Organizing Capital and Controlling Race and Labor

This chapter explores how, as Los Angeles capitalists embarked on investment ventures and urban-imperial expansion across Mexico, they extended concepts of race and labor forged in Los Angeles to build networks for investment and to control their Mexican workforce. They channelled a history of working with California’s Mexican American elite into productive partnerships with president Porfirio Díaz and other Mexican elites. Los Angeles investors also applied ideas about race and labor developed in Southern California to their investments in Mexico. These ideas were also linked to their perspective on race and American empire-building around the globe. Anglo-American investors in Los Angeles believed that a hierarchy of race justified their labor system in Southern California as well as imperial exploits around the globe. These investors included William Rosecrans; Harrison Gray Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times; Senator Thomas Bard; and oil baron Edward Doheny. They believed that Mexican land, resources, and labor could be drawn into Los Angeles’s commercial orbit in the form of a racialized labor system and “informal” empire.