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City
of Industry
Price: $24.95
Subtitle:
Genealogies of Power
in Southern California
Author:
Victor Valle
Subject: American
Studies, Urban
Studies
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4573-8
Pages: 272 pages, 12
illustrations
Publication Date: August 2009
Praise for City of Industry
"The Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist Victor Valle is the pit bull of Los Angeles
writers. In the mid-1980s he sank his teeth into a story about
corruption in the strange city-state of Industry, and he never let go.
Now, after twenty years of relentless sleuthing, he tells a tale of
epic greed that began in the
dusty hills east of Los Angeles but now engrosses the very centers of
power in Southern California’s Pacific Rim economy. As a noirish
revelation of power and
secret history of L.A., this is a stunning non-fiction sequel to Robert
Towne’s Chinatown." —Mike Davis, Author of City of Quartz
Description:
Founded in 1957, the Southern California suburb prophetically
named City of Industry today represents, in the words of Victor Valle, “The gritty crossroads of the global trade
revolution that is transforming Southern California factories into
warehouses, and adjacent working class communities into economic and
environmental sacrifice zones choking on cheap goods and carcinogenic
diesel exhaust.”
City of Industry is
a stunning exposé on the construction of corporate capitalist
spaces. Valle investigated an untapped archive of Industry’s built
landscape, media coverage, and public records, including sealed FBI
reports, to uncover a cascading series of scandals. A kaleidoscopic
view of the corruption that resulted when local land owners, media
barons, and railroads converged to build the city, this suspenseful
narrative explores how new governmental technologies and engineering
feats propelled the rationality of privatization using their
property-owning servants as tools.
Valle’s tale of corporate greed begins with the city’s
founder James M. Stafford and
ends with present day corporate heir, Edward Roski Jr., the nation’s
biggest industrial developer—co-owner of the L.A. Staples Arena and
possible future owner of California’s next NFL franchise. Not to be
forgotten in Valle’s captivating story are Latino workingclass
communities living within Los Angeles’s distribution corridors, who
suffer wealth disparities and exposure to air pollution as a result of
diesel-burning trucks, trains, and container ships that bring global
trade to their very doorsteps. They are among the many victims of City
of Industry.
About the Author:
Victor Valle is a
professor and chair of the ethnic studies department at California
State Polytechnic University. An investigative reporter formerly with
the Los Angeles Times, he is
the coauthor of Latino Metropolis,
as well as several other books, articles, and literary collections.
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Price: $24.95
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