After dedicating over two decades to K-12 education, I made the decision to transition from the dynamic world of school classrooms to become a part of a small yet formidable ICW team consisting of Bill Deverell, Elizabeth Logan, and Jessica Kim—esteemed scholars and motivating individuals in their own right. Now, as I wrap up my first six months as the Director of Operations with the ICW, I reflect on the ways that concepts of wonder, curiosity, and collaboration shape my daily responsibilities. Ultimately, I am filled with gratitude for the chance to contribute to and be a part of this exceptional organization.
Part of the ICW team from left to right: Kate McInerny, Bill Deverell, Elizabeth Logan, and Eryn Hoffman. At Metro Art Presents: Celebrating In Our Ancestors’ Footsteps at Los Angeles Union Station on February 15, 2024, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Los Angeles Union Station)
No day at ICW is ever the same, yet the team’s work consistently revolves around the nexus between scholarly research and community engagement. Within the first couple of weeks, I actively participated in lunchtime webinars, facilitating community learning sessions with Western historians Dr. Sarah Keyes and Dr. Julia Ornelas-Higdon, Huntington Curator Dr. Josh Garrett-Davis, and American cultural historian Dr. Anthony Macias. Almost simultaneously, I dove into the work of producing ICW’s podcast series, currently in its fourth season. With that, I found myself in the role of researcher, asking questions and uncovering stories that breathe life into local history for our listeners. This brought me out of my office at the Huntington Library, and into museum archives, scouring scrapbooks and diaries, onto local residential streets searching for evidence of 19th-century brickworkers, and onto steel staircases amidst the concrete buildings of an old power plant, uncovering tidbits of the larger connection between the past and the present.
Eryn with her daughter in SicilyBill, Elizabeth, and Eryn onsite for the ICW podcast at the historic power plant in Pasadena
ICW’s work balancing the local and with the global resonates with me. As a historian, I seek out human experiences and stories reflecting not just a particular moment in time, but also the values and shifts of society. ICW’s work embodies this concept. An upcoming podcast season will illuminate the unseen side of Pasadena and its impact on the intellectual and cultural growth of the West. Collaborating with Indigenous tribal organizations in the Sierra Nevadas on prescribed wilderness burns, I’ve deepened my understanding of the relationship between climate change, fire, and Indigenous cultural traditions and economic enterprise. Engaging with high school students and teachers in the LASA program, I have explored the Port of L.A. and the Beverly Hills Fire Department, examining their profound impact on the health, safety, and development of the surrounding world, and reflecting with students on their own potential role in L.A.’s future.
Eryn’s support is crucial for ICW’s Los Angeles Service Academy, pictured here on a trip to the Port of Los Angeles.
While the ICW’s projects and practices are intellectually stimulating, it’s the people who have powerfully shaped my experience over these last few months as Director of Operations. Sharing lunch on the patio of Huntington Library with ICW graduate students and postdocs has been inspiring, prompting me to ask questions and reflect on their research. Supporting ICW’s programs like LASA, the podcast series, lunchtime webinars, and yearly conferences, that bring together scholars, civic leaders, and curious community members exemplifies ICW’s commitment to lifelong learning, something that resonates with me. And, planning for ICW’s road forward, prioritizing strategic growth and sustainability alongside the incredible team of Bill, Elizabeth, and Jessica, has demonstrated the productivity and inspiration that a small group of committed individuals can achieve.
In mid-February, “Where You Stand: Chinatown, 1880 to 1939” came to life in new ways. The exhibition created by ICW, the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC), Metro Art, USC Cinema, and The Huntington stands in the waiting room at LA’s Union Station from now until fall 2024. On one night in February though, student dancers from East Wind Foundation performed a traditional lion dance. Two lions and their musical guides moved across the patterned path of the station. Cymbals drew attention from passersby and those rushing to holiday weekend destinations. As one moved closer to the exhibition panels, family members of Old Chinatown and their descendants shared memories and stories passed down generations of life in the community. Their sounds brought new life to a collaborative work years in the making.
East Wind Foundation students perform during the Metro Art Presents: Celebrating In Our Ancestors’ Footsteps at Los Angeles Union Station on February 15, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Los Angeles Union Station)
“Where You Stand” always has included animated and dynamic components, including oral histories as well as the ongoing work of USC Cinema on the augmented reality. As one walks through the exhibition, panels correspond to addresses in Old Chinatown. Family stores and homes, a playground, a temple, and a stable. Accessible via QR code on various panels of the exhibition, guests are invited to listen to sections from oral histories from the late 1970s and early 1980s relevant to the activity in the panel. The oral histories are part of CHSSC and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s Southern California Oral History Project. The project’s stated goal was to “address the archival gaps concerning Chinese American history and the Chinese American experience in the greater Los Angeles area, focusing mainly on the period prior to World War II.” In more than 160 interviews, community members shared their stories with people like Eugene Moy, who worked both on the Oral History Project and “Where You Stand.” Excerpts from just a few of these oral histories are part of “Where You Stand.” David Lee and Jennie Lee Wong spoke of the family restaurant Man Jen Low. Walter Chung shared stories of Jewel Stable and vegetable peddling. Rose Wong, a friend of the Soo Hoo family, spoke of their store, Sang Yuen & Co. More oral histories in this collection and the Duty and Honor Collection are available online via CHHSSC. The oral histories ground the exhibit, a sensory reminder that history has voices.
Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Los Angeles Union Station.Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Los Angeles Union Station.
The sound though last week resonated differently, like a cord. The student dancers participated as a new generation, further creating bonds between the histories of Old Chinatown and both New Chinatown and the entire LA area. Tossing an orange in the air, the magic of the lion dance bringing good luck and banishing harmful spirits reminded us of the core of the work of the exhibition. The complexity of marking this moment in time. In the mid-1930s, business and city leaders razed Old Chinatown. The land of this diverse and thriving neighborhood of several thousand people became Union Station, the last major metropolitan train station constructed in the United States. The digital map that accompanies the exhibition plots the current footprint of the station and the streets of Old Chinatown from Apablasa to Marchessault. This is a chapter of LA’s history of urban planning and racism that deserves continued reckoning.
At the same time, our CHSSC partners are quick to remind all of us that it is a chapter to recognize the vibrancy of Old Chinatown and the rich connections between Old and New Chinatown. Community members, like Peter Soo Hoo Sr. and Y.C. Hong, helped to create New Chinatown in the 1930s. Businesses moved from one neighborhood to the new one. The students offering a lion dance held both this thriving energy and the mindfulness of what transpired in this space almost 100 years ago. Their sound became intergenerational with mixed audiences of commuters, family members present for the event, and history-minded community members.
Guests attend Metro Art Presents: Celebrating In Our Ancestors’ Footsteps at Los Angeles Union Station on February 15, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (All photos by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Los Angeles Union Station)
In addition to the energetic sounds from the students, descendants of Old Chinatown families gathered to stand in front of the panels closest to their histories and shared stories and memories. Extended family members from the Lee, Leong, Hong, and Soo Hoo families helped to clarify the people in photographs and contextualize some of the balcony signs on the large images. They shared stories of the playground and connected over ancestors who lived doors from each other decades ago. Their laughter filled the space as did the quieter, heavier memories. Listening was an honor. Listening to layers of history and whispers of the future is always an honor.
Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Los Angeles Union Station.The Man Jen Low family. Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Los Angeles Union Station.
Elizabeth A. Logan received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University in History with honors, her JD from the UCLA School of Law, and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. She serves as the Co-Director of ICW and the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Service Academy (LASA). Her previous work includes positions as an Assistant Editor of Boom: A Journal of California and as a Dornsife Preceptor. Her teaching and work explores the intersections of law, history and culture in the 19th- and early 20th-century United States and American West.
Dirk Charley is energetic. Though he has two decades on us, we struggle to keep pace as we crisscross fifty acres of land in the Haslett Basin Preserve in the southern Sierra foothills. He stops to point things out. Rocks with wear-patterns that suggest they served as tools. Mushrooms, which he warns us aren’t edible. Sourberry, redberry, different types of oaks and manzanita, sprouting buckeye seeds almost the size of your fist. He guides us across a stream and up a slope. As we walk, he plucks a few fragrant bay laurel leaves, hands them to us, and encourages us to enjoy the scent. There aren’t trails here, just spongy earth covered by grass and overgrown brush and trees. He stops to point out that this dense landscape should be a “see-through forest.” These beautiful foothills should be a place where parents can picnic and still see their children running and playing through thinned vegetation. At different indents in the land he pauses, observes, and waves at the thick growth: “Good place to sit and look at the basin. Should be able to see through this.”
