Indeed I live in the dark ages! A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens A hard heart. He who laughs Has not yet heard The terrible tidings.
Ah, what an age it is When to speak of trees is almost a crime For it is a kind of silence about injustice! And he who walks calmly across the street, Is he not out of reach of his friends In trouble?
Bertolt Brecht, On Posterity
September 2022, Claremont, CA
All through the blistering heatwave that has held Southern California in a vice, I’ve been thinking about Mike. Mike Davis is dying. Esophageal cancer that won’t go away. Last month he opted for palliative care; the end can’t be too far off. The heatwave has another three days to run. Here, in Claremont, it has been around 78 degrees at dawn, climbing to a long hot afternoon plateau as high as 110. I could drive, air-con blazing, to other air-conditioned spaces, but even the short walks across searing hot car parks are unpleasant. Not so much the heat itself, but the deep sense it communicates, that something is very wrong.
I feel it, I think, somewhere deeper than the conscious mind, somewhere buried in the ancient brain stem that stores our trauma and turns it into networks of toxic neurons. So, teaching and food shopping aside, I’m just bunkering down in Professor Davina’s place with its clattering vintage air-con: yoga twice a day, a lot of stillness, just breathing, being in my creaky body… and thinking about Mike.
Mike Davis is one of my guiding stars. I’ve read everything he has ever written, much of it twice. When in 1991, as a grad student in England, I picked up City of Quartz, his polycentric history of Los Angeles, and I couldn’t put it down. I was captivated by its account of the city’s illusions and mythologies, alongside the realities of its racist policing and its fortified architecture. I couldn’t believe sociology or history or theory (it intuitively shape-shifts) could be so smart and sassy, so sharp and stylish, saying it like it is, but wow, saying it like Raymond Chandler. Turns out Mike hates Chandler, for his misogyny, his racism, his small-minded individualism and his amoral fatalistic fascism, but he also can’t stop reading him. I can’t stop reading Mike, and though I’ve never met him, I have at least walked in his footsteps. Back in the 1990s, during one his many periods of financial difficulty and professional limbo, he came and taught at Pitzer college. And I have done much the same. In over a decade of living in and exploring Los Angeles he has been my constant guide and made this strange but extraordinary metropolis at least comprehensible.
A lot of writers might have just left it there. Whole academic careers have been sustained on slighter contributions than City of Quartz, but Mike was a late starter. A meat cutter, trucker and trade union activist in his late teens and twenties, he didn’t show up at UCLA for his degree until he was 30. Impressive as the book was, it was mere prelude, the curtain raiser to two decades of superhuman scholarship and activism. Magical Urbanism surveys the Latino transformation of the American city and its progressive political and aesthetic potential. Planet of Slums, by contrast, was a cadastral survey of the informal settlements that house more than three billion people, in the mega cities of the twenty-first century. Buda’s Wagon was a short and brilliant history of the car bomb and asymmetrical warfare, from Italian-American anarchists to al-Qaeda. Mid Victorian Holocausts is a masterpiece of environmental history, explaining the origins of the global south at the intersection of Victorian imperialism and the El Nino weather events of the era that generated famines, deaths and environmental degradation of such a scale that the gap between North and South became a chasm. In The Monster to Come, a short essay on coronaviruses, avian flu and epidemiology in an era of globalization, published in 2009, he accurately predicted the emergence and course of the COVID pandemic. I could go on…..and on.
His third book, Ecology of Fear sits on my desk. I feel right now like I’m not reading it but living it. So, I’m lucky that Professor Davina’s house, where miraculously I have landed, is a good antidote. Born in the rural Philippines in the 1920’s she arrived in California in her forties and lived here for nearly half a century. For thirty years she was the first Filipina professor of theology in California, teaching at Chaffey Community College. I drink my tea out of a college mug saying “we’re here to help”. The last couple of decades she was retired and mainly alone; three kids who had moved on and a second husband, Milt, who died fifteen years ago. Professor Davina died last year, and her daughter Dodi just didn’t have it in her to sort and clear the house: grief, Covid, losing her own partner just three months after her mother, and then breast cancer and surgery. So, the house has sat empty until I arrived, part caretaker, part tenant.
There are still a few reminders of Davina’s last couple of years—walkers gathering dust, mobility aids in her bathroom—but it’s the rest of her long life that is really present. Dodi told me she had tried to clear some away, but the house is crammed with ecumenical knick- knacks: a seder plate on the wall above the kitchen table, inspirational quotes from a Native American shaman on grubby fridge magnets, statuettes of Confucius and the Buddha, a chopping board from the United Methodists Church, Hindu figurines, Islamic banners. In her office and the living room a lifetime of study, encyclopedias of comparative religion, bibles, Korans, torahs….
One pleasing quirk of the house is the absence of plastic. Dodi said, “She was an environmentalist before her time. She hated plastic.” Look around, the house is full of wood and ceramics, textiles and glass, bamboo, rattan and metal, but literally no plastic. She preferred bone handled knives and wicker basket bins, and all in shades of white and beige and brown and bronze. Clingfilm was allowed, as a cupboard of maybe a dozen huge rolls testifies, but only as an alternative to using Tupperware. Sure, her computer kit and TV are plastic, but I sense they were not much loved. On the shelves in her office there are, carefully organized and catalogued, the products of old analogue technologies—cameras in leather cases, teaching slides in cardboard boxes dozens of photo albums, and half dozen metal rolodexes. On the inside of the food cupboard is an old, typed list, probably from the 1980s, of small environmental actions that we might take—use what you buy, write on both sides of your note paper, choose the lesser of two evils. Its tone is humble and practical, and although the advice feels hopelessly inadequate, it’s a better voice to listen to than my own sense of creeping doom.
Mike Davis at a volcano in Hawaii. By Alessandra Moctezuma
It helps make the house a good place to hide from the heat through the long afternoons. Conscious of the antiquity of the air conditioning system—and the impossibility of getting it repaired right now—I try and nurse it, keeping the thermostat at 71 degrees, but as the sun passes from the front of the house over the roof and into the back garden it can’t keep up. The internal temperature climbs and climbs and I find myself dozing uneasily on the sofa, unable to move. Yesterday my siesta was broken by a series of noisy, unignorable urgent sounds from my British and American cell phones. It’s a text from California’s energy agencies letting us now that the level of demand for electricity is reaching break point. If, for the next few hours, we don’t all turn off everything short of the AC then we are looking at rolling outages and blackouts. I turn out the lights, leave my washing and cooking to later, light a few of the professor’s devotional candles and get back to Mike and Ecology of Fear.
The book’s basic premise is that to build a metropolis of near fifteen million people in a desert is not sustainable. Make it exclusively dependent on the private motor car, and you are really in trouble. Add the fire hazards on the wooded slopes of Los Angeles’ hills and mountains, and the insatiable demand for water that simply isn’t there and disaster looms. Now factor in another two decades of climate change since the book was written and the city, right now, is close to unlivable and only so at the price of more massive carbon emissions.
Then there is the San Andreas fault, the geological atom bomb that runs through the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Tremors are a dime a dozen here, though as I know from my own quivering disbelief on experiencing one, no less unnerving for that. The last time the fault really bared its teeth was the Northridge Earthquake in 1994. It is, by historic standards, due to do so again, sometime soon. Professor Davina had been making preparations. In the garage, beneath a dusty bunch of yellow plastic roses, I find the remnants of a basic earthquake stash—eight big plastic bottles of water, torches, batteries, first aid kit. I’m not sure any of it will be much use when the big one comes and make a mental note to assemble my own.
I sit inside nearly all day. After about 1:00 pm the sun has passed over the front of the house, and outside the front door there is a small pool of hot shade. The small park opposite is entirely empty. For a couple of hours after dawn there is a smattering of dog walkers and determined joggers, but then there is no one until dusk. Huge SUVs, sparkling white and black and silver, occasionally glide past. I listen to the rumble of the 210 freeway, just a hundred meters north of us, the hum of my neighbor’s air conditioner, watch the vapor trails of planes heading to and from LAX.
Only as the sun is going down do I make my way to the back garden. It’s still fearsomely hot, but at least I can look at the smog rainbow sunset and the San Gabriel Mountains. In past summers there still would have been a sprinkling of snow on the high peaks, but they are brown and bare. The smog is still with us. I can see that once the garden was a beautiful space with pomegranate, cherry and apricot trees and dozens of fabulous huge succulents. Since Professor Davina died the drip hoses and sprinklers have broken and there has been no watering at all. Southern California is in the midst of an unprecedented three-year long drought, so there hasn’t been much help from the weather. Now the apricot and cherry trees are dead, their few remaining leaves are crisped to a dark brown. The succulents, still just hanging on, have shrunk, and shriveled and shed what leaves they have held onto to survive. But they are a sorry sight—desiccated mutant versions of themselves. The pomegranate has, amazingly, hung on, and is even bearing fruit. I can’t bear to pick them. It seems, after such herculean botanical efforts, too cruel to take it. Dodi has arranged for landscapers to take out the dead, put in new drips and drought resistant plants, maybe save the pomegranate and the succulents. I tend and water my little collection of newly potted tomatoes and basil. They are surviving.
It doesn’t take much to join the dots here. But as the news from home, where the government is arresting people demanding that the country’s aging housing be fitted with better insulation suggests, the economic and political elites of this world are willfully refusing to do so. I’m reading Mike again, in what will probably be his last interview, and, as ever, he condenses my thoughts, and finds words to pierce my heart.
“Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future. A small group of people have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, and they have no vision, no strategy, no plan.”
Pomona , Cal.; Claremont and Old Baldy. By Brück & Sohn Kunstverlag Meißen
So, what to do? On one of the many occasional tables scattered around Professor Davina’s house, alongside a carved wooden cockerel from the Philippines and a dusty menorah, lies a small, cardboard oval. It is threaded with old string for hanging on a wall, but it has been left on the table. I didn’t notice it for the first week I was here. Then, for no reason at all, I stopped and looked at it. In thick embossed silver script it says “hope”. Its kitsch and its corny, but right now I’ll take corny.
Last week in a press conference PSG star Kilian Mbappe and coach Christophe Galtier were asked why the team took a private jet from Paris to Nantes, just a few hundred kilometers away and accessible by TGV. They both laughed. Galtier quipped, “This morning we talked about it with the company which organizes our trips and we’re looking into traveling on sand yachts.” I showed it my students. It was electric. For the next forty minutes we explored how sports is connected to the climate crisis and what it might do about it. The power and responsibilities of athletic celebrity, the inequality of carbon emissions and climate impacts, football in Africa in a heating world, how climate change affected their own play (lots them are on the college soccer team), and a dozen other things. They were a mix of amazed, curious, angry—and ignited. For all the detail what was really going on was the sound of hundreds of pennies dropping; the slot machine of education hitting the jackpot.
Afterwards, thinking about Mbappe laughing and his smooth ephebic forehead, I made the connection back to Brecht. Of course, it was Mike, whose breadth of reading has never ceased to amaze and please me, that got me back to On Posterity. In the time left to him he says he’s doing a lot of family time, watching Scandinavian noir and reading Brecht. He said:
“I’ve always been influenced by the poems Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the Second World War, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, ‘Well, it’s a new dark ages….how do people resist in the dark ages?'”
Brecht, in the end offers pretty thin gruel. He knows it and asks us, “Do not judge us too harshly.” I need more than that. Mike Davis, for me, just nails it, “Despair is useless.”
What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.
So, I’m writing this and sending it to you because I love you (and Mike Davis, and Professor Davina, and my Pitzer college students), and I’m trying not to bow my head, and to find my way to be a part of our mutual defiance, for what I’m worth. If you want to fight, I’m all ears, but love is also allowed, and if you want to go read some Mike Davis, then that’s good too.
Coda
Mike Davis left us in late October. The heatwave gave way to a long hot autumn, and then the cataclysmic storm and rains of late December 2022 and early January 2023. Professor Davina’s house held up and Dodi and I have made a start on sifting and sorting it.
David Goldblatt is a sports writer, broadcaster, sociologist, journalist, author, and visiting professor of sociology at Pitzer College.
However polite its title, the 1891 “Petition to the Senators and Representatives of the Congress of the United States in the Behalf of the Remnants of the former Tribes of the Yosemite Indians Praying for Aid and Assistance” was anything but deferential.
The petition offered a blunt critique of the mostly white gold miners’ brutal incursion into the Yosemite region in the late 1840s. It sharply criticized the state-sanctioned violence that California unleashed in the 1850s on the Indigenous Peoples of the Central Sierra, and astutely recognized that elite tourists—and the amenities they required to cushion their late nineteenth-century visits to the rugged landscape—were also responsible for cultural disruption and physical dispossession. The petition reported that the previous half century of exploitation had turned the Ahwahneechii and Monos into “poorly-clad paupers and unwelcome guests, silently the objects of curiosity or contemptuous pity to the throngs of strangers who yearly gather in this our own land and heritage.”
The once fertile and sustaining terrain of the Indigenous Peoples had been torn apart. “The gradual destruction of its trees, the occupancy of every foot of its territory by bands of grazing horses and cattle, the decimation of the fish in the river, the destruction of every means of support for ourselves and families by the rapacious acts of the whites,” the petition asserted, would “shortly result in the total exclusion of the remaining remnants of our tribes from this our beloved valley, which has been ours from time beyond our faintest traditions, and which we still claim.”
The US government did not respond to this appeal for the return of tribal lands, an ironclad treaty that would protect their inheritance, and compensation for their decades of immiseration. Instead, the petition, to which forty-three survivors put their names, was buried in the 1891 report of Yosemite’s acting park superintendent. But its bureaucratic fate doesn’t diminish its importance any more than does the probability that the document’s amanuensis was a Euro-American fluent in English. The oral histories on which the petition depends, and, as anthropologist Ed Castillo observed, the “incredible description” it provides of the “political, military, and ecological factors driving remaining tribesmen from their valley could only have as their source local Indigenous knowledge.”
That knowledge, and the distressing catalogue of injustices it contains, is an important challenge to settler-colonial justifications for How the West Was Won. One facet of that master narrative also centers on Yosemite National Park— by the time tourists arrived to “ooh and ahhh” over its iconic waterfalls, steep granite walls, and staggering vistas, the land was “empty.” Its putative emptiness, the result of violent dispossession, set the stage for an early twentieth-century, decade-long battle over whether to build a dam in the park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. The dam’s proponents, including federal officials, as well as citizens and politicians in San Francisco eager to secure a stable water supply following the 1906 earthquake that devastated the city, believed the dam was emblematic of Progressive Era reforms that provided essential—and publicly owned—resources to a rapidly urbanizing society. John Muir, founding president of the Sierra Club, which was established in 1892, was among those who pushed back, arguing that the dam’s construction would inundate the wild Hetch Hetchy Valley. “Dam Hetch Hetchy!” he thundered, “as well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated for the heart of man.”
What neither side admitted was that their respective arguments depended on a shared perception that no one lived in the Hetch Hetchy Valley., or that no had ever lived there. Its emptiness enabled dam supporters to conclude that the site would be perfect for a reservoir. Its emptiness, for those like Muir who pressed for the valley’s preservation, was a mark of its higher utility as pristine nature. Yet to conceive of this valley as devoid of people required two forms of erasure of the history and contemporary status of the Indigenous Peoples that their 1891 petition so brilliantly evoked.
The first erasure occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, when California and the United States governments sanctioned the violent expulsion of the Indigenous Peoples from the Sierras’s flanking valleys and foothills. The dispossession of the Miwok, Paiute, Shoshone, and others from their ancestral territories was an act of genocide, historian Benjamin Madley argues in American Genocide. He writes: the “pressures of demographics (the migration of hundreds of thousands of immigrants), economics (the largest gold rush in US history), and profound racial hatred all made the genocide possible, it took sustained political will—at both the federal and state levels—to create the laws, policies, and well-funded killing machine that carried it out and ensured its continuation over decades.”
The second erasure is embedded in the continuing and disquieting silence over the interlocking connection between the ruthless uprooting of Indigenous Peoples from the Yosemite region, the establishment of the national park, and the subsequent Hetch Hetchy controversy. Until that silence is broken, our understanding of the ongoing debate about the dam and reservoir will remain incomplete. This accounting is especially necessary because scholars and activists assert that the formative battle over the Hetch Hetchy dam marked the birth of the modern environmental movement in the United States. The assertion reveals a troubling and complicated story.
Muir was integral to each of these erasures. Consider his reflections that he jotted down in his journal after a hike up what he called Bloody Canyon in Mono County and then revised for publication in his book The Mountains of California 1894). Entering the pass, the “huge rocks began to close around in all their wild, mysterious impressiveness,” Muir wrote, “when suddenly, as I gazed eagerly about me, a drove of gray, hairy beings came into sight., lumbering toward with a kind of boneless, wallowing motion like bears.” Anxious about “so grim a company,” and suppressing his fears, he realized “that although hairy as bears and as crooked as summit pines, the strange creatures were sufficiently erect to belong to our own species.” He was hiking up a trail that the Mono and other Indigenous Peoples had worn smooth over the millennia, transiting between the Mono and Owens basins and Yosemite and the valleys below. His disdain for these men and women shows throughout his descriptions, such as, “the dirt on their faces was fairly stratified and seemed so ancient and so undisturbed it might almost possess a geological significance.” To Muir they belonged to a distant time, and befouled his wilderness. “Somehow they seemed to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down the pass.”
