"A City of Picture Buyers": Art, Identity, and Aspiration in Los Angeles and Southern California, 1891-1914

2010 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-50
Author(s):  
Jasper G. Schad
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
White Middle Class

In less than twenty-five years, Los Angeles and other southern California urban centers evolved from culturally sterile communities into vibrant art centers. That remarkable transformation resulted from a combination of social, economic, and political changes that drew residents to landscape paintings. They enjoyed widespread popularity because residents invested them with meanings that transcended art. They became icons of identity, bolstered visions of an unspoiled suburban Eden, and helped southern California's white middle-class to cope with the mounting stress of modern urban life.

Humor Orgies as Ritual Insult

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Patrick Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Group Members

In-group members can display a sense of solidarity by earning license to direct verbal putdowns toward one another in the presence of others. An explanation of the process by which in-group members can maintain a sense of solidarity through putdowns in everyday life, however, is lacking in the literature. Set in a corner donut shop in southern California, this article describes how a group of old straight white middle-class men direct improvisational putdowns toward each other and explains how this banter maintains a sense of group solidarity for these men. The article puts forth a view of ritual insult in the form of “humor orgies” as emergent interactional phenomena characterized by successive, situation-dependent turns whereby group members play with interpersonal meanings in “givin’ it” “on top” and “takin’ it” “on bottom.” The findings raise questions about the extent to which superiority theories of humor are adequate and also suggest a need for ethnographies of everyday improvisational humor in public, non-workplace settings.

Holding the Center

2012 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-255
Author(s):  
Michan Andrew Connor
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Central City ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The City

Early television shows that focused on Los Angeles as subject, such as The City at Night (KTLA) and Jack Linkletter's On the Go (CBS), assured white, middle-class, suburban viewers that they had a place in the larger metropolis by presenting a selective knowledge of its features and issues. On the Go surpassed the entertainment level of The City at Night to address some serious social issues. By the mid-sixties, suburbanization had been fully embraced as the "good life." Shows such as Ralph Story's Los Angeles (KNXT), instead of engaging suburban viewers in metropolitan issues, entertained them with glimpses of the city's "oddities." The change in tone marked the passing of the center of cultural identity from the central city to the suburbs.

Resisting Camelot

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 28-51
Author(s):  
Jean-Paul R. deGuzman
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
White Flight ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Homeowner Associations ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The City

For generations white middle-class residents of the Valley, a longtime symbol of post-WWII suburbia, have attempted to break away from the City of Los Angeles. By the end of the 20th century, the secession campaign brought together homeowner associations, business leaders, and small government libertarians. During a period of massive global migration that transformed the city into an immigrant metropolis, this coalition successfully placed secession on the November 2002 municipal ballot. Critics of secession decried Valley independence as latter day white flight and a means to curtail the growing political power of Latinas/os. This article complicates previous studies that solely focus on the tactical failures of white secessionists, and rather unearths the genesis and impact of grassroots people of color organizing both in the Valley and across the rest of Los Angeles.

Planning ‘Suburban Bliss’ in Joe Slovo Park, Cape Town

Africa ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Robins
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Housing Development ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The Everyday

AbstractJoe Slovo Park, a housing development in a white middle-class suburb of Cape Town, was designed to replace the shack settlement of Marconi Beam with an orderly working-class suburb. This article focuses on the vicissitudes of post-apartheid housing development schemes, and raises troubling questions about the failure of planners, policy makers and developers to take into account the complexities of the everyday lives they sought to transform. Had they done so they might have anticipated the ‘re-informalisation’ of the newly formalised suburb. The article explores the disjunctures between the planners' model of ‘suburban bliss’ and the reality. The messy, improvised character of low-income housing development in South Africa is contrasted with their Utopian and technocratic vision. This is not to deny that dreams embodied in blueprints may often be shared by the intended ‘beneficiaries’, only that for a variety of social, economic and cultural reasons poor communities are generally unable to realise such ideal visions of modern urban living.

The value, costs, and meaning of transnational migration in rural Oaxaca, Mexico

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey H. Cohen ◽  
Bernardo Rios ◽  
Lise Byars
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
The Social

Rural Oaxacan migrants are defined as quintessential transnational movers, people who access rich social networks as they move between rural hometowns in southern Mexico and the urban centers of southern California.  The social and cultural ties that characterize Oaxacan movers are critical to successful migrations, lead to jobs and create a sense of belonging and shared identity.  Nevertheless, migration has socio-cultural, economic and psychological costs.  To move the discussion away from a framework that emphasizes the positive transnational qualities of movement we focus on the costs of migration for Oaxacans from the state’s central valleys and Sierra regions.   

The Sunland Grizzly

2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 56-63
Author(s):  
Josh Sides
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Grizzly Bear ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Founding Director

In 1916, Cornelius Birket Johnson, a Los Angeles fruit farmer, killed the last known grizzly bear in Southern California and the second-to last confirmed grizzly bear in the entire state of California. Johnson was neither a sportsman nor a glory hound; he simply hunted down the animal that had been trampling through his orchard for three nights in a row, feasting on his grape harvest and leaving big enough tracks to make him worry for the safety of his wife and two young daughters. That Johnson’s quarry was a grizzly bear made his pastoral life in Big Tujunga Canyon suddenly very complicated. It also precipitated a quagmire involving a violent Scottish taxidermist, a noted California zoologist, Los Angeles museum administrators, and the pioneering mammalogist and Smithsonian curator Clinton Hart Merriam. As Frank S. Daggett, the founding director of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art, wrote in the midst of the controversy: “I do not recollect ever meeting a case where scientists, crooks, and laymen were so inextricably mingled.” The extermination of a species, it turned out, could bring out the worst in people.

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