Promoting the Pacific Borderlands: Leisure and Consumption in Southern California

    In the late nineteenth century, Southern California emerged as a contact point between Mexico and the United States.  It also served as the birthplace of a new sort of American West.  Anglo Americans had previously conceived of the West as a place of labor, where land, minerals, forests, and animals were transformed into wealth through work.  What promoters of Los Angeles came to call the “Great Southwest” was perceived as a very different place – one that promised leisure not as a vacation, but a way of life.  Tourism proved a key strategy for pursuing economic development in Southern California and the Southwest. 
    The promotion of leisure in Southern California had profound and problematic consequences for the region, and for the nation.  While Anglo tourists and residents could enjoy recreation, their leisure depended upon the labor of others.  For Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans, as well as other groups, the Anglo reinvention of the borderlands as a region of leisure meant the continuation of a far older regional labor system – one based on race, as well as citizenship.  Southern California helped popularize democratize leisure for Anglo Americans, but did so by exploiting the labor of others.
    Examining leisure across the borderlands, especially in the region’s largest city, Los Angeles, demonstrates that the borderlands were not a periphery removed from the evolution of consumer capitalism – it was in fact a region that played an important role in shaping consumer culture in the twentieth-century United States.  The history of modern American leisure – as well as American suburbia, which also promised a more leisured life, and replicated important aspects of Southern California’s leisure culture – is inextricably connected to the labor relations and ambivalent history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.