Inland Shift: Race, Space and Capital in Southern California by Juan D. De Lara (review)

Inland Shift argues that the logistics economy has reconfigured metropolitan spatial rearrangements as a handmaid to modern capitalism. Juan D. De Lara arrives at this conclusion through the broader interdisciplinary study of racial capitalism. This text builds upon Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism "by arguing that logistics represents a major rearticulation of modern capitalism" (1). De Lara relies on a multi-scalar analysis of commodity production and consumption to outline how transnational capital movement has reformulated the human geography of Greater Los Angeles. Moreover, he argues that these alterations are informed by local historical contexts, and uses the Inland Empire as a case study to show how "the extended commodity chains of neoliberal economic restructuring created new social and spatial relationships" between and within contemporary global cities (3). His quantitative efforts are deepened by more than 100 interviews, a half-decade of participant observation, and community-based research on Southern California labor history. This approach advances recent scholarship on how capitalism manipulates space to facilitate contemporary race and place making.

Inland Shift is separated into three sections, each of three chapters. The first section explores how offshored production of consumer goods coincided with the rise of "Just-In-Time" warehouse services. These services gave retailers flexibility to provide goods based on demand fluctuations within an increasingly fickle consumer market. De Lara argues that consumer finance helped bolster spending among blue-collar workers even as transpacific production networks undermined employment opportunities in their communities. "Just-In-Time" warehousing innovations helped large retailers provide affordable goods for this population while further minimizing working-class economic mobility within an increasingly precarious labor market. In addition, civic boosters continued to advocate for public investment in logistics infrastructure in response to concerns about downward financial mobility. Local boosters refused to connect the labor flexibility of the logistics economy with the degradation of warehouse workers. De Lara argues that these civic boosters help racialize warehouse workers to justify the temporary employment arrangements offered through labor subcontractors. In this way, civic boosters serve as a liaison between the logistics economy and the built environment while labor subcontractors serve as a liaison between warehouse workers and retail management.

The second section of Inland Shift builds off these themes to explore how warehouse workers experience the logistics economy. The cost-saving mechanisms of "Just-In-Time" warehousing are described in detail, as readers are shown how these industry advances moved logistics labor from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach toward the warehouses of the Inland Empire, and the voices of marginalized Latinx warehouse workers counter the cheery predictions previously prophesied by corporate boosters. White labor leaders are reflected as making a strategic choice to support this type of logistic development to maintain their privileges on the docks and, as a result, ensured that industry management could shift more precarious forms of labor inland. This section heavily relies on oral interviews to prove how the experience of warehouse work operates under late capitalism. In fact, De Lara argues, "Telling stories [is] a political act, because workers used their bodies to provide an alternative spatial imaginary that challenged the erasure of low-wage warehouse work" (74). As he recounts several narratives of labor conditions in these warehouses, the racialized nature of logistics work becomes apparent. The commodification of racialized immigrant bodies, and the relative privilege white bodies, denies warehouse workers the means to achieve aspirations which encouraged their participation in the warehouse labor force from the start.

The final section describes how the logistics economy has reshaped human geographies within Southern California—beginning with the "spatial and racial fantasies of Manifest Destiny" and following with subsequent waves of Anglo, Latinx, and Asian-Pacific Islander suburbanization (114). However, the contested labor history of the area (strongly identified with Kaiser steel mills) is grounded in an anti-blackness projected by working-class Anglos against all communities of color. Moreover, Anglo elites still rely...