City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Los Angeles’ reputation as the capitalist land of dream fulfillment is a crucial part of its appeal. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, WASPs such as Lummis, saw Los Angeles as a place to “change his fortune and improve his health” (24). He promoted the sunlit, orange-grove filled paradise of Southern California as a utopia where privileged WASP Americans could make a new start, away from the impoverished Catholics and Jews who had emigrated to the East Coast. Although Southern California was a place of Spanish names, Boosters such as Lummis saw the old Spanish Missions as an element of picturesque romanticism that could be a form of “capital” (24) in themselves, as they provided a Mediterranean atmosphere that he thought would “reinvigorate the racial energies of the Anglo-Saxons” (27). As late as the 1930s, Davis considers that “the mission aura of ‘history and romance’ was rated as an even more important attraction in selling Southern California than weather or movie-industry glamour” (27). The California dream was therefore sold through “real-estate capitalism” and “culminating speculation,” as people flocked West to buy their share in it (25). However, as Los Angeles became a metropolis populated by strata of people, middle-class WASPs began to commune and adopt a “slow-growth movement” to “challenge the most powerful economic interest in California today: the land development industry” (156). Banding together to preserve their white, privileged communities, which still retained elements of the orange-grove Southern Californian idyll, the slow-growers moved to incorporate their parts of the city and pass legislation that excluded low earners.

The darker side of the WASP Southern Californian ideal was its racial and class bias, which contributed to the increased wealth-gap between rich and poor, and the subsequent entrapment of low earners in poverty. Still, the excluded remain aware of the Southern California dream and strive to participate in any way they can. For example, young African-American men, who join drug- and death-dealing gangs because other lucrative employment opportunities are denied them, seek the symbols of Southern Californian success. Like the incorporated WASPs, the Crips and the Bloods exist within a similar close-knit community and enjoy “total solidarity” and a sense of security within their gangs (315). The status symbols they aspire to are less orange-grove real estate than being “decked out in Gucci T-shirts and expensive Nike airshoes” and driving BMWs (315). Interestingly, the WASP dream of real-estate capital aligns with a contained lifestyle that is based around building and establishing, whereas the gang member prefers his capital to be something that can be flaunted on the street and assist him with his movements through different communities.

Another dark side of the Southern California Boosterism dream is epitomized in the noir movement, which began around the Depression; it was a cultural critique of “the bloated image of Southern California as the golden land of opportunity and the fresh start” (38). Noir books and films showed scenes of “epic dereliction” in the business district of Los Angeles’ Downtown (41). Davis shows how noir’s capitalist wastelands found a real-life parallel in the town of Fontana, which was itself a relic of Kaiser Steelworks’ rise and fall. Fontana is both heavily in debt and irrevocably polluted from the former steelworks. Fontana looks like a town decimated by its own homegrown destructor, which shows not only the workings of karma, but that unchecked, the Angelino capitalist dream destroys the prosperity it has sought to build. Those charged with repairing the damage and abiding the ugliness of a wrecked industrial landscape are not the visionary capitalist investors, but Fontana’s working-class residents who find themselves unable to escape.