In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles, Eric Avila defines cultural history as “the history of stories that people tell about themselves and their world. Such stories are manifested and transmitted in a variety of ways, the sum of which we broadly define as culture” (pg. xiii). Avila argues, “Despite popular culture’s capacity to incorporate diverse and often contradictory meanings within its fold, the cultural forms” he explores “privileged a particular way of seeing the city and its people” (pg. xiii). Avila draws upon the work of Peggy Pascoe, Lawrence Levine, Robin Kelley, and Lizabeth Cohen. He writes, “Streetcars, amusement parks, ballparks, parks, museums, world’s fairs, department stores, nickelodeons, and, later on, the movies constituted the ‘new mass culture’ that drew on available technologies to create a set of new sensations and experiences that satisfied the changing cultural appetites of an expanding urban public” (pg. 3). Further, “Postwar suburbanization nurtured the development of a more expansive white identity, one that extended to various social groups who removed themselves from the racialized spaces of the inner city vis-à-vis home ownership” (pg. 6). In this way, “White flight structured the contours of postwar popular culture as a kind of master narrative, and no city seemed better suited for that structure than Los Angeles” (pg. 15). Finally, Avila writes, “Culture, like war, is politics by other means, and as race surfaced as a primary basis of political conflict in Southern California and, ultimately, the United States, it attained a heightened saliency in the representational realm of popular culture” (pg. 18).
Discussing housing, Avila writes, “By allowing a greater degree of control over zoning and land-use policies, municipal incorporation allowed the residents of Lakewood to create racially homogenous communities by excluding those populations who tended to rely on rental housing and county services” (pg. 44). He continues, “If suburbanization, at least in its postwar manifestation, implied a racialized process that privileged an inclusive white identity, then the suburbanization of downtown Los Angeles underscored the saliency of race in the midcentury transformation of urban life” (pg. 62). Turning to film, Avila writes, “If cinema replicated the varied experiences of modern urban life, its subsequent industrialization in 1920s Hollywood demonstrated how mass production and mass consumption defined a distinctly twentieth-century brand of American modernity” (pg. 70). While film noir represented the racialized threat of urban landscapes, “science fiction cinema, with its discursive emphasis on invasion, infestation, and infiltration, encompassed a set of images and words that found more consequential forms of expression in official assessments of urban property values” (pg. 97). Avila concludes of Disneyland, “Placing his theme park in a suburban location, removed from the inner-city concentration of racialized poverty, Disney used racial representations to underscore the sense of whiteness that took shape among the suburban periphery of the metropolis. Thus, the same processes that exacerbated Coney Island’s plight bolstered Disneyland’s popularity” (pg. 137).
Avila writes, “The history of public cultural practices such as parades, museums, and expositions illuminates a larger pattern of representing otherness in the American public sphere. In a racialized democracy such as the United States, racial signifiers have been used to convey certain cultural ideals, including, if not especially, progress” (pg. 201). Further, “Within the cultural system that took shape according to decentralized patterns of urban growth, therefore, highway construction virtually necessitated the creation of places like Disneyland and Dodger Stadium, which ostensibly anchored a highly mobile and transient population to a set of nodal points along the fluid space of the new freeways” (pg. 223). ( )