Efforts to build interethnic identification and solidarity are often accompanied by disappointment. Devastating consequences have resulted at times from lapses in inter-community cooperation, but more often from organized efforts to undermine solidarity among aggrieved groups. Moreover, those efforts have been accompanied by divisive discourse, by language that measures the histories of interethnic struggles by their shortcomings rather than their successes. Understanding the legacy of Afro-Chicano coalitional politics in Los Angeles is one way to counter that disappointment. This essay examines the wartime activism of two women: Luisa Moreno and Charlotta Bass. It reveals interracial and antiracist alliances, divisions among aggrieved minority communities, and important insights into the infra-politics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle within these two communities of color. (Contains 10 notes.)