Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles

Los Angeles and history are not terms that couple easily in the popular imaginary or, for that matter, in the imagination of scholars who study American society and culture. Rather, accounts of this city's past evoke and at times emulate turn-of-the-century booster promotions intended to draw émigrés to a land of prosperity and progress, a place where the future would arrive first; that future focus has held an undue grip on our analysis of greater Los Angeles. If we were to resurrect the pueblo and re-examine the first decades of city building following the American conquest we would discover a border zone, a site and locale where people, resources, and ideas originating across the globe came together and in coming together, Tongva, Spaniards, Mexicans, Californios, Yankees, and others created a hybrid or metis city and culture. Within this border city, Anglos asserted their political, economic, and social capital and in doing so orchestrated and regulated the use and meaning of urban space through agencies and institutions of the local state. Social segregation (by race-ethnicity, income, gender) and functional segregation (zoning activities and assigning these to discrete districts) are signature aspects of American cities and Angelenos used both in a process of place-making and identity formation that defined space in the city. That history matters because all manner of metrics underscore the fact that space matters; where you live, which school district or council district you call home, which hospital an ambulance takes you to, all those lines on the map define the odds you will graduate high school, attend a university, or whether you will survive a heart attack.