13. Kelley, Race Rebels, p. 56.
14. I was first made aware of beat juggling through a conversation with turntablist Brendan “BK-One” Kelly. I thank turntablist Lord “DJ Lord” Aswod for his instruction on pitch controls and the technicalities of beat juggling.
15. Sánchez documents the civil rights struggles, cultural politics, and formal and informal economies of Mexican immigrants in LA from 1900 to 1940. Sánchez, George. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
16. In her history of multiracial activism and struggle in LA from the 1960s through the 1970s, Pulido examines critical historical developments in the Black Panther Party, El Centro de Acción Social y Autónomo (CASA), and East Wind to consider the mutual and autonomous relationships of their relevant communities. Revealing the third world radical politics nurtured and produced in Black, Chicana and Chicano, and Japanese organizations and communities, she reveals a largely untold history of alliance politics and their challenges. Pulido, Laura. Black Brown Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
17. In Black Arts West, Widener examines the significance of Black cultural politics and productions in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1992. He argues that the distinctive, collective cultural productions of Black artists, cultural workers, and activists in LA constitute a unique and significant social movement. Widener, Daniel. Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
18. Luis Alvarez argues that Black, Mexican, Asian-American, and white youths deployed popular culture as a means to assert new identities and oppose dominant narratives of acceptable style politics and behavior. Alvarez’s history compels readers to consider the multiracial community of zoot style practitioners on its own terms, as a generation and demographic who self-consciously created new multiracial affiliations and cultural productions. Alvarez, Luis. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
19. Macías’s narrative of postwar Mexican-American urban culture in LA reveals the centrality of Mexican-American youth in LA’s popular music, car culture, and zoot phenomenon. Macías argues that the cultural productions and experiences effected by interracial congregation and second-generation identities created important new standpoints and vernaculars of entitlement, transforming what it meant to be Mexican American both within the Mexican community and in relation to the postwar nation. Anthony Macías, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
20. Bunch documents: “Luis Quintero, a 55-year-old Black tailor accompanied by his mulatto wife Maria Petra Rubio, 40, and their five children. Quintero was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco in 1725. Jose Moreno, 22, and Maria Guadalupe Gertrudis, 19, a recently wed mulatto couple, born in Rosario, Mexico. Manuel Camero, 30, and Maria Tomasa, 24, two mulattoes also from Rosario. Antonio Mesa, 38, a Negro born in Alamos, Sonora, his mulatto wife, Ana Gertrudis Lopez, 27, and their two children. Maria Manuela Calixtra, 43, the mulatto mother of six and her Indian husband, Basilia Rosas, 67. Maria Rufina Dorotea, 45, also a mulatto, brought her three children and her mestizo husband, 42-year-old Jose Antonia Navarro.” Lonnie Bunch III, Black Angelenos: The African American in Los Angeles, 1850–1950. Los Angeles: California Afro-American Museum, 1989, pp. 10–12.
21. Ibid., pp. 10–12. See also, Rios-Bustamante, Antonio. “Los Angeles, Pueblo and Region, 1781–1850: Continuity and Adaptation on the North Mexican Periphery” (PhD dissertation, UCLA, 1985), pp. 56–59, 71–72.
22. Menchaca, Martha. Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
23. The literature on Afro-Indian-Mexican communities and encounters is impressive: for example, Ivan Van Sertima has demonstrated evidence of an African presence in Mexico centuries before Columbus; Dennis Valdéz has documented a Black population in Oaxaca as early as 1523. Van Sertima, Ivan. They Came Before Columbus. New York: Random House, 1972; Valdéz, Dennis Nodín. “The Decline of Slavery In Mexico.” Americas 44, no. 2 (1987): 167.
24. This is evidenced, for example, by Gaspar Yanga’s revolt on the sugar plantations of Veracruz in 1570. He led his followers into the nearby nearly inaccessible mountains and kept the forces of the Crown at bay for many years.
25. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America. New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 12–13, 15; Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: ZED, 1983, pp. 184–185.
26. Katz, William Loren. The Black West: A Documentary and Pictoral History of the African American Role in the Westward Expansion of the United States. New York: Broadway, 1996.
27. In 1917, thousands of Blacks escaping brutal conditions in the South migrated not northward, like so many of their counterparts, but southwestward, establishing an agricultural community in Baja, California. According to Ted Vincent, with strong cooperation between these Black immigrants and Mexican locals, the community endured until 1960. Vincent, Ted. “Black Hopes in Baja California: Black American and Mexican cooperation, 1917–1926,” Western Journal of Black Studies, 21, no. 3 (1997): 204.
28. Hansberry, Lorraine. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. New York: Vintage Books, 1969, p. 20.
29. Quoted in Horne, Gerald. Black and Brown: African-Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920. New York: New York University Press, 2005, pp. 183–192.
30. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 1: 1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 40, 42.
31. Horne, Black and Brown, pp. 183–192.
32. In her important work, Lizzette LeFalle-Collins has demonstrated that the work of Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco provided a visual model that expressed and encouraged communal interaction toward the shared goals of fighting oppression and celebrating their cultural heritage. LeFalle-Collins, Lizzetta. “The Mexican Connection: the New Negro and Border Crossings.” American Visions 11, no. 6 (1996): 20.
33. Horne, Black and Brown, pp. 183–192.
34. Dymally, Mervyn M. “Afro-Americans and Mexican-Americas: The Politics of Coalition.” In: Wollenberg, Charles (Ed.), Ethnic Conflict in California History. Los Angeles: Tinnon-Brown, 1970, p. 166.
35. Althusser, L. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: New Left Books, 1971.
36. African Americans and Latinos, together, constitute 67 percent of the total state-prison population, though the rate of incarceration is significantly higher for the former. Hayes, Joseph M. “California’s Changing Prison Population.” San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, August 2006.
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