Los Angeles in the time of the electric railway: Race, gender, and the urban imagination (California)

This dissertation considers the ways in which transit functions as an agent of urban subjectivity. Proceeding from the premise that city spaces actively influence memory, I examine how the decline of public transportation and the rise of the automobile have shaped the urban imagination. Through a reading of the history of Los Angeles' streetcar system, I argue that public transportation has had a compelling influence upon the ontology of race, gender, and urban public space in the postmodern city. Using the literary metaphor of the palimpsest to explore how historical narrative is informed by spatial memory, the dissertation re-examines the racial legacy of Los Angeles' effaced public transportation heritage. Tracing the paths of southern and midwestern black migrants during the Great Migration era, the dissertation foregrounds, the ways in which the racialization of the city was reinforced by the highway movement and the national cathexis upon suburban living. During the postwar era, the suburban ideal became the premier paradigm for American national identity. While the assimilation and “Anglicization” of European immigrants was predicated on the disavowal of urban public space, black immobility was inscribed within the narrative of the urban as other. It was within this frame that Los Angeles emerged as a locus for the autocentric urban development that defined the arc of postwar American cities. In analyzing the material and social role that transportation played in the constituting fiction of white immigrant mobility versus black urban fixity, the dissertation proposes transit as a metaphor for being. Early streetcar and train systems furthered Anglo-American notions of anti urbanism, conferring white immigrants with the privileges of an unraced white identity. Yet these systems were also mediums in which blacks in general, and black women in particular, came to the fore as social actors, challenging the inscription of race and gender within the built landscape. In exploring this dynamic, the dissertation argues that public transportation has been a vital site for redefining American notions of femininity, agency, and political resistance.