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South Central Farmers and Shadow Hills Homeowners: Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles

Laura R. Barraclough

To cite this article: Laura R. Barraclough (2009) South Central Farmers and Shadow Hills Homeowners: Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles , The Professional Geographer, 61:2, 164-186, DOI: 10.1080/00330120902735767

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00330120902735767

Published online: 09 Apr 2009.

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Download by: [California State University Northridge] Date: 25 January 2016, At: 22:54 South Central Farmers and Shadow Hills Homeowners: Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles∗

Laura R. Barraclough Kalamazoo College

This article draws from the recent relational turn in geography to develop a model of relational racialization. It argues that racism functions through the legal and discursive production of linked, interdependent, and unequal places. By comparing two social movements in Los Angeles, the South Central Farmers and the Shadow Hills homeowners, I examine two spatial discourses through which race is relationally reproduced: unequal abilities to mobilize the entitlements of “property rights” and unequal claims to represent hegemonic forms of local heritage. When materialized and naturalized in land use policy, these discourses re-create racial disparities in wealth and poverty and reproduce the qualitative nature of the physical places on which racism depends. Key Words: heritage, Los Angeles, property, race, relational space.

Con base en el reciente giro relacional en geografıa,´ este artıculo´ desarrolla un modelo de racializacion´ relacional. Se arguye que el racismo funciona a traves´ de la produccion´ legal y discursiva de lugares entrelazados, interdependientes y desiguales. Comparando dos movimientos sociales de Los Angeles,´ el de los agricultores South Central y el de los propietarios de vivienda de Shadow Hill, examino dos discursos espaciales, mediante los cuales la raza es reproducida relacionalmente: habilidades dispares para movilizar la titularidad de “derechos de propiedad” y pretensiones desiguales para representar formas hegemonicas´ de herencia local. Cuando estos discursos se materializan y naturalizan en polıticas´ de usos del suelo recrean disparidades raciales en terminos´ de riqueza y pobreza, y reproducen la naturaleza cualitativa de los lugares fısicos´ en los cuales se apoya el racismo. Palabras clave: herencia, Los Angeles,´ propiedad, raza, espacio relacional.

n the evening of 13 July 2006, two very the fourteen-acre community garden they had O different groups of activists in Los Ange- been working for over a decade. The city had les mobilized to protect their interests in agri- initially acquired the land by eminent domain culture, open space, sense of community, and in 1985 for a trash incinerator, but abandoned economic security. At the corner of 41st and its plans following public protest by the Con-

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 Alameda Streets in the southern part of the city, cerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles the South Central Farmers and their supporters (www.ccscla.org). After the Los Angeles upris- staged a candlelight vigil to protest their evic- ings in 1992, the site was contracted to the Los tion by Los Angeles police on behalf of the site’s Angeles Regional Food Bank, which operated legal owner, developer Ralph Horowitz, from the land as a community garden divided into

∗ The author thanks Laura Pulido, Don Mitchell, and the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

The Professional Geographer, 61(2) 2009, pages 164–186 C Copyright 2009 by Association of American Geographers. Initial submission, May 2007; revised submission, March 2008; final acceptance, May 2008. Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 165

Figure 1 Aerial view of the South Central Farm in May 2006, prior to its demolition. Source: Google Earth, created by author.

plots farmed by more than 350 families (South policy took place in the horse-keeping commu- Central Farmers Feeding Families 2006). Dur- nity of Shadow Hills, in the north end of the ing its operation, the South Central Farm was San Fernando Valley approximately 35 miles believed to be the largest urban garden in the from the South Central Farm (see Figure 4). United States. Its farmers were mostly Latino Shadow Hills is one of only four neighborhoods immigrants, many from indigenous communi- within city limits where horses can be legally ties in Mexico and Central America. Access stabled on individual properties. City Council- to the land enabled these families to provide woman Wendy Greuel, who has represented food for their families, supplementing poverty the area since 2002, called the meeting with wages, and to continue indigenous and holis- her constituents to discuss a motion she had tic health care practices, particularly important recently presented to the council, which pro- because many lack health insurance. In a part posed increasing the minimum lot size for all of the city where open space and parks are in future development from the existing designa- short supply, the South Central Farm also of- tion of 20,000 square feet (approximately one- Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 fered a communal green space and a safe place half acre) to 40,000 square feet (almost one acre; for children to play (F. Flores, personal com- Los Angeles City Planning Department 2002). munication, 2 April 2006). Yet the farmers held According to those who support the motion, no legal title to the land, forcing them into con- the increased lot size is necessary to preserve the stant battles to retain their rights to use it.1 community’s semirural, semiagricultural land- Although their lawyers have filed yet another scape and lifestyle and to ensure that all future appeal, the future of the South Central Farm- residential subdivisions enable homeowners to ers is uncertain (see Figures 1–3). keep horses in their backyards. The most re- On the same evening in mid-June, a much cent residential subdivision, built in 2003, had less publicized mobilization around land use complied with the existing minimum lot size, 166 Volume 61, Number 2, May 2009 Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016

Figure 2 Poster on the fence surrounding the South Central Farm. Source: Photo by Jonathan McIntosh, 2006; used through Wikimedia Creative Commons license available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/South Central Farm. Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 167

Figure 3 The South Central Farm in fall 2007, slightly more than one year after the farmers’ eviction. Source: Photograph by Wendy Cheng, used with permission.

but because of the neighborhood’s hilly topog- Central Farmers and the Shadow Hills home- raphy, many of the lots did not have enough owners are perceived as wholly unrelated; and flat space to actually keep horses. Unlike the that the activism of relatively wealthy, powerful South Central Farmers, however, the vast ma- white homeowners is so entrenched and nor- jority of Shadow Hills homeowners are not de- malized as to be decidedly un-newsworthy. In pendent on the productive use of land for the this article, I argue that we must see these strug- survival of their families. Although some fami- gles over land and power as fundamentally and lies keep chickens, pigs, goats, and other small inherently linked. Drawing on insights from livestock on their properties, they do so pri- the recent “relational turn” in geography (e.g., marily as pets for their children or to maintain Boggs and Rantisi 2003; Massey 2004b), I de- the feel and aesthetic of a “rural lifestyle” (see velop a model of relational racialization, with Figures 5–7). Shadow Hills is a majority-white, particular attention to how normative mod- upper middle-class community, and most resi- els of land use planning reproduce patterns of dents are professionals or small business own- racialized wealth and poverty. The protection

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 ers who enjoy their neighborhood because of of privilege in one community, Shadow Hills, its quiet, “rural” atmosphere within commut- demands the concentration of poverty and pol- ing distance of the city. lution in another, South Central. Together, the Whereas the South Central Farmers’s case spatial and economic forces that produce these was covered extensively in the local media and two distinct kinds of places coalesce toward the attracted significant celebrity support and polit- reproduction of racial categories, defining what ical commentary, Greuel’s meeting in Shadow it means to be white, black, or Latino and to Hills and her motion to the City Council were be economically secure or poor in contempo- never reported in the press. This divergent cov- rary Los Angeles. Clearly, there is much more erage reflects the reality that, in the media and involved here than the fight over a commu- popular imagination, the struggles of the South nity garden or creating lots big enough to keep 168 Volume 61, Number 2, May 2009 Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016

