Inland Empire: Settler Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Southern California (Global and Insurgent Legalities)

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 United States. Charting Indigenous nations’ responses to these momentous challenges, Inland Empire details how they deployed novel modes of resistance grounded in Native architectural histories, spatial practices, and epistemologies of land.