the very fabric of the global.”9
The more than one hundred interviews I conducted with workers, policy makers, and regular community members provide the concrete data to jump back and forth between the specificities of everyday life in the Inland Empire and the larger global processes at work. Much of the material for this book also comes from more than five years of participant observation in various community, labor, and environmental justice issues related to inland Southern California.
One book cannot capture everything and everyone that makes up Southern California. What follows is a very specific view of the region that does not attempt to bear the impossible burden of trying to capture all that the region represents as J. Harrison said, “there is no complete portrait of a region.”10 This book is instead a particular sketch that illustrates how state actors and social movement activists deployed discursive tactics and material force to shape inland Southern California’s landscape.
MAP 1. Inland Southern California. Map by Jennifer Tran.
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
