Race, Class, and Counter-Hegemonic Transit Justice Organizing in Los Angeles

• In Event: Race and Urban Politics

Abstract

Race and class inequalities in public transportation access and services are major public policy concerns in American cities and regions. Employing the theoretical lens and concepts of political theorists Antonio Gramsci and Nancy Fraser, and urbanists David Harvey, Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre, and James Holston, this paper examines how working-class ethnic/racial minority groups have organized politically at the grassroots to challenge the inequalities generated by contemporary regional transportation policies in
metropolitan Los Angeles, where a large number of immigrant Latino/a/x and African-American populations depend on bus services for their daily mobility. I argue that the organizing done by subaltern Black and Latina/o/x groups for transportation justice in metropolitan Los Angeles is exemplary and part of a broader assemblage of insurgent citizenship rights-claiming urban social movements. Three questions guide this research project: 1) first, what have been the feedback political effects of regional public transportation policies on working-class minority and immigrant groups in Los Angeles?; 2) what mobilization frames and strategies have these populations utilized to challenge the inequalities generated by these transportation policies?; and 3) what have been the effects of and responses to counter-hegemonic organizing efforts? To answer these questions, this project relies on content analysis of newspaper coverage of the politics of urban transportation in Los Angeles County, and analysis of planning data and reports from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the regional government agency in-charge of transportation policy and planning in Los Angeles. Additionally, data from organizational documents and interviews with organizers representing the Labor-Community Strategy Center/Bus Riders Union (LCSC-BRU), a leading anti-hegemonic transportation justice and civil rights movement organization in Los Angeles, are also employed. The data reveals a radical political agenda behind the activism of this group. Moreover, a wide range of tactics have been employed by the LCSC-BRU to carry out a frontal, anti-systemic response to development-driven, inequality-generating, regional transportation policy agenda that is fueling much gentrification, bus service cuts, and police profiling of poor bus riders of color. The LCSC-BRU demands both “rights” to transportation justice for the multi-ethnic working-class of Los Angeles and also role models the political challenges that subaltern groups confront when challenging powerful urban political institutions. Beyond an analysis of the politics of race, class, and public transit in metropolitan Los Angeles, this paper seeks to highlight the centrality of anti-hegemonic multiethnic grassroots organizing in the politics of the contemporary American global city.

Author

• Armando Xavier Mejia, California State University, Long Beach