“Suburban Warriors”: The Blue-Collar and Blue-Sky Communities of Southern California’s Aerospace Industry

Abstract

Los Angeles’s aerospace suburbs no longer have many aerospace companies or workers in them, but their legacy—a geographical division of labor, class, and race reflected in and reinforced by corporate planning—continues to shape the region’s suburban landscape. In the early 1960s, aerospace companies relocated their new divisions to the emerging edge cities of greater Los Angeles. Until the end of the Cold War, these “blue-sky” suburbs—white, white-collar, and with predominantly male workforces—reinterpreted the California dream for an upper-middle class who believed they had little in common with their blue-collar counterparts left behind in older working-class communities.