Continued from page 1.

Visiting the Las Vegas Strip today provides a provocative postscript on their architectural manifesto. Where it was once an eclectic mix of wedding chapels, gas stations with big signs, and hotels weighed down with neon, the Strip is now dominated by realistic imitation skyscrapers and live-action pirate shows. Upon returning to Vegas in the nineties, Venturi and Scott Brown concluded with tremendous disappointment that the Strip has been "Disneyfied" (Venturi and Scott Brown 126).

Unlike the old Vegas casinos, today's resorts no longer merely reference distant places and times; abandoning "ugly and ordinary" architecture, the new hotels literalize those places. But unlike modern architecture's monuments, these buildings do not aspire to pure architectural form. They are gaudy and excessive and richly decorated. Indeed, they demonstrate that today's Vegas initiates an approach that fuses the modernist focus on form with the postmodern preference for decoration, thereby eliminating the dichotomy between the two. I call this fusion architecture architainment, and it centers mostly on the themed, round-the-clock concept-spaces with symbols that can, as the marketers put it, be synergistically marketed to extend the entertainment experience. What architainment construction leaves out is any regard for societal concerns. There is, of course, the ubiquitous rhetoric of job creation, but that talk is usually suspect, given the kind of irresponsible use of resources, both natural and economic, that exclusive focus on job creation brings. When cities like Las Vegas focus on architainment, they usually sacrifice considerations such as environmental carrying capacity or the problems associated with diverting public funds to infrastructural support and joint public-private projects. Nevertheless, many urban centers have prioritized precisely this kind of architainment development. In Vegas, we can see it in the 1990s evolution of the Strip.

Nine of the world's ten largest hotels are in Las Vegas, but even the "smaller" Strip hotels tend towards the monumental, and most remain near capacity throughout the year. Called super casinos, these massive hotels contradict the principles that the Learning from Las Vegas architects found in the glitzy neon-centric Strip architecture with its "pretty"-if excessive-ornamental neon decorating basic hotel structures. Today, the monolithic structures of the hotels themselves attract the tourists similarly to the country pavilions in EPCOT's World Showcase.

The Venetian hotel features full size models of the Campanile and the Doges Palace and disregards the obvious limitations of its desert location by including a Venetian canal brimming with precious water. The Excalibur does not just hearken back to medieval Europe, say, with sexed-up Maid Marian costumes for the waitresses, the casino itself is a huge castle. The New York, New York's wings are models of the city's skyscrapers including the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. The Statue of Liberty welcomes the huddled masses who can ride a Coney Island-style roller coaster-the epitome of the new, family-values orientation of many of the latest Vegas resorts. Indeed, contemporary Las Vegas's most celebrated developer, Steve Wynn, maintains that the new Vegas is not really about gaming but about entertainment.

Wynn has been uniquely responsible for the conversion of Las Vegas into a resort town as much as a gambling hub. In fact, the story of New World Order Vegas can be told by tracing the development of Wynn's major properties. He developed the first super casino, the Mirage, which features a simulated rainforest environment highlighted by a massive outdoor water fountain resembling a flowing volcano which even erupts several times nightly. But Wynn's first hotel was the Golden Nugget, a classic Fremont Street casino originally built in 1905. The Learning from Las Vegas authors saw the Golden Nugget as the embodiment of Vegas's glory. If the old-style neon facades had made Vegas the apotheosis of the decorated shed, the Golden Nugget was the most decorated shed of all. But at the time Wynn bought the old casino, kitschy neon no longer lured the crowds; thus, he turned the Golden Nugget into a deluxe four-star hotel and spa with minimal lighting-in relative terms, of course. Wynn learned that attracting customers in the new era requires the promise of packaged elegance and trendy entertainment.

For Venturi and Scott Brown, the new Vegas is a rejection of the populist possibility it once represented. Instead, it is "large and mass-produced, and thought through to the last inch" to provide "a three-dimensional, theater-like experience for the pedestrian, with evocative imagery for role playing. . . .This is a total departure from the car-oriented iconography of the Canonized Strip" (126).

