Mayor Karen Bass
A wave of women was elected in California's last election
Mayor Karen Bass
On December 12, Karen Bass will become the first woman to serve as mayor of Los Angeles and the second African American mayor in the city after Tom Bradley. The Los Angeles Times editorial noticed that voters in the city and the state elected a wave of women, with Bass at the forefront. Before running for office, Bass was Executive Director of the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, an organization founded to foster policies that rebuild communities. One of the organization's objectives in the 1990s was to discourage the proliferation of liquor stores in South Los Angeles. She told the Los Angeles Times in 1994 that there were “about 500 liquor stores in that area”. Bass later served in the California Assembly from 2004-2010, and following the retirement of Diane Watson, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where she began her term in office in 2011. Guy Crowder captured images of Karen Bass and Sylvia Castillo, at that time Associate Director of the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, working at their office.
African American Women in LA Politics
Other African American women have been elected in Los Angeles and helped paved the way for Bass’s mayoral run and win. You can find these and other digital images in the section titled, Bradley Center Photographs of our library’s digital collections.
The Mayor and the Greatest
Our newly minted Dr., Keith Rice, showcases Bradley Center's images by Harry Adams and Charles Williams of the life and times of Muhammad Ali, aka “The Greatest,” at the CSUN University Library section A Peek in the Stacks.
Nada Que Ver: On Julián Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs’s “Abecedario de Juárez”
The Los Angeles Review of Books published a book review by the Center’s director, José Luis Benavides, on Julián Cardona’s latest book with artist Alice Leora Briggs, Abecedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon. The publication of Abecedario “bookends a larger reporting and memory project spearheaded by a group of Mexican and American journalists, artists, and intellectuals who, since the 1990s, have sought to reveal the full impact of globalization and free trade on the people of Juárez and other border towns,” wrote Benavides. Cardona’s photographic archive is part of this legacy and it is preserved at Bradley Center. We showcase some of his photographs, prepared by Cardona himself, in our library digital collections.
Exhibition: Hope and Dignity for Farmworkers
You still have time (through the end of January 2023) to see the exhibition of photographs by Emmon Clarke and John Kouns on the Farmworker Movement. The exhibition focuses on the early years of the farmworkers’ struggle, marked by the grape strike, the boycott, the first march/pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento, the early efforts to organize workers in Texas, and César Chávez’s fasting calling for nonviolence and sacrifice. The Soraya Art Gallery will host a reception on Saturday, Dec. 10 from 5:30 to 6:00 pm If you come to the reception, maybe you want to grab some tickets for a performance at the Great Hall, Nochebuena, Featuring Ballet Folklórico de Los Ángeles and Mariachi Garibaldi de Jaime Cuéllar.
