Author, Educator, Speaker
About the Book
Sally and Ken Owens Book Award, Western Historical Association
National Association for Chicana/o Studies Book Award, Honorable Mention
There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape 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 historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.
Author Interview
Journal of Transport History
"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."
National Association of Chicana and Chicana Studies
"The paradigm that Collisions at the Crossroads provides can help us understand what became of Chican@ Mexican communities across Aztlán and the U.S. and view the resistance strategies of raza communities, and barrio planners to maintain, recapture, and equitably transform these spaces and places."
Western Historical Association
"Carpio creatively builds a new framework for assessing the construction of racial hierarchies in the West during the 19th and 20th centuries. By assessing mobility structures and patterns within Inland California, Carpio demonstrates that White settler efforts to construct an Anglo Fantasy Past had real ramifications for Indigenous peoples, Hispanic and Latino inhabitants, and Asian immigrants."