Eric Avila
Biographic Data
| ID | 3990227 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Avila |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Avila |
| SIGNATURE | AVILA E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-0649-7337 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The City Beneath
After the American conquest of Mexico in 1848, Los Angeles emerged as a settler-colonial society that flourished through a pernicious pattern of racial oppression and class exploitation. These processes rested upon the foundation of private property, which brought vast land holdings into the hands of a new oligarchy. The regime of private land ownership has governed the history of Los Angeles over the course of the past 170 years, arbitrating a f…
Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight
Los Angeles pulsed with economic vitality and demographic growth in the decades following World War II. This vividly detailed cultural history of L.A. from 1940 to 1970 traces the rise of a new suburban consciousness adopted by a generation of migrants who abandoned older American cities for Southern California's booming urban region. Eric Avila explores expressions of this new "white identity" in popular culture with provocative discussions of H…
Introduction
The book opens in explaining that this very short introduction to American cultural history emphasizes culture as a driving force in American history. Cultural history is the history of stories, their origins, transmission, and significance in time. However, no work of cultural history can disentangle the cultural from political, economic, and social processes of change. The relationship between culture and identity needs to be understood along w…
American Cultural History
American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction provides a chronological look at American culture—the values, attitudes, beliefs, and myths of a particular society and the objects through which they are organized—addressing literature, music, art, architecture, theater, film, television, and the Internet. In doing so, it emphasizes culture’s role in the shaping of national identity and how previous generations of Americans have imagined them…
L.A.’s Invisible Freeway Revolt
Existing accounts of the politics of fighting freeways during the age of the Interstate largely describes the victories of white affluent urban neighborhoods that successfully mustered local opposition to urban highway construction. Popular understandings of the “freeway revolt” thus remain limited to places like Beverly Hills, CA, Cambridge, MA, Lower Manhattan, and New Orleans’s French Quarter. Yet a close examination of cultural expression fro…
Race, Culture, Politics, and Urban Renewal
When historians refer to “urban renewal,” they are not describing one singular policy. After 1945, as Andrew Highsmith, Irene Holliman, and Guian McKee show, leaders of renewal efforts in Flint, Atlanta, and Philadelphia assumed that a combination of slum clearance, office towers, and expressways would bring white, middle-class people back to downtown. Surprisingly, African American leaders in Flint and Atlanta often cooperated in these plans. In…
Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight
Eric Avila's ambitious and engaging Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight argues that a "new 'new mass culture'" emerged in the United States in the years following the Second World War. The "new mass culture" of the nineteenth century reflected the development of modern, industrial cities; this "new 'new mass culture"' mirrored the development of a new, post-industrial, suburban society. In this new culture, cities represented sites of deca…
Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight
This article takes popular cultural expressions as a window onto the transformation of the American city after World War II. First, it considers the film genre known as film noir as evidence of a larger perception of social disorder that ensued within the context of the centralized, modern city, which peaked at the turn of the century. Second, it turns to Disneyland as the archetypal example of a postwar suburban order, one that promised to deliv…
Roundtable on the State of Chicana/o Studies
Research Article| October 01 2002 Roundtable on the State of Chicana/o Studies Karen Mary Davalos, Karen Mary Davalos Karen Mary Davalos, assistant professor of Chicana/o studies at Loyola Marymount University, is author of Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (University of New Mexico Press, 2001). Trained as a cultural anthropologist with a specialization in feminist studies, her work addresses popu- Search for other…
The Folklore of the Freeway
Essay| October 01 1998 The Folklore of the Freeway: Space, Culture, and Identity in Postwar Los Angeles Eric R. Avila Eric R. Avila Eric R. Avila. Assistant professor in the César Chávez Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.He is currently writing an intellectual history of the Los Angeles freeways. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Aztlán (1998) 23 (1): 15–32. https://doi.org/10.1525/azt.199…
Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight
This article takes popular cultural expressions as a window onto the transformation of the American city after World War II. First, it considers the film genre known as film noir as evidence of a larger perception of social disorder that ensued within the context of the centralized, modern city, which peaked at the turn of the century. Second, it turns to Disneyland as the archetypal example of a postwar suburban order, one that promised to deliv…
Race, Culture, Politics, and Urban Renewal
When historians refer to “urban renewal,” they are not describing one singular policy. After 1945, as Andrew Highsmith, Irene Holliman, and Guian McKee show, leaders of renewal efforts in Flint, Atlanta, and Philadelphia assumed that a combination of slum clearance, office towers, and expressways would bring white, middle-class people back to downtown. Surprisingly, African American leaders in Flint and Atlanta often cooperated in these plans. In…
