Under Spring: Voices+Art+Los Angeles

Under Spring: Voices+Art+Los Angeles
by Jeremy Rosenberg


The winner of the first CHS Book Award reimagines what a history book can be, and it tells a story all California needs to hear in order to understand itself. Beneath Los Angeles’s North Spring Street bridge, a deteriorated concrete landscape was used for years as a homeless encampment and a buffer zone between gang territories. Between 2006 and 2013, artist Lauren Bon and her Metabolic Studio team transformed the underpass into a vibrantly creative space that served as a public square, ceremonial ground, art gallery, community garden, and musical instrument. Under Spring explores the unlikely history of this underpass, revealing the past of Los Angeles itself.

 Sixty-six people from all walks of life—artists, scholars, laborers, graffiti artists, urban planners, activists, gang members—chronicle the underpass’s many metamorphoses, and in doing so construct an energized account of change and development in LA. We come to understand how agriculture and transportation have shaped the city’s growth; how abandoned places serve as refuges for people excluded from society; and how civic pride can arise from a city’s blighted core. Under Spring offers a new look at the story of Los Angeles and a new way of telling the story.

Becoming Mexican American

Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945

by George J. Sanchez
Twentieth-century Los Angeles has been the locus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between variant cultures in American history. Yet this study is among the first to examine the relationship between ethnicity and identity among the largest immigrant group to that city. By focusing on Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles from 1900 to 1945, George J. Sánchez explores the process by which temporary sojourners altered their orientation to that of permanent residents, thereby laying the foundation for a new Mexican-American culture. Analyzing not only formal programs aimed at these newcomers by the United States and Mexico, but also the world created by these immigrants through family networks, religious practice, musical entertainment, and work and consumption patterns, Sánchez uncovers the creative ways Mexicans adapted their culture to life in the United States. When a formal repatriation campaign pushed thousands to return to Mexico, those remaining in Los Angeles launched new campaigns to gain civil rights as ethnic Americans through labor unions and New Deal politics. The immigrant generation, therefore, laid the groundwork for the emerging Mexican-American identity of their children.

Filipinos in Los Angeles

Images of America: Filipinos in Los Angeles

by Mae Respicio Koerner

The year 2006 marked the centennial of Filipino migration to the United States, when 15 migrant workers called sakadas arrived in Hawaii to work on the islands’ sugar plantations. Today the largest concentration of Filipinos outside of the Philippines exists in Southern California. In the 1920s, the first substantial wave of newcomers settled in downtown Los Angeles, eventually migrating to areas just northwest of downtown, a district now designated by the city as Historic Filipinotown. The majority of early Filipino settlers were males who found employment in service-oriented industries, including work as janitors, dishwashers, and houseboys. Filipino Americans now contribute to all aspects of life and culture and live in virtually every Los Angeles neighborhood and suburb, including Eagle Rock, Cerritos, Glendale, Carson, and West Covina.