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185 chapter six Urban Restructuring and the Consolidation of Rural Whiteness The institutionalization and formalization of the San Fernando Valley’s rural landscapes examined in the previous two chapters occurred during a period of radical transformation in racial politics at the local, regional, national, and global scales. As we have seen, beginning in the 1960s, explicit white supremacy gave way to a position of official “color blindness,” which is now widely regarded to be the dominant racial discourse in the United States. However, this discursive and ideological shift coincided with growing inequality, propelled by the intersections of economic restructuring, demographic change, and political choices to disinvest in social-welfare programs. Together, these changes have created an ever-wider gap between rich and poor in the United States, especially its cities, that is distinctly racialized but that is hidden and ignored by colorblind racial ideologies that proclaim racial inequality to be a thing of the past.1 Across these transformations, whiteness and white privilege in the San Fernando Valley have been reproduced through the rural landscape. At the moment in which the racial state at the national level shifted to a position of color blindness, the local urban state in Los Angeles also shifted its position—from explicit production of the rural landscape as an integral part of the “white spot of America” to the protection of “rural heritage” as a presumably racially neutral and universal concept. The urban state institutionalized horse-keeping zoning and historic preservation policies and created vast regional parks on the sites of western film production during the exact period, from the 1960s through the late 1980s, in which deindustrialization, increased immigration, and the emergence of color blindness as the dominant racial discourse intersected to vastly increase urban inequality. Through these practices of rural reproduction and reinvestment, the urban state in Los Angeles recommitted itself to protection of not only rural landscapes but also the historical social relations in which they were embedded. In this chapter, I contextualize the protection of rurality in Shadow Hills and Chatsworth in relationship to Los Angeles’s structural changes over the last 186 • chapter six half century. I compare indicators of economic, geographic, and social status in Shadow Hills and Chatsworth with Los Angeles County, supplementing my fieldwork with quantitative data from the 2000 census in order to situate rural privilege relative to the metropolitan region as a whole. Beyond standard measures of socioeconomic status (income, wealth, and education), I find that rural white residents benefit from racially unequal legacies of property ownership; possess the highly valuable forms of knowledge, expertise, and social connections that result from whites’ overrepresentation in the upper tier of the city’s contemporary economy; and enjoy the public health benefits of low-density residential landscapes with significant open space. These dimensions of socialclass privilege not only create a higher quality of life for white residents of Los Angeles’s semirural neighborhoods but also ensure that they are disproportionately able to protect their status for the long term and for future generations. In the last five decades, Los Angeles has become a profoundly different city from the metropolis envisioned by urban planners and civic boosters at the turn of the twentieth century. Restructuring of the regional economy and exponential growth—both geographic and demographic—have transformed the middleclass , suburban “city of homes” and gentleman farming into a highly unequal region wracked by poverty, environmental racism, and segregation.2 Economic restructuring has increased the extent and concentration of poverty in Los Angeles and the spatial, economic, and racial gaps between rich and poor. As in most U.S. cities, Los Angeles’s loss of manufacturing began in the 1960s, gained steam throughout the 1970s, and is still in process. Deindustrialization destroyed hundreds of thousands of blue-collar, often unionized, living-wage jobs in manufacturing—especially in defense, automobile production, and durable consumer goods—and devastated the city’s middle class. Unlike other cities that have suffered wholesale deindustrialization and high unemployment, however , Los Angeles has retained a significant manufacturing base through nearly simultaneous processes of reindustrialization. Yet the city’s new manufacturing no longer guarantees a relatively secure, middle-class existence. Instead, the high-quality jobs once associated with the manufacturing of defense and durable consumer goods have been replaced with low-wage, nonunionized work in the manufacturing and assembly of clothing, furniture, and electronics.3 During the same period, a bifurcated two-tier service-sector economy has emerged that consists of both high-wage, high-skill jobs...

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