Tag: Art

Our Ramona

Boom California on April 29, 2019

Julia Sizek

Though largely forgotten by contemporary Californians, Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 Ramona was the most important novel about California of the nineteenth century.[1] Ramona follows its heroine, a mestiza, as she leaves the rancho of her adopted Californio family to live in the San Jacinto foothills with her love Alessandro, an Indian. Though the historical novel follows Victorian stylistic conventions, Jackson intended it to be a social commentary on the early days of California statehood. She hoped that Ramona would inspire social critique, making American settlers question their treatment of Native Americans and Mexican-Americans in Southern California when California became a state, causing the dispossession of both Native Americans and Californios.

At the time of its publication, Ramona’s immense popularity and social message earned it comparisons to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the only novel more popular than Ramona in the nineteenth century.[2] Like Stowe’s novel, Ramona was controversial upon its publication. White settlers accused Jackson of defaming them in their new home. Conversely, the book inspired a proliferation of tourism in Southern California that glorified Spanish history, as white settlers glorified dispossessed Californios and Native Americans in a performance of imperialist nostalgia. Ramona outgrew its origin as a novel intended to protest the treatment of Native Americans and Mexican-Americans in California, becoming the romanticized and fictional basis for interpreting California as a place for Euroamerican settlers, Mexican-Americans, and Native Americans.

In its many adaptations, translations, and transformations, Ramona is a story about belonging and dispossession. It is the story of three Californias belonging to the Native Americans, Californios, and Americanos. In its many versions, the story tends to follow the contours of the novel. It begins with Ramona’s life as a teenager at the rancho with her adopted family. Her adopted mother, a Californio named Señora Moreno, is the widow of a Spanish-Mexican man who had fought against the Americans. She is bitter at the Americans who killed her husband and shrunk her rancho after taking control under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Only her sickly son, Felipe, remains to help the Señora at the rancho. During the sheep-shearing season, Ramona falls in love with a hired Native American hand, Alessandro. In a fight with Señora Moreno, the Señora reveals Ramona’s true heritage as both Scottish and Native American. Ramona then decides to leave the rancho to elope with Alessandro, the son of the chief of the Luiseño tribe, based in Temecula village.

The couple travels across Southern California, seeking both work and places to live, made difficult by an influx of American homesteaders settling on Native lands. They have a daughter, Eyes of the Sky, who dies of a fever because they could not convince a doctor to come to their homestead. Their second child, named after her mother, is also born during this time. Unable to withstand the loss of Native lands and constant humiliation at the hands of the Americanos, Alessandro becomes unstable and is killed by a local vigilante after a misunderstanding. After Alessandro’s death, Ramona returns to the rancho (now missing Señora Moreno, who died in the interim). Eventually she marries her adopted brother Felipe and moves to Mexico City, the romantic dream of California proven to be no more than tragedy.

Helen Hunt Jackson intended Ramona to be a protest novel against the mistreatment of Native Americans in the United States.[3] She wrote the historical novel in a feverish three months, drawing from her travels through Indian country in Southern California, as well as her research for, A Century of Dishonor, her nonfiction account of the abuse and neglect of Native Americans at the hands of the federal government.

The novel failed as a reform effort because her white readers did not see the story as a tragic telling of the fallout of California statehood.[4] Instead readers saw it as a romance, an emplotment in which the main character overcomes oppression to become saved or emancipated. Ramona’s commercial success came from readers understanding it as a love story and a regional novel of Southern California. After being published serially it was still a best-seller, selling 21,000 copies in 1885.[5] It has never gone out of print. Though Ramona failed to create political change, it succeeded in popularizing a California myth from the historical facts Jackson had collected.

This new myth of California followed on the Romantic tradition rather than a tragic one, celebrating California multiculturalism in a way that today we would understand through anthropologist Renato Rosaldo’s concept of “imperialist nostalgia,” a problematic longing and valorization of the Native Americans and Californios, which Americans pushed out years prior.[6] Ramona brought new tourists to California, aided by the “See America First” patriotic tourism campaign and low railroad fares. Due to demand, proprietors had shifted their already-existing tourist sites to accommodate Ramona-themed tourism by the mid-1920s.

What began as tourist sightseeing became a veritable Ramona industry as guidebooks to the region appeared (the most enduring by George Wharton James in 1908). Towns and businesses adopted Ramona themes: you could also visit locations like the Ramona Highway or Ramona Pharmacy. The book was translated into many languages, adapted into five films and a telenovela in the U.S. and Mexico, and made into no less than eight plays, the most famous of which is the annual Ramona Pageant in Hemet, dating back to 1923.[7]

Tourists searched for the ‘real’ Ramona promised to them in tourist literature, though they were often met by many seeking to make a quick buck on the myth.[8] Perhaps the most ‘real’ of the Ramonas was a Cahuilla woman by the name Ramona Lubo, who Jackson had read about while writing her novel.[9] Like the fictional Alessandro, Lubo’s husband Juan Diego had mistaken the horse of a white man for his, and a vigilante band subsequently shot him in front of his wife and children. Lubo never received justice for her husband’s death. As a woman and an Indian, she had no legal standing as a citizen at the trial and was not invited to testify.

Lubo tried to benefit from the popularity of Ramona, charging small fees for tourists to take pictures of her with their new Kodak cameras, or for entrepreneurs to take pictures of her to reproduce in postcards (she certainly did not receive royalties for the latter). Newspapers denounced her opportunism, a charge they didn’t level at white and Latino Ramona entrepreneurs.[10]

Though Lubo sustained her livelihood in part from Ramona, she probably died from it too. While on exhibit as Ramona at a fair in San Bernardino in 1922, she contracted a respiratory illness from which she never recovered. Her grave became another in the long list of Ramona sites, suffering from unscrupulous tourists who chipped off souvenir pieces of headstones in the graveyard. The Cahuilla tribe closed that cemetery in 1973, taking Lubo back from the tourists who had defined her in life and death.

Ramona Lubo

The best site to understand contemporary Ramona tourism is the Ramona Pageant in Hemet. Inspired in part by the pageant Tahquitz in Palm Springs, the Hemet-San Jacinto Chamber of Commerce hired Garnet Holme (who later became pageant master for the National Park Service) to write a dramatization of Ramona.[11] Like other pageants of the era, the Ramona Pageant was played predominantly by amateurs who recounted scenes of local history with spectacular crowd scenes, music, and choreography. Theater historians disagree as to whether the Ramona Pageant is more of a pageant, a melodrama, or a hybrid of the two, but both sides agree that Ramona can’t simply be viewed as an “ideologically innocent expression of tradition.”[12]

Pageants were one of the most important art forms of the early twentieth century. They created historical stories that were sedimented in the public imagination and drew in heritage tourism. A prominent example was The Mission Play, which ran from 1912 through the mid-1930s in San Gabriel. The Mission Play articulated tropes of Southern California into a clear and self-evident story: The Spanish period was one of European civilization and the following Mexican period was one of decadence and degeneration.[13] Degeneration theory justified American expansion into California as a civilizing force against Californios and Native Americans. Like the Native American village in Yosemite, these tourist attractions romanticized Native Americans and legitimized their dispossession under the new American government.[14] These myths—forms of imperialist nostalgia—gave a way for tourists and settlers to understand their history through the narrative conventions of drama.

Even though the Pageant was originally marketed to motor tourists in the 1920s and 1930s, the play has always served a large role in community life as a ‘rite of spring.’ Many of the Pageant volunteers return yearly for the event, defining the seasons of their lives by Pageant-time. Barb Matson, an ethnographer of the Pageant in the 1990s, argues that the Pageant is a ritual in which both participants and audience-goers emerge as transformed converts to the Ramona story and its multicultural values.[15] In Hemet, where today forty percent of the population is Latino, the play attempts to reflect the diversity of the community through its Pageantry. Many trained ballet folklórico dancers perform, as do Native American tribal members. Former Ramona Pageant historian Phil Brigandi notes that participants include all socioeconomic classes in the San Jacinto Valley, noting that “some of the most prominent and wealthy families in the region perform alongside people on welfare.”[16]

A longstanding goal of the Pageant has been multiculturalism and intercultural understanding, if not social critique of the actions of Americanos in California after 1848. One of the first big changes to the play was the introduction of Spanish language into the script, but arguably the largest transformation has been the increased representation of Native American tribes. While prominent Native families had always participated, students from Sherman Indian School (the local boarding school) were invited to participate by performing tribal dances in the Pageant in the 1930s.[17] In the 1980s, a Native American Advisory Council was formed to improve the Elder Blessing Scene, which had only been allotted four and a half minutes in earlier iterations of the play.[18] Today, this portion of the play almost equals the length of the fiesta scene at the rancho, including Bird Singing (a southern California Native American singing tradition) and a Native soloist, Hoop Dancers, and the Red Tail Spirit Dancers, together representing California and Southwestern Native American traditions.

Hoop Dancers at Pageant

Native participation in the play is made visible through the performers themselves, but it’s also clear from the program. The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, and the Soboba Foundation (of the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians) provided financial support for the 2018 season of the Pageant. A local participant in the Ramona Pageant noted that “the Pageant may have gone belly-up” without the help of tribes today.[19]

Today’s Native American sponsorship of the Ramona Pageant inverts the historical relationship between tribes in the Pageant. In 1927, Condino Hopkins, the son of Ramona Lubo, wrote a letter to the San Jacinto-Hemet Chamber of Commerce accusing them of profiting from retelling the tragedy of Native dispossession. “Although the pageant is supposed to be in honor of the Indian woman who was immortalized in Mrs. Jackson’s famous story, it is well-known that it is primarily a publicity scheme on the part of the real estate interests in your locality…. In view of the fact that her name is thus commercialized, with the proceeds of this exhibition netting thousands of dollars each season, it would seem to me that it would be no more than right and proper for her heirs to share in such receipts.”[20] Though Hopkins’s point that the play was meant to honor an individual is incorrect, his critique of the Pageant reveals that the benefits of the Pageant largely went to the European settlers in the form of community growth and development,[21] not to the tribes who lost so much from Euroamerican settlement. Though the Pageant is one of the few representations of Native history that could be used to ask hard questions of settlers, has it been used both to reveal how California Native Americans were treated by European settlers and to critique it? A Native American former pageanteer told me that he still hasn’t decided whether the Pageant can bring awareness to Native issues or be a viable social critique, even after a lifetime of attending the event and seven years participating as a Bird Singer. [22]

Though the Pageant is a community building exercise, former Pageant historians places the value of the Pageant in the story: “The message is the story and the story is the message.” Garnet Holme’s dramatization of the play hewed closely to the book in order to have theatergoers identify with Californios and Native American tribes, an identification made possible by the understanding that both groups are tragically doomed. This identification manifests itself in one of the longstanding traditions of the play, when the crowd boos Americano cowboys as they ride away after threatening Ramona.[23] Jackson hoped that strong identification with Native American and Californios would make contemporary Americanos question their role as settlers in a land that was not originally theirs.

The novel highlights this with the final tragedy that befalls Ramona and Alessandro. After Alessandro’s wrongful death at the hands of a greedy Americano, Ramona moves back to the rancho. Life in California becomes more and more difficult, and Ramona and Felipe choose to move to Mexico—a homeland yet unseen—rather than endure the Americans. On the boat, Felipe asks Ramona to marry him and she agrees, deciding that it would be selfish to refuse. He accepts her reluctant hand, realizing that he will never have all of Ramona, as part of her will always be with Alessandro. They have a prosperous life and many children together in Mexico City. Of the children, the most beautiful and loved is “Ramona, daughter of Alessandro the Indian,” the words with which the novel ends.[24]

Ramona and Alessandro, Hemet Pageant

Scholars of Ramona disagree as to the meaning of this ending. Some have argued that Ramona is not miserable enough at the conclusion to make the novel a searing social critique, but other readings suggest that the ending is tragic, since Ramona can never live in Alta California because of discrimination against Native Americans, nor will she ever love Felipe as she had Alessandro.[25] Through the allegorical deaths of Señora Moreno and Padre Salvierdierra, the Spanish aristocracy and Mission system of California become deceased too, making California alien to Ramona and Felipe. Alessandro’s death also dooms California Indians, creating tragedy for remaining Californios and Native Americans.

Garnet Holme’s original script for the Ramona Pageant maintains the sense of injustice by ending with a speech by the ranch manager Juan Canito, in which he begs God to send the Indians justice and return to them the land that was theirs before the Americanos stepped in. The emphatic plea for justice furthers the invocation of tragedy.

In 2015, the Ramona Pageant Board of Directors commissioned an Idyllwild local, Steven Savage, to write a new version of the play. Unlike the Garnet Holme version and Jackson’s book, this version keeps Ramona—and Felipe—in California, at the rancho that they both love. Rather than recognize the changing times and the tragedy that has befallen them both, Ramona seems to overcome tragedy, making the play into a narrative romance. She ends the play with the following words: “My home, California, where everyone can receive justice.”

The newer version papers over the injustices Ramona has suffered with a quick song and speech, rendering anew the question of what Ramona has become today, and the kind of parable it does—and should—offer to its audience. In his compelling reading of C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, anthropologist David Scott demonstrates how historical metanarratives structure possibilities for future thought; that is, how understanding history as tragedy or romance has implications for our understandings of present politics.[26]

As a novel and story that has been told of California and its history, Ramona has been read as both a romance—in which a hero can overcome present conditions to emerge victorious—and a tragedy—which “sets before us the image of a man or woman obliged to act in a world in which values are unstable and ambiguous.”[27] In a moment where it is obvious that a multicultural democracy is not a “done deal,” perhaps Ramona should not be understood as a romance, but rather as a tragic cautionary tale. This tale is one in which Americanos are the ‘bad’ guys and Ramona is trapped in an unstable and unforgiving world that cannot be resolved by a single song.

Ramona Lubo posing at a grave

Notes

[1] Dydia DeLyser, Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Lawrence Clark Powell, California Classics: The Creative Literature of the Golden State (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1971).

[2] Blake Allmendinger, A History of California Literature (London: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 46.

[3] Valerie Sherer Mathes, “Friends of the California Mission Indians: Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Legacy,” unpublished PhD dissertation (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1988), iv.

[4] Although the political message of Ramona was missed in the United States, Cuban writer José Martí felt compelled to translate the novel as soon as he recognized the critique of American expansion into Mexico inherent in the tragic work. This is a pan-American (not North American) story, he argues in his introduction to his 1888 translation of the novel, despite being written by a gringa. See Ana-Maria Kerekes, Poder y belleza de la Palabra: Análysis de la traducción martiana de la novela Ramona de Helen Hunt Jackson,” unpublished Master’s thesis (Montreal: Concordia University, 2009), 21-22, and José Martí, José Martí: Obras Completas 24 (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1991), 204.

[5] Mathes, “Friends of the California Mission Indians,’ 201, Allmendinger, A History, 46. John M. Gonzalez, “The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona,” American Literary History 16 (2004): 437-65.

[6] Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (1989): 107-22.

[7] Vincent Brook, Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013): 52. Dydia DeLyser, “Ramona Memories: Fiction, Tourist Practices, and Placing the Past in Southern California,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93 (2003): 886-908. George Wharton James, Through Ramona’s Country (New York: Little, Brown, 1908).

[8] For example, see D. A. Hufford, The Real Ramona of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Famous Novel (Los Angeles: D. A. Hufford & Co., 1900) and Carlyle Channing Davis and William A. Alderson, The True Story of ‘Ramona’: Its Facts and Fictions, Inspiration and Purpose (New York: Dodge Pub. Co., 1914).

[9] Mathes, “Friends of the California Mission Indians,” 197.

[10] DeLyser, “Ramona Memories,” 127-129.

[11] Phil Brigandi, Garnet Holme: California’s Pageant Master (Hemet: Ramona Pageant Association, 1991).

[12] Shilarna Stokes, “Playing the Crowd: Mass Pageantry in Europe and the United States, 1905-1935,” unpublished PhD dissertation (New York: Columbia University, 2013). See also Barb Matson, “Performing Identity, Staging Injustice: California’s Ramona festival as Ritual,” unpublished PhD dissertation (Boulder: University of Colorado, 2006).

[13] Chelsea K. Vaughn, “The Joining of Historical Pageantry and the Spanish Fantasy Past: The Meeting of Señora Josefa Yorba and Lucretia del Valle,” Journal of San Diego History 57 (2011): 213-235.

[14] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York : Oxford University Press, 1999).

[15] Matson, “Performing Identity,” 431.

[16] Phone interview with Phil Brigandi, 29 May 2018.

[17] Although this was a good faith effort on the part of Pageant organizers, Sherman (like most Indian Boarding Schools) has a much darker history as places where students were prohibited from speaking in their Native languages and forcibly removed from their family for assimilation. See Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (Norman: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

[18] Matson, “Performing Identity,” 466.

[19] Phone interview, 31 May 2018.

[20] Hopkins quoted in DeLyser, Ramona Memories, 135.

[21] A 1972 study tried to tracked some of the economic impacts of the Ramona Pageant, and found that around 7.5 percent of San Jacinto Valley residents had moved to the area after being introduced through the play. This points to the impact of the play as being both an economic change to the community and a social shift to growth in the region based on Ramona tourism. See Robert M. McLaughlin, “A Descriptive Study of the Interrelationships Between the City of Hemet and the Ramona Pageant,” unpublished Master’s thesis (Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, 1972).

[22] Phone interview, 31 May 2018.

[23] Matson, “Performing Identity,” 50.

[24] Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona: A Story (New York: Avon Press: 1970 [1884]), 349.

[25] Matson, “Performing Identity.” See also Allan Nevins, “Helen Hunt Jackson: Sentimentalist v. Realist,” American Scholar 10 (1941): 280; Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 259; Rosemary Whitaker, “Helen Hunt Jackson,” Boise State University Western Writers Series 78 (Boise: Boise State University, 1987), 37.

[26] David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

[27] Ibid.

Julia Sizek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley and Associate Scholar for the Native American Land Conservancy. Her doctoral research focuses on contemporary land use problems in California’s Mojave Desert. Support for research in this article was provided by NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (#BCS- 1756340) and Wenner-Gren dissertation fieldwork grant (#9561).

Copyright: © 2019 Julia Sizek. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Articles

From Heart Mountain, Wyoming, to the Heart of Little Tokyo

Boom California on February 18, 2019

Arnab Banerji

Located in the heart of the city’s Little Tokyo Historic District, a visit to Los Angeles’ Japanese American National Museum (JANM) is a humbling experience. JANM exists by active community collaboration.[1] The museum’s exhibits tell the story of a group of people who persevered in their hopes of making America their home even as “white” America pushed back on accommodating and accepting people of Japanese ancestry. Anchoring the museum’s display is a wooden structure. The sparse and rickety edifice is frugally-built and a less sturdy version of the log cabins that one finds in the Great Smoky Mountains in the American South. The wooden structure is one of the few surviving housing structures bought and relocated to the museum from the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming. It represents one of the most dismal and yet often overlooked chapters of modern American history—the forceful removal, relocation, and imprisonment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans to inland detention facilities from the coasts during World War II.

The wooden structure with its modest interiors greets visitors as the first object of display in the museum’s second floor. Beyond the wooden structure lies an exhibit that includes everyday objects, historic photographs, and useful anecdotes that support the visitor in navigating what is bound to be a fairly new immigrant narrative for most people. The open floor plan that one traverses to explore the first couple of rooms comes to an abrupt halt as visitors make their way past the thick glass doors into the section devoted to the Japanese internment. Although, it might simply have been an architectural choice to separate this section of the exhibit. I couldn’t help but imagine a curatorial intent behind forcing visitors to push open a pair of heavy doors to enter into an area earmarked for exhibits depicting life during a state-sanctioned sequestering of fellow citizens. Like the sudden, swift blow to Japanese American aspirations of realizing their American dreams, the visitor is transported, beyond the glass doors, from the tranquility of everyday Japanese American life to the hostile badlands of middle America.

Japanese_American_National_Museum2 Wikimedia infernalfox

Japanese_American_National_Museum Wikimedia

Little Tokyo, the neighborhood that houses the museum is today a symbol of resistance and resilience. A gateway to Japanese immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the neighborhood was home to some 30,000 Japanese Americans before it was swept clean during Executive Order 9066 in 1941-42.[2] During the war years, the once burgeoning neighborhood became a ghost town before being populated by large groups of Hispanic and African-American laborers. These workers who had arrived in the city lured by defense manufacturing jobs were unable to find housing because of restrictive housing covenants and occupied the abandoned Little Tokyo structures.[3]

Bronzeville, as the area came to be referred to during World War II, was the site of the Zoot Suit riots between white sailors and Hispanic residents of the area.[4] After the war, Japanese residents gradually started coming back to Little Tokyo. Under the leadership of the Little Tokyo Business Association, the area was rebuilt and revitalized around 1947 and is today a thriving tourist and business destination, even if escalating costs have forced the bulk of the Japanese American residential communities to move to Torrance, Gardena, West Los Angeles, and Arcadia.[5]

The Little Tokyo neighborhood is framed by the JANM on one side and the Aratani Theatre on the other with the Little Tokyo Village plaza, with its convenience stores, confectioneries, and restaurants separating the two pivotal landmarks. The Aratani theatre managed by the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC) has been a point of pride for the Little Tokyo district. Since opening its doors in 1983, they have hosted some of the biggest names in Japanese theatre, music, and the arts.[6]

The East West Players (EWP) is another stalwart of the neighborhood. EWP was founded in 1965 by Asian American actors. Now in its fifty-third year, the company is the longest-running professional theatre of color and is seemingly the largest producing organization of Asian American work.[7] Snehal Desai, who is the EWP’s producing artistic director, explained how the East West Players is located at an interesting intersection of the city in that it is surrounded by the Los Angeles Police Department, City Hall, the erstwhile Los Angeles Times building, and a stone’s throw from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Music Center. This puts it squarely in the middle of the multiple loci of power—intellectual, political, and administrative—in the city. And yet the nation’s oldest and largest Asian American company holds on dearly to its diminutive appearance, housed in a former church.[8] It seems the company deliberately stays away from the glitz and glamor of the entertainment world even as it continues to produce and promote high caliber work that celebrates the diversity of the American experience.

