Latino Metropolis

Los Angeles has often been considered a postmodern city due to its ethnic, racial, and national mixtures and its leadership in the globalized market on the Pacific Rim. At the same time, the Blade Runner (1982) image of Los Angeles as a chaotic mixture of voices and cultures seems to defy understanding. These popular images reflect a paradoxical reality that Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres seek to demonstrate in analyzing the Lati-noization of Los Angeles. Latinos are now the largest “minority” in Los Angeles and make up the majority of the city's school-age population. Historically invisible, Latinos remain marginalized. Their segregated living space within the city is a place of increased struggle over political, cultural, and economic control. A major theme in this book is to question the idea of “race” as a mode of explaining social and economic change. The authors do not reject the phenomenon of racism but argue that the “racialization” of social and economic problems has served to confuse and hide the realities of marginalization and change

Ethnic group · Political science · Politics · Population · Postmodernism · Race (biology · Racialization · Racism · Sociology · Theme (computing · Anthropology · Demography · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law