Abstract: El Retiro School for Girls operated from 1920 to 1961 in Los Angeles County, serving as a detention facility for young white women at risk for delinquency. The life and death of this specific institution narrates in minute political maneuvers the role of white feminist philanthropy and white suburban activism in expanding the carceral state and further entrenching racial segregation in Los Angeles. In El Retiro's opening, white women progressives expressly excluded Black, Native, and Latinx youth from El Retiro's focus; in its closing, neighborhood activists advanced white heteropatriarchal ideals for the suburbs and enabled the spatial regulation of unincorporated Black and Latinx Los Angeles. In both contexts, local systems of governance in Los Angeles converged to perpetuate racial stratification and prepare carceral systems for racialized mass incarceration. Blending archival research and remediated ethnography, this micro-history illuminates the mechanisms of urban governance that thwart Los Angeles's struggles to decarcerate and end racialized youth incarceration even in the contemporary moment.
Akhila L. Ananth (Wed,) studied this question.
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