In Imperial Metropolis, Jessica M. Kim examines the period during which Los Angeles transformed from a relatively small town into a regional and eventually global metropolitan city. Kim argues that this feat stemmed largely from LA's construction of a vast “city-empire,” which stretched across the nearby international border to exploit Mexican resources and labor for its own benefit. White Angelino elites actively worked to expand their city's influence, first throughout its immediate Southern California hinterland, then into the broader U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and eventually to sites throughout Mexico. When the Mexican Revolution threatened their power south of the border, Angelinos tried and failed to preserve the city's status as an imperial core before renegotiating their relationship with Mexico. This new arrangement set the stage for LA's central role in the global economy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on impressive archival research on both sides of the border, Kim's analysis skillfully joins the histories of urban development, U.S. imperialism, U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and revolutionary Mexico. At each stage of the city-empire's development, Kim demonstrates its influence upon larger economic and political patterns unfolding in North America.
Imperial Metropolis focuses on a loose oligarchy of Anglo-American men in Los Angeles who pursued an ambitious project of urban capitalist development after the U.S. Civil War. Following the example of other cities in the American West, they invested in extractive industries like mining, land speculation, and commercial agriculture in rural areas adjacent to the city. By exploiting land and resources expropriated from Hispanic Californio elites as well as the labor of Mexican Americans, native people, and Mexican and Asian migrants, Angelino oligarchs built what they believed was a racially and geographically ideal social order—a white urban core uplifting and profiting from its non-white rural periphery. Meanwhile, these same elites developed an aggressive program of boosterism, utilizing trade organizations and the press to promote and lobby for the city's economic development.
Positioned at the far edge of U.S. continental expansion and already connected to Mexico by history, culture, and geography, Los Angeles soon expanded its influence beyond the borders of the United States, helping to pioneer the “informal” American commercial empire of the late nineteenth century. With the support of Porfirio Diaz's government and led by the likes of oil baron Edward Doheny and real estate mogul Harry Chandler, Angelino businessmen invested heavily in Mexico between 1880–1910, concentrating on the same extractive industries developed in Southern California. To build and secure control over this new international hinterland, Angelinos cultivated personal and political relationships with Mexican and Mexican-American elites, culminating with the founding of a Mexican consulate in LA to promote the city-empire's investments south of the border. Though Angelino oligarchs insisted the racial and economic order they extended into Mexico was both neatly compatible and mutually beneficial, the consequences for ordinary Mexicans were often severe. Especially by joining in the mass expropriation of communal landholdings, LA's imperial growth in Mexico helped sow the seeds of its own destruction.
In 1910 with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, the city-empire faced a direct and fundamental threat. Revolutionaries openly denounced and targeted the foreign capitalist imperialism in which Angelinos had played leading roles. Geographical proximity and extensive economic relationships made the revolution particularly intense and intimate for Los Angeles. Revolutionaries, political exiles, and refugees all moved through the city itself, while Angelino-owned sites in rural Mexico witnessed the violent inversion of the city-empire's power structure. The revolution's impacts on the ground varied. Depending on their size, the intensity of nearby violence, and their ability to form alliances with regional Mexican elites, some Angelino ventures failed, while others survived and even remained profitable. Keenly aware of precedents set elsewhere during the same period, Angelino oligarchs led a national campaign lobbying the U.S. government for formal military intervention in Mexico. The failure of this campaign left them dumbfounded. Meanwhile, the revolution's aftermath forced a renegotiation of the relationship between Los Angeles and its Mexican hinterland. Spurred on by local people who demanded fulfillment of promised social reforms, the Mexican state expropriated or nationalized vast amounts of foreign-owned property during the 1920s–1930s. The Mexican Revolution thus upended Angelinos’ basic assumptions about the race, class, and geographical hierarchies that ordered their city-empire.
Despite losing their Mexican properties to post-revolutionary land reform, Angelinos remained committed to profiting from Mexico. The book's final chapter uses the construction of the International Pacific Highway to examine the new relationships forged between LA oligarchs and regional Mexican elites in the 1930s–1940s. Abandoning imperialist ideology and extractive industries, this new arrangement focused on investment in tourism and transportation along a transnational Pacific Coast axis and framed by rhetoric of international fraternity. Still, as economic depression and xenophobia created an increasingly restrictive border, questions about who would use the new highway and how foreshadowed the inequalities of the global free-trade economy that would emerge in the late twentieth century, with Los Angeles as one of its key hubs.
What Kim does best throughout this work is to show the complex connections among the various geographical and political scales of U.S. imperialism and Mexican social revolution. Using biographical sketches and case studies of Angelino-owned sites throughout Mexico, she illustrates how individual ambitions and local agendas overlapped with, influenced, or challenged larger projects of imperialism, economic development, and reform. Her analysis not only demonstrates the entanglement of Gilded Age and Progressive Era urbanism with U.S. empire-building, but also tethers the sweeping scale of imperial history firmly to the local. Similarly, Kim follows Pekka Hämäläinen's and Samuel Truett's call to “envision new cores”Footnote 1 for organizing borderlands history, using the “alternative geography”(15) of the city-empire to look beyond the border itself, while showing the importance of regional borderlands dynamics in shaping national and global patterns. Imperial Metropolis will offer useful and thought-provoking insights for historians interested in imperialism, urban development, capitalism, and race, as well as for scholars of revolutionary Mexico and U.S.-Latin American relations.
