RACIALIZING AND CRIMINALIZING SPACE: THE LOS

ANGELES CASE

Prof. Dr. Ciugureanu Adina

Ovidius University Constanta, Romania

ABSTRACT

The article addresses the issues of locating and relocating Chinese, Mexican
and Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century. Based on

removal and relocation of Chinese, Mexican and Japanese communities were acts
that were apparently meant to solve sanitation problems, but revealed, in fact, a
deeply racial attitude of the colonizer against the colonized. The administration
acts of (forcefully) moving the communities according to the local policies of
urban development and planning are discussed with a focus on the way in which
Los Angeles
Times) and became a target for racialization and criminalization as the reason for
removal. The duplicitous discourse of the newspaper articles about these specific
categories of immigrants is also analyzed.
Keywords: Chinese, Mexican, Japanese immigrants, urban planning, urban
removal

INTRODUCTION

In his Geographical Imaginations (1994), Derek Gregory describes cultural

landscapes in terms of both textuality and spatiality. The former term, textuality,
draws on the reading of space as text, as a cultural representation, in which
meanings are embodied, inscribed, and re-inscribed [1]. In addition, textuality
could also be extended to readings of landscapes, in which architecture is

which Peter Eisenman, Frederick Jameson, Francois Lyotard, and Clifford Geertz
had on his own approach to space and landscape as well as on the connection he
created between human geography, cultural studies and cultural anthropology.

brought foreword the importance of textualization in reading space and landscape,

culture, Gregory distinguishes a number of spatial strategies among which he

mentions the importance of the power-knowledge pair in creating strategies of
dispossession, difference, and authority. All this leads to the existence of a
cartographic anxiety in a world of conflicting geographical imaginations that
includes both postcolonial (re)mappings and postmodern urban
representations. The latest views in urban studies have focused on the creation of
illusionary spaces, of geographic imaginations and cartographic deceptions. In
this line of thought, one element of great importance for the understanding of
space in both the metropolis and post-metropolis stages of the city consists in the
strategies of dispossession and difference which have led to the creation of
racialized and criminalized urban spaces. Seen as the effect of a racializing
process in urban areas, racialized spaces have produced, and still produce,
imaginary geographies of race.

and disciplined. This creates racial spaces for ethnic groups (Mexicans, Asian-
Americans, African-Americans) and secure (or controlled) spaces, for other
categories of people, such as the poor and the homeless, which can easily become
criminalized neighborhoods. Another possible way by means of which space may
be racialized is through public health policies and discourses. In her study Fit to
Be Citizens? (2006), for example, Natalia Molina analyses the stereotypical
images that the Asians and Mexicans acquired as regards their relation to health
matters: the fertile Mexican woman, the dirty Mexican man, the wily Asian
vendor, the germ-spreading Chinese. [4] The stock portraits were produced by the
white Anglo-Americans and stuck not only on the people belonging to the other
races, but also on the space they occupied, which was described as filthy or
perilous. Dispossession and removal have often been caused, besides racial

communities were living.

The article will focus on various representations of Asian and Mexican

immigrants to Los Angeles in the period between the 1880s and the 1930s by the
major periodical, The Los Angeles Times, with a view to revealing how space was
racialized and criminalized for the non-white immigrant, whom the press called

Chinese, the Mexicans and the Japanese.

A number of the Los Angeles Times issues in the 1880s published short

Exclusion immigration act that barred Chinese to come to the United States. While
the act was under debate, the stories about the Chinese in the local mainstream
press, like the Los Angeles Times, referred to their misconduct and the alarming
possibility of bad behavior escalation. One piece of news the Angelenos could
read in February 4, 1882, for
this ethnic group was known for in Los Angeles at the time. He probably brought
d him as much as she should,
when the altercation started:

It has become a common thing in this town for Chinese washmen to insult
ladies at their houses. It was only a few days ago that one of the rascals went so
far as to go to a certain house in this city and strike a woman, and when her
husband lambasted him, he has the heathen cheek to go and have the man arrested
for battery. But yesterday, one of the scoundrels got so bold and impudent as to
go up to a lady and ask her for money when she did not owe him a cent. It is a
pity that some man was not at hand with a ten-pound club to beat an ounce of
American manners into his miserable carcass. [5]

The short piece of news dating February 4, 1882 precedes the promulgation
of the Exclusion Act by the Congress, which was in May, the same year. The tone

is clearly meant to distinguish the civilized and God-loving white Americans from
the uncivilized aliens. Though written and published in 1882, the author preserves

documents since the 1860s. [6]

Los Angeles Times

publishes a concerned address to the editor and, by extension, to the general

central part of Los Angeles which strikingly contrasted to the streets occupied by
the white population:

The first thing a stranger does upon entering a town is to look at the health of
its people. If a person is looking for a home he is more anxious to learn if there is
a perfect system of drainage. He looks about to find the source of water, and if
plentiful and pure. No town can be healthy with
Los Angeles remain even as healthy as now, with China town with all its filth and
stench under the nostrils.

of any town of its size I have ever seen. [7]

incriminating impression of the city. Whether it was fabricated or it was a genuine

letter is, perhaps, less important compared to the expected effects which the letter
envisaged. The solution to the problem should have been the building, by the
municipality, of a sewage system in the area called Chinatown. It is notoriously
known that the sewage system ended in the plaza, a space shared by the white
Americans and the Mexicans at the time. The blame for living in such dreadful
conditions was laid solely on the Chinese residents and not on the non-existent
drain pipes and almost inexistent health-care system. Moreover, the Chinese were
allowed to own their own house, but not the land underneath. They could not have
built any sewage system by themselves. Since the future of the city was at stake,
urgent action was necessary and that was the cleansing of the area of its
inhabitants.