EWP was founded in 1965 by Asian American actors. Now in its 53rd year the company is the longest-running professional theatre of color and the largest producing organization of Asian American work.

With Little Tokyo as its setting, the memories enshrined in the Japanese American National Museum as reminders, East West Players and the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center as partners, and the Aratani Theatre as its venue, Allegiance: A New Musical Inspired by a True Story made its Los Angeles premiere in March 2018. Before it arrived at Aratani, the George Takei starrer had had its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe and a brief Broadway run at New York City’s Longacre Theatre. The musical had been in the works since 2008 when Takei and his husband Brad initiated a conversation with its creators, Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione, about creating a musical that would embrace and put the experience of Takei and several thousands like him who survived the Japanese internment during the Second World War into a stage performance. The conversation started in the aftermath of two back to back chance meetings between Takei and Brad, and Kuo and Thione while attending shows in New York City. Takei was particularly moved by the song “Inutil” during a performance of In the Heights, which the four attended together. And the conversation that ensued convinced Kuo and Thione that Takei’s family experience would produce a moving show.[9]

The George Takei story itself is a celebration of the Asian-American version of the American Dream. Born Hosato Takei in 1937 in Los Angeles to an Issei (first-generation) father and a Nissei (second-generation) mother, Takei was christened “George” after the British monarch of the same name. In 1942 Takei and his family were forcefully relocated first to Santa Anita, then to Rohwer, Arkansas, and finally to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, Northern California as part of the Japanese-American internment during the Second World War.[10] After the war and the release of the former internees, Takei and his family moved back to Los Angeles where his father took up a petty job to support his family. The world war not only claimed a part of Takei’s childhood, but it also took away an aunt and a young cousin who were found dead in a ditch in Hiroshima in the aftermath of the U.S. atomic attack on the Japanese cities.[11] Takei originated the role of Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek and went on to achieve both critical and popular fame for this iconic television role. Since Star Trek, Takei has appeared in numerous films and television shows. Starting in the late 2000s, he embraced various social media platforms and became a social media celebrity with millions of followers across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Takei also recently launched a YouTube series called It Takeis Two with his husband Brad. Using his iconic status first as a popular and beloved television star and more recently as a social media phenomenon, Takei has been vocal about pressing social issues, most notably LGBTQ advocacy and rights. Takei says, “Raising awareness of the JA internment has been my life mission,” and with Allegiance Takei has opened up a national conversation on Japanese internment while simultaneously touching on its overall national shame as much as it is a personal history for the veteran actor.[12]

The most recent Los Angeles avatar of the play opens with a celebration in the Kimura household in Salinas, California where the family are shown to be artichoke farmers. Sammy (Ethan Le Phong), the young son of the family is portrayed to have just returned from college where he has been elected as class president. His father Tatsuo (Scott Watanabe) is quietly proud of his son, but still manages to push him to do better. This mentality rings true for most Asian parent stereotypes in that they seem impossible to satisfy. Kei (Elena Wang), Sammy’s sister and Ojii-chan (George Takei) make up the rest of the family. The celebration is short-lived as the family receives the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Sammy is eager to prove his allegiance by enlisting, but the family instead is forced to join other dazed and confused families as they make their way to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, “where their multifamily barrack is meager protection from choking dust and bitter cold.”[13]

The Japanese internment in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks was one of the darker episodes in the modern history of the United States. Responding to the anti-Japanese sentiment sweeping through the country after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued the infamous Executive Order 9066. This executive order gave sweeping authority to the Secretary of War and his military personnel to designate restricted areas and exclude certain members of the population from these prohibited military areas.[14] Under the aegis of the executive order and under the sweeping authority granted by it, the Western Defense Command announced that all people of Japanese ancestry would be relocated from the West Coast.[15] Notices began to appear in Japanese communities in April 1942 instructing families of Japanese ancestry to make preparations and report to designated areas for relocation. Defiance of the order could lead to arrest and imprisonment.

Several Japanese Americans expressed shock at the turn of events. Miné Okubo, an artist from Oakland writes, “To think this could happen in the United States. We were citizens. We did nothing. It was only because of our race. They did nothing to the Italians and the Germans. It was something that didn’t have to happen. Imagine mass evacuating little children, mothers, and old people!”[16] Evacuees were instructed to pack two suitcases and a duffle bag each and were warned that the relocation centers were pioneer communities without adequate infrastructure. 120,000 Japanese Americans, several of them American born citizens left their homes, businesses, farms, and possessions behind as they embarked on a new adventure inland, unsure about their imminent futures.

Not unlike their real-life counterparts, the play’s characters find themselves in a hostile environment and under brutal suppression once at the camp. Throughout the longer first half of the play, however, we see the internees reconciling with their fate and negotiating with the inimical situation, making it work. In the camp, Tatsuo Kimura, the proud Japanese patriarch of the Kimura household refuses to disavow his Japanese identity when he is asked to fill out an insulting questionnaire designed to test the allegiance of interred citizens. This form, reminiscent of several contemporary visa application forms where applicants are asked if they have ever endorsed terrorism or terrorist organizations, is seen as an affront by Tatsuo to the honest life that he has led while pursuing his American dream.

The play ends with an older Sam Kimura portrayed by George Takei, getting ready for yet another Pearl Harbor commemoration. A visitor, who he doesn’t know has brought a big brown envelope. In it we find a copy of Time magazine, with a young Sammy on its cover, memorabilia that Tatsuo had held on to till his last day, and a purple heart. Sam learns that the messenger is Hanako, the daughter of Kei and Suzuki, named after the slain nurse from the Heart Mountain camp—Hannah, the girl who Sammy had dared to love knowing fully well that their relationship would be considered illegal before law. Reminded of the past, and all that he had missed during the years that he stayed out of touch with his family, Sam Kimura breaks down as he welcomes his niece back into his life in a beautifully touching moment of familial reconciliation.

The cast performing “Wishes on the Wind” in the Los Angeles premiere of Allegiance starring George Takei at the Aratani Theatre, co-produced by East West Players and Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. Photo by Michael Lamont.

Director Snehal Desai says that this play has always had a Los Angeles connection, with Takei being from the city, the first reading of the play taking place in the Japanese American National Museum, and with Los Angeles being home to the nation’s largest Japanese American population. The director, who also heads the East West Players as artistic director was therefore excited to bring the musical back to its spiritual if not actual home. George Takei offered a more nuanced take on Los Angeles’ relationship to the play in an email interview. The octogenarian writes, “In many ways, the City of Los Angeles is the epicenter of the work we have done to keep alive the memory, history and education about the Japanese American internment.”[17] He points to institutions of socio-cultural significance that call the area home to further his point, “With things like the JANM and the Go For Broke Monument, not to mention the JACCC and the support of venerable institutions such as East West Players, Los Angeles has resources that no other city has to integrate our show’s message and story with the rich tapestry of the community today.”[18] But extant resources aside, the history of the neighborhood cements its ties further with the story that the play shares. Takei walked me through the history of this neighborhood highlighting pivotal existing landmarks that are reminiscent of this recent painful history: “Both the JANM’s first ‘building’ and East West Players’ original Union Church building are historic landmarks of the internment of Japanese Americans. The JANM’s first home was the former Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, which was first built in 1927 and served as the headquarters of the Shin sect of the JA Buddhist community until the evacuation order.”[19] Takei continued, “Union Church was founded by JA Christians and was built to contrast with the traditional Buddhist ceremonial entrance of the Buddhist Temple on the east side of the same block. With the evacuation order coming down, JA Christians were gathered in front of the Christian Union Church and from there, they too were bused to Santa Anita Race Track.”[20]

And if the historical past was not reason enough for the city to have a unique stake in the Allegiance story, Takei points out that, “Allegiance still lives here in LA” with the “JACCC, the Isamu Noguchi sculpture in the plaza, the Go For Broke Memorial Monument and in a cozy side plaza beside the JACCC, the Memorial Honor Court of War Veterans are all stirring reminders of the sacrifice, anguish as well as the resilience and indeed the true patriotism expressed in so many countless ways by JAs during the war years. One cannot not be aware of our history in Little Tokyo today.”[21] Hillary Jenks has studied Little Tokyo as a lieu de mémoire.[22] The place of memory serving as places that “not only recall the past but also represent lost alternate futures, making them constant reminders of the social and political consequences of previous choices rather than depoliticized diversions.”[23] Takei’s deft recalling of the various nooks and crannies of this “ethnic” enclave in downtown Los Angeles, the presence of historically significant landmarks, and the inspiration that they lent to the creators of Allegiance to formulate and share the story signifies the importance of this neighborhood as a continued determinant of Japanese American identity even when gentrification rapidly changes the demographic makeup of the area surrounding this neighborhood. However, the changes effecting the community today won’t be the first time that this stretch between City Hall and the Los Angeles river have had to forcefully undergo a change of character to accommodate rapid social changes.

JACCC, the Isamu Noguchi sculpture in the plaza, the Go For Broke Memorial Monument and in a cozy side plaza beside the JACCC, the Memorial Honor Court of War Veterans are all stirring reminders of the sacrifice, anguish as well as the resilience and indeed the true patriotism expressed in so many countless ways by JAs during the war years. One cannot not be aware of our history in Little Tokyo today.

The forceful Japanese American relocation under Executive Order 9066 opened up a vacuum that was quickly filled by other minority communities—especially African Americans and Hispanic Americans. The Bronzeville period of this neighborhood was a result of the rapid westward migration of African American populations during the war. Segregated housing laws did not allow this new population to find reasonable accommodation resulting in the city’s newest residents squatting in houses and structures abandoned by the Japanese Americans. Takei reminds us how Little Tokyo landmarks, like the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, were opened up to welcome the new African American Baptist congregation in order to hold Sunday services. Takei imagines that “during the war, this Buddhist Temple rocked with the foot stamping, hand clapping ‘Hallelujahs’ of Southern Baptist Sunday services” in the Providence Baptist Church.[24] The same holds true for Union Church which also “welcomed African American congregants until the return of the JAs after the war.”[25] The African American settlers in the Japanese enclave were hopeful of turning the struggling neighborhood around, but popular perception of the area as “the city’s most notorious problem neighborhood quickly overshadowed Bronzeville boosterism.”[26] The neighborhood struggled under the pressure of the sudden growth in population driven by Los Angeles’ racist and restrictive housing laws. The California Eagle aptly summarized the situation, “With 95 percent of our town locked, bolted, and barred against us the Negro is bound into a ghetto as fast as any which binds the Jewish people in Germany today.”[27]

The pressure on the already strained resources increased with the return of the Japanese American internees back to Los Angeles from their encampments. Takei recalls relocating back to Little Tokyo after he and his family were finally released from the camps. By then Bronzeville was a shadow of its confident resilient former self and was “skid row.” In Takei’s words, “It was a place for the poorest of the poor, and it was to be honest a harrowing experience—dirty, crowded, and crime-ridden.”[28] The relocation was horrific enough for Takei’s sister to wish that they were back home to the camps, which Takei suggests were “at least clean even for a prison camp.”[29] The African American residents of Bronzeville and the Japanese American stakeholders of the erstwhile Little Tokyo tried finding common ground to resist the racist segregationist policies and practices of the Los Angeles city council and the War Relocation Authority (WRA) respectively. In spite of concerted efforts from community leaders and some positive movement in reconciling the differences that separated the two communities and their efforts to achieve financial and social recognition in white America, “the events of the war had set in motion a divergence of experience between Black and Japanese American[s] that would … prove too wide to reconcile.”[30] The shrinking landscape of the symbolic Little Tokyo “became a target for Civic Center expansion in the in the 1950s.”[31] The development forcefully replacing residents with parking structures and the new police headquarters. The bureaucratic encroachment of the city into Little Tokyo was resisted by the Little Tokyo Redevelopment Authority or LTRA which was created in 1963 to prevent “external land grabbing.”[32] In the 1970s, the LTRA development plan joined forces with the Community Redevelopment Authority (CRA) and Little Tokyo subsequently began its transformation. It thus was turning into a commercial area bearing the kitschy signs of Japanese-ness that would attract a tourist population often at the expense of the ubiquitous Japanese American features that it had celebrated since it was settled in the late nineteenth century.[33]

The forceful “Japanization” of the area was also resisted by second generation Nissei Japanese Americans who spearheaded efforts to locate within the boundaries of Little Tokyo memory artifacts and promoted ethnic, historical, and cultural venues in the neighborhood. As the child of an Issei father, and a Nissei mother, George Takei seemed to have been at the hub of the Little Tokyo redevelopment. Looking back at the 1980s effort to stop “Japanization,” Takei recalls how

In the late ’80s, actress Beulah Quo and I spearheaded the fundraising drive to adaptively reuse the old Union Church as the new home of the EWP. Just before the turn of the century, in the late 90s, the EWP staged its gala opening with a new artistic director, Tim Dang, a new 250 seat theater and a spectacular production of Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures.” When EWP presents stories of the internment, it is told in a building that resonates with the heartbeat of the people who were gathered right in front of those four Ionic columns. Union Church today is a living landmark that tells the story that happened in and around its walls.[34]

Jenks’ refers to the 90s effort to resist the touristic commercialization as a “suffocating pilling-on” of cultural memorabilia. The urge to pile on memory seemed to have stemmed from the need of the community to retain Little Tokyo as a lieu de mémoire (a place of memory). A location like this is peppered with landmarks that serve to remind the community of their Japanese roots. Fundamentally, the “internment demands they remember.”[35] It is no surprise, then, that Takei celebrates the current avatar of his former neighborhood as a “vibrant JA community that welcomes all people to enjoy, discover and learn from the cuisine, the performances and our cultural heritage. It is not simply a ‘commercial’ district. It is a healthy, living and lively community with a unique cultural and historic heritage.”[36] Locating Allegiance in this part of town which is so integrally connected to the story that the play shares therefore becomes as much of a political decision as it is a logistical necessity.

Allegiance, the musical is a reclamation of a history and curating it for retelling strictly from the victim’s perspective. The creative team at the helm of the show chose to soften the critical and historical blow by not creating a scathing drama, but rather a mellifluous musical that, barring its occasional highhandedness, holds its act very firmly together. And in the process the play weaves a musical journey that is reminiscent of the classic American musical. It is interesting that both Allegiance and David Henry Hwang’s Soft Power, (which held its world premiere barely a month after Allegiance closed) both use music that is not fiercely original but somewhat of a throwback to the greatest among the showtunes. Much of mainstream criticism of these new works have therefore criticized the music for not being original. It seems a deliberate choice on the part of the creators to critique erroneous representations of Asia and Asian-ness in much of mainstream musicals. It is also a quick draw for the crowds who are then introduced to a history, this new perspective, or even a story that they would have been hitherto clueless about. However, the musical as a form still has its ways of encompassing expressions that are beyond what has been used as definitive examples. Takei explained that every evening he witnessed audiences celebrating the work of the team both during the Broadway run of the show and beyond. And this popular reception seemed to have carried more weight for him and the others in the Allegiance creative team over the not always favorable critical responses that the team garnered. Audience enthusiasm and support continue to be the mainstay for musicals like Allegiance and Soft Power, which may quite possibly only continue to be unfavorably reviewed by mainstream critics who judge these works on the same parameters as most mainstream musicals, and without the nuance of the historical lacuna that the musicals aim to address.

East West Players’ artistic director and the director for the Los Angeles edition of Allegiance, Snehal Desai, mapped out the journey that led to the musical’s eventual coming to Los Angeles during an informal afternoon chat in the EWP premises in downtown Los Angeles. After the Broadway opening, the EWP felicitated members of the Broadway company at the EWP annual gala. George Takei himself continues to serve as a co-chair with his husband Brad of the EWP council of governors and has nurtured and nourished the company for the entirety of its existence. It was therefore only natural that the EWP were involved in conversations regarding the musical’s future after the Broadway run. And after plans for a national tour were shelved EWP teamed up with JACCC and the production team to bring the musical home to Los Angeles.

Desai decided to don the director’s hat himself because he wanted someone who hadn’t seen the musical to reimagine this edition. Even though he was in close proximity to the musical when it was developing from an idea to a fully realized musical, he had neither seen nor personally heard it. The decision to direct the musical was further motivated by his keen interest in politics, which was something that Desai cultivated during his college days as a political science major while simultaneously pursuing theatre. I quizzed Desai on EWP taking up the challenge of not only producing a play that had struggled to make a mark on Broadway, but also committing to a six-week run in an eight hundred seat theatre. Desai’s nuanced response downplayed the significance of Broadway as the benchmark for great theatre. He went on to say that a few decades ago, Broadway was thought of as the place where new voices and new works were to be seen but that has stopped being the case now when Disney is at the helm of several theatres and the entertainment on offer caters to a tourist crowd who watch plays to check off a bucket list item. And therefore, EWP did not balk from the lukewarm response to Allegiance on Broadway. They went instead with the fact that the show was one of the biggest successes at the Old Globe in San Diego. And Angelenos came out in large numbers to support the play. The overwhelming support that the show enjoyed in Los Angeles potentially could have stemmed from the politics of locating the play within the lieu de mémoire of Little Tokyo and the attempt of the neighborhood to strike a balance between touristy marketing and community engagement. Desai’s refuting of Broadway as a commercial rather than a critical benchmark for contemporary American theatre certainly hints at that direction as well.

The play temporarily enters the urban space of the neighborhood to offer a performed portrayal of not only the community’s reaffirmation of its distinct ethnic identity but also its relationship and resistance to literal and figurative encroachments of bureaucratic and economic forces.

Desai recollects that the Los Angeles edition of the musical came about at what was becoming an increasingly difficult political climate with regards to immigration. The exclusionary rhetoric employed by the current presidential administration towards citizens, citizens-in-waiting, and immigrants finds echoes in this shameful episode from fairly recent American history. An episode that some Americans are painfully unaware of to this day. Takei took me back to an even earlier political moment that the veteran actor heralded his team into during the 2015 Broadway run of the show. Takei says that the show’s creators could never imagine that the play would have such contemporary relevance even though he remembers that the warning signs were already visible. And so in, “2015, as then-candidate Donald Trump questioned whether the Japanese American internment was really such a bad thing, that he would have ‘had to have been there.’ We then invited him to see the show and reserved a special seat for him every night, so that he could ‘be there’ and learn this history.”[37] The candidate never took the company up on the offer. Based on his recent experience of visiting the Texan border towns of Brownsville and McAllen, Takei reminded me of the ongoing vilification of immigrant communities and his memory of the internment, that “JAs cannot help but be reminded of our unjust incarceration and [so have] galvanized anew to fight for justice for others.”[38] In Los Angeles particularly, the location of Allegiance near the various loci of power and the Metropolitan Detention Center (albeit not an ICE facility) is a powerful statement when seen in conjunction with Jenks’ characterization of the Little Tokyo district as a lieu de mémoire. The play temporarily enters the urban space of the neighborhood to offer a performed portrayal of not only the community’s reaffirmation of its distinct ethnic identity, but also its relationship and resistance to literal and figurative encroachments of bureaucratic and economic forces.

It was difficult to find tickets to the performance. The search was so difficult that I had to wait until the closing week to finally manage to scalp a ticket. Desai confirmed that the performance played to near capacity during most of its run, reaching roughly 200,000 folks over its course. Desai also talked about the Wednesday matinees which were for high school students. The company was really excited at the immersive day that the students would be having if they came for the play including a conversation with George, a survivor from the camps, the Go For Broke Monument, which celebrates and commemorates Japanese American soldiers who fought in 442nd Regimental Combat Team. And then visit JANM for a more hands on interaction with the history that they had just seen performed. Desai was thrilled at the way the community came out to support the telling of this important story and at the ways in which various people were able to relate to it on different levels—personal and historical. The company had anticipated some of this response and therefore as Desai confirmed they did their due diligence in terms of their historical homework. It is wise, however as Desai reminded me, to remember that this was the dramatization of a historical moment—a musical based on a true story, rather than a true story as it really was.

