After coming to study at UCLA, Paris-born Elsa Devienne spent years working on her book, ‘Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles.’
Historian Elsa Devienne is the author of “Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles,” out from Oxford University Press. in the late ‘00s. With a gig as a dog sitter in Santa Monica, she had affordable rent and the chance to visit,” Devienne, now based in Manchester, U.K., recalls on a recent video call.
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.
“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.” 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 theto 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.
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.
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