| Summary: | <p> This thesis examines the premodern and ethnically stratified labor and social structure maintained at Rancho Los Alamitos in Long Beach, California during the early-to-mid twentieth century as an expression and performance of an idealized regional identity with roots in a romanticized sense of past and place. Amid dramatic urbanization, industrialization, and corporatization, the rancho’s owners, Fred and Florence Bixby, made significant efforts to maintain past views, technology, and paternalistic social relations with their Mexican employee tenants. To be sure, the desire to preserve an idealized western lifestyle as well as a particular class position motivated such efforts. Moreover, while this daily performance of an idealized regionalism signified a rejection of the modern progress hailed by most elite white southern Californians, it nevertheless constituted a conscious exercise in defining modernity.</p>
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