Remembering Mike Davis: How His Curiosity for Los Angeles Changed The Way We See Our City
When the MacArthur Fellow, social historian and professor emeritus Mike Davis passed away on Tuesday, Oct. 25, countless tributes to his influence ricocheted in newspapers, magazines and publications around the world. Perhaps best known for his book, "City of Quartz" and his ability to see Los Angeles's future, he was a meat cutter, truck driver, union organizer and tour guide years before he became a celebrated author.
Born in Fontana in San Bernardino County in 1946, Mike Davis came up in the civil rights movement involved with groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which forevermore shaped his values. Aside from his prolific writing record, hundreds have also saluted his mentorship and generous spirit. On the lines below are tributes from not only fellow authors and professors, but former students, urban planners and one of his best friends for over 50 years.
James Rojas, Urban Planner
I met Mike Davis in 1992 when I took his L.A. seminar at SCI-Arc. I handed him my freshly written thesis on how Latinos use space in East Los Angeles. He loved it and said it was L.A.'s 5th Ecology. We became colleagues and went to many of his lectures. I would also visit him and his wife Alessandra Moctezuma at various places they lived in L.A. A true Angeleno, his house was always a buzz with people and phone calls discussing issues. His curiosity for L.A. supported my work. It gave me the confidence to continue my research and activism.
Judy Baca, Artist
How do you measure such a loss as Mike Davis? His brilliance, insights and interpretation of our times and of Los Angeles is immeasurable. No one can take your place as a thought leader, but equally important was your humanity and ability to include all of us in the history you wrote. You will be ever present in the 1960's and beyond of the new segments of the Great Wall and your children, students and all those who admire you. Alessandra and your children, my heart breaks for your loss. It also breaks for our world without you.
Gary Phillips, Writer
Can't exactly recall how Mike and I first met but I first knew of him through his "Prisoners of the American Dream" collection of essays about the fracturing of the working class. But as folks and comrades I've worked with on social change issues over the years and maybe bent an elbow together at the bar now and then, Mike's take on our city, his excavating the future as was the tagline of "City of Quartz," was the s**t for a whole grip of us.
The book wasn't a blueprint for organizing but provided an analytical context of the construction of this at times misbegotten metropolis. Particularly, "City of Quartz" was both a look back and in various ways a predictor of the '92 civil unrest. His "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties," written with Jon Wiener, is a bible I keep close at hand, referring to it many times as I wrote the sequel to "One-Shot Harry" taking place in 1965. A dynamite cat who is going to be much missed.
Ron Schneck, Best Friend of Mike
I never had any relationship with Mike in the academic settings so I cannot speak at all about how he functioned in the classroom, but what I can speak about is a number of wildcat situations with Mike where we participated in together in the early 1970s whether it was with the Teamsters or in Harlan County, Kentucky, and labor strikes on the East Coast. Regardless of the situation, Mike was always approachable. He always had a great capacity to listen. He also had a sense of history about where each of these struggles were taking place and that made him really unusual. I had some history already having been in strikes, been a Vietnam Vet and knew the struggle from growing up in South Central, but I did not have his historical breadth.
Mike was always teachable but he also could teach. He was never arrogant. This was a real profound gift given his overall breadth of knowledge. A number of the strikes we were involved in around West Virginia and Kentucky were where the drive to try to unionize went back to the Industrial Workers of the World and the 1870s, maybe even earlier. Mike sharing this knowledge with some of the miners we were hanging out with made a big impact. A number of these guys were Vietnam Vets and around our age. When I think of Mike at his best in the capacity of organizing, as an organizer and radical humanist, I think of how he could connect with all kinds of people.
Brian Cross, Photographer
Mike Davis asked me to make photographs of the hip-hop scene in Los Angeles in 1991 when he came to teach at Cal Arts. I was a landscape photographer and an avid fan of the culture but I had never even photographed people before. The first images I made were of the Boo Yaa Tribe and the Watts Prophets. He then suggested to the 25-year-old me that I should propose "It's Not About a Salary: Rap Race and Resistance" to Verso. He championed the idea of a left wing publisher supporting a book about the history of hip-hop in L.A.
