Regulating Immigrant Labor and Housing Informality in Postwar Los Angeles

Luis Flores, University of California, Berkeley

During the 1970s, the informal labor and housing practices of immigrant households in Los Angeles posed a challenge to the idealized, though regulatorily enforced, separation between home and market. From garage-based auto mechanics, home-based childcare centers, weekly yard sales, bootlegged garage apartments, and home-based garment work, municipal efforts to restrict immigrant informality emerged as proxy for xenophobic politics in the 1970s. This paper will trace the origins and spread of crackdowns of various forms of immigrant labor and housing informality in Los Angeles County since 1970. Animating the racial politics of economic informality was the context of large-scale labor market restructuring that spread precarity across the white middle class. For opponents of immigrant informality, who persuaded city officials to launch countywide crackdowns on informal labor and housing, such practices posed a challenge to two core institutions of postwar middle-class stability, the family wage and the single-family home. While informal home-based labor threatened to undermine the wages of centralized, regulated, and unionized labor, informal housing threatened the precarious savings of neighboring homeowners in home equity. But while these practices were strongly opposed at first, regulators and municipal officials eventually adopted a more lenient orientation to them, especially as the appeal of household informality spread beyond immigrant households during the 1990s. Meanwhile for municipal policymakers, household informality offered a third way between public policy and incentives for private initiative to address the multiple crises of the 1970s. I argue that the contested rise and contested incorporation of immigrant informality offers a window into the tripartite reconfiguration of state, market, and household in the neoliberal era.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 160. Past as Prologue: Migrant Labor, Migrant Rights, and “Multiculturalism” in Late Twentieth-Century Los Angeles