Red Dust: Migration and Labor as Seismic Fractures to the Anthropocene

Abstract

Red DustMigration and Labor as Seismic Fractures to the Anthropocene Nancy Pérez (bio) Here they will be happy, he thought as he grabbed another handful of red earth. Hundreds of people fell from his hand. —Alejandro Morales, The Brick People Dust crosses the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the earth and the sky, the inside and the outside, you and the world . . . what does it smuggle in each of these crossings? —Michael Marder, Dust I arrive at this essay through the story of my family. I spent much of my childhood visiting my tía Hermelinda who rented a unit tucked between a strip of apartment complexes on Greenwood Avenue, a heavily trafficked main street in southeast Montebello once considered the industrial heart of the Western United States. The sounds that would filter into her home reflected the busy, dusty surrounding landscape—a nearby railroad ran adjacent to Telegraph Road where trains regularly announced their way through a web of distribution warehouses, a Home Depot, and a large cluster of truck-driving businesses where we could see drivers being dropped off by loved ones, or sitting on the curb having lunch. My aunt’s home always felt busy, not just because of the nearby machinery but because it was also frequented by neighbors, friends, and family who visited to catch up or buy food she would vend on the weekends. As a ritual, every Sunday we would always gather on the back steps of her home after dinner and listen to my mother and aunt share stories of their lives in Mexico while children played on the [End Page 14] long narrow driveway that separated the apartments from the speeding engines nearby. My interactions in that space with my family were not that distant from the memories that Frank “Kiki” Baltazar shared of his time living in this same community in the mid-1900s. In his blog, he writes, “One memory that comes to life when I close my eyes is when we had retired for the night, I would be lying in bed in my dark bedroom listening to the big rigs as they roared up and down Telegraph Road. Will never forget those months we lived in ‘El Rancho.’”1 It wasn’t a surprise, then, that when my aunt received an eviction notice in 2016, a major whirlwind of events began. The sights and sounds of Telegraph Road would stir memory across the boundaries of space and time, generating a multilayered communal history. In that moment, I had not known who Kiki was, or that the community that my aunt was forced to leave behind had formerly been called Simons. As a way to process the displacement in my family, I turned to writing. It was that journey that led me to obsessively research the Indigenous history of that land, of the violent dispossession of the Tongva-Gabrielino people, of Mexican land grants that gave it the name of Rancho Laguna. I learned that it was later called Simons (after the Simons brothers) who owned Simons Brickyard No. 3, considered one of the largest brickmaking companies in the nation at its peak in the early 1900s. At the time, brick was seemingly destined to replace adobe and was considered the more “progressive” building material for the construction of a “modern Los Angeles.”2 In response to this high demand of building material, the Simons brothers recruited an overwhelmingly Mexican labor force and created a company town that housed the brickworkers and their families. The fundamental plan was to sustain operations nonstop with a labor force that would keep the company booming for a very long time. Incentives were given to families who had more children. The LA Times admiringly called it the “model industrial town,” but according to historian William F. Deverell, “Simons was different, an industrial village that put home right up against work. All beneath the authoritative gaze of a company and a patriarch with the same name, segregated by ethnicity and geography.”3 When Walter Simons grabbed “another handful of red earth,” as Morales wrote in The Brick People, the “hundreds of people that fell from...