39 pages • 1-hour read
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
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Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Hammer and the Rock”
In April 1988, “Operation Hammer” was what the LAPD called the arrest of “more Black youth than at any time since the Watts Rebellion” for drug-related gang violence (268). The LAPD likened the youths, who were all from impoverished inner-city backgrounds, to “the Viet Cong abroad in our society” (268) and thereby terrorist-like enemies of the state and the American people at large. Davis argues that “the contemporary Gang scare has become an imaginary class relationship, a terrain of pseudo-knowledge and fantasy projection” (270). While the violence remained in the ghetto, it attracted little media attention; however, when a Southside hitman accidentally killed a young woman in affluent Westwood in 1987, the gang members’ violence attracted widespread outrage.
In 1978, Daryl Gates was appointed as chief of the LAPD. Gates was racist against the black community and advocated increased police brutality toward them. Illegal police conduct included shooting black people who policemen thought merely looked suspicious and terrorizing communities within the ghettos. Black leaders, who were torn between the desire for safe streets and respect for their communities, “began to weigh police misconduct as a ‘lesser evil’ compared to drug-dealing gangs” (272). Chief Gates eventually came up with a policy of barricading gang-troubled neighborhoods as “narcotic enforcement areas” (277), so that those who entered and exited them had to pass through police checkpoints.
There was also an effort to legislate against gangs and drug-dealing. James Hahn “an ambitious, younger Democrat trying to turn the law-and-order tables on older Republicans […] by being an even tougher cop in the courtroom,” has moved to “criminalize gang members and their families as a class” (278). He made moves such as prohibiting the wearing of gang colors and imposing curfews for minors in gangs. He even wanted to pass a law that would subject any “Doe” to arrest if they were found in the Cadillac-Corning area, where drugs were supplied to rich white neighborhoods, without a letter from a “‘lawful property owner or employer’ authorizing their presence” (280). When civil rights groups said that his policies acted against civil liberties, Hahn claimed “that only […] legislature could rescue Los Angeles from the ‘gang siege’” (281).
LAPD activities, such as arresting black and Latino teens for playing baseball in what was considered a typically white part of town, have had the effect of further marginalizing already marginalized groups. There are even undercover policemen working in schools trying to trap underprivileged youth in drug crimes. Davis notes how “thanks partially to such police ‘vigilance’, juvenile crime in Los Angeles County is increasing at 12 per cent annually” (287).
Davis shows how youth gangs have “offered ‘cool worlds’ of urban socialization” to black marginalized youth who lived in the dilapidated neighborhoods of South-Central and were excluded from lucrative jobs in construction and aerospace (293). Additionally, following the internationalization of low-skilled labor traditionally performed by inner-city blacks in the 1970s, employment opportunities in South-Central have become even scarcer. Los Angeles’ most infamous gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, “were becoming the power resource of last resort for abandoned youth” (300).
Social workers’ attempts to obtain and publicize the gang members’ side of the story have been blocked by the LAPD. This is consonant with the counterterrorism measures practiced all over the world, whereby terrorism was denied a “public voice” (300). In this silencing of voices that could relate the conditions of inner-city life, the cycle of poverty and gangs continues.
Chapter 6 Summary: “New Confessions”
Whereas in 1880 Los Angeles was feted by Protestants as a “a bulwark against immigrant Papism,” a century later, due to Latino immigration, the city is “becoming a Catholic town again” (325). The three-county Archdiocese of Los Angeles “with its 300 parishes” has a “far-reaching institutional presence, comparable to one of California’s largest corporations or city governments” (326). Catholics in positions of authority have stood on both sides of the political divide, where tensions in community have been concerned. Whereas the Catholic immigration and breeding pot is poor and Latino, the Catholics in positions of power during the 20th century have been mainly of Irish descent. On the one hand, Cardinal McIntyre, a staunch supporter of McCarthyism, was also a supporter of the racist chief of police, William Parker, “the most powerful Catholic in local government” (333). However, other Catholics disbanded from the organized church to form groups, such as “Catholics United for Racial Equality” (CURE), and to promote increased rights and opportunities for the poor in their communities (333).
Although Irish-born Cardinal Manning, who received the diocese of San Joaquin in 1967, was progressive and promoted bilingual masses in English and Spanish, his “romanticized view of Irish-Mexican relations made it difficult for him to appreciate the urgency of Latino demands within the church” (337). The alienated Latinos were instead lured to join Spanish-speaking evangelical churches, and at the time of writing, up to 25 percent of new Hispanic immigrants in America joined evangelical tracts rather than the traditional Catholic ones: “Social liberal and doctrinal conservative” (343) Cardinal Mahony set up a Latino Aid Plan in 1986 and placed Latinos in prominent positions, in a recognition of their “social weight” (348) in the archdiocese. However, the plan only enjoyed limited success because Mahony kept tight reins over the budget, and there was a problem recruiting enough young Latino priests to replace the retiring Irish-descent clergy.
