The World in a City: Multiethnic Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Working Class in American History)

This book examines interracial labor and radical organizing in Los Angeles, California, and the United States/Mexico borderlands between 1900 and 1930. Domestic and transnational migration to Los Angeles—including from Europe, Asia, and Mexico—created one of the most racially diverse regions in the United States. Uneven regional economic development drove continued labor mobility for many working-class residents. The book documents a thread of working-class culture in which interracial solidarities formed to oppose capitalism, racism, and often the state itself. These solidarities flourished most frequently among workers with the most precarious employment and living situations, fueled by the ideals advanced in anarchism, socialist internationalism, the syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). This book uses the anarchist notion of affinity to frame its understanding of interracial organizing as the mobility of workers often made coalitions and solidarities short lived. Affinity frames the individual cooperative actions that shaped the social practices of resistance often too unstructured or episodic for historians to capture. This approach maintains focus on the continuity of organizing practices while tracing changing solidarities, associations, and organizations that formed and dissolved through struggle, repression, and factionalism. The radical practices that germinated in and near Los Angeles produced some of the broadest examples of interracial cooperation in U.S. history. A massive population shift transformed Los Angeles in the first decades of the twentieth century. Americans from across the country relocated to the city even as an unprecedented transnational migration brought people from Asia, Europe, and Mexico. Together, these newcomers forged a multiethnic alliance of anarchists, labor unions, and leftists dedicated to challenging capitalism, racism, and often the state. David M. Struthers draws on the anarchist concept of affinity to explore the radicalism of Los Angeles's interracial working class from 1900 to 1930. Uneven economic development created precarious employment and living conditions for laborers. The resulting worker mobility led to coalitions that, inevitably, remained short lived. As Struthers shows, affinity helps us understand how individual cooperative actions shaped and reshaped these alliances. It also reveals social practices of resistance that are often too unstructured or episodic for historians to capture. What emerges is an untold history of Los Angeles and a revolutionary movement that, through myriad successes and failures, produced powerful examples of racial cooperation. | Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Economic Development, Immigration, and the "Labors of Expropriation" 2. Creating Connections through Radical Practices 3. Solidarity and the Legacy of Exclusion 4. Internationalism and Its Limits 5. Organizing Mobile Workers 6. The Baja Raids 7. A Culture of Affinity 8. The Contours of Repression Conclusion: Regeneration, Decline, and Reordering the Left Notes Bibliography Index | Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies, International Committee of the American Studies Association (ASA), 2019 — International Committee of the American Studies Association (ASA) | David Struthers is an adjunct assistant professor at the Copenhagen Business School. This text examines interracial labor and radical organizing in Los Angeles, California, and the United States/Mexico borderlands between 1900 and 1930. Domestic and transnational migration to Los Angeles - including from Europe, Asia, and Mexico - created one of the most racially diverse regions in the United States. Uneven regional economic development drove continued labour mobility for many working-class residents. The work documents a thread of working-class culture in which interracial solidarities formed to oppose capitalism, racism, and often the state itself. These solidarities flourished most frequently among workers with the most precarious employment and living situations, fueled by the ideals advanced in anarchism, socialist internationalism, the syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM)