Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region (review)

The Sunbelt, as this volume's deft title suggests, is ever on the rise. However broadly defined as a place, and the editors here embrace the prevailing wisdom that its geographical reach extends from Southern California to Northern Virginia, the region's political muscle has been precise and pronounced: its favorite sons have captured the White House in all but two elections since 1960. Its political religiosity has also had a profound impact on public life and private belief, just as its auto-centricism has spawned a new kind of city, a sprawling dynamic that pushes outward and depopulates the central core (think Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles). And its service economy—fueled by a demographic surge and capital flow to the south and west—has been the mainstay of the nation's growth since the 1970s. There is a reason why in popular culture its foil has been dubbed the Rustbelt.

But as the editors and contributors to Sunbelt Rising know well, the uncritical conceptions of the region's import are flawed. The deep-seated belief that it is the center of white, right-wing politics is only partly true: in Texas, for example, the GOP dominates state politics, but Democrats govern its major cities. Orange County, California, once synonymous with the John Birch Society, is increasingly Hispanicized, a pattern that holds true across the Sunbelt; this change in particular, as Sylvia Manzano notes, will prove paramount in the coming years.

Indeed, to read her chapter against those that assess civil-rights politics and policies in the mid-twentieth century is to bear witness to the dramatic alterations in communal aspirations, economic opportunities, and social justice that have occurred over the past sixty years. It is also to recognize that these real gains have come with no-less-real complications: notably, the emergence of a color-blind conservatism that is "a late-century means of entrenching racial inequality in the logic of economic and civil rights" (18). This logic was evident in the mid-century battles over California fair-housing legislation and Miami's urban-renewal projects. It is also richly explicated in Carl Abbott's examination of southwestern literature, in which real-estate development becomes symbolic of the "modern methods of dispossession" (289).

At the heart of these stories, factual or fictional, are the ubiquitous boosters. Usually male, invariably rich, and always well connected, these figures draw on dense networks of like-minded (and self-interested) colleagues—developers, media magnates, business bigwigs, automobile dealers, political elites—to forge coalitions that have wielded public capital and private investment to build up the modern city state. San Antonio's Good Government League had its analogs in Dallas, Albuquerque, and Denver. These local power bases, as Andrew Needham demonstrates, also could extend their authority into the national legislative arena. In probing the capacity of Phoenix's growth machine to pursue energy production on tribal and federal lands, he focuses on the emerging collective clout of three individuals: Barry Goldwater, a Phoenix city councilman turned U. S. senator; attorney Orme Lewis, who became assistant secretary of the interior for Public Lands; and Lewis's appointee, banker Walter Bimson, who was charged with reorganizing the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Among other ambitions, in Goldwater's words, they wanted "to unlock the natural resources known to exist on the reservations" (244), to power their hometown's growth and development. They succeeded.

Sunbelt Rising succeeds in turn precisely because its individual chapters offer sharp new interpretations of this most powerful region's foodways, its mega-cities and monster churches, its contested landscapes. As such, the anthology offers as well a wonderful tribute to the late great David Weber, who as director of SMU's Clements Center for Southwest Studies, helped nurture its creation.