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Introduction

HUMAN DESIRE FOR PROFIT AND CONSUMPTION is a powerful material force. For us to buy the things that we want—such as a new pair of jeans or the latest electronic gadget—public and private entrepreneurs, as the agents of capital, have to construct the social relations and spatial landscapes that enable consumer yearnings to become material realities.¹ For example, the ability to buy a simple pair of jeans requires an elaborate physical and social infrastructure, including far-flung environmental resources and extended labor systems.² Consequently our consumption of goods is never an isolated, individual choice, because it depends on expansive commodity chains and the spaces that make them possible.³ The choices we make are thus always embedded in extensive multiscalar relationships that string together elaborate networks of actors, places, and things. This book uses Southern California’s logistics economy and the rise of commodity imports to examine how political leaders and social movement activists remapped the region’s geographies of race and class between 1980 and 2010.

My research into Southern California’s goods movement or logistics regime began with a series of questions about the relationship among globalization, race, and class. I was particularly interested in linking urban political economy with critical studies of race and culture. Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism made this intellectually necessary. One of Robinson’s insights in Black Marxism was that the scientific rationalism underpinning capitalist production yielded a deadlier and persistent racialism. I build on Robinson’s scholarship by arguing that logistics represents a major rearticulation of modern capitalism and space that must be understood within the historical context of place and race making.

The relationship between racial capitalism and logistics can be traced back to the fifteenth century, when the encounter between European merchant capitalism and the Americas generated new Latinx⁴ American identities that were rooted in the confrontation between indigenous ways of life and the imperial project of coloniality that ensnared Black and indigenous bodies into the global circuits of profit accumulation and slavery. European capitalism was built on the extraction and circulation of commodities such as sugar and silver in the colonial period that required distinct racial and spatial arrangements. This relationship continued after national independence, when liberalism and the settler colonial nation-state provided the main engines that drove industrial capitalism and a new period of racialization in Las Americas during the nineteenth century. In the chapters that follow I expand on this spatial-historical reading of race, capital, and commodities to show how post-1980s Southern California was transformed by new modes of global capitalist production and distribution that intersected with the racial terrain of demographic change.

What does it mean to think about racial capitalism through the lens of a place like inland Southern California? To answer this question requires examining spaces of racial identity that are often hidden or overlooked. For example, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties have one of the largest Latinx and immigrant populations in the country, yet they are all but absent in the field of Chicanx and Latinx studies. Simply put, I wanted to learn what the Inland Empire could teach us about race, space, and power that East LA could not. Inland Southern California, also known as the Inland Empire or the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area, is particularly important because it represents the terrain of racial formation for an emerging Latinx population, many of whom moved into Los Angeles’s (LA’s) urban hinterland to find jobs and purchase new homes in the region’s booming housing market. The region illustrates how race is embedded in particular territories through the dynamic exchanges between macroeconomic processes and the spatial legacies of local specificity.

These scales are used as platforms for the three key themes that frame the book: the reterritorialization of race, the relationship between shifting flows of capital and regional spaces, and the various topographies of power that shape particular landscapes. More specifically, I examine how workers, capitalists, state agents, and social movement organizers deployed various cognitive and material mappings to link differentiated but intersecting spatial scales—the warehouse, the diesel-poisoned body, the foreclosed home, the racialized state apparatus—into a contested political space. The book begins with an analysis of how growing consumer demand, innovative retail business practices, and the infrastructure required to support global commodity chains all combined to reconfigure Southern California’s landscape. My argument in part one is simple: to understand global cities we need to account for how the extended commodity chains of neoliberal economic restructuring created new social and spatial relationships among consumers, workers, and regions. Local actors and institutions were especially important to this process because they attempted to strengthen their positions within the global commodity network by investing in extensive regional infrastructure and intensive distribution systems. They hoped such investments in logistics infrastructure would attract a highly mobile and flexible twenty-first-century capitalism.

While logistics provided a road map for capital and the state to transform Southern California, part two of the book examines how it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups, which argued that global commodity distribution exposed already marginalized communities to even more vulnerabilities. How people gave meaning to and mobilized to contest dominant development mappings is at the crux of part three. The final two sections also challenge the erasure of low-wage immigrant workers from the dominant logistics narrative. They show how temporary warehouse workers were important dissident voices who claimed that logistics sacrificed them as unfortunate but necessary pieces of a regional economy built on infrastructure development and the global goods industry. What justified this sacrifice, and how were warehouse workers so devalued that they could be tossed aside for the sake of the region’s economic growth?⁵ Each chapter explores these questions by unpacking how the specificity of place, ideological representations about race, and productive economic activities combined to shape and redefine the region.

Finally, let me provide a brief explanation of my methodological approach. One of the main challenges for me was to figure out how to move from the specificity of a warehouse in Mira Loma, to regional policy, to global networks of capital. To examine these relationships I use a multiscalar reading of inland Southern California that includes a top-down policy focus and a bottom-up understanding of how people organized to contest normative regional narratives that fixed specific racial and class hierarchies in place. I use specific geographical snapshots of Riverside and San Bernardino counties to examine some of the key forces that have shaped the region. When assembled, these snapshots produce a composite image of the various actors and processes that shape everyday life in the region. While it might be easy to dismiss what happens in a relatively unknown place as too specific and not generally applicable to the complexities of global capital and race, it is incredibly important to figure out how the specificity of these things work on the ground. General “concepts have to be applied to,” as Stuart Hall explained, “specific historical social formations, to particular societies at specific stages in the development of capitalism.” This is a Gramscian approach that requires the theorist “to move from the level of ‘mode of production’ to a lower, more concrete, level of application.”⁶ Scholars have spent countless hours thinking and pages writing about how what happens at the microlevel can be applied to a broader level.⁷ Instead of rehashing well-documented debates about the relationship between or importance of global and local processes, I take my cue from Gilmore: “It is my interest here to reconcile the micro with the macro by showing how the drama of crisis on the ground is neither wholly determined by nor remotely autonomous from the larger crisis.”⁸

Fontana and inland Southern California therefore are more than a simple case study; they provide a way to examine how a particular iteration of modern capitalism was shaped by and helped to transform a specific place. More recent scholarship has left the global versus local debate behind and has instead embraced the idea of a mutually constitutive process. Rather than arguing about whether the global has the power to transform and annihilate local spaces, I seek to understand how these two scales are mutually constitutive of each other. Instead of looking at how capital uses local specificity to its advantage, I also examine how local specificity produces a complex and highly differentiated capitalism. This more dialectical approach enables us to see how, according to Helga Leitner and Byron Miller, “local and transnational processes and practices are producing (materially and discursively) the very fabric of the global.”⁹

The more than one hundred interviews I conducted with workers, policy makers, and regular community members provide the concrete data to jump back and forth between the specificities of everyday life in the Inland Empire and the larger global processes at work. Much of the material for this book also comes from more than five years of participant observation in various community, labor, and environmental justice issues related to inland Southern California.

One book cannot capture everything and everyone that makes up Southern California. What follows is a very specific view of the region that does not attempt to bear the impossible burden of trying to capture all that the region represents as J. Harrison said, “there is no complete portrait of a region.”¹⁰ This book is instead a particular sketch that illustrates how state actors and social movement activists deployed discursive tactics and material force to shape inland Southern California’s landscape.

MAP 1. Inland Southern California. Map by Jennifer Tran.