[Review of] Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.). Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA.

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a Spanish fantasy heritage that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a zoot (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American gangsters of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What\u27s more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general