Figure 4 Map of Los Angeles County, highlighting Shadow Hills and the site of the South Central Farm in relationship to downtown Los Angeles. Cartography by Mike Pesses, used with permission. Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 169

Figure 5 Dirt roads are an important part of the “rural” landscape and horse-keeping lifestyle in Shadow Hills, not only for their aesthetic value but also because they are softer on horses’ hooves and slow down automobile traffic, creating safer conditions for riders on horseback. Source: Photo by author, 2006.

horses. The struggles of these communities are torial division of continuous social space into dialectically linked in a regional battle over the dichotomous ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ facilitates social production of space, class, and race. the polarization of a continuous range of col- Race is an inherently relational and ors (browns, beiges, tans, and pinks) into ‘white ongoing social construction, in that a racial and black’ and hence the freezing of identities identity category only has meaning through into ‘we’ and ‘they”’ (7). By extension, systems constant rearticulation of what it is not; that of racial categorization are produced through is, “the other,” which varies with time and the ongoing reproduction of racialized places place. As Doreen Massey explains, “Identities that are related to—indeed, dependent on—

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 are forged in and through relations (which in- each other. clude non-relations, absences, and hiatuses). In con- A primary implication of understanding sequence they are not rooted or static, but racialization relationally is that the production mutable ongoing productions” (2004a, 5, em- of a specific place does not just shape the ex- phasis added). Moreover, race is produced at perience of the racial group with which it is least in part through the construction of places associated but instead participates in the repro- that shape the life chances and experiences duction of the entire material and ideological of those who occupy and use them, either by system of racisms, past and present. This choice or by force. David Delaney (2002) sug- means, for example, that what appears to be gests that “Space [is] an enabling technology a “black place” is thoroughly marked by his- through which race is produced ...the terri- torical and contemporary structures of white 170 Volume 61, Number 2, May 2009

Figure 6 This backyard is typical of properties in Shadow Hills, most of which have a barn or pipe corrals in which to keep their horses. Source: Photo by author, 2006.

supremacy such as restrictive covenants, redlin- of relational racialization because they do not ing, mob violence, and institutionalized envi- merely reflect, but rather actively reproduce, ronmental racism. Simultaneously, in the same systems of categorical racial inequality (De- way that literary scholar Toni Morrison (1992) laney 2002; Blomley 2003). Apparently mun- argues for an Africanist presence in (white) dane land use practices such as zoning, real “American literature,” “white places” (although estate development, and mortgage lending ac- they are rarely marked as such) are fully in- tively construct racial categories by produc- scribed by, or perhaps haunted by, the racial ing unequal places, and systems of places, into “other” through the constant practices of ex- which phenotypically distinct bodies are sorted clusion on which they depend for their lit- (see Schein 1997). The landscape itself is a par-

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 eral and symbolic value (Kobayashi and Peake ticularly powerful agent of racialization because 2000; Pulido 2000; Duncan and Duncan 2001, it disguises the historical dependencies and ex- 2004; Hoelscher 2006; Schein 2006; Vander- ploitations through which it and its constituent beck 2006). Every landscape is thus marked social relations have been produced (Mitchell by, and offers clues to, not just its own history 1996; Schein 2006). As Richard Schein has but also, and more profoundly, the layered ac- recently argued, “The cultural landscape is es- cumulation of historical racial formations that pecially adept at masking its complicity with are simultaneously local, regional, national, and processes of racialization when it is enacted as global. part of other, seemingly benign narratives of Legal systems such as land use planning American life,” such as historic preservation, play a distinctive geographical role in processes “which is usually invoked as something beyond Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 171

Figure 7 Although most lots in Shadow Hills are approximately one-half acre, there are still a good number of very large lots, such as the one pictured here, of ten up to seventy acres in size. Source: Photo by author, 2006.

assail, as a cultural value that is not somehow structed human differences that we recognize tainted by the political” (2006, 10). Through as “race.” The racialization of space achieves such practices resources are channeled to some its own momentum, setting the geographic neighborhoods, enabling the accumulation of framework within which activists struggle to wealth and power, even as environmental haz- maintain or improve their social status and ards and unwanted land uses are channeled to quality of life. As a result, white people can others, propelling the concentration of poverty, mobilize presumably nonracial spatial values poor health, and other dangers. Land use plan- easily and credibly to reproduce both the sys- ning thus constitutes an act of systemic racism tems of racialized place making and the actual

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 or, in one formulation, “the state-sanctioned qualities of the places themselves. Non-white and/or extra-legal production and exploitation people (or those occupying places racialized of group differentiated vulnerabilities to pre- as non-white) are hard-pressed to mobilize mature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected such spatial values and discourses, given that political geographies” (Gilmore 2002, 261, em- concepts like property rights or local heritage phasis added). have been given value precisely through their In short, normative state-sanctioned spatial exclusion. practices, and the qualitative nature of the Although all racialized places are produced places that they produce, are a primary force through some variant on relationships and that collectively give meaning—specifically, a practices of dependency, exploitation, and ex- spatial referent—to the systems of socially con- clusion, our task is to pinpoint what the specific 172 Volume 61, Number 2, May 2009

spatial relationships are and how they work in geles was 71 percent white, 15 percent Latino, a given time and place. In Los Angeles under 11 percent black, and 2.5 percent Asian Amer- American rule (as in many, if not most U.S. ican. By 2000, the white population had de- cities), exclusionary housing practices, the lo- clined to 31 percent, the Latino population cational decisions of the state and business with increased to 37 percent of the city’s popula- regard to industry and toxic waste, and eco- tion, and the Asian American population had nomic redevelopment strategies—to name just grown to 11 percent; the black population re- a few spatial practices—have produced places of mained stable (Grant 2000, 51–52). Growing racialized economic privilege that are not only diversity has not been accompanied by equality; linked to but, more important, fundamentally quite the opposite has been the case. Despite dependent on the (re)production of places of their demographic decline, white workers, and despair and racialized poverty. In recent years, especially white men, remain overrepresented profound economic restructuring has increased in professional and technical services, partic- the extent and concentration of poverty in Los ularly finance, insurance, and real estate, as Angeles and the spatial, economic, and racial well as entertainment (Grant 2000). On the gaps between rich and poor. Unlike other ur- other hand, African Americans have been dis- ban regions that have suffered from wholesale proportionately affected by the loss of durable deindustrialization and high unemployment, manufacturing jobs, suffering higher rates of Los Angeles has retained a significant manu- unemployment. Latinos have disproportion- facturing base. However, the quality of those ately filled the new manufacturing and low-skill jobs has changed from middle-wage, union- service jobs and therefore are overrepresented ized manufacturing of defense and durable con- among the working poor (Grant 2000; LAANE sumer goods to low-wage, nonunionized work 2000). Median incomes for African American in manufacturing and assembly, particularly of and Latino households in Los Angeles trail clothing, furniture, and electronics (Bobo et al. those of whites by nearly $25,000 (Center on 2000; Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000). Cou- Urban and Metropolitan Policy 2003, 58). In pled with extensive low-wage service sector 2000, although Latinos made up only 40 per- work, these transformations have earned Los cent of the city’s workforce, they accounted for Angeles a dubious distinction as capital of the 73 percent of the working poor (LAANE 2000, working poor. Although overall employment vii). Racialized economic divisions are literally increased by 2 percent in the 1990s, working mapped onto social space in Los Angeles, which poverty increased by 34 percent (Los Angeles was more segregated between whites and non- Alliance for a New Economy [LAANE] 2000, whites in 2000 than in 1940 (Ethington, Frey, v), and the overall poverty population increased and Myers 2001). by one-third. As poverty has grown, it has The contrast between the South Central also become more spatially concentrated. The Farmers and the Shadow Hills homeowners proportion of all neighborhoods classified as clearly illustrates the dramatic and increasing “extremely poor” (with more than 40 percent of gaps between rich and poor, white and non- residents in poverty) increased by over 80 per- white, citizen and immigrant, and homeowner cent (Strait 2006). As a result, according to 2000 and tenant that characterize life in contempo- census data, Los Angeles is the most economi- rary Los Angeles. Shadow Hills is a dispro- cally segregated region in the country—only 28 portionately white place, with a non-Hispanic

