Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (American Crossroads Book 13)

by Eric Avila

Los Angeles pulsed with economic vitality and demographic growth in the decades following World War II. This vividly detailed cultural history of L.A. from 1940 to 1970 traces the rise of a new suburban consciousness adopted by a generation of migrants who abandoned older American cities for Southern California's booming urban region. Eric Avila explores expressions of this new "white identity" in popular culture with provocative discussions of Hollywood and film noir, Dodger Stadium, Disneyland, and L.A.'s renowned freeways. These institutions not only mirrored this new culture of suburban whiteness and helped shape it, but also, as Avila argues, reveal the profound relationship between the increasingly fragmented urban landscape of Los Angeles and the rise of a new political outlook that rejected the tenets of New Deal liberalism and anticipated the emergence of the New Right. Avila examines disparate manifestations of popular culture in architecture, art, music, and more to illustrate the unfolding urban dynamics of postwar Los Angeles. He also synthesizes important currents of new research in urban history, cultural studies, and critical race theory, weaving a textured narrative about the interplay of space, cultural representation, and identity amid the westward shift of capital and culture in postwar America.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Race, Urbanism, Urban Studies

329 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, both in the fascinating cultural history and insight into mass culture and suburbanization that it achieved, and in thinking about the articulations of race and space which it doesn't quite manage to draw out. They are stated though, and provocative, and while the book doesn't really deal with the literature emerging from the spatial turn (while also coining the term racial term), it is a good start.

Broadly speaking, this is a study of culture and race

I argue that despite popular culture's capacity to incorporate diverse and often contradictory meanings within its fold, the cultural forms explored in the following chapters privileged a particular way of seeing the city and its people. This way of seeing became the basis for a new political subjectivity that prized an inclusive white identity among a heterogeneous suburban public. In making this argument, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight contributes to the critical study of whiteness (viii)

that tries to incorporate space

More than providing a physical setting for the formation of such identities, space-its organization, construction, destruction, and representation plays an active role in shaping social consciousness. This book adopts the recent spatial turn within the humanities and social sciences, often linked to the emergence of postmodern theory, to illuminate the racial turn that [viv] dawned upon American society and culture in the decades following World War II. In the age of urban renewal, highway construction, and suburbanization, the spatial reorganization of the American city gave rise to a new
racial awareness that, for better or for worse, still grips our collective imagination.
Ultimately, this study emphasizes the suburban character of postwar popular culture. (viv-vv)

But this is really as technical as the spatial discussion gets. While true that the cultural forms he discusses (noir and SF film, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium and the freeways) all take place in, and are affected by, space, this didn't seem to get into any of the deeper conversations on the subject. David Harvey, Neil Smith, Ed Soja among many others all write about culture and space (and even L.A.), yet there is no explicit engagement with them or any other geographers that I could see, apart from nods in footnotes. Not that they are particularly good at transcending departmental limits either.

Unfortunately the section I found least convincing was also the first one, on noir and SF film. I suppose loving noir and SF film as I do, it is hard to see them fairly well reduced to flat one-dimensional meanings -- particularly SF as simply a fear of the racialized other (although that is undoubtedly often there). Nor is noir simply a critique of the brutal and racialized spaces of the city and the transgressive and evil people who live there (though again, it is often that along with other things). Even if I had agreed with the approach I don't know that I would have found it that useful to the argument.

I found the other three sections very insightful, however, and the book is full of gems of information. The section on Disneyland was packed full of well-researched tidbits that will make you rage if you're anything like me, even liking rollercoasters as I do. The living Indian exhibit? Aunt Jemima serving pancakes? The relationship Disney had with television? Tomorrow land and autopia? All of these things certainly support quotes like this:

Extolling the virtues of consumerism, patriarchy, patriotism, and small-town midwestern whiteness, Disneyland issued a set of cultural motifs that emphasized a retreat from the public culture of New Deal liberalism and instead asserted a privatized, suburban alternative to that culture.

The story of Chavez Ravine and the relocating of the Dodgers from Brooklyn to LA is equally fascinating, along with the changes in working-class culture and baseball that this entailed

The onus was thus on Walter O'Malley to clean up the image of major-league baseball, to sever the game from its historical affinity with working-class masculinity, and to make it more palatable for an expanding middle class comprising presumably stable nuclear families.

