Once Mexico outlawed slavery in 1836, Blacks inhabiting regions in ambiguous reach of Mexican law demanded their freedom: Prefiguring the Dred Scott case, in 1846 a woman known only as “Mary” became the first Western slave to win her freedom through the legal system. Mary was brought to San Jose by her owner. When she learned that Mexican law prohibited bondage, she sued for her liberty by arguing that her enslavement was void.26
African-American artists, intellectuals, athletes, and ordinary citizens have historically identified Mexico and the border region as places of refuge from racism and inequality in the United States.27 In 1937, Nannie and Carl Hansberry deliberately challenged the legal system of restrictive covenants in Chicago, which precluded the sale of property to Blacks by white owners. With the help of several white realtors and Supreme Liberty Life Insurance President Harry H. Pace (who did not disclose the race of the home loan borrowers to white property owners in the area) the Hansberrys secretly bought two properties in white neighborhoods on the East and South sides of Chicago. Their daughter Lorraine (future author of the prize-winning play A Raisin in the Sun) described the area around their home on Rhodes Avenue as “a hellishly hostile white neighborhood in which literally, howling mobs surrounded our house.” After a prolonged court battle, the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld the legality of the covenant and forced the family to vacate their home. Although the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision on a legal technicality, this turn of events did not curb white hostility toward the Hansberry children, who were, as Hansberry recounted,
spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. . . . The fact that my father and the NAACP “won” a Supreme Court decision, in a now famous case which bears his name in the law books, is—ironically—the sort of “progress” our satisfied friends allude to when they presume to deride the more radical means of struggle. The cost, in emotional turmoil, time and money, which led to my father’s early death as a permanently embittered exile in a foreign country when he saw that after such sacrificial efforts the Negroes of Chicago were as ghetto-locked as ever, does not seem to figure in their calculations.28
In 1944, Carl Hansberry moved to Mexico to make a home for his family, but died of a cerebral hemorrhage before they could join him. The tragic example of Hansberry and his family demonstrates the severe social and psychological costs of the brutal racism exacted upon Black Americans, and the prominent position that Mexico occupied in the mid-twentieth-century Black imagination.
Novelist Richard Wright’s travels in the 1940s led him to write that in Mexico, “people of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority.”29 During his own stay in Mexico, Langston Hughes reported, “here, nothing is barred from me. I am among my own people . . . for Mexico is a Brown man’s country.”30 Willie Wells, three-time U.S. Negro League batting champion remarked, “not only do I get more money playing here, but I live like a king. . . . I am not faced with the racial problem. . . . I’ve found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. . . . Here in Mexico I am a man.”31
When Lorraine Hansberry attended the University of Guadalajara, she followed a strong tradition of Black American education in Mexican institutions: between 1930 and 1960, African-American artists Charles Alston, John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Sargent Claude Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, John Wilson, and Hale Woodruff reinvigorated the concept of the “New Negro” by studying in Mexico or with Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco.32
Hughes’s and Wells’s characterizations of Mexico demonstrate something worth noting here, that the desire for a homeland free of Jim Crow has sometimes generated descriptions of race relations in Mexico that are too generous and uncomplicated. Racism was and remains powerful in Mexico, though it has evolved differently from the United States at different historical moments. Yet for these early-twentieth-century Black artists and athletes, the identification of the border and Mexico as an escape from U.S. racism prevailed despite Mexico’s attempt in the 1920s to limit Negro emigration.33
Coalitions among oppressed minorities in California have always been present, even when they have not always ended in victory. As early as 1903, Japanese and Mexican beet workers collaborated against unfair working conditions in Oxnard. The Longshoreman’s Union that emerged from the Los Angeles General Strike of 1934 was racially integrated, as were the farm workers’ unions of the 1930s. In the latter part of that decade, Mexicana employees at CalSan protested discriminatory practices in the hiring of African Americans, so that by the early part of 1942, factory owners were forced to relent under union pressure and hire close to 30 Blacks. As third world nationalism was at its height in Los Angeles, Réies López Tijerina and the Black Panthers co-authored a peace pact; César Chávez and Bobby Seale made visible efforts to demonstrate mutual support for each activist’s constituents, and it was working-class women’s organizing that inspired the coordinated efforts of Ralph Abernathy and Corky Gonzalez for the Poor People’s March to Sacramento and Washington, DC, in 1968.34
I have chosen to write about Blacks and Chicanos in Los Angeles because they have long been pitted against each other in debates about civil, economic, and immigrant rights. These narrow depictions undermine collective memories of interracial solidarity by denying existing material and ideological connections between these communities. It is important to acknowledge the power of racial and economic divisions between these two groups, but given all the efforts to divide them, instances of unity and cross-pollination become all the more important.
Five chapters reveal the spatial struggles and cultural expressions that comprise a rich record of Black–Brown affiliation in Los Angeles since the 1940s. In Chapter 1, I examine two historically important yet still understudied activists, Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno, who deployed spatial entitlement as a mechanism for fighting racial subordination and spatial exclusion in this era. They laid claim to 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.
Bass and Moreno advanced cultural pluralism, integration, and intercultural understanding in the 1930s and 1940s, prior to some of the more renowned interracial activism of later periods. Moreover, the strategies of cultural pluralism these women employed shaped and reflected unprecedented neighborhood and workplace sensibilities that incorporated a mosaic of racial and ethnic groups, a precursor of urban activism in the 1950s in Los Angeles. This chapter delineates the relationship between the formation of interracial alliances in the 1930s and the repression of interracial spaces in the 1940s and 1950s. It also fills a gap in recent scholarship on Los Angeles: a gender analysis in the history of interracial politics.
Chapter 2 reveals how Los Angeles African Americans and Chicanos managed to deploy cultural resources to survive in the midst of racial backlash and the evisceration of working-class neighborhoods during the urban renewal period in Los Angeles. It is here that I explicate in more detail my theory of spatial entitlement. Though both African Americans and Mexican Americans achieved broader geographical opportunities for housing and employment in the postwar era, and though both subsequently observed a modicum of progress in integration and employment, both were also witness to pointed and devastating disregard for their communities, even when the physical space of their neighborhoods expanded. I show how as the boundaries of segregated Black and Brown neighborhoods were expanding incrementally, the social agencies and institutions that served these areas were under persistent attack by city and federal policies in the postwar era. Facing the evisceration of historically Black and Brown neighborhoods