This article connects the work of one woman (Josephine Dows Randall, 1885–1968), the larger Progressive Era recreation movement, and its local application in San Francisco in the first half of the twentieth century. In early twentieth-century San Francisco, as in cities across the United States, civic leaders and social reformers embraced playgrounds and children’s recreation, in particular, as avenues through which to alleviate concerns about modernity—namely, juvenile delinquency—and to foster good citizenship in the growing urban environment. The city’s adoption of the recreation movement played into concerns about Americanizing an immigrant population, but also highlighted the limitations of racial equality. However, in the City by the Bay, recovery from the 1906 earthquake both intensified the pressures of urban growth and created greater leeway to reimagine physical space for residents. San Francisco residents also benefited from the talents of Randall, the city’s first superintendent of recreation, whose creativity and connections to national recreation organizations helped put Fog City on the map as a hub for public recreation. Despite her groundbreaking leadership as a woman in San Francisco government (1926–51), Randall and her efforts to reshape the city’s recreation remain largely forgotten due to the consolidation of the recreation department with the park department in 1949, and her own retirement several years later. Randall’s professional rise and later obscurity also mirror a national trend in the increasingly professionalized recreation movement, in which women—and their work—became less visible in postwar America.
Western explorer Joseph Walker has been historically credited with leading the first Anglo-American party to view Yosemite Valley in 1833. Secondary sources have recently questioned that distinction, in part because Zenas Leonard’s narrative, a chronicle for the Walker journey to and from the Rocky Mountains to the California coast, did not allow conformance with reasonable travel rates for the party via previous routing through the eastern Sierran foothills. This article asserts the veracity of the Walker party’s Yosemite Valley viewing, while modifying previous routing. Support for this assertion comes from event and location agreement by independent narratives or accounts regarding the Sierran journey by Leonard, explorer Lafayette Bunnell, party member George Nidever, and Joseph Walker himself. Changes in Sierran mapping between 1845 and 1848 by John Fremont, attributed to Walker’s influence, corroborate these narratives and accounts.
Recent decisions by the Trump administration to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents to American cities have raised significant questions about the role of local law enforcement agencies in immigration enforcement. The partnership between immigration enforcement and local police, such as the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), has a long and contested history. Beginning in 1979, LAPD’s Special Order 40 ostensibly prevented police officers from collaborating with federal immigration agents. However, the LAPD often found ways to circumvent the policy during periods of crisis, including the 1992 Los Angeles unrest and the war on gangs in the 1990s. Collaboration between ICE and local police, this article suggests, threatens to weaken trust in law enforcement and undermine public safety.
The Japanese government seized the opportunity to stage an expensive and elaborate display at San Francisco’s 1939–40 Golden Gate International Exposition. Pulling off such a spectacle required the labor of hundreds, including the dozens of young Nisei (American-born children of Japanese immigrants) men and women who worked in the Japan Pavilion. One such employee, Clara Sasaki, documented her time at the fair in carefully curated photo albums; along with other sources, these albums offer insight into the shared experiences of the young Nisei women employed in the Japan Pavilion. Japanese cultural and religious institutions and the Japanese-language press tied together far-flung Japantowns and brought young women like Clara Sasaki to cities like San Francisco for employment and education. Growing up immersed in both American and Japanese cultures equipped these women with the skills they needed to interpret the Japanese exhibit for all visitors. Although the most well-educated of any ethnic group in the state, the combination of racial and gender discrimination severely limited their job opportunities. But their membership in the Japanese transnational community prepared them to work at the fair. Their labor did support Japan’s imperial project, but it also offered them a social mobility unavailable elsewhere. Sasaki and her peers earned good wages in highly desirable jobs that introduced them to new people and new elements of Japanese culture. Their very presence at the fair challenged stereotypes about the place of Japanese American women in California. They forged relationships that endured long past the fair. Examining the pre-fair lives of Sasaki and her peers offers insight into the vibrant transnational Japanese American community of pre–Pearl Harbor California.
