L.A.’s Invisible Freeway Revolt

Abstract

Existing accounts of the politics of fighting freeways during the age of the Interstate largely describes the victories of white affluent urban neighborhoods that successfully mustered local opposition to urban highway construction. Popular understandings of the “freeway revolt” thus remain limited to places like Beverly Hills, CA, Cambridge, MA, Lower Manhattan, and New Orleans’s French Quarter. Yet a close examination of cultural expression from urban minority communities, like the Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles for example, reveals a more pervasive and sharper critique of building freeways in the city. Losers, perhaps, in the fight against the freeway, city people of color nonetheless voiced specific grievances against highway construction through art, literature, and other forms of creative production. Herein lies another freeway revolt, which inspires local opposition to subsequent forms of spatial injustice in the inner city.