The larger settler-colonial culture adopted his perspective and, whether Indigenous Peoples were forced out of Yosemite by force of arms or the scratch of a pen, a key consequence was that this “empty” terrain was ripe for commercial exploitation. Tourism to the region, enabled by a growing cross-continental transportation grid, and the growth of San Francisco and Los Angeles, was fueled by artists and photographers who visited the region a decade or more before Muir’s arrival there in 1868. James Mason Hutchings, who hired Muir to work at his Yosemite hotel, was a relentless promoter. He drew a swelling number of artists, scientists, and tourists to make the arduous journey to the remote location through his publication of tour guides, lithographs, and magazine articles about Yosemite’s wonders and curiosities. Many of these visitors recounted their experiences in the rough and wild space, some published, others not. However manifest, these documents reinforced the cultural conversation about what they perceived to be Yosemite’s prime value—a beneficent refuge in an industrializing world, where you could escape civilization, and yet have its amenities.
The sanctuary status was one of the key arguments that Muir and others developed in the early twentieth century against the city of San Francisco and its political allies who laid claim to the Hetch Hetchy Valley inside what became Yosemite National Park. The thrust and counterthrust manifested in a series of congressional hearings, in the pages of many of the nation’s leading magazines and newspapers, and in oft angry speeches. The fierce debate testifies to the centrality of a valley that few Americans had ever visited. Even though San Francisco’s interests prevailed, and the O’Shaughnessy Dam and its steep-walled reservoir that funnels potable water to the Bay Area was built, the controversy continues to simmer. Beginning in the 1980s, an odd coalition of Republican state and national politicians and the Sierra Club and its allies periodically call into question San Francisco’s reliance on the reservoir and urge the federal government to tear down the dam and restore the long-submerged valley.
Yet any resolution of this enduring latest struggle to define the future of Hetch Hetchy, and by extension Yosemite, must start by prioritizing what hitherto has been ignored. Novelist, historian, and activist David Treuer writes, “America’s national parks comprise only a small fraction of the land stolen from Native Americans, but they loom large in the broader story of our dispossession.” His pithy conclusion—”the American West began with war but concluded with parks”—is mirrored in the Yosemite Indigenous Peoples’ claims asserted in the 1891 petition: “We say this valley was not given to us by our fathers for a day, or a year, but for all time.”
Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College and the director of the Claremont Colleges‘ environmental analysis program.
Adapted from The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California, by Andrew Garrett, published by The MIT Press (to appear in 2023).
It rained for ten days in late February and early March 1911. “Enough Water to Last All Summer” was the Sacramento Bee headline.[1] Juan Dolores was stuck inside, unable to do the work that had brought him to the state capital. Instead, he spent 14 hours a day writing out a story in O’odham, the Indigenous language of his childhood, family, and people in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. Writing all 2,873 words took him seven days; a precise English translation took two more. He finished at 11 pm, went to bed, and dreamed about translating O’odham.
Dolores described his dream in a letter: “I saw words appearing on the wall, like [a] moving picture show. First a word would go clear across the wall and then automatically arrange itself into two or three words. Sometimes there would be only one letter and under it, would be two or three English words. When I awoke, I said this is no dream. It is the correct way of writing the Indian language.” He emphasized the semantic complexity of O’odham: “I have to write t[w]o or three English words for one Indian word.”[2]
The story Juan Dolores finished writing in March 1911 was one of dozens that he wrote and rewrote in a lifetime devoted to documenting the O’odham language.[3] When he died in 1948, he left thousands of manuscript pages and over 60 sound recordings of his own voice and the voices of elders he recorded. Dolores was “the first writer of his people’s legends,” to quote a later romanticized formulation, and he did write many creation stories (“legends”).[4] He also transcribed oratory, vocabulary, the autobiographies of elders, the words of songs and what they signify, and a memoir of his Arizona childhood in the 1880s and 1890s. For four decades from 1909 to 1948, he did most of this language work as a University of California researcher and museum employee.
The University of California does not memorialize such details, but Dolores may have been its first Indigenous employee. He was almost certainly its first Indigenous researcher. Yet though he is well known to O’odham people in Arizona, in Berkeley he is almost forgotten. His career and life reveal the challenges facing an Indigenous scholar and writer within the academy in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as his profound achievements in the face of such challenges.
Dolores was born about 1880 on the Mexican side of the border dividing a transnational O’odham community. His parents moved the family to the US, where Dolores enrolled in government schools in Arizona and Colorado.[5] In 1898, he entered the Hampton Institute, a primarily Black college in Virginia, graduating in 1901 and continuing for a year in a postgraduate course. In his last student years, Dolores showed his aptitude as a writer, publishing a short creation story (a “legend”) in TheIndian Advance and a valedictory perspective, “As an Indian Sees It,” in the Hampton Institute’s monthly magazine.[6]
Juan Dolores considering a croquet shot in a “championship game,” St. Helena, 1932. A. L. Kroeber Family Photographs, BANC PIC 1978.12, ALB v. 4, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
In 1901, Dolores spoke at the Nineteenth Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, a meeting of white philanthropists who thought they knew what was best for Indigenous people. His speech recounted the words of an O’odham elder who had asked: “What is that thought so great and so sacred that cannot be expressed in our own language, that we should seek to use the white man’s words?”[7] Credited to an elder rather than in his own persona, this was a polite rebuke of his hosts, who favored the assimilation of Indigenous people into Euro-American culture and the elimination of tribal authority. It was also a repudiation of language practices that brutalized children throughout the US, at schools whose students were taught Euro-American ways and severely disciplined if they spoke their languages.
Dolores had been one of those students. He did not know English when he first entered the Tucson Indian School. If students were overheard speaking an Indigenous language, he later wrote in his O’odham-language memoir, the teachers “would punish us with the mule whip, or would give us extra work, or would lock us up in the dark house.” But he channeled his linguistic commitment into subversive play. If a teacher happened to say an English word that sounded like O’odham, Dolores would whisper that to the other students. Ita tcitcivitak hepay ha’itcu sta’a’askima o’otamkatc, he wrote: “this was very funny in O’odham.” Sometimes one of the others “could not control herself and she would just burst out laughing. I was delighted. I was constantly listening for words that would sound funny in O’odham.”[8]
Dolores headed back west after his school years. Seasonal work as a teamster and skilled laborer took him to Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and California. It was in San Francisco that he met the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in 1909. The two men — one in his early thirties, the other a few years younger — had very different backgrounds but converging goals.
Kroeber, born in 1876 to a middle-class German-American family in New York, had come to the University of California in 1901 after finishing a Columbia University anthropology PhD. His central research mission was recording Indigenous languages and stories. Many aspects of culture interested him, but he had shifted to anthropology from literature and once said that his “actual work will always be literature.”[9] His main legacy a century later is the documentation of languages, speech, stories, and songs that Indigenous people in California and elsewhere shared in their work with him, his students, and his colleagues.
Like most contemporary Euro-Americans, Kroeber believed mistakenly that Native American cultures and languages were “dying” or even “extinct.” Recording them whenever possible was seen as urgent by some anthropologists and many Indigenous people themselves. Their purposes were not the same. Researchers like Kroeber thought Native languages and stories could make world culture more ecumenical and culturally tolerant, while Indigenous people understood that they were making records for their own communities.
Indigenous cultures did not die out, of course. Some languages remain vital, too, despite policies of language oppression in government schools. Others are in peril, with just a few elders who grew up with language in the home; or dormant, without speakers but with people who want to learn. Throughout California in 2023, as communities reclaim their languages and stories from archives, what prescient ancestors shared and wrote down a hundred years ago is given new life every day.
Kroeber knew that Indigenous people themselves, with the proper tools, could transcribe their own languages better than outsiders like himself. So part of his work included teaching Indigenous people how to write their languages — in Dolores’s case, the O’odham language he had been whipped for speaking in school. Together, Dolores and Kroeber worked out a quasi-phonetic spelling system for O’odham. With this, Dolores began what would be his life’s work.
Dolores’s employment was itinerant for many years.[10] The University of California hired him for O’odham language work with Kroeber in 1909 and 1911-13. According to UC records, he was first a regular “employee” (rather than a consultant or contractor) in April 1912. Until 1916 he worked for the UC anthropology museum in San Francisco, where his duties included public lectures on O’odham culture.[11] In 1918-19, he held a UC research fellowship to engage in linguistic fieldwork, recording O’odham elders in Arizona.
In 1926, Dolores returned permanently to university work. He had worked outside academia since 1919, but he had health problems as well as a strong desire to resume O’odham linguistic research. Toward the end of 1925, he was hospitalized in Los Angeles with chest pain and an infected foot. He used a cane after he left the hospital. “My speed is about that of a snail,” Dolores wrote with his usual dark humor. “A continuous strain through these five months has now deprived me of my good looks and all that is left of me is courage.”[12] Bruce Bryan, an archaeologist at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, told Dolores in February that he might be able to hire him in a month or so. Meanwhile, Dolores reported, “the pain inside of me got worse” and he used crutches for a while. He told Kroeber that he wanted to continue “that work I started with you some years ago” and that an O’odham dictionary “will give me something to do for a long time.” Otherwise, he lamented, “I shall have to sell shoestrings and chewing-gum for my living.”[13]
So it was that Dolores resumed full-time UC museum work for ten years beginning in 1926; in 1931, the anthropology museum moved from San Francisco to Berkeley. In 1936 and 1937, Dolores managed a government-funded research project at the University of Chicago, focusing on the lives of Mexican immigrants. He returned again to Berkeley and his museum job late in 1937, eventually retiring as a “senior preparator” a few weeks before his death in 1948.
The presence of an Indigenous scholar in conventionally white spaces fascinated newspapers and presumbly their readers. In 1911, the Dolores-Kroeber collaboration occasioned a San Francisco Examiner article steeped in dehumanizing language ideologies.[14] “Gestures are a part of [Dolores’s] speech,” the writer opined. “If he broke his arm he could not talk.” The O’odham language was said to express “common English thoughts” with comically long words. Only a month later, ironically, Dolores would recount his dream showing that two or three English words may correspond to one short O’odham word — precisely inverting the Examiner trope.
In 1927, a reporter found it newsworthy that an Indigenous person worked in a university museum.[15] Why, Dolores was asked, had he chosen the job? His answer demonstrates how effectively US acculturation policies had trapped many Indigenous people:
Indian life and customs as I knew them when a boy are more faithfully represented here in showcases than they are on the reservation. Nothing would suit me better than to live as my fathers lived, hunting and fishing and gathering fruit and berries. There is plenty of time for one to think then. But if I were to try to live that way now, I would be arrested for trespass or something.
American practices had removed Indigenous cultural heritage to museums, and kept Native people from living on their own land. Even those who had adopted new ways were subject to Euro-American whims:
I might possibly go back to Arizona and work on a piece of land I have fenced in there — my grandfather was one of the first men in our tribe to raise cattle under his own brand — but I have seen so many of my friends work for years on land and then be evicted by some court order or entanglement in titles, that I wouldn’t dare improve my piece for fear some white man would decide it was worth having.
These comments were quite candid for a medium that often celebrated white benevolence.
Even in 1935, it was national news when Dolores married Sylva Beyer, a UC anthropology graduate student. It made the front page in Oakland (“U.C. Co-ed and Indian Marry”) and Tucson (“Indian and White Woman Marry”).[16] The story ran in Minnesota, and the Oakland Tribune even published a follow-up.[17] Kroeber was the witness at a civil ceremony that was of broader interest only because it challenged assumptions about who belonged in elite spaces.
Dolores published four academic papers on his language. Two presented information about nouns and verbs, respectively; in another, for a volume in honor of Kroeber, he wrote about nicknames.[18] A fourth paper, co-authored with University of California anthropologist Lila O’Neale, was a novel study of O’odham color terminology, showing how it is embedded in its cultural and environmental contexts. As a person’s hair turns white, they wrote, there is a stage when “the head looks … like ground [saguaro] cactus seeds … The kernel is white, but the bits of crushed black shell in the mixture give the whole an appearance of gray, or skaima’ki” (in Dolores’s O’odham spelling).[19] This was two decades before cross-cultural differences in color naming became a prominent object of anthropological and linguistic study.
Dolores also tried to publish the O’odham stories he assembled over many years. Kroeber said his “new way of writing stories” in English might attract general interest, different as it was from the style of academics and “literary people” alike. “I will try to get them placed for you as a book under your own name,” he told Dolores in 1927.[20] He sent some to New York publishers, but nothing came of the attempt.
By 1947, Dolores had prepared a large set of O’odham stories and translations to submit as a scholarly monograph. He was concerned to include all his stories and “not let the little ones get left behind.”[21] He sent the manuscript to the series editor, Charles Voegelin of Indiana University, and continued to work on issues related to spelling. It was not until the month of Dolores’s death in 1948 that Voegelin finally decided not to publish the volume; apparently it was not academically rigorous enough for him.[22] Dolores had returned to Arizona and never found out.
Dolores also did not live to see the publication of an O’odham grammar based on his work. This was written by the linguist J. Alden Mason and published under Mason’s name. While acknowledged in the introduction, Dolores was not named as a co-author even though the book was almost entirely based on Dolores’s own collection of stories, shared with Mason in 1919. It was Dolores, too, who introduced Mason to O’odham people during the linguist’s only Arizona fieldwork, a trip of “a few weeks … to get some impression of the phonetics.”[23] It was common at the time for the intellectual labor of Indigenous collaborators to be deprecated as service or mere data production.
Mason never learned to speak or understand O’odham; he analyzed it through Dolores’s writing alone, as one might study Latin. Dolores had little respect for the man who was writing what they both assumed would be a major reference. “How does anybody know how to write a word unless he knows how that word is pronounced?” he asked in 1919.[24] Kroeber promised “to try to see to it that you get a crack at everything he does before publication.”[25]
Dolores also disagreed with Mason’s linguistic choices. The 1911 dream that showed Dolores “the correct way of writing” O’odham expressed a sense that its sentences had many small words. These include grammatical particles and pronouns that Mason chose to treat as parts of complex words. Partial English parallels are I’ll and wouldn’t’ve. Mason might have called each a single word; Dolores might have said they are two (I + ’ll) or three (would + n’t + ’ve). “Dr. Mason takes a whole phrase and calls it a word,” Dolores complained in 1920, “because he can’t understand why any part of an unpronounceable collection of syllables should have any special meaning.”
Juan Dolores, “The Wind and the Rain,” 1911 (selection). Ethnological Documents of the Department and Museum of Anthropology, 1875-1958. BANC FILM 2216, 134.1.5, p. 1, Banroft Library, UC Berkeley.
Most of all, Dolores was upset by Mason’s long delay in finishing the grammar. It was not a high priority to Mason amid other professional obligations, but to Dolores it was absolutely essential to see it completed. His letters to Kroeber reiterate his impatience as he waited for the indirect fruit of his own intellectual labor. Whatever Mason has done, he wrote in 1921, “I am sure is good enough to all who don’t know the [O’odham] language … I wish him good luck but more speed, so I can see the work finished before I depart to some other sphere.”[26]
A year later, he echoed this sentiment with characteristic irony: “My health is good, but my teeth are getting bad, and I suppose when I can’t eat, I can’t live. I must be nearing the time when I shall have to take a trip to some other planet, so hurry up Dr Mason, I want to see his work before I go.”[27] Tragically, it was not until 1950, two years after Dolores died, that the grammar based on his work saw the light of day. He never held it in his hands.
The whimsy in Dolores’s language dream and imagined interplanetary voyage was an enduring feature of his writing. In a May 1911 letter from Sacramento, he speculated about a Berkeley linguist formulating grammatical “rules” for O’odham:
Whoever makes the rules for the [O’odham] language, he or she must take into consideration the great difference in the climate of southern Ariz. and Berkeley. You see, I was thinking that many things which grow in Berkeley could not grow in southern Ariz. The climate I think could make anything grow in Berkeley, I believe, I grew some the time I was there. The hot weather has taken me back to about 150 lbs now. For this reason I am compelled to think very seriously, whether the rules now growing on the college grounds (there among the beautiful grass, trees, and flowers, and the nice sea breeze blowing over them every day) could not be too tender, and when exposed to that hot and dry climate of Ariz., get sun burned, change its color, [d]ry up, lose its flexibility, it[s] elasticity and break.[28]
Dolores’s fanciful comments about environment and grammar anticipated his disapproval of Mason’s knowledge of O’odham from writing alone, as well as his collaoration with O’Neale on the ecological context of O’odham color terms. To understand the language, it would be best to learn to speak it in the place it truly lived.
