In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills: Latino Suburbanization in Postwar Los Angeles

In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills

Latinidad

Transnational Cultures in the United States

This series publishes books that deepen and expand our understanding of Latina/o populations, especially in the context of their transnational relationships within the Americas. Focusing on borders and boundary crossings, broadly conceived, the series is committed to publishing scholarship in history, film and media, literary and cultural studies, public policy, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Inspired by interdisciplinary approaches, methods, and theories developed out of the study of transborder lives, cultures, and experiences, titles enrich our understanding of transnational dynamics.

Matthew García, Series Editor, Arizona State University, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies and Director of Comparative Border Studies

For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills

•

Latino Suburbanization in Postwar Los Angeles

Jerry González

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gonzalez, Jerry, 1978–

Title: In search of the Mexican Beverly Hills : Latino suburbanization in postwar Los Angeles / Jerry Gonzalez.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2017. | Series: Latinidad: transnational cultures in the United States | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017015418 (print) | LCCN 2017029748 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813583174 (E-pub) | ISBN 9780813583181 (Web PDF) | ISBN 9780813583167 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813583150 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813583174 (epub) | ISBN 9780813583181 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Mexican Americans—California—Los Angeles Suburban Area. | Los Angeles Suburban Area (Calif.)—History. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Hispanic American Studies. | HISTORY / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY). | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / City Planning & Urban Development. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban. | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations.

Classification: LCC F869.L89 (ebook) | LCC F869.L89 M5172 2017 (print) | DDC 305.868/72079493—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015418

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Jerry González

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my family

And in memory of Clark Davis

Contents

Introduction

1. The Lands of Mañana

2. Mexican Americans and the Suburban Ideal

3. El MAPA to the Suburban Ideal

4. Suburban Renewal

Epilogue: Let’s Take a Trip . . .

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills

Introduction

In 1950 Arthur and Susana Lozano used GI Bill benefits to purchase a new home on a cul-de-sac in what would later become Pico Rivera, California.¹ After the birth of their second daughter the Lozanos had outgrown their home on Record Street in East Los Angeles, so they were looking to the expanding suburbs. Their two daughters, Susana C. and Silvia, found that the predominantly Mexican American neighborhood was full of playmates, and they enjoyed spending long hours in neighbors’ front yards. Furthermore, Susana C. recalls that the neighborhood provided a positive place to grow up in and that it also shaped her and her family’s relationships to collective identity and political engagement. Indeed, this move reinforced the Lozanos’ commitment to Mexican American advancement. Arthur and Susana Sr. modeled civic engagement for their daughters as they helped to found a local chapter of the American GI Forum and also canvassed precincts for city council and school board candidates.² In many ways the Lozanos’ narrative of residential mobility dovetails with the classic post–World War II story, centered on a nuclear family’s quest for the good life. Yet at the same time the Lozanos’ story is one of many that disrupts romanticized notions of postwar America. As Mexican Americans in a suburban space, the Lozanos joined a broad regional migration from older barrios to newly built tract developments and participated in the diverse political movements of their day.³

The Lozanos’ new home, Pico Rivera, incorporated as a contract city in 1958 and billed itself as a place in the sun, a suburb that comprised homes, churches, schools, and industry.⁴ The former agricultural community twelve miles east of downtown Los Angeles claimed a Mexican American population of nearly fifteen thousand people, amounting to 30 percent of the city’s total. This figure included residents of longstanding colonias (rural worker communities) that had transitioned into barrios (urban and suburban neighborhoods composed of mostly ethnic Mexicans), as well as new homeowners such as the Lozanos, who had migrated from the Eastside (a section of Los Angeles comprising the neighborhoods of Boyle Heights, unincorporated East Los Angeles, City Terrace, and Lincoln Heights). By the close of the 1970s, when a plurality of Americans across the United States lived in suburbs, Pico Rivera’s Mexican American inhabitants had swelled to over 60 percent of its total population.⁵ The rapid transformation of this particular suburb anticipated similar changes across Southern California, especially in the nearby cities of Montebello, El Monte, Monterey Park, and San Gabriel. In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills traces the hidden history of how Mexican Americans came to dominate the eastern Los Angeles County suburbs, along with their lived experiences, challenges, and accomplishments in these spaces.⁶

