• In what ways is contemporary capitalism being restructured by the rise of the logistics industry?
• What new processes, re-ordered geographies, and colonial legacies of capitalist racialisation have accompanied the industry’s expansion led by global giants like Amazon and Walmart?
• What does an examination of the changing political economy and regional culture in Southern California’s predominantly Latino ‘Inland Empire,’ one of the world’s largest hubs of logistics growth, suggest about the answers to these questions and the potential for popular-democratic resistance?

BIOS

Alfonso Gonzales Toribio is the Ronald H Chilcote Endowed Chair in Latino and Latin American Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where he is also the founding director of the Latino and Latin American Studies Research Center. Gonzales Toribio’s substantive research areas focus on political economy, migration, refugees, social movements, logistics, and democracy. He holds a PhD in Political Science (UCLA, 2008) and an MA in Latin American Studies (Stanford, 2002). He is the author of Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State (Oxford, 2013) and In the Time of Monsters: Mexican and Central American Asylum Seekers and the Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2026). He is also the founder of the Studies in Subaltern Latina/o Politics book series at Oxford University Press. His popular writings have appeared in major outlets such as The Los Angeles Times, Politico, The Hill, Al Jazeera, and El Pais.

Jamie Acosta Gonzalez is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He was previously Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University, where he also completed his PhD in the Program in Literature. His research focuses on the politics of aesthetics, thinking through how art and literature make visible processes of racialization and accumulation central to the historical development of capitalism. He is currently at work on his first monograph, Landscapes of Dispossession: Latinx Photography and the Administered World, which analyzes a set of contemporary Latinx and Latin American photographers who turn their cameras away from people and toward the administered landscapes of neoliberalism, documenting the emergence of infrastructure, exurban sprawl, tourist enclaves and impermanent housing in the Global South and U.S. Southwest.

Paul Apostolidis is Professor (Education) and a political theorist in the LSE Government Department. His research develops new pathways for critical theory through grounded and engaged studies with Latino migrant workers and other low wage working people. His forthcoming book on night-time labour, social reproduction, and working-class politics is titled Night Work and the Politics of Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2027). He is the author of The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity (Oxford University Press 2019), Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (Duke University Press, 2000). He was Visiting Expert Scholar in the Mellon-funded ‘Latinx Futures’ project based at the University of California Riverside (2021-25), which analysed environmental and social effects of logistics expansion as well as Latino community resistance.