Anger and frustration over Indigenous ethnic identity fraud have reached fever pitch across social and official media, within cultural and political institutions, and in Indigenous communities. It seems a day doesn’t pass without new revelations of people who have lied about and capitalized on Indigenous identity. Joy Harjo decried such “identity crimes,” saying that “Some claim identity by tenuous family story and some are perpetrating outright fraud.” These arguments go beyond simply outing individuals; increasingly, they call for publishers, universities, and other institutions to do a better job of verifying Indian identity claims. In doing so, however, many are pulling toward a problematic benchmark: enrollment in a federally recognized tribe. I respond to this with a reading of two urban intertribal newspapers – Los Angeles’ Talking Leaf and Boston’s The Circle – published before many tribes achieved their federal recognition. For Native nations that have experienced ethnocide, state detribalization, and rejection of their federal recognition claims, such newspapers have helped tribal members find each other, remember their histories and collectively imagine their futures

This chapter introduces young Black changemaking. Black youth face racism at interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels. Young Black changemakers take civic actions to resist racism. Our work brings a fresh, contemporary look at young Black changemaking that is drawn from youth’s own voices and relevant to the current times. The research study is set in Los Angeles, a city with a long history of anti-Black racism and resistance, and coincided with summer 2020, a time of racialized police violence and uprising. Sociopolitical development theory is an important foundation for understanding young Black changemaking. We end the chapter with the 10 main ideas found in the book.

This essay places Brecht within the context of exile from Nazi Germany, follows him on his journey through Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the Soviet Union, and reviews his years in American exile where he joined the German-speaking émigré community in Los Angeles: soon an Enemy Alien. The essay captures Brecht's lived experience of exile as it enters his writing, from his journal entries and correspondence to his numerous poems – which offer sharp insights into the exilic fate, its contemporary dimensions as well as historical antecedents. Furthermore, the essay calls attention to the precarious situation of writers in exile, deprived of publication venues and severed from audiences, and surveys Brecht's own publishing network and its virtual elimination toward the late 1930s. Finally, the essay brings Brecht into contact with other exiles, such as Joseph Roth, Oskar Maria Graf, Anna Seghers, Lion Feuchtwanger, as well as Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and investigates the extent to which the exilic “we” in Brecht's exile poetry – suggesting a community of exiles conjoined in their effort to combat Nazismcorresponded to an existing sense of togetherness and shared responsibility among the exiles, Brecht included: a “people's front” in the spirit of Heinrich Mann.

This chapter explores the relationship between growing concerns about youth delinquency in American cities at midcentury and the development of War on Poverty programs that helped to lay the groundwork for the subsequent War on Crime and the evolution of the carceral state. Emerging postwar patterns of uneven development and environmental inequality affected poor urban and African American youth in particular. The growing popular ecology movement would only underline these truths as toxins and environmental risks to youth came to the center of public concern in new forms and at different scales. This chapter explains how the War on Poverty’s assumptions further entwined youth and environment at this pivotal moment in the construction of gendered and racialized conceptions of juvenile delinquency in the postwar West. Older conceptions of environment and youth – often held by the planners of youth-related government programs – would face new challenges as youth began to resist the ecological conditions they faced in cities and youth camps alike, helping to challenge the meanings of environment in public discourse about race and poverty.

Chapter 11 examines Union de Vecinos, a group in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles that deployed a radical approach to fighting displacement: It directed its militant protest directly at art galleries, identified as the key culprits of gentrification. Alarmed by the negative publicity and the increasing inability to conduct normal business, gallery directors reached out to residents and activist groups. But the response was defiant, and in response some galleries closed. While the group had some success, it is too early to assess the overall impact of the strategy. Yet the approach merits examination because it is an innovative, ambitious, and analytically coherent response to the threat of displacement. The campaign questioned the role of cultural producers and experiential tools as it called for a radical approach to artistic practice, able to counter art's ties to a capitalist market. It also contributed to the debate on resistance against gentrification because of its harsh critique of the nonprofit sector, judged to be exceedingly accommodating and moderate in its demands.

Chapter 7 focuses on cases in which protest relied on judicial tools whose complexity required significant legacy in similar protest.In this type of protest, expertise is absolutely central. However, none of these campaigns are waged only in the courts; on the contrary, they share rallies and demonstrations of various kinds. Therefore, even in these cases, experiential tools play a variety of important roles, including sustaining resident engagement, publicizing concerns, and displaying clout to allies and opponents. The cases examined start with Madrid’s area of Lavapiés, with anti-eviction campaigns led by Asamblea Lavapiés and PAH Centro. The chapter then examines cases in Los Angeles. In Skid Row, it presents campaigns led by LA CAN. Of special importance is the campaign that led to the 2008 Residential Hotel Unit Conversion and Demolition Ordinance, which permanently preserved more than 15,000 homes for the lowest income tenants throughout the city. It also presents the campaign by Trust South LA to protect affordable housing in Rolland Curtis Gardens, where the threat of legal prosecution and regulation pushed the owner to sell and allowed the forming of a land trust on the site.

Chapter 5 explores emerging diasporic communities and their relationships to host societies. Through studies conducted by the sociologist Paul Siu and the historian Wang Gungwu, this chapter explores the ways in which Chinese scholars and writers explored these relationships. The chapter shows that one factor making explorations of these relationships so urgent was the obstacles that Chinese migrants faced in host societies, such as restrictions on immigration and other forms of anti-Chinese legislation. The chapter demonstrates that urgency also stemmed from disruptions to existing diasporic trajectories due to revolution in China and the onset of the Cold War. This chapter then introduces another example of an evolving diasporic community, Los Angeles, focusing in particular on a husband and wife who played prominent roles in shaping the city’s new Chinatown and in asserting the rights of Chinese Americans. The chapter then turns to “return” migration and “secondary” migration in the mid-twentieth century, as ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia and elsewhere faced anti-Chinese violence and legislation.

Chapter 2, “Planning,” examines a consequential moment in urban history, after Jane Jacobs but before OPEC. The question of the future city animated the 1967 competition to plan the most significant project in the world’s leading new towns program, Milton Keynes. Yet the plan that resulted attracted criticism for its banality, and so this chapter recovers the ideas that motivated the city’s planning in order to re-enchant The Plan for Milton Keynes (1970). The story features three characters: the chairman, Jock Campbell, a sixth-generation sugar magnate whose anti-communist campaigns in British Guiana left him wary of grand designs; the planner, Richard Llewelyn-Davies, a welfare state architect-planner whose plan for Milton Keynes propelled him into a thriving global practice; and the visionary, Melvin Webber, an American urban futurist who paradoxically persuaded the new town’s makers that the future could not be known. Together with their colleagues, these figures dared to reimagine both the city and the future, but their refusal of bold designs left a void which eventually became filled by roundabouts and concrete cows.