A massive population shift transformed Los Angeles in the first decades of the twentieth century. Americans from across the country relocated to the city even as an unprecedented transnational migration brought people from Asia, Europe, and Mexico. Together, these newcomers forged a multiethnic alliance of anarchists, labor unions, and leftists dedicated to challenging capitalism, racism, and often the state.

David M. Struthers draws on the anarchist concept of affinity to explore the radicalism of Los Angeles's interracial working class from 1900 to 1930. Uneven economic development created precarious employment and living conditions for laborers. The resulting worker mobility led to coalitions that, inevitably, remained short lived. As Struthers shows, affinity helps us understand how individual cooperative actions shaped and reshaped these alliances. It also reveals social practices of resistance that are often too unstructured or episodic for historians to capture. What emerges is an untold history of Los Angeles and a revolutionary movement that, through myriad successes and failures, produced powerful examples of racial cooperation.

| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Economic Development, Immigration, and the "Labors of Expropriation" 2. Creating Connections through Radical Practices 3. Solidarity and the Legacy of Exclusion 4. Internationalism and Its Limits 5. Organizing Mobile Workers 6. The Baja Raids 7. A Culture of Affinity 8. The Contours of Repression Conclusion: Regeneration, Decline, and Reordering the Left Notes Bibliography Index | Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies, International Committee of the American Studies Association (ASA), 2019 — International Committee of the American Studies Association (ASA)
|David Struthers is an adjunct assistant professor at the Copenhagen Business School.