This essay examines how maps created by Latina/o youth created “ephemeral forums,” improvised ad hoc spaces that served as music venues in 1990s South Los Angeles. The maps included on “Rock en Español ” event flyers demonstrate how Latinx youth envisioned Los Angeles and proclaimed their sense of place in the metropolis at a moment of social and demographic transformation. These maps help us understand how they and other Californians of color create and claim belonging,both past and present.

The African American actor, writer, and director Spencer Williams, Jr. (1895–1969) has been the subject of a range of academic studies in recent years. Scholars have explored his pioneering work in early black film and his problematic role as “Andy Hogg Brown” in the television version of the Amos 'n' Andy radio program as a means of interpreting representations of black life within the confines of the Hollywood culture industry. This new scholarship, however, has reflected a limited and often inaccurate understanding of Williams' remarkable career. As will be discussed in this article, major events in Williams' life that have been unknown until now strongly influenced his filmmaking and his strategies to make the movie and television industries more racially inclusive. Most significantly, Williams was at different times a soldier in a segregated army unit, a convicted felon, and a committed artist and activist in Hollywood. These experiences helped to shape the themes and subject matter of his films, which ranged from religious dramas and singing cowboy westerns to backstage musicals and the first African American horror movie ever made.

Between 1900 and 1930, Los Angeles attracted thousands of white and black migrants from the Midwest and the South. Many had attachments to Protestant churches. But they also arrived with commitments to Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and social reform causes. This paper argues that these religionists in Los Angeles covered a broad spectrum of faiths, including Free Thought, innovative versions of Protestantism, and Freemasonry, and that traditional accounts of religion in the city have ignored these aspects of religious life and civic engagement. As World War I ushered in conservatism in every aspect of public life, the Los Angeles Times , the City Council, and the Protestant churches combined in an effort to squash these challenges to orthodoxy. In profiling two prominent Spiritualists, African American George W. Shields and white midwesterner Cynthia Lisetta Vose, this article illustrates the wide ranging civil and religious engagement of two committed Spiritualists. By the end of the 1920s, the fragmentation of Los Angeles neighborhoods and the growing racism of the city had nearly destroyed what had been a vigorous religion and a thriving commitment to progressive reform. Segregated white women's clubs and Freemasonry organizations turned the worship of California into a replacement for older forms of religious practice and civic engagement.

In 1915, the California Commission of Immigration and Housing (CCIH) unveiled a bold new experiment: the Home Teacher Program. In Los Angeles, this program sent volunteers into Mexican communities to teach immigrant women new, more “American” ways of homemaking and childrearing. The lesson plans, sample dialogues, teacher testimonies, and photographs featured in CCIH publications provide a fascinating window on to the tense interactions between home teachers and immigrant women. Scholars have long explored different ways of mining institutional records and other forms of writing by Americanization advocates for insights into the experiences of those who participated in the programs. This essay contributes to the discussion of California's Americanization curricula in two ways: First, I provide a close reading of CCIH texts in order to uncover and analyze three layers of recorded experience: (1) teacher biases confronted by immigrant women; (2) immigrant women's difficult material realities; and (3) immigrant women's complex responses to Americanization. Second, I provide further evidence for the view that Mexican immigrant women responded to Americanization efforts in a variety of ways, from outright resistance to milder forms of pushback and, at times, conditional acceptance of the “American” customs presented to them. In light of the evidence, I argue that Mexican immigrant women were “doing the impossible” by laying claim to a piece of California through the complex relationship they negotiated with the home teachers. Although Americanization programs intended to flatten Mexican women's ethnic affiliations, the immigrant women found subtle ways to assert their agency, survive hardship and prejudice, and forge a new Mexican American ethnic community in the process.

This article examines the support that California's church groups offered to Japanese Americans during their resettlement after internment from 1945 to 1947, focusing on the hostels these groups opened to house, feed, provide storage, and assist with employment and long-term housing for their Japanese residents. It offers a narrative of California's church hostels, which have been overshadowed in the scholarship by those in the Midwest and East, which operated for nearly two years before the West Coast was reopened to internees. These select church groups were among the lone supporters of Japanese Americans in California and elsewhere in the country, and demonstrated Christian charity by lending a measure of humanity to an otherwise inhumane situation. At the same time, they voiced strong support for the government that was prosecuting the internment of the very people they claimed to support. Conflating Christian and democratic language, church leaders voiced support simultaneously for a popular war and for the most unpopular ethnic group in the country. During resettlement they adopted the War Relocation Authority's program of assimilation to insulate themselves from criticism as they provided aid to “the enemy.” This paradox of church support is the central focus of this article.

Between 1914 and 1941, Los Angeles businessmen opened supermarkets across the city, beginning America's era of mass-food retailing. The very first in the world, Los Angeles supermarkets pioneered business practices and architectural standards that would, over the following decades, become industry standards. This includes self-service shopping, large low-slung buildings cooled by massive air conditioners, and a reliance on colorful displays of fresh fruits and vegetables. More significantly, Los Angeles supermarkets fundamentally reconfigured the ways Americans used urban space, first in Southern California and then across the rest of the United States.