The Color of the West

In the seven years since American Quarterly published the special issue "Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures," scholarship on the history, culture, and politics of Los Angeles, and California more broadly, has continued to flower. Among the five texts under review here, Shana Bernstein and Mark Brilliant offer histories of midcentury civil rights activism in Los Angeles and California, respectively; Daniel Martinez HoSang examines California's system of direct democracy and its implications for racial justice; Laura Barraclough's study of the San Fernando Valley shows how the development of rural landscapes and ideas about rural living depend on urban development; and Daniel Widener explores the relationship between cultural productions and political struggle through the lives and works of dozens of black artists. While these authors cover a common era and many of the same locations, it is the differences among the texts—different thematic focuses, different theoretical frameworks, and different methodological approaches—that make them complementary. Balancing questions of politics and legislation with questions of culture, these books are concerned with the work required to organize intraracial and multiracial movements and institutions. Each author demonstrates how the implications of these movements and institutions, both in their successes and in their failures, extend far beyond Los Angeles and California.

Bernstein's Bridges of Reform examines interracial political activism in Los Angeles from the 1930s through the 1950s. Bernstein shows how activists in civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Jewish Community Relations Committee (CRC), the Mexican American Community Service Organization (CSO), and the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) started building bridges across racial and ethnic lines in the years before World War II and continued to work together through the early cold war years. Bernstein describes these collaborations as pragmatic because they recognized the limited political power each group possessed when working in isolation, and because these collaborative efforts were constantly tuned to gaining and preserving mainstream political access. While maintaining this access during the cold war required these civil rights activists to embrace anticommunism, Bernstein contends that the domestic reform agenda that emerged during the 1930s continued through the 1940s and 1950s and shaped national civil rights transformations.

Bernstein's discussion of the CSO helps illustrate the book's focus. The CSO emerged in the late 1940s from the successful campaign to elect the city council's first nonwhite member since 1881, Edward Roybal. The election coalition was largely Mexican American but included a range of allies from Los Angeles's diverse east side. This election coalition joined forces with the community organizer Fred Ross, West Coast regional director of Saul Alinsky's Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation. The CSO worked to register voters and increase civic participation among east side Angelenos, focusing on such issues as health care, housing, police brutality, and neighborhood infrastructure. While the CSO has received attention in Chicana/o historiography, Bernstein is particularly interested in its coalitional activities in a cold war context. "The CSO," Bernstein notes, "encouraged and relied upon cooperation with Japanese, African, Jewish, and Anglo Americans" (146). These collaborations increased in the context of cold war red-baiting, because groups wanted to partner with "'safe' civil rights proponents" to "reinforce their reputations as 'acceptable' anticommunist...