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Los Angeles, called Tehrangeles because it is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran, is the birthplace of a distinctive form of postrevolutionary pop music. Created by professional musicians and media producers fleeing Iran's revolutionary-era ban on “immoral” popular music, Tehrangeles pop has been a part of daily life for Iranians at home and abroad for decades. In Tehrangeles Dreaming Farzaneh Hemmasi draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles and musical and textual analysis to examine how the songs, music videos, and television made in Tehrangeles express modes of Iranianness not possible in Iran. Exploring Tehrangeles pop producers' complex commercial and political positioning and the histories, sensations, and fantasies their music makes available to global Iranian audiences, Hemmasi shows how unquestionably Iranian forms of Tehrangeles popular culture exemplify the manner in which culture, media, and diaspora combine to respond to the Iranian state and its political transformations. The transnational circulation of Tehrangeles culture, she contends, transgresses Iran's geographical, legal, and moral boundaries while allowing all Iranians the ability to imagine new forms of identity and belonging.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, as Euro-Americans moved westward, they carried with them long-held prejudices against people of color. By the time they reached the West Coast, their new settlements included African Americans and recent Asian immigrants, as well as the indigenous inhabitants and descendants of earlier Spanish and Mexican settlers. The Coveted Westside deals with the settlement and development of Los Angeles in the context of its multiracial, multiethnic population, especially African Americans.

Mandel exposes the enduring struggle between Whites determined to establish their hegemony and create residential heterogeneity in the growing city, and people of color equally determined to obtain full access to the city and the opportunities, including residential, that it offered. Not only does this book document the Black homeowners’ fight against housing discrimination, it shares personal accounts of Blacks’ efforts to settle in the highly desirable Westside of Los Angeles. Mandel explores the White-derived social and legal mechanisms that created this segregated city and the African American-led movement that challenged efforts to block access to fair housing.

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton’s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension collective, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists—musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists—passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.

2008 — Gold Award in Californiana – California Book Awards – Commonwealth Club of California
2010 — NACCS Book Award – National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies

City plazas worldwide are centers of cultural expression and artistic display. They are settings for everyday urban life where daily interactions, economic exchanges, and informal conversations occur, thereby creating a socially meaningful place at the core of a city.

At the heart of historic Los Angeles, the Plaza represents a quintessential public space where real and imagined narratives overlap and provide as many questions as answers about the development of the city and what it means to be an Angeleno. The author, a social and cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Los Angeles, is well suited to explore the complex history and modern-day relevance of the Los Angeles Plaza. From its indigenous and colonial origins to the present day, Estrada explores the subject from an interdisciplinary and multiethnic perspective, delving into the pages of local newspapers, diaries and letters, and the personal memories of former and present Plaza residents, in order to examine the spatial and social dimensions of the Plaza over an extended period of time.

The author contributes to the growing historiography of Los Angeles by providing a groundbreaking analysis of the original core of the city that covers a long span of time, space, and social relations. He examines the impact of change on the lives of ordinary people in a specific place, and how this change reflects the larger story of the city.

2008 — ALLA Prize for Best Book on Latina/o Anthropology

The Pico Gardens housing development in East Los Angeles has a high percentage of resident families with a history of persistent poverty, gang involvement, and crime. In some families, members of three generations have belonged to gangs. Many other Pico Gardens families, however, have managed to avoid the cycle of gang involvement.

In this work, Vigil adds to the tradition of poverty research and elaborates on the association of family dynamics and gang membership. The main objective of his research was to discover what factors make some families more vulnerable to gang membership, and why gang resistance was evidenced in similarly situated non-gang-involved families. Providing rich, in-depth interviews and observations, Vigil examines the wide variations in income and social capital that exist among the ostensibly poor, mostly Mexican American residents. Vigil documents how families connect and interact with social agencies in greater East Los Angeles to help chart the routines and rhythms of the lives of public housing residents. He presents family life histories to augment and provide texture to the quantitative information.

By studying life in Pico Gardens, Vigil feels we can better understand how human agency interacts with structural factors to produce the reality that families living in all public housing developments must contend with daily.

A massive population shift transformed Los Angeles in the first decades of the twentieth century. Americans from across the country relocated to the city even as an unprecedented transnational migration brought people from Asia, Europe, and Mexico. Together, these newcomers forged a multiethnic alliance of anarchists, labor unions, and leftists dedicated to challenging capitalism, racism, and often the state.

David M. Struthers draws on the anarchist concept of affinity to explore the radicalism of Los Angeles's interracial working class from 1900 to 1930. Uneven economic development created precarious employment and living conditions for laborers. The resulting worker mobility led to coalitions that, inevitably, remained short lived. As Struthers shows, affinity helps us understand how individual cooperative actions shaped and reshaped these alliances. It also reveals social practices of resistance that are often too unstructured or episodic for historians to capture. What emerges is an untold history of Los Angeles and a revolutionary movement that, through myriad successes and failures, produced powerful examples of racial cooperation.

