1 “A Timeline of HIV and AIDS,” www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline, accessed 2 May 2020. In January 1989, ACT UP/LA (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power/Los Angeles) staged vigils and die-ins, created a mock AIDS ward, and led marches to protest the lack of AIDS-specific health care and the indifference of key public institutions, including Los Angeles County Hospital, which is now known as Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center. The demonstrations received extensive media coverage, and an AIDS ward was ultimately opened the same year, though the number of beds was only a fifth of what ACT UP/LA had demanded.

2 Highways’ manifesto was published on the cover of its inaugural program/mailer: “Traffic Report,” May–June 1989, 1.

3 “Liberal” as used here is not synonymous with “leftist” or “progressive,” despite these terms’ interchangeability in discussions of US politics. As political scientist Carol A. Horton defines it, American liberalism is “a framework for the fundamentals of political life that prioritizes the value of individual rights and liberties, limited and representative government, private property and free markets, and constitutionalism and the rule of law.” Horton, Race and the Making of American Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5. Neoliberalism, in contrast, is a form of political rationality that “disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities . . . and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo œconomicus.” Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 31, emphasis in the original.

4 “Postmetropolis” is from the title of Edward W. Soja's Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). A third of the volume is devoted to Los Angeles.

5 Steven Durland, interview by Judith Hamera, Saxapahaw, NC, 11 October 2018.

6 Linda Frye Burnham, interview by Judith Hamera, Saxapahaw, NC, 11 October 2018.

7 LAPD was founded by Malpede in 1985. For discussion of LAPD as “spatial irruption,” see Welch, Kimberly Chantal, “Resisting Dispossession: Performative Spatial Irruptions and the LA Poverty Department,” Theatre Survey 61.1 (2020): 52–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Judith Cummings, “The Homeless of Los Angeles Make Their Numbers Felt,” New York Times, 15 December 1985.

9 For a concise history of ACT UP/LA, see Michael C. Oliveira's finding aid to the ACT UP/LA Los Angeles Records Collection, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8k64ghw/entire_text/, accessed 5 June 2019. For a more extensive history, see Benita Roth, The Life and Death of ACT UP/LA: Anti-AIDS Activism in Los Angeles from the 1980s to the 2000s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

10 Tim Miller, interview by Judith Hamera, Venice, CA, 12 November 2018.

11 This was not the Santa Monica of SoCal beach fantasies but a working- to middle-class residential area with a light-industrial core. In 1990, census data for the tract that included Highways (7018.2) lists a population—the majority in family households—roughly evenly divided between white (2,292) and Hispanic/Latino (2,129), with a Black population of 1,106, Asian/Pacific Islander 258, and Native American 37. Renters were the overwhelming majority in the area (1,440 occupied units vs. 301 owner-occupied units); 11 percent of the population had a bachelor's degree or above.

12 Dakin was deeply sympathetic to Burnham and Miller's objectives; she had become increasingly activist during the 1980s, having described herself as an “ivory tower artist” up to that point. Susanna Bixby Dakin, phone interview by Judith Hamera, 29 April 2019.

13 Burnham, Linda Frye, “Getting on the Highways: Taking Responsibility for Culture in the 1990s,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5.1 (1990): 265–78Google Scholar, at 270. The rental arrangements at the venue underwent multiple changes, including over the period examined here. Highways now pays rent to the 18th Street Arts Center, the successor to earlier umbrella formations that include the venue.

14 Burnham drew a salary from the 18th Street Arts Complex housing Highways and Astro Artz/High Performance.

15 See Hillary Miller, Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 27–54.

16 See Donatella Galella, America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington, DC's Arena Stage (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019).

17 Tim Miller interview.

18 One such infrastructure was the National Performance Network, founded in 1985; https://npnweb.org/about/history/, accessed 2 October 2021.

19 Burnham, 271.

20 Tim Miller interview.

21 Burnham, 276.

22 Dan Kwong, interview by Judith Hamera, Santa Monica, CA, 13 November 2018.

23 Disability rights, activist self-care, and environmental depredation were addressed onstage and in workshops at Highways during this formative period as well: part of a wide range of progressive political commitments and radical art-making practices.

