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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 structural arguments, which pay less attention to the processes of subjective 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 of capital and the embedded specificities of local places. It made sense to ask what the deeper connections between political economy and space were if we wanted to move beyond the notion that spaces and places were more than just containers for larger (read as more determinative) social processes. If, as geographers and urban planners argued, space still mattered, then it was important to demonstrate how and why.³⁵ As scholars tried to decipher the multiplicity of actors and forces involved in producing something called globalization, a tension emerged between those who focused on the power of global capital to transform local space and those who argued that the local still mattered and that place-based difference was key to the production of a globalized society.³⁶

Difference is in fact essential to the creation and capitalization of new markets; it allows investors to determine where they should and should not invest.³⁷ This is where universal and abstract models of capitalism fall short. While an abstract model may provide important insights into the relationship between social structures and space, it cannot substitute for a more concrete analysis of how various forces and actors, including gender and race, combine to produce locally specific spatial orders.³⁸ What’s needed is a type of critical inquiry into space that recognizes macroeconomic forces while not glossing over the specificities of places and people. The key is to understand how these specificities are interconnected into a sometimes diffused web of social relations, which means that to understand the logic of global capital, we have to engage with the local specificities of space. This is an important methodological point about the importance of understanding specificity as the embodiment or experience of social processes.³⁹

Indeed, only by looking at what Katherine Mitchell termed “the specific configurations of differing economic systems within their own geographical and historical contexts” will we grasp the intricate and contingent nature of global capitalism.⁴⁰ The idea that capital has a critical “logic which works in and through specificity” rather than a universal abstract mode provides a theoretical bridge that enables us to traverse the sometimes wide gap between political economy and locally embedded cultural notions of difference and articulation.⁴¹ Social movements provide one way to examine how locally embedded actors confront the alienating tendencies of universal abstract space; they are, as Tilly describes, “historically specific clusters of political performances.”⁴² Movements are defined by how networks of individuals create and perform collective identities while giving meaning to their actions. These performances and meanings establish a relational position from which to make claims against entrenched forms of power. Parts 2 and 3 of this book show how social movements in Southern California challenged the moral text of development by providing alternative spatial imaginaries that were rooted in the dialectical exchange between abstract space and local specificity.

My discussion of social movement spatial strategies highlights why a multiscalar, local-global framework is critical to groups who try to challenge universalist development ideologies. Ignoring the local-global dialectic can obscure relationships of power, because as Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson note, “the presumption that spaces are autonomous has enabled the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power.”⁴³ To expose the sometimes hidden relationships of power that produce specific spaces, this project begins “with the premise that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally disconnected.”⁴⁴ Lefebvre was right in arguing that “the survival of capitalism has depended on this distinctive production and occupation of a fragmented, homogenized, and hierarchically structured space.”⁴⁵ Local difference, racial and class difference in particular, has been critical to the survival and evolution of capitalist space. This continues to be the case as modern network infrastructures are “being organized to exploit differences between places within ever-more sophisticated spatial divisions of labor.”⁴⁶ It is therefore important to examine how these sometimes obscure connections can help decipher how difference is produced and sustained. Logistics, I argue, is one example of how the spatial divisions of labor that are vital to the survival of capitalism are fixed in place through a complex interaction among race, capital, and power.

LOGISTICS AS THE REGIONAL SPATIAL FIX

Two cases in particular—the industrial inner-ring suburbs of Southeast Los Angeles and the exurban outer-ring region of the Inland Empire—provide distinct but overlapping glimpses into how different actors responded to the spatial ruptures that transformed Southern California after the 1980s. Both cases show how racial and spatial difference were central to post-Fordist redevelopment strategies.

