Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Book Review|
January 01 1999
Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)
Gustavo Leclerc, Raul Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.).
Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en L A
. (Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi
: Sage Publ ications
, 1999
). Vii, 214 pp., 29.95 paperback.
Catherine S. Ramirez
Catherine S. Ramirez
University of New Mexico
Search for other works by this author on:
Ethnic Studies Review (1999) 22 (1): 126–128.
Citation
Catherine S. Ramirez; Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.). Ethnic Studies Review 1 January 1999; 22 (1): 126–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/esr.1999.22.1.126
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.