Bringing Music to the People: Race, Urban Culture, and Municipal Politics in Postwar Los Angeles

Over the past ten years, closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras have become an increasingly familiar part of the urban landscape in many developed countries. (1) Throughout Europe, despite early concerns about the possible implications for human rights, governments have now begun to regard video surveillance technology as a magic bullet in the fight against crime and public disorder. In Britain alone, over one million cameras have been installed in towns and cities across the country, with an estimated 500 being added to this number every week. (2) While initially slow to embrace this new technology, in recent years public area CCTV has also begun to become more popular in the United States. Street cameras can now be found in Boston, Los Angeles, and New York as well as in a growing number of smaller cities and towns. (3) In many instances, these cameras have been installed without public consent or even public discussion and are subject to little in the way of either formal or informal legal regulation. Provided they have the support of local government, the police and other law enforcement agencies are free to monitor public spaces such as streets, parks, and open malls with little regard for the concerns of private citizens. To some extent, this lack of regulation stems from a reluctance on the part of the courts to tackle the question of whether individuals have some legitimate expectation of privacy in public spaces. Despite declaring in Katz v. United States that the Fourth Amendment protects people not places, since the late 1960s the Supreme Court has been highly resistant to the idea that privacy rights can extend to streets or other public areas. (4) The Court has also repeatedly refused to consider any suggestion that public area video surveillance should be regarded as a form of police search, a view that has been consistently endorsed by the lower courts. (5) As a consequence, individuals who believe that they have been the subject of unnecessary and intrusive CCTV surveillance can expect little sympathy from local, state, or federal court judges. (6) This judicial reluctance is understandable. Privacy rights are notoriously difficult to define, particularly in terms of their operation in public and semi-public spaces. (7) Yet, while most of us accept that we surrender a certain amount of personal privacy once we leave the confines of our own home, few would concede that we have no expectation of privacy when we stand on the street or walk through a park. The problem lies with identifying the interests that are harmed by the absence of privacy protections in such circumstances. How, for example, is being watched by a CCTV camera different from being watched by a stranger sitting on a park bench or, for that matter, by a police officer standing on a street corner? Why is one somehow more intrusive than the other, and does this tell us anything about the types of interests involved or how best to protect them? This article examines these questions, and the possibility of developing a coherent framework for thinking about individual privacy rights in public spaces. In particular, it considers whether CCTV surveillance represents a special or unique threat to such rights and how the law should begin to approach the issue of regulation and control. Whether we like it or not, public area surveillance technology is now a fact of life, and there is a pressing need for us to reconsider many of our assumptions--legal and ethical--about the nature and importance of privacy rights. Privacy as a Civil Liberty Although there are many competing conceptions of privacy as a civil liberty, one of the most coherent accounts is that advanced by the legal philosopher David Feldman. According to Feldman, privacy rights are important because they provide individuals with the ability to determine and control the boundaries between different, interlocking social spheres. …

