“Johnson's book illustrates how sonic affinities between black and brown provide a way of thinking about urban race relations that transcends the limited categories of conflict and cooperation.” —Daniel Widener, author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Black Los Angeles, 1942-1992

“From record stores to radio, from East L.A. punk to South Central hip hop, Johnson puts her ear to the post-WWII city and in a lucid, impassioned voice tells us what she hears: invaluable stories of struggle, conflict, and alliance that continue to shape the political stakes of the contemporary moment.” —Josh Kun, author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America

"Gaye Theresa Johnson had to ignore all the noise about black-brown conflict, seek out archives that were never supposed to be found, and develop new ways of seeing and hearing. In so doing, she has produced a truly magnificent account of the world African Americans and Chicano/as made together—a world of sound, style, and subversion that serves as both a window into social crises and a vision for social change."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

"Beautifully written, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity offers us a new and imaginative way of thinking about relations between Chicanas/os and African Americans. With her concept of "spatial entitlement," Johnson shows us the many ways, including those we cannot see, in which Black and Brown communities forged solidarities."—Laura Pulido, Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity, University of Southern California

Gaye Theresa Johnson is Associate Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity

Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles

By Gaye Theresa Johnson

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27528-7

Contents

Introduction: The Future Has a Past, ix,
1. Luisa Moreno, Charlotta Bass, and the Constellations of Interethnic Working-Class Radicalism, 1,
2. Spatial Entitlement: Race, Displacement, and Sonic Reclamation in Postwar Los Angeles, 48,
3. Cold Wars and Counter WAR(s): Coalitional Politics in an Age of Violence, 85,
4. "Teeth-Gritting Harmony": Punk, Hip-Hop, and Sonic Spatial Politics, 123,
5. Space, Sound, and Shared Struggles, 168,
Conclusion: In This Great Future ..., 193,
Acknowledgments, 203,
Selected Bibliography, 209,
Index, 223,

CHAPTER 1

Luisa Moreno, Charlotta Bass, and the Constellations of Interethnic Working-Class Radicalism

One person can't do anything; it's only with others that things are accomplished.

—Luisa Moreno

[W]hole communities became witness to the importance of what appeared to be singular causes.

—Robin D.G. Kelley

In Los Angeles during the Second World War and the immediate postwar period, Black and Mexican-American activists, artists, and youth cultures deployed the strategy of spatial entitlement as a way of advancing democratic and egalitarian ideals. Spatial entitlement entails occupying, inhabiting, and transforming physical places, but also imagining, envisioning, and enacting discursive spaces that "make room" for new affiliations and identifications. Locked in by residential segregation and territorial policing, locked out of the jobs, schools, and amenities in neighborhoods of opportunity, and sometimes even locked up in the region's jails and prisons, Blacks and Mexicans in Los Angeles turned oppressive racial segregation into creative and celebratory congregation. They transformed 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." 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. 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."

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." 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."

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.'"

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...