This article brings attention to the junction where neoliberal economic policies and immigrant deterrence policies meet, producing infrastructure that has led to the tragic phenomenon of migrant deaths inside of shipping containers at the U.S. – Mexico border. The late 1980s saw five shipping container incidents in one week, highlighting the deadly consequences of increasingly restrictive border enforcement and irresponsible smuggling operations. Such tragedies demand a deeper exploration into why the United States, the richest country in the world, also maintains the deadliest land border in the world with Mexico. This article emphasizes the inherent tension between the neoliberal goal of expanding trade and the exclusionary goal of restricting routes for unauthorized immigration via a growing deterrence apparatus. These interdependent systems have shaped the border’s deadly infrastructure. By exploring their infrastructural contradictions, the article underscores how economic policies and anti-immigrant laws manifest in physical forms that endanger the lives of humans, calling for a reevaluation of the logics on which these systems are constructed to prevent future tragedies.
The catastrophic collapse of the St. Francis Dam on March 13, 1928, stands as one of the largest disasters in California history. Full responsibility for the collapse, including the loss of over 450 lives and extensive property damage, was placed on the City of Los Angeles, which had constructed the dam on unstable geological foundations. While the American Red Cross, Ventura County, and the Los Angeles Restoration Committees provided much-needed relief in the aftermath, they treated Santa Paula’s Mexican flood victims in a racially patronizing manner and relied on coercive strategies that reinforced their authority through control over financial assistance and claims determinations. Drawing on archival research in the United States and Mexico, bilingual newspaper coverage, a scrapbook, and oral histories, this article examines how Santa Paula’s ethnic Mexicans responded by mobilizing mutual aid efforts that transcended neighborhood boundaries and fostered solidarity across communities in Ventura County. This grassroots style of aid rooted in familial networks and mutual solidarity not only challenged the paternalism of official relief agencies and citrus ranchers but also helped forge a new political consciousness and labor activism in the region.
Recent decisions by the Trump administration to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents to American cities have raised significant questions about the role of local law enforcement agencies in immigration enforcement. The partnership between immigration enforcement and local police, such as the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), has a long and contested history. Beginning in 1979, LAPD's Special Order 40 ostensibly prevented police officers from collaborating with federal immigration agents. However, the LAPD often found ways to circumvent the policy during periods of crisis, including the 1992 Los Angeles unrest and the war on gangs in the 1990s. Collaboration between ICE and local police, this article suggests, threatens to weaken trust in law enforcement and undermine public safety.
This article connects the work of one woman (Josephine Dows Randall, 1885-1968), the larger Progressive Era recreation movement, and its local application in San Francisco in the first half of the twentieth century. In early twentieth-century San Francisco, as in cities across the United States, civic leaders and social reformers embraced playgrounds and children's recreation, in particular, as avenues through which to alleviate concerns about modernity-namely, juvenile delinquency-and to foster good citizenship in the growing urban environment. The city's adoption of the recreation movement played into concerns about Americanizing an immigrant population, but also highlighted the limitations of racial equality. However, in the City by the Bay, recovery from the 1906 earthquake both intensified the pressures of urban growth and created greater leeway to reimagine physical space for residents. San Francisco residents also benefited from the talents of Randall, the city's first superintendent of recreation, whose creativity and connections to national recreation organizations helped put Fog City on the map as a hub for public recreation. Despite her groundbreaking leadership as a woman in San Francisco government (1926-51), Randall and her efforts to reshape the city's recreation remain largely forgotten due to the consolidation of the recreation department with the park department in 1949, and her own retirement several years later. Randall's professional rise and later obscurity also mirror a national trend in the increasingly professionalized recreation movement, in which women-and their work-became less visible in postwar America.
This article explores how the Bracero Program’s unintended consequences increased undocumented immigration and, in turn, created a transnational informal bracero economy from 1942 to 1964. As a case study, California’s Imperial Valley and Baja California’s Mexicali Valley demonstrate how the treaty’s formal immigration and labor provisions hampered braceros’ rights and living conditions through stolen wages, unsanitary housing, and unfulfilled labor contracts. At the same time, braceros and receiving communities forged a contiguous informal economy—characterized by informal and illicit commerce—to address workers’ needs. In turn, small-scale entrepreneurship of families and borderland residents, like informal eateries, garment work, and street vending, helped them confront unemployment and underemployment. Despite the inherent problems of the Bracero Program and the transnational informal bracero economy, the U.S. Congress failed to address such issues when it passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (INA). In the post-bracero era, the inequities of this economic immigration structure continued under the transnational informal INA economy. Although scholars have examined the Bracero Program’s effects on undocumented immigration and bribery, this history is incomplete without comprehending how the treaty’s policies intersected with the informal economy that supported braceros, their loved ones, and unofficial vendors, economic systems that conflicted with the dominant formal structures in the United States and Mexico across the program’s history and in the present.
