The suburbs have their own political culture, one that’s often protectionist on local matters — built around the desire to safeguard and defend homes and neighborhoods — but can lean more liberal on national and state matters. What many political analysts miss is that even as the suburbs have diversified, many new residents of color have adopted politics driven by the same protectionist mindset long embraced by suburban whites.
The suburbs have long and deep histories of racial exclusion, creating the lily-white neighborhoods that benefited generations of white families. After cresting in the 1950s and 1960s, however, suburban segregation receded in many regions. Beginning in the 1970s, more and more people of color settled in the suburbs in the wake of fair housing laws and court decisions, increased immigration from Asia and Latin America, and the expansion of the Black, Latino, and Asian middle class. Nationally, nonwhites made up just under 10% of suburbanites in 1970, and by 2020 they were 45%. In Los Angeles, at the cutting edge of these changes, the jump was more striking — nonwhites rose from 9% of the suburban population in 1950 to 70% in 2010.
But rather than dramatically shifting the politics of the suburbs, often these diverse suburbanites shared goals with their white neighbors — a desire for decent schools and municipal services, safety, protection of property values, and the freedom to choose where to live without discrimination. For non-white suburbanites, their arrival in suburbia was the culmination of years of civil rights struggle and a racial achievement not to be taken lightly. The right to hold property signified full inclusion.
Thanks to a confluence of forces, the 1980s put these suburban values and politics to the test. Nowhere was this clearer than in Los Angeles.
Even as suburban diversity accelerated, industrial plants were closing and government cut services as a result of Proposition 13, which limited property taxes. At the same time, the suburbs began taking a more active role in immigrant oversight. Although authority over immigration technically resided with the federal government, during the Reagan years, federal retrenchment began shifting enforcement authority to suburbs and other localities. Suburban communities, in turn, began developing their own toolkits for controlling immigrants, drawing upon their local powers to control land use and behaviors in public spaces.