Discussion assignment

10.1177/1078087403251830 ARTICLEURBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / July 2003Maher / SERVICE ECONOMY AND FEAR

WORKERS AND STRANGERS The Household Service Economy and

the Landscape of Suburban Fear

KRISTEN HILL MAHER San Diego State University

The growing household service economy (e.g., domestic service, gardening) introduces social heterogeneity both within and near suburban regions that have previously been segregated by race and class. The author examines this dynamic through an ethnographic study of a community in Orange County, California, and argues that the shifts in social geography accompanying the household service economy in this neighborhood had exacerbated existing anxieties about secu- rity and contributed to the popular desire among residents to “fortress.” The findings of this study suggest that in a bifurcated economy in which household services proliferate, more suburban neighborhoods may retreat into highly regulated, gated communities.

Keywords: residential segregation; suburban areas; social inequality; fear of crime; neighbor- hoods; race; foreign workers; domestics; spatial analysis; Orange County, California

There has been a proliferation of gated communities in many metropolitan areas since the 1970s. Scholars of this trend (e.g., Low 2001; Caldeira 2000; Marcuse 1997; Blakely and Snyder 1997; Judd 1995; Kennedy 1995; McKenzie 1994) identify gated and privatized communities as a critical means of contemporary social segregation by race and class in America. However, this literature generally ignores the paradoxical reality that most gated communities import service labor, from landscapers, gardeners, house- keepers, and nannies to home health care aides, companions, dog walkers,

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: This study was supported by funds from the Social Science Research Coun- cil’s International Migration Program and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. The study also benefited from excellent research assistance by Nadia Flores and the thoughtful commentary of friends, colleagues, and four anonymous reviewers.

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW, Vol. 38, No. 6, July 2003 751-786 DOI: 10.1177/1078087403251830 © 2003 Sage Publications

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and pool cleaners.1 In coastal metropolitan regions where gated communities have become ubiquitous,2 this regular traffic of service workers often com- prises nonwhite, working-class immigrants, arguably, the types of people whom gates are meant to keep out. How do residents in gated or “fortifying” communities make sense of the presence of service workers? How do they define their security concerns? Why do we see security-oriented gating even in places that do not experience much crime? This study explores these ques- tions through an ethnographic study of a single neighborhood in Orange County, California, that relied heavily upon household service labor and had recently engaged in a debate about whether to erect security gates, despite an ostensible lack of any local crime problem.

This ethnography found that the growing consumption of services in this mostly white community had, in fact, contributed to residents’ anxieties about security—not by introducing new crime but by shifting social geogra- phies. The household service economy introduced class and racial heteroge- neity into residential spaces that had previously been highly segregated. On the whole, residents did not fear crime by people employed in their neighbor- hood; however, they used very similar race- and class-based schemata to identify both service workers and those they considered potential criminals. The blurring between these categories contributed to residents’ sense that there seemed to be growing numbers of “strangers” around that they found threatening. Equally important, the household service economy in this neigh- borhood contributed to the social heterogeneity of the surrounding region. Household services rely upon workers who live close enough to permit a daily commute; hence, growing numbers of Latino immigrants lived in nearby communities. Many residents identified these very communities as the main focus of their security concerns; more specifically, they feared that the kinds of social and economic “decline” occurring nearby would soon also plague their own neighborhood. One impulse in response to these fears was to fortify neighborhood boundaries with further security measures like gates and walls. Another was to develop informal social regulations within the community to make clearer the distinction between workers and strangers who might be deemed threatening.

Although not all gated communities have their origins in this kind of dynamic, the patterns evident in this case suggest that the economic, social, and geographic transformations that accompany the growth of the household service sector may exacerbate existing suburban fears and contribute to the fortification of the residential landscape.

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FORTRESS SUBURBIA

It has been estimated that more than 8 million Americans now reside in gated communities, a trend that has developed largely since the 1970s (Blakely and Snyder 1997). Even in places where suburban developments have not previously been gated, this trend to fortify community boundaries “has assumed the frenzied dimensions of a residential arms race as ordinary suburbanites demand the kind of social insulation once enjoyed only by the rich” (Davis 1992, 246). Most scholars agree that the exclusivity and privat- ized ethic of gated communities pose challenges both to social fabric and to public coffers, identifying fortified enclaves with greater segregation and a lessened sense of responsibility for the public welfare. Much more complex and controversial are the reasons fortified enclaves have proliferated in recent years. To some degree, the fortification of the suburbs needs to be understood within the context of the history of suburban development more broadly, a context that largely precedes the shifts in economy and social geography that serve as a focus in the present study.

In one of the most comprehensive empirical studies of gated communities to date, Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder (1997) argue that privat- ized, gated communities are in many ways simply an outgrowth of historical suburban ideals and planning: “From the beginning, the suburbs have intended to separate their residents, first from the city and later even from each other” (p. 8). Earlier means of controlling access included various tac- tics such as cul-de-sac street design, single-use zoning, inaccessibility of public transit, and location away from urban centers. The walls and gates around today’s fortified enclaves are functionally similar. These authors sug- gest that what is new about gating is the physical reality of these controlled boundaries that makes private what would be public space. In addition, exclu- sive, fortified communities have begun to proliferate among the middle classes; they are no longer solely the domain of the rich and famous.

One mark of the “exclusivity” of gated communities is that they tend to be socially homogeneous, particularly in terms of race and class, a tendency that has it roots in historical segregationist practices not only by home owners but also by the real estate industry and government agencies such as Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) (Jackson 1985; McKenzie 1994). After the Supreme Court outlawed racially exclusive deed restrictions in 1948, residential covenants began using other language and means to ensure exclusion (McKenzie 1994, 60-67; Massey and Denton 1993, 53-55), largely via the kinds of class-targeted restrictions

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that are still common in neighborhoods with privatized governance structures like home owner’s associations, such as limiting the number of people per housing unit and forbidding the presence of trucks or other accoutrements of working-class life. In some contemporary cases, such as in the site I studied, regulations that forbid basketball hoops but permit tennis courts smack of exclusion based on race as well as class. The legacy of the institutionalized racism of historical housing practices is that race and class segregation con- tinue to “seem a mark of social status” (McKenzie 1994, 72). Gates and walls signal social exclusion and hence prestige.3

Other critical aspects of the context in which privatized, fortified en- claves developed include the historical and continuing cultural trends of anti- urbanism and privatization in the suburbs. Suburban ideals of bucolic “gar- den cities” historically developed against the foil of urbanity and particularly the crowding, poverty, and industrialized aesthetic of urban areas. Karen Till (1993, 72) observes the same implicit opposition in contemporary neotraditionalist “urban village” developments in Orange County, which advertise themselves as “orderly landscapes of a rural small town” in opposi- tion to “Hollywood images of Los Angeles as a dark city on fire, a place where looting, chaos, and violence prevail.” Although anti-urban discourse among suburbanites most often gets expressed as a fear of crime and vio- lence, Setha Low’s (2001) ethnographic work in gated suburban communi- ties suggests that this discourse at root is about social divisions and the urban “Other,” as marked by class, race, and ethnicity. Similarly, Teresa Caldeira (2000) argues that the “talk of crime” symbolically organizes the world into simplified categories, stereotyping certain social groups as criminals and placing blame upon this urban “criminal” class for all sorts of social ills or transformations. The physical boundaries being constructed in gated com- munities might therefore be understood in part as a physical manifestation of social prejudices and the desire for distinction as much as for protection.

Developer interests, institutional and individual racism, and anti-urbanism each provide a part of the context in which gated communities have prolifer- ated.4 However, the literature on suburban housing and gated communities has so far neglected to examine how the restructuring of the economy in urban regions has also shaped residential fortification. The present study sug- gests that one cannot understand the racism, anti-urbanism, or talk of crime in Southern California (and perhaps in other metropolitan areas as well) without situating them in relation to the economic and geographic transformations that have accompanied globalization in many U.S. cities. Urban areas have lost traditional manufacturing jobs and have seen a concurrent growth in ser- vices (Sassen 1990, 467). The shift to services has largely bifurcated the job

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market between high-tech, high-paid jobs in production services and low- skilled jobs, many of which involve attending to the “household needs and elaborate consumption wants of . . . high-income gentrifiers” (Waldinger 1989, 221), often off the books (see also Sassen 1998, 48).