To say he changed my life, the lives of many others, contributed so much to the culture of this city, created the promise (and indeed threat) of a history written by working people might be an understatement. Ardent Marxist, exemplary organic intellectual, former truck and tour bus driver and awe inspiring story teller — I used to say of him and Alan Sekula there wasn't a subject that you could bring up that they wouldn't be able to tell you something stunning about.
Whatever it is I have aspired to all these years somehow Sekula, Mike, Billy Woodberry and the great Michael Asher all embodied it. A culture from the bottom up, fed by an insatiable hunger for knowledge not as an end in itself but the keys to real economic and social justice. The sly grin always ready to counter, the distrust of the powerful and the easy generous laugh… Rest up Mike, a life well-lived. Much love to his family, Alessandra and Roisin Davis — the legacy is safe.
Alex Espinoza, Writer
When I was a grad student at UCI, Mike was teaching in the history department — a class about place and memory, if I recall correctly. Having read "City of Quartz" as an undergrad I was a total fanboy. I was dying to work and meet with someone who was a scholar from f*****g Fontana. Of course, his class was packed, so for weeks I attended. He never took attendance and just assumed I was enrolled. He loved me because 1.) I was from f*****g Tijuana and 2.) from the IE.
He gave the class an assignment: write about a significant place that you'd want to take someone you've never met to. Describe its emotional significance. Many of my "worldly" peers in the MFA and PhD programs talked about exotic markets in Marakesh, rainy alleyways in Paris, pubs in England. When it came time for me to share my places, I talked about the Wigwam Motel on Foothill in Rialto, the outdoor swap meet in Colton, and the shopping center in Fontana with the best chow mein ever. Mike nodded and laughed. "You know I got a key from one of those tee pee motel rooms?"
We were instant friends. It was cemented when I told him I was a student of Susan Straight's. "Makes sense," he said. "You've eaten the same dirt. I can just tell."
I introduced him to Susan on a hot day in August in downtown Riverside, in a bar not far from where I'm typing this now. He ended up at UCR "because you had our minds meet that one white hot August afternoon," he told me.
Susan Straight, Writer
I admired Mike from afar, but how would I ever meet him in Riverside, a single mom? Then he came to speak at UCR, where I was teaching, and I brought my baby daughter and sat in the hallway listening. I was too afraid to approach him.
A short time later, Alex Espinoza introduced us at the Mission Inn in Riverside. Mike said he'd read my work. He said we were IE siblings, Fontana and Glen Avon, the tiny unincorporated place where I was born at the edge of the oldest hardest granite formations in SoCal. He'd been born a few miles away. We traded rocks and work and conversations after that, for years. His family came for Thanksgiving in Riverside and I visited them in San Diego. He was truly like a brother to me. I miss knowing he's there writing with fierce loyalty to our places and people.
David Lau, Professor
Mike Davis's work is a deep part of California public higher education pedagogy. I will go into class next week and we are working on research papers for the Puente Program derived from his book "Magical Urbanism."
The commentary and obituary materials I've read so far depict Mike Davis as a California historian, but he had depth and range beyond California of course. He had distinct research projects, one of which was the history of global capitalism. More should be made of his works like "Late Victorian Holocausts" and "Planet of Slums."
Some on the far left have appropriated Davis's concept of surplus populations, but for Davis it was always the proletariat, that politically organized section, that must lead the cause. He was a Leninist and wrote on both workers' history and military history.
He was critical to the end. While he was sympathetic with the post-2008 young left around Democratic Socialists of America, the Occupy movement and BLM, he also noted its weaknesses: on American Empire in the Sanders campaign.
Long ago he coined a phrase to describe the relation between the Democratic Party and the American Left: "the barren marriage."
Lynell George, Writer
In the first ragged hours after I'd learned the news of my friend and mentor Mike Davis' passing, I heard, quite distinctly, his voice: The rounded vowels; the rests and breaths; the way his cadences shifted in different modes — storytelling versus, say, casual conversation. That voice pulled you across decades, continents and contested territory. He'd sweep you to vivid locales in stories — not just his own, but the histories he'd studied and kept alive and urgent through retelling.
Now, like always, his voice led me, clarified.
Getting to know Mike was, for me, a life seminar in the wilds. As a young journalist/storyteller, I learned about new ways to engage with the world. To be aware and open and questioning. Over the years, I've sat cross-legged on living room floors flipping through his books and maps and political ephemera; I've ridden shotgun across several Southern California countries exploring both what once was and what he predicted would come. I leaned across the table at his favorite Yucatan restaurant in Pasadena, closely listening, jotting down notes, as he wove together fact, theory and color. Mike could stitch together long, elegant paragraphs, footnotes and all, extemporaneously, with an erudition that didn't fence you out. Rather, it was with an enthusiasm that welcomed you in.
The region is now, and will forever be for me, stamped in his voice. It was this thirst and engagement, with which I wanted to approach in my own work. He modeled that research and writing was not just about sitting at one's desk, it was about engaging, connecting and being in conversation with an ever-shifting world.
The region is now, and will forever be for me, stamped in his voice.Lynell George, writer
Vickie Vertiz, Writer
I first came across his writings in a class on Los Angeles in undergrad when I was at Williams College in Massachusetts with Dr. Lisa Magaňa who now I think is in Claremont. It was just a rare thing to come across his work in Massachusetts. His work has so much reach that it found me there.
Mike was on my thesis committee at UC Riverside. I worked with him on a memoir about what it was like to have an education where I went between Bell Gardens and the Berkshires and Williams College in particular. The thing about Mike was that he knew if you were someone who was from Southern California and you told him where you were from, he likely had a story about that place or that area. When I told Mike Davis I was from Bell Gardens, he had lots of stories for me. One of them was about the landlords in the early 1980s who came into the Bell Gardens City Hall. Mike was doing research on housing and rent back then and he knew about the local scandals.
The thing about Mike was that he made me feel seen as someone who is from a small town that nobody knew about, cared about or heard about much less associated with Los Angeles. The fact that Mike Davis, this historian who I'd read in college whose work I followed throughout my public policy career and then many years later that I ended up studying with him in an MFA program where he taught at UC Riverside, was meaningful. To feel seen by him and to have him believe in me and my writing in my work meant the world to me and that he knew exactly what corner of Los Angeles I was from.
He actually worked at the Indian Revival church that was on Gage and Specht which is literally like 50 feet from my house. He saw how hard people had it back then so he knows exactly what it was like to live in that place. And so he made me feel seen and he believed in me and my writing. That has changed me and that has made me the teacher I am today. I hope to pass on that gift of seeing our students into my own teaching.
Scott Kurashige, Writer
I feel blessed to have shared time on this Earth with Mike Davis. Before "City of Quartz," Los Angeles history was rarely taken seriously by the academic or book publishing world centered on the East Coast. Having grown up here, I once felt I had to leave L.A. to experience the core of America. "City of Quartz" came out when I was finishing college and coming to the realization that L.A. was the place to read the nation’s future.
Mike Davis directly and indirectly inspired and guided an entire generation of L.A. and urban historians. His chapter, in particular, highlighting the influence of the homeowners' movement as a reactionary social force linking privatization, whiteness and suburbanization is epic. Hundreds of works, including mine, owe a great debt just to that chapter.
