Asian American Studies 197A
Winter Quarter 2002

Political Tour of Communities

My Political Tour of the Garment District
By Greg Hom

I chose the garment district because I have been there to do personal explorations with friends, but with little knowledge of how to really learn more about the people there and why they have the jobs and situations that they do. Also, I have been visiting a center for day laborers that is nearby in the area to the garment district and I feel it’s a good thing I got a new perspective on the area surrounding where I am doing some documentation.

I have taken Chicano Studies classes where immigration, especially to California and Los Angeles were explored and what jobs Chicanos and Latinos how have. I have taken a class looking at Central America, so I know that Los Angeles is home to the largest community of Central Americans outside of their home countries. I know that those people are now garment workers and day laborers near the garment district. Geography classes on immigration and the geography of the world economy have led to my learning about people moving from many different places to Los Angeles.
I did not do much research on the computer before the tour. I did happen to find a website (I’m not sure if it was made by the city describing the area as a "normal" tour would for a very non-politically-conscious and privileged group. The grossest thing I read within it was that the garment district is a great place to do "people watching" — as in exoticizing the immigrants that don’t live in the neighborhoods of the people that are doing the watching. The documentary that just came out on Jamaica, "Life and Debt," described this perfectly, when showing a group of American tourists gawking at a very poor area of Jamaica from a tour-bus: "The people here are envious of your ability to escape your everyday frustration and boredom and turn their frustration and boredom into your own entertainment". I have since looked at the Garment Workers Center website where I hope to learn more. I know that there is also a group called Sweatshop Watch that has a website. The group giving the tour even had handouts from their website to hand out to us. Most of my knowledge of the area right now comes from the experiences of the daylaborers that I am working with.

During the tour, globalization and ‘free-trade’ agreements were mentioned as the driving force behind the underdevelopment of many immigrants’ homelands, and why they were coming here. The ways in which corporations have structurally changed in the last few decades is important as well, where corporations will no longer own their factories, but subcontract them- putting more pressure on the subcontractor and pitting them in competition with each other.

I disagree with the term globalization when referring to economic policies and outcomes, when it is capitalism’s expansion and incentives that create these outcomes. As a term it is too vague and can be confused with what people see as a desirable global culture, which I find as well, as long as it is a diverse culture, and not under capitalist rule. The graph we were given on our tour with workers at the bottom and corporations at the top is nothing new in terms of economics. This is how commodity chains work. Restructuring of corporations means that there are more levels of exploitation, and I believe according to Naomi Klein’s book NO LOGO this happened in a global context, but I say we call a spade a spade, and stop trying to mask capitalism behind words like globalization to make it sound more palatable. In other classes I think the term neoliberalism has been use as well, which refers to new policies concerning capitalism, so I suppose it is more appropriate. I think it is not in the forefront of people’s minds in hardly any classes at UCLA to explore the basic economic rules we live under and the incentives it creates to treat your fellow human being like dirt, even if you’re a "nice guy/gal."

Something that we discussed in our group was also how what is often called the feminization of the global work force is not necessarily true in the Garment District. As we traveled upstairs in buildings with no security (little capital investment, only pay the workers as little as possible — the garment district is banking on the fact that no one knows about the type of exploitation going on- check out the website I put on the list — it talks about the El Monte case, and then says that most workers don’t live in slavery, "their work is merely arduous"— well, what’s arduous, what’s wage slavery, what’s inhuman?!!) we saw many men at sewing machines. This is only my first Asian Am class, so I cannot say that I have studied this before. This feminization of the workforce has been mentioned in my classes in Chicano studies and geography classes on the global economy. I think the professors of those classes would want to know about what we viewed this past Friday.

I think if these political tour papers get printed on the class website, and other students are able to read about it outside of this class, then this is one tool for educating students on how easy it is to take a political tour. To continue to learn about the community, I plan on asking my friends at the daylaborer center about their relationship to the garment district. This may help give me a broader view of the economy’s inner workings in Los Angeles. I know that there is a separate question of if I feel I can give my own tour of the Garment District, and I believe I can, though I should get my details right with the group that took us- sorry- I think that by giving tours I will be able to learn more, because new people will bring in new perspectives and ask different questions about the area and its inhabitants and how business works and so forth.

Students who are interested in becoming more involved in the community of the Garment District can definitely work with Garment Workers Center if they choose. As the GWC helps to protect workers by educating them and fighting with them, it is a good place to go and start learning about the people there by hearing their stories. I honestly don’t know a lot about the GWC, so I don’t know if they attempt to hold community meetings, but these could be good ways in which students could help to facilitate dialogue between fellow workers, and maybe even workers and certain city representatives or other community groups who want to help garment workers. Students usually have more resources to reach those city reps or community groups, and that is why their privilege is important- because it can be used to break down privilege and expand rights for more people.