Reviewed by: Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943 Paul Clark (bio) Yingjin Zhang, editor. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. xvi, 369 pp. Hardcover $55.00, ISBN 0-8047-3188-8. Paperback $19.95, ISBN 0-8047-3572-7. The remarkable precision of the dates in the title of this book belies the breadth of its contribution both to Chinese film studies and to broader understandings of twentieth-century Chinese urban culture. The ten chapters range well outside 1922 and 1943 and beyond films. This is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature that is taking us beyond sweeping assumptions about Shanghai and Chinese popular culture in its pre-1949 guise. Yingjin Zhang has assembled a strong group of researchers and has managed to instill shared themes in the chapters. His introduction, "Cinema and Urban Culture in Republican Shanghai," nicely sets the scene, placing the book in the context of the historiography of Chinese cinema as practiced by scholars on the mainland, on Taiwan, and in Hong Kong. Like several of the contributors, he properly questions the utility of that hoary term "leftist cinema" and essays the issue of the relation between film and print cultures in Shanghai in these years. Ironically, given the precision of the book's title dates, he misdates the Cultural Revolution to the period 1967-1977 (p. 8). The next three parts, each with three chapters, cover "institutions and innovations (Part One), representations and practices (Part Two), and construction and contestation (Part Three)" (p. 4). Part 1 is perhaps the most impressive section in the book. Titled "Screening Romance: Teahouse, Cinema, Spectator," it has chapters by Zhen Zhang, Kristine Harris, and Leo Ou-fan Lee. Zhen Zhang's study of the teahouse origins of early Chinese cinema perhaps heaps too much on the fragile remnants of the 1922 film Laborer's Love. But like the other two chapters in this part, she addresses issues of audience and reception, ending with some intriguing observations on the 1980s and 1990s, well beyond the 1943 of the title. Kristine Harris examines the classical-subject film in the 1920s, focusing on The Romance of the Western Chamber. This chapter is one of the best in the volume, offering insight into the position of classical popular culture in urban Republican China and how film had a special role in investing the traditions with modern notions of equality and populism. Leo Lee rounds out the section with a masterly discussion on the "urban milieu of Shanghai cinema" in the 1930s. He ranges widely and to good effect over relations between print culture and film. His suggestion that female Chinese film stars were not as sexualized as their Hollywood counterparts (p. 82) deserves further exploration by scholars. Part 2 continues this theme, being subtitled "Imagining Sexuality: Cabaret Girl, Movie Star, Prostitute." Andrew D. Field examines dance hostesses in print, [End Page 608] film, and politics between 1920 and 1949 (there go those dates in the title again). Five of his twenty-eight pages are on film portrayals. His chapter offers a fascinating look at how conventions of courtship and concubinage were transformed in a modern urban setting. (I doubt that the Xin xianlin was the "New Zealand" dance hall [p. 126].) Michael G. Chang starts his chapter with a quote from Walter Benjamin, which offers little but alludes to his emphasis on the print media's portrayal and reproduction of images of film actresses. This offers a new understanding of these women, including their versatility: Wang Hanlun spent eight months in 1926 touring Southeast Asia giving live kunqu performances in cinemas where her film was playing (p. 135). The exceptional youth of many of these actresses goes unremarked. Prostitution and the negotiation of public and private space is the subject of Zhang Yingjin's chapter. The analysis of Ruan Lingyu's Goddess draws on William Rothman's 1993 study. Zhang as editor extends his considerations to Edward Yang's urban films of the 1980s. Part 3 is the most mixed section of the book. Zhiwei Xiao treads his familiar path through issues of censorship in the Nanjing...

The role of place in cultivating artistic practice, communities and audiences is well established and the economic, social and cultural benefits that flow from this are becoming better understood. By contrast, the factors impacting and influencing access to these places is poorly theorised. This paper identifies and examines these factors as they apply to live music in Australia, through a qualitative survey of live music patrons and venues. We compare the themes identified from our data with existing theories of access in the arts, with a particular focus on the ways in which place-based music scenes may encourage or exclude participation. We address the question of how access affects participation within these scenes, as well as how access might be improved.

