"...The word Los became current among working-class Latinos, many of them displaced from their homelands by the global forces of capital and empire, as the name for the city in which they made their homes, a city where they hoped to find liberty and fellowship..."—from the Introduction
"The predisposition for universalizing forms of taste that favor timeless over timely work—the sensibility evident in most professional critics and historians of culture—militates against the study of local, tendentious, oppositional forms of endeavor. In Los Angeles, within the belly of the beast, a flourishing oppositional culture, ignored by the dominant media, exists. This book brings to light a remarkable set of artistic, institutional, and cultural practices of exemplary value. James is an excellent writer and dedicated scholar."—Bill Nichols, Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University
"This is an important, multi-vocal, innovative and definitive volume on alternative community arts and cultural spaces as they are envisaged and nurtured in Los Angeles. The city and its innovative cultural institutions have long deserved such a passionate, resonant and articulate perspective as David James provides for them here in this superlatively edited volume."—Erika Suderburg, Professor, Film and Visual Culture Program and the Department of Art, University of California, Riverside