Summary Of The Home: Rancho Santa Fe And Suburban Style

In her essay “The Home: Rancho Santa Fe and Suburban Style,” Phoebe Kropp discusses the emergence of the Spanish colonial style in Southern California. This architectural style became the signature style of this region as many communities began to build that architecture. Kropp uses the San Diego community of Rancho Santa Fe to argue how this style has been taken advantage of by Anglo American’s as they have used it in their modern communities. Kropp addresses that while these communities have adapted the Spanish colonial architectural style they have also created a discriminatory community where not all of the Spanish history and culture are being included and welcomed.
Kropp discusses that the Spanish colonial architectural style was the

This is the contrast between the history and the present. The Panama-California Exposition of 1915 was the precedent moment when Anglo American individuals began to use the Spanish history and culture for themselves. This Spanish colonial stay was now part of an affluent suburban way of life. Brody’s interpretations and arguments about orientalism are similar to those of Kropp’s. Brody discusses orientalism and how it is created somewhat as a fantasy. This architectural fantasy “that invents a narrative of irregularity and forbiddeness and otherness that comes to life in the form of a western reproduction”. (Brody 124) Kropp and Brody also both argue about some type of power dynamic that is going on. Kropp’s argument of Rancho Santa Fe suggests that since it is such an elite exclusive community this gives it a somewhat powerful presence because not everyone can afford to live there. Similarly, in Brody’s essay, with the architectural style in the Philippines was built in that matter to communicate power and make known that the U.S. is there and they have power. In Luhr’s essay, she discusses how Encinitas, in San Diego California, has become an affluent community with “imagination an aura of religious sanctity, diversity, and tolerance in the recent past that embraced…new ageism while reinforcing an exclusionary neoliberal economy of privileged bourgeois consumption and culturally appropriative branding.” (Luhr 1169) In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a large immigration of Latinos and Asians into California creating a more diverse ethnic population in the state. Therefore, Encinitas used this new wave of ethnicity when creating the style and mood of the city. Luhr argues that Encinitas has created an environment of equality and acceptance, different from the communities in the Philippines and Rancho