24 Tim Miller, A Body in the O: Performances & Stories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), 65.

25 Steven Durland interview.

26 Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, interview by Judith Hamera, Santa Monica, CA, 30 April 2019.

27 The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which outlined his theory of the public sphere, was first published in 1989—Highways’ founding year. A year later, within the period discussed in this essay, philosopher Nancy Fraser proposed the formulation “subaltern counterpublics” to both address the structural exclusions in Habermas's theorizing and emphasize her formation's contestory potential for those subjected to such exclusions. The topicality and reckoning with the nature of the public sphere in the United States during the very period discussed in this essay is one more indicator that this time frame is transitional in nature: a moment when publicnesss and ways to theorize it were in flux. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1989), and Fraser, Nancy, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracies,” Social Text 25–6 (1990): 56–80Google Scholar, at 67. For a discussion of relationships between theatre and the public sphere see Christopher B. Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

28 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 119. Warner's theorizing of “counterpublic,” used in the present essay, is in critical conversation with both Habermas and Fraser.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 121–2.

31 Burnham, 271.

32 Both Steven Durland and Tim Miller mentioned this deindustrial connection to the Highways site in their interviews.

33 The Kaiser Steel Plant in Fontana, forty-five miles east of L.A., closed in 1982–3, ending forty-five hundred jobs. Michael Bernick, “After Plant Closings: A Labor Day Story,” Forbes, 28 August 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/michaelbernick/2018/08/28/after-plant-closings-a-labor-day-story/#969558e25b3d, accessed 5 June 2020. General Motors’ Van Nuys plant in the San Fernando Valley, the last auto factory in the L.A. area, closed in 1992, eliminating 2,600 jobs, one in a series of high-profile shutdowns during the previous decade. Associated Press, “Company News; Last Auto Factory in Southern California Closed by G.M.,” New York Times, 28 August 1992, www.nytimes.com/1992/08/28/business/company-news-last-auto-factory-in-southern-california-closed-by-gm.html, accessed 14 July 2020. Another 4,500 were cut by defense contractor Lockheed at its Burbank Aeronautical Systems Division in May 1990. James F. Peltz and Chip Johnson, “Lockheed's Long Stay in Valley May Be Ending,” Los Angeles Times [Valley Edition], 30 August 1994, 1.

34 In his performance piece “The New World Border: Prophecies for the End of the Century,” performance artist and Highways presenter Guillermo Gómez-Peña defines “culti-multuralism” as “An Esperantic Disney worldview in which all cultures, races, and sexes live happily together. Coined by Post-Chicano antropóloco Robert Sánchez.” In short, “culti-multuralism” is synonymous with liberal pluralist multiculturalism as it lingered in Los Angeles during Highways’ formative years; its neoliberal partners included “Free Trade Art.” Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, “The New World Border: Prophecies for the End of the Century,” TDR 38.1 (1994): 119–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 121, 122.

35 Rajeswari Mohan, “Multiculturalism in the Nineties: Pitfalls and Possibilities,” in After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s, ed. Christopher Newfield and Ronald Strickland (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 372–88, at 373.

36 Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon, “Multiculturalism's Unfinished Business,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Gordon and Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 76–115, at 77.

37 These ballot initiatives included Proposition 38 against multilingual ballots, Proposition 63 establishing English as the official language of the state, and, just after the period discussed here, Proposition 187 declaring undocumented immigrants ineligible for state services, including public education. See Daniel Martinez HoSang, Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 3.

38 Lisa Lowe, “Imagining Los Angeles in the Production of Multiculturalism,” in Gordon and Newfield, 413–23, at 415.

39 Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 14; emphasis in the original.

