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The Next Los Angeles

University of California Press

Introduction

Los Angeles: our country's worst nightmare, or a model for a changing nation?

The nightmare seems easy enough to identify. The first horrific smog attack occurred in Los Angeles, on Black Monday in June 1943. By the 1940s, L.A. had become a segregated "northern" city, the setting for two major outbursts of civil unrest and racial turmoil. It gave birth to Sam Yorty, Ronald Reagan, and a string of police chiefs who took special pride in keeping the city safe from Okies, Mexicans, Blacks, and Reds. Los Angeles was also one of the first cities to embrace a systematic anti-union policy known as the "Open Shop," and was the site of some of the worst abuses of labor during the twentieth century. Huge economic disparities can be found in L.A., including concentrated pockets of wealth and poverty less than a mile apart. It is the land of extremes: mild climates and turbulent floods, asphalt and concrete-encased rivers, endless landscapes of subdivisions, freeways, and malls. For many, Los Angeles is the ultimate urban, social, and environmental disaster.

But look again. Los Angeles has also become the home of a new kind of labor movement, of a community-oriented environmentalism, and of a multiethnic coalition politics. It has been and continues to be a place where reformers, radicals, and visionaries help shape the future. For Los Angeles, as Carey McWilliams wrote more than fifty years ago, is not merely a testing ground, but also "a forcing ground, a place where ideas, practice, and customs must prove their worth or be discarded." It is "a land of magical improvisation," a place that "creates its own past." Los Angeles, in fact, has continually reinvented itself and tested out new ideas. It is also the place that may help identify a new progressive politics in regions around the country and help set the standard for political and social change in the years to come.

Understanding Los Angeles

To understand the future of America, one needs to understand Los Angeles. Nearly every trend that is currently transforming the United States-immigration, economic polarization, metropolitan sprawl, the decline of traditional political organization, the provisional rebirth of the labor movement, the struggle to remake cities as more livable places-has appeared in some form in Los Angeles. The changes that L.A. witnessed in the second half of the twentieth century-from the city that celebrated its White, Protestant character to one that has become synonymous with diversity; from an antilabor bastion to the headquarters of the new, organizing-oriented unionism-reflect changes that have begun to appear or may come to pass in other major metropolitan areas. Los Angeles has also been profoundly shaped by the forces of globalization. Much of its manufacturing base has been dismantled, with whole new economic sectors created in its stead. Its major corporate headquarters have moved elsewhere, and its middle class has shrunken. And Los Angeles' cultural and political life has been profoundly reshaped by a wave of immigration on a scale seen only in New York a hundred years ago.

In Los Angeles, the separation of the suburbs from the central city; the decline of upper-middle-class support for such public needs as schools, parks, libraries, and sidewalks; and the emergence of the first serious secession movement in American urban history have made it the very symbol of the dysfunctional urban area. But, with its new immigrant population, its newly reenergized labor movement, and its dynamic community and environmental and social movements, Los Angeles is also the place where the next generation of American progressive thought and action is being defined.

Everybody wants to know about Los Angeles. But for all its importance as the point of creation for global pop culture, as the symbol of urban sprawl, or as the cutting edge of multiculturalism, it still remains difficult to get a handle on this city of improvisation. Los Angeles is a complex place. Beyond the traditional historical story line of right-wing elites, real estate speculators, and Hollywood moguls resides a different and largely invisible story. To understand Los Angeles ultimately requires understanding the origins and evolution of its social movements, of its rich traditions of community activism, and of its alternative cultural life, which has often been marginalized or ignored. Los Angeles, for all its celebrated difference, is in fact becoming representative, providing lessons about the coming challenges and opportunities for a politics of social change in the new century.

The Next Los Angeles

In October 1998, hundreds of activists, young and old, gathered at Occidental College to explore the history, present, and future opportunities for progressive social movements and progressive policy in the Los Angeles region. The participants came to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of a notable moment in Los Angeles history: when Socialist writer Upton Sinclair, in support of striking dockworkers, was arrested for reading the Bill of Rights at a section of the harbor area of San Pedro, which became known as Liberty Hill. The conference also highlighted the twentieth anniversary of the social change-oriented Liberty Hill Foundation, which had taken its name from that 1923 episode.

The L.A.-area progressives gathered that day also referenced another historical moment-Sinclair's 1934 gubernatorial campaign, with its legions of Southern California-based organizers and volunteers, which launched a presumably quixotic campaign, End Poverty in California (EPIC)-and nearly revolutionized the politics of California and the country. What was most striking about EPIC was its capacity to pull together different social movements through a unifying vision of change. And while Sinclair did not win the election, the EPIC campaign helped to reconfigure the political landscape in the region and the state, stimulating new movements and important policy changes.

This book explores how a wide array of social movements throughout the twentieth century-what we call Progressive L.A.-has helped to make L.A. a better city. In doing so, we argue that Progressive L.A. movements provided a vision about Los Angeles and its much-maligned river and landscapes, its multiracial and immigrant cultures and communities, and its social, economic, and environmental conditions of daily life. Our text is at once a history, a policy analysis, and an evaluation of the opportunities for change, both in Los Angeles and in other regions of the country. And we write at a political moment that is ripe for either a grassroots progressive policy agenda or a form of protracted political, economic, and cultural balkanization.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section provides a historical discussion of a changing Los Angeles. Chapter 1, "A Mosaic of Movements," offers a decade-by-decade historical snapshot of Los Angeles' progressive social movements. Chapter 2, "Charlotta Bass," extends that historical snapshot by chronicling the life of this key African American newspaper editor and activist, and by exploring her positions on labor, race and discrimination, the "foreign born" and immigration, and women's rights-all of which prefigured contemporary political themes.

The second section...