Slow Violence of the Supply Chain: A History of Logistics in Mira Loma
Sixty miles east and inland of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino were once the epicenter of California’s “Orange Empire,” where “citrus gold” brought prosperity and prestige, and rows of emerald-green trees bejeweled the landscape. Acres of orange groves as far as the eye could see — vistas Midwesterners would send home on postcards — made Riverside the wealthiest city in the nation per capita in 1895.
Today things have changed.
More than a billion square feet of warehouses and distribution centers now carpet the same landscape; the air is thick with toxic stew that hangs over one of the most polluted counties in America. One in eight jobs is at Amazon, the largest employer in the Inland Empire region, where the work of picking, sorting and packing echoes that of the old citrus industry.
These are the jobs long promised by politicians and pundits to pave the “path to the middle class” for residents who have suffered economic change alongside environmental degradation. Job security for working people has been precarious since post-war housing tract developments pushed out the agricultural industry in the 1960s; offshore manufacturing shut down the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana in the 1980s; and closures at Norton Air Force Base and March Field during the U.S. military base realignments of the 1990s ended tens of thousands of jobs.
Logistics — the management of the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of consumption — represents up to 10% of the Gross Domestic Product of the U.S., and Amazon has the highest market value of any corporation in the world. Yet this has not translated into better jobs for the majority of workers in the Inland region. As labor historian Ruth Milkman writes in The Cost of Free Shipping, “workers are subject to the daily indignities, productivity pressures, and health and safety hazards” long associated with factories in the industrial era before unionization. Only now, management is digital, guided by surveillance and algorithms.
It is hard to estimate what portion of the riches generated by e-commerce, which grew rapidly during the pandemic, actually lands in the pockets of Inland Southern California residents. We do know that warehouse jobs are often temporary, low waged, and lacking in benefits. “A pipeline to poverty,” is how San Bernardino City Councilmember Ben Reynoso has characterized work in the goods movement industry, which grants economic mobility to a scant number of people (4 in 10 jobs pay enough to make ends meet) and leaves the rest with little path to advancement. This is especially the case in immigrant communities, and communities of color, where 81% of warehouses are located.
We can name these gradual and inequitable impacts as the “slow violence” of the supply chain. As Rob Nixon explains in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, violence isn’t typically thought of as gradual, unfolding over centuries, across generations, and with genetic carryover, yet this is often how the damage unfolds with fossil fuel burning, climate change, deforestation, oil spills, chemical warfare and pesticide use. The long-term impacts of these unnatural disasters offer limited spectacle for media coverage, making them difficult to visualize and narrate.
“Slow violence” reminds us to look beyond the news cycle to see longer histories of exploitation of land and people inherent in goods movement. Its temporal scale includes ongoing processes of colonization and the growth of global corporate capitalism.
Those living in the Inland Empire bear witness to this slow violence of the supply chain, and its human and ecological costs.
Violence is baked in to the history of the supply chain. It’s rooted in what geographer Deborah Cowen calls “the deadly life of logistics” — a reference to the supply chain’s militaristic origins and the entanglements of war and trade behind our global economic order. Think Genghis Khan mobilizing his troops to dominate the Silk Road, the military origins of the internet, with Vietnam-era ARPANET, and of contemporary surveillance technologies. As Cowen says, logistics is a “science born of war.” It is also a science born of exploitation.
Scholars Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write about the Atlantic slave trade as the “first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak,” and those enslaved as “not just property but commodity.”
Anglo-European colonists exploited the labor of migrants and Native peoples to build infrastructures of capitalist accumulation and military domination throughout the Americas. In Southern California, in the 18th and 19th centuries, conquistadors, and then settlers, stripped Native people of their lands, conscripted them alongside Chinese and other immigrants to build the railroads, and then pressed them into wage labor in the agricultural settlements that such infrastructure enabled. In short: white settlement and the harvesting and distribution of “citrus gold” depended on these violent extractions of land and human labor.
The slow violence of the supply chain cuts across time and space. It emerges clearly in the 20th century, with economic imperatives to build highways after World War I, and massive industrial growth spurred for the production of weapons and military machinery around World War II and the Cold War.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the military industrial complex in Southern California expanded dramatically, and moved inland from coastal cities, to be safe from potential threat of foreign invasion. As scholar Brinda Sarathy discovered, in January 1942, the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster General established a supply Depot in San Bernardino for the distribution of war material. The Depot later expanded its footprint with millions of square feet of warehouse space on a 522-acre parcel in the unincorporated area of Mira Loma in Riverside County. The sites were also connected to the Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Santa Fe Railroads — the same lines that had enabled the citrus empire to develop over the prior half century.
