Llano del Rio was a socialist experiment

Meet the failed colony outside LA

May 07, 2024

Welcome to Following Studies, an adventure through subcultures, obsessions, the things we follow, and the things that follow us.

I’ve been thinking about intentional communities ever since I was part of a small alternative college within a larger university. They had classes about things like how math made us feel, and one of my friends took a class where the professor had them talk to rocks.

In my first class, I was an absentee group project member that explored an intentional community (sorry Sophie! sorry Elaine! ya’ll did great holding the group together!) outside Boone, North Carolina, and then a few years later, I would visit a friend who was toying with the idea of buying a tiny house on a communal property and then for a really unfortunate moment, my husband and I lived semi-communally on a farm. We would do chores as a part of our room and board. For many of us who went to App State, it was apparently in vogue to think about what an intentional community could look like and experiment with trying it out.

We’ll be exploring intentional communities here on Following Studies. We might not want to live in one, but there’s no denying that our society is lonely. The fabric of the community that once propped society up has eroded. Heck, even Dr. Ruth, who once taught America about sex, was appointed to be NY’s first Ambassador to Loneliness and is trying to pluck us all out of despair. We’re just living in our little silos, working our remote jobs, just doing our best. So I can see why an intentional community would be appealing, why being in community with others - by living and working together - would be a balm to our lonely world. Here, you’ll meet Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony, but if you haven’t already, subscribe to follow along for more.

“The pursuit of utopia is, at its heart, about our relationship with time.”
- Heaven is A Place on Earth: Searching for An American Utopia

About an hour outside of Los Angeles, in Antelope Valley, off CA 138, is everything left behind from the socialist commune Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony's attempt. When seeing it, you’d think that it’s been there much longer than it has. Castles, Roman walls, and even Pompeii ruins seem to be held together better than the scraps of buildings that Llano, the failed utopia, left behind. But that’s the reality of the desert. It’ll eat everything up.

Llano del Rio was first dreamed up by Job Harriman, a Los Angeles lawyer who had just lost a bid to the mayor of Los Angeles. It was 1914. Harriman had run political races before - for California governor, for US Vice President, for the mayorship of Los Angeles- and maybe in 1911, he would have won the race for Mayor, but two men had just bombed the Los Angeles Times. He had represented and supported the men; right before the election, they had pled guilty. For Harriman, the race was sealed.

Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony was Harriman’s next venture, and though he was dipping into a long history of communes and the idea of utopia, the structure of his new world would almost be like a corporation. Members would come into the colony by purchasing $2,000 shares. $1,000 had to be paid, but the other $1,000 was paid back to the colony through labor at a $4-a-day ($1 of that would go to the $1,000 balance and the rest towards food and other expenses).

“The irony, to which some would attribute Llano’s ultimate demise, was that Llano came into being as a capitalistic corporation, borrowing money and issuing stock.”
- Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles

With Llano, Harriman wanted to build a socialist world that could be used as a greater example for society. But Llano was a world they were building only for white people. At its height, around 1,000 people were living in Llano. They had ideas - ideas from people like Architect Alice Constance Austin, who wanted to build centralized communal kitchens and other hubs of tasks to unbind women from the constant domestic labor - but only white women. There was a rot at the heart of Llano, and it would take a few years, but it would consume it despite the early successes that the community had. There would be issues with water rights and leadership, the beliefs that Llano was established on would erode, and the colony would fail, but with its two decades of operation, it’s considered to be the US’s most successful socialist colony.

Llano del Rio was a socialist experiment whose goal was to be a utopian community where all the members cared for each other, but here is the thing with most communes - they are not utopias, not perfected places of community. They are run by people, and we are all flawed, and so many utopias - or attempts of them - are built by people trying to escape something or prove something, or find something. At Llano, for a brief time, for a small amount of people, they did.

Would you ever live in an intentional community or commune? Tell me below!