This section of the metropolitan region shifted after World War II from agricultural areas to a patchwork of suburban industrial and residential zones. Both working-class and middle-class inhabitants participated in this transition. Many of the former simply remained in place while new residential developments engulfed their colonias, whereas the latter group pursued their suburban ideal in newly developed housing tracts. All were at the center of a massive shift in American life during which the suburbs came to influence nearly every aspect of society. Although the geographies of racial difference in metropolitan Los Angeles circumscribed housing options for people of color, Mexican Americans found increased inclusion in suburbanizing regions south and east of downtown. Two concurrent historical processes characterize Mexican American suburbanization in this region. First, developers and city planners displaced colonia residents and removed the neighborhoods following the war. Those that remained morphed into suburban barrios from the 1950s onward.

The second process involved migration into those suburbs. The number of Spanish-surnamed residents in Los Angeles County nearly doubled during the 1960s, a dramatic increase strongly suggesting Mexican American in-migration from southwestern states such as Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas.⁷ Across the Southwest, the overlapping consequences of reduced labor migration from Mexico during the Great Depression in the 1930s, combined with repatriation programs back to Mexico, resulted in a largely native-born Mexican American community. The reasons that Mexican Americans moved into the suburbs mirrored those of other Americans at the height of suburbanization. Many were drawn to the opportunity of owning a recently built home in a planned community. Those with GI Bill benefits were especially inclined to seek suburban homeownership because many developments were directly marketed to veterans. Others were pushed out by freeway construction and urban renewal projects, which wiped their former neighborhoods off the map. The buyouts that homeowners received often contributed to their ability to purchase a new home. Similarly, employment opportunities shaped another dimension of this migration to the suburbs. This combination of industrial and residential dispersion contributed to massive population gains all across Los Angeles. For example, in 1950 in the San Fernando Valley the census registered 311,000 residents, most of whom were newcomers to the region.⁸ Similarly, industrial expansion in Commerce and Montebello attracted blue-collar workers, as did the opening of the Ford-Mercury Motor Company assembly plant in Pico Rivera in 1958.

Mexican American Los Angeles

The geography of residential settlement and industry at the end of the Depression appeared haphazard only to the untrained eye. Following sixty years of massive population booms and concomitant development, Los Angeles sprawled across the basin. Yet the social geography was tightly engineered. Race-restrictive covenants barred the residency of people of color from certain sections and contributed to the maintenance of segregated areas. African Americans were systematically concentrated into several neighborhoods along Central Avenue in Los Angeles, the east side of Pasadena, and the southern part of Monrovia.⁹

Map 1. Eastern Los Angeles County suburbs and their incorporation dates. Map by David Deis.

Colonias, on the other hand, were ubiquitous, distinctly working-class Mexican suburbs. They emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and provided refuge for laborers who toiled in the fields, foundries, factories, and privileged homes found across metropolitan Los Angeles. Despite the protection they offered as culturally affirming spaces, colonias were plagued by endemic poverty, substandard housing, lack of municipal services and infrastructural improvements, public health concerns, and property devaluation. Defined by their proximity to work sites in outlying areas, these communities retained blue-collar attributes that were reflected in the housing construction. Residents frequently built their own homes from salvaged materials and arranged the built environment according to community needs. People with less to spend established colonias in abandoned railroad boxcars near downtown Los Angeles. With their access to decent housing effectively blocked by race-restrictive covenants, many adapted to life in the United States in these impoverished, segregated communities. Just as important, these communities also served as stepping stones toward suburbanization. The first push of suburbanization toward East Los Angeles, for example, occurred when plans for Union Station forced people to move across the river, away from the colonia that was centered on the proposed construction site.¹⁰

