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REVIEW ESSAY
SUBURBIA RECONSIDERED: RACE, POLITICS, AND PROPERTY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
| By Margaret Pugh O'Mara |
Stanford University |
| Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African Americans in Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).Andrew Wiese, Places of their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
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Among the more newsworthy findings of the 2000 United States Census were those showing the dynamic demographics of cities and suburbs at the close of the twentieth century. New waves of immigrants not only brought economic and social capital to neighborhoods within large cities during the 1990s, but they fueled the growth of adjoining suburbs as well. In fact, the Census showed, more of the immigrants residing in U.S. metropolitan areas in the year 2000 lived in suburbs than in cities. The suburban migration of immigrants, many of whom were Latino and Asian, accompanied a concomitant increase in the rate of African American suburbanization. While a good portion of these new suburbanites were relatively affluent, many were blue-collar workers of more modest means.1 Suburbia, long viewed as the province of middle-class whites, appeared to some observers to have become suddenly racially and economically diverse. Coming on the heels of numerous studies examining the rise of suburban job centers and high-tech corridors in the 1980s and 1990s, the Census data underscored the polymorphous character of late-twentieth-century American suburbia.2 Many major regional newspapers devoted serial coverage to these demographic changes and analysis of their local significance, presenting the Census data as evidence of a new metropolitan reality that was a significant departure from the urban and suburban America of a generation before. |
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However, the suburbanization of nonwhites and the working class was neither sudden nor remarkably new. Minority and working-class communities have thrived on the outskirts of American cities for well over a century, just as suburbs have long served as hubs of industry and commerce as well as being places of residence. Twenty years after the publication of Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier and Robert Fishman's Bourgeois Utopias signaled the profession's serious foray into the history of the American suburb, the historical literature has now accumulated an array of article and book-length studies that explore suburbia as a spatial form that long predates postwar Levittowns.3 During the last decade—as suburbs themselves were undergoing the changes later outlined by the 2000 Census—scholars began also to explore the diversity within and among suburbs in order to move suburban history beyond what, as one essay in this journal called it, the "suburban cliché" of leafy, exclusive, and all-white residential communities. Yet more often than not the scholarly work on suburban variegation has focused on the changes of the last twenty years rather than those occurring in the eighty years before.4 |
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