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