Writer and activist reminded us that a kinder, more just world is possible
Mike Davis, who passed away Oct. 25 after battling cancer, embodied a rare combination of brilliance, storytelling and committed scholar activism.
“Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World,” presaging today’s catastrophic climate change, followed, as did “Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City,” chronicling the arrival of the Latino metropolis by scholars from Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban American studies and beyond.
After moving back to San Diego in the early 21st century, Davis collaborated with Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller in “Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See,” illuminating the fierce labor struggles, free speech fights and corruption in what is today America’s eighth-largest city, long dominated by organized capital and state-corporate militarism.
Like the work of Walter Benjamin, Davis was always drawn to fragments, ruins and images of the apocalypse, animated by memories of those defeated heroes who gave their lives struggling for a better world, in hopes of a more livable, solidaristic future. Until the last days, the writings continued, from “Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory,” the landmark social history “Set the Night on Fire: L.A.
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