Dirk is part of the Dunlap Band of Mono Indians. He’s lived an expansive life. From years in Italy as part of the Navy (where he met his wife) to a career as a US Forest Service Hotshot, a position in civil rights with the Forest Service, to many years in Forest Service human relations. Though perhaps technically retired, he now serves as a tribal liaison for the Forest Service in fires both close to Haslett and those that are states away. He’s also held tribal positions, a role close to his heart. His father trained him for it. He tells us, “My dad said, ‘Dirk, if you’re going to stay close, you need to be on the council. Provide leadership. Be a liaison with other tribes.’” Dirk lives in Fresno at the base of the foothills. And he’s spent much of his life working in the Sierras with the Forest Service and his tribe. As a Hotshot, his job was to extinguish fires. In the role we know him in, he trains people to safely start them.
It is starting fires that brings us to the southern Sierras. We’re here to support and observe Dirk’s work with the Sierra-Sequoia Burn Cooperative (SSBC). The cooperative is a collaborative partnership of four California Native American Tribes (Big Sandy Rancheria, Cold Springs Rancheria, the Dunlap Band of Mono Indians, and North Fork Rancheria), the Sierra Foothill Conservancy, and other regional organizations and landowners, as well as ICW’s West on Fire colleague Jared Aldern. SSBC experts, including Dirk, are revitalizing fire culture in the Sierra Nevada by drawing from state and federal training standards and Indigenous history and expertise. This is one of three burn sites where the work is being supported by a grant to ICW from the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, a California state agency. He and others are training Tribal crews to provide prescribed fire services throughout the region. In short, they start small, controlled fires to improve forest health and to prevent the danger of destructive fires.
During our visit to Haslett Basin, hours of training and expertise built through two previous burns culminate in three days of prescribed burning to help thin vegetation and create Dirk’s see-through forest. Indigenous crews have cut back vegetation and built over one hundred burn piles—pyramid-shaped stacks of brush over fifteen feet in diameter designed to ignite. We find the burn location by locating plumes of smoke billowing from forested hillsides. The crews work in groups of two to three and climb steep hillsides from pile to pile, wielding torches, chainsaws, pitchforks, and shovels. The nights are damp and so are some of the piles. To coax a pile to light, they “boyscout it”—building tiny piles the size of your palm and igniting them, then gradually adding incrementally larger pieces of fuel until the larger pile ignites. While the fires start small, the work is rigorous—they burn over 150 piles in one day across a hilly fifty acres. The resulting smoke burns white and doesn’t even overpower the fresh scent of the bay laurel.
From a distance, the Sierra Nevada range is colossal, dividing California from the Great Basin and forming part of the American Cordillera. But this experience, witnessing the burn, is specific and detailed. The color-palette tips to blueish green, a contrast to the warmth of the basin. Dirk’s generosity with his time introduces us to a corner of the range that is so familiar to him that he can spot a salamander on the side of a dirt road while driving and jump out to move it nearer to a creek below.
Dirk’s job during the burn is safety. In years of Zoom meetings, I (Elizabeth) heard him take great care to make sure conditions for training and burning were optimal. This day, he walks the perimeter of the burn area, keeping an eye on the smoke. He takes us along, watching the smoke while also looking for a specific manzanita with a twisted trunk so old and large we couldn’t wrap our arms around it. He speaks with crew members at various piles, sharing a word of encouragement or a tip. He pauses to shovel cuttings that failed to burn the first time around into the center of smoldering coals and ash. At one point he stops and picks up a frog the size of a quarter. He reminds us that he does this work for native species like that frog and the North Kings River deer herd which needs cleared corridors to migrate in search of food. Burning is also deeply tied to Indigenous culture in the Sierra Nevada. Dirk points out patches of redbud, used for basket making. The plants need to be thinned. He shows us how to trim back stalks that bow toward the ground to make room for the ones that will grow straight, toward the sky. Those are the ones that make good material for baskets.
This place is familiar because Dirk grew up here. As did his dad, grandparents, and great-grandparents. He points out many of the places he visited with his dad as a child, as we survey the burn area. Continuous volleys of gunshots interrupt Dirk’s childhood reminiscences as we stand on the edge of a stream. A group has set up a makeshift shooting range on a hilltop above us. Dirk shakes his head and says, “Someone needs to tell the Forest Service about this.” He also tells us that the local tribes moved the location of traditional and communal gatherings to minimize crossing paths with bear hunters. The shooting and the thought of bear hunters clearly trouble him.
But fire, and what it can restore to the landscape, invigorates him and the burn crews he works with. At Haslett and the two other locations, SSBC expects the burns to encourage new growth and vegetation that will be heavily used this spring and fall by resident wildlife. Carefully controlled destruction that will yield regrowth. Regrowth that will be enjoyed and monitored for ten years by Haslett’s co-stewards, Cold Springs Rancheria and the Sierra Foothill Conservancy, as well as other SSBC members and the Sierra Nevada Conversancy. Dirk’s message from across the years of planning together has consistently been that it is critically important to spend time out on the land. We experienced this. And are grateful to Dirk for the time he spent with us in the Basin.
When I (Jessica) get home, I give my eight-year-old son one of the enormous buckeye seeds Dirk picked up on our day-long hike. The size impresses him. I pass along Dirk’s instructions for planting it. He soaks some soil with water and plants it in the backyard: “Let’s see what it becomes!”
Elizabeth A. Logan received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University in History with honors, her JD from the UCLA School of Law, and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. She serves as the Co-Director of ICW and the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Service Academy (LASA). Her previous work includes positions as an Assistant Editor of Boom: A Journal of California and as a Dornsife Preceptor. Her teaching and work explores the intersections of law, history and culture in the 19th- and early 20th-century United States and American West.
Jessica Kim received her PhD in history at USC in 2012, was a postdoctoral fellow with ICW in 2013, and is currently Professor of History at CSUN, where she teaches courses on Los Angeles, California, the borderlands, and public history. Her book, Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865-1941 (UNC Press, 2019), explores the rise of Los Angeles and investment in Mexico. The book is the co-winner of the 2020 Kenneth Jackson Award for best book from the Urban History Association. She coordinates ICW’s social media platforms.
“It’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps.” –Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., May 1967
Dr. King was exhausted. It had been four years since he famously had a dream, and more than a decade since he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott that accelerated the civil rights movement. Still, the nightmare raged on. He saw the unwillingness of white America to contribute to genuine equality for Black Americans. “It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter,” King said, than to guarantee an annual income or fight poverty. The movement’s “new phase” centered on economic equality, the practical next step for freedom and self-determination. Dr. King knew firsthand about violent opposition to the movement in the Jim Crow South. But he was disheartened to see white Americans across the country opposed to making room for Black communities, too. It was in this context that he met NBC’s Sander Vanocour for an interview. And perhaps it’s the reason King did not respond incredulously when Vanocour asked the shortsighted question, why, in his estimation, African Americans found it so hard to adapt while all other immigrant groups eventually found success. To this, Dr. King did not even break stride nor change his facial expression. He unleashed a coherent and powerful response, emphasizing the struggles of the past while looking toward a precarious economic future in mainstream American society.[1]
King knew his history, too. He emphasized the differences between the Black experience compared to any other racial or ethnic group in America. Although Lincoln declared enslaved peoples free in 1863, King explained, the U.S. government did not give the formerly enslaved any land or economic base on which to get started. Meanwhile, the federal government was giving away millions of acres of land, for free, across the West and Midwest. The clear discrepancy proved America’s willingness to provide white peasants from Europe with economic assistance, while refusing to do the same for “its Black peasants from Africa, who came here involuntarily in chains and had worked free for 244 years.” Combined with the “stigma” created against the color of their skin, and what King called the “thingification of the Negro,” making him less than human, Black Americans remained at a distinct disadvantage in the U.S. Therefore, King insisted, emancipation meant anything but. In King’s words, to be at the mercy of the winds and the rains, without food to eat or land to cultivate, made it “freedom and famine at the same time.”[2] Therefore, though he agreed with the concept of picking yourself up by your own bootstraps, to insist it to a bootless man sounded like a “cruel jest,” indeed.
