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11 Chapter {1} Settling into the City American Indian Migration and Urbanization, 1900–1945 Romaldo LaChusa was born in 1883 and raised on the Mesa Grande Indian Reservation, an impoverished rural farming community in northern San Diego County. LaChusa attended a government-run day school on the reservation as a child and then at the age of sixteen transferred to the Perris Indian School for the next four years. LaChusa enrolled at the Sherman Institute in 1902, a new federal Indian boarding school just east of Los Angeles in the town of Riverside. LaChusa graduated from the eighth grade and took a job on the school’s instructional farm, leaving a few years later for the city. LaChusa had no trouble finding steady work once in Los Angeles, especially as the population of the city grew and its economy expanded to create thousands of jobs in the industrial and service sectors. LaChusa was living near downtown and working as a landscape gardener by 1917. Two years later LaChusa married his first wife, Annie, who was a California Indian. The couple relocated to Torrance, an ethnically diverse industrial area near the coast, where LaChusa worked as a laborer at Llewellyn Iron Works alongside Mexican immigrants and several Indians from Arizona. By 1924 LaChusa had married his second wife, Margaret, a California Indian who was born on the Torrez-Martinez Reservation. The two moved to Hollywood, and LaChusa returned to work as a gardener. In 1950, at the age of sixty-seven, LaChusa retired to the city where he had spent most of his life.1 Most American Indian Studies scholars who have recognized the migration of Native people to cities in the twentieth century have characterized Indian urbanity as a post–World War II phenomenon. Historians have referred to the dislocation of the war years and postwar federal relocation programs in particular and argue that they sparked the first significant movements of Native people to urban centers. Others have noted the pres- Settling into the City 12 ence of a prewar population, or even suggested that postwar migration was an intensification of earlier trends. These scholars have proceeded to focus on the postwar era and provide little sense of what Indian life in the city was like before 1945, and how these migratory patterns might have shaped Indian Country as a whole.2 Scholars also have missed the presence of American Indians who often traveled, lived, and worked alongside other peoples of color in the burgeoning cities of North America.3 The stories of Romaldo LaChusa and thousands of others illustrate a longer history of American Indians reimagining Indian Country to include the cities of the United States. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the American Indian population of urban areas throughout the country steadily increased. American Indians traveled to cities and their surrounding areas for thousands of new jobs in the agricultural, industrial , and service sectors. This migration was often regional, as Native people were most likely to take advantage of economic opportunities in the towns and cities closest to their established lands and communities. Built on decades of participation by wage laborers, these movements were often a logical extension of Native people’s more established social patterns rooted in tribal life. American Indians in towns and cities tended to be concentrated in domestic service and unskilled occupations, as they were in rural areas, and these occupations offered the lowest pay under the least favorable of working conditions. Native people also found more skilled and better-paying positions, however, enabling them to settle into the multiethnic , working- and middle-class neighborhoods that came to characterize many U.S. cities. When great numbers of Indian people traveled to urban areas for defense work and military service, there was already a long history of urban American Indian migration. The history of American Indians in American cities from 1900 to 1945 is marked by migrations in correlation to urban expansion. Seen in this light, Indian migration was part of the development of urban America in this era, as well as the foundation for the expansion and development of American Indian communities in cities after the war. American Indians were finding and settling into the cities of the United States as early as the first decades of the twentieth century, beginning a long process of reimagining Indian Country. American Indians have always lived in the towns and cities of North America to some extent.4 In Southern California, the Spaniards who ventured...

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