Reaction to R. Andrés Guzmán’s “From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses”

Andrés Guzmán’s “From Highways to High-Rises” reminds us that capital is not an ether-like substance that floats in the air like the invisible hand of the market, but it is built in concrete, steel and glass. Guzmán’s analysis of the built environment in Ken Loach’s film Bread & Roses shows how Los Angeles’ urbanscape can be read as a genealogy of various phases of capitalist development. Unlike in the early twentieth century, when major industrial capitalists of the day were recognizable and the industries where they earned their wealth were visible, in this latest phase of capitalist development, the people fabricating credit default swaps are mostly anonymous and very few people understand the complex mechanics through which capital is increasingly hoarded by the one percent.

The built environment, however, provides a road map that is hidden in plain sight. Guzmán gives us the legend through which to interpret the high-rise buildings that dominate Los Angeles: the Union Bank of California, the Paul Hastings Tower, the Citigroup Center, and the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. Who built these edifices? Who owns them? And, as significantly, who works in them in the middle of the night when the bankers have gone home to sleep? Guzmán’s reading of Los Angeles’s cityscape is a guide to the history of the development of capitalism in the last hundred years.

Making legible the highways and alienating concrete corridor’s of LA’s financial district is only half of Guzmán’s contribution. He also shows us how these spaces have been appropriated and used by working class and other marginalized people. The workers move from invisibility in the basements of the high-rises to public demonstrations in the streets and even to the exclusive restaurants and lawns of the wealthy businessmen who own the towers. They literally bust into and occupy spaces that have been privatized and enclosed, guarded by security firms. And, predictably, they are arrested. However, the workers are successful in exploiting one of the main weaknesses of global capitalism, namely, its need to remain invisible. By taking their struggle to the streets and the mass media, the exploitative labor conditions in these buildings are exposed. Guzmán’s architectural archaeology allows us to see the political economic skeleton beneath the shiny exteriors of buildings like Frank Gehry’s metal-clad Disney Center.

The last scene of the film shows the protagonist of the film, Maya, being deported. We see LA’s cityscape through her eyes staring through the gratings of the INS bus windows. It is the perspective of a migrant who faces exclusion even as her efforts have helped secure unionization for her fellow janitors. As Guzmán suggests in his final sentence, unionization may not be enough to overcome the transnational dictates of capital. His essay is an important contribution in a moment when the enclosure of public space, the militarization of the border and privatization of the public square is proceeding more rapidly than ever. Occupying the landscapes of capital is a politics worth pursuing in our present moment of danger. Maya will be back.