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 percent of its neighborhoods are middle-class white population of nearly 80 percent in a or mixed-income (Cleeland 2006; see also Bobo county where whites are just 29 percent of et al. 2000, 18). the total population. By contrast, the census Moreover, these economic and spatial trans- tract surrounding the South Central Farm was formations are distinctly racialized. Convulsive 88 percent Latino, 11 percent African Amer- bouts of deindustrialization and reindustrializa- ican, and just 1 percent white. Correspond- tion have coincided with (and been propelled ingly, Shadow Hills has a significantly higher by) substantial increases in the size of the Asian median household income, much lower rates American and Latino populations alongside a of poverty, and higher rates of homeowner- similarly large and rapid decline in the non- ship than both Los Angeles County and South Hispanic white population. In 1970, Los An- Central (see Table 1 and Figures 8 through Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 173

Table 1 Indicators of economic security: South Central Farm and Shadow Hills census tracts relative to Los Angeles County

South Central Farm Shadow Hills Los Angeles census tract census tract County

Median household income (in U.S. dollars) 21,886 73,884 37,388 Percentage of families living in poverty 39.8 4.4 17.8 Percentage of residents who are homeowners 35.0 86.0 38.7

10).2 Shadow Hills residents are also overrep- research from the Shadow Hills and South resented in high-wage service jobs and enjoy Central Farmers’ struggles, I consider how his- much higher educational levels. tory repeats itself through the reproduction Using the South Central Farmers and the of relationally racialized landscapes. There are Shadow Hills homeowners as a comparative certainly many factors worth exploring,3 but in case study, in the remainder of this article the interests of space I examine the two pro- I examine in detail how the racial dynam- cesses that have been most significant to the ics of wealth and poverty in Los Angeles are struggles of the South Central Farmers and reproduced through normative acts of land use the Shadow Hills homeowners: (1) the con- planning and racialized spatial discourses. I cept of property rights, long a racially biased first outline the historical practices that pro- concept but perceived, constructed, and pro- duced South Central Los Angeles and the sub- tected as neutral by the local state; and (2) un- urban San Fernando Valley (with a focus on equal abilities among activists to claim that they the case study community of Shadow Hills) represent the “heritage” of their neighborhood relative to each other as constitutive places or the city as a whole, despite the legacies of within the city’s racialized economic system. racially exclusionary access to the spaces where Then, drawing on archival and ethnographic “heritage” was historically cultivated.4 Taken together, these two struggles illustrate that racism functions through the spatial organiza- tion of linked, interdependent places that sys- tematically reproduce relational privileges and disadvantages. Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016

Figure 8 Median household income of South Figure 9 Rates of poverty in South Central Los Central Los Angeles and Shadow Hills, relative to Angeles and Shadow Hills, relative to Los Ange- Los Angeles County, in 2000. Source: U.S. Census les County, in 2000. Source: U.S. Census Bureau Bureau (2000, Summary File 4). (2000, Summary File 4). 174 Volume 61, Number 2, May 2009

Figure 10 Rates of homeownership in South Central Los Angeles and Shadow Hills, relative to Los Angeles County, in 2000. Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2000).

“Ghettos” and Gentleman Farms: town. Their vision was more or less successful. Histories of Relational Racialization Sprawling industrial suburbs sprung up around in Los Angeles the county in places like Southgate, Torrance, and Bell, making Los Angeles simultaneously Urban geographers and historians have made an industrial giant and a “city of homes” (see much of Southern California’s sprawling, Fulton 1997; Nicolaides 2002). polynucleated urban development (e.g., Scott This was also a deeply racialized vision. City and Soja 1996; Dear 2000, 2001; Hise 2001), boosters and planners imagined Southern Cal- yet it is important to emphasize that the city’s ifornia as a “white spot,” the homeland for dispersed geographic form was both cause and the progress of the Anglo-Saxon race, and product of its formative white supremacist ide- widespread homeownership was intended to lift ology, which intentionally produced segregated working-class whites into the ranks of the mid- and unequal places (e.g., Pulido 2000; De- dle class. Non-whites occupied a central yet verell 2004). At the turn of the twentieth cen- contradictory position within this vision, for tury, planners in Los Angeles advocated for the their labor was critical to the success of indus- creation of dispersed, self-contained industrial trial capitalism in Los Angeles but threatened zones surrounded by worker housing and so- to undermine the racialized tenets of the city’s cial and recreational facilities as a way to lure self-conception (Wild 2005). Formal and in- capital investment. They hoped that such land formal mechanisms of segregation were thus

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 use patterns would avoid the haphazard devel- crucial to the production of the sprawling ge- opment of East Coast cities as well as the social ography of white privilege in Los Angeles and and cultural chaos (especially contact between to the maintenance of the city’s racially exclu- people from different racial groups and gen- sionary image, while still allowing its economy ders) that centralization and high density were to be powered forward by non-white and immi- thought to induce (Hise 2001). Working-class grant labor. Before World War II, South Cen- homeownership in low-density neighborhoods, tral was the largest of several segregated black they argued, would reduce labor discontent districts in Los Angeles, consisting primarily of and encourage greater economic productivity, middle-class homeowners (Sides 2003). Dur- contributing to the success of industrial cap- ing the war, as black migrants from the U.S. italism in what was still a sleepy agricultural Midwest and South came to work in the city’s Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 175

