Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson
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inherently competitive, and sometimes mutually violent. At times this has been the only audible discourse in discussions about the futures of these communities, and it has been more lie than truth. While in the record of Black–Brown interactions there have been devastating examples of intergroup tension, there are far more examples of mutually meaningful Black–Brown antiracism struggles and radical creative affiliations.
Writing a cultural history of post-war Black–Brown struggles and cultural expressions in Los Angeles shares some of the same methods and aspirations as beat juggling, which involves using a turntable as an instrument. A new sound emerged from hip-hop turntablists in the 1990s that reflected the musical dexterity and competence that DJs must command for their craft. “Beat juggling” indicated unprecedented advances in digital technology, and helped create a soundscape appropriate for the needs of its listeners. Beat juggling isolates drum and snare hits, vocal phrases, or sound effects by the recording artist and “flips” or combines the sounds with a cross fader; turntablists take what is already contained in a record to create new rhythmic patterns. At times, DJs work together, using two or three turntables each. Together they form a sort of band, with each DJ responsible for a different sound. For example, one DJ will isolate the drums behind a particular song, another will manipulate a record to make a bass line, and yet another will be responsible for a horn riff. One sound alone, or the work of one DJ or sound in this form of beat juggling, means very little until it is joined with other sounds and results in a collective sonic production. When multiple DJs beat juggle in one performance, they must manage multiple turntables and cross faders to break down beats on records and then recreate them. The records they choose when creating these new rhythmic and melodic patterns are as diverse and complex as the styles developed to execute the movement necessary to perform these physical manipulations quickly and accurately. A turntablist has to know records, to have a mental archive not only of songs, but also of phrases, tempos, lyrics, and instrumentation. Turntables have pitch controls to alter the tempos and tones as well, so DJs must be masters of both mixing and memory.14 The musical productions that emerge from this practice can use eclectic combinations of jazz, soul, rock, hip hop, blues, and funk, resulting in a fusion not only of musical styles, but also of sonic patterns associated with different time periods and diverse social spaces. A listener might hear the sounds of Herbie Hancock, Mongo Santamaria, Cannonball Adderley, Isaac Hayes, Al Green, Public Enemy, and the Eagles all in one song. Beat juggling must anticipate audiences’ collective memories and produce an appealing textual combination of those memories. The practice encodes and communicates centuries of musical memory, minimizes the distance between diverse geographical spaces, collapses the time elapsed between different albums and songs, and interpolates a wide range of life experiences into a new beat. In this book, instead of turntables, records, and cross faders, I use the history of Black and Brown people in Los Angeles, spatial studies, music studies, and a desire to see the freedom dreams of interracial struggles met with equity and social justice.
The Black and Brown expressive cultures I examine have served as concrete social sites where new forms of social relations are envisioned, constructed, and enacted. These overlapping cultural forms emerged not just as practices containing the memory and history of specific ethnic groups, but also as artistic creations representing the mutual influence and locally shared experience of LA’s Black and Chicano communities. In this context, music serves as a rich discursive terrain for examining the emerging consciousness that helped shape the personal identities and political struggles of these communities.
My inquiry into Black and Brown Conflict and coalition in Los Angeles builds on the work in George Sánchez’s Becoming Mexican American,15 Laura Pulido’s Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left,16 Daniel Widener’s Black Arts West,17 Luis Alvarez’s The Power of the Zoot,18 and Anthony Macías’s Mexican American Mojo.19 As a book on Los Angeles that examines multiracial resistance and cultural production, my work is in step with these exemplary studies. But I also try to push the theoretical framework of interracial politics further by offering new perspectives about space and representation that utilize historical and cultural examples with enormous relevance to the present.
My history of interethnic affiliations and coalitions between African Americans and Chicanos in Los Angeles blends evidence about expressive culture with the story of social movements. I argue that while the institutional records of interethnic alliances in politics in Los Angeles are sparse, the rich repository of evidence contained in the memories of cultural workers and activists offers important insights into the infrapolitics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle within these two communities of color. Recognizing the value of antiracist struggles requires a belief in the significance of cultural politics, both as a tool of scholarly inquiry and as a means of community mobilization. This book focuses on cultural histories and memories because I believe that they are an invaluable terrain, where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested. By arguing for a new framework with which to view the history of excluded populations in urban areas, I emphasize the significance of studies that interpolate race, memory, class, gender, and popular culture to understand social change. Because Blacks and Chicanos in Los Angeles were engaged in struggles with and in opposition to other minority groups, the history I offer challenges traditional perspectives on the history of Los Angeles, as well those about its future.
This story draws from different kinds of archives—those found in the valuable work of Vicki Ruiz, Robin Kelley, and Robert Lee—and also in the practices that Robert Farris Thompson describes as the “alternative academies” of aggrieved people—their music, dance, and art. While this book begins in 1940, it is important to explicate a partial history of Black–Brown affiliation and struggle, both to establish the “past” that I spoke of as so vital to the future, but also to delineate a mutual and enduring pattern of resistance among these groups.
Though there are many cities with important traditions of Afro-Chicano interaction, the development of Los Angeles is an Afro-Mexican story. Afro-Mestizos comprised the majority of those recruited to establish a civilian settlement between the mission in San Gabriel and the Presidio of Santa Barbara by the governor of Alta California in the 1780s. The majority of settlers were recruited from Sinaloa (one third of whose residents were of African ancestry) and Rosario (two thirds of whose residents were listed in the census as mulattoes). Lonnie Bunch’s history of Afro-Mestizo settlement of Southern California reveals the racial composition of these first Angelenos: eight mulattoes, two mestizos, two Blacks, and one Mexicano.20
For almost fifty years Afro-mestizos were an important component of city and state politics. Pío Pico, an Afro-Mexicano from Rosario, was the last Mexican national to govern California. His brother Andrés Pico represented California at the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga (which ended the Mexican War in California) and twice served as a state senator. Until the mid-nineteenth century, many Afro-Mexicanos received land grants, which established them as a landed elite: among them they controlled vast amounts of land in the San Fernando Valley, Topanga Canyon, Eastern San Gabriel Valley, and Simi Valley; by 1820, Maria Rita Valdez was granted Rancho Rodeo de Las Aguas, which is now Beverly Hills.21 Beyond California, Afro-Mexicanos founded Albuquerque, San Antonio, Nacogdoches, Laredo, and the Presidio de La Bahia.22
The early contributions of Afro-Mexicanos in California are singularly extraordinary, but also represent an enduring legacy of a particular embodied radicalism. The African-, Native-, and Mexican-American revolutionary anarchist and labor activist Lucy Parsons gained fame among workers during the Chicago Haymarket strike of 1886 and fought against poverty, racism, capitalism, and the state her entire life. Vicente Guerrero, born to an impoverished Black indigenous family in Mexico, taught himself to read and write as he trained troops in the Sierra Madre Mountains. He contributed to the writing of Mexico’s constitution, freed its slaves, and endorsed the education and elevation of its poor and people of color, serving as Mexico’s first president of African and Native American descent.
Africans, African Americans, Mexicans, and Indians have co-created communities with radical legacies for centuries.23 As early as the mid-1500s, marronage communities near Veracruz such as San Lorenzo de los Negros, San Lorenzo Cerralvo, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Morenos de Amapa, and Yanga functioned as nuclei of the African legacy in Mexico, but