And I'm still not quite sure how well freeways fit within these four cultural forms, but they are so key to LA and the chapter is again, well-researched and insightful, and raises some of the most interesting spatial changes in post-war LA (though without going into more depth sadly!)

Simultaneously, however, as freeway construction exacerbated racial tensions within the postwar urban region, the very experience of driving the new freeways diminished the public's awareness of such tensions. The freeway mediated a view of the metropolis, not unlike the way in which Disneyland's structured space mediated a view of a small-town past and a suburban future.

My final critique is that the suburbs are well known to hold homogeneity and whiteness, along with safety and security and order to be ideals. This was amply and well demonstrated, but I'm still not sure how much it shows about how that came to be such an all-powerful force, nor quite how culture and suburbs intertwined and reinforced each other. But I enjoyed reading this one, and found it provocative of much thought!

[Vincent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles looks at racialization in the 1950s through the lens of popular culture. By examining the film noir and science fiction genres, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and the construction of freeways, Avila looks at the ways in which privatization, patriarchy, and especially white identity, were reinforced by popular entertainment, and the role Los Angeles’s sprawling suburbs played in the process. Avila’s intention is to explore “the cultural expressions that mirrored the suburbanization of white culture and consciousness during the postwar period… Postwar suburbanization nurtured the development of a more expansive white identity, one that extended to various social groups who removed themselves from racialized spaces of the inner city vis-à-vis home ownership. What role popular culture played in the formation of a suburban white identity, and how that identity was created, consumed, and contested by various social groups,” is the subject of his investigation. Furthermore, Avila talks of a new “new mass culture,” which was a departure and, in many ways, a reaction against the “new mass culture” of the early twentieth-century, and which “reflected and reinforced the burgeoning racial order of the postwar urban region” and helped to define an inclusive postwar suburban white identity.

Avila organizes his argument by focusing each chapter on a particular aspect of popular culture and its relation to an urban/suburban dichotomy, and how it affected evolving racial categorizations. The first chapter functions largely as an introduction, laying out the rationale for the book: “As dominant icons of a Southern California way of life, Hollywood, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and the freeway repudiated the slums… and was a birthplace of the culture of suburban whiteness that enveloped a generation of diverse Americans who sought their place in the California sun.” In addition, “suburban popular culture also included a powerful fantasy of classlessness that supported representations of racial and sexual hierarchy.” The second chapter provides the background - socially, politically, and economically - that helped give birth to the new “new mass media.” Los Angeles was, in the early twentieth-century, held up to be maintained as a racially homogenous “white spot.” Nevertheless, minorities, especially blacks, poured into the city during World War II and the postwar period. At the same time, LA’s urban sprawl stretched to new horizons, and “the blackening of Los Angeles… sparked a reactionary effort to delineate a new set of spatial and racial boundaries that materialized throughout the course of postwar suburbanization.” Resistance by whites meant black populations concentrated in a limited, racially defined urban space as whites increasingly rejected heterogenous cities for more homogenous suburbs. So it was that “within a span of two years during the early 1940s, Los Angeles confronted a new racial landscape that shattered earlier idealizations of the city as… the westernmost outpost of Aryan supremacy.” Conservatism in 1950s Southern California spawned its own brand of McCarthyism, refusing to tolerate public housing and other such New Deal programs. Wartime communities became more exclusive, sheltering “an inclusive white identity on the fringes of the urban core.” Such spatial organization and predictability, with fears of the Cold War ever-present, “reflected a larger demand for social order that seemed imperative to an uncertain time in American history.” Whites concentrated in what Avila calls Vanilla Suburbs, and blacks into the Chocolate Cities, while Mexican Americans “straddled the fence between” them. Ultimately, plans for urban renewal sought to whitewash city space and wipe it of its diversity.

