Genevieve

Carpio

Assistant Professor of Chicana/o and

Central American Studies​

University of California, Los Angeles

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About Dr. Genevieve Carpio

Assistant Professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies.

Professor Carpio's research and teaching interests include race-making between diverse groups, how people make meaning in the places they call home, and the public humanities, particularly as related to the California Inland Empire and the digital world....

Collisions at the Crossroads:

How Place and Mobility make Race

In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that restrictions on free movement and on settlement catalyzed racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how regional authorities constructed racial hierarchies by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways that people of color have negotiated and resisted their positions within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of race through spatial mobility and the making of place.

Spatial mobility has distributed economic and cultural privileges in unequal ways, but never without contest.

 

REVIEWS

“Through close attention to the entanglement of race and everyday mobility, Genevieve Carpio shines a brilliant light on a previously unexplored aspect of the contested geographies of Southern California specifically and the American West more generally. Empirically rich, theoretically rigorous, and engagingly written, Collisions at the Crossroads connects the diverse experiences of Japanese citrus workers, Dust Bowl migrants, Latinx drivers of lowriders, and Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Filipino migrants to provide a counter-history of the role of mobility in the American West. For those interested in mobility studies, critical race theory, or the spatial histories of Greater Los Angeles, Carpio has provided a pioneering landmark text.”

—Tim Cresswell, author of Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place