many defense plants, these neighborhoods be- way to, and have actively shaped, the contem- came increasingly crowded because restrictive porary concentration of poverty among diverse covenants prevented the new, largely working- immigrants and African Americans in the dis- class migrants from finding housing anywhere proportionately polluted, underinvested, and else. Persistent civic neglect, compounded by impoverished neighborhoods of South Central the postwar outmigration of much of the com- Los Angeles. munity’s middle and upper middle classes and In stark contrast, Los Angeles’s suburban val- of middle-class industrial work, increased the leys were historically envisioned and planned isolation of the city’s poor African Americans, as a collection of “little farms.” Boosters pro- erupting in the Watts uprisings of 1965. moted the idea that suburban farmers could In the ensuing decades, South Central’s his- profit from their investments in urban and in- toric zoning for industrial land uses, based dustrial growth in the manufacturing districts on its proximity to the central business dis- of South and Central Los Angeles while still trict and rail transportation, ensured that dur- enjoying the purported psychological benefits ing convulsive bouts of deindustrialization and of rural living on their suburban homesteads reindustrialization South Central retains a sig- (see McWilliams 1946; Starr 1985, Ch. 5; Gar- nificant manufacturing base even though, as al- cia 2001, Ch. 1). Concomitant with the dis- ready described, the qualitative nature of that enfranchisement of existing Mexican ranchos work has changed significantly (Bobo et al. through legal fraud and economic displace- 2000; Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000). Freight ment of the cattle-based economy (Almaguer rail lines along the Alameda corridor connect 1994; Pitt 1998), planners subdivided “little the port at Long Beach with the vast industrial farms” of one to ten acres where “gentleman districts in southeast L.A.—sometimes called farmers” grew citrus and other crops, not so the “hub cities” of Los Angeles—that produce, much for subsistence but to cultivate the re- assemble, and distribute manufactured goods to publican virtue promised by myths of yeoman global consumers. Simultaneously, South Cen- farming and to counteract the supposedly con- tral’s historic development as a working-class taminating vices of Los Angeles’s urban growth and largely African American area has made it industries and ethnic diversity. The Valley’s an attractive destination for new immigrants, suburban little farms were never intended for especially low-income Latinos, seeking afford- the city’s black, Latino, and Asian populations. able housing that has been artificially depressed Indeed, the suburbs depended on their exclu- in value by years of segregation and discrimi- sion. Non-whites were deliberately excluded natory lending practices. As a result, the neigh- from the ideals of suburban farming through borhoods of South Central Los Angeles are Alien Land Laws, which forbade land owner- home to both the manufacturing facilities of ship by “aliens ineligible for citizenship” (at global firms, who have been enticed by var- that time, Asian immigrants) and segregation of ious government incentives to locate there Mexican agricultural workers into colonias ad- (see Wilson 2006), and hundreds of thousands jacent to the groves (Garcia 2001). A host of of working-class, mostly non-white families other legal mechanisms sanctioned by the fed- struggling to eke out a living. Not surpris- eral government and common to other parts of ingly, South Central neighborhoods are among the country, such as restrictive covenants and the most polluted in the country (Pulido 2000; redlining, concentrated non-whites in the cen-

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 Huerta 2005), and residents, particularly chil- tral parts of the city, including South Central dren, have higher blood lead levels and suffer (Sides 2003; Wild 2005). disproportionately from asthma (Rothenberg The San Fernando Valley’s vast agricultural et al. 1996; Macy et al. 2001). The area has areas were ideal for residential subdivisions and also attracted a significant number of Korean suburbanizing industry during and after World immigrants who have opened shops and liquor War II, when Los Angeles experienced its most stores, filling a void left by corporate neglect explosive economic and demographic growth. of the area but also provoking racial and eco- Beginning in the 1950s, key industries, particu- nomic tensions, most notably evidenced by the larly aerospace, located on the suburban fringe uprisings of 1992. Historic processes of segre- in search of larger, cheaper lots and to escape gation and industrial zoning have thus given congestion. White workers followed industry, 176 Volume 61, Number 2, May 2009

creating a residential construction boom en- 20,000 square feet; effectively, then, because abled by Federal Housing Administration and the whole neighborhood would become part of Veterans Administration home loans as well as the horse district, all new lots would be just the economic exigencies of the Cold War (Scott less than one-half acre (Los Angeles City Ordi- 1996; Pulido 2000; see also Jackson 1985). Yet, nance 122.934 1962). Ninety-eight percent of as in the semiagricultural past, new housing Shadow Hills residents signed the petition, and was almost exclusively reserved for white work- on 20 September 1962 the ordinance was ap- ers (Davis 1990, Ch. 3; Scott 1996). Davis proved by the City Council’s unanimous vote. A (1990, Ch. 3) has estimated that only 3 per- year later, when the City Planning Commission cent of the housing produced in Southern Cal- was drafting its master plan, Shadow Hills was ifornia during this period was made available the first and only horse-keeping district in the to non-whites. New tracts of suburban homes city. First implemented in 1968 and still on the soon produced a powerful political force in books, the Shadow Hills Community Plan vows Los Angeles—suburban homeowner associa- to protect the area’s vaguely defined “rural at- tions, often set up by real estate developers— mosphere” and retains the area’s single-family who took as their primary charge the protection residential zoning and minimum lot sizes (Los of “property rights” and property values as Los Angeles City Planning Department 1991, iv). Angeles County became more racially diverse The plan made no provision for industrial zon- (Davis 1990, Ch. 3). ing, in part because homeowner activists argued Shadow Hills, located in the northeast end that there was sufficient industrially zoned land of the San Fernando Valley, exemplifies the in nearby Sun Valley and San Fernando—the Valley’s historic trends. In 1907, the Cal- historic Mexican colonias in the San Fernando ifornia Home Extension Association subdi- Valley—and in Pacoima, the only neighbor- vided, promoted, and sold Shadow Hills as a hood in the San Fernando Valley with a black community of “Little Farms Near the City,” population larger than 1 percent (Meeker 1964; and for the first half of the twentieth cen- Roderick 2001). Thus, it was only by inten- tury, “gentleman farmers”—middle-class white tionally relegating industrial uses to the Val- Midwestern migrants who worked in real es- ley’s historically non-white neighborhoods that tate, publishing, or contracting but enjoyed Shadow Hills and adjacent white communities Shadow Hills’ rural atmosphere—dominated could preserve their single-family, low-density the community. A group of lawyers and landscape and rural lifestyle—a set of unequal engineers formed the Shadow Hills Civic relations to which city planners have repeatedly Association (later the Shadow Hills Prop- committed themselves in the decennial reviews erty Owners Association) in 1952 to advo- of the community plan. cate for protection of the community’s rural Since the implementation of the horse dis- lifestyle and, implicitly, its racial and economic trict and the community plan in the mid-1960s, homogeneity. Shadow Hills homeowners, their elected of- In 1962, fearful that the rapid subdivision ficials, and city planners have relentlessly of former agricultural tracts elsewhere in the modified and tightened the neighborhood’s San Fernando Valley would soon besiege their land use policies. Table 2 illustrates the most neighborhood, Shadow Hills activists success- important of these amendments and revisions. fully pushed the City Council to establish Although intended to preserve possibilities for

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 “horse-raising” zones in neighborhoods with horse-keeping, these policies effectively restrict at least 1 million square feet of agricultural new development and increase the property zoning and where 90 percent of property own- values of those who already live there, as many ers voted for it (e.g., Butts 1961). Because of as half of whom to this day do not own horses the requirement for prior agricultural designa- but simply enjoy the “rural atmosphere.” tion, urban and industrial neighborhoods like Studies show that the local state’s protection of South Central, where people of color were permanent open space significantly raises prop- overwhelmingly concentrated, simply were not erty values (e.g., Irwin 2002). Therefore, the eligible to create horse-keeping districts. In state’s continued willingness to preserve large the new horse-raising zones, horses could only lots in Shadow Hills directly contributes to be kept on lots with a minimum acreage of the ever-increasing economic privilege of this Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 177

Table 2 Summary of major land use policies and minor amendments implemented in Shadow Hills since 1963

