Oxford University Press to publish "The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945" on January 5, 2024.

LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, January 5, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- 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. In "The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945," author Becky Nicolaides follows the Asian Americans, Black Americans, and Latinos who moved into white neighborhoods that once barred them. They bought houses, enrolled their children in schools, and began navigating suburban life. Over two-thirds of Los Angeles County suburbs have become majority-minority. The new residents 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.

Becky Nicolaides, a research affiliate at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, 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.

"The New Suburbia" presents a wide-ranging portrait of suburban life that contrasts with outdated portrayals by Hollywood, pundits, and the media. Drawing on a large dataset on LA suburbs from 1950 to 2020, the book also includes more than 50 never-before-published oral histories and interviews. Manuel Pastor, co-author of "South Central Dreams" said, "While I thought I knew this story — growing up in La Puente and Whittier, earlier Latino suburbs, I lived this story — I learned so much. This is a landmark volume that will be essential to our emerging understanding of the complexity of America's metro regions.”

The book makes a distinctive contribution to the field by offering a comprehensive portrayal of suburban life that encompasses the diverse experiences of various demographic groups. This inclusive approach stands in contrast to many studies that often focus on narrow case studies of specific locations or deal solely with biracial dynamics. It features 64 supplemental tables and figures also available on the book's Oxford University Press companion website. This supplementary material is drawn from an extensive dataset on LA suburbs and compiled specifically for "The New Suburbia." The dataset serves as a crucial empirical foundation for the book's analysis.

Wendy Cheng, author of "The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California" called it an "essential read for anyone interested in Los Angeles and urban and suburban landscapes," while Thomas J. Sugrue of New York University praised it as “an essential starting point for understanding the challenges and opportunities of an increasingly diverse America.”

The new suburbia has become home to a majority of Americans, with the suburbs now as diverse as America itself. Nicolaides presents an understanding of the social dynamics of these places, their histories, and the forces that shaped them, pointing to where America itself is headed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Becky M. Nicolaides is a research affiliate at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. She is the author of "My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965" and the co-editor of "The Suburb Reader." She has served on the LA Mayor's Office Civic Memory Working Group and is a lifelong Angeleno.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Published by Oxford University Press on January 5, 2024, "The New Suburbia" is an authoritative work based on a half-century of quantitative data. It explores vital landscapes where the American dream has endured, even as the dreamers have changed.

MEDIA CONTACT
To request a copy of "The New Suburbia," contact publicist Nanda Dyssou of Coriolis Company at nanda@corioliscompany.com or 424-226-6148.

Nanda Dyssou
Coriolis Company
+1 424-226-6148
nanda@corioliscompany.com