The Brief

San Bernardino and Riverside counties have the most concentrated cluster of warehouses in the world, in no small part fueled by our love for fast delivery.

They’re also the reason why the area has some of the highest levels of pollution in the nation, causing serious health impacts to the largely Latino communities who live nearby, and contributing significantly to the heating of our planet.

So how did this happen? The Inland Empire has a long and often untold commercial history, from the forced displacement of Indigenous people to establish a booming citrus industry, to the U.S. military building infrastructure that would lay the foundation for the explosive growth of the logistics industry.

A theme through it all has been largely false promises of good-paying jobs at the expense of people’s and the environment’s health. But there’s also another consistent thread — the efforts of local community members who have fought, and continue to fight, for a better way.

That’s the story that a two-week pop-up art exhibit at the Riverside Art Museum, and online, aims to highlight.

“There isn't an inevitability of where we got to today — decisions were made at each step along the way,” said Cathy Gudis, professor of history at UC Riverside and a co-curator of the project with her students and two environmental justice groups in L.A. and San Bernardino: East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice and the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice.

Multi-colored panels tell stories of environmental injustice from 22 communities across the U.S., Mexico and Colombia.

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Jacob Willson

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Riverside Art Museum

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Called “Climates of Inequality, Stories of Environmental Justice,” the traveling exhibit will go across the world, highlighting 22 communities from the United States, Mexico, and Colombia which face similar challenges and are fighting for change.

The Los Angeles and Inland Empire portion is called “Witnessing The Slow Violence Of The Supply Chain.” Stories of environmental injustice and activism in Oxnard and San Fernando are also featured.

The multimedia project takes viewers on a historical journey through a series of significant locations from the ports of L.A. and Long Beach to Southeast L.A. and Commerce, then east into Mira Loma and finally all the way to San Bernardino and Riverside.

Panels from the exhibition

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courtesy of Riverside Art Museum

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 “We need to use media and we need to use history and we need to use the experiences of our people to really understand where we need to go,” said Anthony Victoria, a local journalist with NPR-affiliate KVCR and founder of the environmental justice-focused publication The Frontline Observer. He participated in the project and will speak on a panel as part of it.

The point of the exhibit is not just to highlight the history, but to clearly lay out how that history continues to impact the present, said L.A.-based artist Noè Montes, who also participated in the project.

“The land holds the truth of history,” Montes said. “Once we start talking about that and recognizing it, then we will really be making some headway to the resolution, the reparations that are necessary to achieve justice.”

The exhibit showcases voices of community organizers, artists, warehouse workers, researchers and others involved in the ongoing fight against environmental injustice in the area.

Alicia Aguayo grew up in west San Bernardino and is the communications manager for the group People's Collective for Environmental Justice, which advocates for communities impacted by warehousing.

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Tamara Fleming

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Courtesy of Alicia Aguayo

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“We're telling these stories and making sure that they're not forgotten,” said Alicia Aguayo, the communications manager for the San Bernardino-based People's Collective for Environmental Justice. But she says the exhibit isn’t just about the past — it’s about the present and the future.

“It’s also part of us working with the community and making sure that we're educating each other,” Aguayo said. “We don't believe that this has to be the norm. And we believe that it's possible to have other ways of living.”

A brief history of the supply chain

Postcard images of sprawling acres of orange, lemon and lime groves hearken back to a golden era of southern California agriculture, but the reality was not so rosy.

The citrus industry began with the forced displacement of Indigenous tribes at the start of the Spanish mission era — mission padres planted some of the first citrus trees in the Southland. The industry boomed with the arrival of white American settlers enticed to come West, the railroad, and water diversions from the Santa Ana and Colorado Rivers to help the region bloom. The landscape of southern California was forever changed.

A citrus grove in Highland at the base of the San Bernardino mountains circa 1900.

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Courtesy of LA Public Library

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Indigenous Serrano, Luiseño, Gabrielino-Tongva, Cupeño, Chemehuevi, and Cahuilla people were forced to labor in these fields. In the late 1800s, when the railroad came, Chinese workers largely replaced Indigenous workers. Then anti-Chinese racism led to Japanese immigrant workers becoming the bulk of the workforce.

Another wave of anti-immigrant sentiment came after the first World War, forcing many Japanese workers out as well. By the mid-1940s, Latino workers had become the vast majority of that workforce — as they continue to be today in the region. The cheap labor was essential to making the citrus industry bloom, but people of color benefited far less than most white folks in the region who became some of the wealthiest people in the world at the turn of the century.

“It all goes back to that citrus industry — it's been replaced with low paying jobs in warehouses now,” said Yvonne Chamberlain Marquez, who gathered oral histories and did research for the project during her time as a UC Riverside student in Gudis’ class.

The invention of pesticides and other chemicals further helped the citrus industry boom. But citrus wouldn’t remain king forever — with World Wars I and II, the military took over the area because of its proximity and rail connections to both the ports and high desert military bases. The military’s dumping of toxic waste in the region led to some of the nation’s first Superfund sites, with contamination that still plagues the region’s water tables and landscape today.

