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In the Shadows of Los Angeles traces the multiple struggles of African Americans, Chicanas/os, and white allies for fair housing and ethnic studies and against police brutality in the East San Gabriel Valley from the late 1950s through the 1970s. They fought for racial integration, equal access to the American dream, and the promise of Black spaces for community, joy, and love as part of a larger movement working toward change within suburban neighborhoods. In defiance of the historical erasure that posits suburbs as solely white spaces, Gilda L. Ochoa details the often-overlooked efforts of activists, including many women and girls of color, who have advocated for their communities against a patriarchal, white-supremacist society across generations—and laid the foundation for contemporary struggles for housing justice and resistance to police brutality.
Gilda L. Ochoa is Professor of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at Pomona College. An award-winning author who lives and writes in the East San Gabriel Valley, her previous books include Becoming Neighbors in a Mexican American Community and Academic Profiling.
“Ochoa carefully excavates the suburban civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, illuminating how Black communities fought for self-determination and challenged white supremacist institutions, at times in solidarity with Mexican Americans and other allies. In the Shadows of Los Angeles expands on prevailing conceptualizations of political activism to center community care, belonging, and organizing led by women and young people. This book offers a powerful model for countering Black erasure in suburban historical narratives, uncovering hidden histories, and deepening our understanding of past struggles and those that remain.”—Veronica Terriquez, Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and author of Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities