Читать книгу Inland Shift - Juan De Lara - Страница 10

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.