It would be a disservice to his cause to put Mike on a pedestal. Instead, we need to study and learn from the methods that produce greatness.Scott Kurashige, writer
Davis was, of course, incredibly well read. If you were lucky (like I once was) and he cared enough about your project, he would give you a "Reader B" report pointing out all of the sources you failed to cite and consider. I never got to know Davis personally. But what I believe made him uniquely valuable to critical, radical scholarship and movement building was his engagement as an organic intellectual with activists, organizers and rank-and-file workers.
For those who recognized the originality and brilliance of his insights — alongside his biting wit and infectious storytelling — it was clear that one can't get that just from books and degrees. We need more organic intellectuals in our political movements and in civil society. It would be a disservice to his cause to put Mike on a pedestal. Instead, we need to study and learn from the methods that produce greatness.
William Deverell, Historian
I was intimidated when I first met Mike. I had to be still in my twenties, and I knew him solely because of "City of Quartz." I admit that some of my nerves had to do with that author photograph on the jacket of the Verso hardback that my sister surprised me with for a birthday or Christmas. But it wasn't just that — it was those Marxist bona fides, the working-class Fontana backstory, the driving energy of the writing and argumentation, even the brilliant metaphors and analogies he used in skewering this or that institution, political body, person. But the warmth shone through right away.
We shared Irish America together, we lived not far apart in Pasadena, and Mike and I began to trade ideas about sources, obscure books and forgotten chroniclers. I watched and listened to him as he put "Ecology of Fear" together. We drank beer at a local pub in Pasadena where, occasionally, Mike would be recognized by this or that activist or community organizer. In the early 1990s, we worked together to put on a big environmental history conference at CSUN, and it was through that project that we grew close.
Mike had a fascination for Caltech, where I had been a postdoc and then a professor. Mike was a wannabe geologist, vulcanologist and planetary scientist all rolled into one, and he autodidactically trained himself in these fields.
When I had invited him to Caltech to give a paper, he was nearly giddy about it. Giddy doesn't sound much like Mike, but that twinkle in his eye revealed a playfulness about him that many people missed. Mostly what I remember is our conversations about heroes of the western labor and leftist political movements from long ago.
Our talk over pints could often turn to Job Harriman, or Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, or Louis Adamic. That kind of made me giddy — it was fun and heady and made me all the more excited about the power of historical research and perspective. And I remember Mike as a father, showing me pictures of his kids, always asking after mine (and after my wife, Jenny; he had a very soft spot for her and her knowledge of western photography). My intimidation morphed into deep respect and friendship, and he made a real difference in my life and work. I'm ever grateful.
Johnathan Pacheco Bell, Urban Planner
I was in architecture from Montebello High School to East Los Angeles College to SCI-Arc. I dropped out of the SCI-Arc B.Arch program in 1998 after seeing a lot of ugliness in that field. I experienced racism and classism up close during my studies there. The architecture field has lots of problems. And it creates lots of problems too. It dawned on me that I didn't want to be part of it. So much "signature" architecture is designed for the wealthy, and I didn't want to design buildings for rich people.
After going through that harsh reality check, I realized I cared less about the building and more about what's happening around the building — the struggles for justice in the community. There was a book from my architecture studies that addressed these politics: "City of Quartz."
Mike Davis showed me how architecture, urban planning and politics conspired to design an unjust Los Angeles. It uncovered what planners did wrong. It uncovered the race and class conflicts at the core of city planning and design. "City of Quartz" opened my eyes to the harms planning has done. And it would eventually be part of my inspiration to create a new form of street-level planning to bridge the divide between planners and the people. I call it Embedded Planning praxis.
Mike Davis taught me that planners should take a stance for justice. Drop the pretense of 'neutrality' to fight for people in need.Jonathan Pacheco Bell, urban planner
Embedded Planning urges planners to relocate their work from behind a desk to the community. Embedded Planners work from the street-level. You go to the people. You build relationships at people's doorsteps. You plan in plain language and the languages of the community. Embedded Planning means you move with intention to conduct your work as much as possible from the spaces and places of the community. You make the neighborhood your office.