The discourse of unhygienic people and disease carriers strongly opposes the
discourse of California as the land of sunshine, disease cure and economic
boosterism that was promoted in the Los Angeles Times by Harrison Otis and
Charles Lummis in the 1880s and 1890s. Advertisements describing the climate,
the products of the developing farms, the orchards of oranges and avocados, the
curing effects of the Californian air covered most of the pages of the daily paper.
While the official discourse boosted California as an Edenic realm and invited
immigrants, the Chinese residents fought with insanity and disease.

Despite the provisions of the Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinatown grew in the
following decades and opened various businesses including gambling halls and
prostitution houses owned by both Chinese and white Americans, the latter being
the only ones who had the authority to develop and control transactions. In spite
of joint patronage, it was the Chinese who were blamed for seducing the whites
me victims of the
Los Angeles Times editorial of February 5, 1886,

at is

marginalized position of the Chinese, but also the unbelievable sub-hierarchizing

of the Chinese as even lower than the native Indians, considered at the time to be
less than human. The space the Chinese occupied was so intensely racialized and
criminalized that, a year and a half later, a fire destroyed most of Chinatown. The
perpetrator, if any, has never been discovered, nor was the origin of the fire, but
the consequence of the tragedy was the removal of the Chinese to a new area. The
racializing and criminalizing processes went with them to the newly relocated
space.

When it was established as a town, most of the social, economic and cultural
life of Los Angeles took place in the Plaza, the central area of the emerging city.
Towards the turn of the twentieth centu
Chinatown and following the arrival of more and more of Japanese and Mexican
immigrants, the white Americans left the Plaza and went southwesterly, creating
a white zone, detached from the ethnic spaces, in and around nowadays Pershing
Square. In this way, the racial boundaries moved, as did the segregation of the
multi-ethnic areas occupied by the other immigrant populations.

The major effect of the Exclusion Act of 1882, which concerned the Chinese,
was the rise in number of the Japanese who flowed to Southern California. While

Los Angeles Times

article claims that the arriv

newcomers found employment in households among the white people. Therefore,

Socially, the Japanese were, like the Chinese, inferior to the white race and treated
as such.

important to notice
that the Asian immigrants were firstly judged by hygiene and health and not by
other standards and that comparison was made between any Asian resident and
the Chinese in terms of cleanliness. However, the Japanese had their own flaws:
they were choosy in finding employment because they wanted a higher salary than
the ordinary servants and they requested all their afternoons free. [9] In creating
their own space, the Japanese seemed to be more organized than the Chinese: they
needed the free afternoons to study and get degrees. Moreover, they were good

techniques much better.

The racializing process of Los Angeles continued in the first and second
decades of the twentieth century. With the Chinese held in check, the local

Agreement, on the Japanese in 1906. According to this agreement, the unskilled

Japanese workers were excluded for immigration, though their women and
children were accepted, which drastically reduced the flow of immigrants.
Moreover, the Japanese were not allowed to own land, another component of the
immigration
restrictions, the Japanese community continued to grow until it became a

1920, introduces the theme of the Japanese peril both as a nation with a high birth
rate and as a nation with a well-known capacity of inadaptability to other cultures.
[11] Grounding his article on the report issued by the State Board of Control for
the Federal Government in 1920, the reporter analyzes the negative effects that
devastating consequences:

T
is based upon the social non-assimilability of the Orientals, their apparent
determination to violate the so-
countries by false classification of immigrants, and by the high birth rate
established by those who have settled here is apparent from a review of the report.
That the federal government takes cognizance of the seriousness of the situation
is evidenced by the hearings held in various parts of California during the past
week by the Congressional Committee on Immigration. It is hoped that the results
of these hearings will be recommendations to Congress for legislation curbing the
invasion of the American soil by the Japanese. (italics mine) [11]

agreement by offering an inadequate, wrong classification of the immigrants to

the American officials, while the American government is described as an
innocent victim of the Japanese ruse. This is actually an example of how the white

space was racialized and criminalized. The fear of space invasion was so strong,
the menace so real that the author of the article introduces, in its second part, the

majority, the answer was obvious; therefore, immediate action was required to

Another problem arising in the 1920s, which required both attention and
action was the Mexican immigration. Soon after the arrival of Mexicans in large
numbers, they got the la

they lived were cause for disease spreading which caused further marginalization
and segregation. The Depression years affected the Mexicans to a large extent.
Since their jobs were cut first, the rate of unemployment among the ethnic
population grew. Moreover, the general view held by the white officials was that
they were Mexican-Indians and, therefore, inferior to the Spanish settlers. The

exclusion of any other racialized group. [12] Under such circumstances, fearing a
higher unemployment rate among the Mexicans, due to Depression, and in the
absence of a civil welfare and health system, the white Americans decided to take
action and deport the Mexicans back to their country in 1931. They targeted
especially the blue-color workers after they finished work at the railroad, where
they toiled together with the Chinese. Though officially only the undocumented
Mexicans should have been deported, in fact, a large number of American citizens
of Mexican descent had to go. [13]