40 Ibid., 138.

41 A complete analysis of the 1990 Los Angeles Festival is impossible here; see Lowe for her analysis of this festival. Further, it was not simply Highways’ binary opposite: Burnham praised it, and Highways was an affiliated venue. Guillermo Gómez-Peña and LAPD, both Highways core artists, performed at the festival, as did Rachel Rosenthal, who also was also a frequent Highways artist. Finally, there were certainly oppositional performances offered at the festival, including those by these Highways’ artists. Nevertheless, the overall structure and rhetorical framing of festival performances amply illustrate the multiculturalisms countered by the oppositional transitional subjectivities offered onstage at Highways.

42 Peter Sellars and Judith Luther, “Festival Greetings,” in Los Angeles Festival Program and Ticketing Information (1990), 2.

43 Sellars and Luther, “The City and The World,” in ibid., 3.

44 Ibid., 10.

45 Ibid., 14, 16, 23, respectively.

46 Ibid., 12.

47 Sellars and Luther, “Festival Greetings,” 2; emphasis in the original.

48 Ibid.

49 Crises “of living” is from Highways’ opening manifesto.

50 “Core artists,” as I define them, regularly presented work in the space; in the cases noted here, this meant multiple appearances in a single year. In addition, they contributed to Highways as an activist formation beyond simply performing there: giving workshops, emceeing events, serving as advisors.

51 For a fuller discussion of transitional subjects who mediate periods of structural economic change, see Judith Hamera, Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization (New York: Oxford, 2017): 24–5; D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971).

52 Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 112.

53 These are not the only pieces by these artists that deployed oppositional transitional subjectivities. Indeed, all presented multiple such pieces in any given year. Nor were these the only transitional subjectivities staged, though they were especially attuned to hegemonic multiculturalisms. To name only three other examples of the many, many events and performances in this vein in this period, poet Michelle T. Clinton held a book launch party for her anthology Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry (West End, 1989), coedited with Sesshu Foster and Naomi Quiñonez—an oppositional transitional formation in itself. Tim Miller's and Holly Hughes's performances were also oppositional and transitional, focusing on queer labors and intimacies in the liminal period between late liberal pluralism and a consolidating neoliberalism.

54 Melamed, 148.

55 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Border Brujo,” in Warrior for Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts, and Poetry (St. Paul: Graywolf, 1993), 75–95, at 78. [Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.] Border Brujo was performed at Highways during 14–17 September 1989. The work is also available as a film, Border Brujo, directed by Isaac Artenstein (Cinewest, 1989).

56 On “good” and “bad” racial/-ist manners, see Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 5.

57 Holling, Michelle A. and Calafell, Bernadette Marie, “Identities on Stage and Staging Identities: ChicanoBrujo Performances as Emancipatory Practices,” Text and Performance Quarterly 27.1 (2007): 58–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 79.

58 Dan Kwong, “Secrets of the Samurai Centerfielder,” in From Inner Worlds to Outer Space: The Multimedia Performances of Dan Kwong, ed. Robert Vorlicky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004): 11–45. Kwong premiered the piece at Highways, where it ran 28–30 September, 5–7 October, and 14–15 October 1989.

59 Movement description in ibid., 34.

60 Ibid., 23.

61 Ibid., 45.

62 Colbert, Soyica Diggs, “Black Rage: On Cultivating Black National Belonging,” Theatre Survey 57.3 (2016): 336–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 343.

63 Keith Antar Mason, “for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much,” in Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays, ed. Harry J. Elam Jr. and Robert Alexander (New York: Plume, 1996): 175–254, at 197. The work was performed at Highways on 12–15 December 1991.

64 Ibid., 246–51; 230.

65 Ibid., 193.

66 Ibid., 207.

67 Mildred Thompson, “Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Keith Antar Mason,” Art Papers 17.1 (January–February 1993), www.artpapers.org/guillermo-gomez-pena-keith-antar-mason/, accessed 19 May 2019.

68 Mason, 253.

69 Meiling Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 192; Vorlicky, Robert, “Performing Men of Color: Autoperformance, Highways Performance Space, the NEA, and the White Right,” Minnesota Review 47 (Fall 1996): 157–67Google Scholar, at 158.

70 Danielle Brazell, interview by Judith Hamera, Los Angeles, CA, 28 February 28, 2019.

71 Dan Kwong interview.

72 Ibid.