Making Do,Making Home

Abstract

The racialized and gendered regulations of national borders through the industrialization of neighborhood geographies had a tremendous impact on daily work, home architecture, and social relationships in the Chinatown and Sonoratown neighborhoods of Los Angeles during the early twentieth century. Using space and gender as analytic lenses, this article examines the built environments of house courts in Sonoratown and Chinatown as windows into the everyday lives of Mexican and Chinese Angelenos. Women’s ordering of domestic space and intimate labor in and around the home spaces—in particular, their use of common spaces like courtyards and alleyways—blurred the categories that city and state agents designated for family, home, and nation, as they shaped conceptions of community that exceeded the logic of the nation-state.