2025/05/01 by Shelton Stromquist · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Asian American and Pacific Histories #Latin American and Latino Studies #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11609813
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
This richly textured and densely woven study of Los Angeles as a hub of regional and transnational radicalism in the early twentieth century is both a challenging and rewarding read. The author has deep familiarity with the multiple strands of LA’s multiethnic working-class communities, and he masterfully unravels the conflicting threads of its radical culture, particularly its anarchist, syndicalist, and socialist elements, which seem in a constant state of blending, separating, and reintegrating in the city’s organizational fabric. The richness of this detail gives the study a depth to which few other city-centered accounts can compare. He also tells a good story, whether of the Baja raids, the Wheatland massacre, or the Oxnard farmworkers’ organizing campaign.The work opens with a useful discussion of anarchist theory and practice and posits the tradition of “affinity” as an anti-statist model of organizational history. In LA these tendencies created what the author terms “a local internationalism rooted in place” (5). In the chapters that follow he provides a useful overview of LA’s economic transformation as a transnational corporate space, transportation hub, and service center for an expanding agricultural hinterland that drew a racially and ethnically diverse working class—Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, and African American. He has an astute sense of how “radical space” was constituted and the vibrant print culture that infused it. His accounting of the radical press as an agent of community formation—its financing, distribution, and fragile status—is particularly well done and informs the entire work. The “institutional left,” both the trade union movement and the well-established Socialist Party, occupies space in the larger narrative, but his interests lie primarily with the intersecting roles of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) as primary organizational players. He is attuned to the ways that race and “racial positioning” could at times corrode an otherwise impressive class solidarity. The Baja raids provide one window into the transborder character of the movement and role of Mexican revolutionaries, but they also highlight the internationalism of anarchists and the IWW that helped turn the raids “from a minor front in the Mexican Revolution into a moment of global significance for anarchists” (134). While the chapter on the “contours of repression” during World War I is a familiar story, it took a particularly dramatic form in LA.Several broad features give this study its most unique contributions—amid the welter of organizational detail and a changing cast of activist characters. First, Struthers sees Los Angeles as the hub of regional organizing, fed by migratory streams of radicalized itinerant workers and anarchist/syndicalist activists whose impact radiated both inward and outward. While two organizations—the IWW and the PLM—provide persistent threads in the narrative, a wealth of characters, some known (like Enrique and Ricardo Magon or Frank Little) and others less familiar (Alfred Sanfleben, William C. Owen, or Margarita Ortega) bring the stories to life. Second, the book provides detailed microhistories of the anarchist movement in its varied strands and the IWW in a local and regional context. Third, the importance of transborder political activity is crucial to the ongoing vitality of radicalism in the region, and the Mexican Revolution takes on a fresh international dimension in this account, with Los Angeles providing an essential organizing base. Fourth, however limiting racial and ethnic differences may at times have been, the movement impressively showed a capacity to transcend those differences. As a local correspondent to the Industrial Worker asked in 1910, “Do you belong to the nation that lives by working or to the nation that lives by owning? . . . ‘Workingmen of all countries unite.’ That means unite in your own nation. The Chinaman, Jap, Mexican, Italian, Hungarian or Negro workers . . . belongs to my nation” (105). Fifth, the book documents, at times in overwhelming detail, the proliferating networks of radicals whose shifting and multiple loyalties convey the sense of a dense but evolving and place-based radical culture. Finally, wartime repression exacted a heavy price on LA’s radical movement, but in a changing socioeconomic context, the movement reinvented itself through shifts in ethnic composition fueled in part by immigration restriction and the emergence of new political dynamism in the Communist Party organizing of the 1920s and ’30s. An intellectual culture of anarchism remained vital but organizationally weaker than in its heyday.The World in a City is a model for reconstructing a place-based radical culture, while maintaining a clear-eyed sense of the wider regional and transborder dimensions of the movement. The breath of internationalism gave vitality to local organizing that fed off the ethnic diversity of its working class. Los Angeles in the early twentieth century may have been somewhat unique in these regards, but the comparable threads of this history are worthy of consideration elsewhere. Although the density of the culture and the painstaking detail with which the author reconstructs it may make, at times, for difficult reading, the results are worth the work. Additional evidence of the author’s assiduous research are the portraits of key players, many unknown to the general reader not versed in LA’s radical history, that illustrate the book. The book’s “conclusion” is actually an epilogue that carries the story forward into the 1920s and ’30s and beyond. A conclusion that pulled together the book’s major themes and findings would have been a valuable addition to this otherwise well-conceived and cogently written work.