But today's visitors are not just couples looking for good odds and swell shows, they are also families hoping to entertain the kids who are legally prohibited from even being in the casinos. These families mark the central difference between today's Las Vegas and the earlier. The super casinos cater to them by providing outdoor shows, video arcades, IMAX movies, thrill rides, museums, and-most important among all the family entertainment activities-shopping. This new orientation points to the key factor rooting the success of architainment in general and of the new Strip in particular. It is the promise of fulfillment created by the easy availability of anything: in the typical super casino drinks are free, food is cheap, the doors never close, and no one need ever be alone (which does not mean that no one is lonely). In the end, they offer seduction by camaraderie, for architainment promises affective compensation for the isolating loss of public space that characterizes neo-liberal capitalism (Hannigan 74-76). Las Vegas is, in short, the apotheosis of neo-liberal globalization itself.

We can use the city to explore the effects of the process enabled by the end of the Cold War for capitalism to manage economic relations throughout the entire globe so that worldwide social relations link in ever-more inextricable ways. This process is what many scholars call globalization, and its effect is to weaken or diminish traditional regional and national boundaries. My argument here is that the Strip's architecture is a cartoonish de-historicized tribute to that process of de-regionalization: that process of bringing together and merging "the South" and "the North." The Strip's structures are monuments to a caricatured globality, one that develops exotic, fantasy notions of foreign lands out of a set of what have become rigid requirements created to induce visitors to turn over as much money as possible.3

Living Outside the Strip

The impact the 1990s growth of Las Vegas's gaming industry cannot be overstated. This growth has provided more new job openings than any other region in the country and has led to Vegas's becoming the fastest growing metro in the fastest growing state in the US. In the 1990s, Nevada ballooned to nearly two million people. The vast majority of those people, 1.4 million actually, live in the Las Vegas metro area, and 4,000-6,000 more move in every month. And within this massive expansion, Henderson, ten miles southeast of Vegas, is the fastest growing city both in the area and in the US. Increasing from 69,000 in 1990 to 202,000 at the end of 2000, the area is expected to reach what developers call "full build out" of 560,000 residents within a generation (Egan).

Henderson has been called the capital of what demographer William Frey has labeled the New Sunbelt, which includes states such as Georgia, the Carolinas, Arizona, Colorado and, of course, Nevada, as expatriates of the Old Sunbelt, mostly Californians, come to Henderson looking for relative housing bargains in the town's many gated developments and master-planned communities (MFCs). Though the communities of Henderson and the rest of metro Vegas are removed from the Strip's action, they reflect the same impetus as the tourist center: the names and themes of these communities are as suggestive of some place else as the super casinos' are. The most popular themes seem to be Mediterranean or aquatic. (The unlikely confluence of Desert Shores doesn't seem to inhibit housing starts in that popular community.) Indeed, these communities actually exceed the Strip's practically pornographic use of water. We need only consider Henderson's Lake Las Vegas resort community which combines a Mediterranean theme with an aquatic focus all centered around a man-made 320-acre lake. But perhaps the region's greatest extravagance is the omnipresent grass lawn, which accounts for the greatest amount of water waste.

Continued from page 2.

Ironically, Las Vegas was once actually associated with grass; its name is Spanish for the meadows because the Las Vegas Valley was once filled with trees and saltgrass all irrigated by artesian springs. Some of that spring water flowed at about three to four thousand gallons a minute, but it was pumped so dry by citizen water-gluttony that the ground has actually deflated where the springs once were (Ward 136). Had residents been unable to pump water from the Colorado River, there would be no Las Vegas as we know it today. All told, the residents of Tucson, a climatically similar city, use 160 gallons of water per day per person compared to 360 gallons in Las Vegas (Davis); that is more per capita than any other city in the country (Ward 133).4 This profligacy evinces a population in compulsive denial of the fact that it lives in a desert!

