![]() ![]() Chapters four and five examine how and why Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and other Latinos, racialized as nonwhite, today constitute nearly half of the population found in the Los Angeles County jail system. While unsuccessful, white settlers left an indelible mark in their efforts to achieve their goals for their fair city. The goal: their removal from California and the United States more generally. Indeed, as City of Inmates reveals, the Chinese experienced nothing short of a reign of terror as violence, race riots, murder, and incarceration were common occurrences in late nineteenth-century Los Angeles. Viewed as a threat to the white, middle class, settler order envisioned for the growing City of Angels in the early twentieth century, city leaders made great efforts to round up and imprison unregulated, unproductive, unattached, and immoral poor white males.Ĭhapter three pays close attention to the legal and extra-legal ways white settler society worked to strip the human rights of nonwhites in Los Angeles, and the American West more broadly, particularly the Chinese. Chapter two explores the caging of white "tramps" or "hoboes" who proliferated at the end of the nineteenth century. In so doing, they effectively removed Natives from the land, denying them any claim to rightful possession. American migrants, used imprisonment to control Indians and use them as a pliable and expendable labor force. American conquest in 1848, when the propertied settler class of the Spanish-Mexican Californios, as well as enterprising white U.S. Incarceration, however, did not flourish until after Mexican Independence in 1821 and especially after the U.S. Chapter one opens the narrative by focusing on how Spanish invaders used violence, expulsion, spiritual conversion, and famine to purge Native Californians from the pueblo's landscape in the late 1700s and early 1800s. ![]() Lytle Hernández claims that, with the land wiped clean of the human debris threatening to pollute Anglo Saxon racial purity, white settlers in Los Angeles worked feverishly to build their own city on a hill.Ĭomposed of six chapters, City of Inmates traces the ways in which the process of settler colonialism-"the arc of an enduring conquest" (197)-impacted successive waves of Native and nonnative racialized peoples across two hundred years. A tool of conquest and colonization dating to the eighteenth century, settler colonialism focuses on eliminating or disappearing expendable racialized, or otherwise deviant, peoples from the landscape to make room for more deserving (read: white) colonists: "The swells of imprisonment and the attending realities of poverty, deportation, illness, and premature death, punctuated by all the police killings that surge through Native, black, and brown communities, are, in settler colonial terms, acts of elimination" (197). As Lytle Hernández argues, at the core of this history of incarceration, or what she calls "human caging," is settler colonialism. View the FAQ to learn more.City of Inmates charts the rise of mass incarceration in the modern metropolis of Los Angeles, which today boasts the largest population of imprisoned people found in any city across the United States.
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