Los Angeles is just the second U.S. city to host the Summit of the Americas, which brings together political leaders, civil society organizations, and business executives from North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean to promote inter-hemispheric cooperation, economic growth, and regional security.

The very first summit in 1994 was held in Miami, often considered the hub of Latin America in the U.S. But this time around the Biden administration gave Los Angeles the nod, pointing to its “deep and robust ties throughout our hemisphere.”

This relationship is over a century in the making: Los Angeles owes its status as the second-largest city in the U.S. today to the wealth and capital that crossed over the border throughout the last 130 years.

This is a history deeply rooted in American empire. Rather than pursuing formal territorial control and annexation, American government and business leaders, including those in Los Angeles, advocated for economic domination in regions such as Latin America and the construction of an “informal” commercial empire beginning in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

L.A. boosters and investors, in turn, set about establishing a borderlands economy that reached deep into Mexico and beyond to make their city boom. They created a built environment to facilitate this growth: In the 1920s, members of the Los Angeles-based Automobile Club of Southern California, the nation’s leading motoring association, for instance, initiated construction of the International Pacific Highway, a 12,000-mile road which, in California, overlay the Pacific Coast Highway. When complete, the highway—which began in Anchorage, Alaska, and headed south along the Pacific Ocean—linked every country along the west coasts of North, Central, and South America. The Los Angeles businessmen and Mexican state governors who championed the project believed it would increase the movement of tourists and trade goods within the Americas, with particular benefits for L.A. And, true to form, when the road was completed in 1957, it traversed 13 nations and epitomized a new type of “informal” commercial American empire in Latin America—one that promoted free-market capitalism and globalization.

Over the decades, trade and commercial publications highlighted and reflected Los Angeles’ growing position as a center of U.S. trade and diplomatic relations with Latin America. Business and civic leaders launched Pan Pacific Progress in Los Angeles in 1926 to track trade between Los Angeles, the Western Hemisphere, and the Pacific world. Regular columns in the magazine monitored metrics such as annual Pacific ports tonnage to gauge the number of goods moving between Latin American and U.S. Pacific ports. Others outlined trade and commercial possibilities with Latin America, ranging from the export of citrus to mining for zinc to building shipping infrastructure; and introduced American readers to presidents of Latin American republics including Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Brazil.

Anglo Angelenos were committed to furthering these hemispheric relationships. David Hamburger, a contributor to Pan Pacific Progress and successful department store proprietor who’d lived in Los Angeles for nearly half a century, reflected in 1929 that Los Angeles went “from a desert town to a metropolis that is bound to become the largest and greatest city in the world, economically and geographically.” In the piece, he advised American readers to take their capital to South America and approach business partners there with a cooperative spirit. “If we, with our experience, will lend our advice and assistance to our [South American] neighbors there is no limit to the profit to be derived,” he wrote, promising a “gigantic success will be assured.”

In the 20th century, Los Angeles boosters further tied their city’s fate to the exploitation of natural resources in Latin America, particularly Mexico, believing they needed to reach beyond the U.S. to grow. The city’s Chamber of Commerce organized investment excursions across the border. Oilmen such as Edward Doheny drilled wells in Mexico’s petroleum regions; the interlocked Chandler and Otis families, owners of the Los Angeles Times and successful real estate developers and corporate ranchers, developed a million-acre cotton and cattle ranch in northern Mexico. These ventures proved wildly profitable. Mexican resources helped transform the small town of Los Angeles into a large, successful, and prosperous city.

But this prosperity and success has not flowed both ways. While facilitating trade and investment, 19th- and early 20th-century Los Angeles boosters carefully controlled labor flows for the benefit of U.S. agricultural and industrial employers. Fruit growers with headquarters in Los Angeles, for example, actively recruited agricultural workers from Mexico whom they identified as an inexpensive, “compliant,” and reliable labor source to work in California’s Imperial Valley and citrus belt. As noncitizens, these workers had little recourse to challenge or improve poor wages and harsh working conditions.

Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the ‘70s and ‘80s, federal economic policies have deepened this inequality. The U.S. government’s push to lift regulations, free up trade, open markets, and promote private investment in Latin America led to collapses in industries such as agriculture, forcing millions of workers to flee Mexico and other countries. It is America’s “new imperialism”—nothing short of the “third conquest of Latin America,” as historian Greg Grandin observes in Empire’s Workshop, following Spanish colonization and American corporate and military interventions in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This forced mass migration from Latin America has continued to benefit Los Angeles, providing an influx of creative and economic talent that has remade and revitalized parts of the city, creating community and businesses, and invigorating neighborhoods such as MacArthur Park—once abandoned due to white flight, and now a residential and commercial center for Central American immigrants. Meanwhile, Latin Americans seeking refuge in the United States continuously find their economic opportunities limited to the agricultural and service sectors and the underground economy, and face below-minimum wage pay, dangerous working conditions, and scarce enforcement of labor laws. Complicating matters further is the shadow of the Immigration Act of 1965, which placed limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere just as U.S. dependence on Latin American labor intensified. This curtailment of legal entry led to mass undocumented immigration, compounding workers’ vulnerability.

