Available From UC Press

Black and Brown in Los Angeles is a timely and wide-ranging, interdisciplinary foray into the complicated world of multiethnic Los Angeles. The first book to focus exclusively on the range of relationships and interactions between Latinas/os and African Americans in one of the most diverse cities in the United States, the book delivers supporting evidence that Los Angeles is a key place to study racial politics while also providing the basis for broader discussions of multiethnic America.

Students, faculty, and interested readers will gain an understanding of the different forms of cultural borrowing and exchange that have shaped a terrain through which African Americans and Latinas/os cross paths, intersect, move in parallel tracks, and engage with a whole range of aspects of urban living. Tensions and shared intimacies are recurrent themes that emerge as the contributors seek to integrate artistic and cultural constructs with politics and economics in their goal of extending simple paradigms of conflict, cooperation, or coalition.

The book features essays by historians, economists, and cultural and ethnic studies scholars, alongside contributions by photographers and journalists working in Los Angeles.

Josh Kun is an Associate Professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. His books include Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (California, 2005) and Songs in the Key of Los Angeles: Sheet Music and the Making of Southern California (Angel City Press, 2013). in 2016, he was the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.

Laura Pulido is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. Her books include Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (California, 2006) and A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (California, 2012).
 

"One of the most persuasive cultural conversations of the history of ‘black’ and ‘brown’ cross-racial formations in Los Angeles from the early twentieth-century to the present day. Josh Kun and Laura Pulido's skill in connecting diverse materials and theories by economists, historians, and ethnic studies scholars, the suggestiveness of many of the essayists’ insights and their passionate convictions about ethnicity and race in planetary California make Black and Brown in Los Angeles a timely, exciting, and groundbreaking book." --José David Saldívar, director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, Stanford University

"In this anthology, two of the foremost progressive scholars of Southern California draw attention to an extraordinary range of interactions between African Americans and Latinos in Southern California.  From banking and professional football fandom to residential segregation and popular music, Black and Brown Los Angeles does far more than highlight the paucity of conversations based upon the limited language of “conflict” or “cooperation.” Rather, this book offers a crucial roadmap for negotiating the complicated terrain of America’s most important racial metropolis." --Daniel Widener, author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles