Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 by Jessica M. Kim (review)

Today Los Angeles is the nation's second-largest city, a sprawling metropolis of nearly 4 million residents that prides itself as the country's cultural capital, as a vibrant commercial hub, and as a beacon of diversity and multiculturalism. In the late nineteenth century, however, Los Angeles was a blank slate, a small city on the edge of the expanding American empire. It was during this period that a once-small Spanish settlement began to occupy an important place in the imaginations of ambitious Anglo settlers, as the conclusion of the Mexican-American War turned largely neglected Mexican territories into important American possessions and as the end of the Civil War opened the West for white settlers and commercial interests. As Jessica M. Kim puts it in her important new book Imperial Metropolis, in the postbellum period, the city of Los Angeles became a major "prize" for Anglo capitalists.

Kim skillfully traces this evolution, arguing that in the years after the Civil War, Los Angeles became a target of "Anglo domination" (5) as wealthy figures like Lewis L. Bradbury, Griffith J. Griffith, and Harry Chandler saw in it a strategically important site for their vision of an empire of riches that could be accomplished with access to "land, labor, and emerging markets" beyond the United States, particularly Mexico (6). In Los Angeles, wealthy investors, speculators, and boosters saw imperial and personal ambitions converge. They viewed the city, strategically positioned at the edge of the Western "frontier" and in proximity to Mexico, as the perfect place from which to launch and operate their capitalist empire. As Kim illustrates, doing so required establishing rigid racial hierarchies, building alliances with Mexican elites, mercilessly exploiting and appropriating Mexican wealth and labor, and demanding government support and intervention to protect American interests south of the border, which totaled nearly $1 billion before the start of the Mexican Revolution.

Kim demonstrates that this massive project was facilitated by imperial maneuvering masquerading as diplomacy. With the help of both the US and Mexican governments, American businessmen extracted vast sums of wealth from Mexico, carefully disenfranchising the native population in the name of progress, capital migration, and foreign investment. American businessmen saw Mexican workers as ideal for their vision: racially inferior yet built for hard labor. These investors and boosters, Kim argues, genuinely believed they were doing Mexicans a favor by bringing them jobs and by offering them the gifts of industrialization and capitalist development. Often, Mexican elites agreed, eagerly welcoming American capital, development, and influence.

But these industrialists soon became victims of their own delusions. As Kim argues, "Although they believed they had built an orderly system of resource extraction, Los Angeles capitalists had also helped create the conditions of their own undoing" (79). After decades of exploitation and abuse, Mexicans rebelled against both foreign capitalists and domestic oligarchs. Over the course of one of the messiest and most protracted episodes of violence in the history of the Americas, revolutionaries and reformists took back the land, expelled foreign interests, and established a constitution that protected national sovereignty and mandated political and social restructuring.

American interests, operating from the relative safety of Los Angeles, did not give up control easily or without a fight, however. Though constrained by post-Revolution reforms, boosters continued to exert significant economic and political influence in Mexico, though now, instead of formal empire, they turned to "negotiating trade treaties, finding markets for American goods, establishing manufacturing facilities and production chains, and developing infrastructure" (179). Kim points to the International Pacific Highway, which spans some twelve thousand miles and connects California to the Pacific Coast of Mexico and to parts of Central and South America, as a microcosm of this new and revised phase of capitalist imperialism.

In crafting this narrative, Kim argues for engaging "alternative geographies" in our understanding of the transnational past. She correctly points...