| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970. By Matt Garcia. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xxii, 330 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2658-8. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4983-9.)

A World of Its Own, written by Matt Garcia, has a lot to recommend it. It uses extensive archival material, and historians will mine it for years to come. My problems with the monograph begin with the title. Garcia's definition of 'greater Los Angeles' baffles me. The Claremont-Pomona area, which appears to be falling into San Bernardino County, is hardly considered part of greater L.A. From my perspective the ombligo, or belly button, of the work is the Arbol Verde Colonia in Claremont, from which Garcia too often strays. 1

The author is at home in Arbol Verde; he gives an excellent account of the history of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) there and reconstructs race tensions between its white and Mexican communities. The chapter entitled 'Friends of the Mexicans?' shows the hypocrisy of the so-called friends of the Mexican culture who nevertheless supported the deportation of close to a million Mexicans during the Great Depression. But his constant appeals to authority are distracting. It is conceded that the African American historian Robin D. G. Kelley is a great expert on race, but his expertise is not relevant to the discussion of race in this instance. Mexican notions of whiteness have not been solely a U.S. construct but are also a legacy of Spanish colonialism. . . .

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