Environmental impact has never been a prevailing concern in Las Vegas development. In 1998 alone, some 32,000 permits were issued for new residential housing (Moskowitz 149). Such free-wheeling growth is enabled by the ideological banner of liber tarianism by which Nevadans like to identify themselves (even though the local economy has for decades depended on federally funded Nellis Air Force Base and the Nevada Test Site, not to mention the top secret Area 51, and public works, especially Hoover Dam and Lake Mead). Typical of the regional ideology is the philosophy behind Clark County's growth plan as explained by Jeff Harris, its director of long-range planning: "The planning is market-driven. It hasn't been advanced planning for years" (qtd. in Moskowitz 161).

At a practical level this means that development is less concerned with environmental or traffic issues or even with the quality of the houses themselves than with what sells, and in the Vegas Valley what sells is the assurance of safety and a sense of community. Some have speculated that this region has more gated communities per capita than any other large urban area in the country (Littlejohn 285).

The walls, guards, and elaborate security systems that are now a standard feature in most new Las Vegas subdivisions help persuade newcomers not only that they are safer inside an MPC but also that it's dangerous to be on the other side. In addition to the all-important sense of security, MPCs offer ready-made pop-up communities. . . . Since Las Vegas has no urban center to focus on or build out from, places like Green Valley and Summerlin [the two most important master planned communities] have created their own town centers within exclusive boundaries. (Moskowitz 160)

For its part, the city of Henderson reportedly offers more parks and recreation facilities per capita than any other city in Nevada (650 acres) while Las Vegas, with more than double Henderson's population, actually offers fifty acres less. Such promises of old-fashioned community concern-even if they are built on a foundation of environmental disregard-are the stock-in-trade of the planned communities of Henderson and the Las Vegas Valley: the land of promise for early-retiree baby boomers and yuppie families.

It is fascinating to speculate on the reasons new residents come to "Sin City" to look for security, safety, and society. As we have seen with Vegas, this fusing of qualities that once seemed oppositional has become common practice. The residents do seem possessed of a schizophrenic impulse to be near the excess embodied by the Strip, while at the same time to be utterly safe and sheltered from it. Of course, the undertone of danger embodied in gambling makes the Strip exciting. Though the planned communities are removed from the Strip, their proximity allows them to share that air of excitement. In essence, these residents are lured by the same qualities the super casinos use to draw visitors: communal experience in a sheltered if utterly "unnatural" environment. It is worth noting that the Las Vegas housing boom started at the very end of the 1980s, at the dawn of the super casino era on the Strip. Just as California supplies the most visitors to the Strip's casinos, so too has California provided most of the new population, thereby working in reverse of what had been a trend throughout US history to move from the East to the West.

Typically, Vegas's new-home buyers sell their homes for a tidy profit in the state's hot real estate market and use the returns to buy more home for less money in one of the Valley's many planned communities. Large scale growth keeps prices relatively low with a median housing costs price of $158,000, inexpensive compared to southern California (Egan). What makes this movement particularly noteworthy is that it is part of a trend most pronounced in the states of the Southwest and the Southeast and warrants the grouping of these areas under one rubric: the New Sunbelt.

What characterizes the New Sunbelt is the accelerated rate of migration this region experienced in the 1990s as new residents relocated mostly from what demographer Frey calls the Melting Pot states-New York, New Jersey, Florida, California, Texas (the last three he also labels "the Old Sunbelt"). The southeastern New Sunbelt states attained most of their new residents from the Northeast, while the southwestern New Sunbelt drew mostly from California. Despite their different origins, however, these new residents are very similar. They tend to be mostly affluent whites and younger middle-class suburbanites. Frey characterizes these new residents as sharing "middle-of-the-road values with the home-grown whites" (Frey 91). In other words, he is positing a commonality bred through migration in the character of the Southeast and Southwest. In the Melting Pot states the migrants leave behind, we also find some commonalities, most importantly the growth of the populations of Latinos and Asians. Despite the out-migration from these states to the New Sunbelt, the Melting Pot continues to experience net population growth because of international immigration. As is the case with the other features this paper has examined, in demographics, too, Las Vegas unites apparent oppositions. While Henderson is the capital of the New Sunbelt, a case can be made for North Las Vegas's holding an equivalent position in the Melting Pot.

Outside in the Gaming Machine

The Census Bureau reports that the "Hispanic" population nationwide has grown by over 60% to 35.3 million; in Nevada it grew 900% between 1980 and 2000 to somewhere between 350,000-400,000 people. That makes up about 20% of the state's total population. The epicenters of growth are the cities of Las Vegas, where nearly one in four of the 478,000 residents is Latino, and North Las Vegas, where more than one in three is Latino. In Clark County as a whole Latinos make up 22%. (Note, in Henderson, which is in Clark County, they make up just about 10%.) Their presence in Vegas has been a complete shock to most everyone outside the city itself. Even the US's most important Latino-rights organizations like La Raza, did not direct any resources to the area until the 2000 census figures were released (Pratt).

Most of the area's Latino residents come from Mexico either directly or indirectly after finding border states such as California and Texas economically inhospitable.5 The Census Bureau reports that Nevada employs more Latinos in service industries than any other state. In general, those not working in service industries work in construction. In Greater Las Vegas, they remain the poorest ethnic group just as they are in the country as a whole (Dauber 100). But workers on the Strip, where the jobs are unionized, live in the ranks of the middle class. Vegas's unionized maids earn $400 weekly, twice the salaries of maids in non-union towns and enough to live squarely in the metro's middle class (Greenhouse).

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At 40%, Latinos comprise the largest racial group in the Hotel Employee and Restaurant Employees Union (a.k.a. HERE). They are one of the key reasons many demographers call Vegas the "New Detroit." The Strip's super casinos employ 55,000 cooks, bartenders, waitresses, maids, and other service personnel who have joined HERE's famous affiliate Culinary Workers Local 226; the Local represents fully one-third of all Vegas casino and hotel employees.6 The Culinary Workers' strong commitment to labor has in turn encouraged membership in other non-service sector locals such as the Carpenters Union. All told Vegas has the highest per-capita union membership in the United States. But these members aren't necessarily just simple dues payers. The locals maintain a broad activist base, which readily mobilizes during organizing struggles.7 Since Nevada is a right-to-work state, organization efforts are vital.8 Thus, the rank-and-file routinely spend off-duty hours recruiting their fellow workers. Members even voted to raise their dues by 40% to help pay for strike benefits during the 1991-98 Frontier Hotel strike. That strike was a trial by fire for the union whose numbers had been steadily diminishing through the eighties. Members' perseverance-not one of the 550 strikers crossed the picket line-gained a critical victory for the union (not to mention labor in general), and provided the foundation upon which it has built itself into the largest private-sector local in the US. Today, the union represents 90% of the hotels on the Strip.

Since the 1990s, a key element in successful service union organizing drives is the commitment of Latino members, some of whom have experience of much more bitter, mortally dangerous organizing efforts in other countries. For their part, many (though not all) unions are rejecting the xenophobia characterizing organized labor of the recent past. US-based unions are increasingly energized by immigrant members. In the manufacturing trades where so many jobs have moved to Mexico, organized labor has determined that its efforts will be more successful if it follows NAFTA south of the border. In this way, labor is attempting to acquire the same flexibility as the post-Fordist mode of production by crossing, and with time weakening, the borders the transnational corporations have long since gone over.

Back in Vegas, the organizing success of Local 226 certainly can be attributed to acts of commitment like the Frontier strike but also to the union's rejecting the old organization methods.9 Because the town has become a kind of showplace for labor, the parent organization AFL-CIO is spending richly in the New Detroit to fund more new organizing efforts. And while success does feed on itself and has enabled more organizing success, the fact remains that most of the other employment centers of town are not unionized. The non-Strip hotels, with the exception of a few downtown locations, are not union. Neither is home construction, the region's second-largest industry.

