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7 Fringe Politics Suburban Expansion and the Mexican American Struggle for Alviso, California AARON CAVIN B efore World War II, Mexican Americans in the Santa Clara Valley of California lived in scattered communities, working in the rich agricultural fields. Those fields, however, transformed into the postwar suburbs as development wiped out the valley’s Mexican American communities. “There’s only one exception to that story,” recalled Ernesto Galarza, the farm labor organizer, Chicano activist, and scholar who lived and worked in the valley. That exception was Alviso, a working-class and agricultural town bordering San José. In the 1960s and 1970s, Alviso became a hub of Mexican American struggles for metropolitan political power, a place where residents organized grassroots social movements to challenge suburban growth policies.1 Although places like Alviso were on the edge of the postwar metropolis, they were central to its political economy and racial formation. Semirural Mexican American communities, known as colonias, found themselves drawn into a suburban world, grappling with new suburban industries and sprawling tract housing. Not that many white suburbanites were aware of this process—in a 1958 article that portrayed Santa Clara County as the epitome of sprawl, William H. Whyte summed up suburbanization as “countryside . . . being bulldozed under”—a passive phrase with no actors, suggesting a landscape void of inhabitants (Whyte 1958). Popular accounts to the contrary, the suburban fringe was not an empty frontier but a conglomeration of homes, neighborhoods, jobs, and cultures. Postwar suburban formation changed the existing land-use patterns and the racial cartography of the Bay Area, converting Mexican American countryside into white suburbia. Suburban development required displacing established barrios, engendering sprawl with a racial politics that scholars rarely acknowledge. The suburbs built over land that was inhabited, incorporating Mexican Americans into the metropolis in unequal ways. The history of Alviso inverts the conventional paradigm of suburban development . Scholars narrate the history of suburbanization as a process of moving 106 Aaron Cavin out, and until recently suburban scholarship has tended to portray white people as the original suburbanites and nonwhite people as interlopers. Urban historians tend to emphasize the disruptive effects of capital’s flight from the city rather than those of its arrival in the suburbs, noting increasing urban unemployment as urban industries relocated to the suburban fringe, depopulation as white people moved to new subdivisions, and crumbling infrastructure as the tax base plummeted (Self 2003; Sugrue 1996). The suburbs, on the other hand— with their public-sector resources, particularly quality education and municipal services provided at low tax rates—are portrayed as something of a golden land (De Souza Briggs 2005; Kruse and Sugrue 2006). Accordingly, the settling of nonwhite people in the suburbs is often portrayed as a struggle to move out of the inner city to access suburban resources, a key step in upward mobility (Cashin 2004; L. Cohen 2003; Sugrue 2008). This narrative, however, obscures critical aspects of metropolitan history. The creation of white, fiscally sound suburbs was by no means easy, nor was it inevitable. What if we reverse perspective and view suburbanization from the fringe rather than the center? Unlike urban African American communities, which experienced disinvestment and population loss in the postwar decades, colonias were located in the path of metropolitan growth (Garcia 2001; J. Gonzalez 2009; Pitti 2003). Instead of deindustrialization, Latino communities on the suburban fringe experienced industrialization; instead of disinvestment, investment; instead of a collapsing fiscal structure, a high tax base; instead of white flight, white settlement; and instead of depreciating housing prices, spiraling costs. These processes exacerbated racial and economic inequalities, yet they were not uncontested. In Alviso, Mexican American activists tried to make suburbanization more equitable. By investigating that history, this chapter contributes to a new wave of scholarship exploring not only the political and social disruptions experienced by racialized communities on the metropolitan fringe but also the ways in which communities sought justice (J. Gonzalez 2009; Needham 2006; Needham and Dieterich-Ward 2009; Wiese 2004). In particular, it joins Jerry Gonzalez (2009) in emphasizing the role of metropolitan space and suburban development in Mexican American racial formation and politics. Policies beget interest groups, and they give existing groups new interests, spurring new political struggles (Pierson 1993, 2005). Social relations, moreover , are constituted spatially (Lefebvre 1991). Thus postwar suburbanization policies not only reflected racial identities but also produced new ones (Freund 2007; Sugrue 1996). Housing policies created an investment in white identities that manifested itself in a politics of suburban exclusion (Lassiter 2006; Lipsitz...

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