El Segundo at the edge of the Santa Monica Bay. I was raised there, 9 blocks south of LAX (second busiest in the US), two blocks east of a sewage treatment plant (one of the world’s largest), and three blocks north of the Chevron Oil refinery (processing oil from Alaska, Ecuador, and the Middle East for the LA region’s planes and cars). Factories 1.5 miles to the east became the core of the US aerospace industry. Urban historians call El Segundo an industrial suburb. Constrained by industrial infrastructure, there is little room for the small town to expand. Meanwhile, the robust industrial tax base supports a very strong public school system; in 2017 the high school was ranked among the top 4% in California.The town, the high school, and Hyperion figure prominently in popular visual culture since the 1950s, including Soylent Green, Beverly Hills 90210, and the Terminator. The refinery appears on local television with every fire, most recently in September 2018. Known locally as Smell Segundo and El Stinko, the town remains defensive about pollution; its air and water quality are monitored as part of a much larger region, so its distinctive features are obscured in the data. More has been erased. Only traces remain of a nearby neighborhood, razed for LAX runways. The Ballona Wetlands where I played as a child were drained to build a marina. The 405 Freeway was built where we shopped for vegetables and rode horses among the farms.My focus is on the contrast between El Segundo’s visibility and its absence in the data, its public appearance and its toxic odors, its huge tax base and its modest incomes, a stable community in a rapidly growing region with vast inequalities. Its contradictions reveal impressive methodological, theoretical, and political challenges.
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