Cry California

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 4000 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 farmworkers 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 eighteen-hole 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, busboys, pool cleaners, and farmworkers live. There is an artificial mountain built out of 500,000 tons of sludge (solid sewage) trucked in from Los Angeles, but nary 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/he, most likely, is not yet a citizen and therefore ineligible to vote.

Squalor, exploitation and disenfranchisement are not just anomalies of California's agricultural valleys and "factories in the field." There are urban Durovilles as well, like the sprawling tenement district just a few blocks from downtown Los Angeles. On the gilded coast north of San Diego, an estimated 10,000 immigrant day-laborers and service-workers sleep rough in the wild canyons behind $800,000 tract 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% of the workforce earns twenty-five times more on average than the bottom 20%. Similarly, a third of Los Angeles residents lack medical insurance and must 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 symbolizes, is no accidental creation. The famous tax revolt of the 1970s was racial politics coded as fiscal populism. As the Latino population soared, white voters -- egged on by rightwing demagogues -- withdrew support from the public sector. California became a bad school state in lockstep with becoming a low wage state. Overcrowded classrooms and dangerous playgrounds are part of one vicious circle with sweatshop jobs and slum housing.

The California labor movement, reinvigorated by a new generation of organizing, has fought to halt creeping "Mississippization" with living wage ordinances, increased school spending, and the closure of tax breaks for the rich. There have been some victories (mainly in funding education), but progressive politics fights uphill against two huge structural obstacles.

The first is the legacy of Proposition 13 itself which requires supermajorities to raise most taxes. The second, and more daunting, is the glacial pace of the enfranchisement of new immigrants. Although Anglos are now a minority of the population, they still constitute 70% of the electorate. Even in 2040, according to the projections of the Public Policy Institute of California, whites (only 35% of the population) will still cast 53% of the votes. If current trends continue, this geriatric white minority will also consume a majority of entitlements and tax resources.