Imperial metropolis : Los Angeles, Mexico, and the borderlands of American empire, 1865-1941
Bibliographic Information
Imperial metropolis : Los Angeles, Mexico, and the borderlands of American empire, 1865-1941
Jessica M. Kim
（The David J. Weber series in the new borderlands history）
University of North Carolina Press, c2019
Available at / 2 libraries
Note
Summary: "In this ... narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica Kim chronicles the imperial visions of the Los Angeles civic elites who fueled the city's phenomenal growth between the Civil War and World War II. Driven by the belief that an enterprising white-run city deserved to control a nonwhite periphery, wealthy Angelenos invested heavily in Mexican industries such as agriculture, petroleum, mining, and tourism, and transformed the countryside of northern Mexico, both to enrich themselves and to develop their home city as a new site of empire"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography: p. [255]-268
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth.
Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles's urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.
by "Nielsen BookData"