Big City,” chronicling the arrival of the Latino metropolis by scholars from Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban American studies and beyond. “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World,” presaging today’s catastrophic climate change, followed, as did “Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Immediately thereafter came “Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.” Here, Davis introduced readers to Black feminist science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” (after whom NASA named a landing site on Mars in 2021), and who, “Like William Gibson, author of ‘Neuromancer,’ and other ‘cyberpunk’ writers … uses disciplined extrapolation to explore the dark possibilities of the near future.” These interventions on behalf of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” earned him a MacArthur genius award. In 1990, Davis published “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles,” forever transforming our understanding of Southern California, with its bloody histories of race and class struggles. California’s crusade against democracy, from socialist Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California 1934 gubernatorial campaign, to the 1960s uprisings, and Nixon and Reagan’s counterrevolution, is brilliantly chronicled. In fiery prose, Davis explored how the country that invented the Labor Party and May Day still lacks an independent Labor or Socialist Party to represent the aspirations of the nation’s multiracial working classes. Moving to London in the 1980s to join New Left Review, he penned “Prisoners of the American Dream,” and established “The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook,” part of the Haymarket Series published on the 100th anniversary of the May Day uprising of Chicago’s immigrant workers, martyred for their struggle for immigrant and worker rights. 25 after battling cancer, embodied a rare combination of brilliance, storytelling and committed scholar activism.īorn into a working-class Catholic family in the Fontana suburb of Los Angeles, but raised in San Diego, Davis’ encounter with the civil rights movement, before a long sojourn as a meat cutter and long-distance truck driver, after his father’s heart attack, inspired a lifetime of activism.

Dead Cities by Mike Davis