Metropolitan Border War: Place, Scale, and Boundary Politics in the San Fernando Valley

Chronicler Kevin Roderick notes that the San Fernando Valley "does not exist in any official sense." Roderick refers to the Valley's political status as part of the city of Los Angeles, but his remark could refer as well to the fact that the Valley - symbolically constructed as suburban but materially inclusive of industry and socially diverse neighborhoods - exposes the inadequacy of "urban" and "suburban" as categories of historical analysis, being both and neither. Understanding the Valley requires placing it in the context of a changing metropolitan area in which outlying places influenced Valley affairs as much as the rest of Los Angeles did.  Over the postwar period, the public expressions of Valley residents, organized as homeowners, businessmen, or disgruntled taxpayers, shifted from a claim to distinctiveness within Los Angeles toward a far more pointed sense of grievance against the rest of the city. I argue that this shift was dependent on and followed closely from the incorporation of more than thirty new suburban cities in Los Angeles County between 1954 and 1970. Officials of the new cities promoted a home rule discourse that stressed the comingled benefits of local democracy and community homogeneity, principles which dovetailed with the historical place image of the Valley and the immediate political concerns of many of its homeowners. When Valley activists appropriated home rule as an analytical and activist frame, they reconciled a host of grievances (busing, taxes, infrastructure and representation) into a growing demand for political separation from Los Angeles and found many of their demands validated in the metropolitan public sphere. These grievances culminated in a 2002 referendum on secession from the city of Los Angeles in 2002, which won majority support in the Valley but not from the city electorate at large.