Book Review: Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980 by Mom Gijs

Abstract

Americans and Japanese immigrants, to illustrate how spatial divisions between the two groups reinforced notions of racial difference. The third chapter considers housing campaigns and debates over immigration policy that represented ethnic Mexicans as both permanent settlers and “birds of passage” that would naturally return to Mexico after each harvest. These contradictory discourses eased the tensions between local agriculturalists’ labor needs and federal concerns over immigration in the 1920s. The fourth chapter turns to Mexican immigrant and Mexican American automotive practices, employing a cultural studies lens to reveal how the policing of Latino drivers during the Depression contributed to the perception of driving as a white, middle-class activity despite widespread automobile use by Mexican farmworkers. The fifth chapter addresses a paradox in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the mid-twentieth century. While Latinos and African Americans were able to achieve a degree of social mobility through residential mobility, the expansion of prisons in the region enforced the immobility of surplus workers of color. The final chapter shows how Route 66, a popular tourist highway and regional heritage project, operated in the 1990s as a racial project through the manufacture of nostalgia for mid-twentieth White migration and the erasure of the region’s multiracial residents. To support its argument, the book engages with a broad range of sources, including maps, photographs, song lyrics, radio shows, oral histories, municipal legal codes, local newspapers, and Congressional hearings. These sources contribute new perspectives on the history of mobility in the United States. In contrast to previous research in this area, which has largely elided analyses of race in relation to mobility, Carpio introduces readers to the cultural history of bicycle and automobile use among Asians and Latinos. The author, moreover, includes the racialization of Anglo Americans in their analysis, contributing valuable insight into the relationship between mobility and whiteness in the United States. Despite the centrality of mobility to constructions of the United States as a nation, the insights in Collisions at the Crossroads may indeed be applied to other contexts where the mobility of one social group is advanced at the expense of the mobility of other groups. Carpio’s attention to people’s everyday negotiations with the structures that govern mobility will be of interest to historians of colonial and postcolonial mobility, to cultural historians of bicycles, automobiles, and highways, and to historians of migration, space, and place.