An Outtake from BOMB 104, Summer 2008…

In BOMB’s Summer 2008 issue, Mike Davis and Lucy Raven tour California’s El Cajon and speak of the booming business of the Mexico/U.S. border. Read on for more of Davis’s perspective on the unique growth and evolution of El Cajon.

 

The star map of the Unarian Headquarters in downtown El Cajon. Photo: Lucy Raven.

Mike Davis So much of the flatland consists of dormitories for the blue-collar people, originally white, now very diverse. There are also an extraordinary number of rest homes. I’ve never quite understood the socio-economic evolution of El Cajon. Most suburban cities desperately deploy fiscal zoning to upgrade their tax base and to exclude apartments, rest homes, poor people. The city fathers made a decision sometime in the ’60s to do just the opposite. I assume that it was more profitable for the major landowners in the city to take advantage of the large lot sizes on many streets (often the remnants of small avocado and orange orchards) to pack in as many apartments as possible. The residential density here is, accordingly, more like Queens than Levittown.

The urbanization of suburbia has gone hand-in-hand with new waves of white flight (if only to the adjoining hills) and the outward creep of inner city-like decay and disinvestment. The problem is particularly poignant for families of color and immigrants who move to these older suburbs in hopes of finding better jobs, attractive housing, and decent schools, only to find out that the jobs and teachers have left just as they arrive. Because the El Cajon Valley is ringed by a much richer and conservative population living in the hillside view homes—mostly outside the limits of city tax collection—the decline of the valley floor has an even more dramatic, in-your-face quality, reflected in violent antagonisms at the junior high and high school level. On the other hand, the ethnic and racial heterogeneity of the old neighborhoods is probably durable: as in other inland areas of southern California, like San Bernardino and Riverside, suburbia has finally been integrated even if the traditional resource base for the suburban dream has diminished or disappeared entirely.

By the way, that’s my old high school. Not a repository of my fondest memories, but my teachers were decent people, many of them veterans, and I heard some hair-raising stories about nighttime bombing raids. My father had an almost deadly heart-attack at the beginning of the my junior year and I had to sell my car and go to work full-time until the next spring. My best friend, a red-haired hot-rider from hell, had joined the Navy rather than serve a term in Youth Authority for a fatal accident, and was lobbying me to share his misery. Instead, at the urging of my cousins, I attended a civil rights demonstration in downtown San Diego. I never stopped demonstrating and the Congress of Racial Equality was the force that propelled my life in an entirely unexpected direction. Instead of scrubbing decks or slitting my wrists (or worse, slowly dying of boredom in the parking lot of Oscar’s Drive-In), I ended up in New York City a few years later as star envelope-stuffer and mimeograph-masseur in the national office of Students for a Democratic Society.

 

Voice of Venus, inside the Unarian Headquarters in downtown El Cajon. Photo: Lucy Raven.

 

 

Read the print edition interview of Mike Davis by Lucy Raven in BOMB 104, Summer 2008, now available on newsstands everywhere. Subscribe today and receive your FREE copy!