At the heart of Dr. King’s cogent argument lie the same crucial questions that guide my research. How did the federal government make land accessible in the West and Midwest? Who benefitted from this massive transfer of land? Who did it dispossess, often violently, or exclude? In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act, which gave away at least 160 acres of land to new settlers, and the Pacific Railway Act, which enacted the transcontinental railroad. In many ways the laws of 1862 drove settler colonialism, and the shape of it, across the American West.[3] They produced the massive transfer of not just land but wealth to white people. The wealth often stayed out of reach for poor white homesteaders as well, predominantly controlled by land speculators, town developers, and the corporate or railroad elite. But hopeful white farmers at least got the chance to try and access this wealth by being granted hundreds of acres of land for free. Black Americans would also try to access the available land as an economic resource. In some cases they succeeded through the establishment of all-Black towns and homesteading colonies. These settlements offered freed slaves the opportunity to achieve freedom and autonomy by homesteading their own land while maintaining community and interdependence. Many of these successes proved short-lived, however. In the long run their exclusion set the path toward the economic disparity that King was still fighting against a century later, the systemic inequality that Vanocour could not see for himself.
Black Americans understood that – in the U.S. especially – citizens and migrants without property would never really stand a chance. Privately-owned land meant everything: it made you a full citizen, a free subject, and according to Thomas Jefferson, farming that land made you the most virtuous citizen of all.[4] Jefferson envisioned transforming the continent into a white Christian capitalist republic, ideally populated with homogenous independent family farms. This vision, which Andrew Jackson fervently carried on, infiltrated all ranks of American society. Known in the U.S. as Manifest Destiny, it justified the displacement and confinement of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement, segregation, and persecution of Black Americans, and repeated efforts to exclude and dominate any population considered “unfit” for the republic.
To spatially achieve Jefferson’s “empire of liberty,” Congress gridded the (mid)western landscape through the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). Today, passengers on a flight across the country can still see this distinctive backdrop of the American West. Established through the Land Ordinance of 1785, the survey divided public lands into 6-mile by 6-mile square townships comprised of 36 sections, 640 acres each. After 1862, especially, the grid helped clear the way (literally) for white settlers to flood Western lands, claim their rectangular plots, and set up family farms. Congress also granted millions of acres to railroads to subsidize the construction of rail lines across the West. It hoped the railroads could bring more settlers from the East and connect western settlements to eastern markets.[5] Most of these lands were only “opened” and surveyed under the grid system because Congress continuously pushed Indigenous populations farther west, repeatedly reducing the size of “Indian Territory.” They violently removed and displaced diverse Indigenous nations from their ancestral homelands, stripping them of their local practices and culture, and ultimately confined them on gridded reservations.
Figure 1: Diagram of the Public Land Survey (PLSS). See the possible divisions of one section, required to be in rectangular form. Source: John Burt, They Left Their Mark (1985).
The laws and the lay of the land were being drawn in definitively. Through them Congress and the PLSS made it easier for land speculators and industries like the railroad to swallow up the choicest and most fertile lands, monopolizing wealth and space across the public domain.[6] This usually locked settlers into a cycle of debt and farm tenancy, betraying the dream of individual homesteading and the head start Congress supposedly provided. Yet, the Homestead Act still granted land to white settlers and with it the limited opportunity to make it in the West, against all odds.[7]
Land and the freedom and autonomy that accompanied it, however, largely remained out of bounds for Blacks. Reconstruction had presented great promise for the Black community. But when it ended in 1877 with the withdrawal of federal troops, many white Southerners and Democratic politicians began a ceaseless and violent backlash against African Americans in the South. Police forces harassed and terrorized ordinary Black citizens or ignored the violent mobs attacking them. Local legislatures swiftly enacted anti-Black codes, segregation became the law of the land, and western states worked to enact their own Jim Crow societies. Lynching skyrocketed and Sundown towns spread, created to ensure that Black people could not move into white neighborhoods, or even visit after sunset.[8] The hope of Reconstruction had evaporated into the despair of Jim Crow, which continued to spread westward across the Plains.
The inability to be protected in the South caused many Black Americans to consider escape as the only option for survival. Many freed slaves would heed the calls to “Go West,” aiming to join the frenzy of free and cheap land available to incoming settlers. But no land would be provided directly from Congress. No notices in the land offices of new towns developed or free land available. Formerly enslaved peoples largely found themselves boxed out of the opportunity to individually own and “improve” their land, something the Homestead Act provided other settlers. Black homesteaders who did move West would need the help of Black (and white) entrepreneurs to receive the land and opportunity needed to homestead in the West. Through dogged persistence, they fought to combat the economic inequality that would ultimately persist and galvanize civil rights activists and leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. a century later.
Wealthy Black capitalists tried to combat the discrepancy between Black and white homesteading by founding their own, all-Black, towns and homesteading colonies on the Great Plains.[9] Understanding the necessity for freedpeople to own their own land, these Black settlements represented a distinct method for achieving self-sufficiency free from the constraints of American law and society. They enabled Black Americans to survive the violent reaction against Reconstruction and farm their own land while maintaining community. Working together while becoming self-reliant, these colonies offered a safe(r) space for Black communities to thrive. Despite short-term successes, though, they could not stem the tides of racism, segregation, and the harsh climate of the Great Plains.
In 1878, led by the Exodusters, thousands fled to Kansas, a place they considered to be the “Promised Land” for free Blacks.[10] Several Black towns developed; in western Kansas, the town of Nicodemus emerged as the earliest and most prosperous Black settlement in the West. Its history demonstrates an important exception to the general rule of Black disenfranchisement and their lack of access to land in the region. Nicodemus continues to be one of the longest standing Black settlements, preserved today as a historic site by the National Park Service. The settling of Nicodemus followed the pattern of creating and promoting white western towns developed on pre-surveyed, gridded public lands. Six Black entrepreneurs and one white town developer joined to form the Nicodemus Town Company in 1877; the company reserved sections of land and spread advertising literature across the South to attract settlers.
Figure 2: The plat and location of Nicodemus Township.
Figure 3: Aerial image of Nicodemus from 1955, still able to see the original township plat. Source: Nicodemus National Historic Site.
The first group of settlers came from Kentucky and arrived at Nicodemus in 1877, before the Exodusters began their mass exodus. A second wave from Kentucky soon followed. The first wave of settlers only survived the winter because a group of Osage Indians returning from their seasonal hunt shared their game with the poor, starving settlers. Still, one of the earliest fliers circulating in the South claimed Nicodemus was on its way to becoming the “Largest Colored Colony in America.” Even some white newspapers boosted Nicodemus to try and increase the population in western Kansas and coax a railroad into extending its lines. And much like white boosterism, the advertising literature spewed fantasies and empty promises. Black migrants to Kansas would be devastated to find much of nothing upon arrival.
Figure 4: Nicodemus Township Hall, present-day. Photo taken by author, June 2022.
Wilina Hickman arrived at Nicodemus with the second wave of settlers from Kentucky. She and her children were still recovering from the measles when she heard people say they could see Nicodemus. Looking into the distance across the treeless Plains, Wilina couldn’t believe what she was (or wasn’t) seeing. She asked, “Where is Nicodemus, I don’t see it.” Her husband pointed to “various smokes coming from the ground and said, ‘That is Nicodemus.’” Disillusioned she wrote: “The scenery was not at all inviting, and I began to cry.”[11] In fact, some migrants turned back after the first day. Families lived in dugouts half underground and half made up of sod. The nearest railroad stop was in Ellis, still 40 miles away from the Nicodemus townsite. Guided by a compass and the stars the brave newcomers began the long tiring walk with their limited belongings and livestock. Among the walking party was a pregnant mother in her eighth month. Amazingly, she made it to Nicodemus safely and had her baby a month later.[12] This summer, driving straight on the I-70 from Kansas City to Nicodemus, I took in the monotonous, flat landscape for about five hours. I envisioned what the new settlers must have seen – and did not see – when approaching the town, obviously in much more dire conditions.
Figure 6: Fields and fields of treeless Plains. Photo taken by author, near Nicodemus National Historic Site, June 2022.
Figure 7: The continuous plains, seen from I-70. The trees present were planted by settlers as windbreaks. Photo taken by author, June 2022.
Despite the challenges, the settlers of Nicodemus remained resolute in staying and creating a new life for themselves. Their shock upon arrival echoed the experiences of many white homesteaders who were duped by western boosterism as well. Told of lush green fields and consistent rain, for example, white homesteaders arrived on the Plains with dreams of farming their own land and sustaining their families. Instead, land speculators and railroad agents often hoarded the best lands and forced poor settlers to accept farm tenancy and fall into debt.[13] For freed people fleeing the post-Reconstruction South, however, the prospect of landownership took on a deeper meaning. Not only could they control their own land and start anew with others, they could survive. There was no going back to the increasingly dangerous South if the farm didn’t make it. It was an exodus and in Nicodemus they had an opportunity to farm their own land and build their own community. Their definition of “success” differed greatly from white homesteaders. Many of them viewed homesteading and all-Black settlements as a means to an end, a necessary step on the trail to mainstream America. Unlike Black homesteaders, though, white settlers did not fear for their lives, or their rights, if they returned home or if they had to move to another town.