Japanese American critics vehemently have critiqued what they have termed as outlandish portrayals of camp life and the associated violence that comes with it. They all coherently contend that the “camp was degrading. It was dehumanizing.”[39] Others have questioned how Frankie Suzuki’s resistance movement has been portrayed in the musical or how life in the camp was not as brutal as the musical would have us believe.[40] Takei offers a nuanced take on the way this painful history was recreated for the stage. He acknowledges that the company was tasked with a “difficult job of creating a story that told many facets of all of our story, with respect to all of the camps in one location. This obviously meant that in some cases what we depicted might seem harsher than what some people remember at their own camps.”[41] Based his own experience first at the Rohwer camp in Arkansas and later at the Tule Lake camp for the “‘disloyals’ in the community,” Takei recalls the harsh reality that “camp was brutal. There were beatings. There was enforced solitary confinement.”[42] Historical fact is significant. An exception can perhaps be made under exceptional circumstances like in the case of Allegiance. The musical succeeds in instigating conversations about an issue that a vast majority of the American people are either ignorant about or would rather forget. And the success of the musical in this regard makes Takei’s confident assertion, “I’m proud of the story we told, and am not bothered by those who wanted a different one,” sound like a celebration for a just cause rather than a casual disregard for history.[43]

Allegiance is a bold retelling of an episode that is often ignored in contemporary American history. And it is especially important that we revisit this historical period today when America faces several immigration challenges. Snehal Desai drew my attention to the parallels in language used to discuss and describe the Japanese in 1941-42 to the rhetoric from the top-down while discussing Muslims, Central Americans, non-white immigrants, and refugees today. The Los Angeles edition came about at what was becoming an increasingly difficult political climate especially with regard to immigration and immigrants. The exclusionary rhetoric employed by the current presidential administration towards citizens, citizens-in-waiting, and immigrants finds echoes in this shameful episode from fairly recent American history—something that a large number of Americans are painfully unaware of today. There seems to be more uncanny parallels between the time that we are living through in 2019 and the time when trucks rolled up in downtown Los Angeles more than seven decades ago to take citizens away from everything they had worked their entire lives for. The proposed amendments to the census forms, increased surveillance on non-citizens and their social media presence, and the erosion of civic discourse all seem eerily similar to the period that Allegiance puts squarely under scrutiny within its musical framework. More than anything else, this is perhaps the reason why it is such an important piece of work worthy of critical engagement. In several ways, this play is a metaphor for the city of Los Angeles—quietly significant, sprawling in its scope and possibilities, and irritatingly tedious at times. If so, then it is no wonder why it hit the mark here rather than in New York where many interpreted it simply to be this “singing history lesson” by someone who would rather be entertained while remaining oblivious to history.[44]

And on a final point about George Takei, the headliner of Allegiance and an Angeleno by birth: I would be lying if I said that I went to watch the musical drawn by its story. I went to the Aratani to see Hikari Sulu in flesh and blood. I came away inspired, intrigued, and in awe of this octogenarian who has worked tirelessly over the greater part of the last decade to share a story that is at once extremely personal and yet universal in its ramifications. And, as if to counter the observation made by Kelvin Yu character Brian in A Master of None about Takei being busy with “gay stuff,” the social media phenomenon is a gentle presence on stage, essaying Ojii-chan as an affable grandfather who never ceases to lose his sense of humor and spirit. The older Sam Kimura, similarly bears the burden of family separation, witnesses war, and yet remained resolute as a soldier.[45] Throughout the performance, Takei frequently takes himself to the background and makes room for an excellent group of young Asian-American actors to perform characters beyond caricatures and stereotypes. In the end, Allegiance celebrates inclusion like very few musicals are able to and, in the process, hopefully inaugurates a new kind of musical entertainment that is not intent on promoting superficiality when embarking on such relevant themes, but even more so informs and challenges the range of thematic possibilities.

George Takei as Sam Kimura in the original Broadway production of Allegiance. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Notes

[1] “About JANM,” About the Museum, Japanese American National Museum, accessed on 20 July 2018, http://www.janm.org/about/.

[2] “131 Years of History,” About LTBA, accessed 15 July 2018, http://www.visitlittletokyo.com/About-LTBA.html.

[3] Ibid.

[4] See Roger Bruns, Zoot Suit Riots (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014) for a detailed study on the infamous riots instigated by US Servicemen against Mexican-American and African-American residents of downtown Los Angeles.

[5] See Jonathan H. X. Lee, Japanese Americans: The History and Culture of a People (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2017) for a detailed study of the history of the community.

[6] Alison M. De La Cruz, “The Aratani Theatre: A Meditation on Impermanence,” Performances, March 2018, P10.

[7] “About,” East West Players, http://www.eastwestplayers.org/about-us/.

[8] Snehal Desai, Personal conversation with author, 22 June 2018.

[9] James Herbert, “’Allegiance’ pledges to make it to Broadway,” San Diego Union Tribune, 18 July 2010, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-allegiance-pledges-to-make-it-to-broadway-2010jul18-story.html.

[10] George Takei, email interview with author, 31 January 2019.

[11] Landress Kearns, “George Takei Reminds Donald Trump Of the Past Horrors of Nuclear Weapons,” Huffington Post, 22 December 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/george-takei-nuclear-weapons-trump_us_585c5511e4b0de3a08f4ccae?.

[12] George Takei, email interview with author.

[13] Daryl H. Miller, “George Takei & Co. pledge an ‘Allegiance’ to teaching WWII history,” Los Angeles Times, 1 March 2018, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-allegiance-east-west-players-theater-review-20180302-story.html.

[14] Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Transcript of Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942),” 19 February 1942, ourdocuments.gov, U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, accessed 23 July 2018, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=74&page=transcript.

[15] Peggy Daniels Becker, Japanese American Internment during World War II (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2013), 32.

[16] Becker, Japanese American Internment, 34.

[17] George Takei, email interview with author, 31 January 2019.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Hillary Jenks, “Urban Space, ethnic community, and national belonging: the political landscape of memory in Little Tokyo,” GeoJournal Vol. 73, no. 3 (2008): 231-244.

[23] Ibid., 235.

[24] George Takei, email interview with author corroborated by Scott Kurashige, “Bronzeville and Little Tokyo,” in The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 160.

[25] George Takei, email interview with author.

[26] Kurashige, “Bronzeville,” 160.

[27] Ibid., 161.

[28] George Takei, email interview with author.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Kurashige, “Bronzeville,”185.

[31] Hillary Jenks, “The Politics of Preservation: Power, Memory, and Identity in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo,” in Cultural Landscapes: Balancing Nature and Heritage in Preservation Practice, ed. Richard Longstreth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 39.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid., 35.

[34] George Takei, email interview with author.

[35] Jenks, “Politics of Preservation,” 50.

[36] George Takei, email interview with author.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Frank Abe, “Allegiance Uplifts by Doctoring Japanese American History,” Resisters.com-John Okada/Conscience and the Constitution, 27 October 2015, http://resisters.com/2015/10/27/allegiance-preview/.

[40] Brian Niiya, “Allegiance: See the Film, but Watch for these Historical Inaccuracies,” Densho Blog, 10 February 2017, https://densho.org/allegiance-see-film-watch-historical-inaccuracies/.

[41] George Takei, email conversation with author.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Charles Isherwood, “‘Allegiance,’ a Musical History Lesson About Interned Japanese-Americans,” New York Times, 8 November 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/theater/review-allegiance-a-musical-history-lesson-about-interned-japanese-americans.html.

[45] Master of None, Season 1 Episode 4, written by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, directed by Eric Wareheim, released on 6 November 2015, Netflix.

Arnab Banerji is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Loyola Marymount University where he teaches courses on Theatre History, Indian Performance, and Diaspora performance. His research focuses on Asian American theatre, contemporary Indian theatre, and theatre translation. His articles and reviews have appeared in Asian Theatre Journal, Theatre Journal, TDR, Theatre Symposium, South Eastern Review of Asian Studies, among others.

Copyright: © 2019 Arnab Banerji. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Articles

Viet Weekends

Boom California on May 15, 2018

Thi Bui

Note: The following are reconstructed memories, based on a conversation I had with my friend Christine Pham, who grew up in San Jose in the 1990s. Christine went to Viet school while I did not. Her Vietnamese language skills are far better than mine, but that’s not the only thing.

Thi Bui was born in Vietnam three months before the end of the Vietnam War, and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the “boat people” wave of refugees from Southeast Asia. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, has been selected as both an Indies Introduce and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers title. She is the illustrator of A Different Pond, a children’s book by Bao Phi. Thi was a founding teacher of Oakland International High School, the first public high school in California for recent immigrants and English learners. She currently teaches in the MFA in Comics program at the California College of the Arts. Visit her website at https://www.thibui.com/.

Articles

Our Lady of La Vang

Boom California on April 6, 2018

Thien-Huong T. Ninh

Every two years, more than 200,000 pilgrims make their way to La Vang, a poor farming village in central Vietnam. They come from the around the world to pay homage to the Virgin Mary, whose apparition visited the village in 1798 and gave comfort to persecuted Catholics. From Vietnamese American Catholics to Thai Buddhists, they come seeking her blessings, solace, and comfort.

“She is not just the mother of Catholics in Vietnam but also anyone who comes and prays to her,” an Indonesian Protestant once told me during a visit to La Vang. His comment echoed the feelings of many who made the long, arduous journey to the Minor Basilica of Our Lady of La Vang. Although the Vatican has not recognized the historical apparition, Our Lady of La Vang has become a global religious and spiritual symbol.

Over the course of a few days, pilgrims pray to a large statue of Our Lady of La Vang holding a figure of the baby Jesus. She stands under three large banyan trees, adjacent to an old church building, wearing traditional Vietnamese attire composed of an áo dài and a crescent-shaped headpiece. With her black hair, dark eyes, and porcelain skin, she reflects an ideal image of beauty in Vietnamese society.

This Vietnamese representation of Our Lady of La Vang can now be found wherever Vietnamese people have emigrated, including: Japan, Taiwan, Canada, France, Australia, and the United States. This Vietnamization of the Virgin is a recent development. Until 1998, statues of Our Lady of La Vang were modeled on French representations of another Virgin Mary figure, Our Lady of Victories. But the new Our Lady of La Vang did not come from Vietnam. She came from Orange County, California.

Vietnamese Americans represent the largest Asian American Catholic group in Orange County. In 2010, there were nearly 70,000 Vietnamese Catholics in the region, according to the secretary of the Bishop of Orange. They constitute the largest Asian Catholic group in Orange County. The community has been growing since the fall of Saigon in 1975, when the first large wave of 125,000 Vietnamese refugees arrived in the United States.^[1]Many Vietnamese chose to resettle in Orange County due to its warmer climate, employment opportunities, and close proximity to Camp Pendleton, where many Vietnamese refugees first arrived.

As Vietnamese Catholics struggled to rebuild their lives in the United States, many sought comfort from the Virgin Mary. In 1978, more than 1,500 Vietnamese Catholics across the country attended the largest Feast of Assumption celebration in Carthage, Missouri, during a blazing hot August.^[2]The multiday pilgrimage became known as “Marian Day,” attracting mostly Vietnamese of different religious backgrounds from throughout the world. In Carthage, pilgrims worshipped a statue of Our Lady of Fatima and one of Our Lady of Peace (Đức Mẹ Nữ Vương Hòa Bình). For many Vietnamese Catholics, the statues symbolize miracles but also have strong anticommunist connotations.

Like the original Our Lady of La Vang, the statues of Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of Peace depicted the Virgin Mary with European features. European images of the Virgin Mary had long been the norm in Vietnamese Catholicism.

Then in the 1990s, when multiculturalism was being promoted by the Catholic Church in the United States, the bishop of Orange County permitted Vietnamese Americans to create a Vietnamese statue of the Virgin Mary. In 1994, this image, known as Our Lady of Vietnam, was completed and placed at the entrance to the Vietnamese Catholic Center in Santa Ana. Our Lady of Vietnam joined a growing collection of ethnic representations of the Virgin Mary in Orange County, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Korean Virgin Mary, and Our Lady of Czestochowa from Poland.

Created by sculptor Van Nhan, the white statue represents the Virgin Mary dressed in the Vietnamese national costume. She holds the baby Jesus in front of her with both hands, “as if she wants to hand her most beloved child to Vietnamese people in order to save them and their race,” according to the Vietnamese Catholic Center. She represents the “peace and tranquility” that Vietnamese American faithful seek as they adapt to life in a new country.

Our Lady of Vietnam also reflects Vietnamese American Catholics’ connections to coreligionists in Vietnam during a time in which the country was isolated from the United States after the Vietnam War. She stands on a grotto in the shape of an S that depicts Vietnam and its mountainous ridges. The Vietnamese Catholic Center explains that this representation of the Virgin Mary “guides the spirit of Vietnamese people to return to their homeland roots” and to pray for their coreligionists who are suffering under communism. This is another reason she is referred to as Our Lady of Peace.

In 1995—three years before the two-hundredth anniversary of the apparition of Our Lady of La Vang—the United States reestablished diplomatic ties with Vietnam. This timing helped to revive interests among Vietnamese American Catholics to reconnect to their homeland. In an article published in 1996, Vietnamese Americans were urged to visit the Our Lady of La Vang in Vietnam: “Now is the time for overseas Vietnamese Catholics to be spiritually united and connected with the Catholic Church in the homeland. This is our affirmation that, despite being far away from the homeland, we will never forget our spirituality as a Vietnamese faithful and a citizen of a country and a peoplehood.”^[3]

Our Lady of La Vang became Vietnamized through collaborations and agreements that reached across the Pacific. Clergy from Vietnam had seen the Our Lady of Vietnam statue during a visit to Orange County following the US-Vietnam normalization. They were impressed by Vietnamese Americans’ commitment to the well-being of Catholics in Vietnam, and their commitment to the preservation of Vietnamese Catholic culture and history despite decades of separation from their homeland. As a result of the trip, the visiting Vietnamese clergy commissioned Nhan Van, creator of Our Lady of Vietnam, to create another Our Lady of La Vang for the anniversary of her apparition.

Pope John Paul II blessed this Vietnamese Our Lady of La Vang statue in Rome on 1 July 1998. He also proclaimed Our Lady of La Vang the patroness of the Catholic Church of Vietnam. Although this religious honor did not officially recognize the apparition of Our Lady of La Vang, it was a source of inspiration for Vietnamese Catholics throughout the world. For the first time in history, a Vietnamese icon of the Catholic faith was officially introduced to the global Catholic community. On 13 August 1998, two hundred years after the apparition, more than 200,000 attendees gathered in La Vang to worship Our Lady of La Vang as represented by a Vietnamese woman.

Since her transformation, there have been several visual reinterpretations of Our Lady of La Vang to represent the unique faith and experiences of Vietnamese Catholics. In La Vang, in 2002, the Vietnamese Our Lady of La Vang was replaced with a new version wearing a headdress decorated with twelve stars. Although some believe that the stars are an allusion to the twelve apostles of Jesus, Vietnamese Catholics abroad have interpreted them as the stars that Vietnamese refugees used to guide themselves to their new homes. In the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Vang in Washington, D.C., completed in 2005, stars are used as a decorative motif throughout the sanctuary as reminders of the Vietnamese diaspora.

Today, statues of the Vietnamese Our Lady of La Vang are popular diplomatic gifts often exchanged between Vietnamese Catholic communities in different countries. In 2002, Pope John Paul II blessed six statues of Our Lady of La Vang in Rome and gave them to Catholics in Orange County, who were responsible for distributing them to representatives of six different continents. Through the Vietnamese representation of Our Lady of La Vang, Vietnamese Catholics throughout the world have become reconnected to each other and have transformed the face of the Catholic Church in their image. In 2010, a stone engraved with the phrase Cộng Đồng Hải Ngoại (Overseas Diocese) was placed at the Our Lady of La Vang Pilgrimage Center during the start of the Holy Year. It recognizes the Vietnamese Catholic diaspora as the twenty-seventh diocese of the Catholic Church in Vietnam.

The growing global popularity of Our Lady of La Vang has spurred the construction of a number of parishes named after her outside of Vietnam, including two in California. These transnational ties are not simply nostalgia for the homeland but an effort among Vietnamese Catholics to heal the wounds of war and displacement. The Vietnamese Our Lady of La Vang represents re-connection among Vietnamese Catholics in the diaspora and the homeland after decades of separation.

Notes

[1] Min Zhou and Carl I. Bankston, Growing Up American (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998), 29.

[2] Peter Phan, “Mary in Vietnamese Piety and Theology: A Contemporary Perspective,” Ephemerides Mariologicae 51 (2005): 457–472.

[3] Van G. Bui, “Huong Ve La Vang” [Toward La Vang], Ky Niem 12 Nam Thanh Lap Cong Doan La Vang [12 Year Anniversary of the Establishment of the La Vang Community] (Orange County, CA), 13.

Thien-Huong T. Ninh is an assistant sociology professor at Consumnes River College and a scholar with research interests in race, gender, religion, and in immigration, particularly forced displacement as in the case of refugees. She is the author of Race, Gender, and Religion in the Diaspora: Ethnic Vietnamese in the U.S. and Cambodia (Palgrave Macmilllan).

Copyright: © 2018 Thien-Huong T. Ninh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Articles Photography/Art

Tattoo

Boom California on March 14, 2018

Sydney Santana
Jason S. Sexton

Californians need to find ways to mark their identity. This stands true for newcomers and longtime residents, in spite of the amnesia that often befalls ordinary California life. When lines traced from the past prove insufficient for cultivating this, Californians sketch the way forward with the tools available. Very few of these tools are from here, and yet they readily find their way in the regular use of Californians who aim to be themselves, charting new courses, transmogrifying into new narratives they start to see.

This is the story of tattoos in California, and the roles they’ve played in the lives of many. They didn’t start here, but originated with Oceanic and Asianic cultures, especially the Japanese, gamely reaching the California shores from the Pacific world. Various world cultures have long marked bodies with scarring, piercings, and other features meant to enhance the skin’s rich historical and cultural context.[1] From the ancient world to today, tattoos canvassed the body with information: denoting rank, status, meaning, replacing the natural with new data, displaying and communicating an ongoing openness to fresh, transformative possibilities. Artists ink this information onto bodies, like painting on a canvas, or a mural.

The mid-twentieth century saw a cultural development in California during and after World War II and the Korean War, where the relaxed “California lifestyle” provided a fitting environment for what would soon emerge. It was carried by figures like Sailor Jerry, Ed Hardy, Cliff Raven, and Freddy Negrete.[2] Perhaps the only place capable of integrating, nurturing, and disseminating the phenomena so quickly, California was “the global center of the Tattoo Renaissance.”[3]

It makes sense, then, for our reflections to finally be grounded in Los Angeles, where cultural objects and modalities are “rife with contradiction, conflating artificiality and authenticity.”[4] We leave to our readers and those who interact with and experience the Natural History Museum’s exhibition, “Tattoo,” to determine which bits of this new tattoo culture—especially in California but also beyond—reflect the artificial projection or the genuine reality, the stories of the past and future to live into, both of the artists and those inked. Marking identity in California has never been a simple task, but with the power to make bodies into new texts in a moment, tattoo culture remains one of the truest California things happening.

Tattooed silicone torso, USA, 2016, Silicone, Guy Aitchison (b. 1968)

Tattooed silicone leg, France, 2013, Silicone, Chimé (b. 1961).

“Early in the 20th century Chinese tattoos imitated American, European, and Japanese designs. More recently, Chinese and Taiwanese tattoos are integrating traditional Chinese imagery—the Buddha, lion, and dragon, which are all important cultural symbols.”

Left: Charlie Wagner, from the series “Homage to Tattooing Icons,” Switzerland, 1990, Acrylic paint on canvas, Artist: Titine K-Leu (b. 1968). Right: Anna “Artoria Gibbons, from the series, “Homage to Tattooing Icons,” Switzerland, 1990, Acrylic paint on canvas, Artist: Titine K-Leu (b. 1968).

Screen showing the catalogue of a traveling tattooer, North Africa and the Middle East, 19th c., Wood, glass, pigment, and paint, Artist: Unknown.

“Before there were shops offering black-and-gray tattoos, many tattooers in East L.A. worked out of their kitchens and garages. A homemade tattoo machine, some batteries wrapped in white paper, stencils, black Higgins ink, cigarettes, artistic ability, and a willing friend was often all it took to get started.”

L-R, T-B: Tattoo by Big Gus, USA, 2008, Photographer: Markus Cuff. Tattoo by Louie Perez III, USA, 2017, Photographer: Louie Perez III. Tattoo by Jose Lopez, USA, 2007, Photographer: Markus Cuff. Tattoo by Corey Miller, USA, 2006, Photographer: Corey Miller. Tattoo by Franco Vescovi, USA, 2008, Photographer: Markus Cuff. Tattoo by Manuel Valenzuela, USA, 2012, Photographer: Markus Cuff. Tattoo by Carlos Torres, USA, 2013, Photographer: Markus Cuff. Tattoo by Regino Gonzales, USA, 2006, Photographer: Markus Cuff. Tattoo by Chuey Quintanar, USA, 2014, Photographer: Markus Cuff.

Culture Bomb (tattooed silicone leg), USA, 2013, Silicone, Artist: Paul Booth (b. 1967).

Left: Clay Jar, Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1200-1450 CE, Ceramic. Right: Clay Figurine (possibly Mayan), Mexico, Date unknown, Terracotta.

Left: Flash sheet (eagle and serpent), Long Beach, California, USA, Circa 1950, Reproduction of color drawing, Artist: Lee Roy Minugh (b. unknown). Right: Flash sheet (roses), Long Beach, California, USA, Circa 1950, Reproduction of color drawing, Artist: Lee Roy Minugh (b. unknown).

Smile now, Cry later, Los Angeles, California, USA, Late 20th c., Drawing on paper, Artist: Freddy Negrete (b. 1956).

Shamrock Social Club, Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood.

Freddy Negrete, Shamrock Social Club.

Isaiah Negrete, Shamrock Social Club.

Freddy Negrete, Shamrock Social Club.

Isaiah Negrete, Shamrock Social Club.

Notes

[1] See Nina G. Jablonski, Skin: A Natural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

[2] See Jason S. Sexton, “Black-and-Gray Realism,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 20 July, 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/black-and-gray-realism/.

[3] Arnold Rubin, “The Tattoo Renaissance, in Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body, ed. Arnold Rubin (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, UCLA), 236-41. See also,

[4] David L. Ulin, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 83.

Tattoo is an exhibition on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County until 15 April 2018. With ongoing special events related to the exhibit, the exhibit may be seen daily from 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Sydney Santana is Photographer in Residence (2018-2019) at Boom California. Follow her on Instagram @sydney_santana or on her website, http://www.sydney-santana.com/.

Jason S. Sexton is the Editor of Boom.

Copyright: © 2018 Sydney Santana and Jason S. Sexton. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Articles

A Traveler Comes to a Bridge

Boom California on February 24, 2018

D. J. Waldie

You are looking west from the white bluff of Boyle Heights, to opposite bluffs, backlit by an autumn sunset, mid-October 1877.[1] A panorama of green shadow—grape vines and fruit trees in apple-pie order—fills the valley below, tessellated by farm roads and a rail line that binds the right bank of the river to its left and Los Angeles only recently to the rest of America.[2] Northwest of the bluffs, between the mesa of East Los Angeles and the lip of Reservoir Ravine, thick with white sage and thyme, a ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains that rises behind the city is split by a gap. The Los Angeles River runs through it. Sycamores and laurels step down to the stream. Willows and tule reeds touch the water. Herons wade for fingerling trout and toads that will one day give Frogtown its nickname.

