Latinos and the Liberal City
Politics and Protest in San Francisco
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4155927 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Llana Barber (State University of New York at Old Westbury, Old Westbury, New York, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 107 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 502-503 |
| Publication date | 2020-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaaa262 |
| OpenAlex | W3087807108 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Latinos and the Liberal City is a richly textured history of Latino labor and community organizing in San Francisco from the 1930s through the 1970s. On the cutting edge of the rapidly expanding field of Latino urban history, Eduardo Contreras reveals decades of activism and protest that the historiography barely suggests. By placing Latinos at the center of the city's political history, Contreras allows us to see how generations of Latinos understood and attempted to shape the economic, social, and political systems around them. Latino activists launched a wide array of campaigns, including unionization efforts, electoral politics, gay and lesbian rights organizing, civil rights activism, and movements for community control over urban renewal and War on Poverty programs. Contreras vividly illustrates his subjects’ “nuanced and flexible meditations on rights, morality, and coalition building,” revealing Latino politics as “more intricate and less predictable than we currently appreciate” (p. 3). The book argues that Latino politics in San Francisco in those five decades consistently engaged with the ideologies of liberalism and latinidad, which Contreras usefully defines as “an ideology emphasizing unity, commonality, and affinity among Latinos” (p. 8). The Latino population in San Francisco was quite diverse, including migrants and their descendants from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Chile. In the 1920s, the Spanish-language press began to emphasize the commonalities among these groups, focusing on cultural connections and shared conditions and political interests in San Francisco. By midcentury, community leaders and activists effectively drew on this ideology to mobilize Latinos as a political constituency. Latinos in the Liberal City offers a welcome, nuanced history of latinidad that does not dismiss it as a top-down, government- or elite-imposed ideology, irrelevant to people's lived experiences. Nor does Contreras limit his analysis of Latino diversity to varying national origins; rather, he is closely attuned to the role of class in shaping people's perspectives and politics. The depiction of Latino militancy during the city's general and maritime strikes in 1934 is a highlight of the book
Historiography · Ideology · Immigration · Liberalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,6 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2024 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |