Eric Avila

Race, Culture, Politics, and Urban Renewal An Introduction

When historians refer to “urban renewal,” they are not describing one singular policy. After 1945, as Andrew Highsmith, Irene Holliman, and Guian McKee show, leaders of renewal efforts in Flint, Atlanta, and Philadelphia assumed that a combination of slum clearance, office towers, and expressways would bring white, middle-class people back to downtown. Surprisingly, African American leaders in Flint and Atlanta often cooperated in these plans. In Philadelphia, however, Mayor Frank Rizzo, known as a racist, used renewal funds to create jobs for African American and Puerto Rican women. Federal officials also financed suburbanization, thus channeling resources away from the nations inner cities and leaving behind a wake of dilapidated infrastructure and racialized poverty. White Americans attributed renewal and suburbanization to the work of markets, overlooking the decisive hand of politicians and public policy. The skewed effects of these renewal and suburbanization programs denote a time “when affirmative action was white.”

Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Film Noir, Disneyland, and the Cold War (Sub)Urban Imaginary

This article takes popular cultural expressions as a window onto the transformation of the American city after World War II. First, it considers the film genre known as film noir as evidence of a larger perception of social disorder that ensued within the context of the centralized, modern city, which peaked at the turn of the century. Second, it turns to Disneyland as the archetypal example of a postwar suburban order, one that promised to deliver a respite from the racial and sexual upheaval that characterized the culture of industrial urbanism. Together, film noir and Disneyland illuminate the meanings assigned to the structural transformation of the mid-century American city and reveal the cultural underpinnings of a grass-roots conservatism that prized white suburban homeownership. Ultimately, this article emphasizes the interplay of structure and culture, demonstrating the linkage between how cities are imagined and how they are made.

L.A.’s Invisible Freeway Revolt: The Cultural Politics of Fighting Freeways

Existing accounts of the politics of fighting freeways during the age of the Interstate largely describes the victories of white affluent urban neighborhoods that successfully mustered local opposition to urban highway construction. Popular understandings of the “freeway revolt” thus remain limited to places like Beverly Hills, CA, Cambridge, MA, Lower Manhattan, and New Orleans’s French Quarter. Yet a close examination of cultural expression from urban minority communities, like the Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles for example, reveals a more pervasive and sharper critique of building freeways in the city. Losers, perhaps, in the fight against the freeway, city people of color nonetheless voiced specific grievances against highway construction through art, literature, and other forms of creative production. Herein lies another freeway revolt, which inspires local opposition to subsequent forms of spatial injustice in the inner city.

Revisiting the Chavez Ravine

Nestled adjacent to the corporate citadel that is downtown Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium came into existence through a highly contentious process fraught with bitter animosity among competing social interests. Oblivious, or perhaps indifferent to the fact that the Chavez Ravine had sustained a tight-knit, predominantly Spanish-speaking, working-class community for decades, city officials identified that area as “blighted” as early as the late 1930s. Because of its proximity to downtown Los Angeles and its density relative to other neighborhoods of the city, the Chavez Ravine was slated for the construction of a massive public housing project, drawing upon federal funds made available through the 1949 Taft-EUender Wagner Act. This act, which enabled the replacement of so-called slums with public housing in cities throughout the nation, reflected a New Deal commitment to government-subsidized housing in the wake of a dire housing shortage in the aftermath of World War II. Parcel by parcel, the City Housing Authority of Los Angeles between 1950 and 1951 cleared the Chavez Ravine of its inhabitants, who abandoned their property with the promise of new and improved quarters.1