Institute on California and the West

Making Mexican Chicago 3-08-2023 by Institute on California and the West

ICW California & the World Series: Sarah Gualtieri Wednesday, February 19, 2020 USC Doheny Memorial Library Los Angeles is home to the largest population of people of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, Syrian and Lebanese migration, in particular, to Southern California has been intimately connected to and through Latin America. Arab Routes uncovers the stories of this Syrian American community, one both Arabized and Latinized, to...

"Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race" In Conversation with Genevieve Carpio (ICW Borderlands Series) Thursday, January 16, 2020 The Huntington Library There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West. In "Collisions at the Crossroads", Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire...

"Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands" Monday December 2, 2019 at The Huntington Library ICW Borderlands Series: In Conversation with Julian Lim, assistant professor of history at Arizona State University With the railroad’s arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican,...

"Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941" Thursday, November 21, 2109 at The Huntington Library ICW Borderlands Series: In Conversation with Jessica M. Kim, associate professor of history at California State University, Northridge In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico...

"Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1880-1917" Monday, October 21, 2019 at The Huntington Library ICW Borderlands Series: In Conversation with Andrew Offenburger, assistant professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio This book begins in an era when romantic notions of American frontiering overlapped with Gilded Age extractive capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexican...

Panel: Night Owls Moderator: Elizabeth Logan “Burglary in the Night” Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG “Nighttime Chicano Politics” Jorge Leal, Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow, American Studies and Ethnicity Department & History Department, USC “Night Scenes” Francesca Harding, Music Coordinator and Dj Afterword: Lynell George in Nighttime Los Angeles https://dornsife.usc.edu/icw/la-after-dark/

Moderator: David Ulin “Street Racing” Daniel Miller, Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times “Mammals on the Move” Miguel Ordeñana, Manager, Community Science Program, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County https://dornsife.usc.edu/icw/la-after-dark/

Moderator: Karin Huebner “Streets and the Night” Norma Isahakian, Executive Director, Bureau of Street Lighting, City of Los Angeles “Neon LA” Eric Lynxwiler, Board Member, Museum of Neon Art (MONA) “Parks and the Night in LA County” Clement Lau, AICP, DPPD, Departmental Facilities Planner https://dornsife.usc.edu/icw/la-after-dark/

Foreword: "Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin" by Gary Snyder, read by William Deverell David Ulin, "Noir Themes and the City" Panel: Night Skies Moderator: Jessica Kim “Archaeoastronomy” Bryan Penprase, Dean of Faculty, Undergraduate Program, Soka University of America “Plants and the Night in LA” Jim Folsom, Curator of the Botanical Gardens, The Huntington “Birds in the Night” Daniel Cooper, UCLA Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology https://dornsife.usc.edu/icw/la-after-dark/

Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018 with David Kipen and Lynell George May 7, 2019, The Huntington Join David Kipen and Lynell George as they discuss and read a few letters from "Dear Los Angeles." The City of Angels has played a distinct role in the hearts, minds, and imaginations of millions of people, who see it as the ultimate symbol of the American Dream. David Kipen, a cultural historian and avid student of Los Angeles, has scoured libraries, archives, and...

April 26, 2019 at USC Doheny Library with Chris Rockwell, Librarian, California State Railroad Museum Gordon Chang, Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities/Professor of American History, Stanford University and Co-Director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project Clay Stalls, Curator of California and Hispanic Collections, The Huntington Library Peter Blodgett, H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscript, The Huntington Library and Theresa Salazar,...

Monday, April 15, 2019 at the University of Southern California When the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet in the decades after Watts, the LAPD resisted all but the most limited demands for reform...

Join us for a discussion with Bryan Mealer and Joshua Wheeler, the authors of new books about hardscrabble times, places, and people in Texas and New Mexico. Mealer’s "The Kings of Big Spring," which has been called “the Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy,” is a saga of God, family, and oil across many generations of the author’s own family. Wheeler’s "Acid West," a collection of essays about Southern New Mexico, has been called a “freaky, stylish, heart-cracking-open book.” The evening’s...

Thursday, February 21, 2019 The Huntington Tyler Green speaks about his new book, "Carleton Watkins: Making the West American." Listen to a discussion between Tyler Green and ICW Director Bill Deverell about Tyler’s magisterial new biography of the great landscape photographer Carleton Watkins. This discussion ranges broadly across such topics as the West and the Civil War, the rise of Yosemite and the National Park idea, and the fascinating life of arguably the greatest photographer in all...

The Western Environment - Fall 2018 ICW lecture series Wade Graham in conversation with Daniel Lewis December 5, 2018, The Huntington "Braided Waters" sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii’s Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this study shows how the control of...

Under LA: Subterranean Stories Conference Welcome: William F. Deverell and David L. Ulin The Natural Underground: Moderator: William Deverell; Panelists: Robert de Groot (Seismicity), Joe Parker (Insects), Emily Lindsey (The Tar Pits) What lies beneath our Los Angeles feet? What is the connection between our terra firma and all that lies below? This conference explored the worlds below us and the inextricable ties that bind us to the mysteries of the subterranean. Hydrology, seismology,...

Under LA: Subterranean Stories Conference The Public Underground: Moderator: Geoff Manaugh; Panelists: Dan Sharp (Public Works), David Sloane (Burial), Mike Manville (Parking) What lies beneath our Los Angeles feet? What is the connection between our terra firma and all that lies below? This conference explored the worlds below us and the inextricable ties that bind us to the mysteries of the subterranean. Hydrology, seismology, petroleum engineering - each of these fields has a voice at...

Under LA: Subterranean Stories Conference The Militarized Underground: Moderator: Nathan Masters; Panelists: Sherman Mullin (Missiles), Peter Westwick (Bomb Shelters), M.G. Lord (Ideological Underground) What lies beneath our Los Angeles feet? What is the connection between our terra firma and all that lies below? This conference explored the worlds below us and the inextricable ties that bind us to the mysteries of the subterranean. Hydrology, seismology, petroleum engineering - each of...

Under LA: Subterranean Stories Conference The Cultural Underground: Carolina Miranda in conversation with Ron Athey Closing remarks, Karin Huebner What lies beneath our Los Angeles feet? What is the connection between our terra firma and all that lies below? This conference explored the worlds below us and the inextricable ties that bind us to the mysteries of the subterranean. Hydrology, seismology, petroleum engineering - each of these fields has a voice at this conference - as do...