How Immigrant Activists Changed L.A.

Abstract

Once known as the “wicked city” for its vicious anti-labor politics, Los Angeles has, particularly over the last decade, gained a reputation as a bastion of progressivism. In L.A., one of the few places in the United States where private-sector unionization saw steady gains before the 2008 recession, activists have organized across racial lines for community benefits agreements, job training programs, and transit justice. They have also elected progressive mayors like former community organizer Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005—eight years before Bill de Blasio’s victory in our (friendly) rival city, New York—and Eric Garcetti, the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century, in 2013.