Employment also shaped the residential landscape for ethnic Mexicans. For example, Hicks Camp near El Monte and Simons Brickyard in Montebello were both established by companies that relied on ethnic Mexican labor. Other colonias, such as Jimtown and Flood Ranch, developed on their own terms but were located a short distance from job sites. These places differed from barrios because of the latter’s urban connotation.¹¹ Barrios are communities that are locked in by other residential and industrial tracts and more tightly integrated into the pace of daily urban life, whereas colonias definitely broke from the urban center.¹² Residents created hybrid cultural communities in which community pride and social belonging clashed with outside perceptions of colonias as sources of crime, disease, and taxpayer waste. With the rapid decline of Los Angeles’s agricultural industries, growth advocates targeted colonias for removal. Inequality shaped the political terrain of Los Angeles in profound ways. City survey maps from the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) showed a region deeply divided along class and racial lines. Traveling east along Whittier Boulevard, from Boyle Heights to East Whittier, the neighborhoods assessed by the HOLC yielded few positive evaluations. Of the thirteen districts surveyed, only one received an A grade because race-restrictive covenants protected the area from supposedly deleterious influences. Its class of business professionals and retired capitalists, with incomes that ranged from $600 to $6,000 per year, situated it near the top tier of Southern California’s residential areas.¹³ It was in this process of metropolitan expansion that ethnic Mexicans first became postwar suburbanites and that colonias morphed into barrios, as metropolitan Los Angeles became more spatially interconnected.

During the postwar period the Mexican American population across the Southwest increased, from 2.29 million in 1950 to 3.46 million in 1960, as metropolitan regions boomed. The authors of the 1965 Mexican American Study Project estimated that 60 percent of that growth had occurred in California, especially in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.¹⁴ The Eastside Los Angeles absorbed much of the growth of the Mexican American population. Combined with the mass relocation of Jews to West Los Angeles and the dispersal of Japanese Americans to all corners of the metropolis following internment, the Eastside became the hub of Mexican American life and culture by the end of the 1960s.¹⁵ In addition to the Eastside, other urban barrios expanded with newly arrived Mexican American and Mexican migrants. Watts, Compton, and South Los Angeles gained in ethnic Mexican residency at the same time that job opportunities, access to fair housing, adequate health care, and decent schooling declined. Beyond these areas, ethnic Mexicans carved out places of their own across the San Gabriel Valley and Gateway suburbs. In the 1950s and 1960s, the decades associated with the height of suburban expansion, the numbers of Spanish-surnamed residents in the San Gabriel Valley and southeast Los Angeles County suburbs increased from approximately 20,000 to nearly 180,000. By comparison, during that same period the Spanish-surnamed population of East Los Angeles more than doubled, from roughly 43,000 to over 91,000.¹⁶ Thus, while East Los Angeles evolved into one of the nation’s largest barrios, the region surrounding it yielded the largest suburban Latino population in the United States. As stakeholders in the American dream, ethnic Mexicans crafted their own sense of the suburban ideal, which included activities for collective protection and advancement, efforts to establish a political role in their communities, and especially for the youth, practices in public space that marked these areas as culturally distinct suburbs.

Massive Postwar Suburbanization

Massive postwar suburbanization resulted from the decentralization of housing and industry away from downtown toward the metropolitan fringe. Private development coupled with New Deal liberalism had spurred an unprecedented migration from urban centers to the periphery. World War II armament had drawn millions to Southern California to find work in its booming defense industry. This migration caused a housing shortage in the region that became a catalyst for industrial and residential dispersion.¹⁷ Yet suburbanization also embodied cultural and political revolutions that redefined normalcy in Cold War–era America. Popular culture, sexuality, political movements, and gender roles were all transformed within the context of suburbia.¹⁸ Indeed, suburbanization redefined what it meant to be American and what it meant to belong in American society. The suburban ideal of a single-family home on a quiet street close to quality schools and free of poverty, crime, and overcrowding was normalized in public policy and popular culture. For everyday Americans who pursued suburban homeownership, becoming suburban signaled particular aspirations as people strove for upward mobility. The consequences of suburbanization touch every facet of American life to this very day, but despite recent attempts to nuance the story, scholars and the general public remain wed to the notion that suburbanization resulted from white flight from city centers and the concomitant concentration of African Americans in those abandoned spaces.

