Review: POPULAR CULTURE IN THE AGE OF WHITE FLIGHT: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles, by Eric Avila

The Orange County gardeners of COVID‐19: Making breath in landscapes of racial suffocation

“…Following WWII, favorable bank loans coupled with the GI Bill made homeownership possible for male‐headed white families (Taylor, 2019). In Southern California, this meant a boom in suburban development as white families fled from urban centers associated with Black and Latinx postwar migration (Avila, 2004). In popular media and elsewhere, home ownership, particularly maintaining suburbia's quintessential green lawns, became ideologically constructed as the terrain and responsibility of patriotic white male citizens (Hondagneu‐Sotelo, 2014; McGirr, 2001).…”

“…Particularly for those living in gated communities and other developments managed by homeowner associations (HOAs), the suburban lawn is near‐militantly managed in terms of what it should “look like” (Locke et al., 2018). At these guarded spaces of white flight (Avila, 2004), lawns are about “niceness and property values” and a “middle‐class civility” (Low, 2004, p. 154). Suburbia, in other words, is a site of production where not only white life is actively produced through regimes of racialized labor but so too are the socio‐legal protections and benefits that cohere to it under a property logic of whiteness (Harris, 1993; Hong, 2006).…”

Chavez Ravine: A Story of Mexican American Female Resistance in Mid-20th Century Los Angeles

“…7 In 1949, to address the housing shortage, the Los Angeles City Housing Authority signed a federal contract to build ten thousand units of public housing. 8 After much consideration they ultimately decided to build the public housing on Chavez Ravine, despite the fact that the area was already populated by over one thousand families, most of whom were Mexican American. 9 The plans drawn up for the public housing included two thirteen story buildings, and various two story buildings that could accommodate approximately 17,000 people, compared to the 3,000 people that were already living in the area.…”

Red Scare Politics and the Post-War Racialized vision of Chavez Revine

“…Red Scare politics and manipulation of the strong anti-Communism sentiments of the general ended up being the deciding factors in the election, as the Poulson campaign strategy was to undermine Bowron by aligning he and his supporters with socialism and the public housing controversy. The Times and its allies got their victory when Poulson defeated Bowron in the Mayoral election [41]…”