Please join us for a webinar with two of our 2021 LACHS Scholarship recipients. Students will present their essays followed by a Q&A session. The webinar will also be recorded and published on our website.
7:00 pm
A Municipal Tail: The Rise of Animal Control in Los Angeles, 1880-1909 - Sean McCaskill
This project examines municipal animal control in Los Angeles between 1880 and 1909. It shows how municipal animal control became the confluence of animal welfare reform and progressive state expansion. The animal welfare movement in the United States began in the Colonial Era, but quickly took influence from changing attitudes in Europe, as well as antebellum anti-cruelty reform. As Americans sought to create a better world out of the ashes of the Civil War, many looked towards animal welfare. It occurred first on the East Coast, beginning with Henry Bergh’s founding of the ASPCA in 1866, and reached Los Angeles by the end of the century. Many in the growing city viewed the dawn of the twentieth century with optimism, hoping for its ascendancy into the ranks of the nation’s other great metropolises. As a result, they began to look at the city’s problems through an increasingly progressive lens. Newspapers had covered the pound system’s brutality since the 1880s, but by the end of the century - they began emphasizing its connection to larger social issues. The government responded by passing an ordinance that put animal control in the hands of the Humane Animal League, a private animal welfare organization. When the League failed to handle the city’s burgeoning animal population, the city had to assume the responsibility of animal control for itself. The emergence of municipal animal control in Los Angeles demonstrates a city attempting to extend state power at the local level to create a more humane world for both its human and animal inhabitants.
7:30 pm
La migra in 1980s Los Angeles: Exploitation, unemployment, and the legality of the INS raids - Arnoldo Toral
Since the 1970s, Mexicans and Central Americans have constituted the majority of the unauthorized immigrant population in Los Angeles. Their arrival in mass numbers during the recession of the early 1980s sounded nativist alarms arising from assumptions over high levels of unemployment, union decline, and the draining of local and national resources. This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of immigration in the context of national economic change and legal defense of immigrants’ rights during the 1980s. The conditions, tactics, and subsequent litigation brought against Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) conduct in worksite and factory raids in Los Angeles and California are examined alongside local businesses’ need for low wage labor. Despite anti-immigrant rhetoric and unlawful INS tactics, undocumented immigrants continued to work these labor-intensive jobs. This study highlights the reliance of unauthorized immigrant labor by local businesses and includes accounts of INS worksite raids and their impact on the regional economy. Issues concerning the legality of these worksite and factory raids are also examined alongside immigrants’ fundamental constitutional rights.
Both essays are available for download here: lacityhistory.org/scholarship
LOCATION
Webinar via Zoom
REGISTRATION
This is a free event but registration is required.
If you have questions about the event, please email us at lacityhistoryevents@gmail.com.
About the LACHS Scholarship Program
In 2019, the Los Angeles City Historical Society implemented a program to award scholarships to outstanding history graduate students at local universities and colleges. We hope that LACHS members and friends wish to support the program by donating funds to the program. Please note that 100% of all donations will go to students.
The Board recognizes the critical value of the study and analysis of history to our democracy and seeks to encourage outstanding students in the field.
For more information about the LACHS Scholarship Program and to read the students’ essays, please visit lacityhistory.org/scholarship