The Neighborhood Politics of Class in a Working-Class Suburb of Los Angeles,1920-1940

Abstract

In interwar Los Angeles, the politics of the neighborhood took on immense importance in the lives of white, working-class families. A close study of South Gate, a blue-collar suburb in southern Los Angeles, reveals that home ownership became central to the political identity of local residents. In these years, the peculiar nature of working-class suburbia lent a highly class-sensitive spin to that identity; working-class homeowners were fiercely concerned with protecting the modest economic security that home ownership gave them, particularly in the precarious years before the welfare state. South Gate’s native-born, white residents embraced the tenets of “plain folk Americanism,” which valued self-help, hard work, and individualism. Accordingly, they drew on sweat equity to build their own homes and grow food on their property, as a means of achieving some independence from cash wages. When local merchants sought to raise taxes, to finance their broader goal of developing the suburb’s infrastructure as a means of stimulating local business, working-class families mobilized politically to resist. Local politics became a series of battles between South Gate’s merchants and working-class residents, focused on taxation and development. These struggles reveal how workers ascribed their own class-based meanings to home ownership, and how they asserted their class interests in the arena of neighborhood politics.