1963 “Horse-raising” district implemented in Shadow Hills 1965 City Planning Commission adopts “Open Space Maintenance District” in mountainous areas of the city, including Shadow Hills, to reduce density 1968 Sunland Tujunga–Lake View Terrace–Shadow Hills–La Tuna Canyon Community Plan Adopted; advocates for protection of “rural” atmosphere 1972 Special City Services Tax of $10 annually is imposed on Shadow Hills Horse-Keeping District to pay for trail maintenance and special services; on protest by horse owners, the fee is reduced to $6 1973 Horse-Keeping Ordinance amended to allow property owners to keep up to two additional horses (such as those belonging to a friend or neighbor) on their lots, provided there is no more than one horse per 5,000 square feet 1973 City Council reduces agreement needed to create a new “horse-keeping” district from 90 percent to 75 percent 1978 Shadow Hills horse-keeping district is expanded by 315 acres 1982 City Council passes “landmark” ordinance requiring developers to obtain special permits before constructing next to a horse-owner’s property 1990 City Planning Commission amends Shadow Hills Community Plan to decrease density in hillside areas from “extremely low” (one home per 20,000 square feet) to “minimum” (one home per 40,000 square feet) 1997 City Planning Commission amends Shadow Hills Community Plan to cluster development in flat areas 2002 Scenic Corridor Plan passes; severely restricts development within a designated “scenic corridor” that includes Shadow Hills hillsides 2006 Councilmember Wendy Greuel introduces motion to L.A. City Council to study possibility of increasing minimum lot size to 40,000 square feet on all future development

historically exclusive community. Effectively, Angeles and Shadow Hills as illustrative case each new or revised land use policy reproduces studies, I focus here on unequal abilities to the multiple benefits associated with white claim the “rights” associated with property privilege (Pulido 2000) and channels home- ownership and the alleged need to protect equity-based wealth to those who can continue the city’s suburban semiagricultural heritage. to buy property in California’s bloated real These two processes illustrate the importance estate market.5 These privileged few include of relational geographies and invisibly racial- those who had earlier, racially exclusive access ized spatial values to the reproduction of racial- to the housing market and can convert capital ized wealth and poverty. gains into investment in new properties; those who have received large inheritances, often Racially Unequal Claims to Property based on the sale of property bought during Rights an earlier era; and those who occupy the upper stratum of the contemporary two-tier The success of the Shadow Hills homeowners service economy—all conditions dispropor- and the failure of the South Central Farmers tionately associated with the shrinking number to gain access to open space and its associated of white people in Los Angeles. As Shadow benefits both hinge on questions of property— Hills homeowners successfully resist unwanted who owns it, who can claim legitimate rights to developments, those projects are either sited it, and who can or cannot use it as a resource elsewhere—typically in lower income black for economic security. Land ownership is a crit-

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 and Latino communities with fewer political ical indicator of economic security, because it and economic resources—or scrapped alto- is the single largest dimension of most house- gether. Their activism thus directly affects the holds’ wealth portfolios (Oliver and Shapiro distribution of opportunities and resources not 1995), yet rates of property ownership among only in their neighborhood but throughout the Los Angeles’s racial groups are stunningly un- region. equal. In 2000, 51 percent of white households These deeply embedded, historic systems in Los Angeles were homeowners, whereas only of racialization are continuously reproduced 31 percent of black households and 27 percent through normative and purportedly neutral of Latino families owned their homes (Center systems of land use planning. Taking contem- on Urban and Metropolitan Policy 2003, 65). porary social movements in South Central Los Homeownership is positively correlated with 178 Volume 61, Number 2, May 2009

higher levels of education and higher incomes, border of Shadow Hills, as an example of the as well as U.S. citizenship, characteristics that changes she feared would destroy the area’s ru- are associated with native-born whites in con- ral atmosphere. She asked me rhetorically, temporary Los Angeles and disassociated with foreign-born Latinos (Painter 2000). Home- Why would they do that to somebody’s property owners tend to be more politically involved values? I mean, we’ve worked so hard to get ... in their neighborhoods and to be taken more whereweare whywouldtheydothat? seriously by local politicians. Historian Phil Ethington (2000) has also shown that white Similarly, in explaining to me why she op- homeowners in Los Angeles consistently own posed the same development, the owner of a the top quartile of home values, regardless of small Web development and digital photogra- where they are located, demonstrating that phy business claimed that as Americans, whiteness itself and the racial exclusivity as- sociated with white neighborhoods command It is a philosophy we struggle with. It is a Chris- higher property values. Therefore, property tian value to provide for the poor. But it is the American way of life to care about and protect rights are by no means racially neutral, hav- our property rights. And if you have worked re- ing been thoroughly shaped by the historical ally hard and made something of yourself, it is land use policies previously described. Yet they perfectly okay to want to spend your money on are largely regarded as such by the local state your horses. ...People who work their whole and by homeowners themselves, and the rights lives deserve to enjoy their wealth. of property owners are overwhelmingly privi- leged in the land use planning process. Embedded in these statements are the as- Shadow Hills homeowners successfully in- sumptions that poor people do not work hard voke their rights to the state’s protection of and thus are poor because they are lazy, and that their property values and their perceived enti- the poor do not deserve the same benefits and tlement to live in a “good” neighborhood free protections as do wealthy people, who have suc- from industrial development and high-density cessfully demonstrated their strong work ethic housing, both of which they associate with low- and deserve the protection of the state on that income communities of color. In voicing their basis. These are individualized, cultural inter- opposition to proposed developments, particu- pretations of disparate wealth and poverty that larly mixed-income or low-income residential ignore the institutional and systemic forces cre- projects, contemporary residents articulate a ating unequal life chances. meritocratic and “color-blind” belief that their Similar concerns and discourses emerged in current property values, and thus their indi- neighborhood protests against a proposed base- vidual wealth, are solely a result of their hard ball academy for Los Angeles youth proposed in work. They rarely acknowledge the exclusion- 2002 that would have been partially funded by ary housing policies and government-funded Major League Baseball. At a meeting to orga- programs and the generations of non-white nize a protest against the academy, many com- labor that have allowed them to accumulate plained that the facility would bring children to wealth based on their rather arbitrary racial the northeast San Fernando Valley from across categorization as white (McGirr 2001; Nico- the city, often referring to these children as laides 2002; Lassiter 2004). They typically react “at-risk youth.” Organizers encouraged resi-

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 defensively and with hostility to development dents to try to delay or prevent the project projects that are perceived to threaten the by resisting the requisite zoning change the values of their homes and neighborhoods. In project would entail and handed out a list of Shadow Hills, this threat was most often raised suggestions to help local residents write ef- by proposals for apartment buildings, which fective letters to local officials. Understand- many residents equated unequivocally with ing the exclusionary connotation of appeals to low-income housing. For example, during our property rights, the authors recommended that interview the past president of a local social or- activists instead articulate discourses of (pur- ganization referred to a mixed-income apart- portedly race-neutral) meritocracy and com- ment building proposed for the nearby neigh- munity character. One of the suggestions on borhood of Lake View Terrace, on the western the handout was: Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 179

