What keeps Chinatown alive?

In this episode of The History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox speaks with Dr. Laureen Hom, author of The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles, about the long history—and ongoing political significance—of Chinatowns in California.

Drawing on her research in Los Angeles Chinatown, Dr. Hom explains how Chinatowns have been shaped by racial exclusion, urban violence, redevelopment, immigration policy, and suburbanization, while also serving as sites of community formation, political organizing, and resistance. The conversation explores how the concept of gentrification has evolved, why displacement is often indirect and difficult to see, and how cities deploy tools like redevelopment agencies, multicultural planning, and business improvement districts to reshape ethnic neighborhoods.

Mattox and Hom also examine Chinatown’s changing demographics, its relationship to suburban Chinese communities in places like the San Gabriel Valley, and the challenges of coalition-building in multiracial neighborhoods where Chinese American and Latino residents share space, history, and vulnerability.

This episode offers a powerful framework for understanding Chinatown not as a static cultural enclave, but as a dynamic political space—one that reveals broader truths about California’s urban history, community power, and the ongoing struggle for spatial justice.

In this episode, host Jordan Mattox sits down with Dr. Michael Zeitler for an expansive conversation about John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat — its mythic structure, its treatment of poverty, the nature of friendship and communal codes, and how Steinbeck used the Monterey landscape to explore deep questions about history and identity. Together they examine the novel’s tragic undercurrents, its echoes of World War I trauma, its links to Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle, and Cannery Row, and why Steinbeck’s early works continue to provoke debate about caricature, class, and representation. Dr. Zeitler also reflects on Hardy, Haney’s Beowulf, the anthropology of place, car mechanics in Steinbeck, and the philosophical lineage running from Emerson to Ellison. A wide-ranging, insightful discussion for Steinbeck fans and California history enthusiasts alike.

In this episode of The History of California Podcast, host Jordan Mattox sits down with attorney, author, and Yurok Tribe member Amy Bowers Cordalis for an intimate conversation about her new book The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life. Amy shares the story of her family's deep roots along the Klamath River, the Yurok creation narrative that shapes their worldview, and the tribe’s intergenerational struggle to protect salmon and restore ecological balance. Together, Jordan and Amy explore the 2002 Klamath fish kill, the complex legal fight for dam removal, the importance of myth and cultural continuity, and the profound moment the river flowed freely once again. Throughout the episode, they examine Indigenous stewardship, the legacy of genocide, the nature of environmental restoration, and how the story of the Klamath fits into the larger arc of California’s history.