In Los Angeles the decentralization of residential areas and industry remapped the racial boundaries of the metropolis. Following their return from internment camps after the war, Japanese Americans settled in the eastern Los Angeles County suburbs of Montebello, San Gabriel, and Monterey Park. Likewise, Japanese Americans also made new homes in the Crenshaw District and the South Bay suburb of Gardena.¹⁹ By the 1970s Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, and Latinos had also remade Alhambra and other parts of the west San Gabriel Valley into multiracial spaces²⁰ Also in that decade, nearly 80 percent of Asian Americans in Los Angeles lived in suburbs, where they constituted less than 20 percent of the total population.²¹ These small enclaves paved the way for communities that developed later in the twentieth century. In the eastern San Fernando Valley in the 1980s the largest concentration of Thai Americans in the country staked their claim to suburban public and private spaces. The Thai Buddhist temple Wat Thai of Los Angeles, in the suburb of North Hollywood, has served as a community anchor since its earliest inception in 1968.²² There are many similarities in the history of Asian American and Latino suburbanization.²³ Indeed, Latinos and Asian Americans share space in the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys and have remade those places together. However, differences such as the size and acceleration of growth of the ethnic Mexican population in the twentieth century and the group’s flexible ethnoracial subjectivity warrant a dedicated study.

For Mexican Americans, especially for those who had weathered the storms of the Great Depression and World War II, becoming suburban was the culmination of a long road to becoming American. Historian George J. Sánchez has argued that for Mexican Americans between 1900 and 1945, cultural adaptation to life in the United States occurred in the absence of significant social mobility.²⁴ Thus, in the decades that followed the war, suburban homeownership embodied a material symbol of arrival. For Mexican Americans who had previously staked their claim to citizenship through labor, the suburban home was the manifestation of decades of struggle. Mexican Americans’ experience with suburbanization is a study in the contradictions of obtaining housing. Mexican Americans were excluded by and large from the most desirable residential tracts, yet gained access to others. At the same time many of the newest suburbs were built amid the colonias that predominated throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties before to the war.

So if becoming suburban redefined what it meant to be American for others in the postwar period, then it likewise reconfigured what it meant to be Mexican American. The process of becoming suburban was a crucible in which the community as a whole grappled with questions of belonging, inclusion, collective identity, and group mobility. The postwar period also marks a significant shift in the periodization of Chicano. For the first time in the United States, millions of Mexican Americans participated in some semblance of upward mobility and were able to leverage that position into action. This was also the first period in American history in which Mexican Americans experienced intragroup class tensions that played out in suburban rather than urban spaces. The title of this book references an often-repeated phrase in discussions of where the postwar Mexican American middle class settled in metropolitan Los Angeles. The city of Beverly Hills barely requires explanation because of its universal renown as one of the wealthiest places in the United States. That modest suburbs such as Whittier, Montebello, and Pico Rivera, and more recently Downey, Hacienda Heights, and Arcadia, are likened to Beverly Hills seems peculiar given that these are not bastions of tremendous wealth.²⁵ Read in relative terms, the seeds of Mexican American class mobility began in modest Southern California suburbs. In that respect, Pico Rivera might as well be Beverly Hills for the Mexican Americans who now live their lives in relative affluence.²⁶

Mexican Americans, though ostensibly nonwhite, acquired greater access to postwar suburban housing than African Americans or Asian Americans.²⁷ This occurred despite the fact that Mexican Americans encompass an ethnoracial group all their own.²⁸ In the interstices of racial identity, Mexican Americans from Chicago to the Sunbelt cities of El Paso, Tucson, and Dallas, as well as Los Angeles, have emerged as powerful actors in shaping local political and cultural spaces.²⁹ There are significant differences between the urban and suburban contexts, to be sure. These differences relate to the history of uneven capital investment, the duration of Mexican spaces through the era of massive suburbanization, and other factors. It is therefore imperative