We have to have reasons that they consider saying ‘Look, we are going to stay here’” (Ail- valid. If we simply state that we don’t want it worth 2004, B3). Defenders of Horowitz’s legal [the Baseball Academy] because there might be property rights likewise confirmed his right to crime or drive our property value down, they do whatever he wanted with the land. As Joe .... consider the arguments prejudiced Instead Hicks, former Executive Director of the Los of saying that the property [the Baseball Angeles Human Relations Commission during Academy] will drive down our property val- ues, emphasize that we have worked hard to get the Riordan administration, saw it: where we are. Use statements that talk about The fact is that it is his property, no matter “homeowner pride” and community identity. what these organizers say; the fact is that it is a Let them know that you moved to an area that valuable piece of land in a part of the city that promised to increase your standard of living is becoming increasingly more valuable. It is his where you could give back to and empower the property, he’s got a right to sit there on it and community. let weeds grow if he wants to. (KCRW 2006) Largely because of homeowner opposition, City officials, most of whom outwardly ex- neither the mixed-income housing project in pressed their support and compassion for the Lakeview Terrace nor the Major League Base- South Central Farmers, ultimately remained ball Academy was ever built. Potential working- committed to hegemonic conceptions of prop- class residents lost out on the possibility of more erty rights to justify the farmers’ eviction. affordable housing, and low-income youth lost Jan Perry, City Council representative for out on a potential recreational opportunity be- the South Central area, publicly lamented the cause of the political power of property owners destruction of the South Central Farm but as a constituency and discourses about property declared it a rather open-and-shut case of prop- rights. erty law, which she presented as neutral: The sanctity of property also held sway at the South Central Farm, where legal owner De verdad es una situacion´ muy triste. Los tri- Ralph Horowitz’s property rights ultimately bunales han determinado este tema de derechos trumped the rights of 350 families to feed them- de propiedad y los agentes del Sheriff del con- ´ selves. Contestations over property and owner- dado estan´ ejecutando esa orden judicial. Esto continua siendo un tema legal sobre la pro- ship were visible in the landscape of the South priedad privada y desalojos, sobre lo que no Central Farm itself. On the day after the evic- tenemos jurisdiccion.´ [It really is a very sad tion, La Opinion, the largest Spanish-language situation. The courts have settled this issue of newspaper in Los Angeles, reported that property rights and the county sheriff’s agents are executing that judicial order. This continues Los surcos de las hortilezas quedaron aplastados to be a legal issue about private property and por los rastros de llantas, y un nuevo cartel con la evictions, over which we have no jurisdiction.] leyenda “Propiedad privada, cerrado al publico”´ (Ortega 2006, 1) acompanaba a los que dejaron los campesinos con consignas como “Salven el huerto” y “La City officials adhered to and confirmed the tierra es de quien la trabaja.” [The grooves of political and especially racial neutrality of the the gardens were crushed by the traces of tires, ownership model, which “assumes a unitary, and a new poster with the proclamation “Pri- solitary, and identifiable owner, separated from vate property, closed to the public” accompa- nied those left by the farmers with claims like others by boundaries that protect him or her Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 “Save the garden” and “The land belongs to from nonowners and grant the owner the right whoever works it.”] (Ortega 2006, 1) to exclude” (Blomley 2003, 2). The South Central Farmers pursued two ba- Horowitz defended his property rights sic strategies to challenge dominant and invisi- through reference to his financial investment in bly racialized conceptions of property. On the the land, explaining to a reporter from the Los one hand, they worked through the courts to Angeles Times, “I’m paying the insurance, I’m challenge Horowitz’s legal claim to the prop- paying the taxes, I’m paying the mortgage pay- erty, focusing on the legal details of the specific ments” (Green 2004, 18). He went on to note parcel of land and repeatedly contesting the that “[This] is kind of like someone moving into terms of the sale through appeals. For example, your parent’s backyard and pitching a tent and attorney Dan Stormer argued that the city’s 180 Volume 61, Number 2, May 2009

sale of the land to Horowitz in 2003 for the to those who live and work on the land. Their same price which for they bought it in 1985— analysis was by necessity more structural and, just over $5 million dollars—constituted, in ef- indeed, more relational than the arguments ar- fect, an illegal gift of at least $10 million to a ticulated by the Shadow Hills homeowners, millionaire and major property owner. Simul- who were invested in denying the links between taneously, the farmers articulated an alternate their privileged neighborhood and the concen- vision of community ownership based on self- tration of poverty in South Central. determination and years of labor spent improv- ing the land, both at the farm itself and in the larger industrial districts of South Central Los Racially Unequal Claims to Heritage Angeles. Their arguments explicitly critiqued a model of property that generated tremendous Through its emphasis on protecting and cele- profits to outside investors and owners simply brating selective elements of history, concepts because they had invested money in the land of heritage are always prone to preserving the and possessed legal title. Instead, they argued unequal social relations of the past. Indeed, one that ownership accrues through both financial person’s concept of heritage may well be an- and symbolic investment, such as love for the other’s experience of exclusion, slavery, or dis- community and self-determination. According enfranchisement (Hoelscher 2006). Over the to lead organizer Rufina Juarez, last half-century, as homeowner activists in Shadow Hills have struggled to secure land use I think the importance is that over the last four- planning decisions that not only preserve but teen years it developed into what was the need actively create a rural landscape mediated by of the community. And it wasn’t like we said, the urban state, they rely on recurrent and fun- “Let’s write this program, let’s create 350 plants damental discourses about the valley’s semia- and everybody will grow traditional plants.” It gricultural past, absent any analysis of how that wasn’t like that. It was something that started past was implicated in the economic and racial from the very bottom, with families—without knowing that in a sense they were creating a segregation of Los Angeles and unequal accu- model of a project. (Juarez 2007) mulation of wealth. They are able to do so in credible and legitimate ways, for they repre- Andrea Rodriguez, who had worked a plot sent racially, economically, culturally, and ge- at the South Central Farm for more than ten ographically the communities who historically years, explained the reasons for the farmers’ had racially exclusive rights to claim that vision struggle by appealing to the importance of land of the past. The South Central Farmers, by access among the working poor of South Cen- contrast, are not empowered to claim that their tral. She expanded the notion of property to in- struggle preserves locally revered forms of her- clude values of fresh food access and the organic itage, from which they were and are physically, development of a cohesive sense of community economically, and symbolically excluded. that could be channeled into political struggle. Current Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, who represents Shadow Hills and numerous Muchas personas no comprenden nuestra lucha, other San Fernando Valley communities, ran y es porque no entienden que este es mas´ que un terreno, es el lugar donde las familias se unıan,´ her election campaign on a commitment to pre- donde se creaba un ambiente comunitario en serving the valley’s unique horse-keeping and

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 media de esta gran ciudad. [Many people don’t semiagricultural lifestyle. For example, on 31 understand our struggle, and that’s because they July 2002, just a few months after her election, don’t understand that this is more than a piece Greuel and fellow council member Ed Reyes of land, it is a place where families unite, where a introduced a motion to the Los Angeles City community atmosphere is created in the middle Council for a citywide study of horse-keeping of this great city.] (Rico 2006, 1) regulations.

