Long regarded as a violent outburst significant mainly for California history, the 1871 Los Angeles anti-Chinese massacre raises themes central to America’s Civil War Reconstruction era between 1865 and 1877, namely, the resort to threats and violence to preserve traditionally conceived social and political authority and power. Although the Los Angeles events occurred far from the American South, the Los Angeles anti-Chinese massacre paralleled the anti-black violence that rose in the South during Reconstruction. Although the immediate causes of the violence in the post–Civil War South and California were far different, they shared one key characteristic: they employed racial disciplining to preserve traditional social orders that old elites saw as threatened by changing times and circumstances.
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The Anti-Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles as a Reconstruction-Era Event
Victor Jew
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The Chicana and Chicano Movement
Rosie Bermudez
The Chicana and Chicano movement or El Movimiento is one of the multiple civil rights struggles led by racialized and marginalized people in the United States. Building on a legacy of organizing among ethnic Mexicans, this social movement emerged in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s to continue the struggle to secure basic human needs and the fulfillment of their civil rights. To be Chicana and Chicano during this era represented an assertion of ethnic and cultural pride, self-determination, and a challenge to the status quo. Those who claimed this political identity sought to contest the subordinate position of people of Mexican origin in America. They responded to the effects and persistence of structural inequalities such as racism, discrimination, segregation, poverty, and the lack of opportunities to rise out of these conditions. Militant direct action and protest were hallmarks of this sustained effort. A flourishing intellectual and creative atmosphere existed within the movement that included the proliferation and combination of multiple ideological and political positions, including cultural nationalism, internationalism, feminism, and leftism. A major facet was rooted in historical recovery, analysis of conditions, and cultural awareness, represented within a wide-ranging print culture, and various forms of expression such as political theater, visual arts, poetry, and music. Constituted by several organizations and local movements, El Movimiento participants varied in age, generation, region, class, and sexuality. Several long-standing issues, including labor and land disputes that were directly linked to a brutal history of exploitation and dispossession, were grappled with. A lack of political representation and substandard education fueled struggles for an alternative political party and education. Further struggles stemmed from poverty coupled with police violence and suppression. Others took on anti-war efforts, and still others tackled gender inequality which reverberated throughout.
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El Paso
Alberto Wilson
El Paso, Texas, sits on the northern bank of the Rio Grande along the international boundary between Mexico and the United States and the states of Texas, New Mexico, and Chihuahua. Its location makes El Paso a major urban center in the US Southwest and a key border city, and together with Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, the cities comprise the largest border metroplex in the western hemisphere. Occupying formerly Mansos and Suma lands, the collision between Spanish imperial design and native stewardship began in the mid-17th century as civil and religious authorities from New Mexico established a southern settlement along the river to provide a place of rest and security for the trade and travel making its way from the mineral-rich regions of New Spain to the far-flung colony. Initial settlement patterns in El Paso occurred on the southern bank of the river in what is early 21st-century Ciudad Juárez due to seasonal flooding, which provided a natural barrier from Apache raids. El Paso remained a crossroads into the national period of the 19th century as the settlements began to experience the expansion of state power and market relations in North America. The competing national designs of Mexico and the United States collided in war from 1846 to 1848, resulting in the redrawing of national borders that turned El Paso and Ciudad Juárez into border cities. In the 20th century, industrial capitalism, migration, and state power linked these peripheral cities to national and international markets, and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez became the largest binational, bicultural community along the US–Mexico border. In 2020, the decennial census of Mexico and the United States counted a combined 2.5 million residents in the region, with over eight hundred thousand of those residing in El Paso.
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Latinx Criminality
Max Felker-Kantor
Latinx criminality was a product of racialized policing and policies that constructed various Latinx groups as foreign threats over the course of American history. Crime was not an objective category but one produced by policing, vigilantism, border enforcement, and immigration policy, all of which both relied on and produced dominant beliefs of Latinx criminality. Latinxs were racialized as criminal and foreign enemies to be variously eliminated or contained beginning before the Mexican-American War and continuing with the integration of immigration enforcement and criminal justice, known as crimmigration, in the 21st century. The intertwined process of racialization and criminalization evolved over time, from the conquest of Mexico driven by Manifest Destiny to colonial projects in Cuba and Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War to the Texas Rangers’ assaults on Mexicans during the Mexican Revolution; from the repatriation campaigns in the 1930s to the social movements of the 1960s; and from the refugee and asylum crisis in the 1980s to the antiimmigrant nativism of the 1990s and 2000s. In each of these eras, policing practices built on the deep racial scripts that were deployed to construct different Latinx groups as potential criminals.
