A story central to the rise of Los Angeles, in both scholarly and popular history, is the transformation of a provincial outpost of New Spain and a small pueblo in the Mexican North into a global metropolis. The city's remarkable growth—in population, in geographic size, and in economic and cultural power—is undeniable. Yet the story of Los Angeles as an international city is far older than the modern megalopolis. It was a colonial outpost colonized, which grew to be a colonizer in its own right. Jessica M. Kim's book reminds us that it is first and foremost a borderlands city, and that international boundary is key to understanding the rise of Los Angeles and its relationship to U.S. empire.
As its title suggests, Imperial Metropolis details how Los Angeles projected its power into Mexico, incorporating it into the city's greater economic hinterland and making L.A. a “portal to the growth of American capitalism and empire building” (p. 7). The author asserts that her study takes the “history and geography of investment, empire, and revolution in Los Angeles and Mexico and overlays these across the borderlands and borderlands history” and thus “offers a new and broader model for understanding the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands” (p. 15).
Kim divides her ambitious study into six chapters, beginning at the end of the American Civil War and concluding with U.S. entry into World War II. The first chapter examines how regional boosters and investors connected the growth of capitalism in the city with commercial expansion across the border. Chapter 2 examines how Anglo-American businessmen, already familiar with a racialized labor system in California and informed by a history of working with California's Mexican American elite, entered into profitable partnerships with Mexican elites. Yet, Kim asserts, their very success at exploiting Mexican land and labor sowed the seeds of their destruction, and chapter 3 explores the cascading ramifications of the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. Chapter 4 traces the unsuccessful efforts of L.A. investors to reclaim their lost empire by goading the U.S. government to use foreign policy or armed intervention to retake their private investments, a ploy that had worked in previous cases, including Cuba and Hawaii. Chapter 5 explores the transformation of the city's relationship with its former Mexican hinterland amid the new political and economic realities of post-Revolution Mexico. Chapter 6 traces how a chastened Angeleno elite still tried to create new cross-border linkages with Mexico, focusing on the International Pacific Highway between Los Angeles and Mexico City, as transit and tourism replaced ambitions for a greater American (or at least Los Angeles) empire in Mexico.
One of the book's key contributions is in business history, specifically Kim's careful research into the lives, careers, and holdings of an elite group of Los Angeles business leaders who profited from the growth of the city and had great economic power north and south of the border. Some of these business leaders are well known, even infamous, such as Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler, successive owners of the Los Angeles Times and vast tracts of Mexican land, and Edward Doheny, the oil magnate implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal. The book's important insight in this area is to connect these individuals’ lives and holdings together—to understand not only their power in Los Angeles but also their considerable power in Mexico, and how their economic and political might in both nations was inextricably connected.
The Mexican Revolution and the end of Porfirio Díaz's reign ended their Mexican empires and “undermined the economic logic of Los Angeles as a city with a Mexican hinterland” (p. 7). Even so, Kim makes clear that the rise of Los Angeles could not have happened without Mexican natural resources and labor. Imported Mexican goods, from floor tiles to ornamental plants, would permanently mark the city's built environment, and much of it was built with Mexican labor. For better and for worse, Los Angeles truly was a “city-empire” (p. 1). And just as the city profited from Mexico's resources, it also projected U.S. power into Mexico. Los Angeles was both an imperial hub and part of a larger imperialist framework. Ultimately, Kim asserts, the city's growth “offers a new geography for understanding the dynamic of commercial empire in Latin America,” especially the U.S. informal commercial empire, which spread far beyond its actual territorial acquisitions (p. 10).
No study can be all encompassing, even one as significant as this. Some topics could have received more attention and hopefully will from future researchers. As movies fade in cultural and economic importance we forget their incredible potency early in the twentieth century, when Los Angeles, in some ways alone among U.S. cities, became part of a global imaginary—a place that people all around the world knew. Even today, that cultural power lingers. Early Hollywood productions purportedly took advantage of the proximity of the Mexican border to flee Thomas Edison's motion picture camera patent enforcers, and certainly there were deep connections between Hollywood and the Mexican film industry, from the silent era forward. More surprising is the limited discussion of immigration and immigration policy, both central aspects of U.S.-Mexico borderlands history, especially since immigrant labor was key to the city's economic growth. The book perhaps also neglects the diversity of peoples and opinions in Mexico. Many Indigenous Mexicans were justifiably wary of their own national government in Mexico City, to say nothing of a predatory foreign power. Finally, the economic power projected in Mexico by investors in other cities, including New York, Chicago, London, and Mexico City itself, is overlooked, which is particularly surprising in a study so centered on urban economic power.
Yet Kim undoubtedly succeeds in her larger aim, connecting the regional and international elements of L.A.'s ascent and its economic and political power. Her study helps us see the city anew. It was indeed an imperial metropolis, and her book informs Los Angeles, urban, borderlands, and economic and business history in new and important ways.
