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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34.3 (2003) 484-485



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My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. By Becky M. Nicolaides (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002) 412pp. $65.00 cloth $24.00 paper

South Gate, Bell Gardens, Huntington Park, and Maywood—these small cities and their neighbors are parts of Los Angeles that few but their residents know. Located in an industrialized corridor between downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach, they developed as suburbs for white working-class and wage-earning, middle-class families. Predominantly communities of modest single-family houses, they offered a chance for property ownership and a toehold on the ladder of upward mobility. Located just to the east of heavily African-American neighborhoods (South Central and Watts), they were also the foci of bitter battles about racial integration in the 1960s.

Nicolaides' book is a deeply researched and carefully argued history of South Gate, with comparative attention to its neighbors. It is state- of-the-art urban history that examines the interactions between political choices and the everyday experience of place. Her community study also illuminates issues in the history of labor, race relations, and landscape. Rather than exploring new theories and methodologies, Nicolaides demonstrates her mastery of historical literature and sources, drawing on oral histories and interviews, community newspapers, institutional records, voting data, maps, photographs, census data, and social surveys. The result is a nuanced synthesis that goes a long way to recapture the experience of an otherwise anonymous community.

Nicolaides organizes her study around two broad questions: Why and in what ways were the working-class residents of South Gate politically conservative? What role did homeownership play in shaping the daily lives and ideology of South Gaters? The second question is the key to the first. In the 1920s and 1930s, South Gate was a place where newcomers, usually poor white families from the central and southern United States, could buy an inexpensive lot and build their own home. With wartime and postwar prosperity, contractor-built houses became indicators of social status and then, in the 1960s, the physical savings accounts that locked South Gaters into fierce defense of racial homogeneity. In turn, homeownership as economic strategy reinforced middle-American individualism. Workers joined unions, but home, family, school, and church remained the centers of life and identity. To condense a careful argument to a sentence, they became New Deal Democrats because of promises to expand individual opportunity, and they became Nixon and Reagan Republicans for the same reason. Although Nicolaides does not make the point explicitly, her discussions of family life and leisure strongly suggest Los Angeles was a nice place to live from the 1920s through the 1950s. To be part of its struggling working class was simply more pleasant than to occupy the same economic niche in smoke-choked Pittsburgh or snow-bound Buffalo. [End Page 484]

The author's efforts to reconstruct and describe the physical fabric of South Gate in terms that underline its appeal to its residents is worthy of praise. The cityscape that architectural Banham once dismissed as the "Plains of Id" takes on life and character on Nicolaides' mental drives through the town in a manner reminiscent of Engels' walk through Manchester.1 In sum, My Blue Heaven is a model monograph that raises the bar for the rest of us engaged in telling the history of American cities.



Carl Abbott
Portland State University

Footnotes

1. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York, 1971); Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Stanford, 1968).

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