Conclusion

THERE HAS BEEN A PROFOUND lack of political leadership in inland Southern California. The region’s low-skilled and undereducated workers have had to fend for themselves against the devastating flows of speculative capital while the evangelists of neoliberalism have cut back the safety nets of the Keynesian state. Members of the logistics regime were complicit in this. They convinced themselves and tried to convince everyone else that goods movement represented economic salvation for a region suffering through the job losses of deindustrialization. A sense of economic crisis justified spending on roads, bridges, and rail. At the same time, low wages and cancer-causing diesel pollution were written off as collateral damage. Yet the 2,339 estimated people who get cancer from diesel exposure every year in the Inland Empire and the many more who suffer medical problems that lead to premature death cannot be written off as unfortunate consequences of development; premature deathis an “intolerable failure,” not an unfortunate happenstance....

Latinx Frontiers

In the final chapter, the book considers how the region’s emerging Latinx majority has confronted and transformed inland California’s old geographies of race and class. It examines how key elected leaders tied the region’s growing Latinx population to the national discourse on border enforcement and undocumented immigration. One result is that the growing Latinx population was racialized as suspect citizens within the broader policy debate about the United States–Mexico border. The chapter concludes by showing how social-movement organizations mobilized to transform local institutions.

Cyborg Labor and the Global Logistics Matrix

Individual and collective stories provide insight into how people make sense of the world. Such narratives are laden with cultural meaning and can provide the seeds for opposition to dominant systems. In the case of logistics, personal narratives were critical to the construction of a warehouse-worker identity that challenged the dominant pro-growth discourse or the pro-logistics “regime of truth” by referencing devalued immigrant bodies as a foil against boosterish claims. The chapter uses warehouse workers’ stories as an epistemic bridge that connects Latinx Studies and the theoretical tools of the testimonio to Clyde Woods’s blues epistemology and Robin Kelley’s freedom dreams by turning the body as a site of deprivation into bodies as sites of counter-narratives and collective identities. These stories became the backbone of a campaign by the Change To Win labor federation to improve warehouse workers’ conditions in inland Southern California.

Land, Capital, and Race

This chapter uses the Skechers megawarehouse development project in Moreno Valley to examine how the public debate about whether to allow megawarehouse development evolved into a much more profound struggle over who had a right to shape the city. The Skechers warehouse became a proxy struggle between groups who represented different lifestyles and approaches to what constituted a valued way of life. More specifically, the warehouse debate pitted a working-class Latinx population against a mostly white suburban middle class. The chapter concludes by interrogating how global capital must sometimes negotiate locally embedded histories of race and class when establishing new territory for development.

Contesting Contingency

Chapter 6 provides an overview and critical analysis of the Warehouse Workers United organizing campaign to show how labor and immigrant social-movement organizations crafted spatial narratives that connected global logistics to regional struggles for racial and economic justice. The ensuing struggle over port development illustrates the important role that competing cognitive mappings can play in actively shaping how space is contested, defined, and produced. Logistics and warehouse work give us a chance to see how workers challenged the dehumanizing nature of capitalist space by producing regional counter-narratives. These counter-narratives illustrate one way that social movements organize against hegemonic development norms. Struggles over the production of space often involve multiple spatial layers. Recounting everyday moments and learning to frame them within an economy of power was a key part of the organizing process. These alternative mappings challenged the dehumanizing relationships of warehouse work, because they created spaces for workers to imagine that another world was possible.

The Circuits of Capital

Global economic restructuring, especially the geographic expansion of commodity networks during the 1990s and 2000s, had a profound effect on logistics workers. This chapter examines how companies used new technologies and scientific management techniques to produce labor regimes that cut costs and added value to distribution practices. Some of these technologies included barcodes, radio-frequency identification (RFID), and computer tracking software. Retailers used such technologies to develop sophisticated inventory systems and point-of-sale (POS) information databases that allowed them to implement just-in-time (JIT) production and distribution business models. In addition to these technological systems, retailers and third-party logistics companies (3PLs) or subcontractors also developed new just-in-time management practices and labor regimes. Less time and more goods became the mantra for retailers, who embraced shorter commodity cycles, dispersed production, and flexible labor.

The Spatial Politics of Southern California’s Logistics Regime

Chapter 3 claims that the same global economic changes that triggered capital flight away from Los Angeles and other U.S. cities beginning in the 1970s also provided economic opportunities for local private and public leaders to invest in transpacific trade corridors. This mix between the discourse of crisis and the material geographies of a shifting global capitalism set the stage for a new spatial politics that culminated in a regional development regime centered on logistics. Yet environmental and labor advocates answered by arguing that the market sometimes must be pushed—often screaming—into doing the right thing. By understanding these intersections—between the local and the global, the discursive and the material—we can glean a better understanding of how metropolitan space is produced.

Global Goods and the Infrastructure of Desire

This chapter uses a commodity-chain approach and logistics to unpack the black box of globalization. Logistics is particularly useful as an analytical lens, because it reveals how state actors mobilized space for capitalist development and provides a different view into the systems, processes, and spaces that make up globalization. The chapter outlines how logisticians used scientific rationalism and new technologies to create an abstract and ordered vision of space that enabled them to expand the territorial possibilities for capital investment. It argues that the scientific management of bodies, space, and time produced new labor regimes, which facilitated a more complex and extended system of global production, distribution, and consumption.

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....

Mapping the American Dream

The chapter begins by describing the landscape of the Inland Empire and by examining the role that it has played as a development region for metropolitan Los Angeles. It also shows how the Kaiser mill contributed to the territorialization of new racial and class relations that shaped the region’s politics long after the mill had succumbed to global restructuring. Inland California provides an example of what happened to suburbs in the United States during the transition from a postwar Keynesian spatial order to one based on flexible accumulation. This includes a series of racial migrations, from white migrants during the postwar period to Latinx migrants during the 1990s and 2000s. Chapter 7 includes an account of the sometimes-violent tension that gripped the region’s politics during the transition from a mostly white to a mostly Latinx population.