the right to earn a living for one’s family transcends the right to own idle property. His campaign was a crusade that lit fires in the hearts of millions of ordinary Californians, most of whom had never previously paid any attention to ideas from the Left.
But what is the equivalent crusade today? What moral imperative should organize and give passion to a progressive politics for Los Angeles and California? The answer, I think, has been provided by the extraordinary, if underpublicised hearings that Los Angeles state senators Gloria Romero and Richard Alarcon conducted several years ago, which focused on the scandal of poverty, particularly child poverty in California. They argued with real eloquence that California – one of the richest societies in world history – needs to declare war on the poverty and youth violence in its inner cities and farm communities. This is the great issue – not tax relief for corporations and SUV owners, or persecution of undocumented immigrants – that should be the moral center of local and state politics.
The gigantic demonstrations of Latino immigrants and their allies in the spring of 2006, which reclaimed downtown Los Angeles in the name of El Pueblo, revealed the social power of the city’s blue-collar neighborhoods and suburbs. The challenge to labor activists and community organizers is to harness this emergent power to a consistent progressive program, and the centerpiece of that program, in my opinion, should be a social and economic bill of rights for the city’s children. At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.
San Diego, April 2006
PROLOGUE
THE VIEW FROM FUTURES PAST
The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future. Standing on the sturdy cobblestone foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist city of Llano del Rio – Open Shop Los Angeles’s utopian antipode – you can sometimes watch the Space Shuttle in its elegant final descent towards Rogers Dry Lake. Dimly on the horizon are the giant sheds of Air Force Plant 42 where Stealth Bombers (each costing the equivalent of 10,000 public housing units) and other, still top secret, hot rods of the apocalypse are assembled. Closer at hand, across a few miles of creosote and burro bush, and the occasional grove of that astonishing yucca, the Joshua tree, is the advance guard of approaching suburbia, tract homes on point.
The desert around Llano has been prepared like a virgin bride for its eventual union with the Metropolis: hundreds of square miles of vacant space engridded to accept the future millions, with strange, prophetic street signs marking phantom intersections like ‘250th Street and Avenue K’. Even the eerie trough of the San Andreas Fault, just south of Llano over a foreboding escarpment, is being gingerly surveyed for designer home sites. Nuptial music is provided by the daily commotion of ten thousand vehicles hurtling past Llano on ‘Pearblossom Highway’ – the deadliest stretch of two-lane blacktop in California.
When Llano’s original colonists, eight youngsters from the Young Peoples’ Socialist League (YPSL), first arrived at the ‘Plymouth Rock of the Cooperative Commonwealth’ in 1914, this part of the high Mojave Desert, misnamed the Antelope Valley,1 had a population of a few thousand ranchers, borax miners and railroad workers as well as some armed guards to protect the newly-built aqueduct from sabotage. Los Angeles was then a city of 300,000 (the population of the Antelope Valley today), and its urban edge, now visible from Llano, was in the new suburb of Hollywood, where D. W. Griffith and his cast of thousands were just finishing an epic romance of the Ku Klux Klan, Birth of a Nation. In their day-long drive from the Labor Temple in Downtown Los Angeles to Llano over ninety miles of rutted wagon road, the YPSLs in their red Model-T trucks passed by scores of billboards, planted amid beet fields and walnut orchards, advertising the impending subdivision of the San Fernando Valley (owned by the city’s richest men and annexed the following year as the culmination of the famous ‘water conspiracy’ fictionally celebrated in Polanski’s Chinatown).
Three-quarters of a century later, forty thousand Antelope Valley commuters slither bumper-to-bumper each morning through Soledad Pass on their way to long-distance jobs in the smog-shrouded and overdeveloped San Fernando Valley. Briefly a Red Desert in the heyday of Llano (1914–18), the high Mojave for the last fifty years has been preeminently the Pentagon’s playground. Patton’s army trained here to meet Rommel (the ancient tank tracks are still visible), while Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier over the Antelope Valley in his Bell X-1 rocket plane. Under the 18,000 square-mile, ineffable blue dome of R-2508 – ‘the most important military airspace in the world’ – ninety thousand military training sorties are still flown every year.
But as developable land has disappeared throughout the coastal plains and inland basins, and soaring land inflation has reduced access to new housing to less than 15 per cent of the population, the militarized desert has suddenly become the last frontier of the Southern California Dream. With home prices $100,000 cheaper that in the San Fernando Valley, the archetypical suburban fringe of the 1950s, the Antelope Valley has nearly doubled in population over the last decade, with another quarter million new arrivals expected by 2010. Eleven thousand new homes were started in 1988 alone. But since the Valley’s economic base, not counting real-estate agents, consists almost entirely of embattled Cold War complexes – Edwards Air Force Base and Plant 42 (altogether about eighteen thousand civilian jobs) – most of the new homebuyers will simply swell the morning commute on the Antelope Valley Freeway.
The pattern of urbanization here is what design critic Peter Plagens once called the ‘ecology of evil’.2 Developers don’t grow homes in the desert – this isn’t Marrakesh or even Tucson – they just clear, grade and pave, hook up some pipes to the local artificial river (the federally subsidized California Aqueduct), build a security wall and plug in the ‘product’. With generations of experience in uprooting the citrus gardens of Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, the developers – ten or twelve major firms, headquartered in places like Newport Beach and Beverly Hills – regard the desert as simply another abstraction of dirt and dollar signs. The region’s major natural wonder, a Joshua tree forest containing individual specimens often thirty feet high and older than the Domesday Book, is being bulldozed into oblivion. Developers regard the magnificent Joshuas, unique to this desert, as large noxious weeds unsuited to the illusion of verdant homesteads. As the head of Harris Homes explained: ‘It is a very bizarre tree. It is not a beautiful tree like the pine or something. Most people don’t care about the Joshuas.’3
THE FUTURE PAST
General Assembly Hall/Hotel, Llano del Rio
With such malice toward the landscape, it is not surprising that developers also refuse any nomenclatural concession to the desert. In promotional literature intended for homebuyers or Asian investors, they have started referring to the region euphemistically as ‘North Los Angeles County’. Meanwhile they christen their little pastel pods of Chardonnay lifestyle, air-conditioned and over-watered, with scented brand-names like Fox Run, Mardi Gras, Bravo, Cambridge, Sunburst, New Horizons, and so on. The most hallucinatory are the gated communities manufactured by Kaufman and Broad, the homebuilders who were famous in the 1970s for exporting Hollywood ramblers to the suburbs of Paris. Now they have brought back France (or, rather, California homes in French drag) to the desert in fortified mini-banlieus, with lush lawns, Old World shrubs, fake mansard roofs and nouveaux riches titles like ‘Chateau’.
But Kaufman and Broad only expose the underlying method in the apparent madness of L.A.’s urban desert. The discarded Joshua trees, the profligate wastage of water, the claustrophobic walls, and the ridiculous names are as much a polemic against incipient urbanism
