Urban Borderlands
Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles

Isabela Seong Leong Quintana (Author)

9781469675794

Hardback, published 7 July 2026

210 pages, 15 halftones, 4 maps, 4 tables
23.5 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.666 kg

“Theoretically rigorous and methodologically creative, this is relational race and ethnic history at its best. A tour de force that brings Latina/o and Asian American studies into stark engagement like very few others and charts a new cartography of Chinese-Mexican relations.”—Luis Alvarez, author of Chicanx Utopias: Pop Culture and the Politics of the Possible

Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century was bustling with the rise of industrialization, but the growing labor force that propelled it, mostly consisting of Mexican and Chinese men, was met with exclusion policies and deportation campaigns. Nevertheless, Chinese and Mexican women, children, and men built vibrant residential and business districts—until they were all but eradicated in the 1930s. In this compelling and textured history, Isabela Quintana unearths the entwined stories of Chinatown and Sonoratown through the everyday lives of their residents. As Quintana argues, their ordinary experiences illuminate the interlocking and gendered processes of racial segregation and border formation that built the Los Angeles we know today.

The blurry borders, geographic, cultural, and otherwise, between these communities—what Quintana calls urban borderlands—were less defined than official records would have us believe. Centering the lives of women and children, and the archival glimpses and silences that account for them, Quintana uncovers moments of familiarity, kinship, conflict, and collaboration born of proximity and shared space, particularly that of the Los Angeles Plaza. Revealing experiences of border policing, racial violence, and perceived foreignness, Quintana's dynamic narrative offers an innovative approach to understanding the layered histories of urban renewal in Mexican and Chinese Los Angeles.