The rapid growth of the Depots at San Bernardino and then Mira Loma in 1942 served an additional purpose: to distribute supplies to build and operate the concentration camp Manzanar, in the Owens Valley, over 200 miles due north. The Army Quartermaster at Mira Loma supplied goods and food for over 10,000 incarcerated people of Japanese descent, who were forced from their California homes to construct and live in the camp.
Mira Loma also supplied the Desert Training Center in the Mojave, where some 100,000 soldiers were readied for combat in Northern Africa and Europe; it supplied the military bases and defense sites from Long Beach to San Diego, and from the Coachella Valley through Southern Nevada.
Race, labor, and geography intersected at the Mira Loma military warehouses, according to Sarathy. In federal records, the Quartermaster General’s historian, hired to document events as they were unfolding, “spoke of industrious — white — civilians and military who worked at all hours, to ensure provisions reached the camps.” Incarcerated Japanese American citizens, on the other hand, were invariably described in pejorative racial terms and as unworthy of the advanced techniques of supply chain management that enabled them to get milk at camp, especially when “deserving” Americans couldn’t always.
The Army commissioned L.A.-based architectural firm Holmes & Narver (H&N) to design the structures for the Mira Loma Supply Depot in 1942, and to solve the complex technical problems of integrating nine warehouses, 11.5 million square feet of open-air storage, 12 miles of roads, and 13 miles of railroad tracks that ran through the site. (Notably, H&N also designed nuclear weapon testing sites in Nevada and the South Pacific.)
The firm created an entire mini-Main Street adjacent to the complex with administrative buildings, a fire station, hospital, library, barber shop, and swimming pool. Local newspapers took note, especially, of the challenges in finding workers while men and women went off to war. Laborers imprisoned at the Chino Institution for Men served as freight handlers. Civilian women comprised 80% of the work force.
The Depot and its Main Street continued to operate through the Korean War, until the Air Force took over in 1955; thereafter, the military stored and later dismantled Atlas and Titan I Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) at the site.
After the Korean War, the military infrastructure remained in place in Mira Loma. Private industry took over the nearby U.S. Army Air Force base to handle commercial traffic as Ontario Airport. Kaiser Steel plant, built in 1943 by private companies with federal defense contracts, also continued to bring jobs and people to the Inland Empire after the war.
For industry and political leaders, the steel plant’s environmental impacts paled in the face of potential economic gains. And for a shining moment, the region’s future prosperity seemed to lie in housing the multitudes, whose union wages would let them ride the postwar suburban boom.
Developers tried to cash in on the jobs and available land, opening Mira Loma Village in 1956 with 101 ranch-style homes just a few unpaved blocks away from the Depot’s military buildings. They replaced the vineyards that had flourished in the sandy soil since 1900, when two thousand acres of grapes were planted in Mira Loma, forming the world’s largest contiguous vineyard with twenty thousand acres at Cucamonga-Guasti vineyard to the west.
“I sure hate to see the grapes go,” longtime vineyard foreman Jack Zuniga said in 1955, “but I guess we can’t prevent progress.” Residents still talk about the dark night sky and fields of dirt and vines that surrounded them when they moved in during the 1960s and early 1970s. By the 1990s, nearly all that land around Mira Loma Village had been built over, the homes encroached upon by warehouses.
Today, a few fragments of the wine industry remain in Mira Loma, along Wineville Avenue. One driveway leads to Galleano Winery, a National Historic Register site whose grapes grow right alongside the loading bays for Fedex Freight. A nearby driveway is closed to visitors. It’s the fenced-off Sam’s Club distribution center, one of the area’s many Walmart warehouses targeted in a series of labor protests that began in 2009. At the time, workers used their own bodies to block highway access to the cluster of warehouses in Mira Loma.
The protests were a way to bring visibility, as scholar Juan de Lara writes, to labor conditions across the supply chain, and to implicate “diesel trucks, trains, and ships in the poisoning and premature death of poor Black and Brown communities.” They drew attention to the transformations that had occurred across the region ever since a 1987 amendment to Riverside County’s General Plan allowed huge swathes of vineyards, citrus, and dairy farms to be replaced, one after another, by “big box” distribution centers.
