Inland Shift

Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California

Juan De Lara

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780520289581
• eBook ISBN: 9780520964181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The subprime crash of 2008 revealed a fragile, unjust, and unsustainable economy built on retail consumption, low-wage jobs, and fictitious capital. Economic crisis, finance capital, and global commodity chains transformed Southern California just as Latinxs and immigrants were turning California into a majority-nonwhite state. In Inland Shift, Juan D. De Lara uses the growth of Southern California’s logistics economy, which controls the movement of goods, to examine how modern capitalism was shaped by and helped to transform the region’s geographies of race and class. While logistics provided a roadmap for capital and the state to transform Southern California, it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups who argued that commodity distribution exposed them to economic and environmental precarity.

SCENE 1

A Space for Logistics

IN THE FALL OF 1993 approximately 300 Chinese workers arrived in Fontana, California. They were there to dismantle part of the thirteen-hundred-acre Kaiser steel mill, an iconic industrial landscape that helped build America’s Pacific Fleet during World War II and provided material for the West’s postwar economic expansion (see figure 1). Workers spent nearly a year marking, cutting, and organizing the mill’s pieces into an elaborate disassembly system.¹ As one worker used a torch to cut off pieces of the old blast furnace, another would number and label them in Chinese.

FIGURE 1. Smoke rises from eight open hearth furnaces at the Kaiser steel mill in Fontana, CA, 1952. Photo by Conrad Mercurio, Los Angeles Examiner Photograph Collection, University of Southern California Libraries Special Collections.

Supervisors maintained a grueling, around-the-clock shift schedule and provided a ready supply of labor by housing workers in a nearby fenced-off compound. Workers woke up every day, waited their turn to be bused into the mill, spent the day doing hard labor, and boarded the bus back to camp (see figure 2).² Buses were sometimes met by protestors; they complained that the dismantling jobs should have been offered to locals. Joe Perez, head of the local building trades unions, told an assembled group of protesters, “These jobs don’t belong to those (Chinese) guys, they belong to us.”³ Some of the picketers claimed to have built and worked in the mill; they wanted to be the ones who tore it down. The protesters were relics of an earlier era. The mill’s construction and eventual dismantling were emblematic of the social and economic transition that took place during the shift from postwar Fordist manufacturing to post-1970s neoliberalism. Kaiser’s devalued buildings and downsized people were the industrial and human residue left behind by the deep changes that transformed everyday lives across the globe.

FIGURE 2. Chinese dismantling crew being bused to their camp at the end of the day shift, Kaiser steel mill, Fontana, CA, December 1993. Courtesy Allan Sekula Studio.

ONE

Space, Power, and Method

HOW HAS RACIAL AND SPATIAL difference shaped the character of twenty-first-century capitalism? As Cedric Robinson has argued, “the character of capitalism can only be understood in the social and historical context of its appearance.”¹ Inland Southern California and the logistics industry to explore how modern capitalism has been shaped by its dialectical entanglement with race and space. This requires, as Escobar notes, “setting place-based and regional processes into conversation with the ever-changing dynamics of capital and culture at many levels.”² Warehouse work and the contentious spatial politics of inland Southern California’s logistics landscape provide the multiscalar data to examine how the shifting ground of money and people intersected with local histories to reterritorialize race and capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century. Southern California, especially it’s often-ignored inland spaces, provides an excellent platform to examine how capitalism has been territorialized and enshrined as a racial project. The result of this fusing of race, space, and capital is what I call the territorialization of race. I begin this chapter by examining how regions are produced as discursive and material spaces through political performances that are grounded in the specificities of race, class, and power.

CRAFTING REGIONS AS DISCURSIVE AND
MATERIAL SPACES

Southern California became a haven for the logistics industry because regional leaders made a strategic choice to champion port-based development; they created policy pathways for logistics by supporting transportation infrastructure projects and by propagating a prologistics ideology. State agencies also stimulated logistics development by incubating a regional land market that used zoning restrictions and building codes to encourage port, rail, and warehouse expansion. Local actors and regional planning authorities played an increasingly important role after the 1980s when neoliberal reforms created incentives for municipalities to compete with one another over potential public and private investment. Southern California’s logistics development regime emerged from this global economic and neoliberal political milieu; the regime included local political leaders, the port authorities for both Los Angeles and Long Beach, and private sector leaders with close ties to logistics-based development.

Even if local actors tried to stimulate logistics investment, scholars disagree about whether local choices have had much effect on global capital. Urban theorists developed two main analytical frameworks to study the interaction between local actors and global economic processes.³ Each differs in its assumptions about whether the local or global plays a greater role in shaping space.⁴ One approach privileges the different ways that localities organize themselves to capture and shape development pathways by linking local institutional capacities to new economic scales.⁵ Here, different localities exercise agency by influencing how global processes unfold in particular places. A second approach assigns greater importance to the internal dynamics of global commodity chains and focuses on how regional actors can respond by inserting themselves into these systems. Under this approach the dynamic forces of global capital are given more of the power to shape development paths.

