When Mike Davis thought about California, he thought about concrete. In 1998, the state’s most famous radical not named Angela took the stage at the founding conference of Critical Resistance, the Los Angeles prison abolition organization, and held up a hunk of his driveway. To a kid in the 1950s, “this is what the California Dream was made of,” Davis regaled the audience. In those days, concrete embodied the postwar promise of liberal capitalism: “great dams,” good union jobs, and tuition-free colleges. Now, Davis looked at his prop and saw “something rather sinister.” Concrete meant the prison-industrial complex—and the life-affirming investments that mass incarceration had crowded out. “Each of those prisons,” lamented Davis, “is a school or a hospital that’ll never be built.”
If public works are the material expression of political priorities, then we can learn a lot about a place from what gets built. Davis’s focus was on prisons, as the antithesis of the colorblind “California Dream” he grew up on in Fontana, a steel town fifty miles east of Los Angeles. But follow the concrete into another outlying region, and the relationship between race, infrastructure, and abandonment becomes even more tangible.
Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating after the election of Tom Bradley in 1973, the City of Los Angeles transformed its port from a lowly backwater into the nation’s “gateway to the Pacific Rim.” The San Pedro Bay Port Complex—an amalgamation of the facilities in L.A. and neighboring Long Beach—is today the busiest port in the Western hemisphere. Its growth stands as a triumph of political imagination, made possible by concrete and other raw materials. In the port’s shadow, however, live some of L.A.’s poorest and most marginalized communities. Places like the aptly named Harbor Gateway: a thin ribbon that links inland Los Angeles to the harbor region to the south. What might this area—the gateway to the gateway to the world—teach us about the struggle against inequality under global urban capitalism?
L.A.’s port was not always so central to the city’s economy and self-image. Its turbocharged expansion under Tom Bradley was part of the mayor’s larger project to make Los Angeles a “world city”—a powerhouse of global capitalism. Bradley’s L.A. sat at the vanguard of what liberal technophiles called the “New Economy”: a growth machine organized around finance, high-tech, and logistics, unlike the industrial factories of the Northeast and Midwest. The rising cohort of New Democrats, which included Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and California governor Jerry Brown, saw the financial sector and Silicon Valley as potential sources of inclusive economic development, as historian Lily Geismer documents in Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.