Chapter 3 examines two cinematic genres of film and how they reflect the perspectives of contemporary suburban whites. Film noir of the late 1940s and science fiction of the 1950s offered “cinematic representations that dramatized the deterioration of the modern city.” The “cynical disillusionment” of film noir and science fiction’s “apocalyptic imagery… heralded a new political culture that rejected the social vision of New Deal liberalism and evidenced the ideological transformation of American society during the 1950s.” Film noir’s crime dramas suggested a loss of faith in the American dream, emphasizing the sordid side of urban life: “In the dark and disordered universe of the noir city, the inscribed boundaries between the races, sexes, and classes dissolved… Noir featured the tenement and the nightclub, both landmarks in the culture of industrial urbanism, as conspicuous venues for the kinds of social transgressions that transpire in the noir city.” Noir films were shot on location, showcasing actual slums, reinforcing “the perception of the city as the site of danger, chaos, and imminent doom.” Los Angeles noir emphasized the blurring of urban and suburban, showing how the corruption of the city could spill into the white landscape, and dramatized “an imperative to fortify the boundaries between the suburbs and the ‘black’ city.” Noir films also used the language of cinema to racialize crime by using shadows, grime, or cultural suggestions to imply that a white criminal had relinquished their claims to whiteness and had, in essence, become black. 1950s noir introduced the “policier,” which emphasized law and order as a bulwark against urban crime: “Moving away from the ambiguous and ironic tone… the policies depicted an upstanding portrait of law and order and emphasized the reinscription of the social boundaries that bifurcated the physical and cultural landscape of the postwar urban region.”

Avila’s analysis of film noir is compelling, save for certain moments when his interpretation appears to overreach, such as in his analysis of Sunset Boulevard. However, his imagination really reaches when deconstructing the themes behind 1950s science fiction cinema. Avila’s basic contention is reasonably sound, that “in the changing racial geography of the postwar, postindustrial city, the urban science fiction film provided a cultural arena where suburban America could measure its whiteness against the image of the alien Other.” However, his use of 1953’s War of the Worlds and 1954’s Them! does little to prove his case and requires too broad of an interpretation to accept his thesis of the alien Other as being a surrogate for blacks. He emphasizes the ants in Them! for their color and bulging eyes and mandibles, which he says “recall historic stereotypes of racial groups as animalistic and especially alien.” His later use of the expression “phallic bazookas” makes me believe his Freudian-inspired net is casting too wide while, ironically, missing some other examples which would support his argument far more effectively. (It does well to recall the apocryphal Freudian quote that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and therefore sometimes an ant is just an ant, even when it’s a giant puppet.) Avila errs in concentrating on 1950s urban horror to prove his point, when really he would be better served to look at that era’s suburban horror. A better example of his contention is 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, in which pod people take over the fictional Southern California town of Santa Mira, which Avila mentions briefly in the context of fears of Communist subversion. However, this film also reveals anxieties felt by white suburbanites in context to their changing neighborhoods and in their fears about who or what might infiltrating them, and the effects that presence would have. In the beginning of the film the main character, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), first notices something is amiss when he passes a familiar vegetable stand, now closed and rundown, but which he states was once the busiest and “cleanest” in town. Stephen King, in writing about the film and the popular 1954 novel by Jack Finney upon which it was based, delves further into the theme:

There is nothing really physically horrible in the Siegel version… The pod people are just a little different, that’s all. A little vague. A little messy. Although Finney never puts this fine a point on it in his book, he certainly suggests that the most horrible thing about ‘them’ is that they lack even the most common and easily attainable sense of aesthetics… They don’t even mow their lawns or replace the pane of garage glass that got broken… They don’t repaint their houses when they get flaky. The roads leading into Santa Mira, we’re told, are so full of potholes and washouts that pretty soon the salesmen who service the town - who aerate its municipal lungs with the life-giving atmosphere of capitalism, you might say - will no longer bother to come.

King makes no mention of race, however, it’s easy to see how the disregard that pod people show toward preserving and upholding white suburban communities, let alone an image of capitalist idealism, looks very much like what residents would interpret as the bleeding in of urban squalor. Avila focuses on the physical representations of the aliens, to limited effect, rather than on the fears being showcased in films where the aliens don’t look so “alien.” Regardless of Avila’s choices in evidence, his general argument remains reasonable, that “ultimately, film noir and the urban science fiction film indicted the modern city for its failure to ‘contain’ the subversive energies latent in American society, be they racial, sexual, or ideological.”

