Justice for Samuel Faulkner

Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández

The sixth chapter spans the decades between the 1920s and the 1960s. In these years, as Los Angeles took center stage in the nation’s landscape of jails and prisons, the population of African Americans incarcerated in Los Angeles shot from politically irrelevant and slightly disproportionate to politically dominant and stunningly disproportionate. It has remained so ever since. Chapter 6 tracks the origins of the incarceration of blacks in Los Angeles. In particular, it details why and how black incarceration so disproportionately followed the expansion of L.A.’s African American community. Moreover, by exhuming the first recorded killing of a young black male by the LA PD, which occurred in South Central Los Angeles on the evening of April 24, 1927, this chapter details why and how police brutality so closely accompanied black incarceration in the city. It is a brutal history attended by persistent—and, in time, explosive—black protest, tracking how community members fought police brutality between 1927 and the outbreak of the Watts Rebellion in 1965. Indeed, race, policing, and protest became inextricable as Los Angeles advanced toward becoming the carceral capital of the United States.

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Elizabeth Rosas

Using a combination of oral life history interviews, field observation, and conversations with undocumented Mexican immigrant parents raising children born in the United States in South Central Los Angeles, California, this in-depth consideration of the state of emergency they face as a result of the U.S. government's implementation of the Criminal Alien Program (CAP) and Secure Communities Program (SCP) reveals their uniquely local and transnational confrontation of an increasingly insecure family situation that stretches across the U.S.-Mexico border and throughout U.S. inner cities, like South Central Los Angeles. The visibly public alienation these children, most recently identified as citizen kids endure makes evident that tragically they are most vulnerable to the indignities born out of these programs. The convergence of minor offenses committed by their parents, the illegality of their immigration status, and these children's U.S. citizenship status have paved the way for an incalculable loss that is most palpable when pausing to observe their multifaceted alienation. The relationship between these children's citizenship status, family relationships, day to day interactions, and these program's implementation reveals an underestimated yet infinitely tragic state of emergency.


Author(s):  
William Fulton

It is always difficult to measure urban resilience, but never more so when the trauma results from civil unrest, as opposed to a natural disaster or enemy attack.With natural disasters, it is frequently difficult to place blame, even if “acts of God” are sometimes all too intertwined with ill-advised decisions to site buildings in vulnerable areas. Wars and other attacks usually entail clear enemies, and eventually come to some negotiated halt, accompanied by greater territorial clarity. With riots and civil unrest, by contrast, destruction is community-based. Victims and perpetrators live in close proximity; violence is often inflicted within the very neighborhoods that feel most aggrieved; and recovery entails the need to redress not just physical damage but also deeply ingrained mistrust. Rebuilding, in this sense, requires not just investment in real estate, but also a variety of human capital—local infusions of community dynamism, neighborly cooperation, and no small measure of hope. In the United States, Los Angeles, California, stands out as the site of two generations of civil unrest: the Watts riots of 1965 and the civil unrest of 1992. The 1992 disturbance was the most damaging urban riot in American history, killing fifty-four people and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. Touched off by the acquittal on April 29 of white police officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King, the rampage lasted several days and spread to an area much larger than the earlier riots in Watts. The disturbance ranged across dozens of square miles, mostly along the lengthy commercial strips in the southern part of the city of Los Angeles, including many areas not traditionally viewed as part of South Central. It even spilled northward above the Santa Monica Freeway into Hollywood, the traditionally Jewish Fairfax district, and other neighborhoods far from the traditional centers of African-American residence. This chapter investigates a full decade of efforts to rebuild South Central Los Angeles, following the trial of King’s assailants. In so many ways, Los Angeles is a city like no other—a vast but low-rise city, dense and sprawling at the same time. Auto-oriented and generally without high-rises, Los Angeles might seem different from a more traditional metropolis such as New York.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Chanhaeng Lee

In this article, I argue that Korean immigrant merchants were active agents who opened small businesses in South Central Los Angeles in order to overcome a range of disadvantages faced in American society. From a structural point of view, Korean immigrant merchants constituted a middleman minority group that played the dual role of “oppressed and oppressor” in the suburban ghetto. Although these merchants made efforts to maintain civil relations with their African American customers, they were often treated with hostile attitudes largely because of the exploitative relationship that existed between the two groups. However, I maintain that Korean American journalists and scholars have not only misunderstood the identity of the middleman minority as an innocent buffer but have also erroneously estimated that race relations with African Americans in Los Angeles were better than those in other areas of the United States.


Author(s):  
Christina H. Moon

Fast fashion is often a story about the most powerful global retail giants such as Zara and H&M. The rise and dominance of fast fashion within the United States, however, areintimately tied to the work of Korean immigrant communities within downtown Los Angeles. In the last decade alone, Koreans have refashioned the city of Los Angeles into the central hub of fast fashion in the Americas, designing and distributing clothing from Asia to the largest fast-fashion retailers throughout the Americas. This chapter explores the work of these fast-fashion families who blur the lines between design and copy, author and imitator, exploiter and exploited. How do their modes of work profoundly transform the material object of clothing? How do they complicate the assumed directions and global flows of design and production in the global fashion industry? And finally, what role does risk and failure play—in a landscape of creativity, aspiration, and imagining—to make fast fashion even a possibility?


Author(s):  
Uzma Quraishi

Chapter 2 details the arrival of South Asian students and immigrants in Houston during the 1960s. Along with college towns and major cities across the United States, Houston was an ideal host city for would-be immigrants. South Asians constructed ethnic, national, class, and racial identities through the university and the city. The University of Houston became the cultural hub and a key site for identity formation.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document