A History of the Los Angeles Underworld: From the Spanish Conquest to the Second World War
Creators: name: Snyder, Calvin
Publisher: name: Brandeis University
Year: 2026
Subjects: crime
culture industry
illicit economy
Los Angeles
underworld
Gambling
World History

description: Around the turn of the twentieth century, English-language newspapers and other mass media began using "the underworld" to denote a milieu of thieves, sex workers, confidence men, gamblers, and others on the margins of society. In the decades that followed, the term continued to evoke a broad social world of urban illicitness and criminality. It came to be used anachronistically as well, referring to similar phenomena going back centuries. For the most part, historians have approached the underworld in one of two ways: by focusing on its representation in discourse and popular culture or by zeroing in on one of its constituent elements – gambling, say, or red-light districts. They rarely study the underworld holistically as a coherent object of analysis in its own right.
description: In this dissertation, I examine the underworld concept together with its referent. I interpret that real-and-imaginary underworld as a manifestation of the social relations of economic crime endemic to the capitalist world-system. I identify five structural features of the world-system whose interplay shaped those social relations: (1) the interdependence of organized violence and capital accumulation; (2) the household, with its gendered division of labor, as the key site of social reproduction; (3) the generation of surplus value and relative surplus populations; (4) ideologies of racial difference; and (5) the commodification of culture and information.
description: Thus defined, the underworld provides a framework for examining the social relations of crime as they evolved in a particular place: Los Angeles, California. Between the late-eighteenth century and the onset of World War II, as the region transformed from a peripheral outpost of the Spanish empire into a major metropolis in the core of the world-system, and as the forces of production and the forces of coercion grew more sophisticated and powerful, the social relations of crime got more obscure. The advent of the term underworld—part of a process wherein culture industry products such as newspapers transformed webs of social relations into commodities for mass consumption—reflected that process of mystification. But in alluding to a capacious yet singular milieu defined in relation to an implied upper-world, the term also underscored the criminal milieu’s tangible interconnectedness and its place in the larger society. In the decades that followed, that interconnectedness became harder to see. The social relations of crime grew more far-reaching, more sophisticated, and more secretive, the distance between related historical actors widened and became more intensely mediated by new technology and culture industry commodities. By the mid-twentieth century, "the underworld" could no longer contain its unwieldy referent. It shed its initial capacious meaning and came to refer more narrowly to “organized crime.” No new concept arose to replace it.