Customer Reviews

Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles

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In what the book covers, it does so quite well. But the book came out in 2004. Its weakness is in the last section, the Epilogue. Into which Avila puts the events of the 60s and beyond. We are talking about some 45 years to 2004. There is relatively little discussion of these years. Where large changes occurred. In demography for example, so that Latinos, broadly defined, became the largest ethnic group in Los Angeles.

Also, the Watts riot of 1968 is slightly covered. But the 1992 race riot not at all. Surely the latter, and the recession of the early 90s, which dragged on into a very slow recovery for LA, had some effect on the book's thesis? And if it did not, then that should be explained.

Or maybe all this is [to be] the subject of another book by the author?

I had to read Eric Avlia's "Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight" for a course and was dreading it. I figured that it would be a rather tiresome book pointing out racism in pop culture. Instead I found a terrific work on how race and urban vision informed the spatial construction of modern Los Angeles.

As a lifelong New Yorker, I'm more than willing to have my low opinions of LA confirmed, and Eric Avila, a professor at UCLA, provides some good grist for that mill. Avila argues that the spatial construction of LA, beginning in the 30s and 40s, was informed by a vision of the city which contrasted itself consciously with what he terms "the Noir City." Avila's "Noir City" is exemplified by East Coast cities like New York. The Noir City is dirty, crowded, racially and culturally polyglot, and dangerous. Avila traces how Los Angeles boosters, often with roots in suburban and small town Midwestern states, rejected this vision of the city. They saw Los Angeles as a cleaner, safer, more orderly city, which was also, not coincidentally, racial white. Avila looks at elements of popular public culture in LA, such as Disneyland and Dodgers Stadium, to show how this vision of clean respectable orderliness was realized in post war LA. These arenas of cultural display offered an orderly homogenize entertainment for the masses.

At the same time the city was undergoing a spatial segregation based along racial and class lines. As Dodger Stadium moved into Chavez Ravine it displaced a longstanding Hispanic community. But far more important were changes in transportation and municipality. Avila traces how, in the early 20th century, Los Angeles public transportation system, which had been adequate and which could have taken off dramatically, was left behind in favor of a car centered transportation network. The automobile, and the resulting highway system, had a decisive impact on the shape of Los Angeles. People who had once congregated on the subways and trolley were now isolated in their cars. The highways allowed suburban commuters to bypass other neighborhoods entirely. A white suburban commuter could live all his life in Los Angeles and never have to see a racial minority or poor person.