Originally from Paris, Elsa Devienne spent a year studying at UCLA in the late ‘00s. With a gig as a dog sitter in Santa Monica, she had affordable rent and the chance to visit the local beaches.
“I remember, first of all, being wowed by this incredible landscape, the beauty of the Pacific Ocean,” Devienne, now based in Manchester, U.K., recalls on a recent video call. But she says the heavily built-up areas around the beaches “shocked” her. “You could find parking lots, freeways, houses, buildings.”
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Devienne, who had never visited Los Angeles before her year at UCLA, was most perplexed by the parking lots that are ubiquitous along the otherwise gorgeous landscape: Who, she wondered, had envisioned the landscape this way – and why?
Experiencing the sand first-hand
These questions launched her upon a years-long investigation into the history of the beaches that line the western edge of Los Angeles County. Originally researched for her Ph.D. dissertation at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Devienne continued to work on the material, which was then translated by Troy J. Tice, for her nonfiction book, “Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles,” which is out May 1 on Oxford University Press.
The book tracks the development of the coastline from the 1920s – when the beaches were more polluted and difficult to access – through the midcentury and beyond as a so-called “beach lobby” worked to develop, clean and expand the coastline, often with the goal of making it a bastion of the White middle-class. As well, Devienne examines the landscape from its real estate significance to its ascendance as a place to celebrate physical beauty.
However, as well as research, Devienne says it’s important to experience the landscape you’re writing about.
“You have to observe how people behave at the beach and who goes to what beach for what reason,” she says. For her year in L.A., Devienne immersed herself in the city. She took a class led by the historian Eric Avila at UCLA and worked with people who had been writing about the city for years. She spent time at Santa Monica Public Library, Santa Monica History Museum, Long Beach Historical Society and Los Angeles Public Library.
“I was a library rat,” she says, but talked to plenty of locals. “The lifeguards, surfers, people who hung out at the beach in the ‘60s, anybody who was ready to talk to me about beaches.”
She later returned to L.A., this time as a Fulbright Scholar for a six-month stint at USC, and interviewed Venice High School and Santa Monica High School alumni. She also took a deep dive into beach reading.
“I read some really, really interesting, funky, wonky, crazy, pornographic ‘50s books about the L.A. beach culture, which, in some cases, I was able to use in the book,” she says.
Devienne would return to Los Angeles again during her time teaching at Princeton. For that trip, she brought students and toured Malibu with them, using the Our Malibu Beaches app to locate entrances to the sand. It was a way of applying her research with people who were largely from the East Coast, where beaches can be harder to access than they are in California.
“That’s basically because the law about what part of the beach is public or private has been interpreted differently in different states,” Devienne explains. “In some states, this has been interpreted strictly and other states much more expansively. The main idea is that the beach that is always wet – that is covered by tide – should always be public, should always be accessible, but the part that is dry can be privatized.”
She adds that some states had more ambitious programs to buy back beaches than others. “In some places, like on the East Coast, there’s such a large history of implementation and establishment of settlements that it was very difficult to buy back the beaches,” says Devienne. “Because California has a history of the presence of Anglo Americans that is a bit less old, there were possibilities to buy back bigger lands that hadn’t yet been broken up into smaller properties.”
Throughout her research, Devienne traces a history of L.A.’s beach life filled with ironies. It’s a history steeped in making the coast accessible, yet marred by racist restrictions. While it’s a human-engineered landscape, the beach has also spawned environmentalist movements.
Climate change and the coastline
Devienne writes that local activism has led to beaches that are “cleaner, more accessible, and more inclusive than they have been in over a century,” but that, as a result of our changing climate, the beaches still face a precarious future.
“It’s so important to keep on pushing for these places to be accessible to all people, to be easily accessible. But also for them to continue existing,” says Devienne. “For this to happen, we need to continue pushing for climate change legislation, for reducing our carbon emissions.”
She adds, “Literally, this is a question of survival. My children could see the end of California beaches as we know them within their lifetime.”
SEE ALSO: Read Laylan Connelly’s coverage of Southern California’s beaches and coastline.
Ultimately, “Sand Rush” took a turn that Devienne didn’t anticipate when she began looking at L.A. beach history. “I didn’t realize when I started writing that this is how I would conclude it,” says Devienne of the discussion of climate change. “As I was writing, the scientific evidence became more and more clear that we could lose something so incredibly wonderful as a beach.”
Next up for Devienne is the history of beach cleanups. She came across the stories of women in Oregon and Texas who began organizing cleanups in the 1980s where volunteers categorized the trash that they found.
“That, for me, is an important chapter and milestone in the history of the anti-plastic movement, which I intend on writing about in my second book,” she says.
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