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231 chapter eight “Rural Culture” and the Politics of Multiculturalism Whiteness in the northeast San Fernando Valley at the beginning of the twentyfirst century remains persistently but tenuously linked to the rural landscape, within a city where whites are now a numerically declining but structurally privileged minority. Within this context, the historic relationships between the rural landscape, the urban state, real-estate developers, and capital are being reworked and redefined, and so too are the meanings and articulations of whiteness . Contemporary rural inhabitants of the northeast San Fernando Valley struggle to position their lifestyle as valid and valuable amid the shifting needs of the metropolitan region. In response to the perceived gains of immigrants and nonwhites (especially Latinos) in the northeast Valley, and the perceived and actual retreat of the urban state from its historic commitment to rurality , contemporary rural residents try to situate the rural lifestyle as just one culture out of many in Los Angeles. Drawing on both well-established myths of the rugged, individual frontiersman and woman and ideas of white victimization by identity politics that are central to neoconservatism and the New Right, rural residents argue that “rural culture” is disenfranchised and victimized and thus equally or more worthy of state protection and resources than are racial minority groups. Through this process, they construct the rural landscape and lifestyle within the discursive mandates of both multicultural identity politics and color blindness, racial ideologies that would otherwise appear to be contradictory. The frontier myth and narratives of rural western heritage are useful in this context because they invoke multiple contradictory meanings at once. From the conventional and hegemonic perspective, the frontier myth is the nation’s origin story, a presumably color-blind history with which all can identify. In this regard, contemporary rural communities in Los Angeles symbolize a valuable history of western heritage that is worth protecting, at least in part because that history/mythology is constructed to be exempt from the messiness of racial and class politics. By contrast, from the perspective of critical social theory, environ- 232 • chapter eight mental studies, and the “new” western history, myths of the frontier and western heritage are narratives of Anglo-American supremacy that justify histories of American imperialism and conquest. From this perspective, the semirural communities in Los Angeles celebrate such histories while reproducing whites’ historical racial, class, and environmental privileges. Rural activists in the northeast San Fernando Valley must navigate these tensions and contradictions in their land-use activism, engagements with the state, and everyday social practice. Their actions are both affirmative, celebrating the history and value of the rural lifestyle and western heritage, and defensive, consisting of exclusionary reactions to the linked forces of landscape change and social change, both actual and feared, in the northeast San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles more broadly. Through these diverse practices, in a cyclical manner, rural residents share, test, modify, and affirm their beliefs about rurality and urbanity, the proper role of the urban state, race, class, and the state of the nation. In this chapter, I examine how these tensions and dialectics played out during my fieldwork in the northeast San Fernando Valley. I focus on the process of political redistricting in spring 2002; a series of altercations among Latinos and whites in the Hansen Dam public recreation area during the summer of 2002; the annual celebration of the Day of the Horse Festival, beginning in 2003; a negative critique and unflattering portrait of horse-keeping communities that appeared in the local press; and residents’ responses to my interview questions about perceived social-class and racial disparities between the northeast Valley’s rural districts and the city as a whole. In 2002, Los Angeles began the process of redrawing its city council district boundaries, in accordance with the population data collected by the 2000 census and with fair and equal representation mandates of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This redistricting process occurs every ten years after the federal census, but in this redistricting cycle and for the first time in Los Angeles, the city council appointed a redistricting commission to provide recommendations on district boundaries. The commission was created as part of the new city charter approved by voters in 1999, which was intended to connect citizens more closely with their local government and to enable their more active participation in the redistricting process. The commission consisted of twenty-one leaders from the business community and nonprofit sector appointed by city council members, the city attorney, the...

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