My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965

by Becky M. Nicolaides

In the 1920s, thousands of white migrants settled in the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate. Six miles from downtown and adjacent to Watts, South Gate and its neighboring communities served as L.A.'s Detroit, an industrial belt for mass production of cars, tires, steel, and other durable goods. Blue-collar workers built the suburb literally from the ground up, using sweat equity rather than cash to construct their own homes.

As Becky M. Nicolaides shows in My Blue Heaven , this ethic of self-reliance and homeownership formed the core of South Gate's identity. With post-World War II economic prosperity, the community's emphasis shifted from building homes to protecting them as residents tried to maintain their standard of living against outside threats—including the growing civil rights movement—through grassroots conservative politics based on an ideal of white homeowner rights. As the citizens of South Gate struggled to defend their segregated American Dream of suburban community, they fanned the flames of racial inequality that erupted in the 1965 Watts riots.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Urban, Urban Studies, Cities, Research, Race

430 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 2002

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a marvelously well researched and incredibly detailed look at the lives of people in South Gate, one which challenges a number of common assumptions about the suburbs while providing evidence for others. I love how it details the ways that ideas and meanings of home and community were constructed, and their change over time.
Her principal argument is that from the 1920s through WWII, home was primarily a survival strategy for the working class. They bought affordable lots and built homes as and when they could, using extensive yards to grow food, thus provisioning themselves against want outside of the cash economy. At this time, residents felt that lower taxes were more important than school segregation for example, highlighting the precariousness of their living situation. This shifted after World War II, as South Gate came to ressemble other suburbs such as Lakewood in its infrastructure and tract housing, and as owner salaries rose and situations improved, their homes became principally investments and marks of status. This led to a very strong feeling around taxes. Thus their bitter struggle against school integration, and defensive posture around residential integration to protect home values.
It is an interesting thing to think about, that poverty should make people less inclined to active racism when there were incentives to the contrary. Yet racism was no less virulent for communities made up of so many Southern migrants

In 1925, the local booster-editor asserted "Home Gardens is a town of, by and for workingmen -- and we want hundreds more of them. The only restrictions are racial --- the white race only may own property here," [27]

But this tension isn't explored as much as I wished it to be, although the racial tensions post WWII are quite well documented. This is also true of the shift in how individuals saw taxes, and the foundations of Prop 13, and the today's anti-tax conservatism. It is a fundamental dynamic in American politics, and this is some of the best evidence I've seen in terms of understanding how American politics has developed, both in the origins of strong-held opinions on the importance of low taxes:

When boom hit bust in the 1930s, their assumptions about the role of individuals and government began to shift. As both the politics of development and education revealed, residents began with the unspoken assumption that the burden of financing municipal services-from streets to schools-should fall on the backs of individual property owners, including the humble working-class home owner. Embracing an ethos of privatism, they believed property ownership conferred the responsibility of municipal stewardship. All property owners- regardless of wealth-became urban stewards. It was thus up to individuals, not government more broadly, to pay for services. In a poorer suburb like South Gate, residents simply chose to limit these services, to create a modest infrastructure that they could reasonably afford. There was no assumption that urban services were a right, and that they should be financed through a redistributive system of taxation. This reflected their deeply held ideals of individualism, self- help, hard work, plain-folk Americanism' and anticommunism, an outlook asserting that urban fiscal policy ought to be based on a private approach rather than a collective one.

and then the ways in which discussions around taxes have also become coded in terms of race through the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s

In numerous public statements, "taxes" became a coded reference to civil rights and programs for minorities, an excellent local example of the national trend that saw an overlapping of race and taxes as political issues. "While you work and sweat to protect your earnings and property, the politicians scheme with their minority supporters to put you in a hopeless position to protect yourself against raids of everything you work for.... Today CORE, NAACP, COPE [302] and their like are the only participants who pressure our legislators for the kind of government we have now, while today's citizen is a drone, quite impotent in local affairs because he stays home, and our taxes continue to go up, up and up,"

It is extraordinary to watch a working class community shift from supporters of EPIC and the New Deal, to supporters of conservative Republicans such as Ronald Reagan. But through this historical view it finally makes some kind of sense...it also contains a lot of more ethnographic and quite fascinating information on daily life, entertainment, and particularly labor. Nicolaides argues that home became the center of people's lives rather than their work, and explores some of its implications for labor.