South of here, the Los Angeles River is slower, wider, braiding, making and unmaking gravel islands, and wandering into and out of orchards and vineyards and finally out of anyone’s caring. There is no Fourth Street descending from the heights to the east bank of the river with its own orchards and rows of vines. There is no Fourth Street Bridge across the river.

The falling afternoon light strikes the cupola opposite of the new high school on Fort Moore Hill.[3] It strikes the cross on the new Cathedral of Saint Vibiana and the tower of the county courthouse. The valley is filling with night. The city’s 136 gas streetlights are being lit.[4] Still in sight are the three bridges that finger across the river: a railroad trestle northward, and southward the Aliso Street Bridge. Between them, a slab sided, pitch roofed, wooden bridge, lit with kerosene lamps, stolidly crosses at the river’s narrowest point. No one calls it the Macy Street Bridge. It is just the “covered bridge.”[5]

From the crest of Boyle Heights all of this is visible—bridges, ridge, river, roads—even the loom of Catalina Island, like a band of fog on the southern horizon. It is near the end of that time when all of Los Angeles can be taken in one long glance.

February 16, 1887, looking south from the trestle of the Southern Pacific Railroad, every river crossing, except for the covered bridge at Macy Street, has been damaged by yesterday’s storm. Part of the trestle fell during the night. A stone bulwark, put up last year, collapsed. The trestle of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad stands, but a hundred feet of its western approach washed away. The eastern end of the Downey Avenue bridge went into “a howling chasm” when the riverbank was undermined. A thousand feet of levee further south is gone. The foot of the Aliso Street Bridge disappeared, a hundred feet of streetcar track, “still attached to the western stump of the… bridge, trails disconsolately down the river.” Gaps, with the river running through, separate the western and eastern ends of the First Street Bridge from solid ground. Without all of its bridges, western Los Angeles is nearly cut off. Although the storm passed this morning, at 4:30 a.m. the “hoarse roar of the river, audible all over the city,” continued to frighten residents.[6]

They had good reason to be frightened. The river had flooded in winters of 1782, 1811, 1814, 1825, 1851, and 1861. After the flood of 1867-1868, water lay over the Cahuenga Valley for weeks, with the hills of west Los Angeles like islands in a sea. Flooding in 1876, 1884, and 1886 (with several deaths) began the river’s channelization that will try to confine it to an “official bed” (which is only some lines drawn on a map).[7]

The river will flood again in 1891, 1898, 1914, 1917, 1921, 1924, 1927, and 1934 (killing 40 in La Cañada). It will flood catastrophically in 1938 (killing forty-five in Los Angeles alone). Even after 1938, when concreting the channel begins, portions of the Los Angeles River will flood in 1943, 1956, 1969, 1978, 1980, 1983, and 1995 (eventually killing a total of twelve in all).

Ruined railroad bridge shows the result of flooding along the Los Angeles River in 1914. Phot courtesy of the Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library, 1914.

December 4, 1891, looking north from the First Street Bridge, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times pauses in his streetcar tour of Los Angeles.[8] Above him is Boyle Heights, “on a high mesa which terminates in a bluff, at the foot of which the river formerly ran.” This, he tells his readers, is the city’s most “airy and healthy residence section.” Elevation, he says, is important from “a hygienic point of view.”

An elevated point of view is important because of the persistent flooding of the Los Angeles River, something the reporter leaves out of his description. The heights are doubly “hygienic” because their uneasy residents are safely across the river from the tenements of Sonoratown and Chinatown, and the immigrant Italian and Russian neighborhoods around the old plaza.

The reporter has one regret as his tour of the city ends (and he will not be the last to feel it). “Much of Los Angeles is almost a terra incognita to many of our residents, in spite of the fact that rapid and frequent transit has to a great extent annihilated distance.” The reporter takes a last look at Boyle Heights. “The large brick building on the crest of the bluff, which is almost as prominent a landmark as the high school and the courthouse, is the Catholic orphan asylum. The rays of the setting sun cause the gilt cross on its summit to shine out like the evening star.”

January 12, 1905, looking east from the newly built Fourth Street Viaduct, the members of the city council’s bridge committee (here to approve the work) can see the trees of Prospect Place and the houses along the crest of Boyle Heights. At their feet is acreage to be developed, now that the carriageway of the new viaduct connects the heights to the downtown business district.

It had taken ten years of political pressure by Isaac Van Nuys, Moses Sherman, James Lankershim, William Workman, and other men with a stake in real estate to engineer the transformation of this acreage into house lots and storefronts. Workman, former mayor and now city treasurer, had reminded the members of the bridge committee that the river lacked a vehicle and pedestrian crossing between First and Seventh Streets, a distance of a mile, and those who live in Boyle Heights and beyond “were of necessity greatly inconvenienced.” The lack of a bridge greatly inconvenienced Workman. The profitable development of his fifty-five acres of floodplain below Boyle Heights depended on building the Fourth Street Viaduct. Workman depended on the sale of lots to wipe out years of debt.

It had taken some weeks of city council politics to get construction of the viaduct started. The sale of municipal bonds in 1903 had raised $100,000, which was not enough to repair old bridges and build a new one. The city engineer advised city councilmen to spend the bond revenue on repairs. He was skeptical of the proposed Fourth Street Viaduct. “It winds around like a snake, and I doubt if it would be satisfactory if finished,” he complained. The councilmen traded votes, cut appropriations for the promised bridge repairs, and the city engineer was overruled.

The sinuous geometry of the Fourth Street Viaduct, required to connect the offset ends of Fourth Street in the Arts District and Boyle Heights, was labeled “basically intolerable” by the Federal Highway Administration’s National Bridge Inventory in 2014. The Fourth Street Viaduct over the Los Angeles River was built in 1930-1931 with seismic retrofitting in 1998 that gave the structure improved lateral stability. Image courtesy of Library of Congress, Historic American Engineering Record Fourth Street Viaduct, HAER No. CA-28.

It had taken the J. D. Mercereau Company seven months to build the viaduct. The footings of the western end lay at Santa Fe Street, followed by 200 feet of wood trestle connecting to five wood and steel spans over the railroad tracks on the west bank and 300 feet of steel truss to cross the river, plus another 500 feet of wood trestle over more tracks to reach the edge of Boyle Heights where Workman’s acreage waited to be developed.

The new Fourth Street Viaduct is 2,000 feet long. It has a six-foot-wide footpath for pedestrians who now have slightly more than a mile walk from Boyle Heights to reach the freight depots, warehouses, and factories that crowd the western bank of the river. The viaduct has a twenty-foot-wide carriageway for farm wagons and shays, and increasingly also for motorcars.[9] The Tourist, the first automobile to be manufactured in Los Angeles,[10] is the most popular; 2,692 will be built between 1902 and 1910. The new bridge across the river is paralleled a few feet away by its twin—the Los Angeles Traction Company’s steel trusses erected in 1898. The spindly supports and thin girders of the two bridges—emblems of an unpretentious, readymade aesthetic—will soon be described as ugly.

Beneath the tracery of wood and steel beams, the river sprawls. Dry most of the year, the riverbed is a tumult of sand ridges and gravel flats, some of them mined to make concrete for the tall buildings that have begun to crowd Broadway. At the foot of Boyle Heights, the bed of the river is a dump where the city’s garbage and its trash are hauled, some of it to be set afire, the rest to be raked through by the hogs that belong to a Mr. Clemmons. He sells the hogs to the city’s abattoirs. The city’s butchers sell the pork as “the finest corn-fed.”[11]

A traveler comes to a bridge. As the traveler starts to cross, one foot is still earth bound. Empty space is beneath the other. The next step requires trust. The traveler is uplifted less by concrete or masonry and more by forces kept in balance with the void waiting below. The bridge seems static, but every footfall must be absorbed, its effects distributed by tension or resisted by compression. The bridge responds. Its span springs to the traveler’s step in order to seem unmoved.

The traveler is unimpressed by the daring that manages hidden forces to make it possible to walk above the earth. The traveler prefers to see a sculptural gesture, a vault from known to unknown, and a hope. But a bridge also marks faithfulness and a constraint. Mid-stride, the traveler cannot veer off the bridge to wander along the green bank of the river passing under. The traveler cannot choose a new path of desire. No meanderings on a bridge. The traveler can only depart from one commonplace and return to another—mid-span, exposed at the space in between. There is no refuge on a bridge. A fleeing traveler can only run back to what was left or run toward whatever is ahead.

The traveler pauses, leans against the parapet, and takes in the elevated view. A bridge affords perspective but also detachment. What happens under the bridge happens without the traveler’s intervention. Water flows or trains pass or cars make their way below. Above, the traveler is more than suspended. Daydreams of flight await on a bridge. So do nightmares of vertigo, of falling, and of suicide. The bridge itself is vulnerable if the balanced forces that keep it standing shift. Every bridge is uneasy. If a bridge falls, what seemed a trivial gap becomes a barrier again, and the landscape the bridge assembled disconnects. Overcome a bridge, and communities at either end are estranged. A bridge is a promise that a broken world can be whole.

(Although every bridge inevitably goes somewhere, not every bridge is necessary. Mere connection is not sufficient reason to build a bridge. Sometimes separation is better.)

The traveler knows only the upper half of a bridge. Unlike most structures, bridges have an above and a below that are intimately joined, but separate, places. Rising from its piers is a different bridge, secretly and elegantly utilitarian. The footloose traveler could abandon the bridge’s flow and settle underneath with others who have given up progress toward the destination imposed on those overhead. Instead of support, the poetic interconnection of uprights, struts, and parabolas arching overhead—beauty more legible to the homeless and the urban forager—could be shelter. The traveler could exchange a vista on top of the bridge for an encampment under it.

Instead, the attractive force of the opposite end of the bridge—its constant offer of novelty—leads the traveler on a contradictory path, perpendicular to the events and possibilities under the traveler’s feet. The bridge has taken the traveler to a phenomenological encounter only to take the traveler from it.

The public demands a harmonious and graceful design, Louis Huot tells readers of Architect and Engineer magazine.[12] Huot is a member of the city’s Department of Public Works under Chief Engineer of Bridges Merrill Butler. (Butler will oversee the engineering of six river crossings between 1924 and 1932. Huot will design the ornamental features for most of them.)[13] The only public that Huot finds demanding are the five appointed members of the city’s Municipal Art Commission. The commissioners’ goal is “to work for the gradual elimination of ugliness,”[14] and the humble wood trestles and girder trusses over the Los Angeles River are “about as ugly as they can be.”[15]

The commissioners feel that a better Los Angeles can be evoked through civic architecture in the classical style. City Engineer John A. Griffin agrees. The character of these bridges “will be such as to excite comment from visitors who enter and leave Los Angeles,” Griffin tells the city council in 1923. They will “raise the status of Los Angeles as an enterprising, properly developed city.”[16]

It is an extraordinary epoch, defined by bridges. The Los Angeles Times, the Automobile Club of Southern California, and the railroads persuaded voters (many of them new motorists) that replacing narrow trestles and truss bridges would relieve traffic congestion and give the city monuments to its ambitions. With new bonds approved, eleven improved river crossings are built: Ninth Street in 1925, Macy Street and Franklin Avenue in 1926, Fletcher Drive in 1927, Fourth Street over Lorena Street and North Spring Street in 1928, Glendale-Hyperion in 1929, and now the Fourth Street river crossing, begun in 1930 and finished two months ahead of schedule. (Still to come are bridges at Washington Boulevard in 1931, Sixth Street in 1932, Figueroa Street in 1937, and Riverside Drive in 1938.)

These improvements are made for an accelerating regime of speed. “These bridges, especially over a stream of this character, should seem as little like bridges… and as much as possible like improved bits of street,” landscape architect Charles Mulford Robinson had told the city council.[17] A bridge should be “conformable to the automobile which it carries across the chasm,” according to Huot.[18] They are horizontal monuments for a horizontal city.

The material of ambition—of monumentality and liberated movement—is the steel-reinforced concrete of the arches that supports the bridge decks and in the pylons, parapets, light standards, brackets, and balusters that decorate their roadways. Mixed on site, the concrete is poured into temporary wooden forms over supporting wood framing called falsework. Smoothed, the concrete will look like well-finished limestone. In less visible parts, after the concrete has set, the impression of the forms will be left as they are. Parallel ridges the length of individual boards and the knots and grain in the wood will still be visible, a permanent shadow.

Huot’s design vocabulary comes from imperial Rome, Renaissance Italy and Spain, and the Paris of Louis Napoleon. Nearly all the new bridges are variations on the classical tradition, except for the Fourth Street Viaduct, where the design is Gothic Revival.[19]

Wooden forms (in any shape a carpenter can fit together), poured concrete, and the conservative aesthetics of the Municipal Art Commission have made monuments of desire out of utilitarian bridges over the city’s problematic river.

What nature divided has been brought together, David Faries of the Los Angeles Traffic Association tells the women of the Hollenbeck Ebell Club, who are waiting on the new Fourth Street Viaduct for speeches about progress to end. A locomotive whistle interrupts. The Playgrounds Department band waits to play “Sidewalks of New York” with its refrain about “east side, west side, all around the town.” Officials from the three railroads that pass under the approaches to the bridge are next to speak, happy now that the last wood and girder viaduct over their tracks is gone. Celebratory banners hang from the catenary wires that carry the electrical grid powering the streetcars that share the viaduct with pedestrians and motorists. Dedication day—Thursday, July 30, 1931—is overcast and hot.[20]

Nature’s divide, for Faries, refers to the Los Angeles River, bracketed with earthen levees but not yet bound in concrete, hummocked with sand mounds, dusty most of every year but prone to sudden flooding, and no longer a city dump.

The river is the least of the bridge’s concerns. Most of the 2,700-foot length of elevated viaduct from Molino Street to Anderson Street at the foot of Boyle Heights crosses two industrial roadways and a braid of rail lines connected to repair shops, freight yards, and passenger terminals. The bridge itself, supported on graceful, open spandrel arches that leave the west bank of the river to touch down at what had been William Workman’s fifty-five acres, is only 254 feet long. Just as the city engineer in 1903 had warned, the new viaduct snakes through a tangled section of riverside street grid, splits in two at its western end (anticipating street alignments that will not happen), and bends as it reaches the foot of Boyle Heights to connect with Fourth Street.

Although every bridge inevitably goes somewhere, not every bridge is necessary. Mere connection is not sufficient reason to build a bridge. Sometimes separation is better.

Seen from the air, the viaduct appears uncertain about its start and uneasy about where it must end. Fourth Street on the west side of the river angles southeast, generally conforming to the 36 degrees of disorientation in the city’s colonial street grid. Fourth Street on the Boyle Heights side angles northeast. The two ends of Fourth Street, offset where they should face each other across the river, cannot be made to line up, as if the western and eastern parts of Los Angeles were never meant to be in one city.

The division was not natural, and the viaduct’s sinuous geometry could not overcome the forces keeping the halves of Los Angeles separate. A report sent to the board of the Federal Home Loan Bank in 1939 will explain why. Boyle Heights “is a ‘melting pot’ area and is literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements. It is hazardous residential territory….”[21] The Fourth Street Viaduct seems to have something to say, but none of the Los Angeles papers will ever ask residents of Boyle Heights what message to them the imposing new viaduct is intended to carry.

There is a long flight of steps that takes pedestrians up from Santa Fe Avenue to a streetcar stop where the western end of the viaduct splits to drop one leg down to Mateo Street while the other leg bends further west and north. After the dedication, streetcar passengers will stand there, in the middle of the roadway in a rectangle of white lines painted on the new asphalt. Motorcars will pass on either side while streetcar passengers wait within the white lines of the “safety zone.” The speed limit for motorcars is twenty-five miles an hour.[22]

The streetcar fare is seven cents.[23] 1931 is the second year of the Depression, and not many workmen have seven cents to spare. Some of them will continue to walk from homes in Boyle Heights to jobs in the rail yards, factories, and warehouses between First and Sixth streets along the river. When those men, lucky to still have a job, return in the evening over the Fourth Street Viaduct, one or two might pause to rest on one of the small benches that Louis Huot placed on either side of several of the light standards that spire from the parapet railing. The resting men probably no longer notice, in the fading golden light, the decorative elements that Huot had cast in concrete and made to be appreciated at twenty-five miles an hour.

The Fourth Street Viaduct, somberly Gothic, crosses the not-yet-concrete Los Angeles River in 1931, from the Ralph Morris Collection, Los Angeles Public Library, 1931.

Evergreen Cemetery is at the end of the streetcar line that the Fourth Street Viaduct in 1931 carries over the river—Main Street to Third Street, east to Traction Avenue, a south on Merrick Street, another turn at Fourth Street, across the river to Fresno Street in Boyle Heights, north to First Street, and then a stop at the cemetery gates.[24] The dead could take this way by streetcar; two had been available for charter, specially designed to carry a coffin in a separate vestibule, screened by a stained glass panel, while mourners sat beyond in silence.[25] More recently, automobile corteges cross the river with their burdens and turn off Fourth Street to Evergreen Avenue and the cemetery. A solitary driver arrives by the same route to walk among the headstones to find one and leave flowers.

The new bridges and viaducts Merrill Butler and his engineers have built north of Fourth Street allude to an antique imperial grandeur, confirming with reinforced concrete that the westward course of empire had arrived triumphantly at its destination. The style of the Fourth Street Viaduct is different and solemn in its Gothic Revival details. The pylons at each end of the bridge evoke a memorial cenotaph. Their lancet openings suggest the entrance to a nave. The columns of the light standards, which support the catenary lines of the streetcar power grid, rise above an acanthus leaf capital to taper like the finals atop a medieval cathedral. They intend to lead the eye heavenward. The frames of the streetlight lanterns are banded by a row of primroses, topped by flourishes in the form of leaves, and crowned with a final that could be mistaken for a cross. The parapets lining the viaduct are decorated with alternating equilateral triangles. A trefoil opening pierces each; its three-part shape represents stylized leaves of clover. Both triangles and trefoils are reminders of the 3-in-1 of the Christian Trinity.[26] The Fourth Street Viaduct crosses the Los Angeles River with a pastiche of ecclesiastical architecture and Christian iconography.

The mourner crossing to Evergreen Cemetery by streetcar and the businessman bound for Montebello or Whittier by automobile see one bridge. The train passenger below sees another. The mourner and the driver see a road that rises only slightly at the river crossing, framed by the four pylons. The passenger sees, as the train slows on arrival or picks up speed on departure, a regular pattern of arching ribs overhead, uprights connecting the bridge’s deck to the arches, and cross members connecting the arches to each other. Above is somber decoration, the simplified memories of somewhere else made tangible. Below is structure with no past, beautiful in its economical management of invisible forces.

There is something else to see, perhaps best understood by the occasional pedestrian who pauses to lean against the parapet or sit on one of the small benches. Nearly every outward facing surface, above and below, in the penetrating light of Los Angeles, is patterned with areas of sun-struck brightness and bands and panels of knife-edged shadow. In the moving light, while the pedestrian watches, the surface of the concrete moves too, projections dripping shadows, moldings shedding darkness over plane surfaces, incised grooves stacking alternating white and black bars, changes in profile edged by shadow declaring the three dimensions of pillar, pilaster, corbel, and column.

The Fourth Street Viaduct, gleaming in the sunlight in 1931, is a bright thing for a city that wishes to be only white. As the shadows pass over it, it finds its life in the absence of whiteness.

The tapering spires above the light standards on the Fourth Street Viaduct echo similar features found on Gothic cathedrals. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Engineering Record Fourth Street Viaduct, HAER No. CA-280.

Empty in 2018 except for a stream of processed wastewater[27] in the low-flow slot that perfectly centers its concrete floor, the Los Angeles River passes beneath the bridge that barely interrupts the almost level deck of the Fourth Street Viaduct. Belvederes, set into the arches of the sentinel pylons that mark the bridge’s place, overlook an engineered void. In the months with no rain, under a sky the color of dried urine, the river is a mirror that reflects the city’s disregard of it. Given two or three days of winter rain, however, the river will carry four times the flow of the Colorado, and dark water, passing with the speed of a freight train, will reach up the slopes of the channel.[28] The river is an artifact of desire as much as the bridges that span it.

What Los Angeles sought, after its river was crossed at Fourth Street by rail and highway viaducts, is hard to discern. For William Workman, the ambition might have been marketable real estate; for city planners, to untangle a transportation grid; for the railroads, to secure uninterrupted approaches to the city; and for downtown business associations, to ensure the daily flow of workers and shoppers. Each of them, in different ways, wanted a city of greatness to satisfy the demands of their desire. They constrained a river because of them and built bridges to make the fulfillment of their dreams seem inevitable. (In the name of other desires, this image has begun to change, as the river channel northward is restored and as parts of its floodplain are reclaimed by parks.)[29]

Evergreen Cemetery is the furthest Los Angeles extended across the Boyle Heights mesa. The future was not in the modest houses and two-story shops along Fourth Street as it rose to the crest of the bluff. The future was south of downtown and then west, away from the threat of the river and beyond the historical claims the old plaza made. East of the river is where the city housed its lepers and syphilitics, where its orphans were asylumed; where the city sent its aged and infirmed, and where its paupers are still cremated and buried in a mass grave as each year ends.[30] East is where the city has sent its dead, not just to Evergreen Cemetery, but to the Odd Fellows and Masonic cemeteries (where lodge brothers lay together companionably), and to the cemeteries (segregated by prejudice and theology), for Catholics, Serbians, Chinese, and Jews.