Mike Davis taught me that planners should take a stance for justice. Drop the pretense of "neutrality" to fight for people in need. Planners can work to repair past planning harms by being advocates for disinvested communities. To do so, you need to know the people, and they must know you. Planners earn trust by standing shoulder to shoulder with community members on the ground.
Mike's writing was not just a critique of the planning regime; it was a call to action. A better world is possible if we fight for it. Planners can do right by communities by working in/from community spaces. Bridge the distance between you and the community to plan with reference to lived experience. That's what I did when I created Embedded Planning in Florence-Firestone. Now the praxis is international. The next generation of planners do not want to plan from a desk. They are organizers and change agents. We owe so much to Mike Davis.
As I've done for years, I will continue to recommend his writings as a primer on Los Angeles and urban planning. This is how Mike Davis will live on. We honor Mike by continuing the struggle to create a better world.
Mike Sonksen, Writer
I studied with Mike Davis in my final year at UCLA in the Spring of 1997, but I had already been reading him from early college when I took a Los Angeles history class with Leonard Pitt that used "City of Quartz" as the textbook. I remember seeing the book in the UCLA bookstore the term before I had the class and from the first time I saw it, there was something about the cover that pulled me in.
By the time I studied with Mike I had already read both "City of Quartz" and a bunch of his essays in the "LA Weekly," "the Nation" and the "New Left Review." I always read his latest. In class, he did not spend a whole lot of time lecturing. He shared some thoughts, but he mostly made students talk and always wanted to hear about where we lived and what our families were like. He empowered us by making us realize our stories were important too. Mike helped me contextualize my own family history within the scope of the city. He did this for all of us and always had time to listen. Plus he was an endless source of book and musical recommendations. When I told him I liked John Coltrane, he told me to check Coltrane's record "Ascension" and that I needed to listen to Joe McPhee's "Nation Time." When I told him I wrote poems he hipped me to his favorite poet Lola Ridge. He also pulled my coat to authors like Brian Cross, Lynell George, Ruben Martinez and Bill Deverell. He also liked boxing and told me to read "The Sweet Science" by A.J. Liebling.
His class was a community. He even had all of us over at his house for pizza on a Friday night. He let us look through his bookshelves and filing cabinets of archived materials. He even showed me an outline of an essay he was working on. Some of the assignments he gave us are ones I now use with my students like the classmate interview project and one where students list their layers of identity. Mike was never too didactic, he demonstrated by example. So much of what I learned from him was just through osmosis. He was loyal to his family and friends and saw himself as an everyday man of the people.
Mike always had these dinner parties where writers, artists and eclectic folks would gather. Over the years he introduced me to two of his best friends from the late 1960s, Levi Kingston and Ron Schneck. Kingston was a neighborhood activist in South Central that had owned the Pogos Swamp coffeehouse in the 1960s and Schneck was a truck driver and labor organizer that eventually became a teacher at Dorsey High School, where he had attended in the early 60s. Mike loved these guys deeply and no matter how many awards he won, these two were his partners for life.
In one of the last emails I received from Mike in September that was sent to about a dozen of us in his circle, he wanted to make sure that Levi Kingston was remembered with a historical marker or small monument in the neighborhood just north of USC along Hoover Street. Kingston founded the Hoover Intergenerational Care center in the mid-1970s and it was about responding to the needs of South Central Los Angeles residents through intergenerational child care and paying attention to community needs. Kingston passed in February 2020 just weeks before the pandemic began and the book Mike dedicated to him, "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties" published. Mike remembered everything Kingston had done for the community and wanted to make sure Levi Kingston was never forgotten. It is this type of devotion to Los Angeles and its people that makes Mike Davis such a beloved figure. Mike Davis belongs to Los Angeles like Vin Scully, Art Laboe, Wanda Coleman, Bukowski, Biddy Mason, Huell Howser, Kobe Bryant and Chick Hearn.