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"Barraclough, Laura R"
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Making the San Fernando Valley
In the first book-length scholarly study of the San Fernando Valley-home to one-third of the population of Los Angeles-Laura R. Barraclough combines ambitious historical sweep with an on-theground investigation of contemporary life in this iconic western suburb. She is particularly intrigued by the Valley's many rural elements, such as dirt roads, tack-and-feed stores, horse-keeping districts, citrus groves, and movie ranches. Far from natural or undeveloped spaces, these rural characteristics are, she shows, the result of deliberate urbanplanning decisions that have shaped the Valley over the course of more than a hundred years.
The Valley's entwined history of urban development and rural preservation has real ramifications today for patterns of racial and class inequality and especially for the evolving meaning of whiteness. Immersing herself in meetings of homeowners' associations, equestrian organizations, and redistricting committees, Barraclough uncovers the racial biases embedded in rhetoric about \"open space\" and \"western heritage.\" The Valley's urban cowboys enjoy exclusive, semirural landscapes alongside the opportunities afforded by one of the world's largest cities. Despite this enviable position, they have at their disposal powerful articulations of both white victimization and, with little contradiction, color-blind politics.
eBook
Rural Urbanism: Producing Western Heritage and the Racial Geography of Postwar Los Angeles
This article examines how the local production of Westerns shaped the postwar racial geography of Los Angeles's suburban San Fernando Valley. White suburban activists drew upon the ideologies about rural land that Westerns promoted and forged political coalitions with the mythmakers who crafted them to secure privileged land-use policies, resist residential integration, and justify white flight.
Journal Article
Contested Cowboys
Mexican Americans have long lived in suburbs. Indeed, the colonias—semirural villages established on the outskirts of metropolitan areas at the turn of the twentieth century, inhabited primarily by ethnic Mexican agricultural workers and their families—constitute some of the earliest documented forms of suburban spatiality (Garcia 2001; Gonzalez 2009; Lukinbeal, Arreola, and Lucio 2010). Many post–World War II subdivisions in the US Southwest were built around the colonias, including racially exclusive tracts occupied by white Americans who protested the poor living conditions and infrastructure of the preexisting colonias now in their midst (Gonzalez 2009). Yet the number of
Book Chapter
City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California
Barraclough reviews City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California by Victor Valle.
Book Review
Rural urbanism: Landscape, land use activism and the cultural politics of suburban spatial exclusion
Rural Urbanism analyzes contemporary land use activism among suburban whites as part of the contemporary political project called the \"white backlash.\" I conceptualize land use activism as the struggle over how land is defined, used, and valued. I argue that the control of landscape stabilizes and recreates white privilege in the context of changes to the political-economic structures that have historically privileged white people, while working within the dictates of a \"color-blind\" society. Historical, racially explicit practices of spatial exclusion produced numerous resources for contemporary suburban land use activism, including a disproportionate degree of political expertise, well-developed organizations with a particular vision of land use, and strong coalitions with elected officials; accumulated land-based equity; discursive abilities to appeal to American cultural investments in property rights and the suburban \"good life\"; and ideological associations between landscapes, racial and class markers, and social status. These effects must be seen not as residue that will eventually disappear, but as powerful resources that suburban property owners continue to mobilize. I develop these arguments through a case study of Shadow Hills, California, an equestrian community in suburban Los Angeles. Through archival and ethnographic research on land use activism from 1907 to 2006, I analyze how horse-oriented land use policies and protections of a \"rural\" landscape created and perpetuated metropolitan inequality. Shadow Hills land use activists appeal to the specific vision of suburbia in Los Angeles as the \"best of both worlds\"---of urban and rural living, and particularly the importance of \"rural\" landscapes to the city's heritage---to justify effectively exclusionary land use policies. This construct of suburbia functions as a \"color-blind\" discourse in which many elected officials are invested, and forms the basis of many suburban political coalitions in Los Angeles. Racialized understandings of urban, suburban, and rural landscapes also allow white residents to express anxieties about changes to their communities in safe and politically strategic ways. Nationally, this project illustrates how historically exclusive suburban white communities mobilize discursive and cultural constructs about land, landscape, and property to create policies that effectively reinforce their political and economic power.
Dissertation
Narrating Conquest in Local History
Storytelling, through the writing of local history, was a crucial dimension of the Anglo-American conquest of Southern California and the U.S. West. From the 1920s through the 1960s, real-estate developers and community builders, often working in tandem with middle-class social groups, commissioned local professionals to write histories of the San Fernando Valley, which they then distributed to potential home buyers and tourists. The local history texts produced about the Valley during this period are the first written histories of the Valley, but like all histories, they reflect the ideologies and political-economic interests of their creators. Overwhelmingly, these history texts highlight
Book Chapter