The military’s arrival also laid the foundation for the logistics industry the region is now infamous for. For example, the city of Mira Loma, which Gudis and Pitzer College professor Brinda Sarathy call “the roots of logistics,” became a stop for goods and supplies being brought from the ports to high desert military bases, as well as Manzanar, where 10,000 Japanese Americans forced from their homes were incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II.

A guard stands outside the entrance of Manzanar, where 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II.

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Courtesy of LA Public Library

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After the wars, came baby boomers and the need for a lot more space for a rapidly growing population — suburbia replaced many citrus farms that remained. For a time, the Kaiser steel factory provided union jobs for hundreds of thousands of people in the area, who were able to get their slice of the American Dream — but for the largely Latino and Black workers it came at the expense of coping with daily racism and exploitation.

When the factory and military bases closed in the 1980s, the region’s economic struggles skyrocketed. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the logistics industry saw an opportunity.

Yvonne Chamberlain Marquez conducted research and collected oral histories from local activists and elders while she was a student at UC Riverside for the exhibit.

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Courtesy of Yvonne Chamberlain Marquez

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Marquez, who grew up in Chino during the late 1980s and early 1990s, remembers that, and the false promises of how warehouses would provide the next generation of good jobs and a thriving economy.

“In the nineties, a warehouse job was a good job at one point,” she said, “but then they just popped up and grew so fast and now there's so many people stuck in these low wage jobs with no way out.”

The changes have been especially rapid in the last two decades. Marquez herself watched her community’s landscape go from mostly rural to full of warehouses in a span of less than ten years. Today, one in six workers in the Inland Empire are employed in the logistics industry, including many of the UC Riverside students who worked on this project.

Making space 

Marquez said that as someone who grew up poor and returned to school as an adult and single mother later in life, she has often felt like her voice didn’t matter. When she got into UC Riverside, she said she was at one of her lowest points. She joined Gudis’ consumerism history class on a whim — she didn’t expect it to change her life.

But her experience as a student gathering oral histories from local elders and working closely with community activists to put together the Climates of Inequality exhibit changed her life dramatically.

Community members part of San Bernardino-based group the People's Collective for Environmental Justice.

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Courtesy of Alicia Aguayo

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“I was able to see myself in these people who were like me, talked like me, who had the same background that I did,” Marquez said. “They were … so, like, sure of themselves as the experts in what they were talking about and just like seeing them be unapologetic about it was inspiring.”

Marquez hopes the exhibit helps people realize, like she did, that their voices matter too.

An image created by San Bernardino artist Brenda Angels (@basoulcreates) depicts a vision of a thriving economy that runs on local businesses. It was part of the promotion for a local small business event put on by the People's Collective for Environmental Justice

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Courtesy of Alicia Aguayo

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“Once the community is able to see the work that the community has actually done, they're able to see themselves a little bit more and maybe be more inclined to show up to a city council meeting when they don't agree with something, or get involved in civics at some level,” she said.

For local activists like Aguayo, the exhibit illustrates the intertwined natures of art, storytelling and action. She said art is key to how the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice works to humanize the impact of the logistics industry beyond a bottom line, and provide a vision for a better future.

“Oftentimes, these regulators and elected officials look at numbers and they don't think about the stories and the people feeling the impacts and so we do think that this exhibit is crucial,” she said. “Being able to see your experience in a museum I hope feels very validating to community members who've been saying this for years — like this is not new.”

See the exhibit and associated live events

The exhibit runs through Nov. 5 at the Riverside Art Museum. The exhibit is free and open to the public. You can also view the multimedia project online at climatesofinequality.org.

You can see the live events associated with the exhibit here. All the events are free and open to the public.

Upcoming events at the museum include: 

Sunday, Oct. 22: 2 – 4 p.m. at Riverside Art Museum Rooftop (Julia Morgan Building) “Climates of Inequality: EJ in the I.E.”

A dialogue with environmental justice organizers from the Inland Empire. Spanish/English translation available. Includes same-day museum admission at Riverside Art Museum.
RSVP: ramcheech.ticketapp.org/portal/product/130

Thursday, Nov. 2: 6 p.m. at Riverside Art Museum (Julia Morgan Building) Environmental Justice in the IE: Community-based Practices in Art and Activism

Local social practice artists, documentarians, and activists Tamara Cedré, Noé Montes, and Anthony Victoria talk about how the arts can help humanize the issues and convey the magnitude of the impacts felt today in Riverside and San Bernardino.
RSVP: ramcheech.ticketapp.org/portal/product/137

Saturday, Nov. 4: 10 a.m. – noon at Riverside Art Museum (Julia Morgan Building) Teaching “Climates of Inequality” Tour and Workshop.

Limited spaces for high school, college, or university-level teachers interested in bringing regional issues of environmental justice into classrooms. Includes same-day museum admission at Riverside Art Museum.
RSVP: ramcheech.ticketapp.org/portal/product/129

Sunday, Nov. 5: 1 p.m. at Riverside Art Museum (Julia Morgan Building) “Cultures of Environmentalism: Read Aloud & Artmaking.”

