Rural Urbanism:
Producing Western Heritage and the Racial Geography of Postwar Los Angeles

LAURA R. BARRACLOUGH

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.
IN 1966, GLENN HASCHENBERGER, AN ACTIVIST from the suburban horse-keeping community of Shadow Hills in the northeast end of Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley, explained the reasons for his neighborhood's activism to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. Just a few years earlier, Shadow Hills had been designated the city's first "horse-raising zone," which guaranteed minimum lot sizes of 20,000 square feet (just less than one-half acre), rights to keep horses and other livestock on suburban lots, and the indefinite protection of the neighborhood's "rural atmosphere." Activists there were struggling to preserve their new zoning in the face of the San Fernando Valley's tremendous population growth and pressures for housing, industry, and services. As Haschenberger explained: "We should be able to keep and ride horses in designated areas of the city. And we shouldn't have to live 30 miles out of the city to pursue our interests. That's what our fight is all about—just a little corner of Los Angeles."1 Working with the Los Angeles City Council and City Planning Commission, Shadow Hills activists have been largely successful in maintaining that "little corner of Los Angeles" for nearly fifty years, even as Los Angeles has grown far more dense, diverse, and racially and economically unequal. Today, Shadow Hills is an unusual rural refuge of dirt roads and relatively large lots (given the urban context), with horses, goats, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals in suburban backyards, all within one of the most dynamic and important cities in the global economy. (See Figures 1 and 2.) It is also a disproportionately white community with a median household income nearly twice that of Los Angeles County, and home values well over 150 percent of the median, suggesting a relationship between racial and economic privilege and rural landscapes within urban regions.2 But why were "horse-keeping rights," as articulated by Haschenberger and countless suburban home- and horse-owners since then, such a powerful political claim? And how did the legal protection of horse-keeping rights shape the city's shifting racial and class dynamics in the postwar period?	1
Figure 1. Large Ranches such as this one are the corner stone of development battles in contemporary Shadow Hills. Photo by author, 2006.
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