High-income gentrifiers and even the middle classes are consuming more services, among them services that take place in the private household or resi- dential community such as gardening, housecleaning, and child care. This phenomenon can be traced to a broad number of macroeconomic and cultural shifts. On one hand, we have seen new living standards develop among a pro- fessional class that has ever-larger homes, complex landscaping, and a life- style that is virtually unsupportable without household service labor.5 The consumption of household services should also be seen within the larger trend toward the commodification of social reproduction, in which the tasks associated with the daily and intergenerational maintenance of the workforce (e.g., cooking, cleaning, child care, and elderly care)6 are increasingly being provided through the market instead of via unpaid household labor. The com- modification of these tasks has increased as women have entered the paid labor force (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Uttal and Tuominen 1999), and in- home services comprise an important dimension of this phenomenon.7 The number of women working in household services in Orange County has increased exponentially since 1970; in the years between 1980 and 1990 alone, there was nearly a fourfold increase.8

In global cities, immigrant labor meets some of the new demand for low- skilled service workers (Sassen 1991), and recent studies suggest that similar patterns are starting to develop in some suburban regions as well. Rather than settling in traditional ethnic enclaves in urban centers, working-class immi- grants are starting to move directly into suburban regions where the demand for service-sector workers is strong, such as in metropolitan New York (Mahler 1992), Chicago (Parel 2000), and Southern California (Marcelli 2001).9 Although many of those working in low-skilled suburban services in major metropolitan areas may be immigrants, it is not their immigrant status per se that challenges the social geography of the suburbs. Immigrants who are white and/or middle class are virtually invisible in their “foreignness.” Instead, the social dynamics of the household service economy appear to rest much more significantly upon racial and class divisions.10

The emerging household service economy transforms social geographies, binding together the providers and consumers of services in new patterns of social and spatial interdependencies.11 Through the following case study, I will illustrate the nature of these transformations and how they relate to middle- class suburban fear and the impulse to “fort up.”

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0.0–19.8 39.8–59.5 59.6–79.4 79.5–100.019.9–39.7

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Irvine

Corona

Santa Ana

Norwalk

Fullerton

Anaheim

Huntington Beach Costa Mesa

Figure 1: Percentage Hispanic by Census Tract in Orange County, California, 1990 SOURCE: U.S. Census, 1990.

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A TALE OF TWO CITIES

This study examines the social relations and anxieties about crime in a sin- gle neighborhood that I will call “Ridgewood” in Irvine, California. Under- standing this research site requires some introduction to Orange County— located between Los Angeles and San Diego (see Figure 1)—and particularly to its cities of Irvine and Santa Ana.

Within the mental maps of developers and many residents, Orange County divides into a north and a south with a veritable Mason-Dixon line cutting across the middle (Dodson 1989). North and South County differ in their his- torical development, the physical layout of their residential and business areas, and their demographics in terms of socioeconomic status and racial- ethnic distribution. These differences have come to represent fundamental differences in identity. South County is reputed as wealthy and white, a col- lection of orderly, planned developments. In contrast, North County is reputed as middle and working class and nonwhite, a “chaotic” extension of urban Los Angeles (Till 1993). Neither of these representations is entirely accurate, although they do reflect real patterns of racial segregation. The geography of Latino residences is particularly striking. Figure 1 demon- strates a concentration of Latinos in North County and their virtual absence in South County—a spatial division so clear, it appears almost as a wall or bor- der demarcating racialized territories. Because household services in South County are performed almost exclusively by Latinos, one might imagine the daily commute for workers from North to South County as a type of “border crossing” that blurs social boundaries and binds North to South in an eco- nomic interdependence.

Irvine, in South County, is one of the fastest-growing small cities in the United States, part of the mass suburbanization and development of Orange County since the 1950s. Irvine was centrally planned and strategically devel- oped from private ranch lands in the garden city model, marketed to potential home buyers as a decentralized suburban utopia (Schiesl 1991). With a popu- lation of 143,072 in 2000, Irvine is ethnically diverse, although that diversity primarily spans ethnicities that are white (61%) and Asian (30%). Alongside its residential development grew a strong high-tech industrial base, such that Irvine is now one of four “major technopoles” in the greater Los Angeles area (Scott and Soja 1996, 13). Given the centrality of high-tech industries in Irvine’s economic base, the city’s labor market has largely bifurcated into jobs for high-skilled, high-wage professionals and for low-skilled, low-wage workers in the service economy. Latino labor forms the backbone of Irvine’s low-skilled service sector; however, Irvine’s zoning regulations and expen- sive housing market discourage these workers from local residence. Instead,

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most service workers commute to Irvine from Latino residential enclaves such as those in Santa Ana in North County, roughly 10 miles away.

In contrast to the recent planning behind Irvine’s incorporation (1971) and growth, Santa Ana was incorporated in 1886 and has long served as the administrative center of the county, with a relatively dense urban population that comprised more than a quarter of the county’s residents earlier in the cen- tury (between 1930 and 1950). Although Santa Ana’s population has increased sixfold since 1950,12 this growth has not kept up with the much more rapid development elsewhere in the county. Santa Ana remains the administrative center of the county, but it is no longer the population or com- mercial hub.

The other historical process that marks contemporary Santa Ana’s posi- tion in the county is a significant Latino in-migration and a simultaneous out- migration of other racial-ethnic groups, particularly whites. In 1960, only 15% of Santa Ana’s residents were Latino;13 by 2000, the proportion of Lati- nos had grown to 76%, comprising roughly 40% of all the Latinos in Orange County.14 Like areas of Los Angeles that have become Latino immigrant enclaves over the past several decades,15 the process of transformation in Santa Ana has been rooted in the restructuring of the economy. The loss of blue-collar manufacturing jobs weakened Santa Ana’s economic base and spurred former blue-collar workers to move elsewhere. Given relatively low housing costs, Latino immigrants then found this area an attractive point of entry. At the same time, low-paying jobs that remained attractive opportuni- ties for immigrants proliferated in textile and food production as well as ser- vices,16 including many service jobs in nearby South County. In the 1970s, Latino merchants revived Santa Ana’s languishing downtown area, reinvent- ing it as a commercial and cultural center that continues to flourish.17

In the emerging postindustrial economy, Orange County has become another place where “yuppies and poor migrant workers depend upon each other” (Caldeira 1996, 310). Like global cities (Sassen 1991), suburban areas are becoming another place where we see economies of service and support growing alongside a transnational, high-tech, information-based economy. Part of what this study documents, then, are interdependencies between the peoples and residential spaces of this bifurcated economy, divisions that largely fall along the lines of class, racial-ethnic identity, and—to some extent—migrant status. However, none of the divisions organizing the social relations in Orange County are merely “given”; they are also subject to con- tinuing negotiation. Although this study captures only a moment in an ongo- ing process, it illustrates some of the possible sociopolitical dynamics of the emerging household service economy in suburban areas.

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SITE AND METHOD

The particular site selected for this study was in many ways a “typical” Irvine neighborhood. A planned community developed in the mid-1970s, Ridgewood comprised 246 single-family homes on a collection of cul-de- sacs connected by three public through streets. On average, residents were highly educated—39% had graduate or professional degrees—and most of those who were employed worked in professional, managerial, technical, or sales positions. A total of 14% of the residents were foreign born. In the racial terms of the census, the residents of this community were Asian (10%) and white (90%). Four percent of those identifying as white reported a Hispanic origin, all of Peruvian descent.18 Ridgewood was not one of Irvine’s most elite communities, although its residents were more affluent than the Irvine mean (see Table 1).19

Like most other middle-class neighborhoods in Irvine and in South Orange County, the Ridgewood neighborhood had a steady stream of mainte- nance and service traffic in the neighborhood. Some of these services were hired by the home owner’s association via membership dues, such as the pool maintenance and the landscaping work in the park. Individual households also hired service labor: According to those I interviewed, almost every

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TABLE 1: Ridgewood and Irvine Demographics

Irvine Ridgewood

Occupation (%) Managerial and professional occupations 47 46 Technical, sales, or administrative support 38 43 Service occupations 7 8 Operators, fabricators, and laborers 4 3

Race and Hispanic origin (%) White 78 90 Asian or Pacific Islander 18 10 Black 2 0 Hispanic origin 6 4

Proportion foreign born (%) 22 14 Education (%)

Graduate or professional degree 17 39 Bachelor’s degree 29 28 Associate degree or some college 36 25 High school degree or less 18 7 Median household income ($) 56,307 100,757

SOURCE: U.S. Census (1990).

