Early in the twentieth century, Los Angeles’s regional interurban electric railway, the Pacific Electric (PE), developed serious operational problems because the PE had been assembled from separate railroads that hadn’t been designed to fit together, and because Los Angeles’s explosive population growth overtaxed its facilities. The PE wanted to speed its trains and unify its system with a crosstown subway, but in 1923 the Los Angeles City 1 Council blocked the PE’s plan and instead commissioned engineers and professional transit planners to devise comprehensive regional transit plans to be operated for the public good, not for private profit. These plans all focused on bringing lots of people downtown quickly, something irrelevant in a decentralizing city. Part I concludes with two seemingly propitious developments: the PE’s opening of its own mile-long but isolated Hollywood Subway, a compromise design but still impressive; and the unveiling of the most detailed and elaborate of the transit plans, as required by the new city charter. Part II, in the next issue, will describe why that comprehensive plan failed, then trace how political, economic, and demographic changes in the 1920s and 30s affected transit planning and why a plan to locate rail rapid transit in freeway medians failed. Part II will end with an examination of the PE’s financial condition as a refutation of a common explanation of the PE’s long decline.

This article proposes that a history-of-knowledge approach offers innovative ways to study the use of domestic infrastructure in the household. More specifically, the article investigates the role of knowledge about water fixtures, such as meters, taps, and toilets, in the history of progressive-era Los Angeles. Building on the rich literature about how Los Angeles obtained its water, this article shifts the focus to the relationship that everyday consumers had with their water and how technology mediated this relationship. While the article analyzes three major fields of knowledge about the use of infrastructure (knowledge about personal and public hygiene, about the maintenance and repair of fittings, and about responsible levels of water consumption), it foregrounds users’ agency in construing bodies of knowledge. Taken together, this article argues, first, that practical knowledge about water as a modern convenience was mutually developed by the utility’s publicity department, meter men, municipal health authorities, elected officials, newspaper editors, middle-class reformers, property owners, working-class immigrants, and female householders. Second, the article emphasizes the dynamics, contingency, and locality of this knowledge, which was linked to the stunning growth of Los Angeles between 1880 and 1930.

This article explores the 1960s welfare rights movement in Los Angeles as one example of social justice activism based on Black-Brown coalition building and solidarity across various social movements. Within the larger welfare rights movement, a fundamentally feminist cause, Escalante advocated for the specific cultural, linguistic, and legal needs of the Spanish-speaking community. Participating in Black-Brown solidarity for multiple social justice causes in Los Angeles and nationally, Alicia Escalante faced arrests and police violence, modeling and inspiring her children and others, then and now, to militant dignity work.

Advocating the perspective of emotive history, this article looks at two examples of emotive archiving—the assembly of artifacts, photographs, oral interviews, and documents that record the feelings of Mexican immigrants as an inspiration for family members. The commitment and creativity of the archivist (usually a woman) is a feminist act of empowerment and an expression of love and honor to the subject of the archive, while the innermost feelings of the memorialized individual, often repressed from fear of apprehension and deportment, are expressed openly, forming a model for younger family members.

The impact of incarceration on the migrants in the federal immigration facility in El Centro, California, which operated from 1945 to 2014, is obscured by limited-access government records that emphasize the efficiency of the non-punitive immigration holding center. Direct observation revealed a restrictive environment, an authoritarian regime, and dehumanizing protocols. These discrepancies led to a search for information on the emotional impact of the facility on migrants incarcerated there. This required the collection of data from alternative sources, including interviews, private collections, photographs, activists’ correspondence, journalists’ investigations, and Mexican officials’ inquiries—an emotive archive.

The issue of transborder mobility posed a dilemma for U.S. labor organizations and for border communities that embraced workers, customers, and family connections from Mexico. Labor leaders including Ernesto Galarza of the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) and César Chávez of the United Farm Workers (UFW) had to find ways of protecting U.S. citizen workers and yet humanely addressing the plight of resident aliens, permitted commuters, and undocumented workers from Mexico. Their strategies involved knowledge production and had to accommodate emotions. The article focuses on the Imperial-Mexicali borderlands, 1950s–1970s.

Anita de la Guerra of Santa Barbara married Boston merchant Alfred Robinson in 1836. Taken to the East Coast the following year, she diligently pursued her education and she acculturated while retaining her own priorities, including a patriotic position on Mexican California opposed to her husband’s espousal of “American colonization.” She also facilitated East Coast educations for her children and several nephews that would enhance their opportunities in the new U.S. state of California. In 1852 she was finally able to reunite with her family and fit back into Californio society. The author bases this Californiana’s character and cultural agility on a cache of letters written by Anita de la Guerra, complemented by those written by Robinson and the de la Guerra family.

The Lovell Health House (1927–1929) by Richard Neutra for Dr. Phillip Lovell and his wife, Leah Lovell, was a turning point in modern architecture. The house not only carried out Phillip Lovell’s principles of healthy living, it also incorporated a school conducted along the progressive educational theories embraced by Leah Lovell. This article identifies the educational features in Neutra’s plan. Interviews with one of the last remaining students of the school shed light on the students and faculty and how the design served the school’s curriculum. Neutra’s innovative design accommodating the progressive educational program at the Lovell Health House belongs in any discussion of the later school designs for which he won lasting acclaim.