City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Born 1946 to working class parents in Fontana, the steel-town that borders Los Angeles’ metropolis, Davis has an atypical background for an academic. While this urban theorist and historian was studying, he took proletarian jobs in truck driving and meat cutting. Davis’ experience in working-class life means that, unlike other academics who are content to study phenomena such as gang warfare and illegal immigration from a distance, Davis is eager to talk to his disadvantaged subjects. For example, when he meets the El Salvadorian immigrants who are camped out in the old socialist city of Llano del Rio, they talk in “mutually broken tongues”—he relying on his imperfect use of Spanish, and they on English—in order to hash out communication and share their experiences of Los Angeles (12). Davis’ ability to “have a go” and to talk with people, rather than talking down to them, characterizes his approach to his material and his ethos to get these so-called minorities (who are from a numerical perspective, majorities), seen and endowed with a voice. In addition to his personal experiences, Davis’ attitude stems from his Socialism and Marxism, which inform his belief that all people are equal, and that their quality of life should come before capitalist profit.