Nicodemus residents understood that Black settlements provided their only real opportunity for homesteading in the West. The first two years at Nicodemus saw approximately 700 residents though the population stabilized at around 300 by the mid-1880s.[14] Many filed homestead claims in the surrounding Nicodemus Township which enabled Black farmers to collectively own 13,350 acres of land by 1899. The farming done on these homesteads formed the economic lifeblood of the town Nicodemus. As early as 1879 the town had developed a general store, post office, hotel, land office, two livery stables, and two churches. Thirty-five dwellings had been built in the nucleus of town and residents in Graham County established a school almost immediately.[15] Nicodemus residents reported largely peaceful and cooperative relations with neighboring whites and Indigenous people especially in the town’s early years. County politics involved Black leaders; Edward P. McCabe, one of the founders of the Nicodemus Town Company, quickly became county clerk in 1880. He would go on to serve two terms as Kansas state auditor until 1886 becoming the first African American to hold statewide office.
McCabe and others tried to make Nicodemus the county seat, a necessity for any central Plains town to prosper. Town leaders envisioned attracting the new railroad line to come through Nicodemus, the other necessity for a town’s survival. Unfortunately, both would be granted to white towns nearby spelling doom for the town of Nicodemus. The county seat eventually fell to Hill City, a neighboring white town created by William R. Hill, the lone white member of the Nicodemus Town Company. Though Hill helped set up Nicodemus, he quickly bolted to create a new town and campaigned for the county seat. When a vote was taken Nicodemus received the fewest votes of any locale.
Hopes for a railroad stop were dashed as well. In 1887 two different railroad lines seemed destined to go through Nicodemus but neither did. The Union Pacific Railroad came the closest in 1888 as surveyors began to lay down tracks in the town’s direction but the line ultimately never reached Nicodemus. It chose to go six miles south instead, through the railroad camp of Bogue. Many business owners left Nicodemus and took their shops to Bogue, sometimes bringing entire buildings with them. Combined with severe drought in the 1890s the town of Nicodemus had little hope for economic success. Still, the homesteaders of Nicodemus Township persevered and maintained a tight-knit community, one that endures to this day.
The Black towns of Oklahoma acted as another crucial exception to the disenfranchisement and poverty of Black Americans following Reconstruction. More than fifty all-Black towns existed in Indian/Oklahoma Territory, the biggest concentration of Black settlements in the country. The majority of communities developed first in Indian Territory which had been reduced to the size of present-day Oklahoma. Oklahoma became a Territory in 1890 by halving the remaining Indian Territory; by then Indian Territory already housed a distinct mix of Black and Indigenous people. Many Creeks had owned Black slaves who were freed after the Civil War and became landowners in Indian Territory. Combined with more freed people escaping the South a notable population of nonwhites developed. Creek slaves did not exactly welcome freed slaves from the South considering them encroaching settlers. It created real animosity between the two groups. In the end, though, the only categorical difference that mattered was “not white”; all Black people would be segregated in schools and districts away from whites. Black people and Black towns would be lumped together by white settlers and the state, much like they considered diverse Indigenous nations and their homelands as “Indians” and “Indian land.”
The General Allotment/Dawes Act in 1887 ordered further division of Indian lands into individual homesteads which further dismantled Indigenous practices, culture, and space. It allotted 160 acres to each head of the household much like the Homestead Act did. But these homesteads were subjected to excessive state taxes causing many families to sell their rectangular lots to white settlers. The stated goal of the Dawes Commission was assimilation, to finally “civilize” the Indian. But the Secretary of Interior boasted that through allotment “the United States had finally determined to break down the autonomy of the Five Tribes and erect a white man’s state upon the ruins of the Indian governments.”[16] Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907, becoming the final contiguous U.S. state to occupy an area designated as Indian Territory. Statehood would cement white political power, as the land allotment process guaranteed white economic power.
The new state’s constitutional convention largely excluded Black delegates and ignored Black interests. In fact, the president of the convention considered it “an entirely false notion that the Negro can rise to the equal of a white man.”[17] Without any of the historical customs of the South, Oklahoma would legally erect Jim Crow society, statute by statute. Indeed, the very first statute passed after statehood was Jim Crow segregation. As opposed to the freedom and self-sufficiency of Black towns, the state forced Blacks into mixed but racially segregated communities, incapable of self-support. White settlers took part in a wide-ranging effort to dismantle Black wealth, which sometimes included taking land by force and running Blacks out of town. Some counties saw white farmers take oaths to never rent, lease, or sell land to Blacks. In Tulsa, a local ordinance prevented Black residents from moving onto any block that was mostly white. The lines of segregation and statehood enforced the boundary lines originally drawn by the rectangular survey and then allotment. Oklahoma – once envisioned as a Black state or an Indian State – became one of the most stringently segregated states in the Union.
There was little help available from law enforcement either. In an article detailing the widespread horror of lynching throughout 1915, the Black newspaper TheChicago Defender highlighted an instance in Oklahoma where a white mob lynched 45 Black men and two women, at once. “There was no pretense of a court trial,” the article read. “These organized murders are free under the law, and there is no pretense by the law-making power of the government, or the administrative branch to hinder or prevent mob activities.”[18] Successful Black towns faced violence, harassment, and outright destruction. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood gained a population of 10,000 and became so successful that it received the moniker, “Black Wall Street.” So, in 1921, a white mob destroyed the entire district filled with homes and businesses. Over two days the mob murdered hundreds of Black residents and destroyed over 1,000 homes. The terrorists received help from the police; some even dropped bombs from planes onto the neighborhood. Two years prior, whites in Oklahoma City dynamited the porch of a Black woman’s home for apparently violating the unofficial “dead line” boundary established to exclude Blacks from whites’ living quarters. Police made no arrests.[19]
The 1921 Greenwood massacre exposed the two Americas Black people had to navigate simultaneously: the idealized land of freedom and opportunity and a land of brutal discrimination and violent suppression. The massacre echoed the experiences of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe: hated and terrorized simply for being Jewish, ultimately expelled from towns through violent pogroms. In fact, some Jewish store owners who had moved to Tulsa recognized the similarities and helped hide the families of their Black employees and other community members until the desolate streets were safe again.[20]
Figure 8: Greenwood residents searching through the rubble of the Tulsa Massacre, June 1921. Source: Oklahoma Historical Society.
Black towns in the West played a pivotal, though often overlooked, role in the long struggle for African American freedom and equality. The settlements offered freed slaves land and community, and the hope for self-sufficiency and prosperity. Staying in the South was untenable after Reconstruction ended. Many Blacks eventually migrated to cities, but some tried homesteading on the Great Plains. The opportunity to do so wasn’t as open as it was for other homesteaders, to whom Congress granted 160 acres through the Homestead Act. Black homesteading came without the same foundation provided by the government. Land was instead available through the establishment of all-Black communities, where residents could navigate rural life and racial hostility together.
Figure 9: The Black towns of Kansas and Oklahoma.
Black homesteaders faced the same difficulties that all farmers had to contend with across the West. The harsh climate was unpredictable and big capitalists priced out small family farms, usually through crooked means. But Black farmers had to navigate additional obstacles, simply for being Black. The gridded survey system converted public lands into individual rectangular sections, making it easier for Congress to transfer and tax public land. Its straight lines and rigid boundaries also made it easier to segregate those who did not “fit” into the boxes of dominant American society. This had disastrous effects for Indigenous populations; it also made it simpler for white settlers and local governments to keep Black Americans on the outside and at a distinct disadvantage. Their race, more so than economic competition, represented something white Americans needed to “protect” their homes from, at any cost.
So, a fatigued Martin Luther King Jr., had it right. Black Americans had been kept bootless in a society that insisted on men lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps. A century after it freed its slaves, the U.S. maintained severe racial inequality. King had led the civil rights movement to fight for integration and voting rights, dismantling Jim Crow and securing basic civil rights. But Blacks were still fighting for the chance to access wealth and hadn’t seen major improvements. For more than a century, no matter what Black settlers, homesteaders, or independent communities did, they faced terror and exclusion. Entire communities were often expelled from their towns. Yet, unlike other intentional communities, the members of Black towns had not sought to withdraw from mainstream capitalist society, nor to create a blueprint for a new and improved way of life. They simply sought to live productively and peacefully without constant fear of mob violence or police harassment. They did not try to overthrow any existing government, terrorize, or wage war on white civilians…they just wanted to be. Freely and openly. But Dr. King still had to explain to Sander Vanocour in 1967 that Black people in America wanted to be treated as people. Human beings, equal to others. Tragically, that was – and continues to be – too much to ask in the U.S.
