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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.

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