Historians of mobility have referred to the past century as “the motoring century,” suggesting that the automobile has underpinned all areas of economic, social, and cultural life of the recent past.Footnote ¹ In her introduction to her first book, American Mobilities: Geographies of Class, Race, and Gender in US Culture, Julia Leyda cites geographer Neil Smith, who, in his study of the “Lost Geographies” of global American post-World War II expansion, chose to consider the years going from 1945 to the present under the unifying label “the American Century” (2003).Footnote ² It can naturally be argued, then, that the American century intersects with the motoring century; one could even argue that the latter has been built into the former.

The importance of the mobility paradigm in the history of North America's national and international, territorial and economic expansion is fundamental, and has been celebrated in twentieth-century US culture. Social and geographical representations of mobility in the years from the Great Depression to the beginning of the Cold War are, Leyda argues, symptomatic of America's fascination with expansion, one which is periodically renewed by times of national crisis, “when the public imagination needs more than ever a believable myth of American history” (18). The 1930s were in this sense characterized, Leyda notes, by financial turmoil on the one hand and a surge in national mythologies associated with movement on the other.

Providing a comprehensive historical perspective on the mid-century moment from the Great Depression to the 1950s, American Mobilities makes a case for the place of mobility politics within American expansionism, both domestic and international, arguing that there are continuities between the 1930s and the decades that led to the current economic crisis. Refusing to register the 1950s alone, convenient though it may be, as a mid-point in the century which saw the United States rise to cultural and economic world hegemony, Leyda's study signposts its historical approach to current debates about migration and the movement of capital with the argument, already implied in the recent works of historian Eric Hobsbawm and political theorist Fredric Jameson, that there are systemic and structural echoes between the culture and politics of the 1930s and those of the postmodern era.Footnote ³

The American century, Smith wrote in 2003, was “the century of uneven development” (quoted at 21). It is this history of uneven mobilities – movements of capital which are predicated on the stasis of others – which Leyda tackles. From the racialized “white trash” characters of William Faulkner and Meridel Le Sueur's novels in the 1930s to representations of African American masculinity in black-audience westerns of the same era, Leyda examines understudied dimensions of America's great mobility narratives – in film, literature, and neocolonial urban architecture – and considers how minority identities continuously negotiate their lives on the margins of mobility and amid the idealized spaces which contain them. One critical example that Leyda offers is the way that Los Angeles was stripped of its multicultural foundation and built into a white western utopia, a process partly propelled by the commodification of LA “Old West” architecture and the consistent “othering” of Mexican and Native American cultures and populations in MGM Hollywood cinema (108).

In chapter 2, Leyda considers Bob Jones, the African American shipyard worker who is the protagonist of Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). Bob's ownership of a ’42 Buick Roadmaster, Leyda argues, is a cherished proof of status as worker–consumer living in Los Angeles, a possession which symbolizes and guarantees his – limited – participation in the American dream. Bob's car, Leyda observes, “symbolizes his masculinity and his [social] status … it is his source of mobility in literal geographic terms as well as figuratively speaking his purchasing power and his ability to move into the middle class” (88). It is acknowledged that the power granted him by car ownership is relative to the social limitations imposed on Bob as an African American; there is more to say about the power dynamics of his private relationships than about the physical mobility he effectively enjoys.

For a book that concerns itself with the decades going from the Depression to the outbreak of the Cold War, Leyda's study of mobility is not primarily occupied with the automobile. It becomes clear, as the book's final chapter proposes a reading of American landscapes as “Synecdoche for the Nation” in The Searchers (dir. John Ford, 1956), that Leyda's real focus is territorial and relational space rather than mobility per se. Throughout a convincing reading of Ford's iconic and idealized frontier landscape, Leyda's consideration of the trope of mobility is taken for granted as naturally contained by the western genre, while the representation of the territory is fully in focus. Of course, Leyda's argument that America's early to mid-century fascination with mobility finds representations in both cinematic landscapes and claustrophobic domestic structures is valid, and its application to understudied works such as those by Meridel Le Sueur or Fannie Hurst is a valuable contribution to the field. However, the era's democratization of the automobile for the rising middle class and the looming implementation of the interstate highway might have deserved proper consideration in this ambitious study of the place of minority cultures in a country on the cusp of world hegemony. Perhaps a few words of conclusion might not have gone amiss in acknowledging the contextual importance of these notions.