Changes

If as Lizabeth Cohen argues in ''A Consumer Republic'' that postwar government policies as represented by the G.I. Bill, VA/FHA home loans, and new tax polices sought to create a “consumer republic” that enhanced the purchasing power, conflating citizenship with consumerism, this new orientation reverberated politically, socially, economically, and spatially. While most writers have focused intensely on housing and school desegregation struggles, others have employed a broader lens, employing critical race theory to popular culture of the age. Prominent among such methodological turns stands Eric Avila and his ''Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles''. Examining meanings behind film noir, Disneyland, Dodger’s Stadium, and freeway construction, Avila locates an attempt by Southern California elites and others to construct Los Angeles as suburban “white spot” immune to the dangers of the city, protected by homogenous suburbanization. According to Avila, popular culture not only reflected the changing perceptions and normative values associated with suburbanization but also “prefigured the rightward shift of American politics during the postwar period.” (228)

Ultimately, the importance of Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, Noir, and freeway construction in Los Angeles and Orange Counties represented a broader American shift. Seen in Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s corporatization or as some have labeled it “Disneyfication” of Times Square, “the suburbanism that took shape in locales such as Orange County during the 1950s now extends its reach into the archetypal noir metropolis” New York. (239)