City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Los Angeles’ reputation as the capitalist land of dream fulfillment is a crucial part of its appeal. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, WASPs such as Lummis, saw Los Angeles as a place to “change his fortune and improve his health” (24). He promoted the sunlit, orange-grove filled paradise of Southern California as a utopia where privileged WASP Americans could make a new start, away from the impoverished Catholics and Jews who had emigrated to the East Coast. Although Southern California was a place of Spanish names, Boosters such as Lummis saw the old Spanish Missions as an element of picturesque romanticism that could be a form of “capital” (24) in themselves, as they provided a Mediterranean atmosphere that he thought would “reinvigorate the racial energies of the Anglo-Saxons” (27). As late as the 1930s, Davis considers that “the mission aura of ‘history and romance’ was rated as an even more important attraction in selling Southern California than weather or movie-industry glamour” (27). The California dream was therefore sold through “real-estate capitalism” and “culminating speculation,” as people flocked West to buy their share in it (25).