Center for Food & Justice

1990s

The uprising of April 1992 - called the "Los Angeles riots" by the national media - signaled that life in the city's poorest neighborhoods had become intolerable. The city's business and political establishments were shocked by the civil unrest and unprepared to respond in any coherent way. But they assumed that "something needed to be done" to avoid embarrassment and prevent another outbreak. Mayor Bradley recruited business leader Peter Ueberroth (who had organized the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics) to coordinate the city's response. This was called Rebuild LA (RLA), organized at first as a top-down, private sector vehicle to induce blue-chip corporations to invest in the city's low-income neighborhoods. In its first few years, RLA made little headway. Few businesses made more than token investments, banks made only a few loans, few jobs were created, and most of the riot-damaged buildings were not rebuilt.


Justice for Janitors demonstration, Century City, June 15, 1990

But as RLA's high-profile, media-focused approach began to fade, RLA's new leadership (and its successor organization Prosper Partners) sought to make common cause with the wide variety of grassroots activities that wanted to rebuild Los Angeles with a different approach and vision. On the other side of the city's racial and class divide, progressives forged new alliances to take advantage of and to steer the new opportunities created by yet another crisis point in the city's governance. Progressive leaders of black, Asian, Hispanic, Jewish, and other constituencies forged groups like the MultiCultural Collaborative to address racial tensions and develop a forward-looking agenda. They pushed the city's political, business, and philanthropic leaders to address real concerns and to work with grassroots organizations. Their activism provided progressive elected officials like City Councilmembers Jackie Goldberg, Ruth Galanter, and Mark Ridley-Thomas, legislators Antonio Villaraigosa, Sheila Kuehl, and Tom Hayden, sympathetic foundation staff, and even civic-minded business leaders with greater room to link up with progressive movements in order to rethink the strategy of how to rebuild Los Angeles from the bottom up.

The uprising and its aftermath also helped energize a new set of progressive initiatives. The Labor Community Strategy Center led by Eric Mann organized a Bus Riders Union, which has waged a campaign to challenge the city's two-tiered transportation system. With the help of NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Constance Rice, the bus riders won a legal challenge against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, not only to rescind a rate hike but to require the MTA to add new buses and expand bus service for the overwhelmingly low-wage and minority bus-dependent riders. In the wake of federal "welfare reform," community groups such as the Community Coalition, ACORN, the Los Angeles Coalition to End Homelessness and Hunger, and Crystal Stairs (which worked with child care and family home care providers) began mobilizing to reshape riot-torn communities. They demanded that the "welfare-to-work" program provide opportunities for jobs at decent wages, that food programs be developed to insure the food security for those who were continually dropping in and out of hunger, that liquor stores in poor communities be replaced by genuine initiatives for community economic development, and that affordable child care be made available to all who needed it.

Immigrant rights advocates also continued their efforts to mobilize immigrants, in part through dramatic campaigns to force the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to speed up the process of granting citizenship, by mounting an impressive voter registration campaign among the newly-naturalized citizens, and by mobilizing through demonstrations such as the campaign against the anti-immigrant Proposition 187. These efforts were complemented by a growing environmental justice movement that had initially formed out of neighborhood struggles, as well as research and organizing-oriented groups like Communities for a Better Environment and the Labor Occupational Safety and Health groups that saw themselves as part of a broader progressive movement. New organizations such as the Metro Alliance, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, AGENDA, the Surface Transportation Policy Project, the Community Food Security Coalition, and the Pollution Prevention Education and Research Center, also began to identify broader regional solutions to not only rebuild - but to remake - Los Angeles. This Los Angeles, they argued, would be a more livable, economically just and environmentally healthy place, a Progressive LA in the new millennium.

Can we envision another moment, another opportunity when social movements and progressive ideas come together to carry on Progressive LA's quest for a more just and livable city? If Upton Sinclair were alive today, trying to recapture the spirit of Liberty Hill and the EPIC campaign, what issues would he focus on? What constituencies would he seek to mobilize and coalesce?

Sinclair would surely have his pick of issues in Los Angeles, where major social, economic, and environmental problems cry out for new solutions and new political forces. He would be able to build on an extraordinary level of activism that exists today around workplace, economic development, environmental, neighborhood improvement, education, ethnic, and other issues. But these Progressive LA organizations and activists are fragmented across the metropolitan area a patchwork of progressivism with no unifying theme, agenda, or movement.

How can the forces of Progressive LA recapture the magic and wit of an Upton Sinclair to unite these disparate constituencies around a common agenda and strategy? Can issues such as a bankrupt political process, a widening economic divide, and the worsening problems of environmental and human health unite the diverse constituencies, activists and organizations of Progressive LA? A revitalized labor movement, based in low-wage manufacturing and service industries and increasingly reflecting the region's multicultural reality, may provide one key anchor for this new politics. The emergence of a new type of community activism, consisting of groups dealing with such basic issues as housing, transportation, public health, and food deepens the agenda for this progressive renewal. The social activism of women, gays and lesbians, and immigrants can make significant gains if it joins forces with the workplace and community movements. Can the city's fragmented progressive movement seize the opportunity to become a potent force reshaping the future of Los Angeles? Stay tuned!