Eat, Swim, Pray

"A Bunch of Tough Hombres":Police Brutality, Municipal Politics, and Racism in South Texas Brent M. S. Campney (bio) "Everybody knew the McAllen police were a bunch of tough hombres, especially the Boys on C shift," reported the Dallas Morning News on March 29, 1981. "Working the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift along the border is like being at war, the cops said. You have to be tough. The Boys on C shift worked at being tough." Many of the "Boys" wore black T-shirts with gold letters bearing "the legend, 'C Shift Animals.' They even had their own slogan: 'Kick…and Ask Questions Later.'" Only days earlier, the public had become aware of their misdeeds, revealed in six years of booking room videos recorded by the McAllen Police Department (MPD) and subpoenaed by a civil rights attorney. On these videos Anglo and Mexican American officers alike confirmed suspicions that they had beaten, kicked, and abused prisoners—in virtually all cases, working-class Mexican Americans.1 Station KGBT in nearby Harlingen played television footage of the beatings, bringing a flood of outrage. "One woman, like many of the callers, was almost in tears when she thanked us over and over again for showing such terrible things going on," noted a representative of the station. "She said as soon as she got through talking to us, she was going to call the McAllen police to demand an answer [as to] why those things had happened."2 She was not alone. "The police switchboard was lit up for hours after the tapes were shown on TV," declared James C. Harrington, the attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had secured the videos and released them to the media.3 As investigators probed the scandal, some pointed to the mayor—already locked in a heated, racially tinged political race with Ramiro Casso, a Mexican American challenger—as an enabler. On May 3 the News reported that "the federal grand jury investigation of accusations of [End Page 787] brutality by McAllen police has broadened to include the possibility of a cover-up of the incidents by Mayor Othal Brand and other city officials."4 This study tells the story of the 1981 MPD scandal, its impact on the ongoing municipal election between an Anglo incumbent and a Mexican American challenger, and its role in unifying Mexican Americans in South Texas during a period in which they were beginning to seize the reigns of local and regional power. Historians such as David Montejano, Marc Simon Rodriguez, and Brian Behnken have incorporated the issue of police brutality into their scholarship on the Mexican American civil rights movement during the post World War II period. In his discussion of Colorado, for example, Rodriguez found that between "1962 and 1964, police brutality became a significant issue for Mexican Americans in Denver and was the spark that ignited community activism. Several young men had had interactions with the police, and what should have been no more than minor skirmishes led to the young men's deaths."5 Nevertheless, historians have focused on particularly egregious incidents in places like East Los Angeles and Dallas rather than on the issue of police violence more broadly. This study places police violence at the center of the story and addresses its significance in enforcing repression, promoting resistance, and transforming local and regional power relations.6 The study proceeds in five sections. In the first it details the history of police violence against Mexican Americans in Texas and in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (hereafter, the Valley) in the 1970s. In the second section it examines the role in these events of Othal Brand, the so-called Onion King, who owned one of the most powerful agribusiness interests in Texas and served as the mayor of McAllen. In the third it analyzes the MPD scandal, the roots of which dated back to the early 1970s. In the fourth it explores the mayoral campaign, election, and election runoff, all of which not only highlighted the police scandal but underlined racial and class divisions in this South Texas city. In the final section it considers the historiographical implications of its findings. To tell...

The courts may not work, but when everyone is videoing everyone else justice will be done.--Marge Simpson (1) Can we stand living exposed to scrutiny, our secrets laid open, if in return we get flashlights of our own that we can shine on anyone who might do us harm--even the arrogant and the strong? Or is an illusion of privacy worth any price, even the cost of surrendering our own right to pierce the schemes of the powerful? --David Brin, The Transparent Society (2) Over the past five years, there has been a rapid and sustained expansion in the use of public area closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras in the United States. Although cameras have been a familiar sight in banks and shopping malls since the early 1970s, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, more and more cities have made moves to install sophisticated camera-based surveillance systems in streets, parks, and other public spaces. In major cities like New York and Chicago, large scale schemes now provide the police and other law enforcement authorities with an unprecedented ability to observe citizens as they go about their daily lives in public, while in places such as Baltimore and New Orleans, substantial funding from the federal government has led to the establishment of smaller but highly advanced CCTV networks. (3) Although the US still lags behind countries such as the United Kingdom in terms of the number of cameras in operation, (4) if current trends continue it may only be a matter of time before we see cameras on virtually every street corner and subway platform. Although there is now a relatively well-developed corpus of academic literature that attempts to make sense of CCTV and to understand its broader sociological and political significance, strikingly little has been said about the legality of such technology, or the extent to which it can and should be regulated. In part, this may be because there seems little prospect of the courts extending existing privacy protections to cover the use of technologies like CCTV. To date, courts have shown a distinct unwillingness to treat public area surveillance as a search for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, or as a violation of any constitutionally protected right to privacy. In United States v. Knotts, for example, the Supreme Court rejected any suggestion that the electronic tracking of a vehicle could be regarded as a search, on the grounds that a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another. (5) Read alongside the decision in United States v. Katz, this has been taken by many lower courts and academic commentators to mean that the use of covert CCTV surveillance in public spaces--and presumably, therefore, overt surveillance--is lawful. (6) While the absence of a clear constitutional basis for limiting the use of CCTV obviously does not prevent local and state legislatures from imposing their own restrictions, the lack of judicial interest in privacy in public spaces (and the spread of surveillance technologies more generally) appears to have reinforced the belief among law makers that the police and other law enforcement agencies should be free to engage in the surveillance of public spaces as and when they see fit. In this regard, the answer to the legal question--is the use of CCTV in public spaces restricted by law?--has been taken to provide the answer to the normative question--should the use of CCTV in public spaces be restricted by law? Unsurprisingly, the apparent conflation of these two questions has been exacerbated by the events of September 11, as well as by the more recent bombings in Madrid, Bali, and London. Since the attacks on New York and Washington DC, any discussion about the balance between the rights of the individual and the interests of law enforcement must now explicitly consider the dangers posed by international terrorism. …