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household paid for periodic gardening and housekeeping services. Some households with children employed nannies, most commonly among fami- lies without a stay-at-home parent.20 A small proportion of the housekeepers and nannies in the community lived with their employers from five to seven days per week.21 In addition to these common services, some households hired home care for the elderly, window washers, and carpet cleaners. As is the pattern in most middle-class neighborhoods in this region, working-class Latinos provided virtually all of these services.22

According to reputation and police statistics, Ridgewood was a typically safe neighborhood in Irvine, which the FBI has regularly identified as one of the safest cities in the United States with a population of more than 100,000.23

Despite the lack of significant crime in Ridgewood, its residents had in the previous five years put walls around its perimeter and debated whether to become a gated enclave. The most active period of debate was in 1994, when the board of the home owner’s association announced that it was planning to have the community gated. There was considerable support among some res- idents for the idea. The most commonly articulated rationale for the gate was that it would provide additional security, a pattern that confirmed the findings of Blakely and Snyder (1997) that communities that add gates at their resi- dents’ initiative rather than having been developed with a gate tend to focus on issues of security and crime prevention.24 The discussion below therefore centers on issues of security. However, there were also other arguments artic- ulated during the interviews, including the suggestions that gating would bol- ster Ridgewood’s property values as well as its “community identity,” which would be better defined with a clearer neighborhood boundary and with more protected, exclusive access to their own park and amenities. The arguments about security, property values, and community were all interrelated in that they all represented concern with social distinction and boundaries amidst a complex geography of race and class.25

The gating idea met immediate resistance from a small handful of resi- dents, who argued that gates would be impractical, expensive, or undemo- cratic.26 There were also some legal obstacles to gating because the commu- nity contained three public streets that would need to be privatized to make gating feasible. The debate temporarily subsided when a Los Angeles com- munity attempting to privatize a public street developed into a legal case that lost.27 At that point, as one association board member put it, “we put every- thing on hold.” Despite being on hold, the issue of whether to gate was not dead in this community in 1997 when I conducted the study nor were the kinds of logics that motivated the desire to gate. This constellation of circum- stances—Irvine’s bifurcated (high-tech and service) economy, the

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widespread employment of service workers, and the gating debate—made Ridgewood a rich site to explore the relationship between community for- tressing and the emerging household service economy.

The recent debate about gating also provided a focus for in-depth inter- views, which I conducted using open-ended, semistructured methods. Dis- cussion of the gating debate with residents permitted me to explore the kinds of concerns or anxieties that might have animated this manifestation of for- tressing, individual narratives about how this community and the surround- ing areas have changed over time, and what kinds of people use the common neighborhood spaces for what purposes. These interviews aimed at uncover- ing actual practices in the neighborhood as well as individual perceptions, both of which form the basis for my analysis.

I located respondents through referrals that led me to some of the activists in the neighborhood both for and against gating, as well as to some whose opinions were less polarized. The resulting sample of 18 residents was diverse but not fully representative of the demographics of the neighborhood. For instance, it did not include any of the neighborhood’s Asian residents, who were apparently not active in the gating debate or integrated socially in the white networks that provided me referrals, a clear limitation of my sam- pling technique. In addition, women were overrepresented, comprising 70% of the interviews. However, the sample was otherwise socially diverse and resembled the neighborhood demographics in terms of age, occupation, edu- cational attainment, and foreign- versus native-born status.

Despite the diversity of the interview sample and the wide range of posi- tions respondents held on whether to gate the community, the interviews offered relative consensus on the “facts” of community life. They told me similar things about the main arguments that had been made both in favor and against gating, regardless of whether they personally agreed with these argu- ments.28 They also generally agreed on issues such as how common it was for their neighbors to hire service workers, what kinds of behaviors workers engaged in within community space, and what kinds of crime had happened or was commonly feared among their neighbors. The relative consensus on these issues evinces a set of neighborhood-level norms and practices that form the basis for most of the claims in the following analysis. I supple- mented the interviews with materials from participant observation, the cen- sus, FBI crime statistics, the Irvine police department, local real estate publi- cations, and secondary academic sources. I also worked with a bilingual research assistant trained in ethnographic methods to gain access to and inter- view some of the workers in the neighborhood.29

This study examines the daily practices, implicit rules, and tacit under- standings underlying social relations in the Ridgewood community. These

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kinds of phenomena are the “project of ethnomethodology” (Burawoy 1991, 6) and are best approached through ethnographic methods. But unlike many ethnomethodological studies, my interest was not only in the internal rela- tions of this community. Instead, it served as a site to observe the inter- workings of larger processes—the emerging relationships between the peo- ples and places of the household service economy—as they played out in daily life. This empirical approach approximates what Burawoy (2000, 341) describes as “perspectives on globalization from below.” That is, it attempts to bridge the gap between macro-level economic change and the ways that such changes structure and are negotiated in everyday experience.

THE SPECTER OF SANTA ANA AND A FUTURE OF “DECLINE”

Although concerns about crime and security pervaded the interviews and comprised a major portion of the argument to add further security measures such as a gated entrance to the Ridgewood neighborhood, these concerns were not nearly as straightforward as they might first appear. First, the con- cern with security in this community seemed completely out of line with actual crime trends. Irvine was experiencing very little property or violent crime at the time of this study, and its crime rate—like those of Santa Ana, Orange County, and Los Angeles County—had been in decline since the early 1990s, as represented in Figure 2.

The disjuncture between perceptions of crime risks and the actual occur- rences of crime is not unique to this community; rather, it might be under- stood as part of a larger “culture of fear” (Glassner 1999) that pervades the middle-class suburban imagination even in places with little risk of crime (Davis 1992).

Much more puzzling was a second contradiction: Many of the same peo- ple who argued that a gated entry was necessary for greater security in Ridgewood also claimed that they felt very safe because they knew the crime rate locally was very low and because they had not heard about much crime in the area. One of the strongest advocates for adding a gate to provide greater security also noted that “the burglary rate is virtually nil in our neighborhood. We’ve had a radio or two stolen in the last five or six years” (Tom). Another resident who favored gating explained her position in the following terms: “It’s nice [the gate] because you don’t get people just straggling into your neighborhood. And so in that sense you can have security.” However, moments later, she added, “I don’t feel like we need it as far as crime,

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necessarily. . . . I don’t feel unsafe here at all” (Michelle). One task of this sec- tion is to make sense of what people like Michelle and Tom feared, if in fact they did not perceive much immediate risk of crime. Who might “straggle” into the neighborhood and with what consequences? What assurance of ade- quate security did they feel they lacked?

The analysis that follows suggests that the security concerns of those in the community who favored gating were not as much about immediate crime as they were about the threat of “random strangers” who might enter into their neighborhood from places like Santa Ana that they perceived to be undergo- ing a negative social and economic transformation. Part of their concern about strangers from Santa Ana rested on a widespread association of Latinos with crime; however, it also seemed to reflect a concern that the “decline” that had accompanied the Latino influx into Santa Ana might spread to other nearby places like Irvine. However, it is critical to recall that the growth of Santa Ana’s Latino population had been spurred in part by the growing demand for low-skilled service labor. That is, Ridgewood’s own service economy (and that in similar neighborhoods) had helped produce the circum- stances underlying the pervasive fears among these suburban residents.

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m es

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Figure 2: Crime Rates for Irvine, Santa Ana, Orange County, and Los Angeles County, 1985 to 1999 (California Crime Index)

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THE THREAT OF THE RANDOM STRANGER

In discussing past and potential crime, residents raised several categories of potential criminals: “renters” from neighboring communities who tres- passed to use Ridgewood’s private park or pool illicitly, “neighborhood kids” who either lived in Ridgewood or who were friends with resident teens, ser- vice workers, and strangers from the “outside.” Of these categories, there was no expectation that the gate would eliminate potential crime by anyone but strangers. Trespassers from neighboring communities entered by walking, and a gate would not eliminate pedestrian access. Local teenagers—who were identified both by residents and by periodic Irvine police bulletins as the likely perpetrators of most burglaries—would also continue to have unre- stricted access to community space were a gate installed. For these reasons, it became clear that the key target of gating would be the category of “strang- ers.” The strangers who were feared were defined as either nonresidents of a “different element” who randomly wandered into the neighborhood or bur- glars who selectively targeted neighborhoods like Ridgewood because of their relative affluence.30

The category of “strangers” raises an interesting question. Ridgewood’s residents did not personally know all their neighbors or all those present in the community, such that there were in fact many strangers present at all times. How, then, did they decide which strangers were threatening? For the most part, residents described those they deemed threatening only according to the car they were driving. The cars that were most often described as anxi- ety producing were the “bad” ones: “if this gross-looking, funky-looking, beat-up truck is sitting there . . . you are aware, and you kind of keep an eye- ball on them, because you don’t know if they’re scoping. You don’t know what they’re doing” (Cheryl). Another resident described the vehicles that make her suspicious as follows: “You know, is it a van? Is it a pickup truck? Is it kind of rusty and scruffy-looking, as opposed to being a Mercedes or some- thing? I mean, real estate agents certainly drive around a lot” (Nancy). Part of this identification of bad cars certainly had something to do with the identifi- cation of working-class people as more likely criminals. But it also had to do with the availability of potential explanations for what the drivers might be doing there. If there was an unfamiliar BMW in the neighborhood, it could belong to a friend of a neighbor, a real estate agent, a business contact, a potential home buyer, and so forth. If there was an unfamiliar “bad car” in the neighborhood, there were fewer possible explanations for it: “You see people driving along going slowly looking at everything. If they’re in a fancy car, you figure they’re looking for a new house. If they’re in an old car, you figure they’re scoping it out” (Gerry).

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Talk about cars appeared to be not only the result of a cue-taking about potential criminals but also a coded language in which people could talk about class and race in a context in which explicit discussion of these topics is widely thought to be impolite.31 Many of the residents’ descriptions about what kinds of cars made them nervous involved clear class references encoded in the descriptions of cars as “broken-down” or not fitting “the Irvine mold.” More subtle were the racial overtones of some observations, such as the woman who said she became nervous when drivers were not any of the housekeepers or gardeners she personally knew. Clearly, these drivers were Latinos because she compared them to service workers rather than to neighbors or others she might have personally known. Others were slightly more obvious about the racial content of their observations about bad cars, identifying the cars that made them most suspicious more specifically as “lowriders,” augmented Chevrolets often associated with working-class Chi- cano culture. These kinds of descriptions suggest that it was not necessarily the cars themselves but rather the kinds of people driving them that elicited anxiety from Ridgewood residents.

There was some agreement among those who favored the gate that it would help reduce the random presence of bad cars in the community more than it would eliminate the possibility of strategic burglary by experienced criminals. Although a few people suggested that a gate would be “just one more deterrent” that would encourage a “professional burglar” to go else- where instead, most said that there is nothing you can do about that kind of crime. They suggested that someone who made a habit of burglary could get in anywhere he wanted, such that no neighborhood was completely safe. To illustrate this point, even those who supported the gate gave examples of break-ins they had heard about within gated communities elsewhere. Instead, the gate was more often estimated to keep out the random stranger in a bad car who might just straggle in to the community.

SANTA ANA AND THE IMAGINED FUTURE

As references to bad cars and low-riders above suggest, the strangers that residents in this community read as most threatening tended to be of other races and classes than those living in Ridgewood. This section more explic- itly addresses the social geography of feared strangers. It suggests that the pervasive fears about security relate to macroeconomic shifts that residents discussed and interpreted using the language of crime and social decline, adopting working-class Latinos living in areas like Santa Ana as the central characters in a dystopic narrative about change.

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In discussions about where dangerous strangers might come from, some residents remained vague about social geography, suggesting that the danger came from the freeway, where people from all sorts of places drive by in close proximity to Irvine. They apparently imagined the freeway as a connection to the world, and especially to urban areas, that made an otherwise insulated area vulnerable to crime. Others more explicitly identified Santa Ana and other regions north of Irvine as the source of their insecurities. For instance, Cheryl mentioned at the beginning of her interview that she did not fear crime at all and in fact had not had the security system on her house engaged for months. Yet, she wanted to have Ridgewood add gates because of a threat she perceives as spreading soon to Irvine. “They’re coming in from Santa Ana,” she explained, and later added the following:

Cheryl: In the last two years—I haven’t seen it but I hear it from other people, that the gangs are coming down this way.

KHM: From? Cheryl: Santa Ana, and wait . . . what’s above Santa Ana? What is it, Stanton? It’s

something to think about. But you know they’re going to be everywhere.

This interview excerpt is revealing about the insecurity that makes Cheryl want to install a gate around her community. In part, the relevant question was “Where is the danger?” insofar as she feared an invasion of gangs and minori- ties from Santa Ana and other places north of Irvine. But the more critical question might instead be “When is the danger?” insofar as it was something that Cheryl had not yet experienced in her daily life but feared will happen in the future: “You know they’re going to be everywhere.”

Cheryl was not the only one who seemed to fear the future more than any- thing in the present. Consider the following excerpt from the interview with Jeff, who presented the problem in terms of changing “demographics” not just in Santa Ana but also over the past century in Los Angeles:

Jeff: The demographics are changing here. When I moved here back in the early seventies, I was a typical person here in Orange County. And, as you well know, now . . . Costa Mesa and Santa Ana have declined in their social structure. Or, I don’t know if that’s the proper terminology, but the bottom line is their crime rates have risen, and that type of person has moved down and started to en- croach on Irvine. . . . The best way to look, I guess—go to Los Angeles. Fifty years ago or, you know, ninety years ago, downtown Los Angeles was the place to be. And I guarantee you wouldn’t walk there at night now.

KHM: So your perception, or people around here perceive that that’s the future for Irvine as well . . . ?

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Jeff: It’s a possibility. . . . I absolutely see change in this neighborhood. I’ve seen it! Go to the schools and look at the change in where the kids are coming from and what their background is. I mean, what do their parents do? . . . All of a sudden I’m looking around and saying, “Gosh, everything’s connected here.”

Although Jeff was careful not to say so explicitly, shifts in the racial composi- tion of the greater Los Angeles area were clearly at the center of his con- cerns. Although he—as a white man—used to be the “typical person here in Orange County,” there had been a “decline” in the “social structure” of Santa Ana and Costa Mesa (the two closest areas experiencing significant Latino in- migration), much like in Los Angeles.32 And this “type of person has moved down and started to encroach on Irvine,” as was evidenced by simply looking at the “background” of the kids in nearby schools. Jeff seemed to fear the ways that Irvine would eventually be subject to racial and class shifts like those oc- curring in nearby cities and to what he saw as a concurrent rise in crime.

Similarly, in the excerpt below, Tom very colorfully identifies a rise in crime in Santa Ana and Los Angeles as the primary reason why so many com- munities in South Orange County have been gating:

Tom: All of the new communities that have opened in Newport [Beach] in the last three or four years, every single one of them has been gated. Because people are seeing crime on the rise. And they perceive that it may eventually get to them, whether it’s in the safest city in the U.S., in Irvine, or in the rich city, in Newport Beach.

KHM: So the place that they’re seeing crime on the rise is not amongst their own neighbors?

Tom: No! But it’s in anticipation of what could happen. KHM: Where do they get it [this idea], do you think? Tom: Well, the press. We get a constant diet of it through the press. Christ, turn the

6:00 news on. What is it? Rape, pillage and plunder. They’re not talking about the Boy Scouts having a campout.

KHM: But they’re talking about Los Angeles most of the time. Tom: It doesn’t matter. Los Angeles is Orange County. We still have awful things

happen here. . . . Listen, we’ve got a very serious gang problem over in Santa Ana. It’s almost out of control, the police there are just—they’re beside them- selves. And is that going to move our way? I don’t know, but people are doing things in anticipation of the fact that maybe it could. And if it is, I want to be behind a gated wall. It’s real simple.

Tom emphasized throughout his interview that Irvine was an exceptionally safe city, but here he qualified that observation, raising the specter of Los An- geles and Santa Ana as places that for him represented the future. Whatever

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was coming was moving south with the unforgiving destiny of a glacier, bringing urban races and urban ills all at once. And when it happened, he wanted to “be behind a gated wall.”

A common theme throughout the interviews cited above (as well as others not cited here) was that the urban ills of Los Angeles and Santa Ana were not contained within the geography of these cities but were spreading to other areas via mobile urban minorities. This expectation appeared to rest upon an implicit suggestion that urban minorities in Santa Ana and Los Angeles had caused problems like poverty and crime rather than being victims of them.33

There have been a number of significant transformations occurring in these cities: the loss of much of their traditional manufacturing base and scores of stable, unionized jobs with benefits; the concurrent growth in “flexible,” part- time, and poorly paid jobs; the influx of new immigrants for whom even inse- cure or poorly compensated jobs remain attractive opportunities; and height- ened poverty among workers earning low-skilled service wages. Despite the macroeconomic nature of these shifts, a number of the participants in this study implicitly attributed the decline in these areas to the influx of Latino immigrants.

In this sense, the narrative about Santa Ana also rested on essentialized notions of Latinos as the kind of people who instigate urban problems and who bring poverty, crime, and urban malaise in their wake. The racial anxi- eties in Ridgewood were certainly not limited to Latinos: Interviews also in- cluded stories of racial tensions regarding Persians, Hasidic Jews, and African- Americans. One resident reported an incident in which she had called the police in response to a preteen African-American boy simply wandering through the neighborhood. However, in the discussions about crime and decline, local cities like Santa Ana and Costa Mesa, which are home to fast- growing Latino immigrant enclaves, figured most prominently in the percep- tion of threat.

Teresa Caldeira’s (2000) study of middle-class residents living in “forti- fied enclaves” in São Paulo found similar narratives regarding nordestinos, migrants from Northeast Brazil. Caldeira suggests that residents commonly characterized nordestinos as criminals and engaged in the “talk of crime” to represent the range of local changes they found distressing. She argues that all sorts of losses and anxieties can be articulated through the language of crime:

Crime supplies a generative symbolism with which to talk about other things that are perceived as wrong or bad, but for which no consensus of interpretation or vocabulary may exist. It also offers symbolism with which to talk about other kinds of loss, such as downward mobility. Moreover, crime adds drama to

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the narration of events that themselves may be undramatic—for example, a forty-year process of change in a neighborhood—but whose consequences can be distressing. (P. 34)

The talk of crime reduces a complex, disorderly reality to a few essentialized categories that “elaborate prejudices” at the same time as they give the narra- tor a means to organize the world and gain a sense of control (pp. 19-41).

Caldeira’s (2000) argument is useful for making sense of the contradic- tions in the talk of crime in Ridgewood. The narratives about crime in Ridgewood certainly did not correlate to any empirical reality: There were few personal experiences of crime among those in the neighborhood, and the focus of most anxiety was not about any immediate sense of danger. (Indeed, the kinds of added security under debate in this community such as gated entries were not even targeted at those persons thought to be the most likely perpetrators of actual crime in the neighborhood.) Instead, the talk of crime in Ridgewood appeared to be a more general way to articulate fear or unease about a range of other local transformations. Almost every interview included some expression of disquiet about the inevitability of urbanization and the loss of the “rural feel” of Irvine. Even though many residents described community life in Ridgewood in very positive terms, there was simultaneously a sense of the loss of Eden.34 They noted that Irvine was increasingly woven into a net of freeways that tied it to more urban centers. They saw evidence of more bad cars around. They observed a greater local presence of minorities they viewed as urban. They observed struggling econ- omies and what they perceived as out-of-control crime in nearby cities. Although these observations could be understood as simple antiurban senti- ment, they also reflected a perception of a shifting geography in Orange County in which the “invasion of Latinos” and “Santa Ana” served as potent symbols of a future in which they felt that their accustomed way of life and social status were not secure.

This symbolic language masked the extent to which the transformations in Orange County, and particularly the growth of Latino populations in Santa Ana, had been produced in part by the emerging racialized service econ- omy.35 The growing consumption of household services in neighborhoods like Ridgewood in South County had generated thousands of new, low-pay- ing service jobs for Latinos living in North County. Workers providing household services must by necessity live nearby, close enough to facilitate a daily commute, so it was no coincidence that a community like Santa Ana that is close to the North/South divide in Orange County had been experienc- ing a lot of population growth. As the household service economy in subur- ban areas like Irvine grows, so will the nearby communities in which service

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workers live, in effect, following those retreating into gated communities. This is one of the two ways that the service economy in Ridgewood itself con- tributes indirectly to the forting up of its suburban landscape.

WORKERS AND STRANGERS: BLURRED BOUNDARIES

A second connection between the suburban service economy and the ten- dency toward fortification lies in the daily practices within neighborhood space. Most service workers in Ridgewood strongly resembled those random strangers driving bad cars from places in North County like Santa Ana that many Ridgewood residents wanted to keep out with a gated entry. And yet, with few exceptions, residents did not perceive service workers to constitute any potential criminal threat. This perception rested upon a categorical dichotomy that residents tended to assume between “workers” and “potential criminals,” as well as upon unspoken regulations of workers’ behavior that made their service role more visible. However, not all of those connected to the service economy could easily be contained by this worker-stranger dichotomy; there was, in fact, blurring between these categories that contrib- uted to popular anxieties about a growing presence of threatening strangers.

SIGNS OF THE “BONA FIDE WORKER”

In general, residents described service workers in very positive terms, as “hard-working, sweet people” (Jeff) or “just people who want a better life for themselves” (Jeanne). Most represented the regular traffic of workers in the neighborhood as normal and unproblematic.

One resident illustrated the normality of Latino service workers with a story about how his 10-year-old daughter coming to Ridgewood to live ini- tially made the mistake of thinking that gardeners were threatening. On her first day of school, she came home from school panicked, saying that there had been a man in a white truck following her. Her father had looked into it and realized that the men working for local landscaping companies were all Latinos driving white trucks:

And my little Anglo-Saxon daughter coming from Cleveland, Ohio, sees all these dark-looking Mexican guys in these trucks. And they were like following them because they were always driving around as [the children] walked home from school. And it threw her off. I had to explain it to her, so I took her out and I introduced her to them. And I said, you know, these are the people who clean our greenbelt and everything. (Gerry)

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Evidently, for Gerry, confusing Latino service workers for other Latinos who might be threatening was a naive error that would only be made by someone who does not understand the social landscape in Orange County.36 For him, the categories of “service workers” and “potential criminals” appeared to be mutually exclusive.

Only two of those interviewed raised any doubts about this categorical division, suggesting that workers might be engaged in petty theft or tipping off friends who could burglarize. As one explained, there was no real evi- dence of whether workers were actually stealing things but that one of the first responses when “things go missing” is to blame the gardener: When “someone’s garage door is open, if the gardeners are in the neighborhood, it immediately seems to go that people are convinced that they’re the ones, you know” (Harrison). But most of those interviewed dismissed the possibility of crime by workers, some laughing at the prospect when I raised it.37 Similarly, no one seriously entertained the possibility that their own neighbors might pose a criminal threat, whereas the residents of surrounding neighborhoods were more often considered suspect. These patterns suggest that the residents in this community had a psychological investment in expecting prosocial behavior from all those who “belonged” within neighborhood space, reserv- ing the expectation of threat for outsiders.

Perhaps for this reason, residents almost always placed service workers in a category separate from potential criminals. These dichotomous categories rested on knowing the difference between a worker “who belongs there” and a stranger they might consider threatening. Most residents expressed cer- tainty about their ability to tell the difference. In some cases, this confidence rested on the familiarity some residents felt with their neighbors and their ser- vice workers’ routines: “You know who’s doing what today; you know who’s going where” (Cheryl). In other cases, the confidence seemed to be premised on the clarity of worker’s signification. As Mary noted, “You can just tell who is a service worker.” Or, as Carolyn elaborated,

There have only been a couple of occasions when I saw somebody and went, mm, they don’t look like they live in the area. They don’t look like a gardener. Somebody driving around in a car and . . . circling the neighborhood. . . . There’s only been once or twice that I’ve seen something like that happen. More often than not, the people that we see in the neighborhood appear to be bona fide gardeners. Either that, or they’ve got a real elaborate camouflage scheme.

The distinction between someone just “driving around in a car” and a service worker in this case rested upon the service worker actively demonstrating or performing his credentials as a “bona fide gardener.” That might mean, for in-

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stance, that he needed to drive a white pickup truck with equipment in it. Once out of the truck, he should not stray far from it or else should have equipment on his person or simply remain actively at work.

One resident noted that she suspected the gardeners were aware that they needed to be careful about how they spent their breaks:

You know, the guys who are pruning the trees or whatever, and they’re taking a rest—I think they try to look . . . not too much like they’re just out to have a pic- nic. . . . Their tools are near, or . . . there might be a much nicer tree that they could go to. But they stay very close to their instruments of work, like their tools. (Anne)

Not just gardeners but all Latino service workers in the neighborhood needed to remain easily legible to the home owners there to remain unthreatening. The primary means of identifying a nanny in this neighborhood involved see- ing a Latina with children of some other race, a schema articulated by Marga- ret as follows: “I see a lot of people with baby strollers with blonde children and South American people pushing them. You know that they’re not the par- ents, so that you can just tell.” As in most suburban communities in Southern California, the social distinction between those providing services and those consuming them in Ridgewood was a racialized division, where workers were marked by a “uniform of color,” much as in colonial contexts such as South Africa (Kuper 1947). However, this “uniform” alone did not provide cues for distinction between workers and potentially threatening strangers, given that residents also used racialized cues for identifying criminals.

Hence, unwritten social norms in the community had developed to regu- late worker behavior, norms that were apparent in the almost complete uni- formity in what workers did and did not do within Ridgewood and that were confirmed by interviews with the workers themselves.38 No workers engaged in visible leisure in the community, even during their time off.39 Gardeners stayed close to their trucks and tools. Domestic workers performed their worker status by being visible only when there was a work-related reason to be outdoors, for instance, by accompanying children who appeared not to be their own. Housekeepers who did not care for children were not visible at all, except when waiting for a ride or walking to or from the bus stop. The infor- mal regulations requiring service workers to actively perform their service roles when visible in community space helped support the dichotomy resi- dents maintained between bona fide workers and strangers whose presence would be cause for alarm.

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THE AMBIGUITY OF SIGNIFICATION AND INDETERMINACY OF CATEGORIES

Despite the pervasive social regulation of service workers, Ridgewood residents’ confidence in the dichotomy between workers and strangers was misplaced. In fact, these categories blurred into one another in two ways that contributed to residents’ anxieties about security. First, the signs of someone associated with the service economy were ambiguous enough to permit misreadings of workers as strangers (and vice versa). Second, in practice, the categories of workers and strangers were not as clearly delineated as the pop- ular dichotomy among residents presumed. Both kinds of categorical blur- ring contributed to some residents’ sense that their neighborhood was vulner- able to crime and other ills they associated with the seemingly random presence of working-class Latinos in the vicinity.

As discussed above, the signs of a bona fide worker rested largely on race and the active performance of work. Both of these kinds of signification left plenty of room for misreadings. For instance, the racialized schemas resi- dents used to identify nannies were highly imperfect and backfired in some cases in which the formula of a Latina nanny with blonde children did not apply. Middle Eastern and Asian families had recently begun to move into the neighborhood and had also hired Latina nannies, confusing the expected racial schema, as it was less clear that the children were not their own. According to one resident, what happened then was that “you would get some nanny with some black-haired kids in the park, and somebody is saying, you know, ‘who are these people coming in and using the park?’ ” (Nancy). In contrast, Latina nannies from other neighborhoods brought light-haired chil- dren to the park and pool in Ridgewood without any suspicion that they were trespassing because they fit the expected formula. The domestic workers employed in Ridgewood were apparently the only ones to perceive that these women were present without authorization. The racialized schema for identi- fying service workers permitted both of these kinds of misperceptions about who “belonged” within community space.

More important, the performance of work was not a reliable sign of whose presence in the community was related to the service economy. The service sector in this community produced a regular traffic of working-class Latinos, not all of whom were easily marked by their labor, tools, or signification as being there for a reason rather than “randomly” entering the community to scope it out. For instance, some of the discussion about the increase in bad cars in the community (mentioned in the earlier section on security concerns) suggested that those associated with the service economy were not always

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legible as such. Consider the following excerpt from Claire’s interview, as she discusses her concerns about cars that concern her:

Claire: Sometimes I do see lowrider cars come into this community and, you know, I will write down license plates.

KHM: Really? Claire: Well, yeah. Because that’s not typically the kind of cars that are in the

community. . . . You do see more cars in the community that don’t fit the pro- file. [ . . . ]

KHM: Would they have any other reason to be driving through? Claire: One thing could be—we’re forever having little cards on our gate or little

flyers. Landscaping companies. So I think a portion of it could be they drop off the young men—usually Latinos, walking the street and putting the little cards [out]. . . . So that could be an answer which could be comforting. It’d be better than anything else. Otherwise, I don’t know, unless just checking out. I don’t know.

Claire was the only resident who suggested that some of the “strangers” in the community who made her nervous might have been there for more “comfort- ing,” work-related reasons. But this insight was an important one for its illus- tration of how those associated with the service economy could easily be mis- read as criminally threatening.

In addition, the scenario Claire raises of landscaping companies drum- ming up business suggests that the category of “workers”—or perhaps more accurately, “those present for work-related reasons”—was not as static as many of the residents implied. People moved in and out of this category. For instance, those who were not yet formally working in the neighborhood could later be hired on by a household or by companies doing business there. In addition, those who were currently employed in the neighborhood ceased to be “workers” at the end of their workday and at the end of their employment in the neighborhood. At these moments, service workers would hypotheti- cally join the ranks of the undifferentiated working-class Latino population that many white residents found threatening, even though these workers were assumed to be unthreatening and basically “good people” in the context of their work environment. It was not only in signification but also in practice that the categories of workers and strangers blurred into each other.

Finally, the worker-stranger dichotomy falsely disembedded service workers from any social context besides that of the service relationship, as if they were a fundamentally separate group of people than the strangers from places like Santa Ana who were a key source of anxiety. This became most apparent in residents’ reactions to the family and friends of service workers,

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who were not always viewed in the same positive terms as the workers them- selves. For instance, in answer to my question about whether there was a rule against nannies using the pool for their own leisure, Claire expressed discom- fort about the prospect of workers’ families coming into the neighborhood:

I don’t know what the feeling of the community would be. It wouldn’t bother me personally, unless people were getting out of hand. Or—now this is not very nice—but unless it was attracting some sort of riff-raff into the community. You know, that’s another issue, too, that had never occurred to me. That if other family members were coming in, then that would be an issue that I think a lot of people would have a hard time with.

Others affirmed this feeling in relation to general neighborhood sentiment: “If they brought their whole family in, I’m not sure that would . . . go over” (Nancy).

Many of those I asked about whether live-in domestic workers had friends or family members visit them at their workplace responded with considerable surprise or anxiety about this possibility. These reactions suggested that these residents had not thought much about where the workers had come from or what the circumstances of their lives were outside the neighborhood. Other discussions about the service workers affirmed this point; in one case, one resident described watching the domestic worker from next door with her husband and child as she was leaving work and said she found herself think- ing, “They look just like a regular family”:

I see them putting their child in, and they have a baby seat. . . . And she was talk- ing to him, I think it must have been, in hushed tones about her day, and stuff like that. It was just very . . . you know, a very usual domestic kind of scene. . . . It was a surprise to my system to see her in that role. (Anne)

Because the workers had such a limited, defined role within the neighbor- hood as service personnel—and because the residents’ relationship to them was generally limited to that of an employer or potential employer—it would have been easy to forget all the other aspects of the workers’ lives and particu- larly how they fitted into other social contexts such as their own family and friendship networks. This perception obscured the extent to which those em- ployed in service occupations were embedded in social networks outside Ridgewood and the extent to which the friends and families of workers had become part of the social landscape within Ridgewood insofar as they offered rides, brought lunch, or came to visit. Like those entering the community to drum up business, workers’ friends and family members were associated with the service economy but might not be easily legible as such.

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The ambiguities of the legible signs of whose presence was connected to the service economy rather than being random or pernicious in intent almost certainly contributed to the anxieties about security in Ridgewood. Recall that the increasing presence of bad cars was a key factor in residents’ decision to try to gate out random strangers. In fact, there must have been a significant amount of automobile traffic associated with all the service labor in the neighborhood. There were the vehicles of the workers themselves but also the cars of those who gave rides to workers without transportation, those who were drumming up business, and friends and family of workers who came to meet them in the neighborhood. Most of these vehicles probably did not fit the profile of those that belonged to community residents, and any of them had the potential to generate anxiety insofar as they carried the races and classes of people that many residents associated with criminality. As resi- dents in this neighborhood increase their consumption of services,40 they can expect to see a greater proliferation of bad cars in the area.

The growing household service economy is generating new social hetero- geneity within and near suburban areas like Ridgewood that have formerly been spatially segregated by race and class. The Ridgewood case suggests that two kinds of “fortressing” or “border” practices may develop in response: first, an interest in the physical fortification of boundaries; and sec- ond, social regulations to sharpen the distinctions between workers and strangers. However, neither of these kinds of practices had been fully effec- tive in containing the social complexity of the household service economy in Ridgewood. Much as the residents of this community tried to differentiate between the workers they wanted to keep hiring and the strangers they feared and wanted to keep out, these categories could not be fully disentangled in practice.

FORTRESSING AND THE HOUSEHOLD SERVICE ECONOMY

The bifurcated, service-oriented economy in the suburbs is creating new interdependencies between those who consume services and those who pro- vide them. To some extent, service workers and their middle-class employers enable each other’s well-being, a relationship that Sarah Mahler (1995) char- acterizes as symbiotic. For instance, employment in neighborhoods like Ridgewood provides workers who are immigrants with a livelihood and work conditions that can be preferable to those in other industries in which many Latino immigrants work in Southern California, such as agriculture or textile manufacturing. In return, service workers make possible the standard of

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living that suburban residents enjoy. Housekeepers, nannies, and gardeners permit home owners to have large houses and complex landscaping that require a lot of labor for upkeep. They permit the “liberation” of middle-class women from the unpleasant or routine aspects of domestic labor41 and in so doing provide two-parent households the possibility of a dual-income, dual- career family, as well as the wealth that accompanies it. At a symbolic level, they give their employers the prestige that accompanies having servants and a certain style of house and garden.

Service workers and their employers in the Ridgewood context had devel- oped this kind of interdependent relationship at an individual level. Less obvious but equally important was the interdependency between Santa Ana and Irvine, the communities in which service workers lived and those in which they were employed. Much as residents of Ridgewood wanted to with- draw from Santa Ana’s Latino communities, the household service economy bound them economically and even spatially together. The way of life in Ridgewood rested on the existence of a Santa Ana nearby, and vice versa.

These interdependencies are not without their complications, as this study illustrates. The employment of service labor in communities like Ridgewood challenged social geographies in a number of ways that contributed to the anxieties that appeared to underlie the popular desire to fortify neighborhood boundaries with walls and gates. First, residents did not express concern about Latinos entering their community to work, but the category of “work- ers” was not always static or self-evident. That is, although residents of Ridgewood were confident that they could tell who was a worker by the visi- ble performance of work, they could not identify which people were potential workers, those who transported workers, those who comprised workers’ social connections, or even workers in their time off. This indeterminacy con- tributed to residents’ anxieties about the growing number of bad cars in the neighborhood and the permeability of neighborhood boundaries to those whose presence they could not explain.

The other challenge issued from the spatial proximity and growth of nearby working-class Latino residential neighborhoods, trends that Ridgewood residents interpreted as a sign of the decline that might eventually bring crime and lower property values in Irvine as well. An irony about such a vision of the future is that the economic transition from manufacturing to ser- vice that has challenged Santa Ana in recent years had not deterred Irvine’s economic prosperity and growth in the past several decades at all. On the con- trary, Irvine residents had benefited not only from the high-tech, globalized economy but also from the poorly paid labor of workers who lived in Santa Ana. However, those in Ridgewood who understood the transitions occurring around them in racial rather than macroeconomic terms appeared to conclude

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that any influx of Latinos spelled bad news for a region’s economy and social order.

These two challenges to social geography appeared to contribute strongly to Ridgewood residents’ anxieties about the future, about the security of their property and their potential to maintain a way of life insulated from urban ills. They responded to these anxieties by “forting up” not only with new forms of border security but also with informal social regulations, both of which might be considered “fortressing institutions” that function to regulate social boundaries.42

In short, the Ridgewood case illustrates how the consumption of house- hold services among suburban residents helped create those circumstances from which they felt it necessary to defend themselves. What is less apparent from this case study is the strength of the relationship between the household service economy and fortressing. The kinds of anxieties Ridgewood resi- dents felt about security and social heterogeneity developed within a com- plex context in Southern California in which racial tensions have run high with the demographic transformations of immigration, particularly after the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles. It may be impossible to disentangle the fears that appear to accompany the household service economy from more general middle-class white anxieties about race, class, and social order. Simi- larly, the motivation to add gates in any community has complex social and historical roots, such as historical patterns of suburban segregation, wide- spread beliefs about the correlation between property values and social homogeneity, and the historical anti-urbanism of the suburbs (as discussed earlier). Although Ridgewood residents often articulated the rationale for gating in terms of security, the actual values and beliefs that made gating appear an attractive option were surely also informed by some of these more general cultural trends.

Can we expect suburban communities to develop into “cities of walls”43 in response to a bifurcated economy in which household services proliferate? Extrapolating from the findings of this study, there appears to be a possibility that the shifts in social geography that accompany the household service economy will generate more suburban fortressing. The extent to which this occurs will depend on a number of factors, such as the extent to which house- hold services continue to become normalized as part of middle-class subur- ban life. Not all regions in the United States have developed the same forms or degree of commodified social reproduction as Southern California.44 The regional variations in how social reproduction is being accomplished may have some relationship to immigrant settlement patterns. That is, household services appear to be most common in coastal or border regions with

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significant immigrant populations.45 Immigrant settlement patterns also appear to correlate roughly with the metropolitan regions where Blakely and Snyder (1997) found gated communities to be most prevalent, such as Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, and Chicago; more study is needed to examine this relationship and the potential role that service economies play in it. Finally, whether more suburban communities “fort up” will also depend upon the existence of social and legal obstacles such as those apparent in the Ridgewood community, which has developed some fortressing institutions but has not (to date) actually become a private, gated community. That is, legal obstacles to privatizing spaces that are now public as well as grassroots opposition to gating may hinder the retreat of suburban communities into pri- vate fortresses.

NOTES

1. The exception in this literature is Caldeira (2000), who briefly discusses service labor in fortified enclaves in Brazil.

2. According to Blakely and Snyder (1997), the metropolitan regions in which gated com- munities are most prevalent include Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, and Chicago, although they are found in nearly all metropolitan areas in all parts of the country.

3. Prestige (and the property values assumed to accompany it) was one of the most common themes among the arguments in favor of gating the community examined in the present study, second only to security. Blakely and Snyder (1997) also identify prestige as one of the key values underlying most gated communities, along with security and “lifestyle” in varying combinations of priority.

4. Authors who focus on the privatization of most common interest developments and gated communities would add the cultural trend toward privatization to this list. Although much of the original suburbanization involved a retreat from cities, today’s privatized and fortified enclaves also involve a retreat from the public sphere in which all racial and class groups hypothetically meet as legal equals. Evan McKenzie (1994, 19) labels the cultural basis for this trend the “ideol- ogy of hostile privatism,” in which the “preservation of property values is the highest social goal.” Robert Reich (1991) has called it instead the “secession of the successful,” noting that those who can afford to do so have begun to provide their own services such as security guards and road maintenance in lieu of putting their money into the public sphere.

5. The growth of “common interest development” residential housing, in which owners of homes or condominiums share private grounds and amenities (McKenzie 1994), may also con- tribute to the consumption in services. In contrast with more traditional suburban designs in which some home owners care for their own yards, the common grounds of common interest developments require landscaping services.

6. This definition draws roughly upon that in Glenn (1992). 7. The actual forms of commodified social reproduction vary substantially, many of them

involving labor outside the home, such as laundry services, restaurant food, processed food items at grocery stores, homes for the elderly, and child care centers. Some services must take place within the residential community, such as housecleaning and gardening, but vary in

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whether they are provided by formal businesses or individuals contracted informally. The com- mon preference in Southern California to have child care, cooking, laundry, and elderly care pro- vided within the home rests not only upon an available labor source but also upon a construction of social reproduction labor as appropriately “private” and feminine. Maher (1999, 2001) argues that the appeal of immigrant women as in-home domestic workers depends in part upon such constructions.

8. U.S. Census Bureau (1970, 1980, 1990). Census figures tend to undercount undocu- mented and economically marginal populations and may also miss many service workers who live full-time with their employers, so the raw numbers (1347 in 1980; 5024 in 1990) probably are not an accurate measure of the totality of household workers, but the figures over time are useful for documenting growth, as long as the undercount remains consistent over time.

9. The settlement patterns of immigrants differ across regions and national origins. Mahler (1992, 1995) documents Salvadoran immigrants living in marginal conditions among their employers in Long Island suburbs. In other contexts, working-class immigrants settle in older, inner-ring or urbanized suburbs (Baldassare 1992), a pattern more similar to the one documented here in Orange County. And although some immigrants moving into or near the suburbs are employed in low-skilled service jobs, as discussed here, others moving to the suburbs are higher- income migrants with the financial and cultural capital necessary to forgo ethnic enclaves for suburban housing and schools (Alba et al. 1999).

10. The identity markers of class, race, and nativity overlap in complex ways. Latinos and Asians in the United States have both been constructed through policy and daily practice as eter- nal foreigners, regardless of their actual place of birth or legal status (cf. Gutierrez 1995; Lowe 1996). In many cases, the “immigrant” marker is itself racialized (Colen 1990).

11. Of course, the social and spatial interdependencies between serving classes and their employers are not historically new. Similar kinds of patterns—practices of social control, mark- ers of social distinction, and discourses about crime—emerge in many other contexts with a ser- vice relationship. However, the relations of servitude are new to the contemporary middle class in Southern California, such that those living in communities that have increased their consump- tion of household services in the past 30 years might experience the social dynamics of this econ- omy as a new transformation.

12. Santa Ana had a population of 45,533 in 1950 (Haas 1991) and 305,800 in 1996 (Califor- nia State Department of Finance).

13. This measurement was based on the proportion of those with Spanish surnames (Haas 1991, 257).

14. U.S. Census 2000. 15. See Rocco (1996) about the economic bases for population shifts in several Los Angeles

neighborhoods, which outlines in greater detail the kinds of processes I report here. 16. For instance, the state of California’s Labor Market Information Division, “Orange MSA

Annual Average Labor Force and Industry Employment” (available at http:// www.calmis.ca.gov/) documents that service-sector jobs more than doubled in Orange County from 1983 to 1999 and that textile and food products (nondurable goods) were the only manufac- turing divisions to gain jobs during this same time period.

17. Coethnic markets and social networks comprise other important factors in the continuing pattern of immigrant settlement in Santa Ana. Enrico Marcelli (2001) has recently found, how- ever, that job growth is a critical factor in understanding immigrant settlement, a critical piece of the “puzzle” of rapid economic and demographic change.

18. The category of “white” also included several Persian families, who were identified as nonwhite by some residents during interviews.

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19. The number of advanced degrees in both Ridgewood and in Irvine was relatively high in part because of the high-tech economic base but also because of the colleges and university located in Irvine. The student population of Irvine undoubtedly lowers the figure for median household income (reported at $56,300 in Table 1), which would otherwise look much more like that in Ridgewood.

20. This pattern differentiates middle-class service consumption from that of more elite neighborhoods in Southern California, where full-time nannies and/or housekeepers (as well as cooks, drivers, and even estate managers) are more common in households where women do not have paid employment.

21. Based on resident reports, I estimate that 8% to 10% of the households in this community had live-in domestic workers. Although I did not collect formal data on service consumption in this community, its patterns were similar to those of many other South Orange County neighbor- hoods. Gardening and landscaping services were at times provided by individuals or family busi- nesses but more often by companies that hired contract labor. Housekeeping services with names like Merry Maids, Molly Maids, or Maid for You were highly visible, but some households instead hired individual women as periodic housecleaners, locating them through social net- works (see Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, 2001). Those who hired full-time housecleaning, child care, or elderly care services contracted with individual women they located either through social networks or placement agencies.

22. There were only a few reported exceptions to an all-Latino service workforce. The pool maintenance workers were white, and some of the housecleaning services and window-washing services occasionally had white or Asian employees. Two residents reported that there had been some European au pairs in earlier years, but at the time that I conducted the study, all of the nan- nies, full-time housekeepers, and gardeners that my respondents were aware of were Latina or Latino.

23. FBI reports throughout the 1990s included Irvine among the safest cities with popula- tions of more than 100,000. For several years in that decade, it was ranked first in the nation, prompting local Orange County newspaper reportage and developer claims about the “Safest City in America.”

24. This begs the question of whether gating a community really does reduce crime. Blakely and Snyder (1997) suggest that although there is little evidence that gates prevent crime (and in fact may hinder law enforcement efforts), residents within gated communities commonly report feeling more secure, given the presence of gates. These authors reinforce Mike Davis’s (1992, 128) assertions about gates, walls, and other security mobilization measures serving as “daily reminders of the perceived dangers on the other side,” paradoxically feeding fear even while resi- dents report finding comfort in the visible evidence of their community’s vigilance about crime.

25. One variation on the “security” argument that is not examined closely in the present analysis is the desire to eliminate fast through traffic on the public streets, in part to keep the com- munity safe for children. An elaboration of each of these arguments as well as some theoretical connections between them can be found in Maher (1999).

26. One respondent also added an aesthetic critique, saying that she did not “like that cooped- up feeling” (Margaret). Of all the critiques, cost was most common among those I interviewed. Those who focused on democracy—arguing that they wanted to live in a place that was inclusive instead of exclusive—largely comprised those with some university affiliation, one of whom had been a vocal presence in the meetings where the gating issue was discussed. Although these cri- tiques had not changed the position of the pro-gating activists, they did register, as several of the most vocal proponents of gating spontaneously countered arguments that gating would be “snobby,” undemocratic, or expensive in their interviews.

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27. See Kennedy (1995) and Blakely and Snyder (1997, 106) for discussions of this case: Cit- izens Against Gated Enclaves (CAGE) versus Whitley Heights.

28. Half of the respondents favored gating, a fourth opposed it, and another fourth were either mixed or uncertain about their position. These proportions may not reflect the actual degree of support or opposition to the gate within the community at large; however, they do help illustrate that debate on this topic was still salient, supporting the assertion by the head of the home owner’s association that people ask him at every meeting, “What’s going on with that gate thing? You guys still going to do that?” More important, even respondents who disagreed about whether to gate identified the same range of arguments in which the terms of the debate had been framed (e.g., in terms of security or economic costs and benefits). The agreement on these issues indi- cates that such arguments were part of a more general community discourse rather than being solely individual opinions.

29. The material from this portion of the study focused on live-in nannies, those who were most deeply integrated into the neighborhood on the most intimate terms. The research assistant spent time in the park where nannies took children for walks and took notes based on her obser- vations and conversations with workers. In addition to these informal conversations, we con- ducted in-depth, taped interviews with one worker from this community and 15 domestic work- ers from other communities in Orange County. We have also held formal interviews and informal conversations during participant observation with more than 80 employers of household workers in the greater Los Angeles area during this time period. Although the material from these latter interviews does not play a prominent role in this article (being intended primarily for another portion of a larger study), the content certainly informs the analysis, as does the more general lit- erature on domestic service in the United States (e.g., Romero 1992; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Glenn 1992).

30. The categories listed here are amalgams of those respondents used during interviews. Many respondents used the phrasing “renters” (with one variation of “apartment dwellers” [Jeff]) to refer to people from nearby neighborhoods that they perceived to be lower class, although high rents in these apartment complexes would not have permitted any genuinely poor residents. “Teenagers” was also a common phrasing, with many respondents clarifying that they thought the “kids” or “teens” responsible for burglaries in the community lived either in the neighborhood or nearby. The category of “strangers” was less commonly articulated in exactly this manner. I have adopted this term to capture a range of descriptions of people of a “different element” (Mary, Cheryl) who are “not from Irvine,” (Nancy) who “have no business” being in the neighborhood (Marilyn), who either randomly “straggle” into the neighborhood (Michelle), or who are “hardened burglar types” (Mary) that break in “at night with a mask” (Gerry).

31. I found it very difficult to get people to articulate explicitly their assumptions about race and class as they related to criminality, undoubtedly because there is no polite language available with which to talk about these things among the middle classes. Race and class differentiation are sticky issues in a culture that has mythologized the “color-blind society” in which everyone is part of the all-encompassing middle class. One of the consequences of these myths is the fre- quent coding or translation of race and class descriptors, or their omission altogether, such that they are only present in the silences.

32. For the record, Los Angeles was historically a “small, largely Hispanic backwater” town (Laslett 1996, 39) and even 90 years ago incorporated substantial ethnic-racial diversity, includ- ing native and immigrant Mexicans, native and immigrant Europeans, African-Americans, and Japanese and Chinese immigrants. However, there has been significant growth of the Latino population in recent decades, from 18.3% of the population in 1970 to 37.8% in 1990 (U.S. Cen- sus Bureau 1970, 1990).

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33. This discourse also appears to rest on an implicit representation of Los Angeles and Santa Ana as places of danger and decline, a representation that simplified the extent to which both cit- ies are in fact socially and economically complex, places of significant racial diversity and great wealth as well as poverty. References to these cities apparently did not attempt literal description as much as they served a symbolic purpose in a narrative about the need to maintain and protect boundaries between “here” and “there,” between “us” and “them.” This kind of narrative has also emerged as a common theme in several other studies on representations of central cities among suburbanites (Till 1993; Low 2001).

34. See Patricia Zavella (1997, 137) about white citizens’ sense of California as “paradise lost”—“one of the cultural undertones of the current racial tensions we are experiencing in the state today, especially regarding Latinos.”

35. The recent growth of Santa Ana’s immigrant enclave had a number of likely structural causes, including immigration policy reforms, social networks, and coethnic markets, as well as the macroeconomic shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, with a concurrent increase in the consumption of household services.

36. Gerry had been living in Orange County for a number of years before his daughter came to live with him.

37. There is a strong historical precedent for servants to be suspected of property crimes, so I was a bit surprised to find the strength of the faith Ridgewood residents articulated about the moral fiber of the service workers. This may have been another example of something that they did not think socially appropriate to articulate.

38. The perspective of service workers—such as how they perceived social regulation at work and how they strategically negotiated the “rules”—is developed more fully elsewhere (Maher 1999).

39. The only exceptions that I discovered were the few live-in workers who took walks in the evening at about the time that residents would expect day workers to be walking to the bus stop. However, these workers did not ever swim in the community pool or engage in other activities that would be less ambiguously leisure, despite their full-time residence and the fact that they spent many of their hours off within the neighborhood.

40. I did not formally poll residents about the shifts in their service consumption, although during the interviews, it was repeatedly suggested that it was relatively unusual to hire a house- keeper, nanny, or gardener until the mid-1980s. This information is consistent with census statis- tics on service-sector employment, as described earlier.

41. Romero (1992) notes that this liberation is one that does not in any way challenge the notion that domestic labor is women’s work; instead of challenging patriarchy, it simply shifts the responsibility to working-class women, who are often responsible for the domestic labor in their paid position as well as the unpaid labor in their own homes.

42. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the concept of fortressing institutions.

43. The phrase “a city of walls” comes from Caldeira (2000). 44. For instance, studies from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest that the number of peo-

ple employed in private household services actually decreased in the South and North Central census regions between 1982 and 2000 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1983, 10; Bureau of Labor Statistics 2002, 13). Although these figures probably undercount the number of immigrant household workers, they do indicate regional variation.

45. The nature of this relationship may not be unidirectional. That is, although some studies have noted that immigrants move where there are jobs, there is also a possibility that different kinds of consumption practices develop in places with a surplus of unskilled labor.

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Kristen Hill Maher is an assistant professor of political science at San Diego State University and is also affiliated with the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California–San Diego. She has recently authored a chapter titled “Who Has a Right to Rights? Citizenship’s Exclusions in an Age of Migration” in Globalization and Human Rights (UC Press, 2002) and is working on a book manuscript on the contradictory positions of immigrant service workers in the United States. Her research interests center on international migration, citizenship, social reproduction, and public policy.

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