Avila next focuses on the creation of Disneyland, and of the white suburban ideal it sought to create and celebrate. Walt Disney created Disneyland as an alternative to the messy, unruly, vulgar, sexually charged amusement parks where young people interacted without adult supervision, like Coney Island: “Extolling the virtues of consumerism, patriarchy, patriotism, and small-town midwestern whiteness, Disneyland issued a set of cultural motifs that emphasized a retreat from the public culture of New Deal liberalism and instead asserted a privatized, suburban alternative to that culture.” Disneyland’s landscapes emphasized tradition, order and nostalgia, and served “not only as ‘a protector’ from the chaos and contradictions of the noir city, but also as the very antithesis of the Coney Island experience.” Disneyland promoted the themes of racial hierarchy, the nuclear family, and suburban domesticity. The park’s many unflattering racial depictions also served to emphasize the park-goers whiteness, for “Disneyland provided a space where white Southern Californians could affirm their whiteness against a set of racial stereotypes,” in the safety of the suburbs, away from urban poverty. Similarly, the fifth chapter looks at the building of Dodger Stadium. The chapter highlights a number of ironies, the prime being that in bringing to Los Angeles from Brooklyn the first racially integrated baseball club - a win for racial progressivism - a working-class Chicano community was forcibly removed and destroyed. The owner, Walter O’Malley, “based his decision to move west not on the mass suburbanization of Southern California, but rather on the ambitious proposal to revitalize a deteriorating downtown district.” Urban renewal was the goal. Nevertheless, televised footage of the forced evictions of the “blighted” Chavez Ravine in 1959 “widened the growing racial gulf in postwar Los Angeles and set the urban stage for the late-‘60s explosion of the Chicano movement.” Like Disney, O’Malley advertised the Dodgers as wholesome family entertainment, unlike the rowdy crowds that had watched the team in Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field: “The pristine environment of Dodger Stadium, marketing order, homogeneity, safety, and respectability, satisfied the changing cultural appetite of an enfranchised, white, suburban working class.” Despite the unpopular destruction of a whole community to build the stadium, the Dodgers’ appeal crossed racial boundaries and acted as a sort of “communal glue.” Ultimately, “the construction of Dodger Stadium facilitated the ‘whitening’ of the city center by fueling a racialized political culture predicated upon a privatized, corporate version of downtown redevelopment.”

Finally, Avila gives attention to the construction of freeways, and while he offers valuable insight, the connection to popular culture feels tangential at times. He creates ties by looking at the rise of 1950s automobile culture. Also, for Avila, by incorporating a “disciplined spatial culture… and presenting an edited view of the metropolis not unlike the narrative structures of film, the freeway channeled its ‘audience’ along a concrete continuum that imposed a singular perception of the city and limited the possibilities for different perspectives.” Here again, like the analysis of science fiction aliens, Avila’s imagination seems to be in overdrive, however, he’s still very much behind the wheel. Urban planners throughout the nation saw freeways “as a means of renewing the deteriorating condition of American inner cities. With little or no official interest in providing inner-city housing for those residents displaced by freeway construction, huge sections of central-city land could be cleared for other uses. Downtown business leaders and real estate developers, anxious about the effects of suburbanization on their domain, clamored for central-city redevelopment.” Highway construction became, in effect, a method of slum clearance. There were cultural ramifications as well, for “the freeway accelerated the trend toward increasing segregation by race, destroying the city’s multicultural spaces,” and while “freeway construction exacerbated racial tensions within the postwar urban region, the very experience of driving the new freeways diminished the public’s awareness of such tensions.” Ultimately, these changes limited the interactions between various classes and races.

Avila advances existing scholarship by placing the history of popular culture within the context of white suburbia and its relative racial identity. As he explains, “although various aspects of the history of theme parks, films, ballparks, and freeways have been explored elsewhere, they have not been considered as part of a larger (sub)urban cultural system in which each constituent part implies a relationship with the others.” In addition, Avila contends that “unlike previous accounts of white flight… this book utilizes recent advances in critical race theory, showing how a heterogenous public embraced a classless but deeply racialized fantasy of suburban whiteness, and focusing upon the texts and spectacles that licensed broader access to that newfangled identity.”

