Eduardo Contreras' Latinos and the Liberal City is a welcome new addition to the history of Latino politics in California. In this timely study, we learn that not only were Latinos politically active early in the twentieth century, but they grappled with the same issues that engage the community today including unionization, anti-racism, attacks on immigrants, cross-racial alliances, unemployment, and the dynamics of constructing a pan-Latino identity. Contreras extends his analysis through the 1960s and 1970s, when Latinos were an integral part of newly emerging struggles over gentrification, gay rights, gender and sexuality, socioeconomic inequality, homophobia, and rent control. Finally, Contreras examines the role that Latinos played in local electoral politics, paying special attention to labor organizing and gentrification. The book offers a rich account of forces driving Latino politics around national identity, working class status, ideology, and religion, and describes the opposition progressive Latino activists faced from local business, anti-tax proponents, and land speculators. An important lesson is that there are ample precedents for the problems facing Latinos today, albeit on a far larger scale. Contreras is also careful to demonstrate that there are no easy answers. Skilled and determined organizers brought Latino issues to the forefront of San Francisco politics, and achieved some remarkable victories—but also suffered bitter setbacks. His insights into tensions involved when cobbling together a working urban coalition provide a valuable analysis, potentially useful to scholars and activists alike.
The book's major contribution is the close attention paid to assessing Latino participation in San Francisco's key political struggles and mobilization campaigns. Contreras demonstrates that the city's reputation for progressive politics is only partly deserved. Strong and well-organized opposition to Latino empowerment emerged at every turn and often stalled or effectively stopped their initiatives. The book also documents a relentless drive to urban redevelopment and how it drove out affordable housing in the Mission District, undermining a culturally rich Latino community. This analysis offers a deep insight into the reasons why Latinos are still plagued by disproportionate levels of poverty and unemployment, and are forced to spend an increasing percentage of their incomes on substandard housing. An added benefit is Contreras' textured interpretation of history that illuminates what life was like for poor working-class Latinos, and what it took to organize and fight back.
Missing from the narrative is a theoretical mapping of events and actors that would define the way Latinos negotiated the city's complex web of race, class, and culture. Contreras argues that “though political life has long been marked by diversity and contestation, it consistently involved and reckoned with the ideological denominators of liberalism and Latinidad.” By liberalism he means the “principles of an activist government, social reform, freedom, and progress” (7). The parameters of this thesis are so broadly construed that it is sometimes difficult to tease out where Latino interests, those based on their racial and ethnic status, are at play and how those interests converge or are overridden by other loyalties. For example, labor's story is well developed and explained. Latinos were recruited to work for low wages and faced widespread racial discrimination in the workforce, and when organizing against these injustices they often had the full support of their white counterparts. Moreover, Latinos freely participated in labor organizing and served as union officers. In 1946, for example, when California unions promoted a statewide citizen initiative, Proposition 11, to ban racial discrimination in employment, San Francisco's racially diverse unions strongly supported the effort; its longshoremen's and other maritime unions provided the largest number of precinct workers for the initiative. In this case, working class interests and racial equality were coterminous. In Contreras' words, “such actions affirmed unionists' devotion to the democratic process, street-level mobilization and civil rights” (87). Statewide, the initiative lost by a large margin but in San Francisco, workers of all races stood together in solidarity against workplace racial discrimination.
Alongside San Francisco's multi-racial labor movement, however, were other actors that complicate Contreras' account of Latino organizing. Religious organizations like the Catholic Council for the Spanish Speaking (CCSS) worked in the community to solve socioeconomic and educational challenges facing the community, but also reinforced traditional social values and gender relations. Religiously based organizations wanted to guide Latinos toward regular attendance of mass, promote Christian values as the foundation of family life, and reject birth control. Other conservative value-based groups emerged in San Francisco politics. Latino homophobes were active in the 1970s, relying “on religious dogma to cast homosexuality as immoral, arouse residents, and bring them into the campaign” (223). At the same time a small, but not insignificant, number of Latino voters identified as Republicans and supported their party's presidential candidates as early as the 1950s.
A closer examination of the ideological underpinnings motivating these activists would have added clarity to the story. Contreras sometimes attaches labels to activists without explaining the ways they might differ on fundamental issues like individual volition, the power of racial discrimination, and free market capitalism. Terms such as old liberalism, new liberalism, Alinsky style organizing, conservatives, and radicals are introduced without clear reference to their meaning. This omission is unfortunate especially since these groups were central players in struggles important to the Latino community like rent control, racial conflict, displacement, and civil rights protection. The same problem emerges in Contreras' account of gay and transgender civil rights, given his observation that culturally conservative Latinos often found themselves at odds with progressive efforts to eliminate repression in sexual life. Readers will want to know more about these potentially conflicting world views and how or if they are part of a distinct Latino agenda. These are serious concerns, but they should not detract from the value of this important new book. Contreras' contribution to the literature will spark new debate and reflection on the historic roots of today's Latino identity and politics.
