The Rebel Archive

The documents below highlight the thoughts, analyses, and actions of rebels now battling elimination and incarceration in Los Angeles. These documents do not reflect every voice or organization at work in the city. Not by a long shot. But they do make one thing very clear: rebellion is far from over in the City of Inmates....

Not Imprisonment in a Legal Sense

The third chapter is a western tale of national and global import. That tale, which sutures the split between the history of incarceration within the United States and the history of deportation from the United States, swirls around the passage of the 1892 Geary Act, a federal law that required all Chinese laborers in the United States to prove their legal residence and register with the federal government or be subject to up to one year of imprisonment at hard labor and, then, deportation. Chinese immigrants rebelled against the new law, refusing to be locked out, kicked out, or singled out for imprisonment. Launching the first mass civil disobedience campaign for immigrant rights in the history of the United States, Chinese immigrants forced the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a set of sweeping and enduring decisions regarding the future of U.S. immigration control. Buried in those decisions, which cut through Los Angeles during the summer of 1893, lay the invention of immigrant detention as a nonpunitive form of caging noncitizens within the United States. It was then an obscure and contested practice of indisputably racist origins. It is now one of the most dynamic sectors of the U.S. carceral landscape.

Introduction Conquest and Incarceration

Mass incarceration is mass elimination. That is the punch line of this book. I had trouble arriving at such an unsettling idea, but the collection of two centuries of evidence documenting the long rise of incarceration in Los Angeles left me no other interpretation. Incarceration operates as a means of purging, removing, caging, containing, erasing, disappearing, and eliminating targeted populations from land, life, and society in the United States....

Caged Birds

The fifth chapter continues to chart the rise of Mexican and Mexican American incarceration in the United States. Like Magon’s rebellion, it is a tale that unfolded in Los Angeles and across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Like the history of immigrant detention, it is a story about the collision of deportation and incarceration. But in particular, Chapter 5 examines how, during the 1920s and 1930s, the politics of controlling Mexican immigration to the United States directly prompted the criminalization of unauthorized border crossings and, in turn, triggered a steady rise in the number of Mexicans imprisoned within the United States. Home to the largest Mexican community within the United States, Los Angeles was ground zero for the politics and practices of Mexican incarceration in these years.

Justice for Samuel Faulkner

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.

Hobos in Heaven

Chapter 2 moves deeper into the U.S. era, chronicling how, between the 1880s and 1910s, authorities in Los Angeles redirected and expanded the city’s carceral capacity. They did so while targeting a particular population: poor white men, namely those popularly disparaged as “tramps” and “hobos” for migrating constantly, working little, and living and loving beyond the bounds of the nuclear family ideal. By 1910, when white men comprised nearly 100 percent of the local jail population, Los Angeles operated one of the largest jail systems in the country. And, as the city rapidly grew during these years, Los Angeles authorities operated a large convict labor program. In turn, white men sentenced to the chain gang cut roads, beautified parks, built schools, and so on. Chapter 2 details the rise of white male incarceration at the turn of the twentieth century and unveils the little-known history of how incarcerated white men built the infrastructure of the growing city. From Sunset Boulevard to the paths winding around Dodger Stadium, city residents still walk, ride, and run on the imprint of their labors.

An Eliminatory Option

The first chapter begins many millennia ago when the region now called the Los Angeles Basin was solely occupied by the Indigenous communities today collectively known as the Tongva-Gabrielino Tribe. This story is vital because there is no evidence that Tongva-Gabrielino communities ever tried or experienced human caging until the Spanish Crown dispatched a small group of colonists to establish El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles del Rio Porciuncula, the City of Angels, in 1781. One of the first structures these colonists built was a jail. In time, the colonists and their descendants filled the jail with indios. Throughout the next century of colonial occupation in the Tongva Basin—spanning the Spanish colonial period (1781–1821), the Mexican era (1821–48), and the early years of U.S. rule (1848–70s)—Indigenous peoples consistently comprised a substantive, if not majority, portion of the incarcerated population in Los Angeles. Chapter 1, therefore, firmly grounds the origins of incarceration in Los Angeles with the dynamics of conquest and colonialism in the Tongva Basin.

Conclusion Upriver in the Age of Mass Incarceration

During the late twentieth century, the United States embarked upon a historically unprecedented and globally unparalleled prison boom.1 The trigger for this boom, historians generally agree, was the 1965 Watts Rebellion, as well as the tumble of urban revolts and Indigenous insurgencies to follow, which roused federal, state, and local authorities throughout the United States to unleash a crushing political response: a “frontlash” of mass criminalization and hyperincarceration....

Scorpion’s Tale

The fourth chapter sheds new historical insight on a key but little-studied demographic of incarceration in the United States: Mexicanos, including immigrants from Mexico and U.S.-born persons of Mexican descent. It is a story that unfolded across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands but peaked in Los Angeles when, in the summer of 1907, two LA PD officers kicked in the door of a shanty on the outskirts of town and arrested three leaders of a rebel movement to oust Mexico’s president, Porfirio Diaz. These men, Ricardo Flores Magon, Librado Rivera, and Antonio Villarreal, were political exiles living in hiding in the United States. Their arrests, as with the arrests of thousands of their supporters across the borderlands, were part of President Diaz’s counterinsurgency campaign to cage (if not kill) Magon and crush his rebel movement, which demanded massive political reform and land redistribution in Mexico. Yet, while incarcerated in Los Angeles, Magon, Villarreal, and Rivera cultivated new ways to stoke rebellion in Mexico. Their ongoing assault on the Diaz regime pushed Mexico toward the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17). Therefore, Chapter 4 unearths how the incarceration of Mexicanos in the United States surged during the age of revolution in Mexico. It is an epic tale.