Later that year, Ishi walked into Oroville, California. Publicity surrounded a man who was luridly called a “wild Indian.”[29] Kroeber and his colleague T. T. Waterman both said the US should grant him land in his ancestral territory; newspapers predicted a treaty.[30] Dolores saw this and said he should hide in the mountains so white people could “find” him too. Then, he wrote, “tell [President] Taft or somebody, that they have to make a treaty with me. I think that will be the only way I can get some good place to stay the rest of my life.”[31]Whimsy could not mask the need so many Indigenous people had for their land back.
Wherever he found himself, Dolores was linguistically aware. In 1914, he and his brother were working in Los Angeles together with two young O’odham men. “We have a tent by ourselves,” he told Kroeber, “and in the evenings we tell to one another the funny things our people used to do, and what they used to say.” One of the young men spoke the Akimel O’odham dialect, called “Pima” at the time. “When the Pima boy speaks,” Dolores wrote, “I nearly always laugh at him; not because he always tells a funny story, but I laugh at the way he expresses himself. I have not heard the Pima language for a long time, and it sounds funny to me.”[32] The pleasure that Dolores’s language gave him is a recurring theme in his writing.
Dolores returned to his own land with university support during his research fellowship year, 1918-19, recording the speech (and songs) of O’odham elders. Even then, his correspondence highlights the clash between his employers’ assumptions and Indigenous realities. To reimburse a researcher for expenses incurred, university procedures (then and now) require receipts. The acting museum head asked, “Will it not be possible for you to obtain the receipt for the $3.00 you paid for the two stories, and for the $1.50 for the saddle?”[33] In a letter from November 1918, Dolores explained how inappropriate this would be:
The people who came through San Xavier are some relations to me, and they let me have the saddle horse to Tucson. They charged me nothing, but I gave them the $1.50. I thought that this was right; I might need their help again out in the desert. … I did not ask anybody to sign a voucher, because by that act the thing freely given becomes a different thing altogether. The $1.50 which I gave is not the value of the service to me. It only shows to my friends that I am as willing to give any help that I can. I might go on and make a longer explanation which I think will not do me any good; so charge the $1.50 to me.[34]
People who insist on signatures may be “looked upon now,” he added, “as we look upon a German spy.” More generally, a Euro-American assumption (then and, all too often, now) was that research in Native communities is transactional — money for knowledge. Dolores knew better. Indigenous community-based research is relational, and succeeds only in the context of healthy, mutually supportive relationships.
Writing to Kroeber in 1920, Dolores spun out a fantasy of O’odham language collaboration under the stars:
Some day when we are all well, I’ll build a house and then I’ll send you that invitation. I am in no hurry about building that house, and if you want to come out next summer I’ll find somebody to board us, and we’ll sleep in the open, look at the stars, and talk [O’odham] until your tongue gets tired flying up and down trying to make that t [sound] … In day times, when you are not working on the [O’odham] language, it will be a good exercise to go out and help me chop trees, dig stumps, or if it rains we’ll plant corn, beans and do all kinds of stunts you never done before. While doing the above named exercises, we will at the same time puzzle out the meanings of [O’odham] phrases.[35]
The first sentence alludes to long-term health problems. These included tooth pain; and Dolores’s 1925 hospitalization was mentioned above. In 1940, a workplace fall damaged a shoulder and caused permanent loss of vision in one eye. Worse still, in November 1947, the elderly Dolores was beaten up, robbed, and left unconscious outside his Oakland apartment. Doctors suspected traumatic brain injury, though Dolores “seemed cheerful.”[36] From this assault he never fully recovered.
After Kroeber married Theodora Kracaw Brown in 1926, Dolores grew close to their whole family. He had a weekly dinner invitation at their Berkeley home and spent his vacation every year with them at their summer house. Their daughter, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin, recalled that “Juan — a killer croquet player — always got there in time for his birthday” at the end of June.[37]Dolores gave Christmas presents to the children, like a bow and arrows to four-year-old Karl in 1930. “I hope he’ll not be trying to shoot his play mates,” Dolores wrote. “The arrows have no points but I imagine Carl will not be hunting mountain lions and the arrows will be good enough to play with.”[38]
Juan Dolores, 1911. Photo by J. Alden Mason, A. L. Kroeber Family Photographs, BANC PIC 1978.12, Box 1, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
Le Guin also remembered Dolores’s first vacation with her family, in 1931, “the summer I learned to walk.” She would “stagger” over to him and ask him to walk with her:
And whatever he was doing, writing or reading or talking or working, Juan would excuse himself and gravely accompany me across the yard and up the driveway on a great journey of a hundred yards or so, I holding on to him by one finger. . . . I know which finger it was, the first of his left hand, a strong, thick, dark finger that entirely and warmly filled my hand.
Those who knew Dolores well were aware of how important his relationship with Kroeber was. At the end of Dolores’s short marriage to Silva Beyer, who lived with him in Chicago in 1935-37, she told Kroeber that “you . . . are far more significant to him than I had become.”[39] And Dolores’s niece Rosaria Vavages wrote Kroeber in April 1947 that her uncle “has told me a lot about you and your family [and] how he feels that your family is his family too.”[40]
Juan Dolores died on July 19, 1948, in Vamori, Arizona in the Tohono O’odham Nation. He had left Berkeley for the last time when he retired at the end of June. He reached Tucson “a very sick man,” his niece said. He hardly ate, but every day he “dragged himself to the park,” which was cooler than the house and his room (“just like an oven”). [41] He would not let her call a doctor, insisting instead that he be taken to Vamori, where he could be buried near his brother and sister. Dolores had lived almost all his life away from O’odham land, but wanted to be home with his family. He asked his niece to tell his Berkeley colleagues that she should receive his pension, and to send Kroeber all the manuscripts he had brought with him in retirement.
Dolores’s O’odham manuscripts record language, stories, and songs. He added many details about language and the contexts and meaning of what he recorded. One 60-page story is followed by six pages of notes like this: “The race track is that open space, under the mountain, on the west side. There are no trees on this land, and [it] is level. The distance is about 50 mi[les] or more.”[42] A song transcript comments that a word meaning “Come along” is used “only in baby language.” In the song, the earth doctor is “speaking to the earth as if it is his child, holding it by the hand [as] he pull[s] it along, saying Come along.”[43] Dolores’s writing includes histories and speeches, biography and geography. As a whole, it comprises an O’odham cultural atlas from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Dolores’s manuscripts have been scattered over the decades and are now housed in archives in Berkeley, Tucson, and Philadelphia.[44] His memoir has appeared under his name; many of his stories are in a volume assembled by others who acknowledged his contributions but did not credit him as an author.[45] While some of his writing has been brought home, much awaits the reclamation he surely desired. Almost five decades passed from his student essays to his last work, but Juan Dolores, the “gentle, intellectual man, living in exile and poverty” that Le Guin saw in memory, never lost sight of how land and language would strengthen his people.
SOURCES
[1] “Enough Water to Last All Summer,” Sacramento Bee, March 2, 1911: 3.
[2] Dolores to Alfred Kroeber, March 16, 1911, Records of the Department of Anthropology, CU-23, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Box 11.
[3] Like others at the time, Dolores always called his language “Papago” in English. This term is now often seen as a slur, so I have replaced it throughout with “O’odham.”
[4] For the quotation see Dean Saxton and Lucille Saxton, O’othham Hoho’ok A’agitha: Legends and Lore of the Papago and Pima Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1973), iii.
[5] Before the Hampton Institute, Dolores spent four years at the Teller Institute in Grand Junction, Colorado: Dolores to Kroeber, December 22, 1925, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49. For brief accounts of Dolores’s life, see A. L. Kroeber, “Juan Dolores, 1880-1948,” American Anthropologist 51 (1949): 96-97, and Juan Dolores and Madeleine Mathiot, “The Reminiscences of Juan Dolores, an Early O’odham linguist,” Anthropological Linguistics 33 (1991): 233-35.
[6] J. M. Lolorias, “The Last Great War,” The Indian Advance 2/8 (April 1, 1901): 4; John Miguel Lolorias, “As an Indian Sees It,” The Southern Workman 31/9 (1902) 476-80. “Lolorias” was an Anglicization of the O’odham pronunciation of “Dolores.”
[7] John Lolorias, “Address,” Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, 1901, ed. Isabel C. Barrows (New York: Lake Mohonk Conference, 1902), 76-77.
[8] Dolores and Mathiot, “The Reminiscences of Juan Dolores” (n. 5 above): 294, 309, 312-13.
[9] Letter to Edward Sapir, November 4, 1917, in Victor Golla, ed., The Sapir-Kroeber Correspondence: Letters Between Edward Sapir and A. L. Kroeber, 1905 – 1925 (Berkeley: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley), 260.
[10] Documents relating to Dolores’s university employment are in Records (n. 2 above), Box 16.
[11] “Indian to Lecture Here,” San Francisco Examiner, November 21, 1911: 2.
[12] Dolores to Kroeber, December 22, 1925, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.
[13] Dolores to Kroeber, February 25, 1926, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.
[14] “Juan, Indian, Defies Alphabet,” San Francisco Examiner, February 3, 1911: 3.
[15] “Indian Guards U.C. Relics of Fathers,” The Ripon Record, May 6, 1927: 5.
[16] “U.C. Co-ed and Indian Marry,” Oakland Tribune, November 20, 1935: 1; “Papago Indian and White Woman Marry,” Arizona Daily Star, November 21, 1935: 1.
[17] “Indian’s Bride to Teach at Chicago,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, November 26, 1935, p. 10; “Indian’s Bride to Help Him Write Book,” Oakland Tribune, November 21, 1935: 21.
[18] Juan Dolores, “Papago Verb Stems,” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 10 (1913): 241-63; Juan Dolores, “Papago Nominal Stems,” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 20 (1923): 19-31; Juan Dolores, “Papago Nicknames,” in Essays in Anthropology in Honor of A. L. Kroeber in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday, June 11, 1936, ed. Robert H. Lowie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 45-47.
[19] Lila M. O’Neale and Juan Dolores, “Notes on Papago Color Designations,” American Anthropologist 45 (1943): 394.
[20] Kroeber to Dolores, April 16, 1927, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.
[21] Dolores to Kroeber, July 26, 1947, A. L. Kroeber Papers, BANC MSS C-B 925, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Box 13:15.
[22] Voegelin to Kroeber, July 9, 1948, Ethnological Documents of the Department and Museum of Anthropology, BANC FILM 2216, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, 134.8.1.
[23] J. Alden Mason, The Language of the Papago of Arizona (Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1950), 3.
[24] Dolores to Kroeber, December 26, 1919, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.
[25] Kroeber to Dolores, March 9, 1920, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.
[26] Dolores to Kroeber, August 23, 1921, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.
[27] Dolores to Kroeber, October 31, 1922, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.
[28] Dolores to Kroeber, May 10, 1911, Records (n. 2 above), Box 11.
[29] On Ishi, see chapter 7 of Garrett, Unnaming of Kroeber Hall (first note above), and references cited there.
[30] “First Train Ride for Nogi Indian,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 5, 1911: 3; “President and Senate to Make Treaty with Aborigine,” Oroville Daily Register, September 4, 1911: 1.
[31] Dolores to Kroeber, September 10, 1911, Records (n. 2 above), Box 11.
[32] Dolores to Kroeber, January 4, 1914, Records (n. 2 above), Box 16.
[33] E. W. Gifford to Dolores, October 30, 1918, Records (n. 2 above), Box 16.
[34] Dolores to Gifford, November 3, 1918, Records (n. 2 above), Box 16.
[35] Dolores to Kroeber, August 2, 1920, Records (n. 2 above), Box 16.
[36] Theodore Kroeber to Alfred Kroeber, November 15, 1947, Theodora Kroeber Quinn Papers, AA-15, Arizona State Museum Library, University of Arizona.
[37] This and subsequent quotations from Ursula K. Le Guin are to The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (Boston: Shambala, 2004), 14-17.
[38] Dolores to Kroeber, December 22, 1930, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.
[39] Beyer to Kroeber, June 15, 1937, Kroeber Papers (n. 21 above), Box 13:16.
[40] Vavages to Kroeber, April 16, 1947, Kroeber Quinn Papers (n. 36 above).
[41] Vavages to Kroeber, July 22, 1948, Kroeber Quinn Papers (n. 36 above).
[42] Ethnological Documents (n. 22 above), 134.1.15, p. 62.
[43] Ethnological Documents (n. 22 above), 134.4E.
[44] In Berkeley, they are in the Ethnological Documents (n. 22 above); in Tucson, they are in the Kroeber Quinn Papers (n. 36 above); in Philadelphia, they are in the John Alden Mason Papers, Mss.B.M384, American Philosophical Society Library.
[45] Dolores and Mathiot, “The Reminiscences of Juan Dolores” (n. 5 above); Saxton and Saxton, O’othham Hoho’ok A’agitha (n. 4 above).
Andrew Garrett is a professor of linguistics and the Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also director of the California Language Archive.
Kinship and Cultural Resistance to Environmental Racism in Avocado Heights, California
On December 13, 2022, Quemetco, Inc. (also known as Ecobat), a battery smelter in City of Industry, California, agreed to pay $2.3 million in a civil settlement litigation brought on by the Department of Toxic and Substances Control (DTSC). Along with committing to infrastructural corrective measures and an acknowledgement of violations, Quemetco will distribute $1.5 million to DTSC in civil penalties and $575,000, split between two local environmental justice projects. While this is the largest settlement yet for Quemetco, it has a long history of neglect and contamination in San Gabriel Valley, California, and even globally.
Quemetco, operating at this location since 1959 as Western Lead Producers, recovers lead from automobile batteries and other miscellaneous lead scrap materials. Currently processing over a million pounds of batteries per day (600 tons), it operates seven days per week, 24 hours per day, though the furnaces “may” operate 16-20 hours per day.1 Their chief pollutants are arsenic, lead, benzene, 1,3-butadiene, and nitrogen oxides (NOx); arsenic being the highest contributor to the health, degradation, and risk of the community.2
Quemetco traces to previous and infamous environmental disasters such as The Stringfellow Acid Pits.3 This toxic waste dump located in Jurupa Valley, California became the center of national news coverage in the early 1980s, when it was considered one of the most polluted sites in California and one of the origin cases in environmental justice discourse.4 During Stringfellow’s 16 years of operation, 34 million gallons (about 128703940 L) plus of liquid waste was deposited in evaporation ponds and between 1969 and 1980 poor weather and management resulted in several spills and intentional releases of toxic chemicals into local creeks and storm channels. It was found that Quemetco dumped the tenth largest volume of toxic waste at these acid pits. From 1956-72, under the name Western Lead Producers, Quemetco dumped one million gallons of toxic waste.5
Text from United States v. Stringfellow, 661 F. Supp. 1053, 1061, 17 ELR 21134 (C.D. Cal. 1987), 11
For decades, ambient lead measurements in neighborhoods near Quemetco reflect levels far above the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) with the maximum individual cancer risks modeled at 33.4 ppm. Reports by the DTSC in 1992 and 2006, along with an independent CAC (Clean Air Coalition) and USC Department of Environmental Health surveys conducted in 2016 show on average that most residential houses within a two-mile radius harbor around 117 ppm.6 The highest concentration in Avocado Heights was 2,427 ppm.7
Since 1991, Quemetco and state regulatory agencies knew 8 However, no cleanup was conducted as a result. DTSC “excoriated Quemetco in a 2014 memorandum,” writing how “more often than not, Quemetco is not in compliance with the provisions in their General Permit.”9 A serial violator, Quemetco has also been issued with multiple violations over the years, for problems such as illegally storing hazardous waste and delaying rebuilds of eroding (corroding) infrastructure.
Quemetco failed to comply with various conditions including a 2005 general permit.10 Since their 2013 draft report, DTSC has not approved of the plans to monitor gas, liquid, and surface water discharge. Reporter Daniel Ross in an article on Truthout writes, “The Department of Toxic Substances Control has fallen down badly on its job of protecting the public from toxic harm.” In 2014, DTSC representatives wrote, “Quemetco appears to have been consistently discharging elevated levels of lead” into the San Jose Creek, which runs contiguous with the plant. The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board issued letters in 2010 and 2015 stating they were “exceeding the benchmark values for lead, zinc, pH and specific conductance.” While soil and air pollution are serious matters, water is another level. The “EPA has set the maximum contaminant level goal for lead in drinking water at zero,” thus any violation concerning water poses an immediate and dire risk for public and environmental health.11
Over the years, while the lead leakage diminished, emissions are regular. Arsenic, benzene, 1,3-butadiene, remain a constant. In fact, 1,3-butadiene appears to be increasing.12 Mitigation means little when it comes to contamination. With the arsenic plume of 2013 and all the other carcinogenic metals leaching into the soil, plants, animals, water, and air over the years, the damage is done. Arsenic and lead, among so many toxic metals, stay in the soil for thousands of years.