Gary Stein is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Southern California. He is currently working on a dissertation titled, “Outside the Box: Opposing the Grid and Its Apparatus in Three Western Posts, 1850-1980.” To learn more about his work, read his last post for our blog, “Reading a Settler-Colonial Landscape.” You can also watch him in conversation with Bill Deverell on our Vimeo channel:https://vimeo.com/420345934.
[2] Martin Luther King, Jr., interview with Sander Vanoucor, 8 May 1967.
[3] See D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America (1991); James Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998).
[4] Thomas Jefferson, Query XIX, in Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffleton (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 170.
[5] See Sean M. Kammer, “Railroad Land Grants in an Incongruous Legal System,” Law and History Review 35, no. 2 (2017); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (1991).
[6] Paul W. Gates, The History of Public Land Law Development (1968).
[7] See Paul W. Gates, “The Homestead Law in an Incongruous System” American Historical Review 41 (1936). Gates would backtrack slightly on his famous argument, acknowledging somer positive effects of the Homestead Act.
[8] See Eric Foner, Reconstruction; James Loewen, Sundown Towns (2018). Loewen includes a table of the startling number of Sundown Towns still in existence in the U.S. today.
[9] See Jacob Friefeld, et al., “African American Homesteader ‘Colonies’ in the Settling of the Great Plains,” Great Plains Quarterly (2019): 11-37.
[10] Kansas had gained the reputation as a “promised land” and bastion for freedom, notably after the Bleeding Kansas saga and bold anti-slavery actions of John Brown.
[11] Nicodemus National Historic Site, main house exhibit.
[12] Charlotte Hinger, Nicodemus: Post-Reconstruction Politics and Racial Justice in Western Kansas (2016), 37.
[13] See Jacob Friefeld, et al., “African American Homesteader ‘Colonies’ in the Settling of the Great Plains,” Great Plains Quarterly (2019): 13.
[14] Don Burden et al., Historic Resource Study: Nicodemus National Historic Site (National Park Service, 2011).
August 27, 2022, marked the thirtieth anniversary of the permanent closure of the General Motors Van Nuys plant. Local periodicals observed the date by profiling the last Chevrolet Camaro to roll off the Van Nuys assembly line. Signed by over 2000 auto plant workers, the red interior and black laced Camaro symbolized “a vanished era of labor” that had defined the San Fernando Valley during the latter twentieth century. Industrial hubs like the General Motors auto plant (Van Nuys) the Rocketdyne aero jet facility (Canoga Park), and the Lockheed-Martin Vega factory (Burbank) had transformed the bucolic flatlands of the San Fernando Valley into a locus of post-World War II defense and automobile manufacturing. But by August 1992, those days were decidedly over. The Valley’s industrial crown jewel—the GM auto plant—is now “The Plant,” a diffuse shopping center of box stores.
For the thousands of auto plant workers who lost their jobs on August 27th, 1992, the thirtieth anniversary of the plant’s closure is especially poignant. Many had worked to meet their ‘30 years and out’ retirement plans when GM shuttered its Van Nuys doors. Now, those same workers would have to contend with what ‘thirty years out’ had meant for them, their families, and their friends. What was it like to work at GM Van Nuys on the eve of closure? How did plant closure alter workers’ realities and communities? Studying how former auto workers forged a sense of belonging in the face of imminent plant closure and in its aftermath enhances our understanding of deindustrialization and its varied legacies, particularly in Southern California. It offers insights into how late twentieth-century economic restructuring, especially the decline of US auto manufacturing, produced liminal identities and new forms of social membership.
The entrance to the General Motors Van Nuys Auto Plant c1947 when it opened. Courtesy of the UAW 645 Local Facebook page.
Unlike other deindustrializing cities in the Northeast and Midwest, little has been written of the 2,600 employees who either lost their jobs when the Van Nuys plant shut its doors or parted ways in anticipation of its closure. But “rust” also came to the Sunbelt. Plant closure catapulted workers into a state of limbo. A considerable number became transplants and quickly relocated to extant plants in the Midwest. Others stayed put in the San Fernando Valley. A sizeable number of these former employees took the company buyout and retired without full pensions. Others collected unemployment while they waited for their local chapter, United Auto Workers 645, to broker a longer-term, potentially more comprehensive deal with management. Still others traded industrial labor for the service sector after training at regional community colleges. The economic phenomenon of deindustrialization had arrived in Southern California.
The “Plant” located on the 100-acre lot that once served as the GM Auto Plant Van Nuys. Photo by Wendy Cheng, 2008.
In the aftermath of plant closure, auto workers faced the formidable task of forging a new sense of belonging. The Van Nuys plant had granted workers earning power to purchase homes and support their families. But it had also been a site of solidarity, friendship, and chosen family. As many labor historians have observed, closed shops like the GM auto plant built not just industrial commodities but also communities. Out of exacting manual labor came kinship networks. Writing about auto workers in the industrial Midwest, historian Steven High notes that “memories of factory work tended to be framed around the metaphor of home and family. Working in the mill or factory was invariably described in interviews in familiar terms: ‘a home atmosphere,’ ‘a second home,’ or a ‘family affair.’” When the Van Nuys plant closed, those workplace families would change and members would have to find ways to reconstitute their attachment to each other and the place they called home.
General Motors opened the Van Nuys plant in 1947. Initially the plant offered one shift for over one thousand workers. Line workers built Chevrolet trucks and shells for GM’s Fisher Body Division. By the early 1970s, the plant had a second shift and nearly 3000 employees. In 1977, assembly transitioned to the sexy but inefficient Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds. At the height of the plant’s production two years later, just over 5000 unionized workers reported daily for work. With thousands of employees spread across five divisions and divided into two shifts, employees developed simple but effective means of establishing community.
As Alex Gomez, a thirty-eight-year GM veteran notes, a sense of belonging among workers began the day he arrived at the job: “[Management] gives you three days to learn a job, and if you didn’t learn the job, they’d try you on another job. And if you can’t get that one, then you’re out the door.”[1] The pressure workers faced while being “hired in” created a sense of vulnerability that more seasoned workers met with care and compassion. “When I started in the final line, in the bumper pit, they told me to go in the pit and I had to tighten the front, the front driver’s side bumpers, while the guys were literally back-to-back on a real narrow pit. The people with me were a tall Black guy named Key and then the one above me was another Black guy named Willie. You know they’d tell me ‘Hey kid, let us know if you have any problems, we’ll try to fix it before we have to stop the line.’”[2] Alex was hired in on August 13, 1973, in large part thanks to his buddies in the pit.
For other workers on the line, it was not gate loading, spot welding, or soft trimming that fused social bonds. For example, the plant was too loud. As one former auto worker elaborated, “We can have a conversation with the operator next to us, but in intervals because the plant floor is loud, we can’t hear. There are bells, and buzzers, and the clink of the chain and the voices of hundreds of people.”[3] Instead, workers shared leisure moments at nearby “satellite areas.” UAW records bear clues of how workers bonded in these satellite areas. For instance, on December 30th, 1970, representatives of the UAW Local 645 lobbied management for heartier vending machine food: “The Union stated that the meat in the sandwiches in the vending machines is very meager, particularly in the barbeque beef sandwiches. Furthermore, some food dated 12/22 was vended on 12/29 in the final repair area.” One can imagine what repair area workers had to say to each other and to their union about those measly and expired barbeque beef sandwiches. Management refused to put televisions in the plant’s cafeteria or other satellite areas so coworkers exchanged words in those spaces. At times those words were acrimonious. Most times, though, they helped forge lifelong friendships. Ernie Combs, a veteran worker of thirty years, reflected that “I had a lot of friends. I had a lot, you know, and that many years, you, you get kind of dependent, you’re dependent on the place for your livelihood.”[4]
Satellite areas were one place that workers established community. The most popular spaces, however, were local businesses where workers decompressed on their lunch breaks or after their shifts. There was Mike’s Pizza and Carl’s Jr. But it was the three nearby dive bars that best fostered community among workers. As Roger Hammon reflected, “As for nearby outside activities, the bars across the street were the closest places to go during lunch breaks and after work, and I can remember two of them: The Trophy Room and Chevy Ho.” Ernie Combs also remembered sharing pints at Chevy Ho’s with his coworkers: “Most everybody liked to drink beer.”[5] If it wasn’t Chevy Ho or the Trophy Room, it was Opie’s, a watering hole owned by Flower Ny, a woman of Vietnamese descent.