Iranian Television in Los Angeles Hamid Naficy Naficy explores the seemingly contradictory way in which immigrant media and cultural productions serve as the source both of resistance and opposition to the domination by host and home country's social values while simultaneously serving as vehicles for personal and cultural transformation and assimilation of those values. "An important contribution to cultural anthropology. The Making of Exile Cultures is meticulously researched. It is no small achievement of the book that is pulls the focus in Middle East studies from geographically cohesive national cultures, 'hard' politics and high culture (art, literature) to exile cultures, media politics and the popular. Although it is a close case study, The Making of Exile Cultures participates in debates and methodologies across a range of disciplines beyond media studies. It is not simply a much-needed contribution to the growing set of micro-histories of local media use. Rather, it demonstrates the increasing centrality of minority television cultures to the overall structure of North American mainstream television. The Making of Exile Cultures should be read and used by media theorists, then, not just because it fills in another gap in knowledge of narrowcast television's heterogeneous field (as if there were a collective puzzle in the making here), but because it provides media theory with some important new ways of working through the particular questions of race, gender, nation, industry and audience that come into play regardless of our respective 'local' interest." Screen "Fresh, stimulating, and an extremely valuable contribution to the study of cultural production amongst immigrants and the articulation of local and transnational identities. A fascinating study of the cultural politics of identity." Middle East Journal "The Making of Exile Cultures transcends its limited scope and ethnographic ambitions to poignantly illuminate a truly multicultural situation. Naficy's engaging prose and personal anecdotes made the dry ethnography not just palatable but fascinating. This was not merely a sociological analysis of the interaction of television aesthetics and a group in exile. It was not merely a collection of copious details and taxonomies about what was broadcast when and by whom. It was not merely a study of now an exile group expresses nostalgic longing and fetishistic desire for an absent home. The power of this book is found in narratives, stories, and recollections of the author and interviewees. Naficy saves his study from falling into the banality of charts, tables, and taxonomies through his ability to tie something very specific to the larger issue of what means to live in exile." SubStance "In this book, Naficy provides us with an example of exilic agency and the possibilities that can come about when hybridized exiles use their unique perspective gained form a split-subjectivity. This book is highly recommended for scholars in immigration studies as well as those engaged in cultural studies and the field of mass media and communications." Journal of American Ethnic History "Ultimately, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Media in Los Angeles is an important contribution to the growing scholarship on Iranians in diaspora and serves best as a handbook for decoding the popular culture of Iranians in Los Angeles. Naficy's book serves as the best model yet for studying Iranian culture among the expatriate communities, a model which goes beyond one-dimensional stereotypes or demographic and statistical analyses to provide an intimate and analytical study of a culture undergoing chaotic change." JUSUR (The UCLA Journal of Middle Eastern Studies) "An important contribution to both Iranian and cultural studies. Exile Cultures provides an illuminating study of the mediating role of television in transforming an exile community into an ethnicity. Naficy's careful discussions of its political economy and textual politics offer valuable insights into the micro-practices of this exilic culture, insights that should prove useful to a broad range of readers, from those interested in the general questions of ethnicity and community in the United States to scholars working on the more specific issues of Iranian culture." International Journal of Middle East Studies "Naficy's own blend of rigorous research, well presented data, and thorough knowledge of the theories to which he refers is an illustration of the kind of a successful syncretism he observes in the material he studies." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature "This is an excellent study of the understudied world of Iranian popular culture in exile. An indispensable source of knowledge about contemporary Iran and life in exile in the vast diaspora formed in the wake of the 1978-79 revolution." Iranian Studies "Naficy blends together the psychological and cultural backgrounds and aspirations of users and producers with the political economy of the ethnic media, and the way in which this local political economy not only articulates with the larger economy of the U.S. and world economy, but psychologically and culturally transforms its participants." Michael M. J. Fischer

A nation's collective memory does not simply exist. It is created. But what factors influence its form and content? And what roles do the news media play in fashioning our collective memory? Here Jill A. Edy observes the process of negotiating a meaning for the past as it unfolds in the news, exploring the ways that news practices, the relationships between actors who make the news, the expectations of news audiences, and the impact of current events affect the development of collective memories in a mass society.Using the 1965 Watts riots and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago as case studies, Edy creates a useful framework for understanding how, over time, conflicting versions of events are resolved, what forms the resolutions take, and how those resolutions influence the representation of current news stories. Anyone who is interested in political communication and the role of media in public culture will find a wealth of insights in this valuable new book.