On his book The World in a City: Multiethnic Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles
Cover Interview of December 11, 2019
In a nutshell
The near-continuous movements of people and of ideas are two
themes that flow through the work. Migration from within the United States and
across international boundaries increased the population of Los Angeles from roughly
one hundred thousand in 1900 to over one million people in 1930. This created one
of the most racially diverse places in terms of breadth in the United States
and probably the world in this period. The new arrivals filtering into the city
formed multiracial working-class neighborhoods.
An important thing to recognize about Los Angeles is that it
had a very small industrial sector before 1920; the regional agricultural
economy was far more advanced in terms of scale and corporate organization.
This shaped migratory labor patterns typified by urban-rural and rural-rural
movement where itinerate workers migrated between seasonal agriculture jobs and
infrastructure work—things like laying railroad tracks, building roads, and
digging aqueducts—and then back to “winter” in Los Angeles or other locations.
As the city’s population increased, migration continued for a large sector of
the population.
As workers traveled, they formed social connections at the
sites of their labor, along the path of their journeys, and independent of
their work in places often hundreds of miles away; they formed communities as
dispersed, flexible, and mobile as their lives. The mobile working class
extended the reach of Los Angeles’ diverse urban community through layers of
interconnected social ties that reached throughout the U.S. West and Mexico and
into the broader world. Radical political ideals carried by people and print
traversed the same commodity and migration networks into and out of Los
Angeles.
My interest lies in the alliances people formed to improve
their lives in this period of settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism. The
most racially diverse coalitions formed among workers with precarious
employment and living situations in spaces with weak organizational structures,
fueled by the ideals advanced in anarchism—especially by the Partido Liberal
Mexicano—the syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and
socialist internationalism. Radicals generated novel forms of multilingual and
interracial organizing by rearticulating anti-statist and internationalist streams
of thought to create a local internationalism rooted in place. These practices
had a broad cultural impact.
The radical practices that germinated in and near Los
Angeles gave rise to some of the broadest interracial solidarities in the
history of the United States as Mexicans, European immigrants, Japanese, South
Asians, African Americans, indigenous, and native-born whites often found cause
for cooperation. Though these solidarities constantly reformed, shifted, and
dissolved in a multiracial city during a period of remarkable economic
development and population growth. Radicals did not reverse the powerful
economic forces and racist logics fueling Los Angeles’ rapid growth, but their
organizing provided important outlets for working-class people to shape their
lives with hope for a better world.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
The near-continuous movements of people and of ideas are two themes that flow through the work. Migration from within the United States and across international boundaries increased the population of Los Angeles from roughly one hundred thousand in 1900 to over one million people in 1930. This created one of the most racially diverse places in terms of breadth in the United States and probably the world in this period. The new arrivals filtering into the city formed multiracial working-class neighborhoods.
An important thing to recognize about Los Angeles is that it had a very small industrial sector before 1920; the regional agricultural economy was far more advanced in terms of scale and corporate organization. This shaped migratory labor patterns typified by urban-rural and rural-rural movement where itinerate workers migrated between seasonal agriculture jobs and infrastructure work—things like laying railroad tracks, building roads, and digging aqueducts—and then back to “winter” in Los Angeles or other locations. As the city’s population increased, migration continued for a large sector of the population.
As workers traveled, they formed social connections at the sites of their labor, along the path of their journeys, and independent of their work in places often hundreds of miles away; they formed communities as dispersed, flexible, and mobile as their lives. The mobile working class extended the reach of Los Angeles’ diverse urban community through layers of interconnected social ties that reached throughout the U.S. West and Mexico and into the broader world. Radical political ideals carried by people and print traversed the same commodity and migration networks into and out of Los Angeles.
My interest lies in the alliances people formed to improve their lives in this period of settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism. The most racially diverse coalitions formed among workers with precarious employment and living situations in spaces with weak organizational structures, fueled by the ideals advanced in anarchism—especially by the Partido Liberal Mexicano—the syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and socialist internationalism. Radicals generated novel forms of multilingual and interracial organizing by rearticulating anti-statist and internationalist streams of thought to create a local internationalism rooted in place. These practices had a broad cultural impact.
The radical practices that germinated in and near Los Angeles gave rise to some of the broadest interracial solidarities in the history of the United States as Mexicans, European immigrants, Japanese, South Asians, African Americans, indigenous, and native-born whites often found cause for cooperation. Though these solidarities constantly reformed, shifted, and dissolved in a multiracial city during a period of remarkable economic development and population growth. Radicals did not reverse the powerful economic forces and racist logics fueling Los Angeles’ rapid growth, but their organizing provided important outlets for working-class people to shape their lives with hope for a better world.