Thus, at sunrise on every work morning, men gather anxiously at informally designated spots looking for day labor but hoping for the opportunity to land a permanent job. When hired by the day, these workers-mostly Mexican men-earn about $25-30 for eight to twelve hours work (Dauber 100). Latinos build an estimated 90% of the 20,000 new homes erected each year in southern Nevada; many are day laborers. This industry provides perhaps the best job prospect for illegal or newly arrived immigrant men who cannot speak English.

Foremen have come to depend on these workers not only because they are a willing workforce but also because they are considered meticulous and exploitable. As Peter Nelson, a Las Vegas construction supervisor explains it, "You can bring in a Mexican who's a skilled craftsman and pay him three dollars an hour and he's perfectly happy." The Mexican workers had certainly better be happy because, as Nelson adds, "If they don't bust ass for fifteen hours without sniveling, then they're out of here." But in general he believes that most will exhibit the attitude he wants. "You bring in any other race and cuss him out for doing a poor job and they'll get up and leave. . . . But the Mexicans will get it right" (Dauber 105).

In contrast to the Mexican men who fill most of these non-union jobs in residential construction, many of the Strip hotels' construction workers are members of the fifteen building-trade locals. They tend to be "white men with exclusionist attitudes" who obtained their building-trade apprenticeships and entry into the locals through personal connections, and it has been difficult for union leadership to persuade them to welcome the immigrant workers (Lampros 192). After all, any new worker is job competition, and with current workers obtaining as much overtime as they want, they are pulling in $80,000-100,000 annually, according to the AFL-CIO. Of course, this exclusionist attitude disregards the crucial factor that construction is being undertaken by non-union labor anyway. So union organizers, feeling the ripples of HERE's wave of success, embarked on a major campaign in the late 1990s to organize all segments of the building trades. The effort met with some success, but with current union workers losing job opportunities from competition with fellow workers, not to mention fierce contractor opposition, the program's success was limited to 7,000 new enrollees, a significant number but one that does not really dent the profession in Las Vegas.

An Evolving City, an Evolving Strip

Construction is a fitting focus when considering Las Vegas. In a near-constant state of renovation, the Strip's architecture has presaged post-Fordist manufacturing: it's impermanent and flexible.

The town became a tourist draw during the Depression-era construction of the Hoover Dam when its work crews would bring their precious paychecks into Vegas's small casinos and brothels. At that time, the casino themes and architectural styles were very different from what they are now: they invoked the Wild West-even though Las Vegas had never been a cowboy or mining town. The very first casino development downtown basked in the reflected glory of the Old West with names like the Pioneer Club, Glitter Gulch, the Horseshoe, the Golden Nugget. These early landmarks were constructed when the so-called closing of the frontier was a relatively recent memory, when that past was still shrouded in a romantic aura. But unlike this Wild West theme, the new themes are not obviously congruous. Even the Strip's mid-century Arab desert motif embodied in the Sands, Dunes, Sahara, and Aladdin seems reasonable in a desert climate. But with a few exceptions, today's themes make almost no sense at all-unless we look at Vegas as a global city which hopes to invoke the aura surrounding the idea of globality itself. When this global aura combines with the perception of luxury and the availability of easy shopping and entertainment, then we have the formula for contemporary Las Vegas and increasingly for globalization-era tourism.