In 2002, University of Southern California medical researchers found that grade schoolers from Mira Loma who they had been studying since 1993 had stunted lung development and increased respiratory illnesses with long-term links to heart attacks, cancer and premature deaths. More investigations followed, and reporters discovered that from 1987 to 2002, County officials approved dozens of warehouses and distribution centers, offering tax breaks without addressing cumulative impacts of truck exhaust. “It’s like they think we are a bunch of country bumpkins, and it doesn’t matter to us,” exclaimed resident Lupe Potter in 2002. To this day, government officials don’t account for the cumulative impacts of truck and train diesel exhaust when approving warehouses across the region, though individual municipalities are starting to pay attention.
By the time of the 2007-2008 economic collapse, Mira Loma contained the largest concentration of distribution centers in the nation. During the hard times of the Great Recession that followed, pro-logistics industry leaders and public agencies promoted warehouses as the best possible use for rapidly devalued land. In the name of economic recovery and jobs, city and county agencies approved industrial warehouse developments based on “overriding considerations”: that economic benefits outweigh the significant impacts on air quality and greenhouse gas emissions, conversion of open land and farmland to industrial use, and aesthetic degradation.
Even after the unemployment rate dropped, the language of crisis remained. The argument for jobs at any cost, without much attention to how many, for how long, and with what benefits, remains the mantra of many local officials. Meanwhile, global capital flows through the region, but doesn’t appear to land within communities of need, and local municipalities still struggle to strengthen their tax bases.
Both the economic and the environmental impacts of goods movement are difficult to see, as is typical of slow violence. Vivien Hamilton and Sarathy note that “toxic environments are often invisible or appear innocuous, though such spaces are more prevalent in our day-to-day lives than we either know or care to admit.”
The challenges of logistics are particularly formidable, as the supply chain is both hidden in plain sight — the expanse of freeways, for instance, so mundane and ever-present as to be easily ignored — and operating at an unfathomable scale. Supply chain infrastructure in Southern California involves global circulation of mass data and zillions of products: millions of containers, trucks, and railcars; miles of tracks and intersecting freeways; not to mention a billion square feet of warehouses in Riverside and San Bernardino’s inland ports alone. Like the ocean ports and air terminals, these less expensive inland areas where goods are sorted and redistributed are also quite literally “Foreign Trade Zones” (FTZs).
Almost all areas in the southeasterly arc from the L.A. and Long Beach ports to the inland valley are designated as FTZs, places within the U.S. that function as foreign territory for the purposes of delaying and reducing customs taxes. In the Inland Empire, smog hangs in the valley, generated by concentrated industrial activity and held stationary by the geography of the region. The rapid flow of capital, on the other hand, is facilitated by FTZ designation, which ensures it doesn’t settle in place, or get trapped against the mountains.
FTZs help capital race through the inland port without investment in the communities doing the “essential” work. Meanwhile pollutants settle — into the lungs, groundwater and cellular structure of residents. Economic mobility seems reserved for the global corporations financing the logistical operations. They too are out of view.
The Mira Loma Quarter Master’s Supply Depot was sold off in bits and pieces; two thirds went to the Mira Loma Space Center in 1966 and became a commercial warehouse complex, though the military continued to lease space there. The warehouses flanking Mira Loma Village have turned it into a walled community. As with many housing developments in the Inland Empire, these walls are the only separation between residential space and the millions of square feet of distribution space next door.
The Technicolor visions of the post-World War II suburban landscape that the original, white middle-class homeowners might have harbored are now clouded with smog and filtered through the haze of diesel exhaust from the thousands of trucks loading, unloading or idling as they wait for a turn at the dock. Today’s mostly Latinx residents breathe some of the worst particulate pollution in the U.S. Their isolation amidst industry has led to a decline in community services — no grocery stores and shops serve the area — as well as long-term reverberating health impacts.
Yet not everyone protests. As housing prices soar, some residents just shrug off the warehouses that block their view of the nearby mountains, resigned to the seemingly insurmountable forces changing the landscape across the region.
The original warehouses of the 1942 military depot have come to appear quaint, even Lilliputian, compared to the Amazon sorting warehouse next door. Over the last two months, new owners, Link Logistics, have been demolishing the nine historic depot buildings. Though the site’s toxic history, laden with perchlorate from ballistic missiles, among other substances, does not inspire nostalgia, it is sad to see the heritage of the region plowed under. Is it because this is a memorial site, where visible histories of slow violence are now being razed and disappeared? Or is the mourning more literal? Among its wartime roles, Mira Loma also distributed the remains of soldiers who lost their lives overseas, preparing the dead and shipping them for final burial in U.S. national cemeteries or other stateside locations.
The Depot’s status as an “American Graves Distribution Center” is one of the dark ironies of the site’s multilayered history and its association with the lethality of logistics. Recently, workers on site have been salvaging the Douglas fir and redwood from the buildings and railroad ties. Soon, new concrete structures and smoothly paved roads will embalm any lingering reminders of the past, and Amazon will move in.
