American Quarterly

In his 1949 book North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States, Carey McWilliams notes that the "settlers" who established Los Angeles in 1781, and whom city elites would later celebrate as "Spanish," were, in fact, two Indians, two mulattos, two Spaniards (each married to an Indian), a Negro, an Indian married to a mulatto, an Indian married to an Indian, a mestizo married to a mulatto, and "'a Chino' . . . probably of Chinese descent" (36).¹ Rather than assimilate (or whitewash) Los Angeles's multiracial founders within a Spanish fantasy heritage, as had become common by the time North from Mexico was published, McWilliams notes the racial categories used to classify them. Highlighting their marital status to evoke a doubly mestizo history of Los Angeles, he counteracts the national/racial purity in Spanish origin narratives of the city. From the standpoint of current American studies scholarship, McWilliams's counternarrative of Los Angeles's origins relocates the city's beginnings to an intersection of the Spanish Borderlands, the Black Atlantic, and the Pacific Rim. In all of his writings, McWilliams sought to convey the complexities of the West, California, Southern California, and especially Los Angeles. The range of issues to which he turned his pen remain central to Los Angeles scholars today.

"Titles have always bothered me and never more so than in selecting a title for this book. How is one to characterize, in a phrase, a people so diverse in origin?" McWilliams declares in the first sentences of North from Mexico. "I was told that 'Americans from Mexico' would be an appropriate title. . . . [B]ut, strictly speaking, the Spanish-language minority did not come from Spain and Mexico," he continues. "They were already very much a part of the landscape when the Anglo-Americans came to the Southwest. . . . [I]n the end, I was driven to the conclusion that the title would have to refer to a process, a movement, a point on the compass" (7-9). McWilliams would ultimately reconcile the paradoxes of identity inherent to Mexican migration by emphasizing culture as a whole way of life: "For it is the direction in which the people have moved that has given unity to their lives. . . . 'North from Mexico' . . . implies the extension of a way of life rather than a crossing or a jumping of barriers" (10). [End Page 807]

McWilliams's solution to the contradiction of a singular national identity that belies great heterogeneity is a useful starting point for a review essay on recent Los Angeles scholarship, for it historicizes key aspects of the city itself, then and now. Additionally, his early attention to the centrality of race—Michael Denning and Nikhil Pal Singh best explain the underappreciated significance of his writing/activism in the history of twentieth-century American pluralism and racial thought—is an enduring issue explored in a great deal of recent L.A. studies scholarship. McWilliams's adroit dismantling of the racial-national assumptions underlying L.A.'s Spanish origin myth offers a glimpse of his constant attention to negative racial signification in order to emphasize systematic racial exclusion and class exploitation as the defining factors in the development of California society. Such historical observations were reconfirmed by his personal experiences. During the early 1930s he wrote articles for national magazines and traveled the state delivering speeches to labor organizations in an effort to stop xenophobic Mexican repatriation campaigns and exploitation in farm labor. As California's chief of the Division of Immigration and Housing from 1939 to 1943, he devised means to hold farmers and growers accountable for their treatment of laborers by increasing labor camp inspections and holding wage-rate hearings (Sachs, 239). In 1943 he used his skills as a lawyer and writer to chair the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. During the early 1940s he also wrote condemnations of the Japanese internment and the zoot suit riots as incidents that scapegoated Japanese Americans and race-baited Mexican Americans.²

Although McWilliams cited Chicago School figures such as Robert Park or...