Video of Quemetco: Courtesy of Avocado Heights Vaquer@s
Quemetco was also linked to the transportation of waste material to Exide in Vernon, California before its closure. Exide Technologies was one of two west coast battery smelters before it went bankrupt in 2020 due to the resistance efforts of East Yards Communities for Environmental Justice. Quemetco consistently denies affiliation with Exide, but a DTSC 2020 lawsuit reveals an irrefutable working relationship between Quemetco and Exide over at least twenty-seven years.13 Quemetco has a history of negligent and reckless behavior in arranging and transporting caustic material with lack of regard or concern for neighborhood residents. Coincidentally, Quemetco was in favor of Exide’s closure so that it could eliminate any competition.14
Quemetco’s footprint not only affects local communities but has state, national, and global reach. All these batteries, despite Quemetco’s claims, arrive from local as well as international sources.15 Ecobat, their parent company, has extraction operations in South Africa and South America, with distribution centers and smelters in Europe. It is important to remember that the lead is made into ingots to be sold again. Quemetco is not a public service offering responsible recycling options for batteries. It is a multinational extraction-based business designed for profit.
After three years of relative quiet, in 2022, Quemetco emerged with an application to expand their facility by 25 percent (from 600 tons to 750 tons of lead-material per day).16 In a neighboring unincorporated town, Avocado Heights, California, a group called Avocado Heights Vaquer@s (AHV) are fighting back. Avocado Heights, with 80 percent of the population from Mexico—most from Jalisco or Zacatecas—is a unique equestrian district in San Gabriel Valley with a community of parcels between a half-acre to an acre, containing lots large enough to have seven horses each and run small agricultural business. Until recently, Avocado Heights was working class, however, given the scarcity of large parcels within Los Angeles County they are constantly at war with developers hoping to flip properties, in combination with warehouses and manufacturing developments that are zealous to convert zoning ordinances. Yet even more horrifying, due to Avocado Height’s proximity to the City of Industry, environmental degradation, pollution, and contamination has adverse effects on the community as private and public surveys prove a higher frequency of respiratory problems such as asthma and rare cancer.
(Red indicates 90-100 percentile [highest score], orange indicates 80-90 percentile, and yellow indicates 70-80 percentile. Click on a census tract to learn more about the CalEnviroScreen scores. CalEnviroScreen scores are calculated by the scores of Pollution Burden and Population Characteristics. CalEnviroScreen provides a report with detailed description of indicators and methodology and downloadable results available at CalEnviroScreen 4.0 website.)
Founded in January of 2022, AHV became a serious force within the region, not only fostering support and fighting the expansion of Quemetco, but joining regional coalitions to protect communities of color. Following the legacies of activists in the area who shut down the Exide battery recycling plant and the La Puente Landfill, AHV, “works towards the remediation, preservation, and expansion of air, waterway, and wildlife corridors that will serve our community and future generations as a network of vibrant uninterrupted ecosystems we can access and care for as environmental stewards.” They are organizers who believe that natural environmental spaces can coexist and thrive alongside equestrians, hikers, and cyclists, as educational community spaces for recreation. They are also members of the CAC and participate in other regional coalitions who are dedicated to shutting down Quemetco and fighting developers that want to convert agricultural and equestrian zoned parcels into manufacturing warehouses, reclamation facilities, and industries.
One of the founding members of AHV joins Boom California to discuss the connections between cultural sovereignty, environmental racism, and activism. As with many disruptive environmental justice efforts across California, AHV members face serious legal and personal threats, thus the interviewee will remain anonymous.
Boom
Can you tell us a bit about Avocado Heights and what makes it unique?
AHV
What makes Avocado Heights unique is its rural aspect, and that it has an equestrian culture. It is past East LA, in the San Gabriel Valley, not too far from Los Angeles, in a suburban and industrial area. Even though we’re surrounded by lots of factories, the neighborhood is small and feels tightknit. You’ll walk your dog or go on a stroll and see people on horses, people walking ponies, or training little foals. There are even goats and chickens and roosters here. It’s beautiful, in that sense.
Close ties between neighbors and friends make this the closest thing to a pueblo I’ve experienced. Each day I am reminded why spaces like this are important. These are spaces reminiscent of the rancherias in rural Mexico where a freshly groomed horse and polished leather saddle still carry cachet among locals–where a rag tag group of teens on borrowed horses meander aimlessly stringing along stories to keep entertained.
Strolls in Avocado Heights become visits, usually there’s an invitation to share a beer and catch up. It’s the place where a lazy Sunday quickly transforms into an impromptu outdoor picnic with friends who might be fully engrossed in a volleyball tournament or karaoke duel. The park is our zocalo (the Jardin minus the kiosk). Our equestrian arena with white picket fence attracts throngs of spectators. Kids battle it out shooting hoops while an elotero takes a moment to rest before making another round past the baseball diamond which also doubles as a soccer field.
Kelly, Howard D, “Avocado Heights, 4th Avenue and 3rd Avenue, looking northeast,” 1955, Los Angeles Public Library
Young couples walk towards the edge of the park before lounging for hours on the sloped hill. A group of friends enjoy mariscos from the lonchera fresh off a shift at one of the thousands of warehouses in the City of Industry and ruminate on the adventures that await them. Further off in the distance, admirers narrate which horses they like best and make note of which maneuvers impress them most. Nearby, a washed-up gangster lays flat across the grass and he’s coming off a bender. You recognize him a little, he was someone you went to middle school with.
Sometimes you’ll hear folks refer to this place as North Whittier, Bassett, or La Puente. But for most of us, we prefer Avocado Heights after the massive avocado orchards that were first planted in the 1910’s when this tract was being billed to investors from Los Angeles as a lucrative investment. The area was called la Fortuna Farms, hoping this would generate interest and entice buyers. The land was later acquired by Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, a creditor who acquired the land as collateral after the markets crashed in the 1870s which drove previous landowning family patriarch William Workman to commit suicide.
Boom
Can you explain further what it means to be an equestrian district in Avocado Heights?
AHV
There are two parks in the community. One gets more use because of the skatepark. But the other park, Avocado Heights Park, is also a central hub, where all the vaqueros and vaqueras congregate. And on the weekends, or around special holidays, you’ll hear music. Hundreds of people will gather. You see people selling various products specific to the region. So, I think the equestrian aspect, it’s important for the community and the environment as well.
The park is especially nice during the subtle chill of pre-Santa Ana winds, where you might find a horse steaming from its sweat as the charros lasso large circles above and around them. They intricately weave ritualistic patterns with the riata while a team of escaramuzas inside the round metal pen gallop diagonally towards each other in a circle before executing a full 180 and dispersing in such quick succession that the floating dust still hangs along the wind.
We’re near the Avocado Heights equestrian trail which connects with the San Jose Creek trail. We could connect on horseback all the way to Azusa, down towards the beach, or hit the Puente Hills and ride towards Chino Hills. A lot of vaqueros and vaqueras will go horse-riding throughout the week, but especially on the weekends, they’ll do the trail rides. It’s so important that we’re mindful and conscious of the environment because it directly impacts everyone in the community. At this juncture, we’re interested in expanding public access to wildlife corridors or greenways, improving multi-use trails in our communities, and shaping development projects to offset adverse environmental impacts and to work towards a more resilient ecological system locally.
(Yellow line indicates LA County DPR Trails. Click on the trail to discover information on trail use and access)
Boom
You have illustrated how the story of avocado heights is a story of land. Between today and the evolution of Avocado Heights into Anglo-American settler history, rampant development and the encroachment of manufacturing facilities advanced in the 1970s, a period in which Avocado Heights increasingly faced serious threats to its cultural sovereignty and environment. In 1982, Benjamin Chavis coined the term “environmental racism” to signify the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities. Do you think this is an appropriate term to apply to Avocado Heights and if so, would you elaborate on the scale of the issue?
AHV
I think that is an appropriate term. This past winter, a developer was in escrow with a private Christian university that goes by the name: Latin American Bible Institute. They were trying to sell to this developer who was going to build storage units or an industrial manufacturing warehouse. We got activated and we came together. We were loud. We’re like, “No! We will not be okay with this!” It’s something that has affected the community and continues to do so.
Ever since we were children, nearby, there was a the La Puente Landfill. Avocado Heights is really close to City of Industry, La Puente, Bassett and North Whittier, which allowed for established coalitions, like Clean Air Coalition, to help put a stop to the landfill which significantly polluted the environment. People, members of that organization, also fought against the Athens Waste Facility: A big trash processing company near Valley Blvd. Because of them, and the City of Industry, there are a lot of big rigs. There is a lot of traffic and congestion in that area. The City of Industry has a plastic factory and companies like Goya, which you can smell, and which populate the neighborhood with their big rigs. Think of all the carbon and air pollution they emit. Then you consider the ambient, heavy metals they produce. These metals leech into our waterways and bed into our soil. This water is for drinking. Plants and animals depend on this water. The metals remain in the soil for thousands of years. All this industry, and the freeways, grip the borders of our unincorporated town.
But our current and greatest antagonist, in my opinion, is Quemetco, which now goes by Ecobat. Quemetco has been around for decades operating as an extraordinarily reckless toxic battery recycling facility. Quemetco’s contaminating our air, soil, our water, releasing harmful chemicals into our environment, such as lead, arsenic, benzene, cadmium, and other heavy metals. But it’s a powerful multinational corperation with millions, if not billions of dollars, so they’re very good at covering their tracks or paying fees. They’ve made it abundantly clear that they don’t really care about our community. Why would they? They’re profiting, they have their business, and they don’t have our best interests at heart. Aside from a few postcards in the mail, they reach out to other commercial zones, like Hope City, to buffer their optics.
They’re not going to do things like comprehensive soil sampling, which is why we must work hard, even though we’re a small collective. I’d say everyone is really dedicated, and we’re working with other people who are like-minded. We work with Clean Air Coalition or Active SGV or other environmental organizations that care about public health and want to fight against environmental racism.
Boom
Considering that you participate in several local coalitions, what do you think defines Avocado Heights Vaquer@s, differentiates it from these other groups?
AHV
A few things. Number one, in Avocado Heights, there hadn’t been organizing to the degree in which we do it. There are a lot of environmental and social justice groups in the San Gabriel Valley. There are some in La Puente and even Hacienda Heights. I don’t want to generalize, but some of them are very hierarchical or they’re not focused on meeting the needs of their community. There hadn’t been an organization in Avocado Heights, except the Clean Air Coalition. But that still wasn’t entirely representative of Avocado Heights itself, given that their base was in North Whittier. Their aims, while aligned with ours in many ways, differ.
What makes Avocado Heights Vaquer@s different is the focus on family, or kinship, in our neighborhood. That’s what remains so special about our community. We help each other out. You see a neighbor in need, and you come. I was struggling another day with a horse, freaking out because the horse was stuck, and someone nearby came and helped me out. You see that here. In certain other neighborhoods you don’t. There’s a genuine authenticity, and I think that is part of it too, that cultural aspect where people from small little communities in Mexico bring these common traditions and customs to Avocado Heights. It’s a place where people who are from Mexico can come and feel comfortable. They’re like, “Oh, yeah, hey, this is how we do it in my pueblo!”
Our family helps us out. If we are throwing an event, they’ll be there as much as possible, and they will support us. And I think that’s very special. We’re not a nonprofit. We don’t get money. We don’t have all the resources that a lot of other organizations have.
Courtesy of Avocado Heights Vaquer@s
Boom
Do you think there’s some part of the vaquero and vaquera culture that allows you to be unique stewards of the land, one that offers a new approach to environmentalism?
AHV
Organizing should also be fun as well as rigorous because otherwise people burn out and can get tired of always having to protest. Aside from that, I think nowadays, because of global warming and activism and social media, there’s this consciousness of: “We got to protect our environment. We got to get involved.”I hate to use the word trendy, it’s not a good word to use to describe caring about the environment, but in a way, it is. Certain people have cared about the environment for many, many generations before it’s become a hashtag.
And part of it starts with our family, starts with your ancestors, starts with your traditions. I know when I go to indigenous spaces such as powwows, there’s an acknowledgment of Mother Earth. When it comes to land, our practice is to not take more than what you need. The honorable harvest: if you take something you give back. You use every single part of the animal because nothing should be wasted. In parts of Mexico, where my mom’s from, it’s that same kind of consciousness. It’s not like the way we think of environmentalism now. We are really paying attention to the stories, anecdotes, and wisdom of my mom’s teaching, or my grandmother’s. They were always mindful of the land. It was natural. That’s how they grew up.
Boom
Are there certain goals that AHV are attempting to achieve in the near or distant future, or is it more a processual, reactive type of process?
AHV
I think it’s both. Part of it is that we absorb ourselves in projects that really call our attention or that we see commonalities. We consider whether it is an issue that a neighboring community resonates with us. We’ve talked to people who’ve done soil sampling before—such as with East Yards and their fight to shutdown Exide—people who already have this wisdom. And we’ve also worked with the Coalition Against Lennar fighting the developer mentioned before, because it’s about public land. They’re taking away land to build condos.
We are a little reactionary, but in the long term we are just making sure that we protect our community, protect our neighborhood. We want to see more green spaces and spaces that are good for our environment, youth, and animals.
Ultimately, and I know this is going to be hard, but we need to shut down Quemetco. It’s sad that it’s still around and it’s so harmful, and if it’s still there, it’s going to continue polluting our community even if they say, “Oh, we’re adding this filter… or over-monitoring… or a little lead is not that bad…” NO! Any quantity of lead is too much. Our health is in serious jeopardy because of it. But there are other factories involved. It’s all connected. I think Quemetco is a big one that we obviously must address, but there are other factories.
Boom
Lastly, is this an open group? If not, what are the ways that people (who are interested or believe in this type of cause or form of justice) within the area can either join, participate, or support the organization?
AHV
Yeah, so that’s interesting. It’s something that we reflected on in our last meeting. At first, I think we always saw ourselves as an open group. We don’t want to be exclusive. But we had to reevaluate. Of course, it’s still open in the sense that we want to have support our actions and public-facing events. We need this form of support and solidarity. That’s the crucial thing about doing coalition-building. Through social media networking nowadays or supporting other groups, they’ll turn around and support you.
There’s nothing wrong with just being a little bit smaller, too. We don’t need a lot of people. The agency and identity, and even sovereignty, of our group is important to remember and value as well. The people brought in from the outside can jeopardize the core and spirit of the group. If someone is really interested, of course, we’re not going to turn them away. But I think what’s important is just having people who you can rely on and trust because it’s not a small endeavor going against big companies and companies that have lots of well-paid lawyers. There is also a community, real people, and specific culture at stake. It’s kind of scary because we have to be careful as much as we have to fight.
2) Ibid & Lisa Fuhrmann, Quemetco’s Lead Legacy: A Cycle of Injustice and Contamination in Southern California, EarthJustice, January 27, 2021
3) George Ramos, “Report Urges Firms Be Held Liable for Cleaning Stringfellow Acid Pits,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1986
4) Tracy E. Perkins, The Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism, (Oakland, California: UC Press, 2022), 26.
5) United States v. Stringfellow, 661 F. Supp. 1053, 1061, 17 ELR 21134 (C.D. Cal. 1987), 11
6) Jill Johnston, Soil Sampling Data near Quemetco Battery Recycling, City of Industry, CA, USC Department of Preventive Medicine, July 2016
7) Scott M. Lesch, et al, Final Report: Statistical Modeling and Analysis Results for Topsoil Lead Contamination Study (Quemetco Project), University of California Riverside, January 28, 2006 & Nancy L. C. Steele, Off-site Sampling Report in the Vicinity of Quemetco Inc. December 1991 & Jill Johnston, Soil Sampling Data near Quemetco Battery Recycling, City of Industry, CA, USC Department of Preventive Medicine, July 2016
8) Nancy L. C. Steele, Off-site Sampling Report in the Vicinity of Quemetco Inc. December 1991
9) Daniel Ross, “Lax Regulatory Enforcement Leaves Thousands at Risk of Lead Poisoning in California,” Truthout, November 22, 2015
[For full disclosure, previous editors and SEMAP co-directors Romeo Guzmán and Carribean Fragoza as well as graduate editorial assistant Daniel Talamantes have a continuing relationship with AHV and support their efforts as well as attend their events.]
