Mixed Race Studies

The L.A. Scene: Teaching Race and Popular Music in the 1950s

Organization of American Historians Magazine of History
Volume 26, Issue 4
pages 17-20
DOI: 10.1093/oahmag/oas030

Luis Alvarez, Associate Professor of History
University of California, San Diego

In 1956, Little Julian Herrera had one of the biggest rhythm and blues hits of the year in Los Angeles. His soulful, doo-wop style ballad, “Lonely Lonely Nights,” turned Herrera into an overnight sensation. He was soon known across the city for spectacular live performances that later drew comparisons to a young James Brown. He became a teen idol and heartthrob among Mexican American girls on the Eastside. What many of his fans may not have known, however, was that Herrera was neither Mexican American nor from L.A. He was an East Hungarian Jew who had run away from his Massachusetts home at age eleven. His given name was Ezekiel, though his probation officer knew him as Ron Gregory. After hitchhiking to Southern California, he was taken in by a Mexican American family in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East L.A. and eventually took their surname as his own.

“Lonely Lonely Nights” was produced by the legendary Johnny Otis. Born the son of Greek immigrants in Vallejo, California, Otis came of musical age as a drummer and bandleader playing African American jazz and blues joints along Central Avenue in L.A. By the mid-1950s when he helped launch Little Julian Herrera into local stardom, Otis already was a formidable figure in the L.A. music scene who soon became known as the “Godfather of Rhythm and Blues.” He produced records, hosted radio and television programs, and organized dances and concerts. He was also regularly harassed by local authorities for creating and promoting music whose performers and audiences often crossed racial lines. Otis, in fact, considered himself “black by persuasion.” He once remarked, “Genetically, I’m pure Greek. Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community”. In a scenario emblematic of the racial diversity of L.A.’s 1950s…

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Situating mixed-race households in neighborhood contexts

University of Georgia
May 2007

Margaret Anne Hudson

Census 2000 counted approximately 1.7 million White/Latino mixed-race/multiethnic households in the US. Unfortunately, most research is limited to similar statistical accounting. Very little research moves beyond frequency counts to describe racial and ethnic identities in White/Latino households or the relationships of White/Latino households to segregated US urban terrain. Thus, this dissertation project is a case-study of the LA geography of White/Mexican households. White/Mexican households are the most numerous White/Latino household-type and, in LA, their population size is equal to that of Black same-race households.

Unlike previous work by geographers, I theoretically examine White/Mexican household locations with regard to racialization theory and feminist and cultural studies notions of difference; not simply race-blind theories about individual-level ethnic assimilation through out-partnerships with Whites. Using geographically-detailed and confidential 1990 census data from one in six LA area households, I link individual and household characteristics with census tracts and use dissimilarity and exposure indices, maps of neighborhood concentration rates, and residential attainment models to measure the segregation, concentration, and neighborhood racial compositions of White/Mexican households relative to: individuals from five non-Latino racial groups, groups of Mexican and other Latino individuals, and White same-race and Mexican co-ethnic households. Dissertation results indicate that neighborhood racial compositions and intra-urban residential geographies of White/Mexican households are in-between those of comparable White same-race and Mexican co-ethnic households. In contrast to White same-race households, White/Mexican households have more Mexican and Other Latino neighbors; relative to Mexican co-ethnic households, White/Mexican households have many more White neighbors. Residential attainment models find that, even after controlling for numerous household-level factors not accounted for in simple residential exposure calculations—i.e., household income and education levels, US or foreign-born nativity, and Spanish language use, etc.—White same-race and Mexican co-ethnic households that are equivalent to White/Mexican households do not share the same racially-defined residential space as White/Mexican households. Complex household-level racial affiliations appear to alter the residential locations of White/Mexican mixed-race households and, unlike predictions from assimilation theory, Mexican partnerships with Whites do not necessarily result in household residential patterns that are exactly like those of White same-race households.

Some Observations on Identity Problems in Children of Negro-White Marriages

Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease
Volume 146, Issue 3 (March 1968)
pages 249-256

Joseph D. Teicher (1912-2000)
University of Southern California School of Medicine

The Los Angeles County General Hospital population includes every case, and, inevitably, many Negro-white families present themselves for service at the hospital’s Child Psychiatry Unit. The problems of the children in these families are directly related to the fact that one parent is Negro and the other Caucasian. Such comments as “Any white woman who marries a Negro man is sick!” and “The children are always a mess!” are common, and yet no systematic research has been done in this area. As some of the unit’s staff began to explore the special problems of the children of Negro-white marriages, they became interested in refining the methods of studying these interracial families. The report that follows presents, in brief, a statement of the problem, a review of the literature, three case histories and a description of the study now in progress.

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A Premonition of Obama: La Raza Cosmica in America

New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ)
Volume 26 Issue 4
Pages 100 – 110
Published Online: 2009-10-26
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5842.2009.01119.x

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in 2007, was one of the 20th century’s greatest literary journalists. He personally witnessed the dramatic post-World War II upheavals of decolonization and revolution across what we used to call “the Third World” and set down his reflections in such best-selling books as The Emperor, about the fall of Haile Selassie [I] of Ethiopia, and Shah of Shahs, about the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. He served on NPQ’s editorial board until his death.

When I last saw Kapuscinski for coffee at the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw in the summer of 2005 he was busy preparing a lecture on Herodotus, the ancient Greek traveler and historian regarded as “the father of journalism.”

In 1987, NPQ brought Kapuscinski to Los Angeles to roam around and observe North America’s largest “Third World city.” He stayed at the New Seoul Hotel in the heart of Koreatown, venturing from there all the way down to Disneyland, Hispanic East L.A. and the wealthy Westside. At the end of each day, we sat down to gather his impressions.

Kapuscinski saw the United States as the place where the idea of “la raza cosmica”—the cosmic race—would be realized. For him, America was a premonition of the plural, racially mixed, culturally hybrid civilization the whole world would one day become. In a way, his insight was also a premonition of the presidency of Barack Obama, a self-described cultural and racial “mutt.” In a world where the contamination of globalization has sparked troubling yearnings for a return to purity, being a nation of mutts, Kapuscinski understood, is America’s competitive advantage.