Jessica Kim places Los Angeles at the epicenter of the regional planning and economic development that helped to transform southern California while also deepening its commercial ties with Mexico. She tells the story of how white businessmen and politicians made Los Angeles into a seat of imperial capitalism: Anglo settlers followed in the steps of Spanish colonizers and Californios, perpetuating racial hierarchies that exploited the labor of indigenous and mestizo peoples and later immigrants (50). In the book, Kim weaves urban, regional, and national perspectives to produce a clear portrait of Los Angeles as a city-empire in the western US-Mexico borderlands.
Kim begins by describing how Angelenos promoted the city as a place to build cross-border businesses. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, local investors worked with Mexican counterparts, supported by a friendly national government under the strongman Porfirio Díaz (53). The US Americans saw this deepening relationship in the mold of the economic imperialism that the United States extended over Cuba and the Philippines, hoping to do the same in Mexico. Kim finds this local-international dynamic throughout the story, coupling the growth of the city with its leaders’ broader regional ambitions.
The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 complicated these plans; in response, some Angelenos argued in favor of an armed US intervention to protect their businesses and properties across the border, but they were rebuffed by the federal government (120). During the 1930s, this strained relationship began to improve, thanks to new infrastructure development projects articulated in the spirit of Pan-Americanism. The building of the International Pacific Highway along Mexico's west coast was one of these endeavors. Nevertheless, this project also underscored persistent regional tensions: promoters in Los Angeles wanted to build a picturesque route for American motorists, whereas hundreds of local Mexican officials wanted a road that better suited their own communities’ needs (199).
The book is well written and well researched. It is an example of scholarship that draws on archival and newspaper sources from Mexico and the United States to construct its binational narrative. Kim brings a grand scope to her work; from the first chapter, charting the growth of Los Angeles after the Civil War to its place as a global city in the epilogue, the narrative is broad and extensive, but remains coherent throughout. Moreover, the chapters’ mix of local and international details is what makes the narrative so compelling. By the sixth chapter, these come together in a deep and fascinating case study of the planning of the International Pacific Highway, one of the highlights of the book.
Kim's work is an important contribution to diverse historical sub-fields: borderlands, transportation and mobility, and urban, socioeconomic, cultural, and empire studies. It crosses physical and theoretical boundaries, deftly combining diverse sources to tell a compelling story of the social costs of economic development. To nitpick, one could say the book does not go far enough in its historical study, ending in the 1940s. This reader wonders what Kim would make of Los Angeles's growth in the second half of the twentieth century and its ties to countries along the Pacific Rim, but that would be a different book. This one excels in analyzing themes of power, race, and development. Specialists and graduate students will find it an engaging and insightful read, useful for their research and teaching.