The viaduct’s Gothic Revival details were intended to inspire melancholy recollection in 1931, although they were not generally the memories of the multi-ethnic communities of Boyle Heights, dispersing even then into a second generation of diasporas. (Did sons and daughters of Jewish immigrants, returning at the yahrzeit, notice that the way to Mount Zion cemetery and Home of Peace was now marked by remembrances of English cathedrals?) In 1939, federal housing surveyors, as a warning to lenders, redlined all of racially mixed Boyle Heights. In the 1950s, the California Department of Transportation, taking advantage of redlining, began cutting rights-of-way along the bluff that the Mexican residents of Los Angeles in the 1830s had called, because of its whiteness, the Paradón Planco.[31] Freeways replaced rows of wood-frame houses where Russians, Italians, Japanese, Latinos, and Jews had lived together and left together for work across the Fourth Street Viaduct. In 2017, and mostly Latino now, the community of Boyle Heights remembers the freeways’ dislocation and the indifference behind it.[32] East has been what the city, in its haste toward the future, chooses not to remember.

The Fourth Street Viaduct bears desires across railroad tracks, across access roads, across the blank surface of the Los Angeles River channel, and across time. Some are desires you may not recognize today or want anymore. But the viaduct cannot do otherwise, or be other than what it is, so well made was it, with skill and an eye toward the effect of its repeating elements of arch and trefoil, pylon and spire, light and shadow. These elements, which framed the city’s aspirations in 1931, are still available today as a borrowed elegy for a city full of anxieties about its place.

The contained river below and the stylish viaduct above were intended to be monuments of Anglo triumph over nature and space, achievements that need thoughtful translation if we are to bridge the abyss made by the city’s subsequent erasures of memory. Recovery of the commonplace is sensuous: the sight, smell, sound, and touch of things that might be the prelude to an embrace or a blow, that might make us cringe at their maker’s motivations, that might require humility—even love—instead of fury or contempt when considering the history of these things. Crossing over a bridge is risky.

A traveler comes to this bridge, an articulate framework suspended between its past and our future, to cross over its consort river that divides Boyle Heights from the Arts District. The number of pedestrians is fewer now, and the passengers waiting for streetcars are gone. A Metrolink train rumbles under one of the viaduct’s arches. A tree, rooted within or under the roadway deck, tops the parapet where it crosses Santa Fe Avenue.

A homeless man is living on the belvedere that projects from the arch of the first pylon as the bridge prepares to leap east. A shopping cart and plastic sheeting make a barrier in front. The sidewalk here is only five feet wide, and the footing is uneasy because the metal grates that provide access to conduits under the sidewalk are uneven. Pearly grit, enough to support a few shoots of grass, has gathered along the parapet edge as if a slow-moving river had passed over the bridge, dropping silt. The belvedere beneath the arch of the opposite pylon stinks of urine. The streetlight lanterns here are missing glass panels, so only the skeletal arch remains in the metal frame. Time and the vandalism of indifference both work on the Fourth Street Viaduct every day, which is part of the pathos of things in our lives. Yet insulators for the streetcar wires on the light standard next to the pylon and a catenary holdfast over the arch remain as the viaduct’s memories of itself, not yet erased. The banister under the traveler’s hand has the feel of stucco. The thread of water in the low-flow slot below glints and murmurs. The advent of something terrible or beautiful seems to be near. Some birds wheel overhead.

In 1998, the Fourth Street Bridge was retrofitted to improve the lateral stability of its arches in an earthquake.[33] In 2014, the National Bridge Inventory of the Federal Highway Administration determined that the entire Fourth Street Viaduct met the “minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as is,” although the geometry of its roadway deck is “basically intolerable.” The report added that the viaduct is “functionally obsolete.”[34]

Notes

The drawings and paintings accompanying this essay are by Roderick Smith and Richard Willson, and are part of the exhibition, “Positively 4th Street: An Encounter with Los Angeles Viaduct,” on display at the Don B. Huntley Gallery, Cal Poly Pomona, through April 12, 2018.

[1] This description is based on Brooklyn Land and Building Company, “View of Los Angeles from the East,” 1877.

[2] Connection to the transcontinental rail network (through San Francisco) began in September 1876.

[3] The high school was completed in 1873, the cathedral in 1876.

[4] City of Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting, “History,”, http://bsl.lacity.org/history.html, accessed December 8, 2017.

[5] Water and Power Associates, “Historical Notes,” http://waterandpower.org/museum/Early_City_Views%20(1900%20-%201925)_5_of_8.html, accessed December 8, 2017.

[6] “The Storm: The Situation of Yesterday Fully Set Forth,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1887, 1.

[7] Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Gumprecht details episodes of flooding along the Los Angeles River through the 1990s.

[8] “Ten Years: The Story of a Decade,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1891, 1.

[9] City council’s bridge committee; 2000 foot length; “Big Bridge Accepted,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1905, 14. Bridge advocates; of necessity greatly inconvenienced; “More Interest in Los Angeles Real Estate,” Los Angeles Herald, November 24, 1901, 7. Not enough to repair; it winds around like a snake; “Calls It a Steal: Kern Fights for Fourth Street Bridge,” Los Angeles Herald, July 19, 1903, 8. Sale of land benefits Workman, “Bridge Street Tract Sold, Los Angeles Herald, September 20, 1903, 1. Construction details, “Plans for Fourth Street Bridge,” Los Angeles Herald, October 8, 1903, 14. City council politics; “To Submit Plans for New Bridges,” Los Angeles Herald, January 3, 1904, 6.

[10] Some references claim 5,000 automobiles were produced between 1902 and 1910. The lower total is cited by the Los Angeles Almanac, “First Production Motor Vehicles in California,” http://www.laalmanac.com/transport/tr10a.php, accessed December 8, 2017.

[11] “City’s Garbage Turned into the Pork We Eat,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1906, 13.

[12] Louis L. Huot, “Modern Lines Are Reflected in New Los Angeles Viaduct,” Architect and Engineer (October 1933): 27.

[13] Stephen D. Mikesell, “The Los Angeles River Bridges: A Study in the Bridge as a Civic Monument,” Southern California Quarterly 68 (1986): 365-86. Mikesell describes both the engineering and the aesthetics of Merrill Butler’s bridge program.

[14] “Art Commission to Beautify City,” Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1903, 2.

[15] Charles Mulford Robinson, “The City Beautiful: Suggestions,” in Los Angeles, California (Los Angeles Municipal Art Commission, 1909), 3.

[16] Engineering Department, Annual Report (City of Los Angeles, 1923), 30.

[17] Robinson, “Suggestions,” 3.

[18] Huot, “Modern Lines,” 26.

[19] Merrill Butler, “Architecture and Engineering Are Harmonized in Fourth St. Viaduct.” Southwest Builder and Contractor (August 7, 1931): 50.

[20] “Fourth Street Span Dedicated,” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1931, 1.

[21] Home Owners Loan Corporation City Survey Files, “Area D-53, Los Angeles” (National Archives, Washington, D.C. 1939), 7, quoted in George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 137.

[22] Al Parmenter, “Change in Motor Law Goes in Effect Friday,” Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1931, 1.

[23] Laurence M. Benedict, “No Review on Fares,” Los Angeles Times, January 7, 1930, 1.

[24] “Route Map of the Los Angeles Railway,” 1934.

[25] The Descanso (Spanish for “rest”) was built by the Los Angeles Railway in 1911, followed by the Paraiso. Descanso and Paraiso would often make as many as seven trips a day. The service ended in 1921. See City Lab, “A Funeral Car Named ‘Descanso’ or When Death Rode the Rails in America,” https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/05/funeral-car-named-descanso-or-when-death-rode-rails-america/5478/, accessed December 9, 2017.

[26] William Durandus, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments, ed. John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb (Leeds: T. W. Green, 1843): lxli.

[27] About 20 million gallons of treated wastewater are discharged into the Los Angeles River each day from the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys.

[28] Joe Mozingo, “Watery Giant Roars to Life,” Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2016, 1.

[29] For the status of river restoration and associated riverside improvements, see “Los Angeles River Revitalization,” http://lariver.org/.

[30] Doug Smith and Ryan Menezes, “Evergreen Cemetery is Awash in History and Drowning in Blight, Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2014, 12.

[31] George J. Sánchez. “What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews: Creating Multiracialism on the Eastside during the 1950s,” American Quarterly 56 (2004): 634.

[32] Eric Jaffe, “The Forgotten History of L.A.’s Failed Freeway Revolt,” CityLab https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2014/07/the-forgotten-history-of-las-failed-freeway-revolt/374843/, accessed December 9, 2017. The residents of Boyle Heights today are concerned about further loss of their community identity as the process of gentrification in the downtown core reaches crosses the river.

[33] National Park Service, Historic American Engineering Record, Fourth Street Viaduct, HAER No. CA-280 (National Archives, Washington D.C., n.d.), 7.

[34] Extracted from the National Bridge Inventory, July 2014 inspection data at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi.cfm.

D. J. Waldie is the author of six books of non-fiction dealing with aspects of everyday life, including Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. His commentaries on California history and politics have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

Copyright: © 2018 D. J. Waldie. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Articles

Lines and Fences

Boom California on December 14, 2017

Marcel Brousseau

Gloria Anzaldúa delivered a presentation called, “A Crosser of Borders,” on 10 April 1983 at a conference at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Just a week earlier, on Easter Sunday, Anzaldúa visited Border Field State Park in San Diego. “That place,” Anzaldúa related to conference attendees, “has a fence that runs from the top of the mountains all the way to the edge of the sea. And that fence divides the United States from Mexico. I started writing a poem beside that fence.”[1]

The chain-link and barbed wire fence that Anzaldúa saw, touched, and translated into verse in 1983 has been replaced by an array of forms and materials over the past three decades. In 1992 a perimeter of steel landing mats, running 14 miles from the base of the San Ysidro mountains due west to the Pacific Ocean, supplanted the barbed wire and chain link. In the intervening years steel mesh, and finally, twenty-foot-high steel bollards were installed on the south edge of Friendship Park, where Anzaldúa once stood. Meanwhile, multi-layered mesh and landing mats continue to shadow the rest of the line.

It is not hard to imagine that the border fence will change again in the coming months and years: Fall 2017, the U.S. government built eight prototypes of 30-foot border walls on Otay Mesa, adjacent to the extant landing mat fence. These historic and ongoing changes to the form and media of the California border fence/wall are not incidental. Each fence or wall rewrites the horizon line and the surface of the land itself, as it also revises the political and cultural narrative of the borderlands. By reading Anzaldúa’s poetic drafts about the fence in comparison with Friendship Park photographs from Joe Burkeholder, Peter Goin, and María Teresa Fernández, this essay critiques the inscriptions made by the very presence of the California fence. While the future of the California fence/wall is being written, in legislation, steel, concrete, and dirt, the representations of the fence provided by Anzaldúa, Burkeholder, Goin, and Fernández critically document the fence as a violent yet vulnerable discursive medium. Whether as a shifting poetic symbol, or as an evolving iconic sign, the fence appears as an assemblage of materials and semiotic associations—in other words, as a kind of written text—capable of being replicated, transformed, critiqued, and destroyed through countervailing acts of writing. These acts of writing, like the fence itself, encompass the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, but are centered on California, where the border fence has long been a palimpsest of U.S. line drawing and cross-cultural revision.

Poetic Revisions

In the years after her visit to Border Field State Park, Anzaldúa wrote a few more drafts of the poem that she “started…beside that fence.” Then, in 1987, she published the poem in “The Homeland, Aztlán/ El otro México,” the first chapter of her book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. As Anzaldúa drafted her poem, its content and form changed, and the semantics of the fence shifted. At first a metonym for the bureaucratic violence of boundary marking, the fence also became an analogy linking the brutality of land division with acts of sexual assault, and with agricultural techniques. One draft of “Del Otro Lado”—which we might assume is a typed version of the poem Anzaldúa began beside the fence due to its being labeled, “Begun 3 Abril 83/ Easter Sunday/ Border Field Park/ Beach, San Diego”—ends with the lines, “They build a fence across her body, Mexico,/ a wall called El tratado de Guadalupe-Hidalgo./ Thousands are sacrifieced [sic] to that Barbed wall.”[2]

An early draft of Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “Del Otro Lado,” written in response to her experience at Border Field State Park, in San Diego. Image courtesy of Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

In this draft, bodies are rendered geographically, and the fence is conflated with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which resolved the U.S.-Mexico War and officially redrew the U.S.-Mexico borderline. By characterizing the peace treaty between the two nations as a barbed wall, Anzaldúa characterizes the border not as a legal concept, but as nomos, as an act of land appropriation that forecloses Mexico from its territory, or its body. In this frame, “law and peace” in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands “[rests] on an [enclosure] in the spatial sense” dividing the body of Mexico, and enforcing the sacrifice of Mexicans to the United States. The fence symbolically and technically perpetuates this sacrifice by maintaining the historic foreclosure of Mexico from itself.[3]

In another draft of “Del Otro Lado,” Anzaldúa further qualifies the nomos of the border fence in terms of gender and sexual violence, writing, “She looks at the Border Field fence/ feels them stick posts into her throat, her navel,/ shove barbwire up her cunt./ She and the land were one./ Her body torn in two, half a woman on the other side/ half a woman on this side, the right side.”[4] While the earlier draft qualifies Mexico as a female body dismembered by a treaty signifying a wall and by a wall signifying a treaty, Anzaldúa’s later draft enacts a more personalized and localized violence in which a female observer is violated and dismembered by the apparatus of fencing as she speculates upon the fence. While the specific components of the “Border Field Park fence”—“fence posts” and “barbwire”—are implicated in the dismemberment of the female body, the fence’s particular geography is generalized to a binary of “the other side” and “this side.”

Another draft of “Del Otro Lado” elaborates upon the themes of sexual violence, dismemberment, invisibility, and silencing, in relation to the “Border Field Park fence.” Image courtesy of Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

The fence’s repression of national and cultural markers is revealed by the poem to be one dispositif among a system of discipline, as half of the dismembered female protagonist gains subjectivity by educating herself in language and classification techniques. She only commemorates her historic wounding “At night when no one is looking.” Meanwhile, the other half of the dismembered protagonist is further dissected, viscerally “scattered over the deserts,/ the mountains and valleys,” until her “mute voice” is transmuted to a wind “whisper[ing] through grass stems” in echo of her other half. In its narrative of dismemberment, invisibility, and silencing, this poetic draft forces the reader to consider the poem as a document that communicates yet cannot resolve the multivalent ”struggle of flesh, [the] struggle of borders…[the] inner war” symbolized by the “Border Field Park fence.”

Yet another draft of Anzaldúa’s poetry states, “In—Park in South San Diego/ staring at that rust colored fence/ 2,100 miles long from the mouth/ of the Rio Grande in my valley to/ the Pacific/ Nature had gashed a hole in the wall/ Did not ask are you an American citizen/ Where were you born/ can we see your papers.”[5] This draft also extends the fence, from its localized site of witnessing, across the entirety of the borderline, symbolizing the historic foreclosure of Mexico. Where, in past drafts, the fence/wall enacted violence, in this draft the wall is made vulnerable. Rust eats away and “colors” the metal; “nature” breaches the wall, undermining its physical and discursive formations. However, despite the emerging precarity of the fence, this handwritten draft, taped together from three separate fragments, attributes another loss to fencing—the “ancient myths” of “sacred history.” In this revision, the fence encloses a system of mental concepts—“fence posts on which the mind/ is strung out”—away from the “land of creatures/ primal instinctive.” With this representation, Anzaldúa relates the California fence to “archaic cultural techniques,” such as “corrals, pens, and enclosures,” that “accentuate[d] the anthropological difference between humans and animals.”[6] In concert with the other drafts, the ancient delineation between humans and animals is implicated in the histories of colonization and sexual assault represented by the fence.

Another contemporaneous handwritten draft of Anzaldúa’s poetry introduces a vulnerability to the border fence and addresses dichotomies between natural and mental systems. Image courtesy of Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

The many meanings of the fence worked through by Anzaldúa in her drafts ultimately cohere in her published revision, with a twist: She reformatted the conventional typography of the drafts to express spatial and emotional conflicts in the physical arrangement of lines and words, as well as in their linguistic semiotics. The poem’s second, third, and fourth stanzas, which rewrite the image of waves attacking the fence, slant and arc back and forth, in successive enjambments that resemble the careening tides of the shoreline. The seventh stanza, which continues the trope of the fence stretching the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border, connotes a cartography of the Americas in its formatting, while also embodying a twisting form that resembles the barb of a barbed wire fence:

In refining her poetic visions of the California fence, Anzaldúa declares the fence to be an inscriptive object: a technology that is not only representative of, and represented by, writing, but that also functions as writing, in its marking of space and time. As she twists her poetic lines in shapes across the page, Anzaldúa replicates the fence “unrolling” in space, “dividing” and “split[ting]” the terrain until at the end of the poem the fence has indeed been blown down, and Indigenous land is restored.[7]

In reckoning with the border fence, Anzaldúa indirectly presented the fence as a counter symbol to the figure of the bridge, the guiding motif of her and Cherrie Moraga’s landmark collection, This Bridge Called My Back, which was published the same year Anzaldúa visited Border Field State Park. However, just as the bridge is a complicated symbol of burden and connection, so too is the fence a paradox. “That fence” in Border Field State Park in San Diego ultimately functioned for Anzaldúa as a deeply referential infrastructural text. While her poetry provides a rich document of the California fence, cataloguing its diversity of forms and materials in relation to its violences and its vulnerabilities, the fence also provided a motif for Anzaldúa’s self-reflection. The fence aided Anzaldúa’s understanding of the ways in which she felt displaced and split among different cultural locations and coalitions, and it connected her struggle to monumental histories of hominization and conquest. Although she prophesized the fence’s destruction, her readings of the fence would continue to inform her conceptualizations of artistry and “consciousness.” The fence eventually became central to her idea of nepantla, the transitional process through which one “question[s] old ideas and beliefs, acquire[s] new perspectives, change[s] worldview, and shift[s] from one world to another.”[8]

Photographic Revisions

“In the beginning was the fence,” writes Jost Trier, asserting the enclosure of space as the basis of law.[9] Anzaldúa, in her characterization of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as a fence, concurs that the accord between the U.S. and Mexico is fundamentally an inscription that divides, or forecloses, Mexico from itself. In this context, the actual fences and walls that have risen over the borderline during the last century are indexes of this original diplomatic, postwar enclosure. However, as Anzaldúa’s poetry shows, fences and walls on the U.S.-Mexico border are also representative of animal economies, of gender violence, and of artistic techniques and transformation.

A 1909 range fence installed by the U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry to eradicate the fever tick’s infestation of cattle herds between California and Baja California is among the first documented fences on the borderline.[10] Thus, in the beginning of the U.S.-Mexico border fence was the California fence, which Anzaldúa’s poetics inspire us to see as a work in revision, an object continually rewritten in reference to law and to commerce, to xenophobic rhetoric, and to discourses of fear. A 1974 photograph of border monument 258, taken by Joe Burkeholder and used by the National Register of Historic Places, shows that roughly a decade before Anzaldúa began her poem, a simple range fence with three to five strands of barbed wire also crossed Friendship Park, in what was then known as Border International Park. The labeling of Burkeholder’s photo with the toponyms of Mexico and the United States, on either side of the fence, gestures toward the ambiguity of the borderline, as it also indicates a bureaucratic investment in reinforcing the distinction between the two nations.

Friendship Park, in Border Field State Park, on the border of San Diego and Tijuana, as photographed by Joe Burkeholder on 21 March 1973. It is not clear when or by whom the photo was marked. Image courtesy of United States Department of the Interior.

In dedicating the park three years earlier, first lady Pat Nixon stated, “I hope someday there won’t be a fence here at all,”[11] but in monument 258’s registration as a National Historic Place, the stakes of the California fence are literally and figuratively made clear. The photograph of the site, and its accompanying paperwork, document a fragile borderline, at which the legal marker—the border monument—had, by the end of the nineteenth century, been subject to erasure, or “mutilat[ion] by visitors [until] its outlines were nearly destroyed, and its inscriptions partly obliterated,” at which point it was renovated and itself protected by a fence.[12] This brief history of the border as a site of textual revision corroborates Anzaldúa’s poetic exploration of the unresolved violence underwriting the borderline. Apparently, for bureaucratic readers, neither the border monument, nor the barbed wire fence are depicted in Burkeholder’s overwritten photograph, effectively demarcated the nomos, or the enclosure, of the United States from Mexico. In the hypertextual discourse referenced by Burkeholder’s photograph, the borderline inscribed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is rewritten by the monument, the fence, the photograph, and the markings on the photograph, each a separate mediation correlating to the others, while also implying the limitations of the others.

The overwriting of Burkeholder’s photograph demonstrates why Nixon’s hope for an unfenced border was never honored in any official manner: The fence, as Anzaldúa would later indicate in her poetry, functions as a form of writing used by the U.S. to both demarcate the borderlands and the bodies that inhabit it. The barbed wire fence that bisects Burkeholder’s photo also bisects two bodies, and forecloses them from the photographer’s point of view. The subsequent overwriting of the photo places these individuals on the Mexican side of the fence, as it places the photographer on the U.S. side. The importance of the fence in underlining the distinctions between “this side” and “the other side” is made official in the filing of Burkeholder’s overwritten photograph as evidence of a National Historic Place, namely the “southwestern corner of the Continental United States,” as it is described in the site’s nomination paperwork.

