Borders and Social Distinction in the Global Suburb

Abstract

What happens in historical white-flight suburbs when social hierarchies can no longer be marked easily by physical distance? What kinds of anxieties about boundaries and borders are evident, and with what consequences? This study examines these questions through a 1997 ethnographic study of a largely white, middle-class neighborhood in Irvine, California ("Ridgewood") that depended heavily upon service labor by working-class immigrant Latinos. The Ridgewood case suggests that the social landscape of the household service economy is unlikely to usher in a new era of pluralist integration or to promote a cosmopolitan outlook in global suburbs. Instead, it appears to generate anxieties about both physical and social boundaries. Middle-class residents of Ridgewood marked social distinction through a wide range of everyday practices: through the "talk of crime" and the fortification of physical boundaries, through the legal and informal regulation of aesthetics, and through daily practices that regulated the behavior of service workers within community space. Such practices maintained social distance in circumstances of spatial proximity and even intimacy. These patterns are not entirely new, of course: in many ways they resurrect the dynamics of servitude and social distinction in colonial contexts or in the antebellum American South. However, the Ridgewood case also illustrates what we might expect of emerging global suburbs, and how concerns about local and national border control intersect.