Small Shareholders and Global Radicals in Revolutionary Mexico
In the age of the New Imperialism, the world was turned inside out. The dark slumbering core of the earth was flooded with light, wrenched by fiery blasts, then hacked and dragged, bit by craggy bit, to the surface. From the forced mouths of mine shafts, its innards were scavenged. Silver, copper, and zinc were dredged out of Mexico; gold was wrested from the Yukon lands of the Klondike; and diamonds were plucked from the bowels of South Africa. From deposits of unburied iron, a new exoskeleton of rail fused together across the horizon. Railways screamed over continents with the velocity of finance, tearing new pathways of commerce and trade, and bruising the land around it. Coals disgorged from the mines of West Virginia, Colorado, and Manchuria were made radiant with fire and fed, inexhaustibly, to furnaces. Skies blackened with the spew of smokestacks. Ash drifted onto windowsills. Ash was coughed up from throats. Where forests had been felled and burned to make charcoal, this era reached deep beneath tombs, down past the ancient muck and humus to grab the earth’s vital forces. Oil that had coursed through subterranean veins was transfused into the lifeblood of modern industry. Rubber ran like devil’s milk from Congolese vines into waiting Belgian ships, becoming tires, wire insulation, and machine belts, the sinews of industrial production. From the ground, grains were coaxed to even heights over gridded fields, sheathed into uniform bushels, then loaded into gaping containers. Over rails, roads, ship lines, and pounded copper wires, goods were moved, tracked, and transubstantiated into value. This new geometry of motion was animated by global capital, but it was built and shaped by disciplined muscle. Hands, arms, backs, and thighs were lowered and bent, again and again, becoming pulsing metronomes of economic time. From the dark center of the earth at the turn of the century, capital came dripping with dirt and blood from every pore. How, some wondered, could it be otherwise? The world had been turned inside out. Could it also be turned upside down?[1]
Surely Internationalism
Across the windswept expanse of the Sonora Desert, where the Colorado River snakes through the Mexicali Valley and slips down jagged rocks before it spills into the Sea of Cortez, there, where the US border looms like a mirage, an Okinawan immigrant named Shinsei “Paul” Kōchi found internationalism. Shipwrecked and shoeless, Kōchi walked for miles in a daze. He stepped gingerly on thorny scrub and walked reverently around the discarded canteens and dried bones of those who had come before. It was to them, the “numerous and nameless,” that Kōchi dedicated his reflections in Imin no Aiwa (An Immigrant’s Sorrowful Tale).Following the river north, Kōchi searched for food, warmth, and shelter with a small band of survivors from China, Mexico, and Japan in December 1917. Worldwide, millions had fled their countries, compelled by starvation, debt, dispossession, political repression, and the ravages of the First World War. Immigrants who were not allowed to enter countries “with dignity through the front door” routinely risked their lives “breaking in through the back gate.” Those who perished were often “buried in the sea” while others “left their bones to dry on the empty desert.” As Kōchi observed, the “tragedy” of these journeys came not from heedless risk nor naïve adventurism but “a contradiction born precisely out of modern capitalist society.”[2]
For many like Paul Kōchi, the world of 1917 was at once tragic and aflame with possibility.[3] At twenty-eight, he and his “comrade” Seitoku Miyasato had set sail for Mexico, escaping arrest and political persecution at home. The two friends hailed from Nakijin Village in Okinawa, the largest island in a South Sea chain annexed by Japan only decades prior. Despised by mainland Japanese, Okinawans struggled against accusations of being “backwards” southerners in need of centralized political rule, strengthened work ethic, linguistic assimilation, and the abandonment of their “savage” cultural traditions.[4] Kōchi and Miyasato were active in an underground reading group of village teachers opposed to Japanese despotism. Authorities blacklisted members upon discovering their copies of Daisan Teikoku, a journal critical of the government. Fearing repression, the pair planned to escape Okinawa, leaving their young families behind. Convinced they would return after a brief sojourn, they boarded a steamer at the port in Naha. Once aboard, Kōchi noted the “inexpressible feeling” that welled up in his fellow passengers as they looked upon the possible “last sight of their homeland” and of their loved ones. As the “unfeeling” ship set sail, Kōchi and Miyasato watched their young wives and children disappear, “looking permanently abandoned,” as the harbor receded.[5] The men stood together on the deck, “arm still linked to arm,” until their “mountain home sank beneath the horizon.”[6]
Internationalism, for Kōchi, began with a sense of identification. In Hawai’i, where the ship refueled, he felt profound kinship with the Indigenous Kanaka Maoli dockworkers loading and unloading cargo. He observed the first-class passengers’ delight as they threw coins at young Hawaiians, compelling them to dive into the waves chasing the sinking pocket change. He recognized that Hawai’i, “in its climate, customs, products, as well as its recent history,” was like Okinawa: a remote chain of mountainous islands inhabited by people whose language, culture, and sovereignty were all threatened from the mainland. Hawai’i, like Okinawa, was also dominated by sugarcane cultivation, a commonality that would have been apparent to the nearly ten thousand Okinawans who labored in the Hawai’ian sugarcane plantations at the time. Kōchi listened and felt profoundly moved by the musical resonance between the two cultures: “That heart-tugging farewell Aloha Oe was, in fact, the farewell song to the fleeing king of Hawaii. (Our famous Sanyamā was just such a song for the king of Okinawa.)” Such connections only deepened throughout his journey.[7]
As the ship briefly docked in Southern California’s San Pedro harbor, Kōchi, Miyasato, and all the other Asian passengers found themselves trapped aboard. The 1917 Immigration Act and similar diplomatic agreements prevented immigrants from the so-called “barred Asiatic zone” from entering the country. Kōchi railed against these laws and against the nativism fomented during the First World War that kept Asians from ever setting “one foot down” on US soil.[8] A flurry of indignation overtook the passengers. One Japanese man jumped overboard, desperate to reach shore. Passengers looked on in horror as the man drowned in the cold waters of the Pacific. Despondent in his confinement onboard, Kōchi stared at Catalina Island off the California coast. Slowly he began to reappraise his situation. He considered the long, violent history of US settlement and Indigenous dispossession that drove Native people like the Tongva “into the mountain recesses” to starve. He realized that if the same exclusionary nativism that was applied to him had also been “radically applied” to the United States, no settler would be allowed to set foot in the country. Kōchi condemned US immigration laws and observed that the national boundaries they maintained were themselves illegitimate. Considering the intertwined histories of racist immigration laws and rapacious settler colonialism, Kōchi imagined internationalist bonds forged through shared rage: a web of refusal seething within and against national borders.[9]
With five hundred immigrants from Japan, India, and China still aboard, barred from entering the United States, the steamship Anyōmaru chugged south, destined for Brazil. While many in the upper decks sailed leisurely towards exotic lands and thrilling business ventures, most passengers had been coerced onboard by the churning transformations of the global economy. Since the late nineteenth century, countries newly pulled into the frenzy of modern finance saw intensified investment in extractive industries and commercialized agriculture. The subsequent evisceration of communal land holdings and subsistence farming practices had uprooted millions of peasants, including those en routefrom the “barred Asiatic zone.” Many of the Anyōmaru’s passengers were bound for contract work in the Caribbean and throughout Latin America, often following labor recruiters’ promised jobs. Japanese and Okinawan immigrants sought to join compatriots in Brazilian mining communities. Along with Chinese counterparts, they also sought contracts in places like Peru and throughout the Caribbean. The swirling chaos of colonialism and war also produced its own global circuits, dragging colonial soldiers, particularly from India, onto foreign battlefields. As their labors were conscripted into war economies, their ranks expanded in what Priyamvada Gopal describes as a “world-wide belt of insurgencies.”[10] Radical Japanese students who called themselves “comrades of the four seas” invited Kōchi and Miyasato to join them in Cuba. The two friends had other plans. A ship’s porter had hinted about the possibility of sneaking into the United States through Mexico. This is what the pair resolved to do once the ship docked in Oaxaca.[11]
From the moment their “feet touched down” in Mexico, Kōchi and Miyasato were immediately conscious of being “immigrants owning nothing but our bodies.” They were detained and quarantined in harrowing conditions along with other immigrants.[12] The men looked on in horror as a prisoner from India was stripped and then doused with sulfur, his money belt stolen in the process. As they shared with him their meager funds, the man thanked them for being “Buddhas in Hell.” A few days later, several dozen Asian immigrants, including some of their fellow Okinawan villagers, joined their cell. The area was “well-known for its searing winds,” which blew through the barred windows day and night, creating “sandstorms” inside the jail.[13] Covered in the same dust, Kōchi understood his fellow prisoners as “convicts banished to Siberia in Tsarist Russia,” a timely comparison given that Russian people had recently overthrown that Tsarist regime during the Bolshevik Revolution. The experience was not lost on the men. Given their travels, confinements, and commitments, Kōchi declared retrospectively that he and Miyasato were already “internationalists.”[14]
Japanese immigrants in Sonora, Mexico, Circa 1910, Courtesy Reseña Histórica de la Migración Collection of Asociación México Japonesa, A.C.
Released from prison and into the heat of the Revolution, Kōchi and Miyasato (along with their Spanish-speaking countrymen) raced toward the US border. The men traversed a convulsive landscape, dancing to guitars in Mazatlán and narrowly escaping bandits as their train hugged the western coast through Culiacán. They launched a small boat out of Guayamas. For a week, they sailed north up the inlet of the Gulf of California. In a disaster, the boat caught fire, forcing all passengers to jump overboard. When they reassembled on shore, they discovered that only thirteen of the original passengers remained. Shipwrecked in the Sonoran Desert on December 2, 1917, the small group had next to no supplies. They collected “snow waters” from the Colorado River in rusty tin cans. They ripped strips of cloth and tore out their trouser pockets in vain attempts to protect their feet from sagebrush, cacti, and the cold. A crumbling biscuit was shared among the men. Tearing down the shore, Kōchi called out for his friend. His cries of “Miyasato! Miyasato!” were swallowed by the sea. The group was forced to press on.
In his travels throughout northern Mexico, Kōchi continually discovered and rediscovered internationalism. His group was saved by an Indigenous Yaqui family, who fed the men, gave them shelter, and offered them homemade leather shoes. The warmth of the family reminded him of home. He encountered a French trader who smuggled him to the border under a pile of hay to avoid the eyes of Mexican guards. This kindness, he said, “was surely internationalism.” When Kōchi finally reached the border, it was a group of Chinese immigrant workers who met him. Wrote Kōchi, “It seemed that for them we were all immigrants travelling the same road and they understood our situation from their hearts. This ‘class consciousness’ cuts across race and nationality and promotes mutual understanding which, if preserved and extended, would make the deserts bloom.”[15]
Paul Kōchi’s story demonstrates how the uprooted, dispossessed, and despised of the world came to know each other in shadows, in the tangled spaces of expulsion, extraction, transportation, debt, exploitation, and destruction: the garroting circuits of modern capital. Whether crammed in tight ship quarters; knocking together over the rails; sweating and swaying in the relentless tempo of industrial agriculture; inhaling the dank air of mine shafts; hearing each other breathing, coughing, fighting, singing, snoring, and sighing through thin walls; or corralled like livestock in jails and prisons, the contradictions of modern capital were shared in its intimate spaces. Within such sites, people discovered that the circuits of revolution, like the countervailing circuits of capital, were realizable in motion, often through unplanned assemblages. Roaring at their backs were the revolutionary currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, currents that howled from the metropolitan hearts of empire and wailed across the peripheries of the global world system. Standing before them, in the middle of its own revolution, was Mexico. From the vantage point of these struggles, the new century did not simply portend the inevitability of urban revolts and insurgencies at the point of production, but an epoch of peasant wars, rural uprisings, anti-colonial movements, and, of course, the Mexican Revolution. Mexico, as both a real country and an imagined space of revolution, would become a crucible of internationalism for the world’s “rebels” like Paul Kōchi.[16]
Paul Kōchi’s Imin no Aiwa presents internationalism as nearly an inevitable phenomenon. By narrating his path from Okinawa to the United States through Mexico, Kōchi describes how travel along the contradictory routes newly limned by capital and imperialism enabled him to acquire a radical global consciousness. In describing his encounters with Indigenous people and other immigrants along the way, he offers a sense of how such consciousness could be produced through the contradictory social spaces of ships, trains, boats, in detention, and through covert passage across Mexico towards the US border. Kōchi’s story offers an important perspective into the relationship between the political economy of the period and the formation of a revolutionary consciousness. In this, Kōchi was not alone.
The transformation of the global economy certainly set the stage for the development of an internationalist consciousness. But if all that was required for internationalism were the conditions of a hard journey, the world would be full of internationalists. As significant as Kōchi’s travels were, there were far more people who lived during the era of the Mexican Revolution, who even came to Mexico at the time, who did not become internationalists. This was particularly true for the fortune hunters who arrived seeking land, fame, or wealth in the country in spite of the many radical possibilities presented by the Revolution. This was also true for many Asian immigrants like Kōchi, particularly Chinese immigrants who suffered extraordinary violence and repression at the hands of state and non-state actors. The paths of those who came, saw, but chose moderate or outright reactionary paths reveal some of the fetters inhibiting the making of internationalism. This chapter explores both these possibilities and barriers.[17]
In the era of its Revolution, Mexico represented multiple configurations of space: it was simultaneously a fixed place on the map, a place made meaningful relative to the places it bordered or was connected to through roads, rails, and ports, and it was also an imagined space, upon which multiple competing fantasies were projected. The chapter considers the experiences of radicals who lived in, traveled to, or found themselves in Mexico during the during the fighting phase of the Revolution, 1910–20. The collective act of making new worlds, as they discovered, required a reckoning with the seductions of nationalism, the social relations of imperialism, and the spatial imaginaries of capital. Internationalism, in other words, had to be forged, not simply found. To do so, as this chapter shows, it had to compete with the enticements of the color line, the racist and gendered fantasies of the New Imperialism.
SOURCES
[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, [1976] 1990), 926; Rosa, Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2003); David Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 70; John Tully, Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011); Arthur Conan Doyle, Crime of the Congo. (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1909); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972).
[2] Quotes come from Paul Shinsei Kōchi, Imin No Aiwa (An Immigrant’s Sorrowful Tale), trans. Ben Kobashigawa (Los Angeles: Privately printed, 1978). There are minor differences between this version and the version written in June 1938 and republished as Shinshei Kōchi, “Sad Tale of an Immigrant: Dedicated to the Souls of the Departed,” in History of the Okinawans in North America, trans. Ben Kobashigawa (Los Angeles: Okinawan Club of America and the Asian American Studies Center, University of California, 1988), 524–540. Where relevant, these differences will be noted.
[3] In the 1978 publication of Imin no Aiwa, Kōchi describes setting off: “At four in the afternoon on September 2 in the 7th year of the Taishō era (1918), we rebels boarded the Taigimaru bound for Kobi” (19). But the 1988 edition describes the graffiti Kōchi scribbles on the wall of the Salina Cruz detention center as a note signed “November 1917” and later a message on a rock dated “December 1917” (528, 532).
[4] On “backwardness” and “savage” and for debates on Okinawa’s colonial status, see Alan S. Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani E. Barlow(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 141–70, and Julia Yonetani, “Ambiguous Traces and the Politics of Sameness: Placing Okinawa in Meiji Japan,” Japanese Studies 20, no. 1 (2000): 15–31. For a discussion of Japan in the context of Gramsci’s “Southern Question,” see Harry Harootunian, “Some Reflections on Gramsci: The Southern Question in the Deprovincializing of Marx,” in Gramsci in the World,ed. Frederic Jameson and Robert M. Dainotto (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 140–57.
[5] Kōchi, Imin No Aiwa, 20; Chushichi Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, 1825–1995 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000)192; Chushichi Tsuzuki, “The Changing Image of Britain among Japanese Intellectuals,” in The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations 1600–2000: Social and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Gordon Daniels and Chushichi Tsuzuki (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 17–40.
[7] Kōchi, Imin No Aiwa,21, 33; Mamoru Akamine, The Ryukyu Kingdom: Cornerstone of East Asia, trans. Lina Terrell, ed. Robert N. Huey(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), 140; Richard Siddle, “Colonialism and Identity in Okinawa Before 1945,” Japanese Studies 18, no. 2 (1998): 121–22; James E. Roberson, “Singing Diaspora: Okinawan Songs of Home, Departure, and Return,” Identities 17, no. 4 (2010): 430–53; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Edith Mitsuko Kaneshiro, “‘Our home will be the five continents’: Okinawan Migration to Hawaii, California, and the Philippines, 1899–1941” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999), 116; Adria L. Imada, “‘Aloha ‘Oe’”: Settler-Colonial Nostalgia and the Genealogy of a Love Song,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013): 35–52; Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (New York: Verso, 2015), 35–67.
[8] Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 18.
[9] Kōchi, Imin No Aiwa, 33. For intertwined histories of immigrant exclusion and settler colonialism see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon, 2021). On refusal to consent to colonial mappings and occupations of territory, seeAudra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 128. Mahmood Mamdani suggests placing US settler-colonialism into a “global-historical” standpoint as a precursor to decolonization in Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 98–99.
[10] Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019), 209.
[11] Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Edith M. Kaneshiro, “Communists, Christians, and Japanese Imperial Subjects: Okinawan Immigrants within the Japanese Diaspora, 1899 to 1941,” in Studies in Pacific History: Economics, Politics, and Migration, ed. Dennis O. Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and James Sobredo(London: Routledge, 2018), 170–87.
[12] Kōchi, Imin no Aiwa, 23. Since there is a discrepancy over the date of the voyage, the nature of the quarantine is unclear. If the trip occurred at the end of 1917, the quarantine would have been for typhus. If it occurred at the end of 1918, it would have been for the Spanish Flu pandemic. See Ryan M. Alexander, “The Fever of War: Epidemic Typhus and Public Health in Revolutionary Mexico City, 1915–1917,” Hispanic American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (2020): 63–92; Ryan M. Alexander, “The Spanish Flu and the Sanitary Dictatorship: Mexico’s Response to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” The Americas 76. no. 3 (July 2019): 443–65.
