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What’s Good for Boyle Heights Has Been Good at the Los Angeles Coliseum
No full textGeorge Sánchez’s 2004 article “What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews” brings to light the fascinating history of the cultural and political dimensions of what he calls “radical interracialism” in the mid-twentieth century. As I delve more deeply into the racial, ethnic, and recreational history of Los Angeles, I find myself strongly indebted to the work of Sánchez and his cohorts of ethnic studies scholars working on Los Angeles. Sánchez’s research on the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights during the 1940s and ’50s has uncovered what Luis Alvarez calls a “counter-history of Los Angeles”: a narrative of the city’s and county’s history that disrupts the dominant understandings of decentralization, privatization, and apartheid-like segregation. To Sánchez, Boyle Heights was a “particular site of ethnic cooperation in the midst of racial segregation and political conservatism.” Recalling the neighborhood’s history during this period, he writes, “better situates our own search for neighborhoods of diversity that truly worked together in the past and our hope of a multiracial Los Angeles that can work together in the future.” Following his lead, I examine Sánchez’s formulation of “radical interracialism,” as articulated in his essays on Jewish cross-racial interaction in Boyle Heights and its political manifestation in the ascendance of Edward Roybal, the first Mexican American to serve in the Los Angeles City Council since the late nineteenth century. In these essays, Sánchez historicizes the making of cross-racial linkages on both cultural and political levels. Inspired by his research, I take up his challenge by embarking on my own search for radical interracialism in an unlikely yet ubiquitous urban institution—a sports stadium, whose hidden history of racial integration and public culture counters the social hierarchies inscribed in the neoliberal ballpark of the urban gentrifying present
Twenty-Five Years after Sa-I-Gu: Multiracial Politics in Times of Crisis
No full textWe chose to frame this conversation in terms of crisis: not only the state of permanent crisis created by racial capitalism and settler colonialism but also specific flashpoints like Sa-I-Gu [the Korean term for the April 1992 uprising in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating]. We want to look at the conditions surrounding these flashpoints and the responses to them that then shaped race consciousness and politics subsequently. Today we have no shortage of crisis, no shortage of flashpoints. And yet there is hope. Perhaps more than at any other time in my lifetime, there are opportunities to shift mass culture, at the very least to popularize and normalize a slightly more critical consciousness. So now I want to turn to my friends here to talk about crisis and multiracial politics. We’ll start with Sa-I-Gu and work forward to this moment and also to future possibilities
The Movement for Black Lives vs. the Black Church
No full textSeveral times over the past three years, the Black Church and the Movement for Black Lives have clashed, revealing a peculiar incongruence. Movement for Black Lives activists, advocates, and agitators are not only pushing to hold police officers and officials in the criminal justice system accountable for deaths of Black victims; they have been pushing the Black Church and Black clergy as well. Why have activists, advocates, and aggrieved agitators in the Movement for Black Lives protested against prominent figures in the Black Church so vociferously and boldly? Hasn’t the Black Church been a stalwart presence in the Black Freedom Movement historically? Should such disruptive behavior be condoned? Is it behavior that Jesus himself would condone
Teacher’s Study Guide for Becoming Ourselves: How Immigrant Women Transformed Their World
No full textBecoming Ourselves: How Immigrant Women Transformed Their World is a film directed by Gary Delgado. It explores how the Community Transformational Organizing Strategy (CTOS) of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA), a community-based labor organization in Oakland, California, enables low-wage, limited-English-speaking, immigrant women workers to redefine the meaning of leadership and to deepen our society’s capacity for democracy. AIWA has been an inspiration to hundreds of workers in the garment, electronics, restaurant, nail care, and home care industries of the Bay Area, and the organization’s CTOS method has been an influential model for many activist organizations. The film features testimony from rank-and-file workers active in AIWA as well as from present and former staff members speaking about the organization’s history of education, organization, and mobilization. This guide is designed to help teachers incorporate Becoming Ourselves into college courses in ethnic studies, women’s studies, sociology, and politics. It is meant to promote interactive, student-centered engagement so that the film becomes a learning tool and not merely a spectacle
Strategic Imagining: Expanding Publicly Engaged Scholarship by Building Institutions and Individuals
No full textIt has been my good fortune to be in fellowship with George Sánchez for just about a decade now. While it has been quite tempting to use this opportunity to simply celebrate all that he has meant to me personally in my life and career, my call for this issue was to share reflections on the generative potential of having collaborated with Dr. George J. Sánchez as part of Imagining America: Artist and Scholars in Public Life (IA). As a national consortium of higher-education institutions and community-based organizations dedicated to activating the power of the humanities, arts, and design both within the academy and in our larger society, IA promotes publicly engaged scholarship with conferences, research groups, and strategic organizing that affirm community-based knowledge and draw on the humanistic methodologies of the cultural disciplines. I discuss the goals and reach of Imagining America as well as responses to the dynamically creative and community-centered approaches driving it. In the exchange recorded in this article, edited from an interview we had in November 2016, we touch on a range of issues, beginning with his own autobiographical call to engaged scholarship and then drilling down to various layers of his strategic imagining as it manifests in both his institutional and individual work. Sánchez reflects on how he discovered IA and then in strategic and imaginative ways used that discovery to build on his approaches to research and organizing, thereby making an impact as a publicly engaged scholar in ways that do not often register in the academy. In particular, he addresses issues of diversity and the history of community-engaged work