At the summit in Los Angeles, we can expect leaders from across the hemisphere to lay out a strategy to maintain and stimulate U.S.-Latin American trade, and to promote regional “economic growth and prosperity based on [a] shared respect for democracy, fundamental freedoms, the dignity of labor, and free enterprise,” as the State Department puts it. But any honest movement in this direction must reckon with the U.S.’s long history of disruptive economic and political policies in Latin America, as well as its restrictive immigration policies and simultaneous reliance on immigrant labor. Because Latin America made Los Angeles—and Los Angeles, through the ties of commerce and migration, is part of Latin America.

The post How Latin America Built L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Or did you just forget to put us on your list?

For all the complaints about the democracy summit from big countries that didn’t get invited—poor Russia, poor China—there was no bigger snub than the lack of invitation to California.

The Golden State isn’t just way more democratic than most of the countries you included, like increasingly authoritarian Poland, India, and the Philippines. California also has more people living under democracy than all but a handful of countries at the summit.

More pointedly, where’s your gratitude, dude? California is the most democratic nation in the American empire and considerably more democratic than the United States as a whole. And you wouldn’t be pretending to govern the country now, much less holding an international democracy summit, without the votes of Californians.

But, maddeningly, instead of asking California to send its own delegation to your summit, you missed a double opportunity.

First, a California invitation would have helped you address the very real criticism that the American government shouldn’t be holding a democracy summit when its own democracy is backsliding. Second, you would have put some healthy scrutiny on California’s own democratic deficiencies.

Perhaps you didn’t invite us because you feared, rightfully, that we’d make you look bad. People might point out that the United States, over 245 years, hasn’t managed to hold a single national election. Instead, all elections in this country are at the state or local levels, even for the nation’s highest office, which is why you don’t even have to win the most votes to be elected president. Congress, as a supposedly representative institution, is a joke, with a gerrymandered House and a Senate that gives two seats each to California and Delaware. Democracy is supposed to be the self-government of everyday people, but virtually all hard questions in the United States are decided by nine unelected and unaccountable lawyers with life tenure.

And while you tolerate voter suppression in many states, California is busy making it easier for people to vote. Californians also allows its citizens to make the laws and amend the constitution themselves through direct democratic tools that do not exist at the national level. At the local level, California communities are adopting other democratic advances—including ranked choice voting systems and participatory budgeting.

Meanwhile, we’ve noticed, Mr. President, that you are dumping all the trickiest democratic issues—from voting rights to migrants’ rights—on your Californian vice president, while  allowing your staff to undermine her at every turn.

All that said, we know California isn’t perfect. We only look that way compared to your government.

If you’d invited us, we might have had to answer for our many failings. We have centralized so much fiscal power in state government that our local governments have become little more than NIMBYs and beggars. We’ve also invested a dangerous amount of authority in our governor, who has extended his own pandemic-era power to rule by decree into March 2022.

And for a place that takes so much pride in its diversity, we are terrible at representation. Indeed, Californians are the least-represented people in America. Because of our failure to expand the state legislature over the past century to keep up with population, our legislative districts are twice as populous as any in America—every state senator represents one million Californians, and every assembly member half-a-million.

Our local governments are similarly small and unrepresentative. If we had been invited to your democracy summit, we would have had to leave Los Angeles at home. It’s embarrassing to explain why the city of Los Angeles has just 15 council members for its 4 million people and L.A. County has just five supervisors for 10.3 million. (On the other hand, maybe this ought to be an international scandal worthy of foreign intervention. My idea: asking Mexico City, now a model of democratic structure and representation with its new constitution, to take over and reorganize L.A.’s government to make it a real democracy).

Given all these failings, it sure would be helpful if we could join a meeting with some of the world’s most democratic countries. Learning more about summit invitees like Taiwan, which has built a successful democracy in the shadow of an autocratic state, and Switzerland, which does direct democracy better than California, could help us raise our game.

President Biden, we know it’s too late for you to invite a California delegation for this year’s online summit. So, why not invite California to next year’s in-person follow-up right now?

The post Hey, President Biden<span class="colon">:</span> Where’s California’s Invite to Your Democracy Summit? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.