In other words, the South Central Farmers The horsekeeping tradition of Los Angeles is fully understood the social and economic im- as old as the city itself. However, that tradition pacts of the urban state’s aggressive pursuit of has been under attack in recent decades from global capital through land use policies that are a variety of forces. ...Accordingly, there is a favorable to outside investors but detrimental serious need for comprehensive review of the Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 181

horsekeeping regulations that affect Los Ange- balleros kick up dust along the trails.” Other les residents and for action by the City Coun- speakers stressed that horse-keeping neighbor- cil to protect and strengthen horsekeeping rights. hoods have lower levels of crime and that (Foothill Trails District Neighborhood Coun- horses teach children responsibility, empathy, cil 2006, emphasis added) and self-respect. These discourses echoed the long-standing association between land own- Greuel and Reyes thereby moved that a ership and the cultivation of republican virtue meeting of the Planning and Land Use Man- reminiscent of ideologies of gentleman farm- agement Committee be held in the eques- ing. One resident then argued that “Horse trian areas of the city, rather than in the usual keeping is only viable in this area if it is tied downtown chambers. Approximately 250 resi- to land use,” leading to requests for favorable dents, overwhelmingly white and middle-aged zoning, improved equine licensing procedures, or elderly and many wearing their character- and city subsidization of trail construction and istic cowboy boots, jeans, and hats, crowded maintenance. In an effort to keep these claims Greuel’s field office in October 2002. The pres- to tradition and heritage in the media limelight, ident of a local social equestrian organization the City Council office and the local neighbor- appealed to Greuel and Reyes, arguing that hood council have cosponsored an annual “Day “Horse keeping was the San Fernando Valley,” of the Horse” festival since 2002 (see Figure and another activist claimed, “We are the most 11). The festival emphasizes the history of the rural agricultural areas left in the city.” The San Fernando Valley as an agricultural area and land use chairman of the local property own- claims that Shadow Hills uniquely represents ers association argued that “most of our ur- this history through its horse-keeping lifestyle. ban centers began as ranchos” and that you The South Central Farmers cannot claim could still feel old Los Angeles as “the ca- to represent the “unique history” of South Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016

Figure 11 Los Angeles City Council Representatives Alex Padilla (left, Seventh District) and Wendy Greuel (right, Second District) with California State Assembly Member Cindy Montanez (center) at the Day of the Horse Celebration, Shadow Hills, 2003. Source: Photo by author. 182 Volume 61, Number 2, May 2009

Central as a way to preserve their community communities. As fellow lead organizer Tezo- farm, because their neighborhood’s heritage zomoc explained, is dominated by planning decisions that pro- duced a largely industrial and multifamily res- Nosotros sentimos que este es un acto de idential landscape, rather than an agricultural agresion´ y es otro ataque en contra de la co- munidad que ya esta´ sufriendo. ...Esta accion´ one; and by media representations that por- es como empujar el cuchillo y enterrarlo en el tray South Central as a violent ghetto, rather Corazon de Los Angeles, especialmente en esta than a community-controlled and autonomous comunidad pobre del sur centro. [We feel that space where residents take care of each other this is an act of aggression and another attack and provide for their own needs as best they against a community that is already suffering. can (Hunt 1997; Fulton 2001; Wilson 2002, This action is like pushing the knife and twist- 2005). Indeed, perhaps the only “heritage” of ing it into the heart of Los Angeles, especially in South Central recognizable and credible to the this poor community of South Central.] (Rico media and the local state, as well as residents 2006, 1) elsewhere in the city who know nothing about At best, this dimension of the Farmers’ strug- the neighborhood apart from what they see on gle was completely ignored by mainstream and the local news and feature films, is a history conservative media; at worst, they were dis- of violence, poverty, and disinvestment too of- missed as impractical radicals with Marxist ten- ten blamed on the residents themselves (Fulton dencies. Indeed, through the suppression of the 1997, Ch. 11; Hunt 1997). South Central Farmers’ sharp critiques, the sys- The farmers exposed the racial biases of tems of effectively exclusionary land use poli- “heritage” and located South Central’s true cies that reproduce racialized patterns of wealth causes of poverty and segregation not in the and poverty in Los Angeles were again en- moral or cultural characteristics of its resi- trenched, normalized, and naturalized. dents, as neoconservative explanations would have it, but rather in the city’s history of exclu- sion and exploitation. They linked the fate of Conclusion South Central Los Angeles to an intricate sys- tem of global racialized capitalism that channels The individual struggles of the South Central rewards and privileges to a wealthy, typically Farmers and the Shadow Hills homeowners white elite through the exploitation of non- are dynamically linked in a regional struggle white labor and communities. Consider orga- over the control of land and its resources and nizer Rufina Juarez’s narrative of heritage: the production of racialized wealth and poverty in Los Angeles. In this article, I have focused The farm is located in the ninth district, which is an area that has a lot of contamination, a lot on two dimensions of that struggle—unequal of violence. It has a history. We’ve seen in the claims to the entitlements of property rights, last ten years a real change in the demograph- and unequal abilities to mobilize claims of her- ics in terms of people who have been forced itage. Both practices, I have argued, illustrate to leave their countries because of the diaspora how racism functions systemically and relation- of Mesoamerica and what’s happening with the ally through the reproduction of linked, inter- corn. People are no longer able to live off the dependent, and unequal places. The normative land. If we’re able to connect all that, that is and presumably neutral dynamics of everyday

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 the history of the South Central Farm. (Juarez acts of land use planning obscure relationships 2007) of inequality and dependency between differ- The Farmers understood that South Cen- ently racialized people and places. tral’s disproportionate poverty and pollution There are inherently ethical questions of was relationally linked to the production of power and political responsibility involved here other places around the world, whether priv- (see Massey 2004a). The denial of racial, eco- ileged or similarly exploited. Thus, they inter- nomic, and geographic interdependency is it- preted their eviction as merely the latest action self an act of power, most often asserted by in a long history of land use planning that has those who have benefited from systems of rela- consistently concentrated industrial and toxic tional racialization and privileging. Such de- facilities in poor, non-white, and immigrant nial takes two forms: the denial of present Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 183

responsibility for historic events and the denial support, perhaps most notably when actress Daryl of contemporary dependency on others situated Hannah chained herself to a tree during the final elsewhere in space. This double-edged denial eviction. Despite a last-minute offer from the Trust is the grounds on which many redistributive or for Public Land and the Annenberg Foundation to integrative policies such as affirmative action buy the property for $16 million, Horowitz refused the offer and the farmers were evicted (Doan 2006). and school busing have failed. Asserting the re- 2 For the purposes of my discussion here, all cen- lational production of space and identity, and sus data cited for South Central Los Angeles re- embracing a politics of interconnectivity and fer to the census tract immediately surrounding the mutual responsibility, then, is a crucial political South Central Farm and not the entire community project (Amin 2004; Massey 2004a). that might be known as South Central Los Angeles, In the case of the South Central Farmers and a community name that has no legal geographical the Shadow Hills homeowners, the impacts of boundaries but instead is primarily marked by pop- continuous relational racialization on patterns ular imaginings. All census data cited for Shadow of wealth and poverty are dire. In losing their Hills refer to the census tract that more or less cor- rights to farm at 41st and Alameda, the South responds to the geographic boundaries surrounding the community, as delineated by the Los Angeles Central Farmers lose an essential aspect of their City Council and by the Los Angeles City Planning economic survival—the ability to produce their Commission’s Community Plan. own food and medicine—as well as a vital re- 3 For example, environmental discourses also played source for community building and political an important role in each community. As in the mobilization. By contrast, in gaining the legal other discourses and practices I explore in this arti- protection of increasingly restrictive land use cle, environmental discourses were articulated dif- policies despite growing racial and economic ferently in each community—and served different inequality, the residents of Shadow Hills can purposes—according to racial, class, and geographic expect to reap the multiple benefits of substan- positions. The South Central Farmers and their supporters argued that the Ninth City Council Dis- tial open space, increased property values, and trict, where the Farm was located, has some of the the reproduction of racialized wealth for future
highest toxic pollution rates in Los Angeles County generations. and the fewest public parks. They correctly iden- tified these patterns as an outcome of systemic en- vironmental racism (see Pulido 2000) and argued Notes that the Farm was an important community re- source both on its own terms, as a collective green 1 Under the terms of the initial eminent domain pro- space and source of indigenous horticultural wis- ceedings, the city had granted right of first refusal dom, and as an alternative to Horowitz’s proposed to the largest landowner, Alameda-Barbara Invest- use of the land—a warehouse—which would com- ment Company, if the parcel formerly owned by pound the area’s concentration of manufacturing them was no longer required for public use within and pollution. The Farmers were also supported ten years. Thus, in 1995, the city began sales nego- by the Trust for Public Land, one of the groups tiations with Libraw-Horowitz Investment Com- that contributed money to try to buy the Farm. pany, the successor to Alameda-Barbara, to return Thus, for the South Central Farmers, environmen- the property. After a series of complicated legal talism was typically understood within the context negotiations, in August 2003 the City Council ap- of environmental justice; however, in Shadow Hills proved the sale to Libraw-Horowitz for $5,050,000, environmentalism was simultaneously a convenient and official title was transferred to Ralph Horowitz strategy and, for a minority, a genuine concern. The

