In June 2011, federal authorities indicted fifty-one members of a Latino gang that had engaged in racially motivated attacks on black residents in a struggling suburb named Azusa, California, near Los Angeles. The tally of crime was high: between 1996 and 2001, at least eight families saw their houses firebombed, and in 2000, a young black nurse named Ge’Juan Salle was gunned down as he strolled out of an auto parts store with his cousin (Sewell 2011).

Over the last decade, a flurry of media stories has tended to focus on exactly these sorts of conflicts, creating the appearance of...

The 1992 Los Angeles uprisings caused massive destruction throughout the South Central Los Angeles region. Businesses, homes, and lives were lost all in outrage to yet another instance of state-sanctioned violence inflicted on African American and Latino bodies as the white police officers who brutally beat Rodney King a year prior went unpunished. African Americans and Latinos alike took to the streets as their economic, political, and social livelihoods were severely limited as a result of poverty, disinvestment, and injustice. The acquittal of the police officers was the last straw in years of shattered dreams and opportunities. One business lost...

Leimert Park, a traditionally Black neighborhood in South Los Angeles became an unlikely meeting ground for a group of anti–illegal immigration protesters in the months following the widely publicized 2006 May Day demonstrations for immigrant rights. May 3 of that year kicked off a series of demonstrations in the community, when a predominately White anti–illegal immigration group called the Minutemen Civil Defense Corp was joined by a Black anti–illegal immigration group called Choose Black America (CBA).¹ During an interview with National Public Radio, Ted Hayes, leader of Choose Black America stated, “What the Minutemen are doing today...

On September 10, 1978, the buses finally rolled. After a fifteen-year legal battle, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) initiated one of the largest mandatory desegregation programs in the nation’s history, involving nearly forty thousand students in fourth through eighth grades.¹ Supported by large majorities of Black parents, political leaders, and civil rights organizations and championed by predominantly white liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the plan embraced the notion that educational opportunities for Black students in particular would be maximized when they were no longer relegated to inferior, stigmatized, and segregated schools. A federal study...

On June 20, 1964, the United Civil Rights Committee (UCRC), a predominantly African American civil rights organization, began a voter registration drive in Los Angeles’s black and Mexican American neighborhoods in hopes of defeating Proposition 14 in the November election. The goal of the drive, according to the city’s weekly African American newspaper, the Los Angeles Sentinel, was to “register 200,000 non-voting Negro and Mexican Americans in the local community in a massive all out effort to defeat Proposition 14—the anti-fair housing initiative.” The UCRC believed that increasing the number of black and Mexican American voters would bolster the...

Hollywood movies have often presented sensationalized and racialized images of lowrider culture in Los Angeles that have commonly led to the misconception that lowriders are “gangs on wheels.” Boulevard Nights (1979) was one the first movies that visualized lowrider culture in East Los Angeles by connecting it not only to the culture of “gangs,” or la vida loca, but also to Chicano culture by capturing the lingo, music, art, and cruising of Chicano lowriders in the late 1970s. In one scene, the protagonist, Raymond, takes his ruca/girlfriend and younger brother, Chuco, to cruise on Whittier Boulevard on a Friday night...

During the 1970s and 1980s Blacks and Latinos appeared close to forming a “rainbow coalition” that would work for the political and social benefit of both groups. Large metropolitan cities with sizable minority populations, like New York, Denver, and Los Angeles, saw Black-Brown coalitions to elect African American and Latino mayors, and continuing cooperation seemed to be in the best interest of both groups. In Los Angeles, Latinos were brought into the Bradley coalition over time and became important partners in electing African Americans to office in California. In Colorado, Blacks alongside Hispanics were a big part of the coalition...

In the summer of 2005 I received a phone call from a friend who was being held in Men’s Central Jail, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He had already spent twenty-four hours in a four-man cell with twelve other men—all African American and Latino. There would be more as he remained there for another fifteen hours. He explained to me later that he was not afraid of dying at the hands of one of his fellow inmates, regardless of skin color. It was clear to him and everyone else in that cell that they were not one...

A Latino family is moving onto my block. This is an unremarkable event and, in the predominantly African American part of town where I live, certainly not an unprecedented one. It’s a natural part of the ebb and flow of all neighborhoods; turnover, like death and taxes, is certain. One of the great scenes of Americana is a van or a truck parked by the curb or driveway, ramp extended, as the rest of the block gathers on the sidewalk to watch the installment of new neighbors and their belongings. It represents social mobility and new beginnings at their most...

On the afternoon of December 15, 2006, fourteen-year-old Cheryl Green was talking with friends on Harvard Boulevard, near 206th Street in a tiny working-class L.A. neighborhood in the Harbor Gateway.

The Harbor Gateway is the name given to a strip of Los Angeles that is a few blocks wide and several miles long. The strip is counted as the city, but really it serves only to connect Los Angeles with its port and the communities of San Pedro and Wilmington. The strip’s size and the low income of its residents mean that, until that afternoon, it had been largely ignored...

We know the names: South Central, Crenshaw, Watts, Compton—places of fame and infamy. Vermont, Slauson, Florence, Normandie, M.L.K.Jr.—the boulevards and avenues crisscross the flatlands, where the smog settles over the cramped apartment buildings and single-family homes and vacant lots and buildings-for-lease in a pearlescent haze. We know the images writ large on a mythical collective consciousness, too well to rehearse again here. But there are also churches and liquor stores and carnicerías, barbershops and photo studios and schools, among faded murals broadcasting past struggles and the possibilities of other worlds. There is the rasp of skateboard wheels on...

In 1948, the Black entrepreneur John Dolphin saw an opportunity, and technology was on his side. An L.A. immigrant from Detroit, Dolphin discovered that most music stores in Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles refused to carry records by Black artists. Yet he knew it had never been easier to record and market Black musicians: the postwar acquisition of tape-recording technology meant that ordinary people could now afford portable tape recorders, which meant that recording could be done anywhere and transferred to records. In the 1940s, radio stations had just begun to use recorded music instead of live music in regular...

Perhaps one of my earliest recollections of prejudice that I can remember happened around the age of eight. I recall boarding the RTD and having to explain to my mother what the bus driver said about the bus fair. The bus driver scornfully remarked, “Doesn’t your mom speak English? We live in America.” Indignation filled my small frame, and I felt like beating the crap out of that bigot. Somehow I knew there was a lack of empathy and a sense of contempt spewing from that man.

That childhood event weighs heavily on my practice as an artist. That is...

The rough-and-tumble Raiders returned to Los Angeles in style after defeating the favored Washington Redskins in the 1983 season Super Bowl. The multiday celebration commenced with two thousand fans congregating at L.A.’s airport and is still remembered twenty-five years later by journalists and witnesses alike. A Raiders rally at City Hall on January 24, 1984, drawing eight thousand fans from all over the area, followed the joyous welcome. Never before had Los Angeles won a football championship; fans reveled in the moment. Raider favorites running back Marcus Allen, a University of Southern California alumni, and coach Tom Flores exclaimed their...

In the weeks before the 2003 California recall election wrapped production on a hot new political farce starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor-to-be hit the campaign trail. He wanted to make it clear that even though he opposes his gardeners and nannies having driver’s licenses and even though he supported Proposition 187, he actually likes Mexicans. Or at least that’s what he told a crowd at the Inner City Games softball tournament in Santa Fe Springs, where he was forced to appear after he was disinvited from a Mexican Independence Day parade in East L.A.

“I love Mexico,” he said. “I’ve...