Inland Shift

Abstract

This book uses Southern California to explore a series of questions about the relationship between globalization, race, space, and class. It begins with an analysis of how growing consumer demand, innovative retail business practices, and the infrastructure required to support global commodity chains made Southern California into the largest trade gateway in the United States. Warehouse work and the contentious spatial politics of inland Southern California’s logistic landscape provide the 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. While global logistics innovations provided the impetus for capital and the state to transform Southern California’s economy, it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups, who argued that commodity distribution exposed them to economic and environmental precarity. How people gave meaning to space and mobilized them to contest logistics space is at the crux of this project. The book is divided into three parts. The first part provides an introduction into the spatial politics of Southern California’s logistics regime by showing how the forces of global economic restructuring after the 1980s intersected with regional entrepreneurial actors to produce Los Angeles and inland Southern California as a space for logistics. I argue that logistics represents a major rearticulation of modern capitalist space. Part 2 examines how the flexible production and distribution systems that were critical to the expansion of global capitalism during the neoliberal age were responsible for creating social and economic precarity for logistics workers, many of whom were undocumented. The final part of the book shows how regional development policies and global restructuring combined with demographic change to reterritorialize Southern California’s geographies of race and class. The book concludes by showing how inland Southern California became a key site for the production of new Latinx geographies.