LITMIR.BIZ

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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

TWO

       Global Goods and the Infrastructure of Desire

      CONSUMERS OFTEN ENTER INTO ECONOMIC exchanges without being fully aware of the social and ecological systems required to produce the bevy of things that we consume.¹ In fact, modern commodity chains are often so complex and geographically dispersed that it is difficult for consumers to comprehend the vast spatial and social relationships that make everyday consumption possible. Consumers may also be blinded by ideological and disciplinary frameworks that prevent them from seeing the deeper human connections that bind complex systems together. For example, economic models that try to explain the proliferation of goods in contemporary society often use a consumer choice lens that takes for granted the extensive social relations needed to produce and distribute commodities.² Such rational choice models place too much emphasis on microeconomic market decisions when trying to explain basic social phenomena.³ The result is a rather large gap between the microeconomics of individual choice and the social relations needed to produce robust market systems. A commodity chain approach can help

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