"So Many Children at Once
and so Many Kinds":
Schools and Ethno-racial Boundaries in
Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

Mark Wild

Schools in many working-class districts of early twentieth-century Los Angeles brought together students of different ethno-racial backgrounds.¹ Although these integrated environments provided abundant opportunities for cross-cultural contact, school administrators, teachers, parents, and broader social structures worked against lasting friendships and coalitions.

"My Japanese-American friends . . . were ordered to evacuate the West Coast, so I decided to go with them," Ralph Lozo explained to startled authorities at the Manzanar Relocation Center, where several thousand Japanese Americans were confined during World War II, in August 1944. "Who can say I haven't got Japanese blood in me? Who knows what kind of blood runs in their veins?" Two years earlier the Los Angeles resident had registered for internment despite the fact that both his parents were Mexican. He had been living at Manzanar ever since. 2

1

Lozo's story illustrates an obvious point that few American historians would deny: urban residents in pre-World War II cities like Los Angeles, even those committed to maintaining their own ethno-racial community, sometimes cultivated relationships and alliances across ethnic and racial lines. In recent years, labor historians have finally begun to explore these relationships, particularly within the workplace during the immigration boom of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. 3 But they have paid less attention to interaction and diversity outside the workplace, in the residential neighborhoods, and in public spaces populated by these new urban workers. A traditional emphasis of urban studies on northeastern cities could partly account for this distinction. Working-class residents of Chicago, for instance, may have inhabited neighborhoods "segregated according to race . . . and ethnicity," but the same did not necessarily hold true for other parts of the country. 4 In certain western cities like Los Angeles, working-class districts emerging during a specific confluence of industrialization, migration, and settlement created diverse kinds of urban environments. Like Lozo, the children of these neighborhoods, whether Anglo, immigrant, or African American, shared their streets and, sometimes, schools with members of other groups. 5

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