For this closing day public program, families are invited to learn about, and try their hand at, California Indian basket making while learning about the impacts of environmental change on culturally significant plants with Lorene Sisquoc (Mountain Cahuilla/Fort Sill Apache), curator at Sherman Indian Museum. Also featured are English language and bilingual (English-Spanish) readings of Carole Lindstorm and Michaela Goade's “We Are Water Protectors” (2021 Caldecott Medal Winner), and local artists' books including Timothy Musso's "Chasing the Sun." Art-making is for all ages. Read-out-loud: 3-8-year-olds.
RSVP: ramcheech.ticketapp.org/portal/product/136

A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

The Venice Boardwalk after sunset has generally been a no-go zone for tourists and locals alike, as the beachside bars and restaurants close on the early side and safety is often an issue. Now, a group of artists is out to bring some vibrancy to the creative neighborhood with a series of new installations that will include live evening performances – and even a “Venice Opera House.”

“Let's play with light and let's play with sound and give people a reason to come to the Boardwalk after sundown,” said artist and entrepreneur Stefan Ashkenazy, who is curating the project and owns the buildings housing them. “I mean, let's just be open 24 hours a day.”

The concept doesn’t have an official name yet, but he’s been calling it “See World.”

Artist James Ostrer's space looks out from a bed through the fence to the ocean at Venice Beach.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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William Attaway, a longtime Venice artist, created a gallery space filled with various paintings and sculptures.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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The pair of modern buildings on the Venice Boardwalk at Thornton Ave. – with their big balconies, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and seven open garage-style retail spaces – have sat mostly empty since Snapchat vacated their beachside offices in 2019. Ashkenazy recently bought the building and recruited artists to fill those front-facing spaces with creative work until a full-time tenant comes in.

Over the past several weeks the installations have been created in real-time, in public.

All of the projects are loosely along the theme of “home,” with each artist claiming a “room” in the two buildings that stretch across a full block on the Boardwalk. Several local Venice artists are featured, including William Attaway, whose intricate mosaic work is recognizable on the Venice public restrooms along the beach. Attaway’s space features a floating larger-than-life-sized statue and various works in a mini-gallery. In the next room is Robin Murez’s pieces, featuring carved wooden seats from her beloved neighborhood Venice Flying Carousel.

Ashkenazy is no stranger to wild (and wildly successful) art ideas. He’s the owner of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, a longtime haven for visiting artists, and the founder of the decade-old Bombay Beach Biennale, where artists install all kinds of work in an annual event near the Salton Sea. Many of the artists from that community are featured at the Venice project.

A "Venice Opera House" will host pop-up music events throughout the summer.

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Laura Hertfeldz

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LAist

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny's paintings on the wall of his Venice space.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny and London-based artist James Ostrer have brought some of their work in the Bombay Beach Biennale to the Venice project. Their windows on the Boardwalk both speak to a child-like sense of wonder and creativity.

“I think it's just kind of exploring and playing a little bit, to have the freedom to be able to do that,” Haberny says of his imagined child’s bedroom space, which includes a fort made out of puffy cheese balls. “It's a big space, too.
It's beautiful.”

Ostrer is experimenting with a performance art idea where he sits in bed amongst a room full of his own artwork, which he describes as “happy art with an edge.” Looking out at the ocean from the bed, he’s invited passersby to sit and have chats with him about his work or anything else they want to talk about.

“It’s a very intimate space, so you have a different kind of conversation,” he said. “I use art to channel human creativity, and [talk about] dark things.”

While there are open fences that block off the spaces, they aren’t sealed up at night. Both Ashkenazy and the team of artists seemed open to the idea that anything could happen and that the installations are a conversation with the public – and with that comes some risk.

Greg Haberny (right) works with his assistants on an installation featuring kid-inspired graffiti art and a "cheesy puff" fort.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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“I don't really know if I [would] say worried, but I guess it's just the cost of doing business,” Haberny said. “I don't really make things to get damaged or broken, sure. But I have done [things like] burned all my paintings and then made paint out of ash.”

While he’s felt safe – and even slept overnight in the installation – Ostrer has been collaborating with a local female artist who performs in a pig mask in front of his installation some nights. Watching her perform, he said, has taught him about the vulnerability of women in public spaces like the Boardwalk. “I've started to, on a very fractional level, have seen how scary that is. Because I've sat in the bed behind her performing at the front here… the way in which men are approaching her and shrieking at her … it's shocking.”

Ashkenazy says he will keep the artists in the space, potentially rotating new ones in, until a fulltime tenant takes over.

“This is an experiment … and after acquiring the building, the intention wasn't, ‘let's open a bunch of public art spaces,’ he said. “It is kind of …what the building wanted and listening to what the Boardwalk needed. Let's play, let's have the artists that we love and appreciate have a space to play and engage and give the locals and the visitors to the Boardwalk something to experience.”

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

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Courtesy Steve Campos

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It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.