Typically, Steve Wynn's most ambitious project, the Bellagio, re-set the standard for the super casino. Named for an Italian village near Lake Como, the Bellagio bills itself as an elegant resort, spa, casino, and shopping complex featuring designer boutiques (with names such as Prada, Chanel, Armani), an art gallery with Impressionist masterworks, an outdoor water fountain extravaganza, and a restaurant that displays actual Picasso paintings. These new features are revealing. The lessons Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour learned from Las Vegas in the sixties was that the "middle-middle class" (to use their term) like decorated sheds, and so architects should design decorated sheds. If Vegas remains an index of popular taste, then the implications of a hotel like the Bellagio are frightening. Today's tourists obviously require more excess and more expense. Instead of the kitschy neon of the old Golden Nugget, we have Picassos with dinner in a verisimilar Italian villa. It's significant that the Bellagio displays artists like Picasso and Van Gogh because those artists have come to personify high culture with a price tag. Indeed, we can say that the Bellagio is not really displaying the art at all, but rather just the luxurious excess that the new Vegas tries to represent. Tellingly, the Bellagio was built on the grounds of the imploded Sands Hotel, one of the hallmarks of the old Rat Pack organized crime controlled Las Vegas.

Continued from page 4.

Discussing the Sands implosion that was billed as the largest non-nuclear blast in Nevada history, Mike Davis was reminded of Fredrick Jackson Turner's legendary "end of the frontier" address. "Turner questioned the survival of frontier democracy in the coming age of giant cities and monopoly capital and wondered what the West would be like a century hence. Steve Wynn has the depressing answer: Las Vegas is the terminus of western history, the end of the trail."

Today, it's not the western frontier that has closed; it is the "the global frontier of capitalism" (92) to use the words of Fredric Jameson. Capitalism has stretched its arms into all parts of the world, and its space for expansion has ended. It is the closing of the global frontier that characterizes globalization's New World Order. Without irony, the Strip celebrates capitalism's global saturation by decontextualizing and dehistoricizing the world's historical landmarks for entertainment purposes. Indeed, it offers the verisimilitude of these monuments as compensation for the contemporary loss of historicity. Here the Sands implosion emblematizes the development of architainment. It disregards whatever elements of the past cannot be marketed; that which remains, it reifies. What emerges is a Vegas Strip without the postmodern irony that could be read into the old Strip's ticky-tacky hotels, wedding chapels, and gas stations that stood in sharp contrast to the apparent solidity of organized crime's major casinos. With the mob swept out by a combination of federal government and corporate capital, the old casinos have been demolished or completely revamped. Of course, the mob has very much become an archetype of an earlier moment of capitalism. But making Las Vegas ostensibly safe for family "consumption"-in many senses of the term-required replacing the old-style family ownership and local production with corporate values. For example, Caesars Palace, built in the 1960s with private funding and Teamster loans, has been sold, remodeled, expanded, and has added a mall and entertainment complex designed to look like Roman streets, including a fake sky that becomes dark at fake dusk and bright during fake daytime. The development of Caesars Palace is typical of the Strip casinos we see in the globalization era. Nearly gone are the days of the Strip's decorated sheds whose gaudy neon represented "the forgotten symbolism of architectural form." As the new Vegas marries the garish symbol to the gaudy form creating architainment, what is forgotten today is history itself.

History is the force that defines a piece of land or a part of the world as a region, but the Strip's monuments to monuments shed almost no light on the history of their decontextualized referents. On the Las Vegas Strip as surely as in the planned communities of the suburbs, the histories and traditions of actual regions are merely a design theme.

The Other Side of Paradise

This essay is premised on the proposition that Las Vegas provides a kind of test case, a laboratory for analyzing the conditions of globalization-era living, working, and playing. From one perspective, we see a kind of xenophobic sentiment that has marked life in the US South. It inhabits the gated communities and walled developments of the suburbs and is utterly simpatico with the sentiment on the Vegas Strip-or to be precise on the Paradise Strip.