Besides beer and conversation, the bars offered workers a seat to rest their weary bones. As one auto worker recalled about the body shop, “The line starts and we move sideways, continuously as we work, we can’t stand still because the line will move away from us. The floor is concrete, and if we are lucky we’ll have a decent mat beneath our feet. If not, we better have on good shoes, and then it really doesn’t matter…our feet are going to hurt. We will be on our feet all day, eight hours, nine hours, ten hours, eleven hours.” One can viscerally feel the relief of an open bar stool.
At Chevy Ho’s or Opie’s, it’s likely that workers discussed their shifts, gossiped about friction between union and management, or shared news of their families. It’s also likely that they planned their next camping or fishing trip. A beloved pastime of Ernie Combs and his four closest plant buddies, fishing, became one of the ways plant workers shared their time off: “My best friends were Mexican guys, and a couple Black guys. We liked to fish and we’d go down to Yuma [Arizona]. And we enjoyed each other’s company all the time. Yeah. We’d go fishing every chance we got, take vacations and go fishing down to Yuma…we would go down there sometimes and spend a week and a half on the canal, fishing for catfish, and have a good time.”
Ernie Combs’ fishing crew symbolized how plant work fostered friendships across racial lines. Indeed, multiracialism was a defining feature of the GM auto plant in Van Nuys and belied monolithic representations of the San Fernando Valley as the wellspring of white “homeowner populism” and the antibusing movement. As one Los Angeles Times reporter put it, “Inside the plant, Grandy, a white Minnesota native, worked alongside an African American from Louisiana, a Mexican immigrant and an Asian American from San Francisco. All were lured to the factory by high wages that promised a better life. Despite their different backgrounds, many workers say they formed lasting kinships, a bond that made the hard labor bearable.” If plant work did not necessarily build friendships across the color line, it at least put individuals of different racial and ethnic backgrounds in close proximity. As Mark Masaoka, an electrician and unit chairman of Local 645 explained it, “[the work] was a valuable way for people of various races to get socialized. You may not eat lunch with black workers, but you work next to them and talk to them and learn about their communities, their lives.” In a city marred by residential discrimination, the plant helped dismantle spatial segregation and racial biases.
Throughout the early 1970s, workers at the Van Nuys plant weathered general strikes and temporary layoffs. The temporary layoffs cautioned workers about what they stood to lose if the plant closed. Alex Gomez recalled the eighteen-month layoff he and his buddies faced from 1974 to 1976: “I was getting tired of partying and there was nothing to do, I was wondering if I was gonna have a job later.” Initially, workers relished the free time and late nights. Soon, they languished in abeyance and longed to be back at the plant. The work provided purpose and structure. It was where they communed with friends. And the money was not bad either. In the mid-1970s workers’ hourly wages averaged $6 or $7, over $30 today.
Then came the closures.
For decades, California had the most reliable and profitable market for automobile production and sales. But by the late 1970s, a perfect storm of international competition, oil crises, and stagflation led the Big Three (Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors) to fundamentally restructure domestic manufacturing, especially in California. Rather than absorb shipping and labor expenses for a nationwide production system, executives chose to centralize auto production in the Midwest or across the border in Canada.
Between 1980 and 1983, six of California’s auto plants closed. The closure of the General Motors plant in South Gate was deeply felt by Van Nuys workers. As the historian Becky Nicolaides explains, “South Gate lay directly in the line of fire, losing more than 12,500 jobs by the mid-1980s.” When the GM plant in South Gate closed in 1983, hundreds of African American workers who resided in South Los Angeles became transplants at the Van Nuys plant. In the late 1980s, Eric Mann, a long-term civil rights and labor activist, and leader of the campaign to keep the Van Nuys plant reflected on the South Gate closure: “With closure of the GM Southgate plant, many workers transferred to Van Nuys, of whom approximately 50 percent were Black. Many of the Southgate workers live in the South Central Los Angeles area, the heart of L.A.’s Black community, in cities like Lynwood, Maywood, Inglewood, and Compton.”
South Gate transplants who landed at the Van Nuys plant joined a greater diaspora of auto workers that had grown considerably by 1983. As High observed, auto plant closures, especially those in and around Detroit, produced a growing population of displaced workers. “I-75 Gypsies,” as they self-identified, traveled from plant to plant, often without their families, in the hopes of accruing enough work to retire with a full pension. As one of High’s interlocutors reflected, “We are the people who shut down plants up and down I-75. We have no home plants. We are very hardened people. We are very thick-skinned but we were also very good people because we’ve been at all the battles in the war called the automotive industry.”
Like the I-75 gypsies, South Gate transplants existed in a liminal space between their former lives at the South Gate plant and their new posts in Van Nuys. As Mann notes, writing in the late 1980s, “[South Gate workers] drive over forty miles each way to work, since they do not want to give up their homes, and, after having lived through one plant closing, they certainly won’t uproot themselves based on the tenuous long-term future at Van Nuys.” Even though most South Gate transplants were able to keep their homes, plant closure meant adjusting to lengthy commutes, and a new workplace culture. Although it took time for South Gate transplants to acclimate to the culture of the Van Nuys plant, it was, ironically, company threats of closure that would help transplants find a sense of belonging at their new location.
By 1981, GM’s plans to reduce production in California were common knowledge. A small group of Van Nuys workers, led by Pete Beltran, UAW 645 President, and Mann, then a recent transplant from the GM Milpitas plant, began quietly mobilizing to resist plant closure. Mann and Beltran harnessed their experience as veterans in the Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Asian/Pacific, civil rights, and antiwar movements to strategize a successful movement far in advance of any announcements made by management. They spent the next two years building a multiracial coalition of auto workers. They framed their campaign in a larger, more transnational struggle against U.S. imperialism and white supremacy.
Mann and Beltran understood that auto workers experienced differential racialization and, as organizers, they would have to address those differences with sensitivity. For instance, although the majority of Van Nuys auto workers were Latinx, they experienced racial discrimination distinctly. Campaign organizers noted that Chicano workers, often with higher levels of seniority in the plant, and bearing the scars of linguistic discrimination, did not necessarily want the campaign to be bilingual. Whereas more recent Mexican immigrant workers felt strongly that all materials be translated into Spanish and all meetings be held in both English and Spanish. More to the point, many monolingual Mexican workers felt that the translation provided at organizing meetings was insufficient. The solution they proposed was to purchase United Nations-style headphones and hire skilled interpreters for larger organizational meetings.
As a transplant himself, Mann was aware that seniority could hinder unity among home plant and transplant auto workers at Van Nuys. Indeed in 1983, when the campaign was on the verge of going public, GM had only recently closed its plant in South Gate. At first Van Nuys workers looked upon South Gate transplants with suspicion. If former South Gate workers came with seniority, they could bump a Van Nuys worker from his or her position or shift. On the other hand, South Gate workers could easily become resentful of Van Nuys workers who had better jobs but far less time than them in the company. Mann knew he would have to convince these workers of their mutual dependence and what they all risked losing if the Van Nuys plant closed for good.
Mann, Beltran, and the campaign’s other leaders maintained that the campaign’s success hinged on the involvement of the city’s Black and Latinx communities. [6] Because the Van Nuys plant had been so profitable—and that it was one of the last auto plants in Los Angeles—it attracted workers not just from the San Fernando Valley but across Los Angeles county. As Mann noted, “GM Van Nuys had its tentacles, you could say, in so many parts of the city.”[7] Considering that the Van Nuys workforce was predominantly Latinx, it was less challenging for campaign leaders to amass support from the city’s most prominent Latinx civil rights and labor leaders. Dr. Rodolfo Acuña, of California State University, Northridge, was one of the first to lend his support. The renowned Father Luis Olivares soon joined and became a highly vocal supporter. The campaign even got Cesar Chávez to speak at their inaugural rally on May 15, 1983.
