Power Grabs: Hydroelectricity, Regional Hydropolitics, and the Transformation of Los Angeles, 1890-1925

“Power Grabs” is a hydropolitical history of metropolitan Los Angeles and its interconnected hinterlands during the period from 1890 to 1925. After deciding to transition to a regional energy landscape based on transmitted hydroelectricity in the 1890s, Los Angeles’ hydro-oriented municipal officials and power companies extended their reach north to acquire valuable Sierra power sites. In the process, hydro-rich hinterland spaces, namely the San Joaquin and Owens Valleys, were fundamentally transformed by Los Angeles-based power developers which favored certain areas, communities, and land use practices over others. Hydropolitical development decisions and conflicts, mediated by state and federal officials, turned the San Joaquin Valley into an energy-intensive space of irrigated agriculture and stunted growth in the Owens Valley. In turn, residents of these spaces increasingly opposed the export and control of their regional water-power resources by distant metropolitan outsiders. By the 1920s, politically influential hydro-protectionist and power opposition movements forced private and public actors in Los Angeles to turn to the Colorado River for their future power and water needs.In telling the interrelated stories of hydropolitically-shaped uneven developments in the Los Angeles basin, the San Joaquin Valley, and the Owens Valley, this dissertation incorporates recent scholarship on energy geographies, energy transitions, and hydropolitics to explore the ways that the materiality of an energy resource, transmitted hydroelectricity, can structure regional development. By emphasizing how the energy value of water was central to conflicts between and within Los Angeles and its hinterlands, this study challenges conventional narratives of Southern California’s transformation and highlights the mutually constitutive role that metropolitan power developers and their hinterland opponents played in this process. The hydropolitical legacies of the early twentieth century continue to shape and circumscribe infrastructure development decisions, water management policies, and patterns of land use in Los Angeles, Southern California, and the American Southwest more broadly