Definitely worth checking out if you're interested in any of these topics, and a beautiful example of an in depth historical view of a single suburb that manages to give insight into key historical forces happening all over the country.

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Micro study of how one south Los Angeles suburb, South Gate, negotiated the changing political and economic currents over about a half century. I focused primarily on the chapters dealing with how the transition from insecure working class status to middle-class prosperity between the 50s and 60s pushed South Gate's politics far to the right. The most important result was the emergence of a discourse of "white rights", basically the transfer of Southern politics to the west coast. It's a familiar story if you've read Lisa McGriff or the many other historians who have dealt with the rise of the right in the late 50s/early 60s, but it's done well.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

In My Blue Heaven, Becky Nicolaides presents a number of “modern” attributes for Los Angeles, and the suburb of South Gate in particular. For South Gate’s working class residents in particular, it is a city of hard work, yes – but also of leisure, of consumption, and of intensive mobility (67). South Gate, its homes built by migrants, appears as “a tabula rasa…a thoroughly modern city” (67) upon which home owners wrote their visions of the good life – or at least a better life than in Texas or Oklahoma. What is striking about My Blue Heaven, then, is the specific, rich accounts of how daily practices of leisure, consumption, and mobility effected “a strong centrifugal force” (92) segmenting working class experience both socially and spatially. She moves from daily practices of mobility – commuting to work, traveling downtown to shop – to the larger organization of working class “we-ness” (68). This community feeling, she points out, adhered to church, the nuclear family, and the extended family – but not necessarily to South Gate itself. Yet this “centrifugal force” lost much of its pull in the transition to postwar prosperity. As property values coalesced as a rallying cry for South Gate’s home owners, they focused more of their energies on defending their neighborhoods against what they saw as “undesirable elements” – from the noise and stink of factories to African Americans trying to escape the increasingly crowded Black Belt. Indeed, the importance of “property values” in generating a centripetal spinning-in to neighborhood loyalty appears in part as an effect of yet another segmentation at an even broader scale: the thoroughly modern categorization and zoning of urban neighborhoods by federal loan agencies. Segmentation of urban experience thus appears to participate both in a disassociation from neighborhood as a source of we-ness, and a focus on it. So here’s the question: is that centripetal effect especially ironic? Or just another example of modernity’s endless change?

[Michael Brickey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is set within the Los Angeles city limits and it details how a white working-class "suburb" arose and fought racial integration. Nicolaides is one of the first scholars to challenge the definition of a suburb as a political unit outside the city limits. She contends that the geo-spatial boundaries of a city do not define suburban and urban America. A suburb has an attitude, a way of life that defines itself as a specific place for specific people. South Gate, the "suburb" Nicolaides studies in depth, shares its western boundary with Watts. Alameda St. becomes a mark in the white community's mental, racial map of the South Gate area. The closer to Watts, the cheaper the homes. Battles over housing, education, and community space all develop in this context of racialized space. Nicolaides also does an excellent job of describing the economic stratification of the white population while reinforcing the racial segregation of residential neighborhoods, schools, and public places. I wish there had been more on the Watts suburb, but that is not her aim. I also wish she had taken the story a bit further to show the rise of Reagan in California as he gained support from the working class population she describes. She has done well to account for the development of a white, working class suburb within one of the most ethnically diverse cities in America. Overall, the book is a great tool for anyone seeking to understand 20th century Urban history.

[Nancy Beck]

Um...I'm still reading it. :-) However, so far, it's fascinating. Although I originally got the book to clear up some things about a novel I'm writing (and writing and writing, lol), it does go into some detail as to how people lived in this specific section of Los Angeles from the 20's to the 60's. I'm at the part about the Depression, and what people did for recreation: movies (naturally, since Hollywood's about 20 minutes away), radio, the beach, cutting a rug (dancing, for those of you who don't know ;-)). There are surveys and tables and, yes, some photos; the surveys and tables break up some of the text (which gets to be a bit much sometimes).

One interesting fact was that the people who lived in this section (just south of Los Angeles) would hitch rides to the beach - Long Beach, to be specific - and thought nothing of it. So the hippies who hitched in the '60s were not the first to do so.

I'm a little more than 1/3 through the book as of 12/10/10.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read it for a class, and I'm guessing the primary audience is academic types.

Still, a completely interesting and not boring book about suburban LA.

[Errol · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best books on Southern California history. Deserves a wider audience.