Leaders within the Black community, however, had their own concerns. When campaign leaders attended the Baptist Ministers Conference, it became clear that Black clergymen were understandably apprehensive about supporting a campaign “up in the Valley”—a place infamous for its opposition to school desegregation. Mann assured the audience that campaign leaders were trenchant antiracists, and, in fact, many were veterans of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The most compelling argument, though, was the presence of hundreds of Black transplants who needed the Black community’s support to prevent GM from displacing them once again. In a recent interview, Mann insisted that the campaign’s success “took the Black community. See, the unique thing I was able to do is to be in an overwhelmingly Latino plant and go into South Central, and convince the Black community cause they did not see Van Nuys as friendly. They thought it was white. They said, ‘Wait a minute, you want me to go up and save a plant from a bunch of fucking racists? I said, wait, wait, hold on. I hate those people [referring to the supporters of Busstop, the campaign to stop school integration]. No, this plant is mostly Latino. And I worked at South Gate, and there’s over 500 Black workers over there and you don’t have South Gate, all you got is Van Nuys and even though Van Nuys doesn’t emotionally ring your bell, it should, you should come over there because those Black workers need you.’”[8]
May 15, 1983, Local 645 President Pete Beltran (right), Cesar Chavez and Maxine Waters (center), join picketers at the Rally to Keep GM Van Nuys Open. Courtesy of the California State Northridge University Special Collections Digital Archive.
On May 15, 1983, the campaign officially launched at a rally held right outside the plant. With high-profile speakers such as Ed Asner, Representative Howard Berman, Cesar Chavez, Maxine Waters, and Bishop Juan Arzube (the highest-ranking Latino official in the Catholic Archdiocese), it was clear that the campaign posed a veritable threat to management. Yet beyond the threat to boycott GM products, the May 15th rally demonstrated that plant closure was about far more than job loss. It was about what closure would spell for the community of workers and businesses of Van Nuys. It was about the friendships forged at Opie’s Bar. It was about Opie’s owner, Flower Ny, who risked losing her livelihood and sense of belonging as a recent immigrant from Vietnam. Bishop Arzube stirred the crowd with a deeply resonant appeal: “La cuestión realmente en juego es esta. ¿General Motors tiene una responsibilidad con esta comunidad que los apoyó y los ha apoyado durante 37 años?/The question is this: Does General Motors have a responsibility to this community that supports and has supported them for thirty-seven years?”
Van Nuys Auto Workers in the Campaign to Keep Van Nuys Open. Rally held on May 15, 1983, in front of the GM Auto Plant on Van Nuys Blvd. Courtesy of the California State Northridge University Special Collections Digital Archive.
The Van Nuys plant lasted another nine years. In this way, the campaign was triumphant. It not only forestalled closure but also helped fortify a community of auto workers from across Los Angeles. Ironically, it was the specter of closure that more deeply united workers and solidified their sense of belonging to each other and to the Van Nuys community. As Mann later reflected, the “campaign did not take place in the revolutionary ‘Sixties’ but the counter-revolutionary times of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Not in the period of great labor upheaval of the 1930s and Black-led workers struggles of the 1960s and 1970s but in a period of union defensiveness in the brutal age of plant closings.” But feel-good history this is not. Not even the campaign’s success could parry the inevitable. The rust also came to the Sunbelt. Deindustrialization hit Van Nuys just as it had so many other manufacturing communities of the Midwest and Northeast. As it happened there, plant closures and deindustrialization thrust many Van Nuys employees into the diaspora of auto workers who would crisscross the country in search of continued work. Nonetheless, revisiting how Van Nuys workers built deeper attachments to each other and an even stronger claim to their community complicates our understanding of this recent history and its lingering impact on Southern California today.
United Auto Workers, c1990s. Robin Dunitz mural painted to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Auto Workers. Located on the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Blythe Street, near the Local 645 headquarters.
Julia Brown-Bernstein is a PhD candidate in the department of History. Her research examines the relationship between neoliberalism, citizenship, and belonging in the post-World War II era. Her dissertation is a history of the central San Fernando Valley as it underwent demographic shifts and economic restructuring from the 1970s to the early 2000s. It examines how immigrants not only made the region a transnational crossroads, linking communities from the Southern Cone to South Korea, but also how they shaped US political life and culture. Her work sheds light on how neoliberal policies of the latter twentieth century altered who belongs and what it means to be a citizen in a privatizing world.
[1] Julia Brown-Bernstein interview with Alex Gomez, Los Angeles, California, September 27, 2022.
We have found restoration in the Tetons. Just weeks ago, ICW brought staff, a group of Ph.D. students, and carefully chosen guests to Grand Teton National Park for a four-day retreat. We spend as much time within sight of the Tetons; their sheer grandeur lifts all spirits. We take in the sounds and scents of the surroundings with daily group hikes and, when we pause at the edge of a mountain lake for lunch, we hear from one another about history, writing, and teaching. At night, we stargaze together, and then make our way to tiny cabins interspersed in aspens, black hawthorns, and evergreens, some of them fluorescent by day in autumn colors of yellow, golden, and red.
Photo by USC Postdoctoral Fellow Naomi Sussman.
Our students, ourselves, and our guests come away renewed. Doctoral students breathe more deeply as they learn about professional opportunities from guests, and the guests encourage our students to think broadly about career goals. In our recent trip, we brought along the Chief Historian of the U.S. Forest Service, a scholar of the overland trail experience in the 19th century, and a senior public historian from The Smithsonian.
Julia Brown-Bernstein – historian of Southern CA suburban identity/race – recalled that both mornings, “the Tetons were shrouded in a thick cloud cover. We knew they loomed behind the granite sky but we couldn’t fully discern their majestic shape. [From Phelps Lake to Lake Taggart, never] had I seen so many shades of grey. As we walked, often single file or in pairs, we discussed our work’s many challenges and satisfactions…Our conversations were silenced by Elk calls. Lakeside, we ate boxed lunches and kept daring chipmunks at bay. By the time we arrived back…each day, the clouds had parted. Sun rays radiated through the Aspens. The Aspens in the sere and yellow leaf.” She continued, “After two years of isolation, from each other and, at least for myself, the natural world’s many wonders, our visit…renewed my belief in life’s many possibilities. Like our hikes to the lakes, many of us graduate students have ventured forth unsure of what lies ahead. We can make out the contours of our future professional lives, but their…meaning, remains elusive to us. [We] listened to [those] who have found their work’s meaning…Their stories resonated deeply with me and restored my faith in this degree as an instrument for the public good. It may be trite to put it this way, but as the clouds had parted to reveal the mountain peaks, so did [this place] uncover the many professional trails that lie ahead.”
Julia Brown-Bernstein and Tahireh Hicks. Photo by Naomi Sussman.
Will Cowan – historian of climate change/weather – wrote that “the first thing I did was go down to the shore of the Snake [River]. Staring nearly into the sun, I listened to the river rush along, and I took the deepest breath I’d had in ages…We witnessed…the magic of the land- and waterscapes, and the charisma of the plants and fellow creatures of the Tetons. One of the most healing aspects for me was gazing up at that shock of stars strewn across the predawn sky. The Muries…were with us throughout. I heard the Gray Owls each early morning. And perhaps nothing was more reaffirming, more reassuring, more reinvigorating than reflecting on their love for each other and the networks of living and nonliving beings they fought so hard to protect.”
Abby Gibson plans to write her doctoral dissertation on “everyday acts of spiritual renewal.” “This weekend…could not have arrived at a better time for me as a learning scholar. During the weeks leading up to the trip as I worked on the prospectus for my dissertation, I felt intimidated by the enormous prospect of producing fresh and original scholarship…But under the looming shadow of the Grand Tetons and with the company of wonderful friends and mentors…, my energy and excitement for this next stage in my PhD journey has reignited. Being together in such a magnificent and mysterious place…reminded me just how important it is for our work as historians to be collaborative, and that we should never presume to conduct our work in isolation from both the places we study and the people who inspire us.”
Will CowanAbby Gibson
Graduate student Stanley Fonseca echoed his peers as to the soul-replenishing trip. “Amidst the incredible beauty of the Tetons in fall, the weekend was a beautiful combination of lively camaraderie and quiet contemplation…We all came away enriched by the connections both renewed and forged anew. I can imagine no better place, and no better way, to foster a sense of scholarly community and find new inspiration as I move towards the end of the PhD and into the job market!”
Last day on the family farm. Finally heaved myself out of bed early for a walk. My cousin sent me out across the harvested cornfield, down near a creek (roaring, as we had a big storm in the night). It was beautiful, and birds flew alongside me for minutes at a time. I did wonder about the story behind this homemade ladder, though there are apple and crabapple trees all around, so maybe it was an impromptu harvest. I had the entire landscape to myself as the sun came up.