While ethnic Mexicans in the Southwest bore the brunt of racist policing and criminalization during the 19th and first half of the 20th century, demographic changes resulting from new migration streams, American imperial ambitions in the 1890s, and Cold War interventions ensured that other Latinx groups, such as Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitians, Cubans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans, were subjected to racialized policing and criminalization. In the process, the logic of racist assumptions about the criminality of people of Mexican descent born out of America’s ideological belief in its Manifest Destiny easily translated to the criminalization of other Latinx groups. The framework of racial scripts explains this common process of racialization and criminalization. Although the nature of policing and criminalization shifted over time and targeted different Latinx groups in different ways, Anglo-Americans continually displaced their fears of “foreign threats” onto racialized others, making Latinxs into “criminals” through punitive policies, scapegoating, and policing.
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Los Angeles
Jessica M. Kim
Since the founding of Los Angeles in the 18th century, the region has been a “global city,” defined by links between the region and the broader world. Los Angeles grew into the nation’s second-largest city and one of the world’s “megacities” or “global cities” as a direct result of European imperialism, global capitalism, and national and international patterns of migration. The 1781 founding of the city by Spanish settler colonists and later annexation by the United States were driven by global forces of colonization, conquest, and resource exploitation. Subsequent regional economic development and ties to global markets created economic growth in Los Angeles while drawing global migrations to Southern California from the late 19th century and into the 21st. Global migrations included the movement of millions of people to greater Los Angeles from Asia, Latin America, and around the world. These migrations transformed Los Angeles into one of the most diverse regions of the world by the first decades of the 20th century. The city’s phenomenal economic growth across the 20th century was also extensively tied to global economic links and the expansion of global capitalism. Global patterns of deindustrialization and economic restructuring at the end of the 20th century intersected with a significant rise of post-1965 immigration and settlement in Los Angeles in the final decades of the 20th century. At the start of the 21st century, it is the city’s diverse global communities that are reimagining and remaking the city in the face of deep urban economic and racial inequalities.
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Phoenix
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Phoenix, the capital of the state of Arizona, exemplifies the ways Sun Belt cities dramatically grew after World War II. Phoenix was best described as a small trading town in 1912, when Arizona became the last territory to achieve statehood in the continental United States. Although Phoenix was a capital city located in an area with little rainfall and high summer temperatures, its economy depended heavily on the sale of cotton and copper as well as tourists attracted to the Salt River valley’s warm winters. But members of the local Chamber of Commerce, like many small-town boosters across the US South and West, wanted to attract manufacturers by the 1930s, when the Great Depression upended the agricultural, mining, and tourism markets. The Chamber’s White male leaders (including future Senator Barry Goldwater) succeeded during World War II. They lobbied for wartime investment that transformed Phoenix into one of the many boom towns that dotted the South and West. That success fueled postwar efforts to attract industry by building a favorable “business climate.” Local leaders, business executives, and industry experts used that seemingly benign phrase to describe cities that guaranteed investors low taxes, weak unions, few government regulations, and other policies that maximized profits and undermined 1930s reforms. Phoenix stood out in what reporters called the “Second War between the States” for industry. General Electric, Motorola, and Sperry Rand had all opened branch plants by 1960, when Phoenix was already one of the largest US cities. It also stood out in 1969, when Republican strategist Kevin Phillips drew attention to the “Sun Belt phenomenon” that seemed to be the metropolitan core of a new conservative politics dedicated to free enterprise and poised to spread across the rapidly deindustrializing Northeast and Midwest. But growth undermined the Chamber’s power. By the 1970s, citizens questioned putting business first, and investors began shifting manufacturing overseas, which left residents to deal with the environmental, fiscal, and political damage the business climate ideal had wrought.
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Police and Crime in the American City, 1800–2020
Simon Balto and Max Felker-Kantor
The relationship between policing and crime in American history has been tenuous at best. In fact, policing and crime are imperfectly correlated. Crime is understood as a socially constructed category that varies over time and space. Crime in the American city was produced by the actions of police officers on the street and the laws passed by policymakers that made particular behaviors, often ones associated with minoritized people, into something called “crime.” Police create a statistical narrative about crime through the behaviors and activities they choose to target as “crime.” As a result, policing the American city has functionally reinforced the nation’s dominant racial and gender hierarchies as much as (or more so) than it has served to ensure public safety or reduce crime. Policing and the production of crime in the American city has been broadly shaped by three interrelated historical processes: racism, xenophobia, and capitalism. As part of these processes, policing took many forms across space and time. From origins in the slave patrols in the South, settler colonial campaigns of elimination in the West, and efforts to put down striking workers in the urban North, the police evolved into the modern, professional forces familiar to many Americans in the early 21st century. The police, quite simply, operated to uphold a status quo based on unequal and hierarchical racial, ethnic, and economic orders.
