Los Angeles is a City of Contrasts, according to Mike Davis

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What is the point of learning about L.A.’s past? Because history repeats itself unless we inform ourselves.

“…Los Angeles in the 1920s was in many respects a de facto dictatorship of the Times and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, as the LAPD’s infamous ‘red squad’ kept dissent off the streets and radicals in jail.”

In 2016, it sounds like it’s straight out of a Hollywood script: a newspaper and an Association forming two parts of a ‘dictatorship’. But Los Angeles in the 1920s wasn’t the megalopolis it is today. If one can imagine it, in 1900 L.A. barely had over 100,000 people living in it.

By 1910, the city population more than doubled to over 300,000, but was still smaller than Long Beach (+400,000) today. And though by 1920 the city grew to a population of over 576,000 people, it was still only the tenth largest city in the United States, behind Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (+588,000) of all places.

New York, by contrast, counted over 5,620,000 people in 1920.

In other words, L.A. was still just another town out west in California, leaving room for just a few major ‘players’.

Davis goes on to describe how the Times and the Association’s reign took place at the time of a great internal migration in the U.S. from the the early twentieth century up to the mid-1920s, when ‘middle America’ came out to the West coast and made L.A. a particularly white, Anglo-Saxon protestant town supported by a Mexican underclass.

“…the new WASP ascendancy found its essential economic support in the arrival of Mexican labor in massive numbers after the fall of the Porfiriato in 1910.”

The Porfiriato was a thirty-five year dictatorship in Mexico from 1875 – 1910. Headed by President Porfirio Diaz, his rule by force made significant developments for the state and relative stability of Mexico, but also violently suppressed the poor or lower classes.

In the end, Diaz’s rule came to a violent demise when a revolutionary war ravaged the country. Diaz would die in exile in France, as war for his succession ravaged Mexico for the next ten years and saw many leave their homeland with dreams of a better life en el Norte.

As such, it’s easy to see how Los Angeles was a prime destination for a new beginning for Mexican laborers in the 20s, as well as how their desperation for a decent living would make them great workers for a city in need of building.

It also makes sense how a newspaper and its printing power at the time could command far more power. There were only half a million people in its beat, then.

And when considering that the Manufacturer’s Association was one of its kind as industry was still lacking in Los Angeles, the state of The City in the 1920s becomes clear: it wasn’t anything but a few people’s stomping grounds.

Yet even with this relatively ordinary backdrop, there was still a shift in power taking place. In Davis’s words:

One of the first casualties of this recomposition of demography and power was the integrated social status of Los Angeles Jews. By the early 1900s elite Jews, including the pioneer dynasties of the 1840s and 1850s, were being excluded from the corporate directorships, law firms, philanthropies and clubs that in many cases they had helped to establish.

When I read this, it was as fascinating as it was problematizing, as I realized that if the “upper classes” weren’t all just one united front but a series of different actors, then surely they aren’t now, which makes the entire notion of power far more complex than what meets the eye. It’s not just a city, but a world of contrasts.

With more soon,

J.T.

white house

Obama!

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There’s a lifetime to debate the legacy of the 44th president of the United States, but what’s certain now is that he’s one of a generation, if not a lifetime. As citizens of the world in this final chapter with him, we’re absolutely privileged to hear him speak one more time, and it’s a privilege I hope as many of The People can enjoy.

J.T.

Los Angeles: Intellegentsia

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JT_Cahuenga_Panorama
Cahuenga Library; East Hollywood, L.A.

“First of all, Los Angeles is usually seen as a peculiarly infertile cultural soil, unable to produce, to this day [1990], any homegrown intelligentsia. Unlike San Francisco, which has generated a distinctive cultural history from the Argonauts to the Beats, Los Angeles’s truly indigenous intellectual history seems a barren shelf.”

Davis’s introduction to The City as a land with no ‘intellegentsia’ is an interesting way of casting L.A. as a place without leadership; even if intellectuals don’t necessarily lead people, they influence people, or at least acknowledge that there is a group of people to talk about in the first place, without which people have less of a sense of themselves or their culture. In the case of San Francisco, for example, San Franciscans can point to the literary romance held between the young Beats and their town. It is also an historic process. Though Jack Kerouac and his contemporaries weren’t ‘homegrown’ in SF, the Beats still inspired San Fran legend and discourse to this day as figures of a revolutionary time in the town, not to mention the United States as a whole. For L.A. to lack in its own cast of poets and cultural icons, then, at least in the intellectual sense, is for L.A. to lack in culture or a sense of culture.

