ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Inland Empire, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió examines how modernist architecture and urban design structured US settler colonialism and capitalist hegemony in the twentieth century. Focusing on Palm Springs’s settlement upon the Agua Caliente Reservation and other reservations in inland Southern California, he shows how architecture became a key technology for governing empire at the height of the state’s drive to terminate Native American sovereignty. Through extensive archival research and dialogue with Cahuilla, Kumeyaay, and other Tribal community members, Shvartzberg Carrió offers a new architectural history of modernism. Carefully placing the work of seminal California architects within the genealogy of manifest destiny, he demonstrates how their designs over settler and Native housing, prefabrication technologies, the logistics of migrant construction labor, community development plans, and environmental infrastructures offered new ways of managing Indigenous resistance—a spatial turn in Native American administration that constituted a veritable workshop for neoliberalization policies later sponsored globally by the US. In turn, Inland Empire also chronicles fierce and subtle modes of Indigenous resistance to appropriation and assimilation by examining their own decolonial architectural histories, projects, and epistemologies of land.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego.

REVIEWS

“Inland Empire is a brilliant response to the question: How did architects in Southern California pass off colonial dispossession as technological innovation? A story of Indigenous struggle against settler colonial architecture planning, it will change how we imagine the pristine photogenic modernism of the twentieth century.”
-- Swati Chattopadhyay, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Inland Empire uniquely and carefully unveils generations of injustices that were waged against the Coachella Valley’s first peoples from an urban planning perspective. This book is an imperative read for all Greater Palm Springs Area natives, residents, and visitors alike as it thoroughly explains how we have gotten to where we are now both socially and environmentally.”
-- Terria Smith, editor of the magazine News from Native California

“A nuanced, meticulously researched account of the political moves of the Agua Caliente and the challenges they faced from the people and government of Palm Springs and beyond, Inland Empire shatters the pristine, reflective gloss of the quintessential midcentury modern city that sprung up in their homelands. This productive break foregrounds the longer Native architectural traditions against which that modern aesthetic took shape and exposes the settler colonial imagination that elevated the prefabricated single-family home, the national steel industry, and all-white suburbs during the era of redlining.”
-- K-Sue Park, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law

TABLE OF CONTENTS