"California Reaming"

Mike Davis

Voters in California were set to go to the polls on 7 October, until the election was postponed this week. When it does take place, the two-part ballot will ask whether state governor Gray Davis should be removed. It will then ask voters to choose from among 135 candidates, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, to replace Davis. Mike Davis, whose books include City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts, writes on the issues which the media's election coverage has ignored.

EVERY CANDIDATE in California's dark recall election comedy should be obliged to answer the question, "Whither Duroville?" Duroville is the California visitors never see and that pundits ignore when they debate the future of the world's sixth largest economy.Officially this ramshackle desert community of 4,000 people in the Coachella Valley doesn't even exist. It is a shantytown-reminiscent of the Okie camps in The Grapes of Wrath-erected by otherwise homeless farm workers on land owned by Harvey Duro, a member of the Cahuilla Indian nation. The Coachella Valley is the prototype of a future -- Beverly Hills meets Tijuana -- that California conservatives seem to dream of creating everywhere.

The western side of the valley, from Palm Springs to La Quinta, is an air-conditioned paradise of gated communities built around artificial lakes and golf courses. The typical resident is a 65 year old retired white male in a golf cart. He is a zealous voter who disapproves of taxes, affirmative action, and social services for the immigrants who wait on him.

The east side of the valley, from Indio to Mecca, is where the resort maids, pool cleaners and farm workers live. There is an artificial mountain built out of 500,000 tons of sludge (solid sewage) trucked in from Los Angeles, but not a blade of grass. In Duroville the largest body of water is the sewage lagoon, and the local playground is a dioxin-contaminated landfill. The typical resident is 18 years old, speaks Spanish or Mixtec, and works all day in the blast-furnace desert heat. She or he, most likely, is not yet a citizen and therefore ineligible to vote. Squalor, exploitation and lack of rights are not confined to California's agricultural valleys and "factories in the field". There are urban Durovilles as well, like the sprawling tenement district just a few blocks west of downtown Los Angeles.

On the gilded coast north of San Diego an estimated 10,000 immigrant day-labourers and service workers sleep rough in the wild canyons behind $800,000 homes. Throughout the state, hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers live in illegal garage conversions, derelict trailers, even chicken coops.

Economic inequality has soared in the last generation, particularly in the southern half of the state. In the Los Angeles area, for example, the top 20 percent of the workforce earns 25 times more on average than the bottom 20 percent. Similarly, a third of Los Angeles residents lack medical insurance and depend on a handful of overcrowded county hospitals whose doctors have recently given chilling testimony about the rising number of needless deaths from shortages of staff and beds. This Third World California, which Duroville poignantly symbolises, is no accidental creation.

Full story is at: Davis