But I want to scan my mind for a moment, to think of the icons of Los Angeles.

Snoop Dogg and D.R.E?!

Tupac Shakur, certainly.

Eazy-E, maybe?!

To be certain, Mike Davis’s City of Quartz is talking about L.A. up to 1990, and it’s 2016. We’ve had some additions to the band of intellects from and about The City since then.

In particular, I think of musicians that also serve as intellectuals or cultural critics, like Zack de la Rocha and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Kendrick Lamar, Nipsey Hussle and YG, and generations of lesser known but equally active political artists in the ‘underground’.

I also think of L.A.’s writers, who have grown the canon substantially since 1990, and which includes authors such as Hector Tobar, Luis Rodriguez, Helena María Viramontes, and generations of other literary forces in the scholarly and journalistic fields throughout L.A.’s universities and other research centers.

Still, even if Davis introduces L.A. in terms of what it lacks, he expands on the introduction to make the point that even while ‘L.A.’ commands fame and reputation second only to that Other City, what it lacks is a true historical archive which shows what L.A. was, is, and is becoming.

“Virtually alone among big American Cities, Los Angeles still lacks a scholarly municipal history – a void of research that has become the accomplice of cliche and illusion.”

I see, then: even in its history, Los Angeles is just like its streets and boulevards; decentralized; a sprawl of different histories across different neighborhoods and communities, with no area or any of its figures really capturing more of the overall character of The City than the other.

I also see, then, how the author introduces what’s lacking in order to fill it up with something at last. That is, if L.A. is lacking history, City of Quartz is going to do something about it.

And hey, JIMBO TIMES is going to do something about it, too.

With more soon,

J.T.

Remembering the Times: March 2006 in L.A.

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2006.jpg
PHOTO BY EMILIO FLORES/LA OPINIÓN.

This past March marked ten years since the historic march against House Resolution 4437, which was a bill passed by the 109th House of Representatives in late 2005 during the Bush administration’s tenure. Also known as the “Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act,” the proposed legislation sought to make undocumented immigrants into felons for lacking citizenship and criminalize organizations offering assistance to them, including clinics, churches, and other non-profit organizations.

I was fifteen years old in 2006, and I walked out of school with my peers to march alongside other students and workers across Los Angeles and the country in solidarity with immigrant families. Schools were on lock-down all across the city, but the voices of the students would not be repressed. The walk-outs culminated on Saturday, March 25, 2006, when an estimated 500,000 to 1 million people stormed the streets of downtown Los Angeles to protest. This historic day would also come to be known as a “Day Without an Immigrant” or “The Great American Boycott.”

LA OPINIÓN/ARCHIVES.

What a marvelous time it was to be a teenager! The massive, nationwide marches pressured Congress so that H.R. 4437 would ultimately be shelved by the U.S. Senate. Moreover, the marches created momentum for pro-immigrant organizers and their allies that would last for years. Most of all, their energy would inspire a generation of new leaders who saw how the power of their pueblo was truly a formidable force when united; students linked arms with their parents, workers with allies, and so much more.

Today, Jimbo Times the L.A. Storyteller still owes its foundations to a chant I first heard when marching with the people on the streets of L.A for “A Day Without an Immigrant”:

El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido!

The people united will never be defeated!

J.T.

Ana Castillo: Massacre of the Dreamers (1995)

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Massacre of the Dreamers is crucial literature for any activist in the 21st century, as Castillo searingly navigates through the century-old roots of oppression at the heart of the Americas: the oppression of the brown woman.

Castillo not only details the layers of misogynist systems which brown women have faced throughout their existence, but she also manages to cast a vision for those of us who want to be allies of Xicanisma –Chicana-based feminist consciousness — as we seek to free ourselves from our own internalized oppression.

Steeped with fact-based analysis but not overwhelmingly focused on numbers, the book is also a model for what academic literature should be: based on the present conditions faced ‘on the ground’ by non-academics, since the majority of the working class which so many scholars hope to advocate for have neither the time nor the patience to sift through jargon-laden writing aimed at other academics.

M.O.D was published in 1995, but is as relevant now as it was during the nineties for its careful examination of events like the Chicano Student walkouts of East Los Angeles in 1968, subsequent movements for economic justice such as the 1986 Watsonville Women’s Strike, and the form which the movement has taken more recently in events such as the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) conference.

For its words of wisdom, sources, and its persistence in seeking ways to identify and dismantle systems of inequality, I absolutely recommend Ana Castillo’s book for anyone looking to learn about the Amerindian, or Mestiza mujer‘s role in the movement.

J.T.