Everyone Used to Use a Shopping Cart: Siblings' Experiences of Suburban Gentrification in Los Angeles

• In Event: Losing Place, Losing Opportunity: The Varied Experiences of Latinx Families With Neighborhood and School Gentrification

Abstract

This paper examines the gentrification experiences of mixed-status Latinx families through the lens of siblings’ educational trajectories. The paper focuses on the San Fernando Valley (SFV), a collection of Los Angeles suburbs that include some of the highest and lowest income zip codes in southern California. Over the past 30 years, the San Fernando Valley has undergone significant social and demographic change (Barraclaugh 2011), playing host, on the one hand, to retired athletes, successful Hollywood executives, and reality television stars like the Kardashians and, on the other, to established and evolving immigrant communities, which form the basis of the blue-collar economy in the area.

The professional, regional, and demographic diversity of the Valley is reflected in its schools, which remain heavily segregated by race and class in spite of efforts to encourage integration via neoliberal “school choice” models (Betts 2006). The persistent segregation of SFV schools, coupled with the evolving population of the area and the rise in choice-centered rhetoric, has engendered powerful narratives that seek to distinguish “good” from “bad” schools – distinctions that often invoke coded language depicting institutions serving high populations of immigrant families as “ghetto schools.” While these identities are not stable, the stereotypes they incur are pervasive, increasing the pressure families may feel to access schools with more positive reputations.

By zeroing in on sibling pairs who have experienced the same schools and neighborhoods at different points in time, the paper unravels the enduring impact of ethnicized residential typologies in light of the new challenges and opportunities incurred by gentrification and the rise of “school choice” (Billings, Brunner & Ross 2018). Through ongoing ethnographic research with 60 students and their families, I offer a counter-narrative to existing scholarship, which tends to portray suburbs like the Valley simply as locations that work to concentrate the wealth and privilege of the area’s more visible population. I thus complicate existing research on suburban education, drawing attention to how families whose histories and perspectives are often neglected by popular and academic discourse dealing with suburban gentrification experience the residual effects of school-wide stereotyping, and how these realities can shift and change even among members of singular family units.

The paper focuses on three findings. First, I discuss the influence of gentrification on siblings’ experiences in their homes and neighborhoods, detailing how the influx of gentrifiers has brought about a rise in ethnic and linguistic discrimination, even as it has instigated some improvements in the local area (e.g. development of parks and other leisure spaces). Second, I unpack how experiences of gentrification are refracted through the lives of older and younger siblings, leading the latter to downplay instances of racial profiling in relation to the storied traumas of the former. Finally, I describe how the co-occurrence of gentrification and school choice has hardened existing stereotypes about local schools, reinforcing racialized institutional identities that originated in an earlier, pre-gentrification era but which are now overlaid with a sense of individualistic guilt derived from being “stuck” in a “bad school.”

Author

• Corinne Kentor, Teachers College, Columbia University