Tracing the history of policing and crime from the colonial era to the present demonstrates the ways that policing has evolved through a dialectic of crisis and reform. Moments of protest and unrest routinely exposed the ways policing was corrupt, violent, and brutal, and did little to reduce crime in American cities. In turn, calls for reform produced “new” forms of policing (what was often referred to as professionalization in the early and mid-20th century and community policing in the 21st). But these reforms did not address the fundamental role or power of police in society. Rather, these reforms often expanded it, producing new crises, new protests, and still more “reforms,” in a seemingly endless feedback loop. From the vantage point of the 21st century, this evolution demonstrates the inability of reform or professionalization to address the fundamental role of police in American society. In short, it is a history that demands a rethinking of the relationship between policing and crime, the social function of the police, and how to achieve public safety in American cities.
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The Rise of the Sunbelt South
Katherine R. Jewell
The term “Sunbelt” connotes a region defined by its environment. “Belt” suggests the broad swath of states from the Atlantic coast, stretching across Texas and Oklahoma, the Southwest, to southern California. “Sun” suggests its temperate—even hot—climate. Yet in contrast to the industrial northeastern and midwestern Rust Belt, or perhaps, “Frost” Belt, the term’s emergence at the end of the 1960s evoked an optimistic, opportunistic brand. Free from snowy winters, with spaces cooled by air conditioners, and Florida’s sandy beaches or California’s surfing beckoning, it is true that more Americans moved to the Sunbelt states in the 1950s and 1960s than to the deindustrializing centers of the North and East.
But the term “Sunbelt” also captures an emerging political culture that defies regional boundaries. The term originates more from the diagnosis of this political climate, rather than an environmental one, associated with the new patterns of migration in the mid-20th century. The term defined a new regional identity: politically, economically, in policy, demographically, and socially, as well as environmentally. The Sunbelt received federal money in an unprecedented manner, particularly because of rising Cold War defense spending in research and military bases, and its urban centers grew in patterns unlike those in the old Northeast and Midwest, thanks to the policy innovations wrought by local boosters, business leaders, and politicians, which defined politics associated with the region after the 1970s. Yet from its origin, scholars debate whether the Sunbelt’s emergence reflects a new regional identity, or something else.
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San Francisco
Ocean Howell
San Francisco has a reputation as a liberal city. But history shows that San Francisco’s liberalism must be regarded as evolving, contested, and often internally contradictory. The land that became the city was originally home to the Yelamu people, a small tribe in the Ohlone language group. Spanish missionaries arrived in 1776, but the Spanish empire only had a tenuous hold on the place—it was the furthest outpost of empire. By 1821, when the Mexican government took the land, most of the Native population had perished from disease. Immediately after the Americans took the place, in 1848, gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and the world rushed in. The population increased 2,400 percent in one year, and fewer than half of the new residents had been born anywhere in the United States. Well into the 20th century, elite San Franciscans worried that the rest of the country viewed their city as a barbarous place, full of foreign libertines seeking fortune and pleasure. These narratives masked the extent to which San Francisco’s economy was corporatized from the early days of the Gold Rush. They also present an image of racial liberalism that ultimately must be regarded as a myth. However, there is some truth in the view that the city has been a comparatively tolerant place, where various subcultures could thrive. San Francisco’s status as a bohemian place, a wide-open town, has always sat in tension with its role as a headquarters of global, corporate capital.
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San Jose and “Silicon Valley”
Glenna Matthews
Since 1988, San Jose has billed itself as the Capital of Silicon Valley. Thirty-five years later, it is the wealthiest city in the country. Despite San Jose’s size and its self-proclaimed title, however, the city remains far less known than its Bay Area sister cities—San Francisco and Oakland—both of which were smaller in population after 1980.
Yet the history of San Jose and the metropolitan region deserves to be better known for a multiplicity of reasons. First, in the heart of the Santa Clara Valley, San Jose was the first secular pueblo established by the Spanish in Alta California, in 1777, hence is California’s oldest city. Second, with its Native Californian population, its Hispanic Catholic first settlers, and the diversity of immigrants after the discovery of gold in 1848, San Jose has never been a place of Protestant hegemony. Despite the existence of racism and ethnocentrism, newcomers there encountered a playing field different from much of the country. That the Silicon Valley workforce has had so strong an immigrant profile is perhaps related to the fact that San Jose was born diverse. Finally, San Jose’s political and economic history are important. A small market center for the vast fruit-growing and processing industry in the Valley—as of 1930, there were at least a hundred thousand acres in orchards and dozens of canneries—San Jose began a transformative period of explosive growth during World War II that saw the city’s local economy dramatically change while increasing tenfold in geographical size and twice that in population. Local boosters, in fact, hoped and planned for it to become “the Los Angeles of the North.” Whether that goal was desirable or not, their vision, along with developments at Stanford University and enormous amounts of federal spending on defense, paved the way for the Santa Clara Valley to evolve into “Silicon Valley.”
