Southern California and the Southwest

Southern California and the Southwest (Figure 2.51) are united primarily by their attractive warm, dry climate; by their increasing dependence on water from outside the region; by their long and deep cultural ties to Mexico; by the hope that NAFTA will make the subregion a nexus of development; and by worries over the problems posed by the border they share with Mexico.

FIGURE 2.51 Southern California and the Southwest. (A) The Colorado River Aqueduct, which supplies much of southwestern California with drinking water diverted from the Colorado River, is a key resource in this dry subregion. Agriculture can be highly productive, given the nearly year-round growing season, but it relies heavily on irrigation.
Courtesy Sarah Leen/National Geographic/Getty Images

The varied landscapes of the Southwest include the Pacific coastal zone, the hills and interior valleys of Southern California, the widely spaced mountains and dramatic mesas and canyons of southern Arizona and New Mexico, and the gentle coastal plain of south Texas. This region has warm average year-round temperatures and an arid climate, usually receiving less than 20 inches of rainfall annually. The natural vegetation is scrub, bunchgrass, and widely spaced trees. Ranching is the most widespread form of land use, but other forms are more important economically and in numbers of employees.

Agriculture, Energy, Transportation, and Information Service Industries

Where irrigation is possible, farmers take advantage of the nearly year-round growing season to cultivate high-quality fruits, nuts, and vegetables. As discussed in the opening vignette of this chapter (see also Figure 2.48), California’s Central Valley is a leading agricultural producer in the United States and is one of the most valuable agricultural districts in the world. Many of the crops are produced on vast, plantation-like farms. Migrant Mexican workers, often undocumented immigrants and sometimes mere children, supply most of the labor and lower the cost of North American food by working for very low wages.

Although irrigated agriculture is important, the bulk of the region’s economy is nonagricultural. Information and service industries—high-tech, software, financial, and the entertainment industries—are the most profitable and employ the most people, but the coastal zones of Southern California and Texas are also home to oil drilling, refining, and associated chemical industries, as well as other industries that need the cheap transport provided by the ocean. Los Angeles—with its major trade, transportation, media, entertainment, finance industries, and research facilities—is now the second most populous city in the United States. Like San Francisco, Seattle, and other Pacific coastal cities, Los Angeles is strategically located for trade with Pacific Rim countries; it recently replaced New York as the largest port in the United States.

On the eastern flank of this region, Austin, Texas, has attracted IT industries, lured by research activities connected to the University of Texas, the warm climate, and the laid-back, folksy lifestyle of central Texas. Austin has close to 1.7 million people and grew by more than 30 percent between 1990 and 2000. The region as a whole draws large numbers of retirees; entire planned communities of 10,000 and 20,000 people each have sprung up in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona within just a few years.

From the start of the first decade of the 2000s, residents of Southern California and the Southwest have had to worry about energy costs, congestion, smog, and increasingly scarce water. In the case of energy, a number of factors have provoked questions about the region’s economic future. These include high usage based on originally low energy prices, deregulation of energy providers leading to escalating prices, corruption among some private generators and distributors, and decreased supplies. In the short term, the electricity supply problem has been alleviated by controls on prices and reduction of nonessential use. But like the rest of the United States, Southern California and the Southwest have been consuming energy at rates that are not sustainable, affordable, or safe for the environment.

Water: Scarcities and Disparities of Access

Increasingly scarce water is the most worrisome environmental problem in this region. With rainfall light and increasingly irregular, water must be imported to serve the dense urban settlements and industries; agriculture is the most demanding water user. Most water comes from the Colorado River, which flows naturally southwest from near Denver, through portions of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and along the California–Arizona border, through a small part of Mexico, and on to the Gulf of California (see Figure 2.51 and Figure 2.52). Since the mid-twentieth century, the water has been captured by such dams as Glen Canyon, Hoover, Davis, and Parker, and held in reservoirs, where it is used first to generate electricity.

FIGURE 2.52 The Colorado River basins. The Colorado River, which flows through some of the driest land in the Continental Interior, is modified by many dams, reservoirs, and diversion canals that enable river water to supply a host of cities in the Southwest.

The water is also sent through aqueducts to irrigate agriculture and supply domestic and industrial users in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; and the Imperial Valley and cities in Southern California (see Figure 2.51). Recently there has been increasing awareness that at present rates of development, all of the users will need ever more water, but the environment of the Colorado River basin cannot sustain even present rates of water diversion. Control of wastage—water lost through evaporation, percolation, and leaks in canals, as well as through nonessential uses such as lawn watering—would help significantly.

Raising the cost of water to users would control its use; now it is so cheap that few take the trouble to conserve because it seems almost a free commodity. But higher user costs could seriously impact those who use the least and are the poorest. A popular saying in this region is that although water flows downhill, it flows uphill to money—to those users who are the richest and most powerful politically.

Cultural and Economic Shared Interests with Mexico

Much of this region was originally a colony of Spain, and the area has maintained the Spanish language, a distinctive Latino culture, and other connections with Mexico. Today, the Latino culture is gaining prominence in the Southwest and spreading beyond it. As we have seen, large numbers of immigrants are arriving from Mexico, and the economies of the United States and Mexico are becoming more interdependent as NAFTA fosters greatly increased trade (see the previous discussion).

Among aspects of this interdependence are the factories, known as maquiladoras, set up by U.S., Canadian, European, and Asian companies in Mexican towns just across the border from U.S. towns in California, Arizona, and Texas. Maquiladoras in such places as Ciudad Juárez (across from El Paso), Nuevo Laredo (across from Laredo), Nogales (across from Nogales, Arizona), and Tijuana (across from San Diego) produce manufactured goods for sale primarily in the United States and Canada, taking advantage of cheaper Mexican wages, cheaper land and resources, lower taxes, and weaker environmental regulations to reduce costs. (The maquiladora phenomenon is discussed further in Chapter 3.) These factories are a key part of a larger transborder economic network that stretches across North America.

Until recently, the U.S.–Mexico border has been one of the world’s most permeable national borders, meaning that people and goods flowed across it easily (though not without controversy). This permeability, greatly increased by the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994, meant that for years there were as many as 230 million legal border crossings each year through 35 points of entry. Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the border has become much less permeable—a high wall now runs along much of the border—and for undocumented travelers the trip has become much more dangerous. Smugglers who move workers north and illegal drugs and weapons both north and south across the more heavily guarded border charge high fees. They often cheat their passengers, trade the women and girls to sex traffickers, and in a number of cases have left whole truckloads of people to die in the desert heat without food or water.

Contentious Border Issues

As discussed earlier (see pages 93–96), several contentious issues surround the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States, of whom perhaps 6 million are Mexican. One conflict is about language. Although English and bilingual speakers in the Southwest far outnumber those who speak only Spanish, some fear that English could be challenged in much the same way it has been challenged by French Canadians in Québec. Accordingly, Arizona in 2006 and California in 1986 made English the official language. Some bilingual programs, installed in the 1970s to help migrant children make a smooth transition from Spanish to English, have been abolished by those who feel it is better that children learn English as quickly as possible. Scientists have found, however, that migrant children do better in math and science and enjoy higher self-esteem if they can study for a period in their native language.