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Regime X -- Reform-Neoliberal, 1992 to the Present

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The 1992 Uprising, or “Rodney King Riot” was the terminal heart attack in the unhealthy life of the ninth regional regime (1940-1992). The segregationist policies of the racialist regime had stored great mistrust and rage against injustice in the vast spaces of neighborhood violence, school failure, and economic abandonment. The Civil Disturbance was a genuine socio-cultural rupture, temporarily leaving the regime in disarray. Its political-cultural infrastructure had been deeply compromised, and for years it was not obvious which kind of regime might emerge in its place. In large part, the regime change was made necessary by the protracted death of the previous ruling order, which was “hollowed-out” by the migration of its most powerful institutions and individuals to national and global locations. The question “who rules?” in Los Angeles began to mean something very different than it had during the height of the Otis-Chandler regime, when an interlocking directorate of economic and political command posts was highly concentrated within the region. Regional institutions gained global footprints in the eighth and ninth regional regimes, but those institutions became so globalized by the end of the ninth regime, circa 1989-92, that local power become mostly divorced from global power. Angelenos, in other words, have been left to rule themselves now that their progeny have gone off to rule nations and shape the globe.

The plant closures and aerospace decline from the 1970s through the early 1990s did not lead Los Angeles into a “decline”, as had been the fate of Detroit and other rustbelt cities. Instead, it prospered in new, often ruthless ways. Major consumer durables such as cars were replaced with industries powered by low-priced immigrant labor, as Los Angeles became the primary U.S. entrepôt of the “new immigration.” These immigrants were, of course, among the most entrepreneurial of their native countries. Risk-takers with enough means and determination to move thousands of miles, Latinos and Southeast Asians.  Immigrants are no longer concentrated in a few, restricted sectors. They have staffed every type of occupation in a highly diverse economy, from unskilled laborers, to semi-skilled needle trade workers, domestic service, to independent gardeners, shopkeepers, skilled tradesmen, petty manufacturers, professionals, entertainers, all the way up to the sciences and all professions, media moguls (Telemundo and Univision have the largest media markets in Southern California).

This "post-Fordist" economy (an industrial economy no longer organized around large central manufacturing plants, but rather in smaller, flexible-production units, subcontracting to larger firms) is certainly a global one.    Steven Erie estimates that “in 2001, upward of one-quarter (or $160 billion) of the Greater Los Angeles’ $650 Billion economy depended on global trade, up from 13% in 1972.” (Erie 2004: 211). Low-wage, non-union labor in dispersed, small plants is characteristic of many of its newly globalized sectors, especially apparel, which was the “only manufacturing industry that continued to grow as the California economy declined and its growth was greatest in Los Angeles County, which in 1991 employed 99,000 of the state’s 141,000 garment workers.”[1]

Vast landscapes of Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Eurasian homeowners represent a mighty middle class of taxpayers and participants in the astonishingly variegated public spheres of the metropolis, carried out in more than fifty languages. Thanks to the victories of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, these massive waves of immigration found residential spaces in the now-opened working- and middle-class suburbs to the east of Downtown Los Angeles: the vast “East Side,” East LA; Southeast LA, and the endless consumerized landscapes of the San Gabriel Valley. More than twenty of the municipalities in the county are now ruled by Latino, Asian, and other “non-White” city governments. Many municipal spaces are majority-Latino, but even more are highly integrated and diverse.[2]

Until the early 21st century, however, it was not clear whether the ninth regime' political culture was actually dead. The triumph in 1994 of Proposition 187, an attempt to deny public services to undocumented immigrants—pointed toward a new wave of repression under neo-Nixonian policies of Governor Pete Wilson. When a coalition of fearful whites and African Americans elected Kenneth Hahn in 2001 over Antonio Villaraigosa, it was not clear if the multiracial acrimony would ever subside. But the 2005 multiethnic support for Villaraoigosa, coupled with a highly responsive, community-oriented LAPD under Chief Bratton, seems to indicate that the politics of racial division may have lost its currency with the arrival of the newest center-weight of the political culture, Latino voters.  Villaraigosa's successor, Eric Garcetti, the son of an Italian-descended Jewish father (Gil Garcetti, the LA District Attorney whose prosecution of O.J. Simpson for murder ended in defeat), and a Latino mother, continues this reconquest of Los Angeles by its Latino majority.

The collapse of the Parkerian LAPD opened the way to genuine reform of a repressive political economy and the rise of a Latino political resurgence during the tenth regional regime (1992-present). The seeming irreversible rise of Latino politicians, voters, and, and political discourses poses one of the most remarkable recoveries for a conquered people in American history. The vast majority of Los Angeles’s 50% Latino population, nearing 5 million persons, are Mexican-born or recent descent. The possibility of a “reconquista” has been seriously discussed, but the metaphor can be carried too far. The Borderland political territory of Los Angeles has cultivated an Angeleno version of mexicanidad in American politics. But a new mostly non-white ruling coalition that is bound to characterize the politics of Los Angeles City, its suburbs, and the County, is of a different type than the Otis-Chandler regime.

The most important difference is that the chieftains of the region’s most distinctive industries, oil, aircraft, and motion pictures, no longer coincide with the membership of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Ownership and corporate headquarters of the leading sectors dispersed globally, feeding the regime strength of the United States at a global scale, as it re-headquartered throughout the Sunbelt. Burbank-based Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta in 1995 to become the global giant Lockheed Martin, and shifted headquarters to Bethesda, Maryland, close to the hands that feed it. In 2000, the Los Angeles Times was purchased by the Tribune Company of Chicago, ending concretely the long local reign of the Chandler family, and ceding control of the dominant voice of the region’s public sphere to absentee owners. Motion picture corporations are owned by shifting conglomerates. In 2005, a tsunami-sized echo of Nixon’s foreign policy arrived in the form of an offer from the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation CNOOC, which tried “to acquire Unocal with a bid” of $16 - $18 billion. Provoking a vote by Congress and review by the Bush Administration, this offer was considered a very serious threat the national security of the United States.
 
Neoliberal and networked, Los Angeles became, in the opening years of the 21st century, just one among many great world cities.  It no longer enjoys concentrated monopolies on the key sectors that it once brought forth to the world--aircraft and motion pictures.  Region and place have been vitiated as shaping forces with the rise of the Internet and its vast new frontier for global commerce and communication.  But with that rise of the digital world, echoes reverberate from the cultures and ideologies that Los Angeles produced and broadcast to the world during its own "golden age" of the mid-20th century.  Hauntingly, few of the ghosts set forth by the LA metropolis in the 20th century have been laid to rest.

[1] Cannon (1999: 9).

[2] Ethington, Frey, and Myers (2001).

This page has paths:

  1. Regimes VIII - X Aida Jesse Rogers
  2. Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
  3. Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Phil Ethington
  4. Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles and Its Places in Global History, From the Pleistocene to the Present Phil Ethington

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  1. Timeline Page Test Aida Jesse Rogers
  2. 1990s Phil Ethington