Meanwhile, salvage operators load the wood onto flatbed trucks, headed for house builders in Montana. As witnesses to the slow violence of the supply chain, we can watch for a few months longer, as every last hint of organic material is removed from the region until there is nothing left but asphalt, warehouses, trucks, and smog — land conquered by logistics and people still fighting for a reprieve from Empire.
This essay builds upon the author’s ongoing work with the Bureau of Goods Movement environmental humanities collective, and with students, community-based organizations, and the Humanities Action Lab, which produced Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice, including “Witnessing the Slow Violence of the Supply Chain in L.A. and the Inland Empire.”
Sources and Additional Reading
On the imperial roots of “Inland Empire,” see Karen Tongson, “Empire of My Familiar,” Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 112-58. Some residents dislike the associations of “Inland Empire” with the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, which has had a stronghold in the region; others call out this association to galvanize resistance to white supremacy.
A keen examination of the history of the Inland Empire and the intersections of place and mobility, labor and race, is Genevieve Carpio, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).
Vincent Moses, “Machines in the Garden: A Citrus Monopoly in Riverside, 1900-1936,” California History 61 (Spring 1982): 17.
Juan De Lara, Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California (Oakland: University of California, 2018), examines the growth of the logistics economy in the Inland Empire, and how global corporate capitalism helped transform the region’s geographies of race and class.
Juliann Emmons Allison, “What Happens When Amazon Comes to Town? Environmental Impacts, Local Economies, and Resistance in Inland Southern California,” in The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, eds. Ellen Reese and Jake Alimahomed-Wilson (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 176-93.
Ellen Reese and Jason Struna, “’Work Hard, Make History’: Oppression and Resistance in Inland Southern California’s Warehouse and Distribution Industry,” in Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain, ed. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 81-95.
Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Patrick Chung, “From Korea to Vietnam: Local Labor, Multinational Capital, and the Evolution of U.S. Military Logistics, 1950-97,” Radical History Review 133 (January 2019), 31-55.
Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Alvin P. Stauffer, Quartermaster Depot Storage and Distribution Operations, Q.M.C. Historical Studies No. 18 (Washington, D.C.: Historical Section, Office of the Quartermaster General, 1948), 49-50, 119.
James Bennett, “Supplying 40,000 Japanese Aliens,” 25 May, 1943, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) RG 94, Folder 1, Box No. 7, File 314.7.
“Army Engineer Depot Supplies Nation’s Forces Throughout Wide District,” San Bernardino Daily Sun, 12 September 1943, 8.
“Japs[sic] at Manzanar Found Well Fed,” San Pedro News Pilot, 31 May 1943.
Historic Resources Analysis Report: Proposed Space Center Mira Loma Project, Jurupa Valley, CA (La Mesa, CA: Urbana Preservation & Planning, November 2020), 15-16.
“Camps—U.S. Army Services Forces, 1945-46,” Inventory of the Department of Corrections Records, California State Archives, Folder F3737:437, item 151.
Col. Harry M. Andrews and Mrs. Rheba Splivalo, “Mira Loma Q.M. Officials Say Women Solved Problem,” Riverside Daily Press, 3 July 1943.
George Walker and John Peragine, Cucamonga Valley Wine: The Lost Empire of American Winemaking (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2017), 111, 35.
“Giant Tract Foretells New Era for Mira Loma,” San Bernardino Sun, 30 September, 1955.
Sheheryar Kaoosji, “Lessons Learned from Eight Years of Experimental Organizing in Southern California’s Logistics Sector,” in Choke Points, 214-16, 220-23.
David Danelski, “Air of Concern,” The Press Enterprise, 25 August, 2002.
David Danelski, “Unclear Future,” The Press Enterprise, 22 August, 2002.
Interview by Antonio Gonzalez Vazquez with Penny Newman, Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice (CCAEJ), 23 June 2004
Interview by the author with Veronica Alvarado and Sheheryar Kasooji, Warehouse Worker Resource Center, 26 April 2019, and with Andrea Vidaurre, CCAEJ, 17 April 2019.
Steven Cuevas, “Moreno Valley Continues to Debate 41-million-square-foot Warehouse,” KPCC, 22 May 2012.
Vivien Hamilton and Brinda Sarathy, “Introduction: Toxicity, Uncertainty, and Expertise,” in Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise, eds. Brinda Sarathy, Vivien Hamilton, and Janet Farrell Brodie (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 3.
On Foreign Trade Zones, see Dara Orenstein, Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2019).
