Water for White People: LA’s Infrastructure and the Archeology of Inequality, 1880–1920

This proposed conference paper seeks to examine how new water infrastructure in Los Angeles became a part of standard practice and how this connected to the making of class, race, and gender inequalities. Between 1880 and 1920, water technology pushed deeply into people's lives, changing how they worked, spent their leisure time, and raised their children. Most obviously, the driving force behind the construction of water supplies was the attempt to bring public health to Los Angeles, especially to its working-class families from different ethnic backgrounds. This went hand in hand with a racialized idea of modernity based on sanitary reform. As a result, neighborhoods inhabited by Chinese and Mexican Americans remained excluded from the water networks until the 1920s. Against the backdrop of this, the paper not only explores how city dwellers adapted to having water supplies in their everyday lives and how this molded their identities, but the paper discusses whether and to what degree the 'modern' city resident took shape through his or her encounter with the city's built environment and with technological artifacts. Taken together, this paper aims at excavating the archeology of urban inequalities in Los Angeles. It evidences that race, class, and gender inequalities were made in the local sites of homes and neighborhoods, as well as through the interaction with quotidian technological artefacts such as water taps or bathtubs.