L.A.’s Invisible Freeway Revolt
Existing accounts of the politics of fighting freeways during the age of the Interstate largely describes the victories of white affluent urban neighborhoods that successfully mustered local opposition to urban highway construction. Popular understandings of the “freeway revolt” thus remain limited to places like Beverly Hills, CA, Cambridge, MA, Lower Manhattan, and New Orleans’s French Quarter. Yet a close examination of cultural expression fro…
The Folklore of the Freeway
Essay| October 01 1998 The Folklore of the Freeway: Space, Culture, and Identity in Postwar Los Angeles Eric R. Avila Eric R. Avila Eric R. Avila. Assistant professor in the César Chávez Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.He is currently writing an intellectual history of the Los Angeles freeways. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Aztlán (1998) 23 (1): 15–32. https://doi.org/10.1525/azt.199…
The Folklore of the Freeway
Essay| October 01 1998 The Folklore of the Freeway: Space, Culture, and Identity in Postwar Los Angeles Eric R. Avila Eric R. Avila Eric R. Avila. Assistant professor in the César Chávez Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.He is currently writing an intellectual history of the Los Angeles freeways. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Aztlán (1998) 23 (1): 15–32. https://doi.org/10.1525/azt.199…
Roundtable on the State of Chicana/o Studies
Research Article| October 01 2002 Roundtable on the State of Chicana/o Studies Karen Mary Davalos, Karen Mary Davalos Karen Mary Davalos, assistant professor of Chicana/o studies at Loyola Marymount University, is author of Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (University of New Mexico Press, 2001). Trained as a cultural anthropologist with a specialization in feminist studies, her work addresses popu- Search for other…
Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight
This article takes popular cultural expressions as a window onto the transformation of the American city after World War II. First, it considers the film genre known as film noir as evidence of a larger perception of social disorder that ensued within the context of the centralized, modern city, which peaked at the turn of the century. Second, it turns to Disneyland as the archetypal example of a postwar suburban order, one that promised to deliv…
Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight
Eric Avila's ambitious and engaging Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight argues that a "new 'new mass culture'" emerged in the United States in the years following the Second World War. The "new mass culture" of the nineteenth century reflected the development of modern, industrial cities; this "new 'new mass culture"' mirrored the development of a new, post-industrial, suburban society. In this new culture, cities represented sites of deca…
Race, Culture, Politics, and Urban Renewal
When historians refer to “urban renewal,” they are not describing one singular policy. After 1945, as Andrew Highsmith, Irene Holliman, and Guian McKee show, leaders of renewal efforts in Flint, Atlanta, and Philadelphia assumed that a combination of slum clearance, office towers, and expressways would bring white, middle-class people back to downtown. Surprisingly, African American leaders in Flint and Atlanta often cooperated in these plans. In…
L.A.’s Invisible Freeway Revolt
Existing accounts of the politics of fighting freeways during the age of the Interstate largely describes the victories of white affluent urban neighborhoods that successfully mustered local opposition to urban highway construction. Popular understandings of the “freeway revolt” thus remain limited to places like Beverly Hills, CA, Cambridge, MA, Lower Manhattan, and New Orleans’s French Quarter. Yet a close examination of cultural expression fro…
Introduction
The book opens in explaining that this very short introduction to American cultural history emphasizes culture as a driving force in American history. Cultural history is the history of stories, their origins, transmission, and significance in time. However, no work of cultural history can disentangle the cultural from political, economic, and social processes of change. The relationship between culture and identity needs to be understood along w…
American Cultural History
American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction provides a chronological look at American culture—the values, attitudes, beliefs, and myths of a particular society and the objects through which they are organized—addressing literature, music, art, architecture, theater, film, television, and the Internet. In doing so, it emphasizes culture’s role in the shaping of national identity and how previous generations of Americans have imagined them…
Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight
Los Angeles pulsed with economic vitality and demographic growth in the decades following World War II. This vividly detailed cultural history of L.A. from 1940 to 1970 traces the rise of a new suburban consciousness adopted by a generation of migrants who abandoned older American cities for Southern California's booming urban region. Eric Avila explores expressions of this new "white identity" in popular culture with provocative discussions of H…
The City Beneath
After the American conquest of Mexico in 1848, Los Angeles emerged as a settler-colonial society that flourished through a pernicious pattern of racial oppression and class exploitation. These processes rested upon the foundation of private property, which brought vast land holdings into the hands of a new oligarchy. The regime of private land ownership has governed the history of Los Angeles over the course of the past 170 years, arbitrating a f…
History (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Art (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Politics (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works) · Art history (4 works) · Literature (4 works)