Lessons in accumulated rage and rebellious scholarship with Mike Davis

Abstract

This essay reflects on the ways that Mike Davis's commitment to social justice shaped his pedagogical practice and mentorship. It uses the author's personal experiences to highlight Davis's support for devalued communities and overlooked places. More specifically, the essay provides examples that show how Davis created new platforms that amplified marginalized voices. Finally, the author uses current research on the Salton Sea and the Coachella Valley to illustrate how Davis's intellectual contributions generated valuable epistemic frameworks for those interested in social and ecological justice.

I first met Mike Davis in 1992, during my first year at Pitzer College. City of Quartz had been published two years earlier. The book made Mike into an intellectual rock star among my small circle of progressive college friends. They were the ones who coaxed me into taking Mike's class. It seemed like a torturous choice at the beginning of the semester. His early lectures on urban form were often too complex for me to grasp. I tried to make up for my perceived intellectual shortcomings by signing up for as many office hour slots as he made available. Those informal visits would eventually turn into long conversations held over food and drinks. I’m happy to report that the class and those conversations turned into a magical learning experience. In this essay, I share my experience to give you a sense of how Mike's commitment to social justice shaped his pedagogical practice.

It was only after Mike passed away that I realized how his personal support for me was deeply rooted in his epistemic commitment to devalued people and overlooked places. This was evident by the way that he created new platforms for marginalized voices to speak. Case in point: Mike once told an interviewer that “intellectuals who imagine themselves to be writing and acting on behalf of social movements have a particular responsibility … to try to draw attention to the people that should be heard and people should be listening to” (Davis and Frommer, 1993). He said this at a time when white liberals were regularly inviting him to speak at lavish luncheons about the state of the urban crisis. Instead, Mike took those opportunities to tell his growing audience that they should listen less to him and more to the voices of Black and Latinx communities. I don’t think it was a coincidence that he was encouraging me to write about my experience during this same period.

Mike's insistence that I write about my hometown began in earnest after I gave him a tour of the Coachella Valley in the early 2000s. During that trip, I showed him how racial and class apartheid had been carved into the desert landscape through generations of ecological violence. We began by moving from the mostly Mexican American eastern side of the valley to the mostly white Palm Springs resorts in the west. Our first stop was at the Duro mobile home park. Duroville, as it became known colloquially, was located on the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation. It gained public notoriety after several news outlets published stories about open sewers and squalor-like living conditions. At one point during our visit, we had a chance to speak with indigenous Mexican migrants who had settled in the trailer park. Mike was so taken with their stories that he turned to me and said, “Juan if I was you, I would go get a PhD from the UC Berkeley Geography Department so that you could study and write about this place.”

I later realized that Mike had not asked for a tour to collect and extract stories for his own writing project. Instead, he used that opportunity to encourage me to write. Mike's small gesture of encouragement made me feel seen and valued at a time when I did not think a brilliant professor could be interested in anything that I had to say. Afterall, he was a famous intellectual and I was just a first-generation Chicano student from Coachella, a small agricultural town that was not yet home to a famous music festival. Early in our friendship, I sometimes thought that he simply showed interest in me because he was taking pity on a poor kid from a farmworker family. But Mike's politics did not allow him to indulge in such gestures of liberal guilt. Instead, Mike saw something in me that I could not see in myself. He believed that the people and the place I came from had important things to say about our collective path toward a more just world.

I eventually earned that geography PhD from Berkeley. Unfortunately, my dissertation and first book were not about Coachella. Nonetheless, Mike's mentorship shaped that book project too. I’ve said before that my book Inland Shift began where Mike Davis left off in the final chapter of City of Quartz. That chapter was about Fontana and the Kaiser Steel Mill. Mike once described his analysis of Fontana as “the most important chapter in the book, probably the most important thing I’ve ever written” (Davis and Frommer, 1993). It was important because it allowed him to express “an accumulated rage and frustration and passion about what's been done to the working class over the last decade, and also all of my own autobiographical feelings about the dislocations of place and the destruction of people's history.” He went on to say that this destruction was never complete because the people of Fontana were too resilient and lawless. Mike made this comment about accumulated rage and frustration in the aftermath of the post-Rodney King riots. He embraced the use of riot as a political strategy by those who felt dispossessed. For example, he refused attempts to distinguish between those who were marked as rebellious citizens and those who were labeled as criminal rioters. As Mike explained, “I have no problem with ‘riot’, because I’m trained as a labor historian and in my mind riots are quite respectable things” (Davis and Frommer, 1993).

