Macías conducted numerous interviews for Mexican American Mojo, and the voices of little-known artists and fans fill its pages. In addition, more famous musicians such as Ritchie Valens and Lalo Guerrero are considered anew in relation to their contemporaries and the city. Macías examines language, fashion, and subcultures to trace the history of hip and cool in Los Angeles as well as the Chicano influence on urban culture. He argues that a grass-roots "multicultural urban civility" that challenged the attempted containment of Mexican Americans and African Americans emerged in the neighborhoods, schools, nightclubs, dance halls, and auditoriums of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. So take a little trip with Macías, via streetcar or freeway, to a time when Los Angeles had advanced public high school music programs, segregated musicians' union locals, a highbrow municipal Bureau of Music, independent R & B labels, and robust rock and roll and Latin music scenes. "I am especially excited by the interviews Anthony Macias conducted, which make central perspectives long missing from scholarship on jazz, swing, and R & B. Macias's method of looking at Los Angeles's social geography of race and ethnicity 'through a prism of popular music' will be of great interest to those interested in the histories of popular music, Mexican America, and Los Angeles."--Sherrie Tucker, author of "Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s"

Anthony Macías is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.