Regional policy makers used Southeast Los Angeles as a warning to the rest of Southern California because it embodied the social and economic dislocation that wreaked havoc on blue-collar industrial suburbs between the late 1970s and 2000s.⁴⁷ Blue-collar suburbs that were abandoned by capital and by a shrinking social safety net became what Mike Davis called the discarded “junkyards of the American Dream.”⁴⁸ According to local political leaders the solution was to rally behind the region’s ports as a potential cure for Southern California’s manufacturing malaise. The logic was simple: if the shuttered manufacturing plants of Southeast Los Angeles represented the region’s Fordist past, then the ports and inland warehouses in places like Fontana provided a glimpse of its future.

Such disruptions are a normal part of capitalism, because it operates under a constant tension between needing to be fixed in particular places and having to fend off falling rates of profit that stem from decaying machinery and outmoded business models. “To solve this contradiction,” as Richard Walker notes, “capital must be liberated from its shackles to move elsewhere or destroyed (devalued) to raise the rate of profit and make room for new investments.”⁴⁹ Creative destruction is thus woven into the fabric of capitalist development and provides a solution to the devaluation of fixed capital by reconfiguring spatial-temporal relationships to create new investment options.⁵⁰ Kaiser’s mill and the Chinese workers who dismantled it embody this spatial fix.⁵¹

One result is that new spaces are constantly entangled and swept up into the capitalist system of accumulation as investors seek outlets for growth. The Chinese company Shougang’s purchase of the Kaiser steel mill in Fontana in 1992 was a spatial fix because it was part of a more comprehensive effort to make China into a major industrial manufacturing power. Redundant Western industrial facilities offered a solution to Shougang’s leaders, who desperately wanted to expand Chinese steel manufacturing but lacked enough capital and time to build their own equipment. Chinese government officials prodded manufacturers to increase capacity when they set a national goal to produce one hundred million tons of steel by the year 2000.⁵² Company executives responded by purchasing sixteen secondhand facilities from the United States and other industrialized countries throughout the 1980s and 1990s.⁵³ By the end of this period Shougang’s traveling band of workers had become experts at dismantling the old industrial spaces of Western economies and reassembling their remains into giant, Frankensteinian steel plants.

Kaiser’s rusting carcass was prime fodder for industrial scavenging because part of it was relatively new. Corporate officials had invested $278 million to build a state-of-the-art No. 2 Basic Oxygen Process and Caster plant in 1978.⁵⁴ Yet even such massive investment in new facilities did not prevent the mill’s collapse; executives blamed tougher environmental regulations and increased international competition as major reasons for ceasing operations. Kaiser provides many lessons; one of them is that abandoned spaces are not completely left behind. Abandoned spaces and people sometimes learn to renegotiate their relationships with different circuits of capital.⁵⁵ For inland Southern California this renegotiation began when workers loaded the mill’s disassembled parts onto the Atlantic Queen (see figure 3). The ship, which left the port of Los Angeles in July 1994, transported the old blast furnace and cauldrons that Kaiser workers once used to pour molten steel (see figure 4) in Fontana to an area just outside of Beijing. Shougang officials planned to reassemble, modify, and attach the old mill to an existing steel plant. In its new incarnation the Kaiser mill became part of a hodgepodge superfactory that helped usher China into a modern 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 and packaging companies where they package up whatever China sends over and they break it down into smaller units and they sell them. You might say it’s 99 cent heaven. All the warehouses for the 99 Cent stores are located right here in this strip.”⁷⁶

Before moving on to the next chapter, it’s important to connect all of the elements discussed so far—space, power, and method—into a coherent narrative. First, spatial ideologies are critical in the chapters that follow because they represent a central playing field in how the region was produced as a logistics landscape. Second, these spatial ideologies extend beyond the realm of discourse because they constitute a spatial method that does not separate the material from the ideological. For instance, the notion of the American Dream is a useful analytical framework because it involves both the cognitive and material forces central to the production of space. Something called the American Dream represents both the ideological construction of a normative spatial order and the material spaces that are required to make this idea an embodied and lived space. Instead of separating the ideological production of a logistics development discourse from the material construction of a regional transportation infrastructure, it is far more intriguing to examine how ideas—such as those espoused in dominant development discourses—are transformed into a material force that is exercised by and through power.⁷⁷