The New Suburbia:
How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945
A Talk with Author Becky Nicolaides
Please join the Los Angeles City Historical Society for a special webinar with historian Becky Nicolaides, author of The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945.
America’s suburbs have been transforming. The conventional story of suburbs as bastions of white, middle-class homeowners no longer describes the suburbs of America’s cities. Today they house a more typical cross-section of the nation—rich, poor, Black American, Latino, Asian, immigrant, the unhoused, the lavishly housed, and everyone in between. Stories of everyday suburban life, in the process, have taken on new inflections.
Nowhere are these changes more vivid than in Los Angeles. In this suburban metropolis and global powerhouse, lily white suburbs have virtually disappeared, and over two-thirds of the County’s suburbs have become majority minority. Examining this vanguard of change from the postwar to the present, The New Suburbia follows the Asian Americans, Black Americans, and Latinos who moved into white neighborhoods that once barred them. They bought homes, enrolled their children in schools, and began navigating suburban life. They faced a choice: would they remake the suburbs, or would the suburbs remake them? In places like Pasadena, San Marino, South Gate, and Lakewood, suburbanites faced the challenges of living together in difference. Historian Becky Nicolaides explores a range of community experiences, from internal resegregation to suburban poverty, an embrace of law-and-order culture to police brutality, friendly neighbors to social withdrawal. In some communities, diverse residents continued longstanding habits of exclusion and perpetuated metropolitan inequality. In others, they embraced more inclusive, multicultural suburban ideals. Through it all, the common denominators of suburbia remained—low-slung landscapes of single-family homes and families seeking the good life.
An authoritative work based on quantitative data spanning 70 years and over 60 unpublished oral histories and interviews, The New Suburbia explores vital landscapes where the American dream has endured, even as the dreamers have changed.
The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.
LOCATION
Webinar via Zoom
REGISTRATION
This is a free event but registration is required.
About the Author
Becky Nicolaides is an LA-based historian and consultant specializing in the history of suburbs, metro areas, and Los Angeles. She’s author of The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford, 2024), My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (University of Chicago Press), and The Suburb Reader (Routledge), co-edited with Andrew Wiese. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other outlets. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Haynes Foundation, the Huntington Library, and UCLA. She is currently part of an EU Erasmus+ transnational project focused on the study of suburbanism and urbanism in the EU and US, and is a lead team member of the NEH-supported “LA County Demographic Data Project, 1950-2010” at the USC Digital Library. She’s taught at UCSD, UCLA, Pitzer College, and Arizona State University West, and is currently a research affiliate at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. Becky is a co-founder of History Studio, a partnership of award-winning scholars providing expert research, script vetting, and original content for the entertainment industry. She served on the LA Mayor’s Working Group on Civic Memory and is a lifelong Angeleno.
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If you have questions about the event, please email us at lacityhistoryevents@gmail.com.