By 1987—the year Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera was published—the barbed wire fence at Friendship Park had itself been overwritten by chain link and wire mesh, as documented by photographer Peter Goin in Tracing the Line, his photographic survey of the U.S.-Mexico border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. At the time, Goin’s fieldwork revealed that “most of the [border] fence [remained] barbed wire, usually three to five strand.” However, he also learned that during the late 1970s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had selectively “constructed an ‘impenetrable’ fence… twelve feet high… of metal webbing (much like chain link) topped with barbed concertina wire,” between Calexico and Mexicali and San Ysidro and Tijuana.[13] Goin’s photograph of a heavily-fenced Friendship Park, in comparison with Burkeholder’s earlier official image, indicates the escalation of the enclosure of the “southwestern corner of the Continental United States,” as it also provides context for Anzaldúa’s semiotic shift between symbols of barbed wire and chain link in documenting the different forms of the borderline. Goin writes in Tracing the Line, that “Each photograph must represent an area far greater than the parameter of its rectangle,” arguing for, not unlike Anzaldúa, a metaphorical yet material reading of the borderlands, in which “path, roads, bridges, and fences with barbed wire become line [which then] creates tension by dividing the space, both visually and culturally.”

Friendship Park, as photographed by Peter Goin for his 1987 book Tracing the Line: A Photographic Survey of the Mexican-American Border. Image courtesy of Peter Goin.

Lines—or fences—structure Goin’s photographs, revealing the 1980s borderlands to be a “web of boundaries.” In his image of Friendship Park, the rewriting of the fence as a chain link wall with locked gates becomes a multiplication of lines blotting the horizon and the ground, and casting the sunlight into shadows. The area labeled “Mexico” in Burkeholder’s photograph is not actually visible as land in Goin’s photograph, but rather only as tracings or shadows, as visual effects of the crosshatched lines of the California fence. The rewriting of the California fence in steel mesh and chain link was, in narratological terms, rising action in the now-long story of the U.S.-Mexico border fence. Contextualizing Goin’s image, Anzaldúa’s roughly coeval poetry indicates that the fortified fence remained symbolically plurivalent yet materially ambivalent: A culturally divisive, physically imposing, historically onerous enclosure, albeit vulnerable to the elements and to transborder economies and human migration. The slab of chain link seen in Goin’s photograph of Friendship Park is replaced by a broken and patched web of metal in his photos taken further East, in areas derogated as “lawless” by the Border Patrol.[14]

The slab of chain link in Friendship Park is also replaced by a twenty-foot bollard wall, clad in steel mesh, in a photo taken by María Teresa Fernández thirty years after Goin and Anzaldúa’s books were both published. Since the end of the twentieth century, Fernández has been photographing Friendship Park, and families “torn in two”—to use an Anzalduan phrase—who meet there to talk and bond through the California fence/wall. Her photography has regularly documented a correlation of events on the borderline: The capricious expansion of the border fence to a larger and more tortuous wall, and the constancy of families and friends—a binational community—in negotiating the nomos enforced and reinforced by the growing fence/wall. What would Anzaldúa write about the scene depicted by Fernández? What would she say about a fence so large that it obliterates the southern horizon, about the steel bollards dissecting the faces and bodies of people on the south side of the borderline, about the thick layers of metal and mesh that now commemorate “el tratado de Guadalupe-Hidalgo”? “I am tired of borders,” Anzaldúa said at that 1983 conference talk in Illinois, “I am tired of nationalist thinking.” She cast her vision forward: “I think we will grow to have respect for one another, that we will listen to each other… [and] tear down that iron fence.”[15] This growth of respect and compassion is, beside the shadow of the California wall, the other subtext of Fernández’s photography. Despite the fact that the fence has not been torn down—quite the opposite—patterns of filiation and amity have emerged at Friendship Park that implicate the fence into “act[s] of fellowship [and] strategic coalition” by families, friends, law enforcement, and local activist groups such as Friends of Friendship Park.[16] Although Fernández’s photo documents Friendship Park as a dystopian enclosure, it also depicts the results of dedicated binational activism to write a communal narrative around, through, over, and, indeed, beside the fence—a narrative that seeks to erode the enclosure and revise the nomos foreclosing Mexico from itself and the U.S. from its others.

Friendship Park, as photographed by María Teresa Fernández on 10 September 2017. Image courtesy of María Teresa Fernández.

Political Revisions

“This sagging wire fence is conclusive evidence of the present cordial relations between the two countries,” John A. Ryan writes, unironically, for Westways magazine in June 1958, captioning a photo of the “lonely” borderland above the Pacific Ocean, which would become Friendship Park. By Ryan’s logic, the California border fence is an index of international diplomacy, a barometer of the political consensus between the U.S. and Mexico. Where Anzaldúa later reads and writes the fence as a permanent trace of animalization, war, and sacrifice, Ryan sketches an idyll finally emerging “after bloodshed and hate… after a war of empire building through force of arms.” Strangely, to look backward at Ryan’s wild, windswept border site is to look forward to Anzaldúa’s proleptic flood, in which waves wash away the California fence. In this comparison, there is the intimation that the revision of the border fence is circular, not unilinear; that what has been written over and over will also someday be erased. However, Ryan’s article also documents another fence, the barbed-wire topped, chain-link fence discretely surrounding the border monument. Despite Ryan’s diagnosis of binational cordiality in a withered barbed-wire border fence, the sacrificial nomos of the border prevails: “U.S. Government Structure,” a sign reads on the east side of the monument’s chain-link fence, without specifying the fence, the monument, or the borderline it/they represent, “do not molest under penalty of law.”[17]

“Access to the monument is easy,” Ryan wrote, urging his auto-club-members-cum-readers to detour west down Monument Road and experience “the never-to-be-forgotten feeling of somehow being part of history.”[18] A quarter-century later, Anzaldúa, divided by history, urged us to go farther: “I propose we become a crosser of borders,” she declared in her 1983 conference talk, encouraging her audience “to start within yourself and reconcile [gender, racial, cultural, emotional, sexual, spiritual] borders,” and ultimately to “open ourselves up to what the other person is saying—to feel the other person’s presence.”[19] In this call to restore the self and to be marked by the other, the border fence has become, it seems, sublimated into a passionate political metaphor. This semantic shift, however, cannot be understood without acknowledging Anzaldúa’s insistence on the materiality of the symbolic, on the stages of revision that inform and deform ideas and visions to make personal and social change. Tired as she was of borders, Anzaldúa continued writing and rewriting her poetic fence, until it became a symbolic medium for self-reconciliation and communication with the other, a written object that she would live in and through, and not merely beside.

In her artistic destruction—or deconstruction—of the California fence/wall, Anzaldúa anticipated the ways in which the U.S.-Mexico border fence/wall writ large has become a medium of transborder culture, a palimpsest for binational expression. Photographers, poets, activists, academics, families, and friends: At Friendship Park in San Diego, on most any Saturday or Sunday, countless people are literally or figuratively beginning poems “beside that fence,” as Anzaldúa did, writing themselves and each other in and through the fence, over the line where lawmakers continue to write with the fence. Of course, in Tijuana, and elsewhere del otro lado, people are free to write on the fence. One weekend in Playas, having crossed to volunteer with Dan Watman, of Friends of Friendship Park, in the Binational Friendship Garden of Native Plants, my wife and I watched schoolchildren cover the fence in writing, in pithy post-its that would have made Anzaldúa proud. “Di no al amor con fronteras” read one. “¡No Separan a las Familias!,” said another. Given a few years of revision, one can only imagine what these fence-post post-it poems might become. Likewise, one can only imagine what the California fence/wall will look like by then. Maybe it will be gone.

Student post-it poems affixed to the south side of the fence at Friendship Park, in Playas, Tijuana, 15 November 2014. Photographs by the author.

Notes

The author would like to thank Dan Watman, María Teresa Fernández, John Fanestil, Jill Holslin, and the Friends of Friendship Park, Peter Goin, Carla Alvarez, the staff of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, Domino Perez, Rita Raley, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, and the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Literary Trust. Quotes and images of Anzaldúa’s poetic drafts are copyright of the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Literary Trust and may not be reproduced without permission of the Trust.

[1] Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Pre-draft early notes, Box 32, Folder 4, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. The conference was called “Feminism: Cross-Cultural Perspectives.”

[2] Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Manuscript, discards, Box 32, Folder 3, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. It should be noted that a poem specifically addressing queer identity and oppression by Anzaldúa, called “Del Otro Lado,” was eventually published in 1987’s Compañeras: Latina Lesbians (An Anthology), ed. Juanita Ramos. See Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 99.

[3] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, Ltd., 2003), 74-75.

[4] Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Manuscript, discards, Box 32, Folder 3, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Bernhard Siegert, “Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory,” trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Theory, Culture & Society 30 (2013): 56.

[7] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands-La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Co., 1987), 2.

[8] Ibid., The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 248.

[9] Schmitt, Nomos, 74.

[10] United States, Bureau of Animal Industry, Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Animal Industry for the year 1909 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911), 290. This report by the U.S. BAI frankly conflates humans and cattle, stating, “with this fence installed, eradication [of fever tick infestation] will soon be accomplished…Such a fence will also assist customs officials in preventing illegal traffic between the two countries.”

[11] “Legacy of Parks,” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C., 20 Aug 1971: B4.

[12] United States, Department of the Interior, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form for Federal Properties: Initial Point of Boundary Between U.S. and Mexico, 6 September 1974, https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/3a5a9b80-bb6d-479e-a006-e2e18bb2ed4d?branding=NRHP

[13] Peter Goin, Tracing the Line: A Photographic Survey of the Mexican-American Border (Reno: Library of the University of Nevada-Reno, 1987), n.p. The “impenetrable fence” was also installed between El Paso and Juárez.

[14] See Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.- Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002), 63-65; and Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 2d ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), xi

[15] Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Pre-draft early notes, Box 32, Folder 4, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004, Benson Latin American Collection, The University of Texas at Austin.

[16] Jill Holslin, “Saving Friendship Park A History of the San Diego Coalition Friends of Friendship Park,” in Wounded Border/Frontera Herida (San Diego: San Diego City Works Press, 2011), 133.

[17] John A. Ryan, “Lonely Monument on the Border,” Westways, June 1958, 14-15. The photos do not reveal if the monument’s fence contained a similar sign under the aegis of the Mexican government, on the west side.

[18] Ibid. Ryan also quotes a sailor, employed at what was then the U.S. Navy’s Border Field, who assures him that the military installation does not deter visitors, stating, “We can’t keep the people from their monument.” Absurdly, the current fence installed by the U.S. at Friendship Park seals the monument on the south side, away from U.S. visitors.

[19] Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Pre-draft early notes, Box 32, Folder 4, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

Marcel Brousseau is a lecturer in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2015 to 2017 he served as a Carlos E. Castañeda Postdoctoral Fellow in UT’s Center for Mexican American Studies. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Copyright: © 2017 Marcel Brousseau. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles Photography/Art

Southern California Science Fictional Thinking in Mundos Alternos

Boom California on September 19, 2017

Tyler Stallings

History is written in retrospect. Patterns are sought among seemingly unrelated events at the time of their occurrence. There is never just one historical narrative. Historians make choices about what events to represent and from which perspective, often to the disadvantage of people on the losing end—for example, the colonized or enslaved. Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas provides a space-time continuum for reimagining the past from the perspective of the “alienated” and the “other,” from the peoples marginalized by the powerful. The exhibition includes over thirty contemporary artists who explore interactions of science fiction and the visual arts in Latin America, the U.S., and the intergalactic beyond; collectively laying out a provocative view of arts in the Americas told in the present but with an eye toward future, alternate Americas.

Mundos Alternos is an 11,000-square-foot exhibition, with an accompanying book of the same title, presented at University of California, Riverside’s downtown UCR ARTSblock, which includes two adjacent venues: the California Museum of Photography; and the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts. Myself and the two other co-curators, Robb Hernández and Joanna Szupinska-Myers,[1] have brought together works from across the Americas that use science fiction to imagine new realities and alternate worlds, utopian and dystopian. The exhibition is part of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, which is an exploration of the global intersections of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Southern California, with many of its seventy-plus exhibitions opening Fall 2017.

ARTSblock’s project was inspired by two facts: UCR Library’s Special Collections and Archives possesses the Eaton Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection, one of the world’s largest archive of its kind; and UCR is designated as a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI), defined by 25% or more of its student body falling within that demographic.[2] The power of nomenclature is an important aspect of the Mundos Alternos title. The use of the word “Americas” in its subtitle was significant in order to point to a hemispheric approach in which the exhibition’s original location, the United States, is realized in a broader milieu of cross cultural connections including Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.

In the exhibition, artists employ science fiction tropes in their works, most created in the last two decades, such as alternate history and time travel, organized under themes such as “Post-Industrial Americas” and “Indigenous Futurism,” suggesting diverse modes of existence and representing “alienating” ways of being in other worlds. Latin American, Latina/o, and Chicana/o science fiction is a burgeoning area of study that has gained momentum within the past ten years, with an emphasis mostly in literature and film. In light of this, our curatorial team selected artists from across the Americas (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico and Puerto Rico, as well as California, Florida, New Mexico, New York, Virginia, and Texas) who have created artworks that point to mundos alternos (“alternate worlds”), where self-determination and autonomy can occur in a present that is quickly becoming a past pointing to a future.

Considering that dystopia and utopia are often two polarities of a single, metaphorical world, the artists in Mundos Alternos explore equally multi-faceted issues around immigration, queer futurism, indigenous futurism, information control, the border, and so on. An underlying concept is the “alienated alien,” or the “other,” and how they reimagine themselves in a world in which they are not marginalized anymore.

Simón Vega (La Libertad, El Salvador), Tropical Mercury Capsula, 2010/ 2014, Sculptural installation (wood, aluminum, tin roofing sheets, cardboard, plastic, TV, fan, icebox, boombox, found materials; 67 x 129 inches (capsule), 118 x 236 inches (total floor installation area). Collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miama, Gift of Mario Cader-Frech and Robert Wennett.

The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy, UC Riverside

Before I rewrite the history of my own writing, I would like to loop back around to a major source of inspiration for Mundos Alternos and a significant resource in California for science fiction studies scholars: The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy.

It is one of the largest publicly accessible collections of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and utopian literature in the world, and is housed in the UC Riverside Library’s Special Collections & University Archives in the Tomás Rivera Library on the main campus. It features more than 300,000 holdings that include over 100,000 hardback and paperback books; full runs of pulp magazines; nearly 100,000 fanzines; film and visual material, including 500 shooting scripts from science fiction films; comic books, anime, and manga; and collectible ephemera and regalia, including cards, posters, pins and action figures.[3] The Collection contains several manuscript collections of essential Southern California-based speculative fiction writers, including papers of UC Irvine physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford’s, and those of David Brin who wrote Uplift War and Sundiver.

Another major science fiction collection is held at the University Archives & Special Collections of California State University, Fullerton’s Pollak Library,[4] which includes original science fiction manuscripts, books and related materials of several U.S. authors including Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and Ray Bradbury. As a side note, Dick died in nearby Santa Ana, and I once made a trek to his last known address. It is the site where he supposedly received the pink beam of light from God that revealed that the Roman Empire had never ended.[5] Additionally, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino holds the papers of Octavia E. Butler,[6] author of Kindred (1979), and arguably the most prominent African-American woman in the field of science fiction.

Over the years there have been periodic academic conferences of science fiction studies held in Riverside, sometimes connected directly to the Eaton Collection and other times organized by faculty like Sherryl Vint, a professor in UCR’s Media and Cultural Studies Department, who specializes in technoculture and science fiction film history.

These conferences are usually less for the fan and more for the scholar of science fiction and fantasy. Without the exuberance of Comic-Con[7] or the World Science Fiction Convention[8] that has been going strong for seven decades, no one dresses as their favorite Star Wars or anime character; rather, unkempt clothes and mussed hair are the scholarly fashion. Additionally, it is not a gathering spot for Hollywood’s film industry, which is one aspect of Comic-Con’s metamorphosis. Instead, it is the serious underbelly to the glitz, and a place for the absorption of true cutting-edge ideas and writing in the field of science fiction, or speculative fiction, studies.

The most recent conference at UC Riverside in 2016 was sponsored by the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA).[9] Its overarching theme, “Unknown Pasts/Unseen Futures,” was meant to stimulate reflection on the future of scholarship of marginalized authors and subjects. It also reflected upon how science fiction studies at UCR are challenging the genre’s canons. This is exemplified with panel papers that included titles[10] like Cole Jack Pittman’s “Crip (Community) Futurism: Science Fiction as a Method for Analyzing Disabled Community Building, Networking, and Resource Sharing”; Joshua Odam’s “Fear of a Black Universe: Afrofuturism, Speculative Fiction, and the Black Liberatory Imagination”; Joan Haran’s “California Dreaming: Dystopian and Utopian Calls to Action in Parable of the Sower and The Fifth Sacred Thing”; and Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer’s “Excessive Cyborging: Using Techno-Orientalism to consider Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell: Innocence.” Additionally, the conference’s keynote speaker was author Nnedi Okorafor, writer of fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction, who is perhaps best known for her Binti series that entwines African culture into a future imaginary. Okorafor’s work can also be couched historically under Afrofuturism, which underpins Mundos Alternos.

Sun Ra in California and Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism uses science fiction and cyberculture in a speculative manner, just as cyber-feminism does. It is an escape from the externally imposed definition of what it means to be black (or exotically African) in Western culture, and it is a cultural rebellion drawing on techno-culture, turntables and remixes as technological and instrumental forms. By placing black man in space, out of the reach of racist stereotypes, Afrofuturism allows for a critique of both the history of the West and its techno-cultures.

The tenets of Afrofuturism became a foundation on which notions of Mundos Alternos have been built. Coined in 1994 by Mark Dery in his essay, “Black to the Future,”[11] Afrofuturism refers to a creative and intellectual genre that emerged as a strategy to explore science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and Pan-Africanism, perhaps best exemplified by African-American musicians such as Sun Ra and George Clinton, and writers like Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Steven Barnes, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delany.[12]

Space Is the Place, organized in 2016 by New York City-based Independent Curator’s International, traveled the U.S. as a group exhibition with artists’ work inspired by nostalgia and speculation about outer space. The title was taken from a 1974 science fiction film of the same name that featured Sun Ra and his Arkestra.

During the late 1960s and early ’70s, Sun Ra traveled to California and taught a course titled, “The Black Man in the Cosmos,” at UC Berkeley. The film is based, in part, on the lectures he gave there in which he articulated many nuanced views like “I’d rather a black man go to Mars… than to Africa… because it’s easier,”[13] referring to the difficulty of a westernized African-American seeking roots back in Africa. The basic plot is that Sun Ra lands on a new planet in outer space and decides to settle African-Americans there. Seven years later, in 2013, the Studio Museum in Harlem presented The Shadows Took Shape, an interdisciplinary exhibition exploring contemporary art through the lens of Afrofuturist aesthetics.[14] Since then, one of the exhibition’s curators, Naima J. Keith, has become the deputy director for exhibitions and programs at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. In one of the exhibition catalogue essays, nearly twenty years after Dery, Tegan Bristow updates a definition of Afrofuturism:

Afrofuturism uses science fiction and cyberculture in a speculative manner, just as cyber-feminism does. It is an escape from the externally imposed definition of what it means to be black (or exotically African) in Western culture, and it is a cultural rebellion drawing on techno-culture, turntables and remixes as technological and instrumental forms. By placing black man in space, out of the reach of racist stereotypes, Afrofuturism allows for a critique of both the history of the West and its techno-cultures.

These examples stretching between 2001 and 2015 indicate how the visual arts have historically looked at race and social difference through a lens of science fiction cultural production. Mundos Alternos proceeds from here.

As one reads the book and peruses the exhibition, we hope viewers feel like their thoughts and experience become part of proto science fiction Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ unbounded library, or that inklings of the Aztec empire existing on the Moon are experienced. Or perhaps participants may walk the streets of Los Angeles anew and feel moments of being part of the first Xicano science fiction novel by East L.A. born Ernest Hogan, where in Cortez on Jupiter (1990)[16] Pablo Cortez sprays graffiti across L.A. and paints in zero gravity, all in an effort to make a masterpiece for the universe and his barrio.

Erica Bohm (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 21 works from the “Planet Stories” series, 2013, Instax Fujifilm, 12 x 11 inches each (framed). Courtesy of the artist and THE MISSION, Chicago.

How A Meteorite Inspired Twenty Years of Curating from the Cosmos

I came to the recent realization that a particular news story affected many exhibitions that I organized over the past twenty years, which touched upon outer space themes: it was the possible discovery of fossilized Martian bacterial life in 1996, based on the observation of carbonate globules in a small section of a meteorite called the Allan Hills 84001 (usually abbreviated as ALH 84001). It was found several years earlier in Allan Hills, Antarctica in 1984 by U.S. meteorite hunters, but it was not until much later that careful analysis was applied to it.[17] In September 2017, with the opening of Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the America, I now realize the impact that the meteorite has had on my curatorial endeavors.

My first curatorial venture inspired by the Martian meteorite was Are We Touched, Identities from Outer Space (1997). It coincided with NASA’s first lander on Mars and the 50th anniversary of the reported U.F.O. crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. The exhibition featured a range of artists, including those fascinated by the cultural phenomenon of U.F.O.’s but would not label themselves as believers, such as Southern California artists Deborah Aschheim and Connie Samaras, to artists who felt they may have had an unexplained experience that provided inspiration for their work, but would not admit to it openly for fear of rejection. And there were also people who would not call their work “art” but rather a visual representation of an experience that they felt they did occur, like with alien abductee and artist David Huggins.

The pop cultural highlight for me was when Huggins was invited as a guest on a daytime talk show based in Los Angeles, Leeza, which is no longer in production. The artist claimed to have interbred with an extraterrestrial that he named Crescent, as she came to him only when there was a crescent moon, producing upwards of 200-plus hybrid human/extraterrestrial offspring. In 2014, a documentary was released about his alien sexual encounters, Love and Saucers: The Far Out World of David Huggins. Huggins states, “The reason why extra-terrestrials are interested in me is not because of my physical body but what’s inside—my soul.”[18]

Are We Touched was followed by Cyborg Manifesto, or The Joy of Artifice (2001), which featured twenty-six artists who explored changes in a tech-driven age. Theorist Donna Haraway coined the first part of the title, “Cyborg Manifesto.” I found kinship with her viewpoint of the cyborg as a metaphor for discussing hybridity, whether in terms of gender issues, genetics, or cross-cultural encounters. In other words, I was less concerned with thinking of the cyborg as a humanoid robot in which human and machine merged. Rather, I was interested in the impossibility of the notion of purity.

