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 normative idea of what constituted a good life—by a Keynesian spatial regime that was built on racial and class difference. Even though race and space are deeply entangled, the two are often treated as parallel rather than mutually constituted processes. For example, studies that address race often treat space as a container for specific social relationships. Much of the literature on Chicanx and Latinx identity is infused with spatial tropes in which cultural practice is tied to specific spatial scales like the border, the barrio, the home, and the body.26 Some Chicana and Chicano studies scholars have argued that the spatial processes of barrio formation—as a political project of containment—resulted in the production of counterhegemonic cultural practice.27 This shift toward space and culture was deeply influenced by feminist theories of standpoint epistemology and intersectionality.28 Likewise, scholars who study mobility—migration, white flight, diasporas—must all grapple with space as a critical element of their work (even if the focus on mobility suggests that space and place are limiting).29 More recent studies on race have focused on multicultural neighborhoods as spaces of conviviality and exchange.30 These spaces, which were deeply influenced by the enactment and dissolution of racially segregated housing practices, have emerged as places where Asian, Latinx, and Black residents are learning to craft polycultural identities and practices that are not centered in white normative experiences.31 All of this scholarship has provided critical insight into the racial state and the spatial techniques deployed by the architects of racialization.
The intersections between race and space can be traced back to European colonialism, when the imperial spatial logics of capitalist expansion intimately linked a new global order to a morality that dictated the erasure and subjugation of racialized others. Capitalism and imperialism have formed a deadly partnership in which universal assumptions about progress and modernity were tied to white supremacy and manifest destiny, including in the American West. In fact, “modern political-economic architectures” as Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira Da Silva argue, “have been accompanied by a moral text, in which the principles of universality and historicity also sustain the writing of the ‘others of Europe’ (both a colonial and racial other) as entities facing certain and necessary (self-inflicted) obliteration.”32 This deadly moral text is critical for the survival and territorial expansion of global capital. It “asphyxiates” what Henri Lefebvre described as the “historical conditions that gave rise to it, its own (internal) differences, and any such differences that show signs of developing, in order to impose an abstract homogeneity.”33 Such normative economies are incredibly powerful because they not only define monetary exchanges; they also demarcate those who inhabit a life that is worth living from those who do not. The result has been that global capitalist space has condemned devalued bodies and the spaces they produce to a life of precarity and premature death.34
Much of the early work on globalization tried to figure out the relationship between highly mobile circuits
