Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson
ordinary residential and commercial sites into creative centers of mutuality, solidarity, and collectivity. Precisely because they experienced race as place, changing the racial realities of their society required them to challenge its spatial order as well.
Spatial entitlement encompasses sonic spaces as well. Sound travels even when people cannot. Individuals in separate spaces can savor the same sounds. The sonic realm is not merely a matter of frequency and vibrations in that it also entails the construction of social “soundscapes.”3 Scholars of the blues, salsa, and banda music have long argued that among displaced and dispossessed populations, music serves as a home from which listeners can never be evicted.4 Blacks and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles were not only visible to one another in the physical spaces they shared but also audible to one another in sonic spaces that they inhabited separately as well as together. Popular music performed publicly but also consumed privately through radio and recordings produced a shared sonic space that promoted mutual identifications and prefigured subsequent political affiliations. As Michael Bull and Les Back remind us, “sound makes us rethink our relation to power.”5
For Blacks and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s, the physical and sonic spaces of the city were places of containment and confinement. They were not only isolated from white residential and commercial spaces but also constantly pitted against each other in desperate competition for scarce resources. Yet the tactics of spatial entitlement enabled them to perceive similarities as well as differences, to build political affiliations and alliances grounded in intercultural communication and coalescence in places shaped by struggles for spatial entitlement. I use the spatial metaphor of “constellations of struggle” to trace these activities. Stars in constellations are related to one another because taken together they reveal patterns, but they also have independent existences. The spatial and racial politics of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s created constellations of struggle that tell us a great deal about how alliances and affiliations coalesce into coalitions, even though participants did not necessarily think of themselves as creators of a common cause.
Two historically important yet less-studied activists, Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno, deployed spatial entitlement as a mechanism for fighting racial subordination and spatial exclusion in this era. They laid claim to physical and symbolic spaces in forging networks of political and cultural resistance among Blacks and Mexican Americans. Charlotta Bass’s attempt to move across space to participate in an international congress of women meeting in China and Luisa Moreno’s efforts to stay in the United States by resisting deportation provide a generative point of entry into the politics of space and sound.
Early in 1949, Charlotta Bass was ecstatic. As editor of the most enduring Black newspaper in Los Angeles, she was invited to attend the Women’s Asiatic Conference in Peking. “It never dawned on me,” she wrote, “that I would ever have the opportunity even to consider a visit to that part of the world.”6 The invitation reflected the international attention she had garnered after nearly three decades of social justice work among the multiracial members of the working class in Los Angeles. From the time she began editing the California Eagle (often called just “the Eagle”) in 1912, Bass’s writings and activism transformed the political import of Black Los Angeles to both local communities of color and international organizations. Well known for her public campaigns against racially restrictive covenants in housing and persistent efforts on behalf of Black community development and empowerment, Bass also championed the rights and dignity of Mexican Americans. She served as a member of the sponsoring commission for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, which was organized on behalf of a group of young Mexican Americans falsely accused of murder, and she campaigned forcefully against the racial brutalities exacted upon Mexican American zoot suiters during the summer of 1943. Congress of Industrial Organizations activist Alice McGrath recalled that even before the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión took up the cause, the California Eagle was “one of the first papers to recognize and publicize the racist and discriminatory nature of that case.”7
When Bass arrived at the airport for her trip to China, she was detained. In an organized effort, officials delayed the processing of her paperwork for so long that she missed her flight.
“After a night’s wrestle with sleep, I awoke the next morning . . . with a renewed determination to make the California Eagle a bigger and better newspaper . . . and as I settled down to the production of the next issue . . . I whispered to it, ‘I can’t go to China, but you can. And you will tell the people how disappointed I was.’”8
Bass’s resolve to enable her newspaper to travel where she could not—to use discursive space as a response to the constraints placed on her movement inside physical space—constituted an exercise in spatial entitlement. Her decision to disperse the disappointing news of repression took its place in a long tradition among aggrieved community members who have used the press to expose injustice. For years she had been articulating the connection between domestic racism and international imperialism and also among the seemingly particular grievances of besieged communities. Six years earlier, at the time of the violence of the Zoot Suit Riots, Bass, like many of her contemporaries, had come to believe that those opposed to equality in America “shared ideals, goals, and tactics with enemies abroad.”9 To miss an opportunity to share these insights with a pan-Asian audience was a loss that held singular significance for Bass. She had something to say about interethnic identification and affiliation, and it was an expression honed by sustained, radical engagement with working-class struggle. Halted by city officials, Bass was forced to articulate from a liminal space between the enduring mobility of her words (via the California Eagle) and the sudden imposition of immobility on her body (in her physical detention).
In another context, geographer David Harvey has argued that the politics of space lie in the contradiction between mobility and immobility. Following him, I argue that it is in this space between mobility and containment that many Black and Brown people in Los Angeles struggled to preserve their neighborhoods, to enjoy the freedom to congregate, and to create the mutual spaces of political and cultural expression that inspire collective success.10
At nearly the same moment, Luisa Moreno, one of the most visible Latina labor and civil rights activists in the United States from the 1930s to 1950, was facing deportation for her own interethnic activism that she had begun two decades previously. Moreno had organized Latino, Black, and Italian cigar rollers in Florida, cannery workers in California, migrant workers in the Rio Grande Valley, and pecanshellers in San Antonio. In her work from 1935 to 1947 in Los Angeles, she had encouraged cross-plant interethnic alliances and women’s leadership inside several area food-processing firms. Rather than emphasize the primacy of the individual, Moreno distinguished herself as an educator, agitator, and mobilizer by focusing on the relationship between individuals and their communities.11
In 1950, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was thirteen years old, and averaged five—often highly publicized—trials per year in California.12 Its focus on un-American and subversive activities was based on the assumption that the Communist Party had infiltrated social programs such as those started by the New Deal and also influenced the strategies and intentions of social justice workers and organizations. The HUAC perceived the particular accumulation and deployment of Moreno’s experience, coupled with her sustained commitment to collective action among Black, Brown, and working-class white women, as sufficient justification for her deportation that year. Moreno’s sentiment on the question of her eviction from the United States was that the HUAC could “talk about deporting me . . . but they can never deport the people that I’ve worked with and with whom things were accomplished for the benefit of hundreds of thousands of workers—things that can never be destroyed.”13 Like Bass, Moreno focused her activism on challenges deployed in what often appear to be the interests of singular racial groups, but both women kept a steady emphasis upon the common oppressions suffered by Mexican-American, Black, and Jewish communities in Los Angeles and later San Diego. This sensitivity to interethnic unity stemmed from more than abstract ideals: it emerged from the spaces that members of these groups shared at work places, in neighborhoods, on public transit vehicles, and in their leisure time pursuits in recreational, artistic, and cultural venues.