Movement In California Research Articles

In Millennial Footsteps: California Social Movement Organizations for Generation Z

This article highlights main themes that emerged from our panel featuring youth organizers and scholars of youth social movements in California. We focus on how organizations uplift youth leadership, foster queer inclusivity, build across racial difference, and cultivate “beloved community,” a concept popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our organizations address the root causes of inequities that threaten low-income communities of color, while adapting to contemporary challenges by proposing new modes of social change. For example, youth-centered leadership has long been at the crux of youth organizing; meanwhile, “healing” has increasingly emerged as a prominent aspect of youth organizations devoted to social change. This article thus summarizes our panel’s insights about youth organizing across California.

The Political Economy of the Anti-Chinese Movement in California in the Nineteenth Century

The Political Economy of the Anti-Chinese Movement in California in the Nineteenth Century

From Socialite to Public Servant

In 1912, one year after women won the right to vote in California, Luella Johnston became the first woman elected to Sacramento’s city council, and to any city council in the state. She played an integral role linking the local clubwomen, progressive, and suffrage movements in California’s capital city. Her remarkable life provides a case study of how women in the early 1900s acquired and used political power, and in doing so changed their own and public perceptions of a woman’s role in the public sphere.

We Don't Need Your Permission: The Era of Non-Affiliated Student Activism

Student activism, just like any social movement, cycles through times of great excitment and visibility and times of near invisibility. The early 21st Century has been filled with new social movements in communities across the world and on campuses as well. These new student movements take up bold ideas and actions but from a different positionality than those before. In this paper, I explore the nature of new student movements in California through an ongoing ethnographic research project. In particular, this paper focuses on how student groups are using their identities and material experiences to draw on positionality in their work for justice. By positioning themselves outside of traditional student organizational relationships with universities, these student activists come from a position of greater freedom. But at what cost?

The Political Economy of the Anti-Chinese Movement in California in the 19th Century

The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 painted one of the most unsettling themes in the history of discrimination against ethnic minorities in the 19th century. The enactment marked the first federal legislation to prevent the immigration of laborers of a specific ethnic group. This paper develops a model to study the anti-Chinese movement in California by drawing on the previous literature. The model suggests that adverse economic conditions in the labor market, direct competition between Chinese workers and native workers, well-organized native labor, durable legislation can explain why there was a three-decade time lag between the first wave of Chinese agitation and the passage of the exclusion act. It can also explain why political actors frequently responded to the demands of labor organizations.

How just is transportation justice theory? The issues of paternalism and production

The topic of justice has increasingly attracted attention from transportation scholars, and a variety of perspectives and approaches are employed to study this topic. Arguably the most elaborate and sophisticated theory is put forward by Karel Martens in his 2017 book “Transport justice”. We start with a critical reading of Karel Martens’ work which is based on the work of liberal philosophers such as Richard Dworkin. While Martens makes several telling points, we explore how debates in the justice literature apply to the case of transportation, and may question aspects of transportation justice theory. In particular we discuss the issues of (1) the paternalistic treatment of people below the accessibility poverty line, and (2) the production and planning of transportation services. Two cases are used to inform this theoretical discussion, on the one hand, the Transportation Justice movement in California, and on the other, the “basic accessibility” debate in Flanders (Belgium).

Greenhouse gas emissions from heavy-duty natural gas, hybrid, and conventional diesel on-road trucks during freight transport