Local actors across the United States responded to global restructuring by mounting vigorous campaigns to lure new investment, even as scholars doubted that they could harness and control capital’s shifting tides. The most successful efforts imposed what Neil Brenner has described as a “certain cohesiveness if not a logical coherence of territorial organization.”⁶ Part of this cohesiveness was produced through regional spatial narratives that rationalized particular development paths. For instance, the idea that inland Southern California could and should be a global distribution hub required boosters to produce a regional cognitive map, what Lefebvre describes as a “representation of space,” to lend coherence to the logistics effort.⁷ Cognitive maps are vital parts of the material landscape, illustrating how spaces are produced through a combination of social and physical processes.⁸ These mental maps are cultural frameworks that help humans shape and give meaning to different landscapes. I use cognitive mapping analysis to protect against overly determined structural arguments, which pay less attention to the processes of subjective racial and class formation.⁹ Narratives introduce affect and feeling into deciphering how, as Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou note, “we do not simply move ourselves, but are ourselves moved by what is outside us.”¹⁰ Yet we should also take care not to get stuck in the cognitive and discursive analysis of spatial representations and ideologies, because material spaces still matter.¹¹

My analysis of inland Southern California bridges some of the gaps between cultural studies and political economy by examining what Don Mitchell referred to as the “relationship between material form and ideological representation.”¹² I take different material spaces, such as warehouses and industrial suburbs, to disentangle the relationship among culture, cognitive mappings, and the social relations of particular economic processes.¹³ Regional discursive mappings provide insight that illuminates how actors shape the terrain of spatial politics. Such mappings developed into political projects because their champions used them to inscribe the social and physical infrastructure of logistics onto the material landscape of Southern California. Such prologistics narratives became spatial ontologies because they defined the conditions of regional possibility. I argue that we need to disrupt such ontologies by generating new conceptual frameworks that unmask the violence of uneven development by making explicit connections between the spatial logic of global capital and the local articulations of race. Such an approach provides a better picture of how capital, the state, and cultural notions of difference combined to produce Southern California as a distinct place within a much broader global spatial order.

Regions provide a way to examine how space is produced, maintained, and contested through both discursive and material processes.¹⁴ Urban scholars have paid close attention to regions, especially in the aftermath of post-1970s globalization. Regions are one of the key spatial scales that urban scholars and geographers have used to understand the “new territorial structures and imaginaries” that were produced during the shift to globalization.¹⁵ Some of this scholarship was influenced by regulationist theory and argued that the urban scale was undergoing a restructuring process that included a rescaling of state institutions into supra- and subnational forms of governance.¹⁶

The contested everyday production of regions is critical because they are much more than state-sanctioned territorial units. They also function as spatial ideologies that rely on specific social, political, and economic assumptions. These ideological foundations are necessary because regions “are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, they are our (and others’) constructions.”¹⁷ To create regions, as Julie-Anne Boudreau asserts, “actors deploy spatial imaginaries and practices in their efforts to achieve their political objectives, incrementally producing coherent political spaces.”¹⁸ Regions are therefore “constructed entities, ways of organizing people and place” through political and cultural narratives that link economic forces to everyday spaces.¹⁹ The discursive and material production of regions provides an opportunity to examine how space is imagined, produced, and contested. This combination of ideology, normative discourse, and power is what makes regions such a useful geographic scale through which to interrogate the production of space and race.²⁰

TERRITORIALITY AND RACE

When Shougang workers from China took their blowtorches to the old Fontana mill in 1993, they were dismantling part of a blue-collar manufacturing economy that built up many post–World War II U.S. cities. In Southern California military spending drove the region’s incredible post-1940s growth and produced industrial suburbs in Southeast Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.²¹ The region’s expansion continued during the Cold War years of the 1960s and 1970s, when defense spending lured new industries and workers into the region.²² The postwar manufacturing boom had enabled an earlier generation to pursue something called the American Dream. In fact, what it meant to be middle class in Southern California was intricately linked to the production of blue-collar industrial suburbs in cities like Cudahy, Southgate, and Maywood. These suburbs were home to major manufacturing companies, many of which benefited from defense industry government contracts. They were also almost exclusively white and were kept that way by restrictive racial covenants that prevented the sale of homes to nonwhite residents.²³ Deindustrialization, including the Kaiser mill’s dismantling, foretold the end of the Keynesian spatial order that made the United States and California into a global economic powerhouse.

Something that often gets lost in discussions of regional development is the role that spatial fixing or the place-boundedness of capitalism has played in the production of racialized geographies. The paradox of wanting to erase racially marked bodies while needing their labor has ultimately been resolved through a variety of spatial solutions.²⁴ Work camps and barrios are just two examples of how differentiated space has been deployed to contain and control racialized bodies while at the same time making their labor available for capital. This was certainly the case when Southern California’s war economy needed the labor of Black and Brown bodies but used the racist techniques of segregated homeownership and unequal wage markets to keep them in their place.²⁵

Southern California’s industrial suburbs were thus enshrined—as a normati...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Scene 1: A Space for Logistics
• Scene 2: Precarious Labor
• Scene 3: The Reterritorialization of Race and Class
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index