A significant amount of research is concerned with the interrelation between society and urban space since communities are the actual users of the space. The typology of the space changes as social groups evolve. Public spaces are defined not only by their spatial structure, but also by their use and attraction, which contribute to their identity. Access to space through transportation and parking increases its vitality. Indeed, urban culture is another aspect that needs to be reflected in space, as there is variation in the social life of different cultures, so there is constantly a challenge to choose which element can foster social interaction in that specific space within that culture. This research focuses on the challenge that architects and urban designers face in fulfilling their role in facilitating human activities related to the social life of a community. Social life reveals the culture of the city as a consequence of the complex relationship between space and people. Several explanations exist for this phenomenon, including the fact that some spaces, despite their excellent design, fail to meet societal norms. Various elements promote social interaction in public space, but it's crucial to thoroughly examine each scenario with the participation of the public. The research aims to elucidate the concept of promoting social interaction in public spaces in relation to culture. In conclusion, public space is the mirror of city culture and city life since it is the medium that influences and completes society. Melkova clarified that William White defined public spaces as “places of sharing, of living, and of belonging citizenship.” Other scholars define it as the third place where you reduce the stress of life and work through gathering and entertainment activities. Public spaces serve as a platform for expressing and shaping the mindset of the community, making it a highly interconnected variable. Designers strive to strike a balance between all these factors.

The 1920s and 1920s witnessed the rise of a dance industry in Shanghai. Many of the city’s ballrooms and nightclubs featured dance hostesses or taxi-dancers, and by the late 1930s most of the young women working in this profession were Chinese. This chapter examines the following questions: 1) To what extent did dance halls in Shanghai serve as platforms for modern romantic encounters and courtship rituals among their customers? 2) Did dance establishments in Shanghai encourage and facilitate meaningful social and cultural interactions across racial, ethnic, class and national boundaries? 3) How did the ubiquitous presence of Chinese hostesses in the city’s dance halls influence and shape patterns of courtship and romantic and/or sexual encounters between men and women in the city? The chapter begins by examining the origins of couple dancing in Shanghai and shows how fashionable dances were taken up soon after their launch abroad by foreign settlers in the city and how ‘localised‘ jazz music began to attract Chinese patrons to western-style dance halls. The second part follows this trend to the late 1920s and presents factors that helped make couple dancing attractive to Chinese patrons, who at first had to overcome strong reservations against couple dancing. The third part traces the rise of taxi-dancing in the city. Focusing on the figure of the dance hostess and her role in Shanghai’s social world of dancing, it discusses couple dancing’s position between prostitution, stardom and romantic love and asks how their presence affected social relations in dance venues.

