"Until recently, most research on Latina/os in the U.S. has ignored historical and contemporary dynamics in Latin America, just as scholars of Latin America have generally stopped their studies at the border. This volume roots Los Angeles in the larger arena of globalization, exploring the demographic changes that have transformed the Latino presence in LA from primarily Mexican-origin to one that now includes peoples from throughout the hemisphere. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, it combines historical perspectives with analyses of power and inequality to consider how Latina/os are responding to exclusionary immigration, labor, and schooling practices and actively creating communities. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.

Contemporary Los Angeles can increasingly be considered a part of Latin America. Only 200 miles from the border with Mexico, it has the largest, most diverse population of Latinos in the United States—and reportedly the second largest population of Mexicans outside of Mexico City. It also has one of the most diverse representations of Latino gastronomy in the United States, featuring the cuisine of nearly every region of Mexico, countries such as Peru, Argentina, Guatemala and El Salvador, as well as an incredible variety of Asian-Latin fusion cuisine. Despite the expansion of Latino cuisine's popularity in Los Angeles and the celebrity of many Latino chefs, there is a stark divide between what is available at restaurants and food trucks and what is available to many low-income, urban Latinos who live in food deserts. In these areas, access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate foods is a daily challenge. Food-related diseases, particularly diabetes and obesity, plague these communities. In the face of this crisis, grassroots organizations, policy-makers and local residents are working to improve access and affordability through a growing embrace of traditional cuisine, an emergent interest in the farm-to-table movement, and the work of local organizations. Angelinos are creating alternatives to the industrial food system that offer hope for Latino food culture and health in Los Angeles and beyond. This book provides an overview of contemporary L.A.’s Latino food culture, introducing some of the most important chefs in the Latino food scene, and discussing the history and impact of Latino street food on culinary variety in Los Angeles. Along with food culture, the book also discusses alternative sources of healthy food for low-income communities: farmers markets, community and school gardens, urban farms, and new neighborhood markets that work to address the inequalities in access and affordability for Latino residents. By making the connection between Latino food culture and the Latino communities’ food related health issues, this study approaches the issue from a unique perspective.

Los Angeles has long been a place where cultures clash and reshape. The city has a growing number of Latina/o authors and filmmakers who are remapping and reclaiming it through ongoing symbolic appropriation. In this illuminating book, Ignacio L—pez-Calvo foregrounds the emotional experiences of authors, implicit authors, narrators, characters, and readers in order to demonstrate that the evolution of the imaging of Los Angeles in Latino cultural production is closely related to the politics of spatial location. This spatial-temporal approach, he writes, reveals significant social anxieties, repressed rage, and deep racial guilt. Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction sets out to reconfigure the scope of Latino literary and cultural studies. Integrating histories of different regions and nations, the book sets the interplay of unresolved contradictions in this particular metropolitan area. The novelists studied here stem from multiple areas, including the U.S. Southwest, Guatemala, and Chile. The study also incorporates non-Latino writers who have contributed to the Latino culture of the city. The first chapter examines Latino cultural production from an ecocritical perspective on urban interethnic relations. Chapter 2 concentrates on the representation of daily life in the barrio and the marginalization of Latino urban youth. The third chapter explores the space of women and how female characters expand their area of operations from the domestic space to the public space of both the barrio and the city. A much-needed contribution to the fields of urban theory, race critical theory, Chicana/oÐLatina/o studies, and Los Angeles writing and film, L—pez-Calvo offers multiple theoretical perspectivesÑincluding urban theory, ecocriticism, ethnic studies, gender studies, and cultural studiesÑ contextualized with notions of transnationalism and post-nationalism.

Images of Baseball: Mexican American Baseball in Los Angeles celebrates the flourishing culture of the great pastime in East Los Angeles and other communities where a strong sense of Mexican identity and pride was fostered in a sporting atmosphere of both fierce athleticism and social celebration. From 1900, with the establishment of the Mexican immigrant community, to the rise of Fernandomania in the 1980s, baseball diamonds in greater Los Angeles were both proving grounds for youth as they entered their educations and careers, and the foundation for the talented Forty-Sixty Club, comprised of players of at least 40, and often over 60, years of age. These evocative photographs look back on the great Mexican American teams and players of the 20th century, including the famous Chorizeros--the proclaimed "Yankees of East L.A."

Material expressions of spiritual belief are integral components of the Los Angeles landscape. Cathedrals, temples, churches, and shrines dot the city, but they are not the only sites where notions of the divine, or at least the supernatural, are made visible. Reflecting the broad ethnic and cultural reconfiguration of Southern California in recent years, botanicas have emerged as one of the most frequent purveyors of sacramental items. This book explores these fascinating venues and their role in transmitting, transforming, and critiquing traditional faiths. An ever-evolving combination of spiritual center, religious supply house, and alternate healthcare facility, the botanica is generally associated with folk Catholicism and other Latin American religious traditions. Vivid photographs and essays describe these sites of spirit-infused artistry, ceremonial activity, and community building. Patrick Arthur Polk is visiting assistant professor of world arts and cultures at UCLA. Other contributors include Donald J. Cosentino, Ysamur Flores-Pena, Miki Garcia, Claudia J. Hernandez.

