At Length with Steve Scher
At Length with Eric Avila
Prior to his Graduate School Public Lecture, Chocolate Cities and Vanilla Suburbs: Race, Space and American Culture After World War II, Eric Avila, professor of history, Chicano studies and urban planning at UCLA, sat down for a conversation with At Length host Steve Scher, ’87.
Recorded on January 27, 2015
Poster from the lecture, Chocolate Cities and Vanilla Suburbs: Race, Space and American Culture After World War II. Click to enlarge.
Departing from the Cold War narratives taken for granted in depictions of the United States after World War II, Eric Avila explores new interpretations of urban postwar life, where highway construction, suburbanization, deindustrialization, slum clearance and white flight redefined the American city as one fraught with disparities of race, class and gender.
In this conversation with Steve Scher, Avila discusses the Freeway Revolts of the 1960s, the “coded, tacit” terminology of racism today and the meaning of George Clinton’s song “Chocolate Cities.”
