Under the Perfect Sun

Three muckraking essays on the underside of San Diego
cover the city’s historically recent turn from red to blue while highlighting a new cast of villains and tenacious activists fighting for social justice—now in a new, updated, twentieth-anniversary edition.

“Behind the luminous veneer of San Diego, there is also a powerful story of radical activism and resistance—vital inspiration for our times.”
—Angela Y. Davis

San Diego is a paradise in the sun for over thirty million tourists each year, free of the urban ills that afflict other cities.  But America’s eighth largest metropolis has a dark side of militarization, economic inequality, municipal corruption, and racial injustice. In Under the Perfect Sun, Mike Davis outlines the making and re-making of San Diego by a series of largely unchecked local plutocrats, from the snarling Republicans of old to what he calls “high tech . . . opportunist Clinton Democracy.” Davis moves from John D. Spreckels, “King of the Vigilantes,” crushing dissent amidst the Free Speech Fight during the Progressive era to a new class of politically shapeshifting business elites ushering in a “tidal wave of gentrification” that continues to the present day.

Jim Miller offers what is essentially a peoples’ history of San Diego that gives a bottom-up view from the perspective of activists of all stripes seeking to challenge the local hegemony.  Miller’s episodic account of rebellion and repression in “America’s Finest City” chronicles the struggles of workers, immigrants, civil rights, and anti-war advocates to contest the powers that be.  Kelly Mayhew sketches life in vacationland with a series of interviews that reveal the “Other’ San Diego.” Mayhew includes a wide range of local activists and everyday San Diegans who tell their own stories about what it is like to live and struggle in this tourist wonderland. Life beneath the postcard in this theme-park city is frequently harder than San Diego’s marketing suggests.