[16] For the debates about the disjuncture between nineteenth-century revolutionary political predictions and twentieth-century revolutionary conditions, see Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 153; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007), 174; Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 207–9; Mike Davis, “Old Gods, New Enigmas,” Catalyst 1, no. 2 (2017): 7–40.For a discussion of the insufficiency of the “transnational” designation, see Arif Dirlik, “Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World Histor(ies),” Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (December 2005): 391–410. Dirlik notes, “Ethnic and diasporic spaces are prime examples in our day of such spaces that are often described, somewhat misleadingly in my opinion, as ‘transnational’ spaces. Such spaces preceded in their existence the emergence of nations; they may not be of equal significance to all parts of the nation, in which case they may help undermine its unity and homogeneity, and they are quite likely to outlast the nation as we have known it” (397).
[17] For many Asian immigrants like Kōchi, especially many Chinese people, the question of internationalism in relation to the Mexican Revolution was a vexed one. East Asians were unevenly incorporated into state-building and capitalist development projects. As Jason Oliver Chang notes, Chinese immigrants were largely regarded as disposable labor or motores de sangre (engines of blood) under the Porfiriato and then later reimagined as threats to the state and killable subjects at different points during the Revolution. See Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880–1940 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 8, 71–87; Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012); María Elena Ota Mishima, Destino México: un estudio de las Migraciones Asiáticas a México, siglos XIX y XX. Mexico D.F.: Colegio de Mexico Centro de Estudios de Asia y Africa, 1997.
Christina Heatherton is an American Studies scholar and historian of anti-racist social movements. She is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College.
In their introduction to the anthology Goth: Undead Subculture, Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby identify Sioux as one of goth’s founding figures. They write that Sioux, “who began her career as a gothic doyenne in the Sex Pistols’ scene, helped to popularize a look characterized by deathly pallor, dark makeup, Weimar-era decadence, and Nazi chic” (2007, 1). While one might take issue with their conflation of Sioux’s styles that span a significant period of time (particularly when her adoption of “Nazi chic” was an early, brief, and much regretted move that assented to the miscalculated punk attempt at subversiveness by wielding the swastika on an armband or T-shirt), Goodlad and Bibby are right to note her significant role in popularizing what we now understand as goth.[1] However, on numerous occasions, Sioux and Banshees bassist Steven Severin have commented on their association with goth, often times referring to it as “goff” to signal a clichéd performance that has flattened rather than highlighted the nuances underscoring the band’s music. As Sioux asserts, “Gothic in its purest sense is actually a very powerful, twisted genre, but the way it was being used by journalists—‘goff’ with a double ‘f’—always seemed to me to be about tacky harum scarum horror and I find that anything but scary. That wasn’t what we were about at all. There was something hippie about it too. Juju [the Banshees’ fourth and undeniably most critically acclaimed album] did have a horror theme to it, but it was psychological horror, nothing to do with ghosts and ghouls” (Paytress 2003, 106, emphasis added). Noting that they were “reading a lot of Edgar Allan Poe at the time” (107), Severin admits that while the band indeed described Juju as “gothic” upon the album’s release, journalists had not picked up on or immediately classified the music and the band as such. Cited as a key influence on subsequent artists, Sioux clarifies that the “strong identity” of Juju was diluted: “The goth bands that came in our wake tried to mimic [us]. They were using horror as the basis for stupid rock ’n’ roll pantomime” (107).
While the “psychological horror” characteristic of the album and much of the band’s music runs more in the vein of The Twilight Zone than Dracula (or as one-time Banshees guitarist John McGeoch recalls, “More blood dripping on a daisy than scary beast sinking its fangs into its victim” (Paytress 2003, 107), it is also about the everyday alienation experienced by those on the periphery. Indeed, Severin notes that the track “Halloween,” which based on title alone may seem to conjure that yearly celebration’s attendant ghosts and ghouls, is based on a revelation the bassist had as a six-year-old: “I suddenly realised that I was a separate person. I was no longer simply a part of things. And once you realise that, you’ve lost a certain innocence.”[2] As the lyrics substantiate, “‘Trick or treat’ / The bitter and the sweet / The carefree days / Are distant now.” And while Siouxsie became, as Mark Paytress points out, “a style icon for a generation of ambitious, thrill-seeking young women” who visually emulated their rebellious idol, she and the Banshees sounded a marshaling call for outsiders everywhere to stand and be counted.[3] Recounting how she was bullied daily at school as a child, Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson saw in Siouxsie a rebel with whom she could identify, and the Banshees’ music provided the stimulus for converting her disenfranchisement into the feeling that she could rule the world.[4] Moreover, in her foreword to Paytress’s biography, Manson reasons that miscategorizing the band as goth dulls the “real edge” of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Their music, she maintains, reveals “so much articulated spite, humour and politics with a small ‘p’” while refusing to perambulate “down that simple, gloomy path” (Paytress 2003, 9).
In the band’s assessment of Juju and its contested gothic impulse, what I find most remarkable is Severin’s following confession: “If there was a band that influenced what we did on Juju it was The Cramps. Not musically, because they were much more rooted in straightforward rock ’n’ roll, but in terms of some of their imagery and the way they came across” (Paytress 2003, 107). The Cramps—described by one journalist as “the scariest band of all time” (Tashjian 2018)—were an American punk band that began to take shape in Akron, Ohio, in 1974 and took flight the following year in New York City. Consisting of the husband-and-wife combo of vocalist Lux Interior and bassist Poison Ivy, along with guitarist Bryan Gregory and numerous drummers in their early years, the Cramps—after making a momentous impact on the formative New York punk scene and playing noted venues like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City—relocated to Los Angeles in 1980. According to Ivy, “We didn’t move to LA because the scene was in LA, it was because there was no scene any more that there was no reason to stay in New York” (Porter 2015, 163). And at that time, Lux notes, “New York [was] concentrating on British bands or out of town bands” (163). Indeed, 1980 was the year Siouxsie and the Banshees would first tour the United States.
Severin’s aforementioned comment that the Banshees drew influence from the Cramps makes sense for how the former crafted their persona after the latter, based not on their music but on their “imagery” and “how they came across.” When comparing the image of the Cramps and Siouxsie and the Banshees, what becomes apparent at this particular moment is that they both boasted an undeniable psychedelic aesthetic that flew in the face of an assumed perpetual adornment of all-black gear. One might also point to Ivy’s and Siouxsie’s teased big hair or both bands’ affinity for classic horror and psychological thriller films (which, despite each group’s distinct musical styles noted by Severin, is titularly registered by the Banshees’ “Spellbound” and the Cramps’ “I Was a Teenage Werewolf ”).[5] And like the Banshees, “The Cramps were a fully formed vision. People think, ‘Ooh horror movies, and ooh black.’ But no, it’s so much more than that. . . . It was a whole lifestyle. A manifesto” (“Kid Congo Powers Oral History” 2005). In view of their association, I want to signal another link between the two bands: the bond shared by Siouxsie and the Cramps’ one-time guitarist, Kid Congo Powers.
The same year Siouxsie and the Banshees first toured the States, Kid (né Brian Tristan), a third-generation Mexican American born in La Puente, California, joined the Cramps to replace Bryan Gregory on guitar. Introduced to a variety of musical traditions and genres from his family, Kid recalls hearing Mexican rancheras at weekend family parties and bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (and “low-rider music, doo wop, oldies, a lot of soul and funk music, a lot of Santana, Jimi Hendrix, and Black Sabbath”) while growing up.[6] A thirteen-year-old “big magazine hound” who pored over the pages of Creem and Rock Scene, he learned of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, Television, Patti Smith, and others defining the 1970s New York City glam and emergent punk scene, eventually becoming the Ramones fan club president. In 1977, the seventeen-year-old Brian traveled with a school group to Europe. With London as one stop on the trip, he and a friend split off from their peers “and just went to concerts the whole time and sought out punk rock record stores.” As he recalls, “I went to this club, the Vortex Club, and I saw the Slits play and different bands. And the Clash were hanging out and Siouxsie and it was all very very very exciting. I was like seventeen—not even eighteen yet. And I got a punk rock haircut and came back to NY at the time and saw the Dead Boys and the Heartbreakers and went to CBGB’s and went back to LA quite informed with what was going on” (“Kid Congo Powers Oral History” 2005).[7]
A devoted fan of the Cramps, the twenty-year-old Kid was beyond elated when invited to join the band as their guitarist upon Gregory’s departure.[8] Renamed “Kid Congo Powers” by Poison Ivy and Lux Interior from a Santeria candle with the inscription “When you light this candle, Congo powers will be revealed to you,” Tristan added “Kid” because he “thought it sounded like a boxer or a pirate” (Porter 2007, 87–88). Appearing on two of the band’s signature releases—Psychedelic Jungle (1981) and the live mini-album Smell of Female (1984)—he remained with the Cramps until September 1983. In an illuminating 2005 oral history with the online publication New York Night Train, Kid details his abiding relationship with Siouxsie over the duration of his membership with the Cramps, the Gun Club (the LA-based country/cow punk/post-punk band to which he was recruited by longtime El Monte friend and collaborator Jeffrey Lee Pierce, who in his book Go Tell the Mountain identifies Siouxsie and the Banshees as “friends more or less” [(1998) 2017, 45]), and Fur Bible (a collaborative endeavor with Patricia Morrison—bassist and cofounder of the Bags and later a member of the Sisters of Mercy—and drummer Desperate). In Kid’s words:
We had been friends with Siouxsie for a long time. I had actually met Siouxsie and the Banshees, the whole band, when I was in the Cramps and we did some shows together and I befriended them. Billy Holston, who was their assistant, right-hand man—he’s the guy who made the Fur Bible cover, the artwork on that—he was a champion of our band. And he suggested it to them. And the Gun Club had played some shows with the Banshees as well and they were big fans of the Gun Club. And so they asked us to go on a tour with them and of course we said yes. And that was good because they were really popular at the time. We played at the Royal Albert Hall, where Bob Dylan played, and we played at big theaters everywhere in England. I guess we went over OK. I don’t remember. (“Kid Congo Powers Oral History” 2005)
After the Gun Club’s split in 1984, Fur Bible lent their support to the Banshees, opening a number of shows for the Tinderbox tour. From their reformation two years later in 1986 until their final days in 1996, Siouxsie remained a fan and friend to both the band and Kid.
In Donna Santisi’s landmark book of photographs, Ask the Angels (originally published in 1978 and redistributed in 2010), Kid and Siouxsie are captured together during a 1982 visit to Disneyland in Anaheim, California.[9] Santisi provides the backstory:
One day Siouxsie Sioux wanted to go to Disneyland. It was Sioux, Kid Congo, Marcy Blaustein, Randy Kaye, and me. Sioux was really excited when we got there but once we were on Main Street, two security men came up to her and told her she had to leave. They said that she looked like an attraction and it would confuse the people in the park. Siouxsie was telling the men that she just wanted to see everything and go on the rides. They finally agreed that Sioux could stay if she covered up with Randy’s raincoat. We were followed all day by several security people with walkie talkies.[10]
Capturing Sioux’s delight in absorbing the sights and attractions of Disneyland, Santisi’s photography, as Kid keenly notes, “catches the subject matter at ease, casual, yet exciting” (Santisi [1978] 2010, 32). Since encountering these photos, I have diligently studied their details. Not only do they index the globally recognized theme park I’ve visited since childhood, given its location in the next city over from where I grew up, but they register an unmistakable intimacy between Siouxsie Sioux and Kid Congo Powers.
In the two photos reproduced in Santisi’s book—one in which they flank the walkaround character Br’er Fox culled from the animated sequences of the Disney film Song of the South (Foster and Jackson 1946) and the other capturing the two sharing a ride on the Tomorrowland Rocket Jets—Kid and Siouxsie, with their almost identical big, black manes, recall Severin’s comparison of the Banshees and the Cramps. In this instance, though, the Cramps are represented by this Chicano from the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte whose discernable brownness contrasts with his friend’s pallid complexion, yet his chosen aesthetic categorically matches that of the former suburban Bromley recluse turned Ice Queen. With Disneyland—a wider-scale Wonderland of sorts—serving as one spatial point of contact, Kid and Siouxsie’s post-punk transatlantic intimacy manifests in Santisi’s photos that connote unequivocal joy and affection. Apparent in the discernable touch shared by Siouxsie and Kid in the small space of the jet, one may also, following Tina Campt (2017), listen to this image to hear their respective bands’ sonic intimacy. And I can’t help but imagine my ten-year-old self at nearby Disneyland on the same day as Siouxsie and Kid, admiring these outcast and defiant figures whose names I would learn three years later from music magazines, not unlike those publications the young Brian Tristan, also as a thirteen-year-old queer Chicano Southern California kid, intently read with the information discovered on their pages solidly committed to memory.[11]
Troy Andreas Araiza Kokinis, in his poignant essay “El Monte’s Wildweed: Biraciality and the Punk Ethos of the Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce,” writes about the “otherness” uniquely experienced by Kid and Pierce (whose mother was Mexican and who felt at home in Southern California Mexican American culture) in relation to the punk and alternative music scenes. For Kid, Kokinis writes, “the Hollywood punk scene” was “a site of refuge for weirdos and outsiders of all types, including racialized people and gender queers,” whereas Pierce, despite “being a white-passing biracial Chicano,” “remained uncomfortable with whiteness throughout his life” (2020, 237, 238). Yet Kid, noting his inability to pass as white, concedes his incessant outcast status: “America is white culture and Anglo culture. No matter how I do not even speak Spanish; I was raised as anyone would be in LA. But you still feel like an outsider” (238). With the combined dimension of his queer sexuality, Kid declares a “built-in otherness and built-in bucking the system,” thus prompting his ability to “shine and belong, to others” (238). Given her history as a social outcast and her alliances forged with kindred outsiders like those making up “the Bromley Contingent,” Siouxsie’s bond with Kid Congo Powers makes complete sense not only with respect to their mutual admiration as artists but also based on the affinitive alignment of a gay Chicano man in a predominantly white subculture and a woman fronting an all-male band in a mostly male music scene. And while the body of writing about the participation of queers and people of color in punk contexts in either the US or the UK has exponentially grown, there’s also much to be said about the relationships cultivated between American musicians of color and British post-punk artists in these often-overlapping music scenes.[12]
NOTES
[1] Chapter 3, focused on the Northampton band Bauhaus, engages in a more thorough discussion of goth, particularly around the 1979 single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” their most famous song, considered by many the first goth record and the unofficial goth anthem. Siouxsie has on more than one occasion expressed her regret for wearing the swastika, primarily on an armband. As she explains, “Maybe I had been naïve in thinking people would understand what I was doing with the swastika. I must have been, because we started to get a lot of National Front skinheads turning up to gigs. They used to piss me off so much. I tried everything to stop them coming, drawing attention to them and slagging them off, even stopping a gig and beating the shit out of them a few times. But they just wouldn’t fuck off. I was so pissed off that I decided to use another equally strong symbol, the Star of David, which would completely alienate the idiots. When we played this gig in Derby, we tried everything to stop them, but nothing seemed to work. So we went off stage, put the ‘Israel’ T-shirts on and did ‘Drop Dead’ with the lights spotlighting them. It was fantastic. The whole audience felt empowered and turned on them” (Paytress 2003, 104). Despite adopting the Star of David on T-shirts and for their single “Israel” (and featuring “Red over White” on the B-side) as “an atonement” and writing the song “Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)” in the memory of anti-Nazi visual artist John Heartfield, journalists and scholars continued to take note of the too-casual incorporation of Nazi imagery in punk contexts of which Siouxsie was a part. For a discussion on Sioux’s range of styles, see Kevin Petty (1995), “The Image of Siouxsie Sioux: Punk and the Politics of Gender”; and Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ’n’ Roll, which notes how Sioux’s “career has consisted of an endless succession of costume changes and sexual personae” (1995, 291). Lucy O’Brien’s ([1995] 2020) foundational She Bop also provides an excellent arch for assessing Siouxsie’s initially controversial public image to her sui generis role in the British punk and post-punk scenes.
[2] Severin’s words are from the liner notes written by Mark Paytress for Polydor’s 2006 remastered cd release of Juju.
[3] The persistence of the Siouxsie clone extends into the recent present, as illustrated in a 2013 episode of the American sketch comedy television series Portlandia, where the character Alexandra models herself after Siouxsie, hilariously mispronouncing her name “Suxie Sux.”
[4] Taken from Manson’s interview in The Queens of British Pop (Newton 2009).
[5] These songs are no doubt nods to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Gene Fowler Jr.’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957).
[6] For additional information, see “Kid Congo Powers Oral History” (2005).
[7] For an insightful local history of Kid Congo Powers, see Melissa Hidalgo (2021), “Gente from La Puente: Underground Punk Icon Kid Congo Powers Still Rocks.”
[8] John Wombat’s (2018) The Cramps, Beast and Beyond: A Book about Bryan Gregory provides an insightful account of Gregory’s personal history.