This chapter explores dance hall culture in Buenos Aires during the 1920s and 1930s, paying special attention to the cultural depictions and lived experiences of young women who patronised dance halls. In particular, it explores the rise of these places and their impact on young women's leisure time. In order to do this, the first section investigates the development of milongas, academias and cabarets, and analyses the diverse patrons that attended them, the social values these places endorsed and the dances that were in vogue in Buenos Aires during this period. The second section explores female representations and young women's involvement in dance hall culture. It examines two female types that condensed the moral panic generated by the dance hall, and explores 'actual' young women's visual styles and their encounters with men at the various dance venues. The chapter analyses the yellow press, general interest magazines and women's magazines in order to examine representations of gender and dance hall culture, and explores how young women experienced them through opinion pieces, advice columns and letters to the editor sections. The historiography on Argentine women in the 1920s and 1930s has explored women's significant involvement in the public sphere. It has focused, particularly, on the feminist movement and on female political engagement, education and labour market participation from a social history perspective. This article engages with this scholarship and argues that popular culture, and principally beauty, fashion, intimacy and courtship, were relevant practices in the lives of young women as well as crucial discourses in the shaping of their identities.

Contributors to This Issue

Beside having significant values that would enrich the Indonesian nation, tribal, cultural, and religious diversity brought seeds of conflicts that could potentially disrupt social order and threaten national unity. The conflicts that occurred in Ambon from 1999 to 2004 were conflict examples that were caused by religious plurality that had appeared many societal problems that could not be fully resolved until today. The trust among Ambon's plural communities had not returned well and it was even worsened by settlement segregation separating Muslim and Christian communities that factually brought potential for further conflicts. In the present life of Ambon’s segregated societ today public spaces inspired by brotherhood and “unity in diversity” spirits thatt could be meeting and socializing means of the communities and to reduce the social polarization were to be absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, the existing public spaces in Ambon for the time being served only as stages of activities and they did not connect with the communities’ social spectrums so that the public spaces remained meaningless. A public space here served just as a witness, not as a means of socializing in accordance with the communities’ cultures and characters. This paper would discuss how to integrate the communities’ cultures and characters into a public space design that had significant meaning in overcoming the polarization of Ambon’s segregated communities. The public space would be designed by taking into account a location choice where two segregated communities could easily meet. In the public space a macro space concept where the sea as the front page of Ambon communities should be applied and even forwarded since such a concept tended to be forgotten. Beside the spatial format, the public space should also be designed by facilitating various cultural-based activities so that the communities’ characteristics that were integrated in the urban culture and daily activities would appear in the public spaces.

Twenty years of development in a town’s history is not a long period of time especially provided that the sociocultural context conditions for such a development may be defined as “favorable” or “normal”. Under conditions of accelerated urbanization, however, when a town is undergoing particularly rapid development, which is even more encouraged by conditions of the context, the whole situation looks by far worse. Throughout the 20th century Lithuania underwent two stages of such an accelerated urbanization. During the first stage of such an urbanization, at the time of the first Lithuanian Republic (1918–1940), the concept of a national capital was conceived and rapidly developed. As soon as it was realized within 20 years in Kaunas, a capital city of European level was formed not only with all the attributes characteristic of a town of the type, but also with its content – urban culture. It is a consistent pattern that the results of urban development can be seen most clearly not only in expansion of a town’s territory (outward development), but also through changes in its “inner” or public spaces. Within the aforementioned period, when it was so important to entrench the ideology of the nation state, new monuments representing a national idea occurred in public spaces (squares) of major Lithuanian towns, and even such spaces were reconstructed in a new manner (Fig. 1). Similar urban development – although on a fairly accelerated scale - has been carried out during the recent decade, when starting from 1995 to 2008 the capital city and other major Lithuanian towns were growing and developing extremely extensively. As for the changes in urban public spaces, the situation is far worse. The last significant period of public space formation goes back to the soviet occupation times, and within recent 18 years of independence just a few town squares have been formed or reformed. The present situation might be determined by the fact that the key social power entities, planning for the future of a town and most actively participating in its formation – private capital and self-government (rarely, the state) – have different understanding of urban public space significance to the town itself as well as its community, and also have different capabilities to change them. With commercial logic of benefit, typical under conditions of capital prevalence, an, undeveloped space in a town center can be hardly explainable in commercial terms, especially where land is expensive; and only in rare cases the commercial logic can appreciate real value added and social attraction created by the urban public space. On the one hand, in conditions of urban development under rapid and wild capitalism the self-government lacks leverage and power to implement its duties, form and/or take care of public spaces in a town. On the other hand, it should be taken into consideration that tradition of self-government and public space has been terminated and exterminated in Lithuania for half a century. Santrauka Straipsnyje aptariama šiuolaikinė miesto pagrindinių aikščių formavimo situacija Lietuvoje, išskiriant ir apibūdinant kelis svarbiausius bruožus. Čia analizuojama kintanti miesto viešųjų erdvių samprata ir jų pavyzdžiai, kintanti miesto viešųjų erdvių tipologija bei kintantys visuomenės reikalavimai aikšių ir paties miesto formavimui. Tekste išskiriamos ir aptariamos kai kurios aiškiau matomos aikščių formavimo tendencijos bei idėjos.