Just outside of Paradise are the areas not privileged enough to have a theme evoking some exotic locale: the cities of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, which are left to bear the brunt of the social problems associated with rapid growth in communities of the poor and working classes. But perhaps the only reality harder to deal with than the rapid urban growth is the absolute lack of growth in the west side of Las Vegas, where the population is 78% African American. As the metropolitan area grows by thousands of residents per month, West Las Vegas has maintained the same population of about 15,000 since 1960. Laid waste by the three R's of racism, redlining, and riots, we see an exclusionism at work that has marked the city's treatment of African Americans at least since the town became a tourist attraction and segregated its casinos in the 1930s to appeal to white tourists and Hoover Dam workers.

Interestingly, Las Vegas is the only Southwest Sunbelt area to experience a trend that is dramatically shaping the Southeast Sunbelt: there has been a marked reversal of the historic African American migration north. For the first time in a century, the South-most dramatically Georgia-actually saw a net gain of black residents, many of whom are middle class or retirees (Frey). Las Vegas too has experienced this in-flux with an almost 100% growth in the area's black population.10 As in the Southeast, many of Vegas's new black residents are joining the new white migrants in the suburbs.

Despite the surprising homogeneity and provincialism of the New Sunbelt, there is a certain cosmopolitanism in the Vegas case resulting from the character of the Strip. Granted, the Strip casinos are caricatures of what Americans see when looking at the world outside its borders. But an actual infrastructure of people who have come from outside those borders actually does undergird those casinos, and their often unnoticed labor keeps the casinos operating. In Vegas, as in many parts of the United States, those workers are often Latino/immigrants.

Saskia Sassen points to this kind of job-growth as a product of globalization. Studying the case of women, she concludes that the conditions promoting the formation of a supply of migrant women into industrial jobs in the nations of the South are part of the same complex that creates a supply of immigrant women for service jobs in the North. Both are expressions of "the broader process of economic restructuring occurring at the global level" (130). Ironically, immigrants generally come from countries that have attracted significant numbers of manufacturing jobs from the industrialized nations. In a sense, their movement is the opposite of patterns in the US where workers move from deindustrialized urban areas to the Sun Belt states of the South. "There is, then, a correspondence between the kinds of jobs that are growing in the economy generally, and in major cities particularly, and the composition of immigration-largely from low-wage countries and with a majority of women" (Sassen 129). Sassen concludes "the feminization of the job supply in conjunction with the growing politicization of native women [in the US] may well create a growing demand for immigrant women" (121).

Indeed, the American Hotel and Lodging Association is lobbying Congress to allow more immigrant "essential workers" into the US. In that industry, the essential workers are the crews that staff the hotels. As a lobbyist for the association explains, "There are places in this country that wouldn't survive without immigrants" (Parker). Las Vegas has become one of those places. Yet unlike most of those places, in Las Vegas, immigrant service work actually can lead to middle-income status. But generally that status accompanies only those jobs where the unions hold sway; that is, on the Strip.

So we see here a noteworthy dynamic. That part of Las Vegas embodying the global impetus behind the contemporary culture and economy is actually the part of Las Vegas where service work-the kind of employment that marks the post-Fordist economies of the erstwhile North-actually provides a living wage. The apparent paradox is that globalization has generally led to decreased living standards-for workers in "the North" and "the South."

When we think about what we can learn from today's Las Vegas, the most important lesson may well be that organized labor can still be a powerful force and can still produce high wages. But on a metaphorical level, perhaps Las Vegas teaches another lesson. If the Strip is a kind of simplified metaphor for globalization, then we can see that globalization is not inherently the enemy of labor. The breakdown of national divisions enacted both figuratively in the case of the Strip's worldwide themes and literally in the composition of its union workforce can be a positive step forward for those who care about economic fairness-if its people join together across the old boundaries.

Continued from page 5.

This is not to be sanguine about the present or the future of globalization, but it is to acknowledge that we cannot return to the Cold War-era nation-state sovereignty and its separations between the North and the South or the First, Second, and Third Worlds. It is not that globalization as it has developed has reduced inequity; it is that capital is inextricably linked beyond old boundaries. If workers are to achieve advances in the current system they will need to approach capital at its level. The massive disparity we see between the middle-class workers on the Strip and those making just a few dollars a day working off of it symbolize a disparity characterizing all regions of the world. The efforts of Vegas unions like Culinary Workers Local 226 to reach across the divides represent the first steps toward reducing this inequality.