Mystery ladderTrail
My mom and I said goodbye to my cousins, whose generous hospitality touched our hearts. On our way out of town, the two of us stopped to see my mom’s cousin, Jimmy, who is just ten days shy of 90. He greeted us warmly, had us in to his home, and the two cousins reminisced about this and that, reaching back eighty years and more. They shared a tender goodbye.
We made our way through a howling rainstorm towards Albany. Stopped at Canandaigua Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, and had lunch at a cute place just off the shoreline. On to Saratoga Springs – horse country, to be sure – and now settled in for the night in a BnB farmhouse, once again from the mid-19th century. Our innkeeper is a friendly young woman who bought the place a year ago and seems, to my eyes at least, to be making a go of it. She noted that the farmhouse had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and knowing just a bit about the proximity to Rochester, and Canada, I bet she’s right.
She recommended a charming pub and teahouse (such a combination!) to us for dinner. We drove the few miles there, and once we parked, I felt the college town vibe. “There’s a school here,” I said to my mom, “I can feel it. But I can’t for the life of me remember which one.” Skidmore College! My great aunt, an artist, went here (class of sometime in the late 1920s). She went off to New Mexico and, alongside dozens or more like-minded men and women, painted in the company of (or at least near to) Georgia O’Keeffe.
To Boston tomorrow, leisurely and easy. Flying west to Denver Saturday, and I return to Southern California on Sunday. I am excited to see my wife and kids (and three curs), and I look forward to being in class with my students mid-week.
Up early today; walked through the back of some of my cousin’s corn. The field had been recently harvested, so it was all stover, about two feet high. I was on a slightly-rutted part of the field where, I think, the tractors had laid the grass down flat. The dew soaked through my shoes. The faint trail turned into a dirt road, and that spit me out onto an empty country road. I walked up towards where it intersects with another lane. It was here, in the middle of the intersection, that my grandfather, driving some kind of early truck, hit a motorcyclist in about 1914. My granddad would have been 16 or 17 then. The crash broke the motorcyclist’s leg. “I think that fellow was a bank robber,” my granddad told me about seventy years later. “He had all his safecracking tools spread out on the road.” As I remember him telling me, both medical and law enforcement personnel responded to the scene.
Not far from here, a tiny burial ground sits amidst big trees. There can’t be more than about thirty or forty gravestones. Some are broken, some are in the brambles under the trees. But most are in pretty good shape, and the town tends the site well. About four or five families are well represented here, most of whom I’ve heard about from my mother, as she would have grown up with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who are buried here. Many small stones marking the grave of a child, including this broken one that memorializes a child of 13 months. One surname – Weed – was unfamiliar to my cousins and my mother, but these are the oldest in the cemetery: there are Weeds buried here as early as 1819. The Weeds died out or moved on, sometime before the Civil War.
Avon burial ground.
My mother and I went to the big cemetery in town so that we could pay respects to family. My grandmother and grandfather, great aunts and a great uncle, my mother’s brother. Here was my great great grandfather, the melodiously-named Horace Publius Virgilius Bogue (known to the family as “Alphabet Bogue”).
Midday was spent with my cousins over a lovely lunch at the main farmhouse. My mother and I visited the new barn, the one lifted up by Mennonite laborers. Here’s a picture of the barn and its tenants.
The new barn.
This evening we go into Rochester to see Fringe Fest; tomorrow we depart, making our way a bit slowly back to Boston over a few days. It’s colder here now, the skies are threatening, and I think this is likely to bring out a bit more fall color as we head southeast at week’s end.
We left “The Castle” in Amsterdam mid-morning today. We headed northwest to a small (really small) farming town outside Rochester, about three hours away. Our drive was uneventful, and I loved that we paralleled the Erie Canal a good chunk of the way. I’ve recently taught a little of that canal’s history (and have an Irish émigré ancestor who apparently worked digging it out). What a thrill it must have been to have that waterway open up so many opportunities for travel, commerce, different perspectives on time and space. My students and I just talked about a small collection of letters I have from a young man writing to his sweetheart in the early 1830s. He’s in one upstate New York town, she’s in another. But, he tells her in one breathless letter, he can travel to her in record time, thanks to the “new canal.” The canal had its heyday, but it (and that of others built at the same time) faded pretty quickly once the “Rail Road” arrived. And there it was, also parallel to the canal. Canal, railroad, the New York Thruway – about two hundred years of transit history side by side by side.
Our journey today had echoes of the violent colonial past. This or that name, that battlefield, that town where I knew a massacre of Indigenous people had taken place. And we were, after all, on the Mohawk Trail most all the day yesterday. Today it was more subtle – Indigenous names on, of all things, Thruway rest stops. Or a river. A bridge. Enduring, yes – I guess so. But faint. Although: we did stop for gas at a service station that had two entry doors. One to the convenience store and cashier, one to the “Over 18 Only” slot machines, and I could see the nearby high-rise casino (one of a great many Native casinos up and down the Thruway corridor).
By early afternoon, we had arrived in my mother’s hometown. We both knew our way around – she better than me, to be sure – and it wasn’t hard to drive to the center of this little village. My mom pointed out where she had a job as a cook when she was a teenager. We passed the cemetery where her parents and her brother are buried. We saw the site where her granddad had a mill long ago. On the outskirts of town, we drove by the home she grew up in (it had been a wedding gift to her parents from her grandfather). That home is now owned by a man who works for my cousin. My cousin, a salt of the earth man and farmer, is the fourth generation to own the family farm, and the men all have the same name: there was I, then II, then III, and now IV, my cousin.
Out at the farm, we are staying in an early 19th century farmhouse, which has been lovingly redone as a rental property. This is the view from my room on the second floor, looking out to the home where my cousin lives. He’s just put up a new milking barn for his Holsteins. It is a big, beautiful structure. Jim contracted with men from a nearby (or sort of nearby) Mennonite community to do the labor in putting the barn up. The work took about two weeks, once the pieces of the barn had been brought to the site. Jim told me that the work site was silent save for construction noises – no music, no loud talking – just labor. The crew took a 10:00 a.m. break every day, and they knocked off at exactly the same time each day.
Dinner up the hill where my other cousin lives. Lots of family talk, lots of love expended in my mom’s direction. I knew this farm and these woods as a boy – I used to wonder what I’d find if I went into those woods.
Tomorrow we’ll visit other kin, see the high school, and, lest you think this is all bucolic reverie, head to Rochester for “Fringe Fest,” a beloved, unconventional arts festival.
My mother and I drove into western Massachusetts and eastern central New York today and, in doing so, motored right into the pages of a Richard Russo novel. We deliberately chose state roads, this and that numbered route (there are a lot of them) and, as we traveled, the trees and scrub turned more yellow, some already tinged with orange and red.
Every town, it seemed, had a bigger or smaller river gorge. Every town, it seemed, had hulking brick mills that dated back at least to the early 19th century. I don’t know about “Satanic.” But they were almost all dark. Beautiful, in their own way, like shipwrecks up against each river and millpond. The towns, save for just a few that we drove through, are struggling – there’s only so many breweries that can start up in an old mill, I think, and make a go of it. The roads are pocked and scarred by the hard winters, and the road crews we saw looked to be doing their best to prep them for the coming snow and sleet. It was never hard to find the wealth or once-wealth in these towns: top of the hills, big and stately homes, many with Ionic or Doric (I confess I have forgotten the difference) columns out front. Some cared for, most not. The landscape is hilly, smaller Berkshires pointing to bigger ones as we got closer to the Massachusetts/Vermont/New York borders.
We got to The Clark, which I’ve always wanted to see. Closed on Mondays. But it was still worth it to see it and how it sits in its space against the hills about to erupt in autumn colors. It poured for a long while, the rain and wind yanking yellowing leaves into the air.
Marne at the Clark
By dusk, our day-in-the-novel took, well, a novel turn. I’ve wanted our lodging to be different, quaint if we could find it, but no chains, no motels. Last night’s BnB in Fitchburg was lovely, and innkeepers Ryan and Sarah (along with giant dogs Dexter and Winston) were warm and generous hosts. But tonight is something on its own terms. We are at the Amsterdam Castle, a colossal pile atop this village’s biggest hill. Turreted, red stone: it is a castle! But it didn’t start out that way – it’s this town’s late 19th-century armory. The Amsterdam burghers must have been sorely anxious about their town’s peace and probity to build something this big. It is remarkable inside, not least because there are many photographs of the late Queen of England, complete with God Save the King on the piped-in music and suits of armor standing sentry in the vast main hall. If it wasn’t all so interesting and fun, all the messages and symbols and metaphors would make my head hurt.
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