Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2016 Mobile Homes: Class, Space and Race in Idealized Landscapes of Home Annemarie Michele Galeucia Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Galeucia, Annemarie Michele, "Mobile Homes: Class, Space and Race in Idealized Landscapes of Home" (2016). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 4333. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4333 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. MOBILE HOMES: CLASS, SPACE AND RACE IN IDEALIZED LANDSCAPES OF HOME A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Geography & Anthropology by Annemarie Michele Galeucia B.A. Wagner College, 2003 M.A. University of Colorado at Boulder, 2008 May 2017 Acknowledgements This dissertation would have not have been completed without the support and guidance of my committee. Thank you to Isabelina Nahmens for offering insight into the manufacturing elements of mobile homes. Thank you to Helen Regis and Dydia DeLyser for tirelessly advocating for the participant voice and for fostering precision and intentionality in all forms of writing. And thank you to my advisor, Kent Mathewson, for modeling insatiable interest in multi-disciplinary and multi-themed academe. LSU’s Communication across the Curriculum program fostered funding, flexibility and full support throughout this process. I am proud and grateful to be a member of the team. Fieldwork and research development would have been significantly more challenging without support from the West-Russell Travel award, the Evelyn Pruitt Travel award, the Cultural Geography Specialty Group Denis Cosgrove award, as well as research materials provided by Dr. Jorge Atiles and D. Jane Wills at Virginia Tech. Special thanks go to Felicia West and Giovanni Tairov and Livingston Parish Public Libraries, and to Mary Stein and East Baton Rouge Parish Public Libraries, for their hospitality while I conducted field work. The person who helped the words and images make sense was Jeremy Harper, my proofreader, copy editor and graphics support. Errors are mine. To those confidential participants: thank you. Your experiences are bigger and more important than this project, and yet you made the time for it and for me. Thanks to gENTRY hANKS for getting me to Louisiana, and jenny hay and Emily Graves for keeping me there. To Paul Watts, Jade Huell and James Long for hours of advice and insight. To Melissa Thompson, Jeff Snell and Sheri Thompson for being the enthusiasts I needed. Thanks to all the members of the G&A Cultural-Historical Collaborative and the dorky i professors of Krewe du Monde: you are too numerous to recount here but are nonetheless held with me in my pocket. Thanks to my grandfather, Dick Eastland, for always asking how the dissertation was going, especially when I didn’t want to answer. And thanks to the rest of my family, who claim to “really have no idea what it is” I am doing, but support it without hesitation. It means more than I can articulate. Thanks to Meghan, Lizz, Nicole, Becca and Colleen for making the point to not ask about my dissertation, for picking up the phone, sending ridiculous pictures and articles, for yard hangs, air mattresses, pies, puns and all of it. Productivity stagnates without these moments and your support. Final thanks to Jeremy and Ethan Harper. Two good eggs. You are my landscape of home. I delight in having found my ideal in this lived experience with you. Let’s go for a walk. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................... i List of Figures and Tables ............................................................................................................... v Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... viii Chapter 1: Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Research Questions .................................................................................................................................... 2 Idealized Landscapes of Home .................................................................................................................. 3 Chapter 2: History and Literature Review ..................................................................................... 12 Mobile Homes in the United States: History and Distribution .................................................. 12 Material and Public Cultures ................................................................................................................... 21 Studies of Home ....................................................................................................................................... 27 Space, Race, Anthropology and Geography: Whiteness ......................................................................... 34 Social Production of Mobility .................................................................................................................. 40 Chapter 3: Methodological Considerations and Project Methods ................................................. 47 Preliminary Field Work ........................................................................................................................... 47 Project Methods ....................................................................................................................................... 49 Defining Complex Terms ........................................................................................................................ 50 News Media Collection and Analysis ...................................................................................................... 51 Setting the Local Site ............................................................................................................................... 54 Site Visits to Manufactured Housing Retailers and Manufactured Housing Communities .................... 57 Surveys and Informal Interviews ............................................................................................................. 61 Chapter 4: Mobile Home as Misnomer and the Connotation of Short-Term Residents ............... 74 Terms: Trailer, Mobile Home, Manufactured Home ............................................................................... 76 Home, Dwelling and Transience ............................................................................................................. 78 Literal Attachment ................................................................................................................................... 81 Mobile Home Park versus Private Property ............................................................................................ 89 Owning versus Renting in a Mobile Home Park ..................................................................................... 92 Community/Metaphoric Attachment ....................................................................................................... 95 Rules and Aesthetics .............................................................................................................................. 103 Displays of Nationalism ......................................................................................................................... 112 Chapter 5: Unstable Structures, Unstable People ........................................................................ 118 Inferior Design and Materials ................................................................................................................ 121 Structural Vulnerability to Storms ......................................................................................................... 128 Financially Unstable People .................................................................................................................. 132 Generally Unstable People in Mobile Home Parks ............................................................................... 144 Chapter 6: Class, Race and Normative Space ............................................................................. 156 The White Mobile Home Demographic: Public Perception and Census Data ...................................... 160 White Trash and Trailer Trash ............................................................................................................... 164 Mobile Homes as Public and Private Space .......................................................................................... 170 Undesirable Landscapes ........................................................................................................................ 176 iii Mobile Home versus Home ..................................................................................................................