The 1970s was a time of growing government repression, incarceration, and subsequent radical activism across the United States and Mexico. This is reflected in the migration, incarceration, and organizing efforts of José Jacques Medina, a Mexican activist who fled to the United States to escape political persecution after his involvement in the 1968 student movement in Mexico City. After the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) apprehended and incarcerated Medina inside an immigration detention facility in El Centro, California, activists, inspired by radical movements such as the Black Panther Party and the Third World Left more broadly, organized to gain Medina political asylum and avoid deportation. This story of radical transborder organizing highlights the connections between the carceral state and migration, prison movements and migrant rights. It also exposes the increasing power of the detention and deportation regime in the United States as the INS collaborated with federal agencies such as the FBI to repress political dissent and control migration.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Robert P. Shuler, head of Trinity Methodist Church, rose to fame in Los Angeles as a tireless evangelical muckraker. Shuler, via Bob Shuler’s Magazine and his popular radio station KGEF, charged that many powerful Angelenos were involved in various vice pursuits—drinking, drug use, even prostitution—and that the city’s image as a moral, middle-class metropolis was just a facade. Using Shuler’s writings, Los Angeles City Council files, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce minutes, and local newspapers, I argue that Shuler headed an alternative grassroots power structure in Los Angeles, founded during Prohibition. In those years, Shuler’s efforts found a receptive audience among the many midwestern migrants who had arrived in Los Angeles during previous decades. The city had once rigorously enforced alcohol restrictions, but in the 1920s, police officers and political leaders often protected illegal leisure activities. City leaders eventually retaliated against the preacher, and his power precipitously declined after the end of Prohibition, but for a time Shuler held a unique power to shape local public discourse. This essay reveals one of the battles over Los Angeles’s public image that shaped the city’s prewar rise.

This article considers the histories of two countercultural, “back-to-the-land” communes located in Northern California: Siskiyou County’s Black Bear Ranch and Sonoma County’s Morning Star Ranch. Both communes were highly influenced by the concept of “open land,” a quintessentially 1960s vision of countercultural colonies that rejected private property, welcomed all newcomers—particularly individuals who were alienated by urban modernity—and allowed each to live as they chose, free of rent, compulsory structure, or governance. I examine the ways in which these communes related to and were shaped by their rural neighbors, as well as state authorities overseeing this region, revealing how the influences of each determined success or failure. Positive relations with neighbors enhanced commune viability, although maintaining such relationships often required that communards compromise their original founding principles, including their commitment to open-land ideals. At the same time, the presence of such enclaves in their midst prompted many rural residents to rethink received notions regarding communes and communards. The exchanges that followed force us to recontextualize the era’s back-to-the-land movement within broader American traditions of frontier settlement and reinvention.

The approximate location of the first railroad to reach California from the east had its origins in the congressional debate over slavery prior to the Civil War. The precise location of track took years to define. By comparing two sets of historical maps in the California State Archives, this article examines how the route of the Central Pacific Railroad evolved from a plausible engineering concept to the busy track it is today. This occurred at the hands of Congress, a pharmacist, an engineer, and the engineer’s assistant, in response to national politics, local business concerns, balance sheets, and the limits of railway construction technology in the 1860s.

Organizations within the Black Power movement strategically deployed interracial alliances and community organizing across the country during the late 1960s, from Los Angeles to Newark, Chicago, and New York. This methodology is especially striking in the Black Student Unions (BSUs) founded in San Francisco and Seattle in 1966 and 1967, respectively. Indeed, this line of activism that originated with San Francisco’s BSU extended directly to Seattle. Careful study of the interracial alliances and community organization among these BSUs and other Black Power groups in this era challenge the dominant narrative of the movement, which characterizes Black Power as myopic, destructive, and a departure from the prosocial protests of the 1960s.

In the late 1960s, Mexican American and Chicana/o students and faculty began to create new cultural and academic spaces at the University of Southern California (USC). As outspoken advocates, they promoted a collective social identity as they questioned USC’s commitment to fulfilling the moral and humanistic responsibilities of its educational mission. These students and faculty members took part in the formation of ethnic studies and Chicana/o studies on their campus and in higher education generally. Their activist contributions, however, have been ignored by USC and by most of the scholarly community. Yet, through their work and use of parrhesia (saying what one means with frank speech), the core Chicana/o movement concepts of Aztlán (the conception of a sacred homeland, borrowed from the Aztec cosmovision archetype of origins) and Chicanismo (a collective Chicana/o cultural nationalism) have been woven into the mythology of USC, creating a Chicana/o legacy of deep education and learning.