Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring outside Ethnic Lines, 1925-1955 |
Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring outside Ethnic Lines, 1925-1955
University of California Press
April 2008
318 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520253452
E-Book ISBN: 9780520941274
Allison Varzally, Associate Professor of History
California State University, Fullerton
On the cover: Future R&B singer Sugar Pie DeSanto in San Francisco’s Fillmore District (circa 1940s)
Winner of the 2009 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society
What happens in a society so diverse that no ethnic group can call itself the majority? Exploring a question that has profound relevance for the nation as a whole, this study looks closely at eclectic neighborhoods in California where multiple minorities constituted the majority during formative years of the twentieth century. In a lively account, woven throughout with vivid voices and experiences drawn from interviews, ethnic newspapers, and memoirs, Allison Varzally examines everyday interactions among the Asian, Mexican, African, Native, and Jewish Americans, and others who lived side by side. What she finds is that in shared city spaces across California, these diverse groups mixed and mingled as students, lovers, worshippers, workers, and family members and, along the way, expanded and reconfigured ethnic and racial categories in new directions.
Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. California Crossroads
- 2. Young Travelers
- 3. Guess Who’s Joining Us for Dinner?
- 4. Banding Together in Crisis
- 5. Minority Brothers in Arms
- 6. Panethnic Politics Arising from the Everyday
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index