“Under the Perfect Sun,” a people’s history of San Diego replete with corruption and rebellion, is the closest thing that the local progressive movement has to a Bible.
Since 2003, the book has served as the go-to guide for organizers and journalists trying to understand the alienation they sensed at the core of America’s Finest City. The authors, Jim Miller, Kelly Mayhew, and Mike Davis, argued that San Diego was undeserving of its benign reputation and is governed more like a private utility than a commonwealth, permeating the political landscape in cognitive dissonance.
Scathing and iconoclastic, the book has been out of print for years but returns on May 26 with new essays and interviews, updating its thesis on major city events. Two of the three original writers — Miller and Mayhew, both professors at San Diego City College — took on the updated edition after the passing of Mike Davis. It’s filled with perspectives from influential organizers and activists, and a second book of oral histories, titled “Beyond the Theme Park,” will be released for free on the CPI and AFT websites and available in libraries.
Miller and Mayhew are officially launching the updated classic with a reading at the Book Catapult in South Park on May 21.
The GOP, as the new edition explains, dominated the region for most of its history but is no longer in control. Yet, the decades of systemic underfunding they presided over linger. Miller, noting this, takes aim at the 2011 campaign and 2012 passage of Proposition B, which blamed unions for the city’s budget problems. Public sector pensions were eventually restored through the courts, but the campaign’s rhetoric prevailed — poisoning and distorting the economic discourse to the detriment of underserved populations, Miller writes.
Though two decades have passed since the book was originally published, San Diego remains obsessed with its postcard image and still burns with contradictions. “Unlike Los Angeles and New York,” Miller said in an interview, “San Diego is still very allergic to its noir realities.”
To wit: Gilded Age-level inequality, racial injustice and environmental degradation. The I-8 and the I-5 still serve as a dividing line between classes — the further east and south, generally the worse off the communities.
“More and more people who were born and raised here are looking to other states like Arizona, Texas and the South as their only choice,” Pillars of the Community president Khalid Alexander is quoted as saying in the book. “Through police harassment, incarceration, and mass economic displacement, San Diego is quickly becoming a city only for the elite.”
The Democrats now govern, bringing a diverse body of representatives, but, as the book argues, the party is far from pushing an ideologically coherent, consistent and unified message. At the grassroots level, the vibe is shifting from one of optimism to impatience and outright disappointment.
The new essays read more like a call to action than a history of the twists and turns of the last 20 years.
As San Diego enters a new “era of austerity,” in Mayor Todd Gloria’s words, with proposed cuts to the arts and increases for the police, the authors advocate for a direct confrontation with what they see as the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party and its capitalist backers and beneficiaries. Instead, they believe a coalition of working-class communities of color and white progressives — rooted in community and social justice, intersectional in nature — needs to articulate and push a new vision of wealth distribution that doesn’t fall back on the neoliberal playbook of regressive sales taxes and parking fees and public-private partnerships.
“The work that remains is far more structural,” Lucas O’Connor, executive director of the Progressive Labor Alliance, is quoted as saying in the book, following an overview of Democratic politicians flaming out prematurely. “It means understanding that solving a problem is different than hiding a problem.”
Of course, this modern history of San Diego that “tourists never see” does have its bright spots in Miller’s telling — such as the minimum wage ordinance and citywide Project Labor Agreement — thanks to ordinary people advocating for themselves. The couple’s outsider status within the framework of the Democratic Party gives them a unique vantage point to both criticize and chalk up successes.
“It’d be a mistake not to honor the progress that’s been made,” said Miller in an interview. “But at the same time, the paradox is with all that progress, there remain deep entrenched divisions in the city.”
One of the many points Davis made in the original book was that the well-meaning liberal who managed to seize a little power proved ineffective because they didn’t have a popular base to fall back on. Miller and Mayhew acknowledge that the base has often been siloed, but they see encouraging signs of mobilization and unity from labor, environmentalists and community groups.
“None of those movements individually are powerful enough to rule the game,” Miller said. “That needs to happen if we want to have a significant progressive front.”
Mayhew’s main contribution to the new text — interviews with local organizers, labor leaders and progressive politicians — focuses more on the pace of change and the rigidity of civic institutions that have been designed to reproduce the interests of the upper classes.
“The power structure and how we do business in San Diego, it takes a longer time to change than the faces of the institutions,” County Supervisor Monica Montgomery-Steppe says in the book. “We are really at a crossroads.”
Mayhew elaborated on this point in an interview: “The Republicans had decades to build a right-wing government infrastructure in terms of staffers and policy, and so navigating this hidden layer of government takes time and effort and resources that are invisible to us and invisible to the public.”
So what has changed? Culturally, plenty. San Diego is a more socially liberal place, even if it remains fiscally conservative. There’s regional cooperation on homelessness. Labor has sway but doesn’t run the town. Voters have willingly increased property taxes to fund schools. The pandemic brought with it restraints on evictions and rent, showing what’s possible in an emergency. A consensus is forming around social housing to bring down the inhumane cost of living.
Both Miller and Mayhew are optimistic about a crop of newer leaders, including Montgomery-Steppe, Councilman Sean Elo-Rivera and County Supervisor Paloma Aguirre, even if the energy they bring has been blunted at the city and county levels. Voting every couple of years won’t cut it. What’s needed, Mayhew said, is “an infrastructure of accountable organizations, not just electing Democrats.”
Case in point: during the 2020 election for mayor, both Democratic contenders declined to get behind a statewide citizens’ initiative that would have increased taxes on large commercial properties for schools and government services. Had Proposition 15 passed, it would have rolled back part of a 70s-era cap on property taxes that strangled the ability of governments to raise revenue.
“With the exception of the couple people we named,” Miller said Democrats “are the dogs who caught the car. ‘Oh shit, we won. What do we do now?’”
The Book Catapult, located in South Park (3010-B Juniper St, San Diego, CA 92104), is hosting Miller and Mayhew for an official launch and reading on Thursday, May 21, at 7 p.m.