Heavy-duty on-road vehicles account for 70% of all freight transport and 20% of transportation-sector greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States. This study measured three prevalent GHG emissions – carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) – from seven heavy-duty vehicles, fueled by diesel and compressed natural gas (CNG), and compliant to the MY 2007 or 2010 U.S. EPA emission standards, while operated over six routes used for freight movement in California. Total combined (tractor, trailer, and payload) weights were 68,000 ± 1000 lbs. for the seven vehicles. Using the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) radiative forcing values for a 100-year time horizon, N2O emissions accounted for 2.6–8.3% of total tailpipe CO2 equivalent emissions (CO2-eq) for diesel vehicles equipped with Diesel Oxidation Catalyst, Diesel Particulate Filter, and Selective Catalytic Reduction system (DOC + DPF + SCR), and CH4 emissions accounted for 1.4–5.9% of CO2-eq emissions from the CNG-powered vehicle with a three-way catalyst (TWC). N2O emissions from diesel vehicles equipped with SCR (0.17–0.30 g/mi) were an order of magnitude higher than diesel vehicles without SCR (0.013–0.023 g/mi) during highway operation. For the vehicles selected in this test program, we measured 11–22% lower CO2-eq emissions from a hybrid compared to conventional diesel vehicles during transport over lower-speed routes of the freight transport system, but 20–27% higher CO2-eq emissions during higher-speed routes. Similarly, a CNG vehicle emitted up to 15% lower CO2-eq compared to conventional diesel vehicles over more neutral-grade highway routes, but emitted up to 12% greater CO2-eq emissions over routes with higher engine loads.

Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas by Alan J. Watt

Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas by Alan J. Watt

Driven by Fear: Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence

Driven by Fear, by Guenter B. Risse, investigates the relationship between disease and emotions. It explores how fear and disgust shaped the history of the pesthouse, the popular term for a quarantine and isolation facility. Such emotions led to the denial of proper medical care and respect for basic human dignity. This study of the stigma attached to the pesthouse and the people within it makes a significant contribution to the history of medicine and public health, as well as the history of San Francisco. Driven by Fear is a prequel to Risse's earlier work on the history of the plague in San Francisco's Chinatown in the early twentieth century. In his latest study he addresses how the anti-Chinese movement in California influenced the creation of the pesthouse, or isolation hospital, as a response to the dangers of contagion. From the 1860s to the 1920s, San Francisco officials used the institution to contain four diseases: smallpox, syphilis, leprosy, and plague. Risse shows the efforts of the local medical society and of patients who advocated for better conditions and improved caregivers in the “house of pestilence.” They repeatedly pushed the San Francisco Board of Governors to provide appropriate funding to offer both public protection and a more humane environment for those who were banished. Such efforts, however, were often hindered by a tax-averse electorate.

Berkeley Mayor J. Stitt Wilson: Christian Socialist, Georgist, Feminist

AbstractJ. Stitt Wilson (1868–1942) was a leading American Christian Socialist. When he was elected Mayor of the City of Berkeley in 1911 he had to shift focus from the broad moral and economic case for socialism to the specifics of municipal reform. He drew on the ideas of Henry George, feminist urban reformers in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the settlement house movement, and progressive and socialist mayors who preceded him. He became a leader in both the Socialist Party and the single‐tax movement in California from 1911 to 1917, working with the shared belief that society, as a society, creates tremendous value that should be used for public benefit rather than taken as private profit. His story illustrates the creativity that can result when people are active in and learn from multiple social movements as well as the difficulties that can result from the tensions within and between movements. It illustrates, as well, some of the varied strands of the urban reform movement that helped create modern city government in America.

Editor's Introduction: The Politics of Urban Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1870–1920

Editor's Introduction: The Politics of Urban Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1870–1920

Contingent Maps: Rethinking Western Women's History and the North American West by Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett

