The World in a City: Multiethnic Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

Abstract

In The World in a City David Struthers outlines the “world” of organizing that the radical Left made in Los Angeles, in networks across the western United States, and into Mexico. Struthers's contribution to labor history lies in his attention to the more pervasive “practice” of a “culture of affinity” in the daily activities and networks of the radical Left. Practices formed a shared culture, which in turn contributed to the organization of interracial, multi-lingual, international coalitions. Anarchists, syndicalists, and trade unionists of the Los Angeles radical Left moved in and out of formal and informal associations, sometimes lasting only as long as specific workplace struggles. Other organizations endured throughout the early twentieth century, as with the International Workers of the World or the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). Organizers sought to teach anarchist ideals and to pass on tactics that workers could use in response to the specific conditions of labor that they experienced. Thus, the radical Left in Los Angeles was intentionally temporary, impermanent, constantly forming and reforming. Because direct action, rather than political reform of the state, was the goal, universalizing narratives of class equality and deliberate formation of community through a shared culture were more necessary.While these were the ideals that informed the affinities diverse workers created, interracial and multi-ethnic coalitions were frequently riven by common-sense assumptions about members of ethnic groups as conforming to racial types. Japanese workers were too well organized—and workers were believed to be organizable according to their racial characteristics. Mexican laborers were uneducated. Indigenous people were childlike and ignorant of the modern world. Anglos most often expressed such conceptions, but racialization occurred between non-whites as well. Most significant during this period, leftists of many ethnicities expressed anti-Chinese sentiments in support of Chinese exclusion.Struthers identifies key features that made possible and contributed to a multi-ethnic culture of affinity. Workers from Japan, China, South Asia, the Philippines, and Europe, as well as convicts moved through overlapping migration networks as they built the regional infrastructure of railroads and roads, harbors, and water systems, extracted the resources necessary for such construction and farmed large tracts of consolidated agricultural land. In Los Angeles this regional labor force lived in multi-ethnic neighborhoods where experiences in labor struggles were shared: on streets and in shared public spaces, in bars and pool halls, in ethnic-owned grocery stores and restaurants. Thus, in early twentieth-century Los Angeles, organization of space and residential patterns facilitated interracial and cross-ethnic interaction and exchange. In chapter 2 Struthers delineates anarchists’ spatial and print culture networks. Union halls owned by one organization were shared and used by many organizations. Workers formed reading groups and made use of workers’ libraries. Vacant-lot, free-speech zones, boxcars, and jungle camps were also places where common cause was formed. In Struthers's detailed analysis, individual newspapers that seemed to have a small readership, or that were short-lived, were part of a larger global print culture, amounting to a longer-lived anarchist mass media. Newspapers printed in one language frequently reserved pages for news and advertisements in other languages. Mexican-run newspapers were part of a “trans Mexican network” of Spanish and Italian speakers that extended from the East Coast of North America to the greater Caribbean, the Pacific coast of South America, the Andes, and the Río de la Plata.Struthers revisits the major strikes and labor conflicts that involved Los Angeles radicals. He documents when European immigrant, Mexican, Japanese, and African American men (and occasionally women) came together. In 1903 Japanese and Mexican farm laborers organized the Japanese Mexican Laborers Association and briefly succeeded in extracting concessions during strikes in the sugar beet fields in Oxnard. Struthers asserts that the significance of PLM-led, armed raids into Baja California in 1906, 1908, and 1910–11 against the Porfirian government of Mexico, “rests in the multiracial and transnational composition of the fighting force” (p. 128). Participants included European immigrants from England, Russia, Sweden, Germany, France and Italy, South Asians, Native Americans, and African Americans.The culture of affinity that Struthers emphasizes is not an example of “culture as a whole way of life” as in Raymond Williams's formulation. And Struthers leaves other scholars to explore the possibility of additional evidence of the culture of affinity in Wobblies’ songs or literary and visual expression created by radical leftists. In such sources, as well as the voluminous archive of leftist newspapers that Struthers draws from, it might also be evident that the coalitions leftists created through multi-ethnic affinities were also enabled by the creation of specific conceptions of masculinity. With that said, Struthers's thorough research adds significantly to our understanding of the making of the Los Angeles radical Left.