Racial Capitalism and the Roots of Mexican Segregation in Southern California: Advancing Urban Theory by Examining Mexican Colonies 1910-1930s

Maria Rendon, University of California, Irvine
Amalia Mejia, UC Irvine
Flor Flores, UC Irvine

We contribute to urban scholarship on the Mexican community in southern California, expanding from seminal studies that center their experience in the central city of Los Angeles (Romo, 1983; Sanchez, 1993). We call attention to Mexican’s spatial distribution in the region, in segregated Mexican colonies that were scattered across southern California and were integral to urban development then. Most studies on the Mexican community in the early 1900s in southern California emphasize their rural character, often linked to agriculture (Gonzales, 1994). We note that while many Mexican colonies then had rural characteristics, they were in fact “urban villages” in a rapidly developing region. We provide an overview of the spatial distribution of these Mexican colonies in the Los Angeles region as its urbanization and their connection to key industries in the region. We highlight three Mexican colonies in the Los Angeles region during its rapid urban expansion around the 1920s, to demonstrate how the formation of these colonies was rooted in racial capitalism, as well as local practices of race prejudice and racial exclusion that marginalized these communities to the outskirts of predominantly white cities. We flip the urban script on racial segregation, by calling attention to residential and school segregation, as well as displacement, which emerged with white settlement encroachment of established Mexican colonies. We contend that the history of Mexican segregation requires that we account for the history of racial displacement in a system of racial capitalism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 182. Geographies of Racialized Dispossession