Avila succeeds in pulling examples of 1950s suburban white identity from contemporary popular culture, with the few exceptions mentioned above. His depiction of Disneyland and its wider impact upon American culture is certainly worth taking pause to reflect upon. Likewise, his analysis of film noir, and of urban racialization in film, is certainly fascinating, though it does make me wonder about other examples and how they fit, such as the portrayal of poor urban whites in The Honeymooners (1955-1956) and whether or not Avila would see racialization in the Kramden’s modest apartment or in Ed Norton’s frumpy attire, or in their mannerisms or decisions (as opposed to white nostalgia for imagined urban ethnic enclaves). If not, what kept them “white” in viewers’ eyes? Popular culture gives us a window into the past which is sometimes murky, but it’s perhaps the clearest one we have. Through film, television, etc. people reveal their wishes, desires, fears, and values. Of course, it generates as many questions as answers, but Avila shows that it’s a dialogue worth having, and that there’s a tremendous amount of insight still to be excavated from examining the artifacts of popular culture.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Useful book breaking down the postwar Southern California landscape. With chapters divided into different components of the Los Angeles region, Avila defines the contours of the Chocolate Cities, Vanilla Suburbs, and their uneasy confrontations. Through the urban studies, cinema, sports, amusement park, and highway literatures, Avila takes us through the 1950s and the destructive developments to the New Deal era. Sowing the seeds for Reagan reactionism.

That last point is I think the most valuable contribution of this whole book. Linking immediate choices in the aftermath of WWII to the Reagan revolution by the urban landscape is no easy feat. And, truthfully, some sections were more convincing than others. The sports section seemed particularly muffled on this regard, but I never lost track of the broader points, and Avila always did a good job making his material interesting.

I especially appreciated the visuals he included/referenced. The title picture especially does a good job portraying the displacing urbanism that made the Los Angeles 20th century order. I also rather enjoy the book’s bibliography, definitely a treasure trove for future reads.

For those seeking to piece together the fragmented nature of 1950s LA, this is the book for you.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Los Angeles provides the terrain for the unfolding of a particular story of American progress. Avila’s work reveals a process in which consumerist, suburbanized communities were shaped by the exclusionary forces of containment, whether it was the creation of a homogenized white identity which incorporated ethnic groups previously outside popular definition of whiteness, the construction of ethnically homogenous neighborhoods in the suburbs and the de facto establishment of same in areas vacated by white flight, the proliferation of suburban architecture and suburban ways of life, and the infrastructure - whether they be freeways or entertainment complexes.

These forces working upon the landscape of Los Angeles fabricated a compartmentalized metropolis; Avila quotes D.J. Waldie, who noted the distinction between neighborhoods and communities: “You rarely go across the street, which is forty feet wide .... [I]t is as if each house on your block stood on its own enchanted island ... but the island is remote.” More than simply a statement on the physical landscape’s deterrent influence on communal life, Waldie’s observation resonates with the Cold War suburban containment thesis of Elaine Tyler May.

Avila himself posits New York City as something of a counterpoint to Los Angeles. While New York, with its heterogeneous neighborhoods and public transportation-heavy infrastructure “epitomized the social world of New Deal urbanism,” the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area was one shaped by Cold War forces, “a new spatial culture that bred a growing suspicion toward public life.” Avila notes that this juxtaposition is best encapsulated in the flight of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the very franchise which broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier when Jackie Robinson donned a Dodgers uniform in 1947, from the sagging brick and mortar structure of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn for the (eventual) freeway-bound, steel, concrete, and plastic confines of Dodger Stadium, build on land confiscated from a community of Mexican-American homeowners.

Elaine Tyler May’s suburban containment theory is visible in Avila’s understanding of the ultimate implications of the process which unfolded in Los Angeles. “Southern California during the postwar period cultivated a racialized vision of suburban modernity ... [that] included every amenity of modern life, yet also sought relief from the dissipating effects of modernization on traditional notions of family, property and community.” Avila likewise finds resonance with Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumers Republic, noting that the “fruits of postwar consumer affluence” were cultural products which “codified the formation of a white suburban identity.”

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

- White flight has a lot to do with crime, innate racism - but most of the all, as the author noted, was the coordinated effort by several factors to developed a more "civilized", "family-friendly" areas where the areas (suburbs) are not plagued by "societal corruption" of crime, lust, drugs and lost-ness (my word) that is still prevalent in American cities today

- Film-making was mostly an individual enterprise at the outset of the 20th century. However, with the rise of Hollywood, studio system production quickly became the norm. An effort to "kill the slum tradition in the movies" (echoed by Adolph Zukor) gained steam. "New" movies portrayed values that is wholesome became mainstream

