Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Francisco by Eduardo Contreras (review)

In this book, Eduardo Contreras weaves ideas of liberalism and latinidad to show changes and continuities in Latino political engagement in San Francisco from the 1930s through the 1970s. He defines liberalism broadly as an ever-changing political principle that was detached from allegiances to particular political parties.

Contreras details several variants of liberalism that Latinos wrestled with in political spheres during these eras. He first engages with New Deal liberalism in the 1930s, with its focus on producing “an activist government that endorsed workers’ rights, promoted economic security, and held the potential to advance equality and opportunity for all Americans” (p. 9). Next, he considers civil rights liberalism of the 1940s and 1950s, with its focus on racial equality, fair employment practices, and racial justice. He also discusses liberalism rooted in assimilation and Great Society politics, with Latinos in the 1950s and 1960s working to draft “an ethnic-based agenda centered on greater access to social services, an enhancement of family life, and cultural assimilation” (p. 10). Finally, he details how, by the late 1960s, a new generation of Latinos questioned these allegiances with the government, believing that “the government itself was an apparatus of economic inequality and racial oppression” (p. 10).

Throughout, Contreras moves between these different notions, examining how Latinos engaged with these approaches to liberalism, interweaving their debates with ideas of latinidad, which he describes as a notion of pan-ethnic identity that held together Latinos to varying degrees as a political and cultural bloc. While he allows for an examination of latinidad as a mechanism to bring together Latinos as “one community, a political constituency, and an ethnic bloc,” he also considers factors like class-based agendas, ideas about gender and sexuality, and beliefs about government regulation that caused divisions preventing the mobilization of a coherent Latino bloc (p. 12).

This book explores how Latinos contend with evolving notions of liberalism, sometimes unified to work for a particular cause, but quite often fragmented because of different goals and political ideologies. Contreras considers topics including how San Francisco unions incorporated Latinos in the rank-and-file organization, and also through strikes and direct action through unions like the Ship Scalers Union. He examines topics of support for social services through War on Poverty funding, urban renewal and the rise of Latino coalitions like the Mission Coalition Organization, and gentrification expanding into the Mission through the Castro’s gay population expanding beyond the neighborhood’s boundaries. With this variety of topics, Contreras teases out ways in which Latinos engaged in the political sphere by articulating concrete political ideologies rooted in culture, socioeconomic status, and civil rights, and advocating for policies that supported their larger goals.

In his focus on political history and local organizations, Contreras carves out a unique space for himself among recent histories of the Mission District, including Cary Cordova’s The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Ocean Howell’s Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and Tomás F. Summers Sandoval’s Latinos at the Golden Gate: Creating Community and Identity in San Francisco (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Put together, these books depict an incredibly detailed picture of Latino politics, art, culture, and community in the Mission District.

One of Contreras’s major contributions to this body of work about the Mission District is in his nuanced depiction of variability in and out of the Latino community of San Francisco. Instead of referring to what Latinos did as a broad group, he seeks out spaces in which community members responded in a variety of ways. As Contreras notes, “To identify Latinos as a political community, then, demands a recognition that their efforts were not marked by invariability, absence of conflict, or uniformity of thought and approach,” instead he shows “change and...