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 in December 2003 (South Central Farmers Feed- Shadow Hills homeowners sometimes used envi- ing Families 2006). After receiving notice that their ronmentalist tactics to slow or stop a proposed de- community garden had been sold without their velopment (e.g., by demanding an Environmental involvement in the political process, the farmers Impact Report), but environmental concerns were formed South Central Farmers Feeding Families, rarely their primary argument and were most likely a community organization that not only lobbies for to be used by a minority of community leadership. their rights to continue using the land but also spon- Their environmentalism is “an amalgamation of sored farmers’ markets, festivals, and various po- several different strands of environmentalism, some litical and cultural events. They organized in the more ecological and others more spiritual and aes- courts and in direct actions for several years, at- thetic” (Duncan and Duncan 2004, 103). As Duncan tempting to raise money to buy the property and and Duncan (2004, 103) have mused in their study of attracting significant media attention and celebrity the aesthetic politics of landscape in Bedford, New 184 Volume 61, Number 2, May 2009

York, “people often subscribe to multiple strands [of les, ed. L. Bobo, M. Oliver, J. H. Johnson Jr., and environmentalism] without being troubled by the A. Valenzuela Jr., 3–50. New York: Russell Sage contradictions.” Foundation. 4 My arguments in this article are drawn from Boggs, J. S., and N. M. Rantisi. 2003. Relational eco- over five years of fieldwork in Shadow Hills, in- nomic geography. Special issue. Journal of Economic cluding observation of two political organizations, Geography 3. approximately twenty interviews, and archival re- Bonacich, E., and R. Appelbaum. 2000. Behind the search. Because the South Central Farmers were so label: Inequality in the Los Angeles apparel industry. well documented in both the English- and Spanish- Berkeley: University of California Press. language media, I rely extensively on newspaper ac- Bonilla-Silva, E. 2003. Racism without racists: Color- counts, the South Central Farm Web site (which blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality includes many blogs and links to articles in the in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman and popular press), informal conversations with those Littlefield. involved at the farm, and oral history interviews Butts, R. S., to E. G. Burkhalter. 18 September 1961. conducted through the South Central Farm Archive Los Angeles City Council File 105850, Los Ange- Project. les City Archives. 5 I follow Laura Pulido in defining white privilege Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. 2003. Los as “the hegemonic structures, practices, and ideolo- Angeles in focus: A profile from Census 2000. Wash- gies that reproduce whites’ privileged status.” As she ington, DC: The Brookings Institution. rightly points out, “whites do not necessarily intend Cleeland, N. 2006. Rich, poor live poles apart in L.A. to hurt people of color, but because they are un- as middle class keeps shrinking. Los Angeles Times aware of their white-skin privilege, and because they 23 July:B1. accrue social and economic benefits by maintaining Davis, M. 1990. City of quartz: Excavating the future the status quo, they inevitably do” (Pulido 2000, in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage Books. 15). Similarly, I do not believe that most activists in Dear, M. 2000. The postmodern urban condition. Ox- Shadow Hills, past or present, pursue horse-keeping ford, UK: Blackwell. land use policies to deliberately or strategically ex- ———, ed. 2001. From Chicago to L.A.: Making sense clude people of color. Many of my interviewees per- of urban theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ceived themselves as “color-blind,” although this Delaney, D. 2002. The space that race makes. The self-conception is also problematic, in that color- Professional Geographer 54:6–14. blindness inherently prevents acknowledgment of Deverell, W. 2004. Whitewashed adobe: The rise of Los persistent racial inequalities or policy to remedy Angeles and the remaking of its Mexican past. Berke- them (see Bonilla-Silva 2003). What is important ley: University of California Press. in our analysis of land use policy in Shadow Hills, Doan, L. 2006. Protest subsides at urban farm site. as well as South Central, is how the effects (rather Los Angeles Times 15 June:B4. than the stated intentions) of land use policies re- Duncan, J., and N. Duncan. 2001. The aestheti- produce wealth and poverty in racialized ways. cization of the politics of landscape preservation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91:387–409. ———. 2004. Landscapes of privilege: The politics of the Literature Cited aesthetic in an American suburb. London and New York: Routledge. Ailworth, E. 2004. Garden owner says he’s not a bad Ethington, P. 2000. Segregated diversity: Race- guy; A developer who seeks to evict hundreds of ethnicity, space, and political fragmentation in Los An- farmers from a large plot in South Central L.A. geles County, 1940–1994. http://www.usc.edu/dept/ defends his efforts to use his own land. Los Angeles LAS/history/historylab/Haynes FR/Haynes 2000

Downloaded by [California State University Northridge] at 22:54 25 January 2016 Times 14 March:B3. FR/FINAL REPORT 20000719e.html (last ac- Almaguer, T. 1994. Racial fault lines: The historical cessed 12 February 2006). origins of white supremacy in California. Berkeley: Ethington, P., W. Frey, and D. Myers. 2001. University of California Press. The racial resegregation of Los Angeles County, Amin, A. 2004. Regions unbound: Towards a new 1940–2000. http://www.rcf.usc.edu/∼philipje/ politics of place. Geografiska Annaler 86:33–44. CENSUS MAPS/CENSUS 2.html (last accessed Blomley, N. 2003. Unsettling the city: Urban land 8 September 2006). and the politics of property. London and New York: Foothill Trails District Neighborhood Coun- Routledge. cil. 2006. Greuel motions for citywide study Bobo, L., M. Oliver, J. H. Johnson Jr., and A. Valen- of LA horsekeeping regulations. http://www. zuela Jr. 2000. Analyzing inequality in Los Ange- wildwildwest.org/forum (last accessed 16 January les. In Prismatic metropolis: Inequality in Los Ange- 2006). Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles 185

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