Moral Capitalism
No full textScholars have long held interest in the way power is accumulated and reproduced. The paradox of moral capitalism is the problematic reproduction of marginality through uneven exchanges and the embodiment of ethical and moral considerations. Despite well-known indictments, the desire for a moral capitalism persists. This essay suggests that the contexts of moral capitalism are frequently informed by this awareness and the permission people give themselves to embrace contradictory propositions. People hope that a moral capitalism can affirm the particularities of personhood, so that their identities are not valued solely through the lens of the things they do in order to earn money. In the same way that theft can be viewed as form of social redistribution that actualizes Robin Hood mythologies, moral capitalism can highlight the social and personal moments when forms of identity embrace contradiction as a habit of resilience
East LA Interchange: A Documentary Exploration of Boyle Heights
No full textThe documentary East LA Interchange (2015) has extraordinary potential to be used to increase awareness about our diverse, multicultural society and the specific challenges facing low-income communities of color. These communities’ residents are especially vulnerable to gentrification and displacement, and across the United States, we are currently seeing the impact of gentrification on our neighborhoods. One of the most important aspects of a documentary is what happens after the film is completed. We are in the process of creating a multiplatform strategic outreach campaign designed to engage youth and mobilize advocates around the issues addressed in the film. Our outreach and engagement goals are varied yet complementary to the themes in East LA Interchange. We believe that East LA Interchange’s message of empowerment through community action is one that can greatly benefit youth and adults in rapidly changing communities. Because Boyle Heights is one of the United States’ great places of diversity, inclusion, and tolerance, we would like the film to create momentum around social justice issues depicted in the film such as acceptance and appreciation of diversity, immigrant rights, environmental and transportation justice, urban development, and effective political representation
Seizing the Moment: Learning from Humanely Relational and Interdisciplinary Soundscapes
No full textLessons learned from George Sánchez have been at the heart of the work I do with undergraduate students at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Many of them face enormous stress as a result of being (or being related to) undocumented Latina/o immigrants in the United States. During the 2011 Winter quarter, several of those students conferred with me about their intention to invite fellow UCI undergraduate students enrolled in our “Histories of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” course to join UCI Dreamers. This is an undergraduate student group that supports undocumented immigrant students at our campus as they struggle to finance, complete, and derive full social and intellectual benefit from their undergraduate education. This initiative situated our Chicana/o history course as a productive common ground, a space for this generation of women and men to act in support of each other. Attending UCI Dreamers meetings was not an automatic or random decision but rather the outcome of a series of interactions, discussions, and experiences. Prominent among these was our consideration of music and musical soundscapes that have influenced how life in the US–Mexico borderlands is lived and discussed.
Leaving Money on the Table: Pennsylvania Exceptionalism in Resisting Energy Severance Taxes
Get PDFNearly all energy-producing states elect to adopt and sustain a tax on the extraction of their oil and gas resources through so-called severance taxes, generating significant revenue for general as well as specialized state funds. Political support for such taxes generally crosses party lines and endures across multiple partisan shifts in the political control of a state. This reflects numerous features that tend to make these taxes quite popular and durable across election cycles. This long-standing pattern, however, faces one major exception: Pennsylvania’s enduring reluctance to follow the path of other major energy-producing states and adopt such a tax. This article explores what it deems “Pennsylvania exceptionalism,” as it seeks to address the issue of why one leading energy-producing state would refrain from tax adoption in contrast to every other such state. It places particular emphasis on the past decade, in which natural gas in shale deposits has triggered a dramatic expansion of production in Pennsylvania and ongoing political controversy over whether or not a severance tax should be adopted
Wind Development in Pennsylvania: A Reflection on State Policy
Get PDFWhile other states have continued to add wind turbines in recent years, there has been no new wind development in Pennsylvania since 2012. This article considers how state energy policy as well as local land-use policies related to wind energy compare with other states as a way to understand how these policies may be impacting wind development in the Keystone State, especially in light of the geographical characteristics of the state’s highest quality winds