A collaborative project led by UC Riverside historian Catherine Gudis is documenting how decades of warehouse development have transformed once-thriving Inland Southern California communities, from the predominantly Black neighborhood of Valley Truck Farms to the rural Latino community of Bloomington.
The initiative, called "Live From the Frontline," combines archival research, oral histories, photography and community art installations to chronicle what researchers describe as the "slow violence of the supply chain" across the region. The project, which the Gazette previously covered for its Eastside citrus worker installations on Commerce Avenue, now extends its documentation to warehouse-impacted communities throughout the Inland Empire.
"Still, there's a magic to this region," Gudis, a UCR professor of history, told UCR Magazine's Tess Eyrich. "And it's in part the people, and in part the landscape, and in part the way that industry and infrastructure frame so many of the views."
Gudis co-directs the project with Jennifer Tilton, chair of race and ethnic studies at the University of Redlands, and Audrey Maier, public history director of the Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California and a 2021 UCR doctoral graduate.
Valley Truck Farms, once home to about 500 Black families in southeastern San Bernardino, exemplifies the transformation. Beginning in the 1920s, families moved from Los Angeles to purchase land and build homes where discriminatory housing policies elsewhere prevented ownership. Residents grew crops, raised livestock and built a thriving community anchored by institutions like St. Mark's Missionary Baptist Church.
Percy Harper, St. Mark's pastor and lifelong Valley Truck Farms resident, witnessed the area's dramatic change firsthand. He describes how zoning changes beginning in the late 1960s gradually converted residential land to commercial use.
"The undermining of a community," Harper calls the transformation into "an asphalt jungle of warehouses."
Today, St. Mark's sits surrounded by warehouses, with only a handful of the original homes remaining.
The pattern extends across the region. In Bloomington, an unincorporated community west of Colton, ongoing industrial park development since 2022 has displaced longtime residents. Mira Loma, which Gudis calls "ground zero" for the regional supply chain, saw its vast vineyards replaced first by World War II military supply operations, then by expanding warehouse development.
The researchers trace the region's logistics industry to World War II, when military operations leveraged the area's proximity to rail and highway corridors. After the war, local officials actively courted industry, eventually transitioning from production — citrus in Eastside, cement in South Colton, steel in Fontana — to goods storage and movement.
"In the early 2000s, when the region was so financially strapped, there were economic pundits who really led the region in claiming that warehousing was the only way to go because the land was cheap, and the labor was cheap — selling out the working people of the region," Gudis said.
The environmental and health impacts have been severe. These communities now experience some of the worst air quality in the country, with high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses.
The Live From the Frontline team has partnered with local artists, including visual artist Tamara Cedré, to create community-driven installations. Cedré, who recently exhibited related work at the Riverside Art Museum in "To Rise Above Ruins," photographed and produced multimedia pieces about the project sites and community members.
A June 2024 event in Bloomington invited residents to express their feelings about the area's transformation by decorating cardboard shipping boxes, which were displayed outside a shipping container at Zimmerman Elementary School, itself being relocated due to industrial development.
Despite ongoing warehouse expansion into communities like Mead Valley, Barstow and Hesperia, researchers see signs of successful resistance. The San Bernardino Airport Communities coalition halted a 2023 plan to rezone nearly 700 acres for industrial use in San Bernardino and Highland.
"You can see communities trying to learn lessons from each other as they have faced these struggles, and to me, that's really powerful," Tilton said.
The researchers warn that warehouse jobs marketed to communities may prove temporary. "These are exactly the robot-replaceable jobs," Tilton noted. "The promise of jobs in 5 or 10 years may evaporate, and then we'll have huge blocks of land providing almost no jobs but all the environmental burdens."
The team hopes their work will be incorporated into local K-12 ethnic studies curricula to educate young people about their communities' histories and empower them to influence future development decisions.
"We really want to question: how it got here, why it's here, and do we want it here?" Maier said. "And if we don't, what's something else that we can put in its place?"
More information: The full article by Tess Eyrich can be read in UCR Magazine at ucr.edu/magazine and additional project materials are available at livefromthefrontline.org and peopleshistoryie.org.
