Southeast Blues

You never can tell who might be living in a garage. Take the lower-income communities of Maywood, Bell Gardens, South Gate and other crowded suburbs southeast of downtown. As the 20th century ended, the Southeast cities drew their share of alarums over what were seen as burgeoning social problems for Los Angeles. Ilustrative sample: “We have a tremendous number of garages being converted to illegal homes; laundry rooms turned into sleeping rooms; we have even found tents pitched in yards,” the city manager of Maywood said after the 1990 census logged an influx of Latino immigrant residents to the area.

Welcome to the barrios of the 21st century? Try white suburbia, circa 1930. In “My Blue Heaven,” recently published by the University of Chicago Press, Becky M. Nicolaides, a UC San Diego historian, suggests that subsistence living in Southeast L.A. is a case of deja vu, right down to the tents and garage shelters.

Nicolaides’ chronicle of working-class white Southeast L.A. from 1920 to 1965 is exhaustive scholarship, with the attendant charts, maps, footnotes and academic turns of phrase. But it’s also history as tragic drama. America’s strugglers often face off across a racial dividing line, and Southern California was no exception.

Focusing on South Gate, Nicolaides, raised in South Pasadena, mined phone books, census data, City Council minutes and other sources to document a poor white Los Angeles now all but forgotten. During the ‘20s and ‘30s, South Gate and its neighbors may have been suburban, but this was suburbia a la Tobacco Row. Many settlers were fleeing the Dust Bowl region or the rural South. Residents raised animals for food, kept vegetable gardens and lived in tents and garages while building their own jerry-built ramshackle houses.

It’s a picture that recalls the quasi-rural Watts of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mystery novels, and that’s precisely the point. “Blacks and Mexicans were pretty much trying to do the same thing,” says Nicolaides, an associate professor of history and urban studies and planning who began the project as a PhD candidate during the early ‘90s. “Everybody was doing pretty badly in those interwar years.”

But to the economic refugees in white Southeast L.A., homeownership--underwritten by federal programs and union jobs in booming industries such as General Motors and Firestone Tire--was the ticket to the middle-class good life. In the flush postwar years, South Gate’s chicken coops gave way to landscaping, and contractor-built tract homes replaced its shanty houses. Prosperity blurred the line between working and middle class. South Gate and its neighbors began to look like their more upmarket cousins Lakewood and Glendale. They built baseball parks, joined civic booster clubs and took family excursions to Disneyland.

“My Blue Heaven’s” dominant theme is not suburban rhapsody, however, but a grimmer counterpoint of deteriorating race relations. While segregation prevailed in public schools, redlining shut nonwhites out of federal mortgage programs that gave white cities rising property values and an expanded tax base.

But in the skewed mind-set of working-class whites, the tract homes and parks were threatened by those from the “wrong” side of Alameda Street, then a racial dividing line in Los Angeles. Nicolaides documents successive attempts to keep working-class L.A. segregated through restrictive covenants, anti-integration campaigns and initiatives such as Proposition 14, a 1964 measure to overturn California’s equal housing laws. Nixon’s “silent majority” came of age, white Democrats began to vote Republican, and “white flight” became a familiar occurrence.

The sad irony was that poor Angelenos of all colors were in similar straits before the postwar windfalls favoring whites--and that lost puzzle piece may be “My Blue Heaven’s” offering to L.A. history. “We can’t just be pointing the finger at groups we might deem as having problems because of racial or ethnic background,” Nicolaides says. “These are universal struggles played out by different groups, including whites. People in these same [working-class] communities have the same aspirations to a better life. It’s a constant theme in the history of L.A.”