Right to the Metropolis?: Black and Latinx Struggles for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles, 1985-1993

This thesis explores a diverse range of grassroots social movements and organising amongst African American and Latinx residents of Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s. Through an understanding of how activists worked to tackle myriad problems within their communities, this thesis makes an important intervention into our understanding of the 1992 Rodney King riot/rebellion, the most costly and destructive instance of civil unrest in modern American history. Moving beyond reductive and homogenising interpretations which view the Black and Latinx population of L.A. as economically and politically powerless during this ‘urban crisis’, this thesis illustrates a more complex interpretation of communities which emphasises the prevalence of active efforts to contest injustice. A focus on space, place, and ‘spatial justice’ helps us to better understand this activism. By considering a wide range of issues which these residents organised around – police and the criminal justice system, environmental racism, the janitorial industry, the proliferation of liquor stores, and urban tourism – this thesis demonstrates the broad scope of issues these communities wished to tackle were connected through a shared desire to claim and control urban space, both real and imagined. These activists argued that in addition to their race, class, or gender, where residents lived in the city was often a source of inequality and discrimination. They therefore fought to gain control over the cultural productions of place and physical spatial forms in the city, a right to self-determination that was already taken for granted in more privileged neighbourhoods. Understanding the connections between this diverse and vibrant activism as a struggle for spatial autonomy helps us better understand the dialectical relationship between racial identities and the social production of space, and why this is of such importance in movements for social justice both historically and today.