Reviews  historical societies and other interested parties began to interpret and mark the site. Today’s greater South Pass region still encompasses visible emigrant trail ruts, emigrant markers, and the geopolitical boundaries that resulted from emigration.Like all such cultural geographies ,“South Pass is a history-haunted place” where, as quoted by archaeologist Terry Del Bene, “you can stand in 2006 and 1846 at the same time” (p. 293–294). South Pass contains extensive primary source material that tells the story of the peoples of the emigrant trail, which, coupled with its readability and expansive time frames, will make it useful in an undergraduate setting . This book should be on the reading list of any scholar of western United States history, particularly those interested in the history of the emigrant trails. Laura Woodworth-Ney Idaho State University CONTINGENT MAPS: RETHINKING WESTERN WOMEN’S HISTORY AND THE NORTH AMERICAN WEST edited by Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2014. Photographs, notes, index. 312 pages. $40.00 paper. Contingent Maps is a wide-ranging collection of ten essays on women and gender set primarily in the twentieth-century West. The editors organize these diverse offerings using a framework inspired by feminist geography and centering on three themes. Part I, “Identities and Place,” opens with a chapter on the social role of menstrual lodges among Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest Plateau, followed by another on the function of dress in blurring gender and racial boundaries in turnof -the-century San Francisco. The next essay discusses sites in interwar Hollywood where women “players” in the movie industry challenged “heteronormativity,” and the section closes with a chapter about the reaction to Chicanas who spoke pachucho slang in 1940s Los Angeles (p.81).Part II,“Colonized Places,” features articles exploring how constructions of gender shaped the “Californio racial fantasy ”of a pastoral early California; how Navajo women artisans were incorporated into the tourist economy of early-twentieth-century Albuquerque; and how the employment of young Indian women as housemaids in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1930s may be seen as a “domestic frontier” (p. 160, 201). Finally, Part III,“Networks and Place,” begins with a chapter focusing on competing definitions of masculinity that fueled the Bisbee Deportation incident of 1917 in Arizona, then concludes with two essays on more recent history — the background and status of Chicanas and Latinas among union organizers in the Los Angeles garment industry of the 1990s,and the struggle for “cultural rights” by progressive artists and activists in late-twentieth-century San Antonio (p. 288). Each of these essays provides valuable insights onto the “infinite variety of social relations”to be found in theWest,according to the editors (p. 11). Yolanda Venegas’ s chapter, for example,illuminates the cultural politics of the Spanish heritage movement in California with a provocative and nuanced reading of the classic novel Ramona.Margaret D.Jacobs’s contribution on American Indian servants neatly illustrates the notion of the “domestic frontier” as a “contact zone” involving the disparate agendas of young Native women, Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, and white women employers (p. 201). Such examples could be multiplied, because each contribution may stand on its own — in fact, each did originally, the editors indicate, because each was published separately in the pages of  OHQ vol. 116, no. 1 Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies between 2001 and 2007. It is up to editors Susan Gray and Gayle Gullett to show readers how these diverse essays “cohere topically, spatially, and temporally ,” despite the fact that they were chosen “more for their quality than because they address a particular theme related to gender, place, and the American West” (p. 13). Gray and Gullett attempt to supply that coherence with their introductions,and readers will have to decide how successful they were. They wish to add “place” to the analytical categories for understanding the North American West, alongside“gender,sexuality,class,colonialism, and race” (p. 10). But readers might note that six of the ten essays on the North American West are about California, and five of these six focus on either Los Angeles or San Francisco — spatial coherence indeed...

Dopamine challenge reveals neuroadaptive changes in marijuana abusers.