When I heard that Mike's cancer was progressing during the summer of 2022, I knew that I had to return to my Coachella project. I had to process, in Mike's words, “my own autobiographical feelings about the dislocations of place and the destruction of people's history” in the Coachella Valley. I put all other projects on hold and began to write the book I knew I had to write. The book is dedicated to him. In fact, one of the chapters is called “Who Killed the Salton Sea?—An Ecological Autopsy,” a title that hearkens back to one of Mike's famous essays about revanchist attacks on the urban poor. In my case, I use Coachella, Palm Springs, and the Salton Sea to examine how humans have built the material and social infrastructures that made speculative dreams into material reality. Here too Mike looms large. For example, in Ecology of Fear, he recounted the destructive ways that Southern California's urban development was built on a pattern of human-orchestrated natural disasters. My research on the Coachella Valley examines the destructive ways that agriculture, leisure, and spectacle have produced the desert as a site of social, economic, and ecological precarity for Mexican and Mexican American communities.

One way that I employ infrastructure as an analytic involves thinking about the ways that development intersects with understandings of nature and with the afterlives of settler ecologies. In fact, part of this project includes drawing explicit connections between nature, development, and race by showing how regional ecologies reveal some of the world-making strategies that have been deployed by white settlers in the Southern California desert. Here, I borrow from several scholars who argue that “infrastructures are concrete instantiations of visions of the future” (Anand et al., 2018: 6). My work examines who those visions belong to and how such futures have produced unsustainable and precarious ecologies.

I recently returned to the Duro Trailer Park to continue my research. The vibrant community was gone. All that was left was a water storage tank with the word “Duro” emblazoned on its side, a pair of worn shoes, and a “children at play” sign nailed to a rotting wooden post. The absence of mobile homes on the landscape made me notice more troubling human remnants. Mountains of refuse and debris stood on the same reservation land that once housed poor families. These mountains of waste are the remains of 26 illegal dumpsites that once operated on tribal land (Kelly, 2007). Illegal dumping operations proliferated on reservation land because they provided a source of income for tribal members who felt like they had limited economic options. The first dump was established in 1989 when tribal member Geraldine Ibañez signed a contract with Chino-based Corona Farms. Reservation dumps attracted companies and other clients because these sites enabled them to dispose of toxic waste without having to adhere to state and federal safety regulations. The contract with Corona Farms turned part of the reservation into a giant compost bin for sewage that came from San Diego. So much sewage was dumped on the reservation that residents referred to the growing pile of human waste as Mt. San Diego.

My return trip to Duroville included a stop along the northern shore of the Salton Sea. Native American groups, including the Torres Martinez Tribe, share a long and complicated history with the Sea (Voyles, 2021). White agricultural investors and land speculators formed the current iteration of the Salton Sea when they diverted the Colorado River in 1905. They did so to channel water into the Imperial Valley. The Salton Sea was essentially produced as part of an agricultural infrastructure project. Its creation enabled multiple generations of mostly white investors and developers to produce the desert as an agricultural and leisure economy. From the beginning, the Salton Sea was used as a toxic sump for the region's agricultural runoff. Over the years, the pesticides that flowed into the Sea created an ecological disaster.

Until 2018, the Salton Sea had been left to fester. Since then, the Sea has become the subject of new economic speculation. Policy makers and corporate interests have generated new efforts to save the Sea as part of a larger strategy that involves lithium mining. Public energy agencies have invested millions of dollars in research contracts with private firms to develop new technologies that could extract lithium from the briny waters that lay underneath the Salton Sea. According to public and private research, lithium from underneath the Salton Sea region could provide enough raw materials to manufacture all the electric vehicle batteries needed for the U.S. market. The push to extract lithium from under the sea intensified when then-President Donald Trump signed Presidential Executive Order No. 13817 in 2018, which designated lithium as a critical mineral. For environmentalists and community activists, the sudden interest in the Salton Sea created new opportunities for ecological and economic restoration. Residents and researchers have long argued that deteriorating conditions at the Salton Sea pose a public health threat to the mostly Latino communities that live near the toxic body of water (Biddle et al., 2022). Meanwhile, developers have used efforts to clean up the Salton Sea as an opportunity to restore the lake back to its leisure heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, when Frank Sinatra and other Hollywood stars visited regularly.

Restoration of the Salton Sea as a site of leisure leads me back to my early undergraduate conversations with Mike Davis, which included my imprecise attempts to analyze the political ecologies of Palm Springs's leisure economy. I was convinced back then (the early 1990s) that the economic and racial apartheid I experienced while growing up in the Coachella Valley could be explained by examining how race and class were embedded within the region's ecological and cultural landscape. Said differently, I’m now working to explain how the Salton Sea as experienced by Hollywood's Rat Pack and by my working-class community were part of the same ecological system. You can see how Mike's interest in nature and political economy has shaped the way that I think. He also shaped my intellectual trajectory by teaching me how to turn accumulated rage into passionate and rebellious scholarship. My book on Coachella is a testament to these lessons. More importantly, it bears witness to the passion and resiliency of family and friends who have struggled to make the world a more humane and livable place.

On a more personal note, I’d like to end by acknowledging how important Mike Davis was to me as I navigated the sometimes unwelcoming spaces of academia. Mike believed in me at a time that I did not believe in myself. He did so not just because of who I was, but because he was committed to a radical intellectual pedagogy that created new opportunities for people to speak for themselves and for us to transform accumulated rage into a politics of hope and rebelliousness.