Paradoxically, 1931 was the year in which the Angelenos celebrated 150
years since the founding of the city. In September 1931, they organized a huge
Fiesta in which almost one million people participated and which featured,
through parades and short acting scenes, the founding families of Los Angeles,
who had actually been Mexican-Indian, as well as the first white pioneers. While
the whole town, including the Chinese and Japanese communities, celebrated the
150 year-anniversary, the Mexicans, most of whom had completed the railroad
work, were sent back to their home country by thousands. A short notice in the
Los Angeles Times

The Mexican people being sent home are indigents who have been under the
care of the County Welfare Department. All the citizens of Mexico are going back
voluntarily. A County Welfare Department officer will accompany each train and
remain with the repatriates until they reach their destination. More than 6000 of
the Mexican citizens have been sent back by the county authorities. [13]

The documents of the time actually record that a very small number of the
deported Mexicans were under Welfare Care, most of them not benefitting from

questioned, as it seems to have been induced as a better alternative to the

economic situation in the States. The exact number of the expatriates is not known
(the official average number is 1,000,000), but the critical part of the problem was
-

repatriation process did not understand what was happening to them, why they
were singled out and why repatriation did not affect other ethnic groups as well.
Moreover, adaptation to Mexico was harder than expected and re-adaptation to,
and reconciliation with, America and the American life when the expatriates
returned to California was not easy either. The trauma lasted with the indigenous
population for decades. It was in 2005 that California State Senator Joseph Dunn
addressed the Californians an open letter in which he denounced the Californian
policy in the 1930s of deporting the Mexicans against their will within the

that was
foreign to them, since most of them had been born in the California, where they

Against this background, the Fiesta celebrating 150 years since the birth of
Los Angeles was organized. One of the major goals of the Fiesta, if we look at all
the preparations which had been carefully made for weeks before the actual event,
-
create a past rooted in the histo
and not in the history of Mexico. The whole scenario of the Fiesta, the articles
describing the founding and rise of Los Angeles, the orchestration of the
celebratory moments and the skillful, yet very discriminatory, involvement of the
other ethnic communities and races (Chinese and Japanese) were meant to seal
forever the European tradition of Los Angeles at the expense of the Mexican
contribution.

CONCLUSION

Until, perhaps, the last quarter of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was an
outpost of white supremacy in the region. The racializing process in the first three
decades of the twentieth century in Los Angeles was very intense because the
local boosters had created a myth of the city that appealed very much to the white
population; the non-white peoples who, charmed by the myth, came to Los
Angeles to find a new and better life (as advertised) were accepted only as
providers of cheap, invisible labor. Whenever workers were needed, immigrants
were invited to come, while during the recession periods they were usually
criminalized and forced to leave. Although Los Angeles had a large number of
immigrant populations, the policy of zoning, mainly through housing
development and the practices of restrictions created a segregated city growing
into racialized spaces, moving and repositioning boundaries according to the
social and economic development of the area.

REFERENCES
[1] Gregory, Derek. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA, Oxford,
UK.: Blackwell, 1994, pp. 141-150.
[2] Lefebvre, Henri, (1974) The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-
Smith, Oxford, U.K. and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991, p. 26.

Cross & M. Keith (eds.), Racism, the City and the State,
London: Routledge, 1993, p. 52.
[4] Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens? (Public Health and Race in Los
Angeles, 1879-1939). Los Angeles, Ca.: University of California Press, 2006,
pp.75-115.
[5] Los Angeles Times, Feb. 4, 1882
[6] Torres-Rouff, David Samuel. Before L.A. (Race, Space, and Municipal
Power in Los Angeles, 1781-1894). New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2013, p. 189.
Los Angeles Times, Oct. 13, 1882:3.
Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 1886.
 Los Angeles Times, Jan.
15, 1903.
[10] Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens? (Public Health and Race in Los
Angeles, 1879-1939). Los Angeles, Ca.: University of California Press, 2006, p.
55.
Los Angeles Times, July 25, 1920.
[12] Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens? (Public Health and Race in Los
Angeles, 1879-1939). Los Angeles, Ca.: University of California Press, 2006,
pp.129-137.
Los Angeles Times,
March 8, 1932.
[14] Balderrama, Francisco E., Rodriguez, Raymond. (1995) Decade of
Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico, 2006, p. 266.
[15] Balderrama, Francisco E., Rodriguez, Raymond. (1995) Decade of
Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico, 2006, p. 322.