manufacturing era. Initiatives like this made East Asia and the Pacific into economic powerhouses and drove manufacturing employment to grow from thirty-one million jobs in 1970 to ninety-seven million by 2010.56 These new industrial regions quickly established connections with U.S. consumer markets. Rapid industrialization enabled East Asian manufacturing exports to increase from $269 billion in 1997 to nearly $1.5 trillion in 2007.57 At the same time, the port complex that had bid the mill farewell became a major gateway for imported Chinese goods. The mill, its disassembled parts, and the factories that it helped to create formed a new circuit that connected China’s manufacturing heartland to the inland warehouses of Southern California.
FIGURE 3. Workers load 75-ton ladles from the Kaiser steel mill onto the Atlantic Queen for shipment to China, Los Angeles Harbor, July 1994. Courtesy Allan Sekula Studio.
FIGURE 4. Kaiser steel worker oversees pouring of hot metal pig iron from a blast furnace by means of a 75-ton ladle, Fontana, CA, May 1, 1952. Photo by Conrad Mercurio, Los Angeles Examiner Photograph Collection, University of Southern California Libraries Special Collections.
REMAPPING THE DREAM
Southern California’s manufacturing decline took place concurrently with the numerical ascendance of the region’s Latinx and Asian American populations.58 Devalued former industrial spaces, which once provided middle-class lifestyles for white Angelenos, offered first- and second-generation residents an opportunity to buy or rent more affordable housing. The landscape changed drastically when “white people left, black people tip-toed in, and Latinos, including immigrants, moved in en mass[e],” as Manuel Pastor described it.59 By the end of the twentieth century, expanding Latinx and Asian populations had transformed Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles into an experiment in the future of American democracy at exactly the same moment that new circuits of capital were reorganizing regional space.60 Maywood’s transformation was particularly dramatic. The small southeastern city measures less than one square mile and has a population under thirty thousand. Its population went from nearly two-thirds white in 1970 to 97 percent Latinx by 2010. Nearly half of Maywood’s new residents were foreign-born immigrants.61 South LA’s new residents encountered a discarded industrial landscape; it was full of deadly artifacts left behind by an amalgam of postwar capital, blue-collar white labor, and a desiccated Keynesian state.
Neoliberal state policies were complicit with the abandonment of LA’s industrial suburbs.62 The wave of neoliberal reform that reshaped U.S. government policies favored capitalist growth but did little to protect workers from the insecurities attached to fluctuating markets.63 For example, Ronald Reagan’s throttling of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) signaled an end of the postwar Keynesian accord that had enabled large portions of the U.S. working class to enjoy the perks of blue-collar unionism and middle-class suburban lives.64 The replacement of Keynesianism with monetarist policies during the early 1980s led to rising interest rates that jolted the financial markets. Such economic and political reforms caused a debt crisis and paved the way for structural adjustment policies that dismantled Keynesian social safety nets.65 Neoliberal reformers also successfully deregulated parts of the transportation, telecommunications, and financial sectors. Deregulation created pathways for capital investment to flood into new markets. Combined, structural adjustment and deregulation policies decimated the old industrial spaces that had once provided middle-class livelihoods to blue-collar—mostly white—manufacturing workers.66
The burden of restoring once idyllic suburban spaces was particularly daunting, because many of the Keynesian institutions that had made blue-collar middle-class lifestyles possible had been gutted during the ascendance of neoliberal politics.67 These communities, “spiraling in downward directions,” were burdened with what Albert Camarillo described as “diminished tax bases, weakened institutional infrastructures, mounting crime rates, and violence.” The result was a “suburban decline” that was a “corollary to the ‘urban crisis’ in the older, industrial cities of the Northeast.”68 The combination of white flight and capital mobility created pockets of hypervulnerability for Black and Latinx urban residents, a process that urban scholars have attempted to grapple with through, for example, research on spatial mismatch theory.69 More cynical readings of this process will draw a correlation between economic decline and growing immigrant populations. Similarly, culture of poverty theories that blame Latinxs and African Americans for economic inequalities tend to ignore how capital, the state, and cultural notions of difference shape the processes of racial formation in the United States.70
Collective abandonment of these spaces did not signal a complete absence of the state and of capital. These devalued spaces also served as “planned concentrations or sinks—of hazardous materials and destructive practices” that increased what Ruth W. Gilmore termed “group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death.”71 Such was the case in Southeast LA, where deindustrialization turned old suburbs into toxic landscapes, especially during the retrenchment of Southern California’s military-industrial complex. Toxic residues lingered in abandoned factories and poisoned new residents long after the old production lines had disappeared.72
Felipe Aguirre served as a Maywood city council member and mayor between 2005 and 2013. He implicated a postwar alliance between capital and the state in his argument that the suburban communities that once provided spaces of hope for white families posed a deadly threat to the region’s growing immigrant populations. Aguirre explained during an extended interview that “there were a lot of good union paying jobs here when Maywood’s population was mostly Anglo.” Maywood and other Southeast LA neighborhoods were the quintessential representation of postwar suburban life. But this changed when, as Aguirre described, “a lot of these companies started closing in the late 70s early 80s, a lot of those people started to take off. Then Latino immigrants came in and had to clean up all the previous society’s mess.”73
What he referred to as “the previous society’s mess” was the specific spatial order produced by an expanding postwar industrial regime, held in place by racialized labor markets and segregated housing. City boosters, led by the LA Chamber of Commerce, cultivated Southeast Los Angeles as an investment opportunity by luring manufacturing companies with marketing literature from the 1920s that promised an “abundant supply of skilled and unskilled white labor,” including “no Negroes and very few Mexican and Chinese.”74 While official narratives tried to erase Black, Mexican, and Asian workers from the landscape, those groups nonetheless played a key role in building postwar Los Angeles; they also played a role in reclaiming abandoned industrial spaces. Deindustrialization and white flight meant that new residents had to clean up the environmental waste that was left behind by companies like Bethlehem Steel, National Glass, Anchor Hocking, and the Pemaco superfund site. “We were cleaning a lot of these sites that were part of the previous society’s prosperity,” Aguirre said. “But we were cleaning it with our bodies. They did not leave these places in a very good state.”75
Immigrants weren’t the only ones who moved into devalued industrial suburbs. These spaces became prime real estate for new industries, including the global logistics sector. Former industrial suburbs became new conduits for global goods as the industrial suburban corridor was transformed into a distribution pipeline for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach; old union jobs gave way to new Walmart jobs. Many of these former industrial communities played host to or were located near railways and train stations that serviced the ports. The transformation was, as described in the next chapter, part of a regional effort to transform Los Angeles and its metropolitan hinterland into the country’s largest logistics gateway for transpacific goods. The symbolic spatial irony of global restructuring was captured by Aguirre: “All these companies that exist here in Vernon [a neighboring city] are now basically warehouses
