Offers a critical anthology of Los Angeles's most significant English-language and Spanish-language nonfiction writing from the city's inception to the present. Contemporary Latinx authors, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, focus on the ways in which Latinx Los Angeles's nonfiction narratives record the progressive racialization and subalternization of Latinxs in the southwestern US.

Acknowledgments     LA’s Latina/o Phantom Nonfiction and the Technologies of Literary Secrecy     Victor Valle Decolonizing Latina/o Nonfiction in LA’s Writing     Ignacio López-Calvo and Victor Valle Selections 1. “With the Amicable People of Ensenada de Palmas”: Excerpt from Breve relación de la nueva entrada al sur, en la copiosa gentilidad de la nación de los coras . . . , por el padre     Ignacio María Napoli, S.J. 2. The Public Outcry. Noteworthy Pamphlet     Francisco Ramírez 3. The Repercussions of a Lynching      Ricardo Flores Magón 4. To Womankind, a Manifesto      Blanca de Moncaleano 5. Excerpt from “The Memoirs of Alfredo Cobos”     Alfredo Cobos 6. Excerpts from The Journals of Anaïs Nin     Anaïs Nin 7. Bert Corona’s “Struggle Is the Ultimate Teacher”      Jesús Mena 8. Beach Blanket Baja      Helena María Viramontes 9. “The ‘Good Old Mission Days’ Never Existed”: Excerpt from The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California     Alejandro Murguía 10. Light at the End of Tunnel Vision: In Memory of Gerardo Velázquez and Ray Navarro      Harry Gamboa Jr. 11. “Deported to the North”: Excerpt from Dangerous Border Crossings: The Artist Talks Back     Guillermo Gómez-Peña 12. Lights      Nylsa Martínez 13. Movie Version: “Hell to Eternity”      Sesshu Foster 14. Americanismo: City of Peasants, Los Angeles, California      Héctor Tobar 15. “The Boy Left Behind”: Excerpt from Enrique’s Journey     Sonia Nazario 16. My Father’s House      Rubén Martínez Source Acknowledgments     Notes     Bibliography      

“Ignacio López-Calvo and Victor Valle have assembled an intriguing anthology of how and what Mexican Americans and other U.S. Latinx think about Los Angeles. Its other virtue, a provocative pair of essays on the city’s literary culture, proposes a critical agenda for reimagining an urban practice of humanities at this time of anti-immigrant hysteria.”—David William Foster, Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University and author of São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production“This book will pump new life into future reviews of Los Angeles’s literature, strengthen the city’s grasp on the peoples and facts of its opaque history, and stimulate teachers to imagine, with their students, a better democracy for all. This finely written book, in both its critical vision and more than a dozen examples of liberating journalism, is a strong step toward an urban humanities that puts Latinx nonfiction writing about LA, for the first time maybe, into the `We’ of `We the People’ of the global city.”—Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America at Harvard Divinity School“With inspired juxtapositions, the editors give us a pathbreaking volume that contextualizes and historicizes their unexpected selections to reveal a too often unspoken genealogy of Los Angeles Latinx nonfiction.”—Otto Santa Ana, professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles