shadows-streets-book

12 Introductionto organize their communities through the practice of liberation theology.48 Diverse histories have thus shaped the immigrant rights movementin L.A. as it has spread through community centers, worker centers, faithbasedcoalitions, multiethnic organizing alliances, and other innovativeforms of community organizing. During the last two decades, there hasalso been a shift away from “ turf war ” unionism and towards attempts toorganize entire sectors of the workforce at once, through networks ofunions, CBOs, churches, and universities. 49 L.A. ’ s racial, ethnic, and culturaldiversity has also generated innovative organizing forms. Aside fromthe labor movement and the churches, the immigrant rights movementincludes a vast and diverse array of less visible but highly active CBOs,student groups, cultural activists, media- and filmmakers, progressive lawfirms, radical scholars, musicians, punks, and anarchists, hip-hop artists,mural painters and graffiti writers, indigenous rights activists, queer collectives,and many others. The rich history of intersecting social movementsin L.A. — described by Laura Pulido as “ Black, Brown, Yellow, andLeft ”— has been extensively documented by many scholars and activists,and I encourage interested readers to explore that literature further ontheir own. 50At the same time, L.A. has long been a key site for the development andgrowth of the globalized cultural industries. Hollywood remains both thesymbolic and material center of global film production, despite trendstoward transnational coproduction networks, recentralization in cheapersites of production, and the rise of studios in New York, Toronto, and NewZealand, not to mention the steady growth of competitive regional filmexport industries in India (Bollywood), Nigeria (Nollywood), South Korea,and China. 51 Besides film, native media industries in L.A. include television,music, games, and, most recently, transmedia production companies.The city looms large in wave after wave of transformation in the broadermedia ecology. L.A. occupies a unique location in the global imagination:it is a city of dreams, image making, and myths. It symbolizes both thepromise and the deception of the American project, and it remains animportant site of popular resistance, radical imagination, and concretemovement-building work.The immigrant rights movement in L.A. is thus a rich, complex, multilayeredworld. It lies at the fertile confluence of the cross-platform powerof the globalized cultural industries and the innovative, intersectional