The Folklore of the Freeway: Connectivity, Creativity and Conflict in the Age of Highway Construction

Eric Avila, professor of history, Chicano studies, and urban planning at UCLA, will present "The Folklore of the Freeway: Connectivity, Creativity and Conflict in the Age of Highway Construction" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, November 11 in Joe Rosenfield '25 Center Room 101.

Avila currently serves as associate dean for equity, diversity and inclusion for the Division of Social Sciences. As an urban cultural historian of Los Angeles and the United States in the twentieth century, Avila is author of Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles and The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City.  Currently, he is writing American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press.

He studies the intersections of racial identity, urban space, and cultural representation in twentieth century America. Anyone with an interest in American history, urban studies, race relations, or the relationship between communities and development will be interested in his talk.

For the Center for the Humanities series on “Sites of Creativity: Streets, Salons, Studios, and Schools", he will talk about communities of color and their resistance to the building of highways in this way mapping the creative strategies devised by urban communities to document and protest the damage that highways wrought.