From Citrus Groves To Warehouses: A Pop Up Art Exhibit Traces The Damaging Impacts Of The Inland Empire's Industrial History

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