- Before the development of Disney Land, amusement parks like Coney Island was rather popular (similar development spurred accrosed the country, such as Willow Grove Park in Willow Grove, PA). However, Coney Island was mostly seen as a places where sexual permissiveness was prevalent where young people would go solely for lust to escape their families. Disney Land (and Disney World) soon attempted to erase that, and make amusement park similar to suburb developments, with themes and amusements that do not encourage sexual encounter (whereas Coney Island, many of the rides/dance halls are intended solely for lust)

- Suburb developments, too, emphasize on that. People move to suburb to "raise a family"

[KT · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avila's framing of rapid suburbanization with the lens of white supremacy is needed. I think his framework is excellent and necessary in today's conversations about reexamining unchallenging narratives with an anti-racist lens. While his narrative centers on Suburban Los Angeles, I find it applicable to many communities. Los Angeles creates the cultural product that defines the rest of the Western United States. I recommend this book to everyone.

[Sam G · Rating 5 out of 5]

A definitive introduction to critical L.A. urbanism that's both accessible and highly engaging. Beyond individual Mike Davis chapters, this is what I'll now be recommending to people looking for books about L.A. history (and, in some cases, suburban history more generally).

[Daisy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Awesome

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

wish i had read this in college.... really unsatisfying now and the analysis is just a little too wrapped up...

[Jacob Woocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book on the post-WWII suburbanization of Los Angeles. The thorough materialist base of the cultural analysis is much appreciated.

[stella! · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so fascinating

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have rated this higher but it's actually the second time I've read the book. About 5 years ago it was assigned in a California Cultures class and it was much more exciting information. Exciting, meaning, "oh god I'll never look at Dodger Stadium the same."

Reading it for the second time, some things bothered me about the Disney section. Like the insistence that Walt was trying to educate the public (which he was not) and missed opportunities in discussing aspects of the park. The berm got example, which is a 15 foot barrier that separates the.(all visible & audible) outside world from the in-park experience. It became apparent that I've done more research on Disney than Avila's sources reflected. This may be because of the book's publication date. There are now many books on Disney, Disney, and Walt himself available and published at the same time as White Flight. I can't give him much flack for inopportune timing.

One last thing, to those of you who did not grow up in southern California---when Orange County is mentioned, it is a part of southern California but not Los Angeles. They are separate counties in a region. Some authors generalize them all together but they are quite distinct from each other. Orange County is south of Los Angeles County, and San Diego County is south of Orange County. There are a ton of cities within each county, obviously. Avila has stitched them together because of Disneyland's presence in Anaheim (a city in Orange County) that is connected to LA via the freeway system (which is statewide).

[Kim Fay · Rating 4 out of 5]

In researching my new novel, I am trying to understand the racial dynamics in regard to the geography of Los Angeles. This book was an eye opener. It explains how the suburban spread of the mid-1900s, combined with housing covenants that excluded most races, created "trapped" urban areas - which were then appropriated/divided for public use (freeways, Dodger stadium), furthering splintering communities already at risk. There is a lot of repetition, and I wish there were more first-hand accounts of the effects of suburbanizing the LA area, but overall I think this book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how the city/county became what it is today, with such distinct ethnic communities: most notably Mexican and African American. While I knew about many of the atrocities described in this book (Bunker Hill, Chavez Ravine, the freeways through East LA), these pages fanned my feelings of rage to greater heights. More frustrating is how few people in our city know about this history, especially as it prepares to repeat itself with proposals to destroy cultural institutions such as Wyvernwood Garden Apartments. Excuse me now while I go grab my protest sign so that the author of this book doesn't have reason to write yet another chapter in this despicable story.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

In "chocolate cities" and "vanilla suburbs," Avila studies the formation of LA race relations, in particular the formation of a white suburban identity in the post-war period, through popular culture and space. He argues that LA is a perfect case study for observing the larger transitions of American politics from New Deal liberalism to the conservative new right, the rise of new mass culture forms such as TV and shopping malls, and the construction of new types of spaces such as mega ball parks and Disneyland.

[Cecelia]

I thought his arguments were interesting but at times a little too forced to be completly convincing for me. Otherwise I think he makes excellent points and focuses the book very well around the three primary hinges of cinema, the construciton of Disney Land, and the consturction of Dodger stadium. He of course mentions the construction of highways and urban renewal projects but his main foci are those three things.

[Ellen]

Read selected chapters for an American Studies course on California Cultures. This book held enlightening information about the history of California that I recommend everyone to read, especially if you've ever resided in the state.

[Erin Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

An AMST read!