Collisions at the Crossroads is a study of the regional agglomeration east of Los Angeles, California, that includes eastern Los Angeles County and western San Bernardino and Riverside Counties. The book is temporally bounded by the City of Riverside's settler colonial founding in 1870 and the region's transformation from Citrus Belt to suburban Inland Empire in the post-World War II period, ending in 1970. The author carries her argument over five chronological chapters that shift in spatial and thematic emphasis to draw out the scale of economic, demographic and cultural change in the region in the period under consideration; the conclusion brings the book to the present. The theoretically rich analysis centres race, mobility and place by drawing on geographers, urbanists, historians and critical race scholars. Carpio's central argument is that mobility and immobility operated along multiple axes – from forced to voluntary and legal to extra-legal – to construct racialized meanings rooted in place. Probably more because of Los Angeles’ shifting geographic centre rather than despite of it, the book is deeply engaged with the social and contested process of place-making. To be more precise, the book is rooted in the shifting economic, social and cultural forces at work in the racially diverse communities that form the region, while also weaving inland history into broader national and global narratives on migration and race.
The author's attention to mobility is equally intertwined with immobility. Both mobility and its inverse could be voluntary, compelled or forced and occurred within and outside of legal constraints. Carpio argues that in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century ‘the fluidity of global migration was met by policies and practices enforcing local immobilities’ (p. 73). These factors brought different results across individual experiences with clear racial patterns. Racial meanings were constructed while walking the street to a job site or a store and through mechanized transport on bicycles, trains and cars. Furthermore, laws greatly impacted where non-Anglos could buy land, own homes or if they could freely move across the United States’ international border. Racialized constraints particularly affected the lives of Japanese in the citrus economy as the ‘freedom to control one's own mobility presupposed economic autonomy’ (p. 66). The author documents that 58 per cent of Japanese arrests in Riverside were for bicycle related offences between 1907 and 1912 (p. 85), while arguing persuasively that bicycles increased the range of employment option of their riders. Yet the mobility of Japanese workers also became a key avenue for the city to police them. The book carries this examination of race and transportation through to automobiles, car ownership and the ‘rise of the modern day-labor economy in 1930s Los Angeles’ (p. 155).
On race, Carpio moves away from binary approaches that examine non-whites in relation to the white majority. The author takes a relational approach that allows attention towards ‘affinities and tensions’ (p. 10) that reached horizontally across non-white groups and could include Anglos. One example of this came on a ranch in Redlands in the 1930s where ‘displaced white, resident Mexican, and African-descent workers formed close ties, and multiracial forms of socialization were commonplace’ (p. 160). However, the author stresses the limits of these forms of interaction to bring about widespread societal change, suggesting that ‘white migrant workers’ never fully shared a ‘class-consciousness’ with non-white workers, drawn toward upward mobility afforded by their racial status (p. 161). This reader would have appreciated a deeper analysis of what drew people together, rather than dismissing the inter-racial ties common in the region because they were subsumed by larger societal forces as time wore on.
Chapter 5 stands out in its importance to urban scholars, and those interested in Los Angeles, in its explication of how the citrus belt transformed into the Inland Empire in the post-World War II era. The process of federal subsidies disproportionately benefiting whites, and facilitating suburbanization, took local form. Here, federal programmes helped shift the region's citrus industry to California's Central Valley and Arizona, which opened groves to housing developers. Suburbanization in the Inland Empire increased racial diversity, while it encouraged racial stratification in Los Angeles. The author also evidences why scholars of suburbanization need to decouple residential mobility from social mobility, especially when considering non-Anglos. Pomona Valley was a majority–minority community from the early 1970s, and the African Americans and Latinas/os relocating or remaining there did not realize the same material and social benefits from suburbanization that nearby white residents enjoyed. Racial disparities were even more skewed with the rise of the valley's prison industry, which disproportionally caged non-Anglos.
It took time for historians of Los Angeles to create a historiography that could match the city's outsized role in urban geography literature. It has taken even more time for scholars to connect the citrus growing towns 55–60 miles east of Los Angeles to broader regional social and economic processes. Carpio contributes to both of these literatures by melding urban geography with social history and ethnic studies in a work of impressive breadth, scholarly rigour and impact; Collisions at the Crossroads thus deserves broad readership.