Accordingly, I thought it possible that Martian meteorites landed on an ancient earth and provided an important element to the primordial soup that gave rise to life. So, when looking through a telescope at planet Mars, we actually see an abandoned home. In this way, any human sense of feeling pure dissolves. Once we consider ourselves apart from Earth, we are all aliens and immigrants.

In 2009, I co-organized with artist Rachel Mayeri, Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art. It was a group exhibition of twenty international artists exploring human interaction with animals through a collection of provocative video installations, photographs, paintings, and sculptures. I saw this exhibition having a further development of the desire to make contact with other sentient beings. In this case, ones already present on Earth.

Artists in the exhibition collaborated with cockroaches, pigeons, dogs, cats, ants, bears, baboons, rats, spiders, and trout, which may have been domesticated, imaginary, laboratory, modeled, or wild. Curious about the animal’s point of view, artists designed their projects as a form of conversation or inquiry about the nonhuman world. Their artwork challenged the anthropocentric perspective of the world, placing human perception on par with other animals. Inspired by Darwin, the environmental movement, and species collapse, Intelligent Design envisioned a paradigm shift in which human beings are no longer the center of the Universe.

Rigo 23 (Los Angeles), Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program, 2009—resent (ongoing). Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco.

Another paradigm shift, this time in U.S. policy, that would allow private companies to go into outer space inspired the 2013 exhibition, Free Enterprise: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration,[19] which I co-organized with artist Marko Peljhan. Civilian space travel and space exploration represents a major political and cultural shift away from sponsorship by the federal government and toward a private enterprise model. The possibility of fulfilling the human dream to fly into space has been encouraged by a major political and cultural shift away from state-sponsored space activities, which were controlled by agencies such as NASA in the USA, JAXA in Japan and RKA in Russia, towards a private enterprise model.

Its presentation in 2013 arrived at a time when several private enterprise ventures had come to fruition. They included the successful launch in May 2012 of the Falcon 9 vehicle and the Dragon space capsule by Elon Musk’s Space X company based in Hawthorne, California, which rendezvoused with the International Space Station, the soon-to-be-completed spaceport in New Mexico that will be the launch site for Virgin Galactic’s space tourism program, and the burgeoning efforts of XCOR Aerospace, a Mojave-based company, north of Los Angeles near Edwards Air Force Base.

These developments signal that we are at a dawn of a new radical change in near-Earth space exploration. Engaging artists directly in this discussion at an early stage is extremely important: it is the technology and capital that allow for exploration, but it is the imagination and the spiritual capital that create a new state of mind open to a broader awareness of humanity and other life, both on Earth and beyond.

One of my favorite projects in Free Enterprise was by artist Richard Clar, based in northern California, which links back to my interests developed with Intelligent Design. He turned toward art-in-space in 1982 with a NASA-approved art payload for the U.S. Space Shuttle, Space Flight Dolphin (SFD). Approved by NASA, SFD was an interdisciplinary art-in-space SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project designed to be deployed in low-Earth orbit from the cargo bay of the U.S. Space Shuttle. The dolphin sculpture/satellite would have transmitted a signal modulated by dolphin “voices” that might have been detected or sensed by extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). As the sculpture/satellite orbited the Earth, the dolphin voices would have been monitored in various museums around the world and on the Internet, providing a link between different peoples and cultures on our own planet. The project suggested that humans might first consider trying to communicate with other very intelligent beings on Earth before considering extraterrestrial communication.

Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas represents the most recent project inspired by the 1996 Martian meteorite bacteria imaginary. Perhaps it is the meteorite’s transcendent materiality—an object likely older than humankind—that has stuck with me. Mundos Alternos focuses on the materiality of being present in artists’ studios and exploring science fiction, not through literature and film, but through the uncanny presence of an art object that seems transcendent too.

Slipstream Islands of Strange Things: Building Mundos Alternos in the Americas[20]

World building is a major element of the science fiction genre. History, geography, economics, demographics, physics, cosmology, transportation, religion, technology, food, and the culture of an imaginary world are elements under consideration by authors, filmmakers, and game makers. The test for a reader, viewer, or participant is to suspend their present-day logic so that they can feel present in a virtual future. The challenge for the maker is to reconsider ongoing tropes, like anything called “Empire” being absolutely evil; an entire world being defined as if it had one purpose, such as the desert world of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965); and then the altogether prevalent, homogenous alien race that may populate an entire planet or galaxy. Embracing diversity is a major underlying theme of Mundos Alternos.

It is hard to say whether there is a particular genre of science-fiction fine art, per se, at least within the context of the international, contemporary art world that the Mundos Alternos artists inhabit. Here, I separate the world of the more familiar cover art, movie posters, comic books, and illustrated stories, arguing that the contemporary art-making endeavor represents a kind of science fictional process that results in a slipstream artifact, or strange thing.

Gyula Kosice, Maquette I, Maquette K, Maquette L, 1965-75, Exhibition prints. Courtesy of Kosice Museum, Buenos Aires.

Slipstream Immigration

“Slipstream,” a phrase coined by science fiction author Bruce Sterling and colleague Richard Dorsett in 1989, applied primarily to literature that includes elements of science fiction, also called speculative fiction, in order to create a sense of the uncanny, of weirdness in the world, of dissonance between what one thinks is real and the feeling that other layers exist beyond the senses upon which we rely. More than twenty-five years ago, Sterling wrote in the essay in which he coined the term, “It seems to me that the heart of slipstream is an attitude of peculiar aggression against ‘reality.’ These are fantasies of a kind, but not fantasies which are ‘futuristic’ or ‘beyond the fields we know.’ These books tend to sarcastically tear at the structure of ‘everyday life.’”[21]

A recent and notable Latin American slipstream example is Junot Díaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Its settings range from New Jersey to the Dominican Republic, featuring a science fiction-obsessed boy who eventually dies, though the reasons for the death are ambiguous. The result of a fukú curse? The lingering vestiges of a corrupt society as result of the Dominican Republic’s former dictator, Rafael Trujillo? Or perhaps an inseparable mixture of both family, political scourges, and colonialism as filtered through the allegory of the science fiction genre?

Commenting on his falling for science fiction, Díaz said in a recent interview, “I fell for [the] genre because I desperately needed it—in my personal mythology, [the] genre helped me create an operational self. I suspect I resonated with the world-building in many of these texts because that’s precisely what I was engaged in as a young immigrant.” He then added, “Alien invasions, natives, slavery, colonies, genocide, racial system, savages, technological superiority, forerunner races and the ruins they leave behind, travel between worlds, breeding programs, superpowered whites, mechanized regimes that work humans to death, human/alien hybrids, lost worlds—all have their roots in the traumas of colonialism.”[22]

Beatriz Cortez (Los Angeles). Memory Insertion Capsule, 2017 (in progress). Mixed media, c. 144 x 144 inches, exact dims tbd. Courtesy of the artist.

Contemporary Art as Speculative Technology

For a visual artist, the magic of their own making occurs when a preconceived notion takes a different turn during the process; leading them down a road that they could not have expected without taking the first step of manipulating materials with their hand. It is a method that intertwines haptic, optic, and cognitive processes. In regard to contemporary visual art, an artist’s methodology of process and product are inseparable from one another and therefore slipstream inherently. This slipstream aspect in visual art to which I allude is where the difference lies between it, writing, and filmmaking. There is a physical manifestation of the artist’s idea into the world—that is, it does not remain an imaginary one in a reader’s mind nor an untouchable screen image. Rather, it is a physical object that rests in a world where viewers can interact with it through touch, smell, and sound, or perhaps walk back and forth from it, around it, or through it.

Los Angeles-based art critic Jan Tumlir expressed a similar notion about the relationship between contemporary art and science fiction when he wrote about the Orange County Museum of Art’s 2007 California Biennial. He said, “The young artists on the West Coast are operating in an idiom closely linked to science-fiction.”[23] He goes on to list some of the science fiction tropes with which they are engaged: future and alien civilizations, time travel, colonization, “the redefinition of the idea of the human in response to the other, either alien or handmade,” and so on. More specifically, he wrote that, due to the materiality of visual art, “Intensive concentration on these various artifacts is aimed at somehow ‘breaking through.’”

The emphasis on artist made physical objects, or slipstream, science fictional artifacts, is the major reason for the absence in the exhibition and book of classic visual memorabilia that one associates with the science fiction genre: book cover art, comic books, and movie posters, to name a few. This is as opposed to the unique object generated by visual artists that can exist in only one location; thus, it requires a pilgrimage to the site, such as a gallery, museum, collector’s home, public plaza, or artist studio.

A turn towards re-engagement with materiality, and its place within an increasingly screen-based cultural environment, is underscored by a recent exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria. The Poetics of the Material (2016) was a group exhibition in which “contemporary art, which can be regarded as being aligned with ‘new materialism,’ attempts to give expression to the interpenetration of material phenomena and immaterial aspects of reality. The latter reveal themselves in the meaning of language or in the influence of cultural narratives on the perception of reality.”[24]

In a sense, I have felt often, throughout the visits with artists for Mundos Alternos, that I have engaged in a type of “retro-labeling,” as described by Rachel Haywood Ferreira in her seminal book, The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (2011). She outlined the process towards defining a science fiction genre in Latin American literature in light of the genre’s already prescribed nature in the United States and Europe. Haywood wrote, “Although the genealogy of science fiction has been actively traced in its countries of origin since the moment Gernsback formally baptized the genre, in Latin America this process did not get underway until the late 1960s and continues today.”[25] Initially, her process identified texts in the late 19th and 20th centuries in Latin America, primarily in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, due to the strength of publishing in those countries, where there were science fictional tendencies. The most immediate and prominent examples of retro-labeled works were the ubiquitous and highly marketed “magic realism” novels and short stories of Argentine Jorges Luis Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy (1935), Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Chilean Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982).

In this regard, my two co-curators and I sought contemporary visual artists in Mundos Alternos who employed science fictional or slipstream thinking rather than literal science fiction elements. Driven by the theme of the show, we saw in their work, and through conversations during studio visits, that they demonstrated a commitment and influence from science fiction literature and film. The main theme that occupied them was a consideration of the future, focusing on post-colonization, labor, surveillance, environment, and hemispherical connections, viewed through the lens of art. However, what remains to be the biggest difference, and what I hope to be the contribution of this exhibition and book to the burgeoning scholarship around Latino and Latin American science fiction studies, is the effect of the material nature of visual art whose subject matter is science fictional.

Visual art exists as though a magical or a yet-to-be speculative technology has in fact manifested itself from the future into the present. They are strange objects whose message(s) are ambiguous. It requires work on the part of its viewer, who must be willing to engage with said object in order to receive meaning from it. I am not suggesting that there is a single, hidden meaning to be ascertained, but that its meaning is determined in part through a viewer’s interaction with it, as if a close encounter of the third kind, in which contact is made with alien beings, whose language we not yet know.

Meaning being determined in part by a book’s reader, for example, is a characteristically postmodern notion that accounts for paradox, unreliable narrators, and undermining the authority of the writer through metafiction techniques. However, I employ it here in order to demonstrate that this postmodern methodology can be different when dealing with strange objects versus literature and film.

Fighting for the Future

One difference between Anglo and Latino science fiction is that making it to the future is something that can’t be ignored. The future isn’t a given, it will have to be fought for. And if you don’t fight for it, you might not get there.

The artistic inclination to pastiche disparate materials and ideas together generates uncanniness through its physical manifestation. This technique creates a slipstream or science fictional effect of “cognitive estrangement,” to borrow a phrase from science fiction theorist Darko Suvin, where the material and conceptual smashups provide a platform for viewers to look at their immediate society differently. Suvin might suggest that one’s viewpoint could be shifted to the point that there is recognition of one’s oppression and therefore, with a new view of the world, begin to resist, which is the major subtext for Mundos Alternos.[26]

To illustrate further, East L.A. born Ernest Hogan, author of the seminal Chicano science fiction novel, High Aztech (1992), wrote ten years after its publication in his blog on Latino science fiction, La Bloga, “I’ve always been more interested in science fiction as a confrontation with changing reality rather than escapism. And as a Chicano, I’m plugged into cultural influences that most science fiction writers don’t have access to.”[27] Three years later, after participating in “A Day of Latino Science Fiction” symposium at UC Riverside, he wrote in another La Bloga post: “One difference between Anglo and Latino science fiction is that making it to the future is something that can’t be ignored. The future isn’t a given, it will have to be fought for. And if you don’t fight for it, you might not get there.”[28]

I would add that Hogan’s use of the phrase “plugged into” is embodied, literally, by Mundos Alternos with Los Angeles-based artist Alex Rivera’s film, Sleep Dealer (2008), which finds nodes inserted into one’s body to allow Mexican workers to work in the U.S. virtually, and thus the United States get its labor, but doesn’t have to deal with their bodies. It was preceded by Rivera’s more experimental videos that featured what he called, the “cybracero,” which is a clever, techno inflected twist on the bracero program in the U.S. from1942 to 1965 which brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the U.S.[29]

Sherryl Vint, UC Riverside professor of English, science fiction studies scholar, and Mundos Alternos research team members and contributor to this book, invited both Hogan and Rivera to UC Riverside’s campus. As organizer of “A Day of Latino Science Fiction,” she said, “Our event will foster discussion of the specific ways Latino writers negotiate science fiction’s relationship to the colonialist imagination, and its possibilities for imagining more ethnically inclusive futures.”[30]

Rigo 23 (Los Angeles), Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program, 2009—resent (ongoing). Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco.

Accessing Gateways or Las puertas

As curators, and with the visual arts in general, it is necessary to travel in order to see the work. This is a different experience than with film or literature where one can go to the local cinema or read in the comfort of a home where, theoretically, any engaged individual would be reading or viewing the same text or image shared by others. This is not the case in the visual arts where, at least in the context of this show, the materiality of a unique, strange object requires one’s presence. This means that, as a curator, my colleagues and I had to travel to the objects’ location. Rather than being deskbound or screenbound, footwork was involved to access gateways, or las puertas, to mundos alternos.

The future is their inseparability yet, at least for the moment, the artists in this show who focus on their slipstream artworks, present islands of materiality for salvation. For those of us who have not succumbed to screen-culture completely, we may commiserate on these islands throughout the Americas and plan the next world to build where water is free and flows.

Much further south of the border, a more recent revolution in Chiapas, Mexico, was explored by Portuguese-born, Los Angeles-based artist Rigo 23. For several years, he worked with indigenous groups in Chiapas, which aim for equal rights or autonomy from the Mexican government. Rigo 23 chose to extend Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation’s (EZLN) use of poetics through workshops with the Good Government Junta of Morelia, Chiapas.[31]

Through this art making with Rigo 23, they envisioned autonomy as having occurred already. They asked how they would then represent themselves beyond Earth, on an intergalactic level, emphasizing an indigenous, technoculture imaginary, calling their project the Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program (2012). Rigo 23 suggested that to imagine autonomy and to begin to materialize strange objects around this notion puts one on the path towards generating a new vocabulary in the present-time to be used in the future, similar to how indigenous communities in Chiapas might negotiate with the Mexican government.

In this context, Rigo 23’s cornhusk spaceship from the project, which arose from Southern Chiapas, was destined to become an interplanetary traveling vegetable that nurtured recognition of any being, whether on Earth, or elsewhere, as one who deserved freedom, justice, and equality. From an intergalactic sensibility, social justice for the indigenous in Chiapas translates to all Earthlings who become collectively indigenous in the context of encountering other beings beyond our blue dot in the solar system.

In an ART21 interview, Rigo 23 recognized the value of traveling and through his presence becoming a wormhole in which he collapsed geo-political events in order to generate kinship:

I have come to realize that, often, the further one comes from an area of intense conflict, the more likely the locals are to give you the benefit of the doubt. So, as one talks about Leonard Peltier in East Jerusalem, or about going to Palestine in Wounded Knee, links and kinships that are invisible to most manifest themselves in wonderful and affirming ways. There is a mutual recognition that one is globalized in an entirely different way.[32]

In kinship with Rigo 23, Salvadoran-born, Los Angeles-based artist and professor of Central American studies, Beatriz Cortez, created several projects in which she aimed to enunciate a positive, future imaginary for an Indigenous population.

Guillermo Bert (Los Angeles), The Visionary, 2012; Tarn, natural dyes, wood, 82 x 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Cortez’s La máquina de la fortuna or The Fortune Teller Machine (2014) is an interactive sculpture, developed in collaboration with the Guatemalan Kaqchikel Maya collective Kaqjay Moloj, and prints fortune messages in Kaqchikel and in Spanish. When a viewer presses a button, a thermal printer ejects a message from their collective desires that were programmed into the fortuneteller machine. The messages are written in a future perfect verb tense, as if predicting what will become, hopefully, a reality soon. A sample list of possible, future-tense messages that a viewer may receive from this portal to the future include:

Xtik’oje’ jun raxnäq k’aslen
Habrá justicia
There will be justice

Xtiqetamaj achike ru ma xe kamisäx ri qawinaq
Sabremos la verdad
We will know the truth

Xtiqaya’ ruq’ij ri kib’anob’al ri qatit qamama’
Estaremos orgullosos de nuestro pasado
We will be proud of our past

Xti ak’axäx ri k’ayewal qa chajin
Nuestra voz será escuchada
Our voice will be heard

Chiqonojel xtiqil ru b’eyal ri qak’aslen
Tendremos oportunidades
We will have opportunities

Xtik’oje’ jun qak’aslen ri man xkojyax ta pa k’ayewal
Seremos libres
We will be free

Brought together under the Mundos Alternos moniker, Beatriz Cortez and Rigo 23, the former from El Salvador and the latter from Portugal, demonstrate cross-cultural affinities as they engage technology closely tied to Indigenous communities. This approach is mindful of Indigenous knowledge and expertise with devices, which have often been cast as archaic and unsophisticated within Western colonization. Another Mundos Alternos artist, Guillermo Bert, born in Chile, but living in Los Angeles, has also worked closely with native communities to inform and realize their work. Bert’s Encoded Textiles tapestries were inspired by his observation that Quick Response (QR) code patterns often resemble the textile patterns woven by the Mapuche of Chile. He commissioned the woven works on view, which bear functional QR codes that link to dictums by tribal elders. He marries the encryption technologies of Indigenous woven textiles with contemporary digital ones, achieving the same goals but through different pathways.

Science Fictional Connectedness

From a curatorial perspective, the necessity of travel in cars, trains, planes, and by foot throughout the Americas became an experience in which the circulation of the kind of artwork that we sought became slipstream islands of materiality. Our radars were attuned to artists who viewed their art as platforms for investigating and questioning the immediate culture that surrounded them and the world at large, that is, embodying Suvin’s aforementioned cognitive estrangement.

In this regard, our visits became ones where citizens of alternative worlds found one another and cemented bonds through face-to-face meetings. We were surrounded by the artists’ slipstream artwork in their studios or their galleries, which became las puertas. It was by traveling through these wormholes, found throughout the Americas to islands of materiality (as opposed to “islands in the net,” to coin another phrase from Bruce Sterling’s 1988 novel with the same title), that I found an overall utopian experience of connectedness through material presence, rather than a dystopian one of disembodied connection through the telepresence of texts and screens. In other words, we were in true locations of the future, rather than just sensing, at an untouchable distance, the things to come.

In other words, we were in true locations of the future, rather than just sensing, at an untouchable distance, the things to come.

Notes

Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas is on view from 16 September 2017 through 4 February 2018. The opening party for Mundos Alternos is 30 September 2017 from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. at UCR ARTSblock (http://artsblock.ucr.edu). UCR ARTSblock is open Tuesday – Thursday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.; Friday– Saturday, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m., and closed Mondays. Open late until 9 p.m. every first Thursday of the month. Admission is $5.

All photography taken by Sydney Santana.

[1] The Mundos Alternos curatorial team includes Robb Hernández, assistant professor of English at UCR; Tyler Stallings, artistic director of the Culver Center of the Arts at UCR ARTSblock; and Joanna Szupinska-Myers, California Museum of Photography (CMP) senior curator of exhibitions at UCR ARTSblock. Kathryn Poindexter, CMP assistant curator, is the project coordinator; and Sherryl Vint, director of the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program at UCR, curated an accompanying film program and contributed an essay to the book. A heavily illustrated, 160-page book accompanies the exhibition, including original essays by the curators, contributions by Kathryn Poindexter and Rudi Kraeher, with additional essays by Kency Cornejo, Itala Schmelz, Alfredo Suppia, and Sherryl Vint, leading voices in science fiction studies and contemporary art of the Americas.

[2] The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), https://www.hacu.net/assnfe/cv.asp?ID=191.

[3] The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy, http://eaton.ucr.edu.

[4] University Archives & Special Collections, Pollak Library, California State University Fullerton, http://www.library.fullerton.edu/services/special-collections.php.

[5] See Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, eds. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

[6] The Huntington’s Octavia Butler archive, http://www.huntington.org/octaviabutler/.

[7] Comic-Con International in San Diego, http://www.comic-con.org

[8] World Science Fiction Convention, http://www.worldcon.org.

[9] Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), http://www.sfra.org/sfra-annual-conference.

[10] Science Fiction Research Association 2016 conference program, http://www.sfra.org/Conference-Program.

[11] Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 180.

