UCLA

During the American Progressive Era, discourses of progress were co-constructed with racialized ideas about habitation. Communal, matriarchal, semi-nomadic, and self-built dwellings and their racialized inhabitants were positioned as antagonists to a single-family, heteropatriarchal, Anglo-American ideal. As associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Craftsman, Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival style bungalows that defined Los Angeles’ suburbs presented an illusion of self-made, simple living in connection with nature and frontier ideologies. Though purportedly democratic, the development of the suburbs involved the conversion of Indigenous lands into private property. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples, Black migrants and ethnic Mexicans were funneled into worker housing while employed in the construction and maintenance of a domestic sphere that secured social and financial capital for beneficiaries of Whiteness. The dissertation focuses on three sites where this occurred that have since been erased in the physical landscape, as much as in the public imaginary: 1) The Pacific Electric Railway Company’s labor camps, home to Mexican workers who built and maintained Henry Huntington’s exclusive Pasadena suburbs and resorts; 2) The homes built and maintained by students of the Sherman Institute, an Indian Boarding School in Riverside, California for the vocational training of Indigenous youth; 3) The bungalows of the industrial suburbs marketed to Black and unskilled employees of the Los Angeles Investment Company, a home-building enterprise that went on to build racially restricted, residential subdivisions in southwestern Los Angeles. In each case, laborers were racially targeted and housed in overcrowded, unsanitary, and flimsily built structures that materially foretold their demise and future redevelopment. This research challenges conceptions of the “slums” familiarized by neighborhood surveys, by exposing how their production was instrumental to the construction and maintenance of the suburbs. The chapters of this dissertation devote themselves to the designed details of these hidden histories, as emerging from three distinct labor camp, domestic service, and industrial suburbs. Though historically unique in their racial, material, geographic, and social composition, when considered together, the three sites demonstrate a commitment to settling labor and race through the uneven development of the domestic sphere.