Ask an Urban Historian: California

In this issue, Dr. Natalia Molina, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California-San Diego, fields reader questions about California. Have a question about a city in your area? Send it to .

Dear Urban Historian,
In what ways has eminent domain impacted the growth of ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles?
–Peter Sobieriski, Pasadena, California

The politics of race and space have long been a central feature in the growth of Los Angeles. Race played a large role in urban renewal and the federal government’s sponsorship of home loans during the late 1930s. Federally backed private loans offered low to no down payments. But racialized groups in urban areas were routinely denied federal loans, which were given largely to suburban whites. Rather than promoting individual investment in private homes in urban areas, the federal government built public housing and offered it to racialized groups. Policy decisions seemed colorblind because they targeted geographical areas, not people. The two-pronged process of funneling federally backed mortgages into the suburbs while denying the same loans to racialized groups in urban areas was unjust, but went largely unnoticed.

A second major factor in the racialization of space was the growth of freeway systems. L.A.’s highways developed in tandem with postwar urbanization. The creation of the East Los Angeles interchange in the Boyle Heights area in the 1960s divided neighborhoods, displaced 10,000 people, and destroyed 29,000 homes. (It is now the busiest freeway interchange in the U.S.) Initially, community members protested. They wrote letters to their councilman, a prominent Hispanic, Edward Roybal. They attended meetings, formed committees, and demonstrated in the streets. The project went forward.

Recently, while I was going through Roybal’s archived papers, I came across a petition the neighbors had circulated to protest the freeway system. I decided to look for the people who had signed, hoping to interview them. I walked down streets, reading the house numbers as I went. Just as I would near the address I was looking for, the street would end, bumping up against the freeway. The homes of all the petitioners had been razed to build it.

Dear Urban Historian,
Has the porosity of the California–Mexico border and migration of laborers across it always been so controversial? If not, when did it become so, and how?
– Loretta Lopez, Barstow, California

After the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848), Mexico ceded about one-third of its land to the United States, including much of today’s Southwest. Mexicans who had lived in California were offered U.S. citizenship. For the next 60 to 70 years, the Mexicans’ presence was not an issue. The public subscribed to the then-popular belief that Mexicans, like Native Americans, were a race that would eventually fade away. But by the early 1900s, the public realized the number of Mexicans, especially in L.A., was not diminishing, but growing.

Starting in the 1910s, Mexicans began to fill a manual labor void created by the exclusion of Asians. First, Chinese laborers were forced out, through the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (and its repeated ten-year extensions); later, Japanese workers faced a similar form of exclusion, through the 1907-08 Gentlemen’s Agreement and state laws passed in 1913 and 1920 restricting landownership by “aliens.” As the number of Mexicans in L.A. increased, so too did concerns about how this group’s presence might affect the economic, social, and physical landscape of the city. Until the 1930s, labor shortages shielded Mexicans from some of the worst discriminatory practices leveled against the city’s Asian communities.

Dear Urban Historian,
Is California still “The Great Exception”? Is the national attention to immigration generating more commonalities between San Francisco, L.A., and other cities across the nation that rely heavily non immigrant labor, legal and illegal?
– Jeff Aaronson, San Mateo, California

Yes and no. Take Los Angeles as an example. It is a multicultural metropolis, home to the largest population of Armenians outside of Armenia, the largest population of Salvadorans outside of El Salvador, the largest population of Mexicans outside of Mexico, and so on. But as much as L.A. likes to tout its multicultural image, it hasn’t quite figured out how to deal with the question of labor and immigration. Proposition 187, passed in 1994 but immediately blocked by the courts, denied public health, education, and services to illegal immigrants, particularly Latinos. Public employees were to report anyone seeking services whom they even suspected to be undocumented. Other cities that rely heavily on immigrant labor have not dealt with the issue much better.

Take the federal law enforcement raids of meat-processing plants in six Southeastern states in the mid-1990s, in which over 1,000 federal agents arrested 4,000 undocumented workers. We made it much easier for capital and goods to cross borders between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada through NAFTA, but we dropped the ball about what this would mean in terms of labor. The commonalities that L.A. shares with other U.S. cities is that they all need to think through a pollution that provides flexible, legal provisions on labor flow and allows workers to be safe and retain their dignity.