schmidt. Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands. New York: New York University Press, 2008, p. 137.

22. Quoted in Ruiz, Vicki. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 101. Also quoted in Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, p. 137.

23. Bernstein, Shana. “Interracial Activism in the Los Angeles Community Service Organization: Linking the World War II and Civil Rights Eras.” Pacific Historical Review 80, no 2 (May 2011), p. 235.

24. Sánchez, George. “Edward R. Roybal and the Politics of Multiracialism.” Southern California Quarterly 92, no. 1 (Spring, 2010), 51.

25. Ruiz, “Una Mujer sin Fronteras,” p. 6.

26. Ruiz, Vicki. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987, pp. 74–78, 83.

27. Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, p. 2.

28. Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City. Oxford, United Kingdom: Basil Blackwell, 1973.