Queering Desire from California
Việt Lê During and after my father’s two-year terminal illness, and my own simultaneous cancer scare (2000-2003), I became concerned with individual illness as a metaphor for the failure of ideology...
View ArticleIs Boyle Heights “Worth Saving”?
The History of Gentrification in a Historic Immigrant Gateway
View ArticleGreetings from Bakersfield!
Law Enforcement Corruption, White Supremacy, and Latinx Lives in California’s Deep Red South
View ArticleMilitary Industrial Sexuality
Urban California, Gay Liberation, and the Military Industrial Complex
View ArticleProtesting Displacement and the Right to the City
Anti-Gentrification Activism in Northeast Los Angeles
View ArticleFollowing the Moniker Trail: Hobo Graffiti and the Strange Tale of Jack...
Susan Phillips In his book The Road, Jack London describes his experiences living as a hobo. From hopping trains, begging, and doing time to writing graffiti, London’s book recounts his experiences...
View ArticleThe Tides that Erase: Automation and the Los Angeles Waterfront
With “Postcards,” creative non-fiction stories grounded in place, we aspire to create a new cartography of California. For us, literature and language are as much about marking and representing space,...
View ArticleThe Politics of Living and Dying
Rachel Grace Newman Lupe Gómez migrated to California from a small town in Zacatecas, Mexico when he was very young. It might seem that he chose to make his life north of the border, where he went to...
View ArticleYemeni Farm Workers and the Politics of Arab Nationalism in the UFW
Neama Alamri Growing up in the Central Valley, the history of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and Cesar Chavez loomed large. When teachers in school incorporated him into our history lessons, many of the...
View ArticleLA Oil Noir: Genre, Activism, and Spatial Justice in a City Made by Fossil Fuels
Miranda Trimmier Sometimes it’s hard to see the shape of the story you’re being told. As I understood it, the plot points laid out by my then-lover Bill went like this: The earthquake itself wasn’t...
View ArticleChinese Workers and the Transcontinental Railroad
Manu Karuka The Central Pacific Railroad transformed California from an overseas possession to a continental possession of the United States. Chinese railroad labor, organized under contract and...
View ArticleLunch Ladies and the Fight for School Food Justice: A Superhero Origin Story
Christine Tran Plagued by unsavory stories in American popular culture, the lunch lady has been a mocked and villainized figure for decades. Yet, as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds in real-time, lunch...
View ArticleRise Against the Machine: Interview with Adam Goodman
The rampant spread of coronavirus throughout the United States has illuminated undocumented migrants’ role as essential workers as well as their precarious position in this country. Indeed, Trump’s...
View ArticleSouth Bakersfield’s Confederate Remains
With “Postcards,” creative non-fiction stories grounded in place, we aspire to create a new cartography of California. For us, literature and language are as much about marking and representing space,...
View ArticleThe “Lost Cause” Goes West: Confederate Culture and Civil War Memory in...
This essay was originally published in California History, Vol 97, No. 1 Kevin Waite Where the monument once stood, only a gentle divot in the earth remains. Visitors to Hollywood Forever Cemetery...
View ArticleCalifornia and the 1918–1920 Influenza Pandemic
Published in collaboration with California History Diane M. T. North The 1918–1920 influenza pandemic remains the deadliest influenza pandemic in recorded history. It began in the midst of World War...
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