NOTES

1 As these lines prove increasingly fluid-disconcertingly so to those whose economic position is threatened by the shifting borders-we see the growth of structures aiming to solidify the borders, especially the rise of surveillance and the growth of what Mike Davis has famously called fortress architecture. Both of these trends are hugely present in Las Vegas as we see in both the "eye-in-sky" panoptic surveillance for which Vegas's casinos are legend and in the unmatched growth of gated communities in the city's suburbs.

2 The 1990-92 recession demonstrated that Nevada was vulnerable to such economic instability as it was only one of four states to actually suffer a significant increase in poverty (Nassir).

3 Almost all the hotels follow the same formula. The casino floor opens up to visitors as soon as they step through a hotel's doors; the ubiquitous hotel towers open space for thousands more rooms without disrupting the hotel theme too much; the all-you-can-eat buffets and the all-you-can-stand entertainment.

4 I should note that Las Vegas's water use will be skewed by the fact that it is a tourist center. However, given the water excess of its residents, the statistic is indicative of cities with very different ecological philosophies.

5 According to the Census Bureau, Mexico is the by far the greatest source of US immigrants. Of the thirty million immigrants in the US in 2000, 7.8 million were from Mexico.

6 Surprisingly, when dealers asked the local to represent them, the local turned them down flat-as did the Teamsters. Casino management has since the Strip's earliest days declared the dealers hands off, and since dealers are not really in either union's purview, the unions felt potential benefits were not worth the risks. Finally, the only organization who would represent the dealers is the little-known Transport Workers Union of America. To date, dealers, traditionally on management's side in past strikes, have rejected the union in seven casinos and accepted it in only three (Binkley).

7 Indeed, the hotel employees' local has prioritized organizing, spending 42% of its budget on recruiting and hiring twenty-one full-time organizers, compared to the national average of 3% spending and no full-time organizers (Greenhouse).

8 "Right to work" laws mandate that if a workplace has authorized union representation the union must collectively bargain for all workers whether they are dues-paying members or not. Allowing, even encouraging, such free-ridership can obviously devastate a local.

9 The traditional method calls for workers to vote on whether to accept membership. The newer methods rely on card drives in which organizers go directly to employees asking them to sign cards supporting union representation. When a significant majority of employees at a site signs, the unions take the cards to management and request recognition. This strategy depends on management's accepting the card-check recognition and organizers' willingness to fight a multi-front battle to win recognition if recalcitrant employers refuse. When the MGM Grand resisted union organizing and refused card-check recognition, members of the locals engaged in civil disobedience, used PR tactics to drive up the borrowing costs for finishing the hotel (under construction at the time), and lobbied heavily to halt casino expansion into Detroit, Chicago, and Windsor Locks, Canada. This kind of union pressure led to bottom-line deficits and caused a shake-up that resulted in new management and union recognition (Greenhouse).

10 The 2000 Census puts the metro area black population at 133,000.

WORKS CITED

Binkley, Christina. "In Drive to Unionize, Casino Dealers Defy a Longtime Las VegasTradition." Wall Street Journal 6 Mar. 2001, 15 June 2002. http://www.twu.com/Organized/Drives/GetOrgnz.LV.4.html

Davis, Mike. "House of Cards Las Vegas: Too Many People in the Wrong Place, Celebrating Waste as a Way of Life." Sierra Magazine Nov.-Dec. 1995: 36+. 1 July 2002. http:// www.sierraclub.org/sierra/199511/vegas.asp

Dauber, Bill. "El Pueblo de Las Vegas." In Littlejohn. 97-108.

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PATRICIA VENTURA is a Marion L. Brittain Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research is in globalization studies and contemporary American literature and culture.

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