The current watershed in legal status and rising use of marijuana can be traced to a California ballot initiative (Prop. 215, its legal successor SB420), that enabled widespread access to smokeable or edible forms of marijuana for self-reported medical conditions. Circumventing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug approval process, the movement in California was replicated by ballot or legislative initiatives in 23 states and the District of Columbia, and culminated in the legalization of marijuana in 2012 by Washington state and Colorado. The shifting status of marijuana reflects a change in public perception and belief that marijuana is harmless. Marijuana use in the population over age 12 is escalating; 60% of 12th graders do not perceive marijuana as harmful, and daily or nearly daily use has risen dramatically in this cohort (1, 2). Paradoxically, public perception of marijuana as a safe drug is rising simultaneously with accumulating evidence that frequent marijuana use is associated with adverse consequences, especially among youth (3). In PNAS, Volkow et al. register compelling new observations that marijuana abusers manifest adaptive behavioral, physiological, and biological responses, which conceivably contribute to marijuana addiction and compromised function (4). In response to a dopamine challenge (methylphenidate) and compared with non-using controls, marijuana abusers self-reported blunted reward (less “high”) and heightened negative responses (anxiety and restlessness), which were associated with attenuated dopamine responses in brain and cardiovascular responses.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction Arthur Versluis For this issue, we have chosen articles that concentrate primarily on the history of radicalism from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Of course, the question remains how one defines “radicalism.” In general, we have kept to the idea with which we began the journal: radicalism applies to those who seek sudden social transformation, often, though not always, through violent means. But of course there are also those who question the very basis of a society, as well as those who can be described as reactionary. All of these are visible in this issue’s rich lode of articles. Our first article, by Rowland Weston, takes us back to the seminal period of the French Revolution and its aftermath, and asks us to consider more carefully what we mean by terms like the “Enlightenment,” or “the radical Enlightenment.” What are the philosophical presuppositions that underlie “modernity” or “anti-modernism”? Weston does not rest with the figure of William Godwin or his circle, but extends his inquiry to contemporary philosophical assumptions as well to consider what makes Godwin a radical thinker in ways that challenge conventional notions of what constitutes the “Enlightenment,” or “modernity”—that is, what is included in and what is excluded by those terms. Our second article, by Michael J. Turner, looks back to British history, and in particular to the seminal movement of the Chartists. Turner gives us the history of James Bronterre O’Brien, an important figure in this [End Page v] movement for dramatic political reform, but he also offers an analysis of what O’Brien can teach us about how a radical leader develops and maintains his political reputation, and what this can teach us about the reception of ideas and the development of political influence. The third article, by David Struthers, takes us across the Atlantic and all the way to Los Angeles in the early twentieth century. Struthers offers a detailed history of the radical labor movement in California during a turbulent period of immigration and, sometimes, conflict. Italian, Hispanic, Asian, African American, Anglo, and other ethnicities all converged in Los Angeles during this time. Struthers concentrates on issues of race in a period and place where multiple population groups intersected, the points of intersection often being the labor movements. But Struthers also includes anarchists and others whose radicalism is self-evident. Our fourth article is by Stephen J. Whitfield, and concentrates on a single figure, Frank Tannenbaum, whose life chronicle takes us from labor movements (he was a Wobbly) through social and prison reform, through the history of race relations in North America, to the development of the academic study of Latin America. Tannenbaum eventually became an influential professor at Columbia University, but, Whitfield maintains, his anarcho-syndicalist inclinations continued throughout his life. Through this examination of Tannenbaum’s life, we can see the interconnections between the Jewish community and the larger history of radicalism in the twentieth century. And our fifth article, Benjamin T. Smith’s examination of the political significances of narcotrafficking in Mexico during the middle of the twentieth century, presents a groundbreaking analysis of how narcotrafficking and state violence intersect to produce some unexpected political and social consequences. Smith shows that, contrary to what one might think, especially from the 1970s onwards, governmental agencies and drug traffickers aligned not only for reasons of financial self-interest, but also in a joint attempt to suppress radical groups in the Sinaloa region of Mexico. While this is a very detailed historical study, it also offers broader conclusions about the political and social results of “narcopopulism.” This issue also includes five book reviews, chosen to link with some of the themes discussed in our articles. We did not include a conversation in this issue, but we have several conversations with some interesting and [End Page vi] unexpected contemporary figures that we are preparing for coming issues—you may be surprised at some of them. One purpose for including conversations with primary figures from across the political spectrum is to challenge conventional notions about some of these figures and what they represent, and to do this by allowing them to speak for themselves. As you...

Alan J. Watt. Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas.

Alan J. Watt. Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas.

Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas (review)

Reviewed by: Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas Anthony Quiroz Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas. By Alan J. Watt. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010. Xii, Pp. 252. Photos, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781603441933, $24.00 paper.) In his new book, Alan J. Watt provides readers with an intriguing, well-written comparison of the role of the Protestant and Catholic Churches during the farm workers’ actions in California and Texas in the 1960s. A pastor for over two [End Page 409] decades, the author contributes to the growing body of literature produced by scholars such as Gilberto Hinojosa, Timothy Matovina, Roberto Treviño, and more recently Mario T. García, focusing on the role of religion in Mexican-American history. Watt studies California and Texas because the struggles in the fields were contemporaneous, with the Delano strike beginning in September 1965 and the Rio Grande Valley struggle coming in June 1966; both ended in 1970. Watt also finds the comparison between these two states interesting because of four major differences between them. First, they had very different historical trajectories. California became a state after the Mexican War, and its international population influx created a stronger sense of cosmopolitanism in California. Texas, by contrast, was populated largely from the American South, resulting in greater provincialism. Second, agribusiness grew much earlier and more rapidly in California. Third, California urbanized more rapidly. Fourth, and most importantly for his argument, religion developed differently in each state as well. The Protestant missionaries who first came to California were Congregationalists, Northern Presbyterians, and Northern Methodists who believed in the ecumenical movement and social justice. Further, the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists established a chapter in San Francisco by the 1930s, where the Church maintained a tradition of union support. In Texas, by contrast, Southern versions of Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians dominated the religious landscape. No devotees of the social gospel, southern religion was individualistic and conservative. To make his case, Watt divides the book into two major parts. The first examines events in California. The period from 1920 to 1940 is defined as one in which Protestants focused primarily on saving individual souls. The Catholic faith, for its part, had to balance the needs of the poor against the conservative, anti-union social climate in the southern part of the state. Further complicating issues was the fact that the Catholic church believed in the rights of workers to organize, but it stood foursquare against communism, which was sometimes rooted in organized labor. The second portion studies the unfolding of events in Texas, where a strong historical social and political conservatism joined forces with a deeply embedded religious conservatism to frustrate worker demands. Although Watt proffers interesting food for thought in terms of religious, social, historical and distinctions between the states, his narrative does not always sustain his assertions. Unlike Texas workers, Californians reached an agreement in 1970 with the major grape growers. But in neither the California “peregrinación” nor in the Texas “marcha” did the respective governors (Pat Brown in California, John Connally in Texas) agree to meet with the marchers. Both areas faced strong opposition by growers, and both areas experienced disagreements between clergy of all denominations over how to deal with increasing farm worker demands over time. Watt even concludes that it was a confluence of factors, including religion, that shaped the fortunes of migrant workers in the two states. That said, the book provides a rich account of the differing religious traditions in California and Texas. Students of religious history will find the work fascinating. Despite its interpretive shortcomings, students of labor history and Mexican American history will also find the book useful in fleshing out the complex story of the United Farm Workers in the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. [End Page 410] Anthony Quiroz Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Copyright © 2012 The Texas State Historical Association

Review: Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas, by Alan J. Watt

Review: <i>Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas</i>, by Alan J. Watt

Review: Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas, by Alan J. Watt

Book Review| November 01 2011 Review: Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas, by Alan J. Watt Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas. By Alan J. Watt. (College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 2010. ix + 252 pp.$48 cloth, $24 paper) Sara M. Patterson Sara M. Patterson Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2011) 80 (4): 660–661. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2011.80.4.660 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sara M. Patterson; Review: Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas, by Alan J. Watt. Pacific Historical Review 1 November 2011; 80 (4): 660–661. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2011.80.4.660 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 by the Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review Alan J. WattFarm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas. (College Station: Texas A&amp;M University Press, 2010. ix + 252 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $48.00, cloth; $24.00, paper.)

Review Alan J. Watt<b><i>Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas</i></b>. (College Station: Texas A&amp;M University Press, 2010. ix + 252 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $48.00, cloth; $24.00, paper.)

Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas

Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas