ABSTRACT
When Carey McWilliams wrote his seminal Southern California Country over half a century ago, he was among the first to discuss the area “south of the Tehachapi” as one contiguous region. And yet, McWilliams saw the region not as a unified whole, but rather as an “archipelago” of isolated communities.1 Southern Californians developed their expansive and expanding network of suburban villages against the American urban models of Chicago and New York, self-consciously imagining cities that might hold a metropolitan allure while retaining semirural amenities. This regional consciousness, coming to the fore in the early twentieth century, rested on leisure, sunshine, and a distinctly antiurban impulse. As suburban paradises retreated further into the hills, residents might have continued to identify with an urban center, but likely did not visit it regularly.