The early twentieth century brought transformative Mexican migrations to places from Texas to Alaska, Michigan to California, and the South was no exception. Examining the case of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the South from 1908 to 1939, this essay shows how international migration, in this case between the United States and Mexico, has shaped the racial ideologies of nations and societies at both ends of migration streams. It traces the arrival of Mexican immigrants to two Southern locations, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, and discusses their initial experiences of race and class there. It then focuses on the middle- and upper-class community surrounding Mexico’s New Orleans consulate, as well as the self-appointed leadership among poor Mexican sharecroppers in Gunnison, Mississippi, to illuminate the distinctly Mexican strategies which Mexicans of all social classes pursued in their quest to attain and retain white status in the U.S. South. In the early twentieth century U.S. South, there were no Mexican Americans who could call upon U.S. citizenship or claims to be “Caucasian” under the law, nor organizers drawing Mexicans into class-based politics. There, Mexicans’ sole cultural and political claims took the form of Mexico-directed activism, through which the racial ideologies of both immigrants and Mexican government bureaucrats had a discernible impact upon the color line’s shape and foundations. Conversely, it was in the South that Mexican government representatives most directly confronted the black-white eugenic binary of U.S. white supremacy, and did so without the support of U.S.-based institutions or groups. This article argues that during the decade following the Mexican revolution, Mexican immigrants and bureaucrats in the South emphasized Mexico’s pre-revolutionary tradition of cultural whitening, avoiding the official post-revolutionary celebration of race-mixing, or mestizaje. In so doing, they successfully elided questions of eugenic race in their negotiation of the color line. They eventually secured Mexicans’ acceptance as white, a trajectory more closely mirroring national trends for European, rather than Mexican immigrants in the same period.

En el barrio de Pilsen de la ciudad de Chicago la comunidad ha venido realizado diversas acciones y esfuerzos para revitalizar e identificar este espacio antes multicultural ahora para los mexicoamericanos. Estudios realizados en la ciudad de Chicago, nos permiten conocer acciones y procesos de apropiación del espacio público por los grupos étnicos migrantes que se han instalado en esta ciudad. En Pilsen, uno de los más antiguos de la ciudad, existen organizaciones que han estado trabajando para revitalizarlo. Las acciones y objetivos que han emprendido pretenden buscar la identidad de los mexicanos emigrados a esta ciudad. Un ejemplo, <em>el proyecto resurrección </em>es una asociación que ha trabajado por más de veinte años, desarrollando múltiples acciones buscando no solo la identidad mexicana, también dignificar la vivienda y apoyar a los migrantes mexicanos. El Museo de Arte Mexicano, es otra organización que también ha contribuido para proporcionar y fortalecer la identidad mexicana en esta ciudad multicultural. Este trabajo pretende exponer los principales logros, limitaciones y los retos en la revitalización social y espacial de un lugar ocupado mayoritariamente por migrantes mexicanos en esta ciudad.

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's <i>Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty</i>