Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson

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.