[12] The passages in this section, “Sun Ra in California and Afrofuturism” are excerpted from Robb Hernández and Tyler Stallings, “Introduction” in Robb Hernández and Tyler Stallings, eds. Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas (Riverside, CA: UCR ARTSblock, 2017), 13-14, 18-19.

[13] Recorded lecture from 1971 when Sun Ra served as artist-in-residence at UC Berkeley and offered the course, African-American Studies 198, “The Black Man in the Cosmos,” https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/ra_sun/Ra-Sun_Berkeley-Lecture_1971.mp3.

[14] For more on “Shadows Took Shape” see, Naima J. Keith, and Zoe Whitley, eds. The Shadows Took Shape (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013).

[15] Tegan Bristow, “We Want the Funk: What is Afrofuturism to Africa?” in Naima J. Keith, and Zoe Whitley, eds., The Shadows Took Shape, (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013), 81.

[16] Ernest Hogan, Cortez on Jupiter (New York: Tor Books, 1990). Out of print. Now available for digital download at https://www.createspace.com/5026216.

^[17] “Meteorite Yields Evidence of Primitive Life on Early Mars,” Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, 7 August 1996, https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/snc/nasa1.html.

[18] Sara C. Nelson, “Alien Abductee David Huggins ‘Lost His Virginity To Extra Terrestrial Woman Named Crescent’,” Huffington Post, 16 October 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/10/16/alien-abductee-david-huggins-lost-virginity-extra-terrestrial-woman-crescent_n_5995334.html.

[19] Online catalogue from 2013 for Free Enterprise: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration, http://sites.artsblock.ucr.edu/free-enterprise/.

[20] Excerpts from Tyler Stallings, “Slipstream Islands of Strange Things: Building Mundos Alternos in the Americas” in Robb Hernández and Tyler Stallings, eds., Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas (Riverside, CA: UCR ARTSblock, 2017), 130-143. An emphasis is placed on artists from California in these excerpts and includes additional text on artist Guillermo Bert that was not in the original published essay, along with a few additional comments that emphasize the California connection.

[21] Bruce Sterling, “Catscan 5: Slipstream,” sf Eye 5 (July 1989), online at https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/Catscan_columns/catscan.05.

[22] Taryne Jade Taylor, “A Singular Dislocation: An Interview with Junot Diaz,” Paradoxa 26 (2015): 97-110.

[23] Jan Tumlir, “Sci-Fi Historicism, Part I: The Time Machine in Contemporary Los Angeles Art,” Flash Art 40 (March-April, 2007): 102-105.

[24] Leopold Museum, http://www.leopoldmuseum.org/en/exhibitions/78/the-poetics-of-the-material.

[25] Rachel Haywood Ferreira, The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 1.

[26] Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” College English 34 (December 1972): 372-82.

[27] Ernest Hogan, “Chicanonautica: Prophesy, High Aztech, and Nerve Jelly,” La Bloga, 5 February 2011, http://labloga.blogspot.com/2011/02/chicanonautica-prophesy-high-aztech-and.html

[28] Ernest Hogan, “Chicanonautica: Voyage to a Day of Latino Science Fiction,” La Bloga, 15 May 15, 2014, http://labloga.blogspot.com/2014/05/chicanonautica-voyage-to-day-of-latino.html.

[29] The Bracero History Archive, http://braceroarchive.org/about.

[30] “Latino Science Fiction Explored, UCR Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Program hosts April 30 event,” UCR Today, https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/21579.

[31] “The Good Government Juntas represent both the poetic, populist and the practical nature of the Zapatista struggle to build workable alternatives of autonomy locally, link present politics to traditional ways of organizing [sic] life in indigenous communities, and contrast with the ‘bad government’ of official representational politics in Mexico City.” See Paul Chatterton, “The Zapatista Caracoles and Good Governments: The Long Walk to Autonomy,” State of Nature (2007). http://www.stateofnature.org/?p=6119.

[32] Thom Donovan, “5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Rigo 23,” ART21 Magazine, 20 January 2011, http://magazine.art21.org/2011/01/20/5-questions-for-contemporary-practice-with-rigo-23/#.Wb2PHtGX02x.

Tyler Stallings is artistic director at the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts at UCR ARTSblock. He was chief curator at Laguna Art Museum prior to his arrival at UCR in 2006. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts. His curatorial projects focus on contemporary art, with a special emphasis on the exploration of identity, technology, photo-based work, and urban culture. For more information see http://tylerstallings.com.

Copyright: © 2017 Tyler Stallings. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Photography/Art

On the Road to the Summer of Love

Boom California on July 26, 2017

Dennis McNally

Editor’s Note: In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, the California Historical Society’s “On the Road to the Summer of Love” tells the story of this countercultural movement through an ambitious photographic exhibition. The selection of images and text included with this article are reproduced from the larger exhibition and highlight a portion of the cultural and contextual features that led up to the 1967 Summer of Love. The full exhibition will be on display through 24 September 2017 at 678 Mission Street, San Francisco.

The Summer of Love

The community that grew up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood from 1965 to 1967 was part of a vital tradition celebrating personal freedom and the right of peaceful protest that has traveled through American history since Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1954). The thread is intrinsic to San Francisco, which as Thoreau began his masterpiece was emerging during California’s Gold Rush. The forty-niners were not dutiful servants of the Protestant work ethic but rogues gambling their lives for gold, scamps who cherished an eccentricity uniquely American.

Today, fifty years from the Summer of Love, its impact—social, cultural, economic, political, psychosexual—continues its ripples through American culture. Its unabashed pursuit of liberation triggered all manner of questioning of gender identity. LSD challenged social hierarchies, which had a particular impact on engineers around Palo Alto; without the West Coast psychedelic ethos, Silicon Valley and the development of the personal computer may have happened in Boston. It also created sensitivity to what one put in one’s body that led to natural foods and the organic food industry. The music and graphic art of the subculture swept the globe and seized young imaginations everywhere.

All this and more remains with us: the origins of the revolutionary maelstrom begin with the tribal elders known as the Beat Generation, succeeding important political events and the mind-changing effects of a powerful avant-garde art scene. Combined with psychedelics and rock and roll, the result was the creation of a new consciousness, which we call the Summer of Love.

The Beats

Helen Haight and Don Graham at Grant and Green, 1958, Jerry Stoll (1923-2004); courtesy of Jerry Stoll Photography.

The roots of the Haight-Ashbury scene arose in a small cluster of disaffected writers repulsed by the monstrous death and destruction birthed from World War II. In 1944, a seaman and Columbia University dropout named Jack Kerouac fell in with Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr and another man, William S. Burroughs. They created a “new vision,” a mix of transcendentalism and bohemianism that evolved into “Beat,”[1] a rejection of mainstream bourgeois American beliefs and an advocacy of art and spirituality pursued through intense experience.

Their friend Neal Cassady settled in San Francisco, and then Kerouac and Ginsberg followed. Here Ginsberg blossomed as a poet, producing Howl in 1955. He first read it at the Six Gallery along with sympathetic companions and fellow readers Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and others, with the elder of the city’s poetry scene, Kenneth Rexroth, as master of ceremonies. Howl was published the next year by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press. Along with Kerouac’s 1957, On the Road, the poem inspired young artists to align with the idea of Beat, especially in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.

Protest Movements

A succession of youth-dominated political events prepared the ground for the consciousness labeled the Summer of Love. In 1960, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) came to San Francisco’s City Hall to hold hearings, and the students of UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University demanded the right to attend. They were not only denied entrance, but forced down the hall’s grand staircase by firehoses. Outside, students and left-wing unionists mocked HUAC with Nazi salutes; the once-terrifying power of the committee would soon disintegrate.

In 1964, students from the two schools came together again, this time to challenge white-only hiring among the auto dealers along San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue and at the Sheraton Palace Hotel. After nonviolent picketing and hundreds of arrests, they achieved victory when the car dealers and hotel owners agreed to integrate.

Barbara Dane, Vietnam Protest, 1964, by Erik Weber.

Auto Row Protest, “We Want Jobs,” by Joe Rosenthal, San Francisco Chronicle; courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle

Later that year, students at UC Berkeley created the Free Speech Movement, as they named it, and challenged the limits on political free speech in the university’s Sproul Plaza in what developed into a countercultural critique of a technocratic university treating education as a product. The mass arrests and frequent violence surrounding the FSM presaged many more such incidents to come across the nation, as well as the ensuing reaction that helped elect Ronald Reagan as California governor and later US president, jumpstarting a nascent conservative movement still ascendant in 2017.

Coupled with an awakening sexual liberation stimulated by birth control and ongoing Vietnam War protests, many young people in the Bay Area evolved a very new perspective by the mid-1960s. The experiences, experiments, and beliefs of those “hipsters” or “hippies” would soon rock the world.

Mario Savio on top of Police Car, University of California, Berkeley, 1964, photo by Ronald L. Enfield (b. 1945).

Crowd led by FSM Banner through Sather Gate, Regents’ Meeting, University of California, Berkeley, 1964, photo by Ronald L. Enfield (b. 1945).

Arts Ferment

An underappreciated element of the cultural and intellectual flowering of the Haight-Ashbury scene is the role played by various avant-garde arts group and individuals over the previous decade. The Actor’s Workshop, the Tape Music Center, the Committee and Lenny Bruce, the Open Theater, Canyon Cinema—each had a heavy impact on young people whose minds had been opened by Beat poetry and political events. Two groups emerged as particularly significant.

The Actor’s Workshop would have a far-reaching impact, bringing serious theater to San Francisco with plays by Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, and Jean Genet. They sought, wrote co-director Herb Blau, to “shock, disturb, remind, tease and infuriate our audiences.” They succeeded. Among the veterans of AW was former assistant director Ronnie Davis, founder of the legendary San Francisco Mime Troupe.

The Tape Music Center, founded by Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick with Pauline Oliveros, Bill Maginnis, and Tony Martin, would challenge the notion of what music was. It was central to the development of modern avant-garde music, and its propensity for interacting with other groups—for instance composing for the Actor’s Workshop, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin—made it an aesthetic nexus in the scene.

Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, 1962, by Jerry Melrose (b. 1939); courtesy of the artist.

San Francisco Mime Troupe, c. 1966. Photo by Gene Anthony; from the collection of the California Historical Society.

The Catalysts

Poetry, politics, and avant-garde art were the elements in the alembic chamber (wherein alchemists tried to change base metals into gold). LSD and rock and roll were the final agents that catalyzed a remarkable transmutation in the minds of the Haight’s new citizens. The need for spiritual transcendence is a fundamental aspect of humanity, and LSD was a revolutionary agent of change, making the psychedelic experience exponentially more accessible—inexpensive, powerful, and easily obtained in San Francisco. It found a perfect partner in high-volume, visceral rock and roll.

In the summer of 1965, the San Francisco band the Charlatans took over the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, and became the first band to routinely combine LSD, a light show, and rock and roll. Later that year, author Ken Kesey and his friends the Merry Pranksters began a series of parties where LSD was available, dubbing them Acid Tests. They grew very quickly, and reached their apogee in January 1966 at the Trips Festival at Longshoreman’s Hall, with thousands in attendance. Many of the avant-garde arts groups—the Tape Music Center, Anna Halprin, the Open Theater—took part, but it was Tony Martin’s light show and the rock and roll bands (the Grateful Dead, Big Brother, and the Holding Company) that people embraced.

Ken Kesey and Carolyn Adams at Courthouse, 1966, San Francisco Chronicle; courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Hit of Blotter Acid, 1981; courtesy of Mark McCloud.

Avalon Ballroom, 1967, by Ben Van Meter (b. 1941); courtesy of the artist.

Jefferson Airplane at the Monterey Jazz Festival, 1966, by Stephen Rees (b. 1948); courtesy of the artist.

[The Grateful Dead on steps of 710 Ashbury Street headquarters,

Grateful Dead on steps of 710 Ashbury Street headquarters, c. 1966, photo by Gene Anthony; from the collection of the California Historical Society.

The Real Summer of Love

The true Summer of Love was not the public affair of 1967, but the private social experiments that took place largely in the Haight-Ashbury in 1966. Among the most fondly remembered of these was a pair of parties at Olompali, a large home in Marin County where the Grateful Dead had taken up residence for the summer. Inviting their friends—members of Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans, Big Brother and the Holding Company, among others—they played, danced, and got quite high in the private, natural setting of the ranch.

Back in the city, a psychedelic neighborhood sprang up along Haight Street. Hip businesses like Mnasidika, the Psychedelic Shop, and In Gear opened. The Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium presented music, poster artists advertised the shows with extraordinary creativity, and a community grew. By fall, the Haight had generated its own iconic social-theatrical-political visionary troupe, the Diggers, who would subvert the dominant paradigm with art and humor.

When LSD was made illegal on 6 October 1966, the Diggers and their friend Allen Cohen of the Haight’s newspaper the Oracle responded with the Love Pageant Rally, a celebration rather than a protest. At their request, the Grateful Dead played for free, and free music in the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park became a fixture of the Haight experience.

Fantasy Fair, Mill Valley, 1967, by Elaine Mayes (b. 1936); courtesy of the artist.

Cop Strings Orchids on Antennae, 1967, by Elaine Mayes (b. 1936); courtesy of the artist.

Jimi Hendrix at Monterey Pop, 1967, by Suki Hill (1941-2014); courtesy of the artist.

The Gathering of the Tribes

As 1966 drew to a close, there was a palpable sense of accomplishment in the Haight. Peace, joy, and love were actually working. A few hundred people had created something remarkably beautiful. It called for a celebration, and Allen Cohen and his artist friend Michael Bowen of the Haight’s Oracle newspaper conceived of a Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In, to be held in Golden Gate Park on 14 January 1967.

Among those who came together, there were elder and mentor poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Lew Welch; spiritual leaders like Timothy Leary and the apostle of Zen Buddhism in America, Shunryu Suzuki; various rock bands; and even the Berkeley radicals. They were celebrating, as someone remarked, nothing in particular. It was a truly wonderful day.

But it had enormous, unanticipated consequences. Up to that point, the Haight-Ashbury scene, whose members referred to themselves as “freaks,” had flown largely under mainstream society’s notice, not least because the group was actually quite small. But the Be-In attracted tens of thousands to the park, and the spell of invisibility vanished. The media descended, the phrase “hippie” became immortalized, and suddenly the trivial accoutrements of life in the Haight—long hair, flowers, extravagant clothing—were broadcast around the world.

[l to r: Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Freewheel

Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Alan Ginsberg at the Be-In, 1967, by Gene Anthony; from the collection of the California Historical Society.

Dizzy Gillespie at the Be-In, Polo Grounds, Golden Gate Park, 1967, by Erik Weber (b. 1940); from the collection of the California Historical Society.

[Winding down at the Be-In, Golden Gate Park, 1967 January 14]

Couple on Ground After Be-In, by Gene Anthony; from the collection of the California Historical Society.

Notes

[1] For a discussion of Kerouac’s understanding of “beat” as tramping along with a rucksack, and as beatitude, beatific, see Conversations with Jack Kerouac, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2005), 31. With thanks to David L. Ulin for this reference.

Dennis McNally is author, historian, and music publicist. He was the publicist for the Grateful Dead, is the band’s authorized biographer, and wrote the bestselling history of the band, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, as well as the recently published On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom and Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America. He lives in San Francisco.

Copyright: © 2017 Dennis McNally and the California Historical Society. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Interviews

A Boom Interview with California’s Poet Laureate

Boom California on March 14, 2017

Dana Gioia

Editor’s note: Having served as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009, Dana Gioia has long been known for his provocative essays, for his work in literary criticism, and especially for his poetry and advocacy of the craft. A native Californian born to Sicilian and Mexican immigrant parents in 1950 and raised in the southwest Los Angeles County industrial town of Hawthorne, as a first-generation college student, Gioia earned his BA from Stanford, MA in comparative literature from Harvard, and MBA back at Stanford, leading him into the business world decades before becoming a full-time writer.

With a seemingly ever-growing emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education in contemporary K-12 learning and in universities, a natural tendency has been to dismiss the arts and humanities as less important. This is as true in California as anywhere. And yet, as big questions remain and loom ever larger for California and its people, so does the importance of the arts and humanities for learning, for critical thinking, and for engagement with wider societal concerns. Consistent with California’s rich literary tradition, Gioia has contributed in many ways, with California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Heyday), The Misread City (Red Hen), his essay “Fallen Western Star,” and in poems from his many collections including Pity the Beautiful (Graywolf) and 99 Poems (Graywolf). Together with his essays, Gioia takes up the task of the poet, for whom California reserves a special place.

While the title of State Poet Laureate has been held by California poets for over a century, the position became official in 2001 and is overseen by the California Arts Council, which conducts an intense nomination process, after which the governor chooses the poet laureate from three top candidates; then the appointee must be confirmed by the California State Senate. On 4 December 2015, Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. appointed Dana Gioia to this role. What follows is Gioia’s accounting of his work as California Poet Laureate, originally delivered to the California Senate Rules Committee and here revised with new questions for our Boom readers.

Boom:
You are California’s tenth poet laureate, serving a two-year governor-appointment. California has changed a lot over the years, as has the dynamic makeup of our state. What do you hope to accomplish in this role?

Gioia:
My goal as state poet laureate is to bring the power of poetry and literature to as many people and communities as possible across California. I especially want to reach people and places outside the major metropolitan areas. The state poet laureate should serve the whole state. For that reason, I have set the goal of visiting every county in California. Reaching all fifty-eight counties in two years perhaps may be too ambitious, but it seems the right target. With proper planning and the active partnership of county libraries and art councils, that goal should be achievable. I will give it my best effort.

Boom:
What are your plans to reach diverse regions and people in the state?

Gioia:
I want to reach all California. Our state is so large and varied that one needs to be systematic in covering the vast territory and meeting the diverse populations. That is why I have chosen the approach of trying to visit as many counties as possible. Of course, it will also be necessary to do multiple events in the metropolitan areas to reach different audiences. This second goal is easier since so many invitations come from urban areas. The key is to focus on invitations that reach different communities.

Boom:
Why is poetry significant, and why does it matter in today’s society?

Gioia:
Poetry is our most concise, expressive, and memorable way of using words to describe our existence. Poems awaken the imagination and memory to make us more alert to life. On both an individual and communal level, poems provide the language, ideas, and images to help us understand ourselves, our society, and the world. That is why poems are so often used to great effect at public occasions. They give people the words to articulate what they experience and feel. That is also why poetry has always been used in education. It not only develops a student’s mastery of language; it also enhances creativity, empathy, and emotional self-awareness.

Boom:
One of the functions of the California Poet Laureate, as with the United States Poet Laureate, is to create a cultural project during the appointment. Could you briefly describe your cultural project? How has it come to and involved artistically underserved communities?

Gioia:
My project has been to participate in at least one cultural event in every county in California—with a focus on creating a free event at each county’s public library. This approach is necessarily simple and flexible, then, and the events are either primarily literary or combine several arts, including poetry. In both cases, I have and will continue to involve local students, writers, musicians, and artists in each visit. I have already had local Poetry Out Loud high school champions participate in my public presentations and will continue to do so. By trying to visit every county, my public service, by definition, focuses on underserved communities.

Boom:
You teach in the university, but how does poetry become accessible rather than a mere academic pursuit for cultural elites?

Gioia:
I have spent most of my working life outside the university—in business, government, and journalism. I believe the pleasures and enlightenment of poetry are open to most people, not simply to an academic elite. Although I take myself seriously as an artist, I don’t see much point writing in ways that exclude the average intelligent person. Art without an audience is a diminished thing. This is one reason why I have been and plan to continue working with local civic institutions, especially libraries and art centers—local venues that are open to everyone. They are the best avenues to reach a broad and diverse audience. Mixing poetry with music and the other arts also makes events more accessible to the average person.

Boom:
How do you see poetry connecting to the minds of individuals in leadership and innovation throughout California, in both public and private sectors?

Gioia:
I have been and will continue to be open to invitations to meet and speak with leaders in both the public and private sectors. I have both held and have scheduled several talks at statewide or regional gatherings for librarians and high school teachers, with one for county officials. I also believe that our state finals for Poetry Out Loud in the Capitol building allows our elected representatives a chance to see the transformative power of poetry programs in the lives of students in their districts.

Boom:
Do you plan to collaborate with your predecessor, Juan Felipe Herrera, now the US Poet Laureate, or the State Librarian of California Greg Lucas, or any other government group

Gioia:
It is impossible for me to be an effective state poet laureate unless I collaborate with arts councils, libraries, schools, parks, museums, and city book festivals. As chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I learned how much could be accomplished through partnerships. I consider myself a member of the State Arts Council team, and I involve them in everything I do. I am currently working with Greg Lucas to find an effective way of partnering with county libraries to help reach my goals. His support is essential to my success. As for the US Poet Laureate, I have also already done two public events—in Sacramento and Los Angeles—with Juan Felipe Herrera and have an invitation out to him for a third event in partnership with State Parks.

Boom:
Who among our California poets do you believe have had the greatest influence in California?

Gioia:
California has an extraordinary poetic tradition. When I led an editorial team to create the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, I found it challenging to limit our selections to only 100 poets. If I had to pick a central poet for the state, I would choose Robinson Jeffers. His vision of California’s landscape and wilderness has inspired three generations of writers, artists, and environmentalists. There has also been a great bohemian tradition with writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Charles Bukowski. I also admire the great Theodor Geisel of San Diego, better known as Dr. Seuss. Among my favorite living California poets are Al Young, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Ron Koertge, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Kay Ryan. Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Award winner Ryan, who also served as US Poet Laureate, is probably my favorite living American poet. A master of ingenious, short poems that mix wisdom and surprise, she is California’s answer to Emily Dickinson.

Note

Dana Gioia is the ex-chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and Poet Laureate of California. He received an MA in comparative literature from Harvard University and has published five full-length collections of poetry between 1986 and 2016.

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A Boom Interview with California’s Poet Laureate