Book Review: Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race by Genevieve Carpio

Abstract

For historians of transport and mobility, a book about Southern California in the twentieth century might bring to mind the region's congested highways or vibrant automobile cultures. While Genevieve Carpio's book certainly addresses such themes, its focus on race brings new analytical possibilities to the field. Collisions at the Crossroads takes readers to traffic checkpoints, bicycle races, neighborhood boundaries, and other sites where the state exerts control over mobility to demonstrate how restrictions on movement reinforce racial hierarchies. In Southern California, these racial hierarchies involve Latino, Asian, African American, and Anglo American groups. Restrictions on the mobility of non-White people in this context, Carpio argues, are central to processes of racialization because they allow White settlers to construct historical narratives about local belonging that delegitimize the place-based claims of other groups.The "crossroads" in the title of the book refers to inland Southern California, a region where rail, auto, and air transportation routes intersect, and where numerous migrant and immigrant groups have relocated in response to the labor demands of local farms. The book, which covers a time period from the 1870s to the 1990s, examines the regional and international mobilities that make inland Southern California a global crossroads. Importantly, the book extends this analysis of migration beyond large-scale economic processes and national policy to consider the local politics of mobility that emerge when these groups take up residence in suburban and rural locations, revealing how different groups experience racialization as a result of these local politics. Racialization, an analytical concept from critical race and ethnic studies, refers to the structural processes that define racial categories and give them meaning. Carpio explores how migrations as well as everyday mobilities generate meaning about race and belonging through an interdisciplinary framework that weaves together insights from mobility studies, critical race and ethnic studies, migration studies, and geography.One of the book's major strengths is its close attention to how differently mobile groups construct and negotiate "race" in relation to each other and how these categories can change over time to accommodate the shifting demands of capitalist industries in the region. The first chapter sets the stage by describing how Anglo Americans who migrated to inland Southern California from the eastern United States in the late nineteenth century legitimized their occupation through the erasure of Indigenous people, the dispossession of ethnic Mexicans, and the criminalization of Chinese farming and daily travel. The second