Annotation This project examines the political dynamics of Latino immigrants in California.

The hit movie La Bamba (based on the life of Richie Valens), the versatile singer Linda Ronstadt, and the popular rock group Los Lobos all have roots in the dynamic music of the Mexican-American community in East Los Angeles. With the recent "Eastside Renaissance" in the area, barrio music has taken on symbolic power throughout the Southwest, yet its story has remained undocumented and virtually untold. In Barrio Rhythm, Steven Loza brings this hidden history to life, demonstrating the music's essential role in the cultural development of East Los Angeles and its influence on mainstream popular culture. Drawing from oral histories and other primary sources, as well as from appropriate representative songs, Loza provides a historical overview of the music from the nineteenth century to the present and offers in-depth profiles of nine Mexican-American artists, groups, and entrepreneurs in Southern California from the post-World War II era to the present. His interviews with many of today's most influential barrio musicians, including members of Los Lobos, Eddie Cano, Lalo Guerrero, and Willie chronicle the cultural forces active in this complex urban community.

Cholo writing originally constitues the handstyle created by the Latino gangs in Los Angeles. It is probably the oldest form of the graffiti of names in the 20th century, with its own aesthetic, evident long before the East Coast appearance and the explosion in the early 1970s in Philadelphia and New York. The term cholo means lowlife , appropriated by Chicano youth to describe the style and people associated with local gangs; cholo became a popular expression to define the Mexican American culture. Latino gangs are a parallel reality of the local urban life, with their own traditions and codes from oral language, way of dressing, tattoos and hand signs to letterforms. These wall-writings, sometimes called the newspaper of the streets , are territorial signs which main function is to define clearly and constantly the limits of a gang s influence area and encouraging gang strength, a graffiti made by the neighborhood for the neighborhood. Cholo inscriptions has a speficic written aesthetic based on a strong sense of the place and on a monolinear adaptation of historic blackletters for street bombing. Howard Gribble, an amateur photographer from the city of Torrance in the South of Los Angeles County, documented Latino gang graffiti from 1970 to 1975. These photographs of various Cholo handletterings, constituted an unique opportunity to try to push forward the calligraphic analysis of Cholo writing, its origins and formal evolution. A second series of photographs made by Francois Chastanet in 2008 from East LA to South Central, are an attempt to produce a visual comparison of letterforms by finding the same barrios (neighborhoods) and gangs group names more than thirty five years after Gribble s work. Without ignoring the violence and self-destruction inherent to la vida loca (or the crazy life , referring to the barrio gang experience), this present book documents the visual strategies of a given sub-culture to survive as a visible entity in an environement made of a never ending sprawl of warehouses, freeways, wood framed houses, fences and back alleys: welcome to LA suburbia, where block after block, one can observe more of the same. The two exceptionnal photographical series and essays are a tentative for the recognization of Cholo writing as a major influence on the whole Californian underground cultures. Foreword by Chaz Bojorquez.

South Los Angeles is often seen as ground zero for inter-racial conflict and violence in the United States. Since the 1940s, South LA has been predominantly a low-income African American neighborhood, and yet since the early 1990s Latino immigrants—mostly from Mexico and many undocumented—have moved in record numbers to the area. Given that more than a quarter million people live in South LA and that poverty rates exceed 30 percent, inter-racial conflict and violence surprises no one. The real question is: why hasn't there been more? Through vivid stories and interviews, The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rules provides an answer to this question. Based on in-depth ethnographic field work collected when the author, Cid Martinez, lived and worked in schools in South Central, this study reveals the day-to-day ways in which vibrant social institutions in South LA— its churches, its local politicians, and even its gangs—have reduced conflict and kept violence to a level that is manageable for its residents. Martinez argues that inter-racial conflict has not been managed through any coalition between different groups, but rather that these institutions have allowed established African Americans and newcomer Latinos to co-exist through avoidance—an under-appreciated strategy for managing conflict that plays a crucial role in America's low-income communities. Ultimately, this book proposes a different understanding of how neighborhood institutions are able to mitigate conflict and violence through several community dimensions of informal social controls.

Black and Brown in Los Angeles is a timely and wide-ranging, interdisciplinary foray into the complicated world of multiethnic Los Angeles. The first book to focus exclusively on the range of relationships and interactions between Latinas/os and African Americans in one of the most diverse cities in the United States, the book delivers supporting evidence that Los Angeles is a key place to study racial politics while also providing the basis for broader discussions of multiethnic America. Students, faculty, and interested readers will gain an understanding of the different forms of cultural borrowing and exchange that have shaped a terrain through which African Americans and Latinas/os cross paths, intersect, move in parallel tracks, and engage with a whole range of aspects of urban living. Tensions and shared intimacies are recurrent themes that emerge as the contributors seek to integrate artistic and cultural constructs with politics and economics in their goal of extending simple paradigms of conflict, cooperation, or coalition. The book features essays by historians, economists, and cultural and ethnic studies scholars, alongside contributions by photographers and journalists working in Los Angeles.