Mahony’s conservativeness was especially evident when he opposed the formation of sanctuary churches, which had been set up by Latino rebel Father Olivares as a means of providing shelter to illegal immigrants. In Davis’ view, “Olivares was implicitly challenging the credibility of Mahony’s Latino Aid Plan. Was the Plan truly devoted to Latino empowerment and the ‘preferential option for the poor’, or just to the containment of evangelical threat?” (356). Mahony’s conservativeness was further evident in his declaration that unionizing for higher wages was anti-Catholic. In the wake of the 1980s Aids crisis, Mahony also remained stringently doctrinal in condemning archdiocesan agencies that permitted the use of condoms to prevent disease.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Junkyard of Dreams”
Davis’ junkyard of dreams is Fontana, a small town located 60 miles to the east of Los Angeles. Fontana began in the early 20th century as a “modernized Jeffersonian idyll: an arcadian community of small chicken ranchers and citrus growers living self-sufficiently in their electrified bungalows” (376). During the Second New Deal, Henry J. Kaiser’s steel company moved into Fontana and set up a “vast, mile-square plant […] before Fontanans had a chance to weigh the impact on their small rural society” (392). However, by the early 1970s, Kaiser had to pay 127 million dollars to the Southern California Air Pollution Control Board to comply with clean air regulations. This resulted in multiple layoffs.
Once Kaiser Steel was shut down in 1983, Fontana underwent extensive redevelopment, including home building, and the Los Angeles Times “downplayed the impact of the Kaiser shutdown,” misreporting the 15 percent unemployment as 9 percent (423). However, by 1987, there was no denying that Fontana was nearly bankrupt, with “its Andean-sized debt and the lien on its tax base until the next millennium, its underfunding of essential services, a growing mismatch between housing and jobs” (424, 426). Most ironically, Fontana will “foot the bill for the clean-up” of slag residue left over from Kaiser Steel’s time, plunging it further into debt (429). Davis compares the sight of the former steel-works to “Tokyo in April 1945 after three months of concentrated fire-bombing with Kaiser-made ‘goop’” (432), potentially made in a town like Fontana. The indignity has therefore come full-circle.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
In the final section of his book, Davis illuminates the controversies, violence, and squalid living conditions that Los Angeles’ moneyed authorities would render invisible. He seeks to tell the reader the censored stories of Los Angeles’ many poor and disadvantaged.
The first stories are those of black gang members living in South-Central Los Angeles. Given that the LAPD has been ruled by a succession of racist chiefs of police, such as Parker and Gates, who have “vehemently […] opposed attempts by social workers and community organizers to let gang members tell ‘their side of the story’” (300), the latter have been painted as senseless, racially-stereotyped criminals. This voiceless stereotype further dehumanizes gang members and makes the extreme and erratic police violence toward them more acceptable. It also means that stories of gang violence in the community are overlooked by the media unless they directly spill over into white areas. Davis counters the silence and stereotypes by drawing attention to the lack of employment opportunities and entrenched prejudice that keeps young black men excluded from mainstream achievement. The silencing goes hand in hand with the ghettoization of the gangs and their communities in police checkpoint areas. In highlighting that gang violence is linked to poverty, lack of investment, and racism, Davis seeks to make all citizens who would concentrate Los Angeles’ wealth in the same few white hands as responsible as the criminals.
Next, Davis turns his attention to the silenced but increasingly vocal Latino majority in Los Angeles’ Catholic Church. Whereas in the 20th century clergy in leading positions have been of Irish descent, most of the congregation has hailed from impoverished Latino immigrant backgrounds. While Irish cardinals with their own cultural memory of being subordinate—first to the British who colonized their own island, and then to WASP Americans when they emigrated—had sympathy toward Latino plight, their new positions of authority and affiliation with wealthy Anglo-Catholics in institutions, such as the police force, also meant that they made limited concessions to support the advancement of their nonwhite congregation. Davis shows how these Irish-descent clergymen were engaged in a delicate dance of making small concessions to Latino congregation members who stood to be wooed away by evangelical tracts, while keeping them in their subordinate place, by discouraging unionization and the creation of sanctuaries for illegal immigrants. Other measures, such as taking a hardline doctrinal stance on contraception even in the Aids crisis, further contributed to their poor congregations’ sufferings. The example of the Catholic Church shows how a white hegemony controlled institutions in Los Angeles across the board and acted to keep poor, nonwhites in their place.
Finally, the citizens of Fontana, a town where early 20th century immigrants moved to fulfill the American dream of self-sufficiency, were silenced and ignored by having their interests sold to big business, whether to Henry J. Kaiser’s steel plant during the Depression, or to Alexander Haagen’s mall development in the 1980s. Although big business caused the town’s debt and flouting of air pollution standards, the town itself, made up of ordinary working people, had to pay to solve both problems. Ending his book with bankrupt Fontana and the dilapidated amusement park that represents “a junkyard of dreams,” Davis shows how the heady California dream of a better life was surrendered and then ultimately ruined by the force of unchecked capitalism and abstract outside investors, whose only goal was profit, rather than the advancement of the area and its inhabitants (435). What was once a utopian place, with the potential to provide better lives for people who were invested in their local area, became a dystopia of rich non-inhabitants’ failed capitalist ventures.
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