[9] Additional Santisi photos of the Disneyland visit can be found in Ray Stevenson’s (1986) Siouxsie and the Banshees: Photo Book, although they are reproduced in a much smaller scale. I thank Donna Santisi for clarifying that her photos were taken in January 1982.
[10] This Santisi quote is taken from an interview with Alice Bag (2016).
[11] For an interesting analysis that understands Kid Congo Powers’s future embrace of the vampire (and hus tallying another example of what she calls the “Chicano Dracula” figure) see Paloma Martinez-Cruz (2020), “Chicano Dracula: The Passions and Predations of Bela Lugosi, Gomez Addams, and Kid Congo Powers.” Martinez-Cruz’s argument about Kid Congo Powers-as-vampire superbly assists in refusing his categorization as some standard-issue goth.
[12] In the case of the former, see Alice Bag’s (2011) excellent autobiography Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story; Jayna Brown (2011), “‘Brown Girl in the Ring’: Poly Styrene, Anabella Lwin, and the Politics of Anger”; Michelle Cruz Gonzales (2016), The Spit Boy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band; Colin Gunckel (2017), “‘People Think We’re Weird ’Cause We’re Queer’: Art Meets Punk in Los Angeles”; and Celeste Bell and Zoë Howe (2019), Dayglo! The Poly Styrene Story.
As long-time readers of Boom California, it has been an honor to work with artists, writers, poets, student interns, and scholars to think deeply about California’s past, present, and future. Raised East of East Los Angeles to migrant parents from neighboring colonias in Guadalajara (via neighboring ranchos in Zacatecas), we worked hard to center overlooked communities, cities, and regions, as well as voices. Like many parents, we did our best to balance work and childcare during a global pandemic and to mourn those we lost in the last three years. We appreciate your patience and the invaluable work of peer-reviewers.
We’re thrilled to announce that Boom California will continue under the visionary editorship of Dr. Ofelia Cuevas and be housed at UC Davis. A third-generation Californian and Ethnic Studies scholar, Dr. Cuevas brings a commitment to theory and praxis. Her work on state violence and incarceration has been published in journals like American Quarterly, PUBLIC, and edited books such as Black and Brown Los Angeles: A Contemporary Reader (UC Press, 2013). She is currently directing a California focused campus wide initiative for formerly incarcerated and system impacted students. She is also the recipient of a UCOP Multicampus Research Grant which will excavate the historical connections of The Organization of Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) political print art with political print art in California and the West. Lastly, she is working on her second book titled, A Consideration of the West: California and the Geo-Historical Shift of the US.
Romeo Guzmán will stay on as editor-at-large, Carribean Fragoza will become the poetry and creative non-fiction editor, and Claremont Graduate University PhD student Daniel Talamantes will step in as an editorial assistant. We hope that you will continue to read and support Boom California.
“In it, you realize the river has no shape,” reflects Jesús Romo on his photo, “Riding in the River.” The photo depicts a pair of vaqueros wading through a tributary in Whittier Narrows. Above the horses’ cannon, water splashes above their knees, infusing motion in the still. Twilight eclipses a vaquero’s greeting hand and sombrero as his riding partner advances toward us—or is he following Jesús Romo? Ripples, ephemera, trace the contours of Jesús Romo’s ghost in the water, out of frame as he puts the scene in focus. The patina of ordered ripples contrasts with the shoreline brush of shadowy chaos.
“Riding in the River,” though taken recently, feels like it belongs in another place and time. The photo conjures modalities in movement, of diaspora, and an environmental legacy once ubiquitous in the region. Now it has been reduced to a rare and confined natural space. Wilderness and vaqueros elicit a pathos or melancholic reflection of what could have been. While the photo may hint toward an idyllic depiction of the San Gabriel Valley’s natural environment, it does not necessarily portray an accurate social history of its Mexican and Latinx communities. Still, it shows how vaqueros or vaqueras succeeded in claiming public space and reclaiming Mexican presence in the San Gabriel Valley.
What remains of Whittier Narrows is only a valence of what the region used to be. As David Reid in East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte writes, “[Whittier Narrows] ensured the survival of some 400 acres of forest, lakes, trails, lawns, and soccer fields… preserved a link to the Whittier Narrows area’s history and to the natural world… and offers the first taste of the natural world to many locals.”1 Always under threat of development, Whittier Narrows, cleaved and siloed by the 60 freeway, 605 freeway, and Rosemead Boulevard remains a site of natural wonder, preservation, and recreation for the surrounding communities of Avocado Heights, El Monte, South El Monte, and La Puente, among others.
“Riding in the Narrows”
The oneiric quality of Whittier Narrows is troubled by the waking reality of the Whittier Narrows Dam. Despite community efforts to preserve Whittier Narrows by relocating the dam further down the river, the dam ultimately punctuates the county’s priority for energy extraction and management. But there’s a great irony here: the county’s erection of the dam had arguably secured Whittier Narrow’s survival. This is an important consideration. It evinces this space as a contested site of culture, environment, and power. The dam becomes a metonym for industrial control and extraction of diaspora’s flow. Just beyond the frame, a colossal urban landscape lurks. It encroaches. Matrices of roads and freeways, telephone wires, and pipes fasten to strangulate the veritable island of wilderness. Waste facilities, manufacturing plants, and distribution centers leech pollutants into streams and soil. The air over it, so thick of smog, can be noisome, laced with sulfur, ammonia, rubber, lead, or other strands of toxic fumes.
“Trail ride with Esteban and company”
Jesús Romo explains that these tributaries are the only passable trails bridging this natural corridor to his community of Avocado Heights. These are his points of access until the water is too deep to traverse . Auto industries, waste facilities, and housing developments converted a rich agricultural and natural landscape into grids of pavement, fences, pipes, and wires. Avocado Heights, among many surrounding communities, became what city planner scholar William Fulton refers to as the “suburbs of extraction,” where Latinx individuals, despite attaining political power, struggle with access to resources and to fund public services.2 Furthering this, scholar Laura R. Barraclough writes in Charros: How Mexican Cowboys are Remapping Race and American Identity, suburbs of extraction, like the many communities in San Gabriel Valley, “[find] themselves empty-handed, with few strategies available beyond luring businesses such as casinos, pawn shops, and scrap metal recycling yards—all of which…extract any remaining wealth from already-disinvested sources.”3
“Employee at feed store near Sports Arena”
Situated near the Puente Hills and Whittier Narrows, Avocado Heights is an unincorporated neighborhood east of the 605 freeway and just north of the San Jose Creek which feeds into the San Gabriel River. The town’s population remains approximately fifteen thousand people, yet it is surrounded by much larger cities such as City of Industry, La Puente, El Monte, and South El Monte. It is also adjacent to a constellation of other unincorporated communities such as Bassett and North Whittier. A distinct feature of Avocado Heights is its designation as an equestrian district which traces a legacy back to the vaqueros of early Californios and Mexico—a majority of Avocado Heights residents are of Mexican descent. And while Avocado Heights has a prominent identity and agency of its own, its characteristics are as interpretable as the river.
“Rancho Jimenez”“Mis tíos”
Wading through the river, vaqueros interact with assemblages of making and being. Contested sites, specific histories, and cultural exchanges emerge and submerge in expressions of power and resistance. Though we can abstract histories and narratives from the photo, “Riding in the River” is material. The photograph is now a part of Whittier Narrows’ ecology. It is a fragment of the location, both as a living portal and as artifact. It is contingent and yet a continuum. Despite erasure, despite elision from regional, state, or national narratives, Avocado Heights is immutable. Photographs expose. They are taken, putting moments, people, and places into focus.
“Colitas”
Transnational Desfile
“Community desfile”“la paseada patron saint festival in Avocado Heights”
“Community desfile” and “la paseada patron saint festival AH style” are celebrations of the patron saint festival, La Paseada. Celebrated in Avocado Heights annually, this is the second biggest event in Avocado Heights Park after the Easter celebration. Romo says, “Starting a few years ago, a group of different families in the area formed an association to raise money and connect several undocumented individuals who were unable to visit their home communities with their family back home.” The organizers of the event originate from Las Palmas, Jalisco and like most patron saint festivals, these are religious celebrations that coincide with a week of work off.
The celebration in Las Palmas is known for having a large cabalgata to inaugurate the event. Romo continues, “Given that this is horse country, we all join in their festivities, but in the Avocado Heights version, as if we are there in Las Palmas for the week.” Along with the tamborazo, a reina carries the American and Mexican flag while following an altar containing the patron saint. Independence celebrations in Yahualica, Jalisco are on September 16, 2016. Celebrations in Avocado Heights and among the equestrian community, at times, closely resemble the celebrations in Mexico.
“Industry Expo feria de caballo español”
It is not uncommon for the escaramuzas and charros of the San Gabriel Valley to compete with some frequency down in Mexico, or to attend an annual coleadero. On return to the U.S., they provide updates to their family or group of friends about the latest community gossip, who’s the leading equestrian athlete, and what musical group headlined the event. For being a relatively small neighborhood, Avocado Heights epitomizes a unique bilateral relationship with Mexico. These are not relationships that exist because parents grew up in a particular place, but rather, these are relationships that are constantly reinforced by the consistent back and forth travel that occur through recurring events, such as patron saint festivals or independence celebrations.
“Privadita”“Filming a music video”
Vaquerx Ephemera
“Horse Parade in Jalisco”
On September 16, 2016, in the city streets of Yahualica, Jalisco, Romo joins a cabalgata underway. The vaquera centered in the photo is Nadia. And while she doesn’t announce her sexuality publicly, she is widely known in the horse community for being a prominent fixture at horse events and is often seen accompanied by her partner. Romo explains, “After marching on horseback in the parade, Nadia hired the banda and it was myself and one other escaramuza, kind of a protege of Nadia’s, who joined her for an impromptu parade once again throughout the town.” Nadia was not dressed in the typical escaramuza outfit, but rather a charro outfit. “She triumphantly led us on a long-winded post-march route with a loaded gun in her holster. It was a very public and triumphant display and I just had to document the photo.”
In Nadia’s story we have a unique exposure to the dimensions of gender embodiment and representation in vaquerx culture. She is both a leader and yet presents herself in traditional charro outfits. Likewise, her partnership, according to Romo, remains a discretionary fact. It is no doubt the case that vaquero culture celebrates and predominantly exhibits traditional masculine traits. These traits trace to patriarchal values of colonial Spain. Yet, vaqueros culture is and historically has created spaces and is an identity that has opened gender fluidity and resistance. Across the United States and in Mexico, vaquerx spaces foster hetero-, homo-, and transsexual performance. Massive conventions occur every year in cities including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Dallas, and Mexico City which host queer reuniones vaqueros. The events feature live performance combined with regional Mexican food, drink, music, and dancing. Though these conventions are unique, they also amplify the reality of the vaquero/a/x everyday—one present in Avocado Heights. Romo, who established his ranch in Avocado Heights as a queer space for artists and vaquerx, disrupts masculinized narratives in his photographs’ style and through his positionality.
Historian Susan Stryker argued that gender representation is analogous to a digital image. She writes, “It’s unclear exactly how [a digital image] is related to the world of physical objects. It doesn’t point to some ‘real’ thing… it might in fact be a complete fabrication built up pixel by pixel or bit by bit—but a fabrication that nevertheless exists as an image or a sound as real as any other.” Like the digital image, gender is a construction. Pixel by pixel, bit by bit, bodily stylings through clothing and accessories, a person’s behaviors and interactions, their movements, dancing, songs, vocal utterances, and expressions add up to the dance of gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and nationality identifications present in vaquerx lifestyles.
Away from the recursive performance of male bodies in vaquero spaces, Romo shares that out on the trails, men transcend typical male behaviors and share intimate details and stories about their lives with each other over bonfires. They exhibit acts of care, play, and bonding that transmute traditional male roles. Heteronormative behavior characteristics are often found to be more fluid where the binary gender model of nuclear family orientation is out of the picture. Men and women ride together in the desfile around the central park of Avocado Heights to show off their horses, socialize, and play. Performative gender hierarchies, though present here and there, are most often ambiguous and indeterminable within these events or settings. Vaquero/a/x practices can disrupt imposed binaries and essentialist notions through endless re-imaginings of sex/gender models, white/brown bodies, and middle class/working class lives. Vaquero/a/x performance digitizes and decolonizes the body. Like music, it blends and flows in measures and meter imperceptibly.
“Towards the San Jose Creek River Trail”
Interspecies
“Ranch in Avocado Heights”
Horses witness human behavior. In witnessing human’s play, love, and connection, an ineffable lifeworld emerges. The horse, the viewer from vantage of the horse, is embedded. They can grasp a sense of the embodied experience but are always in some way dispositioned. One can lament the separation, but the degrees of connection and distance are innate in every interaction, whether that is by photograph or in embracing a partner for the dance. The interaction between man and animal is a gestural language. In behaviors shared between animal and human, or photographer and researcher, or dance partners, are modes of interaction, coding and decoding practices, and unconscious and conscious choices.
In “The Vaquero Way” a horse trainer, Sheila Varian explains, “The Vaquero method of training is a beautiful song sung with the softness and beauty of the rhythm of the horse. It is about the total harmony and togetherness of horse and rider.”7 The process of becoming a vaquero often begins at an early age. Training involves more than the act of breaking or taming a horse, but developing a mutual relationship, a partnership with another being grown from respect. The best horses are trained over varied terrain and can navigate their surroundings through experiential learning. Feeling and unity with the horse comprise the methodology.
“Pajaretes”“Recycled wood chips”
Like a photographer and their subject, or a historian and a past culture, animals and human beings train together to become “available to events.”8 French ethologist Jean-Claude Barrey’s analysis of this phenomenon is defined as isopraxis. To him, isopraxis articulates the “unintentional movements” of muscles that fire and contract in both horse and human at the exact same time.
“Talented riders behave and move like horses… Human bodies have been transformed by and into a horse’s body. Who influences and who is influenced, in this story, are questions that can no longer receive a clear answer. Both, human and horse, are cause and effect of each other’s movements. Both induce and are induced, affect and are affected. Both embody each other’s mind.”9
Animals and humans, like material and their environments become response-able. The interface reveals that between space and place, signifier and significant, forms lose distinction. Through iterations, intention, and idiosyncratic relations, emergent patterns evince rich cultural understandings.
“Herrero”
The complex interactive relations described between Avocado Heights residents’ connection with horses, their fellowship to other riders, how the vaqueros/as become innate stewards of the land, and how this connection ties history to the present situates humans, nature, and horses as central actors in the story. As anthropologist Anna Tsing argues, “Species interdependence is a well-known fact— except when it comes to humans. Human exceptionalism blinds us.”10 No matter the cultural variety available, many believe humanity, the biological human, is a constant. Instead, from molecule to ecosystem, humans reshape the environment as they are reshaped. In considering the domestications that closely knot humans with horses and all other organisms, Tsing asks, “What if we imagined a human nature that shifted historically together with varied webs of interspecies dependence?”11 She and Haraway submit that humanity is an interspecies relationship. It is more than us. It is more than human.
With the connection to the horses, the specific natural history of the San Gabriel Valley, and continual exploitation of the community’s health, Jesús Romo’s photographs convey that we are indelibly intertwined with our environment. Our subject of human nature and what is natural has historically excluded, or marginally considered nature as a critical element of culture and society. Human behavior is a part of natural processes and never exempt from them. Everything from viruses, evolution, mycelium, deforestation, drought, food systems, tectonic shifts, to cosmic events are essential explanations for behavior. Environmental racism through development discourse is not just material but epistemic violence. Between fact-retrieval through the modalities of linguistic conventions, embodiment and space, or nature, these are “exposures” which emancipate past stories, events, places, things, and people from the rigor of hegemonic, settler, colonial regimes. As each modality can lead one down a lifetime of research for just one subject alone, the researcher alone depends on this collaboration to make something of the findings. The intention of the project and the responsibility of its representation are most important.
Photographs, when not outright exploitative practices, almost ensure a type of embodiment or positionality less credible in alternative medias. Jesús Romo’s positionality, affiliation, and agency inspire an even greater trust in the content and intentionality in representation. Jesús Romo’s photographs are exposures of the interspecies assemblage of the San Gabriel Valley.
Notes
[1] David Reid, “Whittier Narrows Park,” East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, edited by Romeo Guzman, Caribbean Fragoza, et al. Rutgers, 2020. 191
[2] Barraclough, Laura R. Charros: How Mexican Cowboys Are Remapping Race and American Identity, 1st ed.. University of California Press, 2019. 164
[3] Barraclough, Charros, 159
[4] Kara L. Stewart. ”The Vaquero Way.” Horse Illustrated. November 16, 2004
[5] Donna Haraway. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008.
[6] Vinciane Despret. ”The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis.” Body & Society. Vol. 10(2–3): 111–134. DOI: 10.1177/1357034X04042938
[7] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: an Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. [8] Ibid.
Daniel Talamantes is a writer from the Central Valley of California. He is working toward a doctorate at Claremont Graduate University currently as an environmental historian, ethnographer, and environmental justice activist. Essays, short stories, and poems of his have been published with Entropy, Elderly, SF Chronicle, Soft Punk, to name a few. His first poetry chapbook Ruminate Emergent was the winner of the Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series and set to be published Fall 2022.
Jesús Romo is an activist, photographer, and resident of Avocado Heights. You can find him on the trails and fighting for clean air, water, and land with and for SGV residents.
Rolling down under: protesting the proposed fencing off of the people’s hill at New Parliament House, Canberra, Australia. Image credit: Lukas Coch / AAP, reproduced with permission.
An imaginative form of protest took place on the other side of the world in 2017 as some Australians took to rolling down grassy slopes at the heart of the nation’s capital of Canberra.[1] Although it appeared lighthearted, the motivations of these tumbling citizens were quite serious. They were rolling down Parliament Hill, situated at the heart of Canberra’s constellation of avenues and topographic landmarks. They were rolling to exercise an egalitarian ideal that was originally embedded in the design of the New Parliament House.
When conceptualizing the design in the 1980s, the New Parliament House architect Romaldo Giurgola sought to place the people above the parliament, rather than subservient to it. While this ideal has since been expressed in other parliaments—such as Foster and Partner’s gravity defying ramp that spirals above the Reichstag in Berlin—the design for Australia’s Parliament took the radical approach of burying the parliamentary chambers beneath a publicly accessible grassy knoll. This fusion of parliament and landscape sought to embrace the aspirations of all inhabitants and their interdependence with the timeless landscapes of the Island Continent.
The people’s hill: New Parliament House, Canberra, Australia. Image credit: John Gollings, reproduced with permission.
As landscape poetics go, it is a beautiful notion. Yet it is also selective, in the sense that First Australians have never identified with, or felt included in, the narrative of the people’s hill. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, which for almost half a century has continuously occupied the lawn at the foot of Australia’s Parliament House, embodies this implicit exclusion.[2]
This exclusion remains unresolved, with global events overtaking Giurgola’s egalitarian gesture after little more than a quarter of a century in the ground. The concept of the people’s hill was initially eroded with the tightening of security following the trauma of September 11, 2001. Then, in September 2017, the object of the people’s protest materialized: a nine-foot high welded steel security fence was erected around the hill to finish the job once and for all.[3] By sealing the knoll—and its legislature—off from its citizens, the new fence invokes a fortified medieval hill town that has shut the gate on its hinterland.
Shutting the gate on the people’s hill: fencing off New Parliament House, Canberra, Australia. Image credit: Kym Smith / Newspix, reproduced with permission.
And so, the people roll no more. As is also evident in the worldwide barricading of public space to repel vehicular terrorism, fencing off Australia’s Landscape Parliament is deeply symbolic. It reveals a feedback loop, whereby political systems are pushed further and further away, even as the ideal encapsulated in the people’s hill would seem ever more relevant to many political predicaments on other continents, including here in California.
To comprehend why a landscape parliament in the land Down Under was worth rolling for—and why it is relevant to California—entails venturing a thousand years back in time to Iceland. The land of ice and fire is steeped in geysers, glaciers, volcanoes, and Sagas. Amidst this storied landscape lies Iceland’s most hallowed ground, where from the year 930 to 1798, Thingvellir (Þingvellir) served as the dramatic venue for the world’s first parliament. Unlike the climate-controlled buildings that house contemporary political forums, Iceland’s parliament was held out under the open sky. Each year, Icelanders gathered amid the rocky fissures formed by diverging tectonic plates to discuss important matters of concern.[4]
Site of the ancient landscape parliament of Thingvellir, Iceland. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
In reference to its topographic setting, the name Þingvellir translates loosely as meeting valley in English. And while the correlation between vellir and valley is evident, understanding the other half of the name is more complicated. Although Þing is etymologically connected to the English word thing, it is unlike anything we know today. In Old Norse, Þings referred to landscape-based forums for discussing important community matters. Indeed, while the dramatic setting and near millennium of constant use make Thingvellir the most celebrated example, Thing parliaments were established in many locations throughout the Viking world. Their names live on in places such as Gulating in Norway, Tingwalla in Sweden, Tinganes in the Faroe Islands, Tingwall in Shetland and Orkney, and Tynwald on the Isle of Man.
The etymology of Þing can also be traced further back to the ancient Germanic proto-parliamentary Ding.[5] Referring to a general assembly or court of law in Old High German, Dings were often sited in topographically prominent locations that typically included megaliths, springs, or distinctive trees. These meanings were also absorbed into English, with traces of Þing and Ding still retained in thing, in the sense that we might say that someone “knows a thing or two” to imply that they comprehend the issues at hand.[6]
But these traces hang by a thread. In today’s industrialized world, we are far more likely to understand things as the many inanimate objects that surround us with our own indifference. Today, things are just the peripheral stuff that we overlook and often can’t be bothered to call by name. We might run an errand to “buy some things” or observe that we “forgot something.” And as the Internet of Things vaporizes our interaction with everyday appliances into the Cloud, our collective ambivalence towards things seems destined to increase.
Dispensing with things. Self Portrait as Revealed by Trash: 365 days of photographing everything I threw out, gallery exhibit, 2004-2008, Tim Gaudreau. Image credit: Tim Gaudreau, reproduced with permission.
To understand why the language of things changed so profoundly over the centuries—from the discussion of important matters to the trivialization of dispensable objects—entails travelling again. Even as Thingvellir’s parliament continued to operate within the unique and isolated landscapes of Iceland, things were subject to new forces of transformation in Continental Europe. As Europe modernized and political control centralized, the process of land enclosure began to displace the feudal commons that Thing parliaments had traditionally occupied. With no place left in the landscape, Thing parliaments moved undercover, and in time, into the fully enclosed buildings that inhabitants of the industrialized world take for granted today.[7]
In addition to parliaments, other culturally significant forums such as markets, performance spaces, and religious ceremonies also came in from the cold. Extrapolating this process to the present day, enclosure takes the form of industrially scaled agriculture within endless fields of climate-controlled hydroponic greenhouses.
The Sea of Plastic: the fully enclosed agricultural landscape of Mar del Plástico, Almeria, Spain. Image credit: George Steinmetz, reproduced with permission.
Whereas Things once referred to landscape-based community assemblies for discussing important issues, the enclosure of these forums led to things becoming understood more as the objects that surround them. With things now conceived more as objects than as issues, this shift also had profound implications for conceptions of landscape. Divested of its thingness, the landscape became more of a passive receptacle of physical things than a political Thing inherently.[8] So much so, that today it is hard to imagine landscape in any other way than as a benign scene or as ‘threatened’ nature in need of human assistance.
In this world, the landscape bears the scars of objects and events, but no longer takes a seat in the parliament that it once cultivated. And despite the promise of a seamless globe in which humans, capital, and wildebeest move without friction, the landscape is riven with more fissures than ever before.[9] These divisions take the form of walls between nation states, infrastructural ruptures within communities, socio-economic inequality, fragmentation of ecological biomes, and so forth.
Gathering at the edges: migrants attempting to cross the Macedonian Border from Greece, 2015. Image credit: Nikos Arvanitidis, reproduced with permission.
And yet, many of the most pressing issues that define the present Age of the Anthropocene transcend these barriers with impunity.[10] Walls do not readily circumscribe global warming, nuclear radiation, antibiotic resistance, non-biodegradable plastics, or global human migration. And unlike the everyday things that surround us all, these hyper-things are so vast and enduring that they often defy human scales of comprehension. They reveal a yawning gulf between our hazy awareness of the things that matter and our limited capacity to discuss, let alone address them.[11]
What to do? The issue here is one of horizons. From within houses of legislature or parliament, our shared political horizons are simply too inhibited to accommodate the scale and scope of the Anthropocene. In response, a city, a state, a nation, or even a coalition of nations, may seek to construct more expansive parliaments under which to gather ever-larger political assemblies.[12] And yet, even if these forums were to rival in enormity the largest sporting stadiums on Earth, they would still be buildings. And as buildings, they remain historically bound to the enclosure of political gatherings, and subsequent diminishment of Things into things.
For all their proficiency in keeping the rain out and the politicians in, buildings can never truly become Things. How, then, might the ancient conception of the landscape parliament be re-imagined to stretch our shared political horizons in order to more adequately encompass contemporary matters of concern? That is, how might some of the lost agency of landscape be rediscovered within the political process? How might some of the Thingness of things be recovered?
This is not to imply that Californians begin dissolving Capitol Hills and City Halls and repatriating venues of governance out into the landscape in a futile attempt at refashioning Thingvellir. It is not possible to just go back and recreate Things because the nature of contemporary political processes and assemblies has profoundly changed. To take Things literally in this way would probably just add to the assortment of unused public amphitheaters that unwittingly reify nostalgic yearnings for community congregations of yesteryear.
Taking Things literally: abandoned amphitheater, Foster Park, Ventura County, California. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
Nor is cultivating Thingness in landscape akin to invoking some form of animism that imbues inanimate objects with a mystical life force. And to be clear, re-connecting landscape and politics has nothing to do with the “blood and soil” that the Third Reich used to such catastrophic effect by weaponizing the power of place on an industrial scale. What it is about is feeling connected to a process. It is about leveraging the public landscape to embolden the public in politics.[13]
To begin this process, the first instinct may be to take down the fences. De-fencing parliaments and legislatures would be a revolution of sorts. It suggests comparisons with the eighteenth and nineteenth century process of dis-parking, whereby the royal hunting grounds of Europe were gradually opened up to public use.[14] This process was initiated by unlocking the gates, and ultimately—as Californians now take for granted in city parks that remain open 24/7—demolishing the boundary walls altogether.
If we return Down Under for a moment and think through dis-parking Australia’s freshly fortified landscape parliament, the flaw in this venture becomes apparent. To remain functional in the current climate, new, more sophisticated, invisible, and insidious forms of security would almost inevitably emerge to offset a de-fenced the house of the legislature. Albeit at a vaster scale, this phenomenon is demonstrated along the US southern border. From California to Texas, the heavily surveilled and profiled 100-mile-wide thickened zone that shadows the border puts fences and walls in context; material expressions of a more pervasive filtering process that occurs before a traveler even knows they have arrived and persists long after they think they have left.
And as the deplorable scenes from the January 2021 breaching of the US Capitol demonstrate, even the most hallowed ramparts can be scaled with sufficient incitement. As at the border, the walls of the Capitol proved more performative than impervious; something reassuringly concrete to assail as a diversion from thinking though what one hopes to accomplish once inside. Here, as at Australia’s parliament, walls and fences are a symptom not a cause. The parliament’s fence is going to remain somewhere; if not encircling the building in full view, then as a thickened zone on the margins, or, more perniciously, as a wall in the minds of those who feel shut out from the political process.[15]
US/Mexico border zone, Jacumba Hot Springs, California. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
Instead of deconstructing the walls and roofs of official houses of parliament and legislature of the State (only for other more pervasive barriers to raise in their place), a more constructive path could lay in devolving landscape parliaments as parallel processes. That is, perhaps the role of landscape Things today is not to be reprised as (non)representative parliaments for making laws, but to operate as moral shadow parliaments for discussing the issues that really matter; issues that dithering bricks-and-mortar parliaments and legislatures seem to habitually forfeit under the weight of earmarks and the fog of obfuscation.
With Things no longer satisfactorily represented in conventional parliaments and legislatures, where might these shadow landscape parliaments be situated? Perhaps everywhere and nowhere, in the sense that today a great deal of political assembly occurs in online forums that transcend borders and censors. But being digitally untethered from time and place has the significant downside of conveniently enabling individuals to insulate themselves from divisive issues within polarized online communities.
Yet even as social media spins its wheels, when people really need their voices heard, they still take to the streets on foot. If these issue-driven gatherings are to stick for any longer than an outrage-news-cycle, momentarily occupying the frictionless ground of polished airport foyers and online echo chambers is insufficient.[16] To stop Things from just slipping away into a capsicum haze of unfulfilled aspirations, landscape shadow parliaments would need to somehow lodge into the fissures that permeate everyday Californian environments. The Occupy Wall Street movement in New York and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Australia’s capital Canberra are recent and continuing precedents for this enduring act of literally digging in on an issue.[17]
Interstitial spaces in Northern California, (top) freeway teardown in Hayes Valley, San Francisco, and (bottom) freeway easement in Santa Rosa, California. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
Although often overlooked in our individual cognitive maps, California’s cultural landscapes are riven with local borderlands that cleave between neighborhoods, discordant land-uses, maintained and derelict sites, and most insidiously, between planning visions and their lived reality.[18]
In many situations, agencies or communities have valid rationales and useful mechanisms with which to heal rifts in the urban fabric. Consider, for example, the re-stitching of San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood following the demolition of the earthquake damaged double-tiered Central Freeway. Yet in other circumstances, adjacent locales march to decidedly different tunes. Consider a neighbourhood ‘on the other side of the tracks’ that is vulnerable to runaway change when the tracks are sunken or removed. Richmond’s Iron Triangle, which circumscribes an underprivileged neighborhood in the shadow of the oil refinery, encapsulates this condition.
In certain circumstances, this latter type of linear no-man’s-land could provide fertile sites for snagging shadow landscape parliaments. Dug into these thin borderland situations, landscape Things could be configured to thicken the jump-cut between two conditions with a third space that is neither one, nor the other. Here, ancient Thingvellir is instructive, with the geological fissures of the Icelandic setting cleaving space between local clans, into which the parliament occupied an interstitial every-man’s-land over which no single clan held jurisdiction.
The parliament of tears: Friendship Park, California/Mexico border at the Pacific Ocean. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
While California’s coastal conurbations are riddled with manmade fissures that suggest potential thickening into landscape Things, one of most potent (and confounding) sites surely lies at the State’s southernmost edge. Friendship Park straddles the US/Mexico border on the last high ground before the border fence spills down into the surf.[19] As one of the few locations where in-person cross-border interaction is condoned for a few hours on weekends, Friendship Park is a place of family reunions, mixed emotions, sit-in protests and coordinated trans-border activities. Twin fences define the site; one on the border, and a second inside US soil. This second fence is furnished with a disproportionately monumental gateway that promises thoroughfare but leads only to no-man’s-land.
Considered in the context of other heavily fortified no-man’s lands in urban areas, one may continue to hope for a future ‘Berlin moment,’ whereby the fortification of California’s southern border is eventually demolished as a relic of history.[20] But in the meantime, working within current geopolitical realities, how might a site such as Friendship Park be thickened into a third space? How might the fledgling aspirations Friendship Park be amplified into a landscape Thing?
At present, the challenges of the site and situation are immense. The fences are too insistent, admission to the controlled no-man’s-land too selective, and the shared horizon glistening out across the Pacific Ocean too bittersweet. Indeed, as the semantic distinction between fences and walls becomes increasingly partisan, the border ‘fence’ at Friendship Park is now so heavily armored with welded mesh—leaving apertures barely wider than a human finger—that it is, in substance, already a ‘wall.’
And although walls ably defended territories for thousands of years, their presence today is decidedly regressive.[21] In the sixteenth century, as medieval fortifications proved increasingly ineffective against advancements in ballistic technology, horizontal defensive earthworks supplanted vertical masonry walls. Reaching its zenith in Europe’s Renaissance star forts, this strategy can still be explored today in the Batteries that were built along the California coast in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the advent of long-range ballistics pushed defensive earthworks to new extremes. As threats materialized from over the horizon in every direction, people retreated underground, relying on the thickness and shape of the land as their primary mode of defense.
Battery Cavallo, Fort Baker, California, circa 1938. Image credit: National Archives and Records Administration, Aerial Photographs Collection, image in the public domain.
This brief fortification primer illuminates the superiority of strategically shaped landform over masonry walls and reinforced fences. By shifting this capability from a defensive to a public conception of space, the shaping of landscape thickness becomes an intriguing proposition. Through the medium of land shaping, what form could a shadow landscape forum at Friendship Park—or elsewhere—take?
Mounding the landscape up into a hill would seem the obvious answer. As was (until recently) possible on Australia’s Parliament House hill, Californians from all walks of life may seek to fabricate the moral high ground from which to better foresee and understand the expansive issues at hand. If the concept of a political horizon is conflated with the physical horizon (as formed by the curvature of the earth), climbing a hill would appear to expand one’s horizons, allowing each of us to see more things—to literally see over the wall.
To take things to the next level, those who are so inclined could go a little higher in the basket of a hot air balloon and expand their political horizons a little further. Or, they could liftoff into the low Earth-orbit of the International Space Station and see what satellites see. Or, like the astronauts on Apollo 17, travel halfway to the moon to catch the lonely blue marble within the single frame of a Hasselblad; revealing that the whole Earth is itself a thing, albeit one that no human can see both sides of at the same time. In the sense that this epiphany energized the environmental movement, humanity has been metaphorically trying to get back down to Earth ever since.[22]
The point is that the higher an individual goes, the more likely they are to feel as though they are on top of things. And yet, from up on the hill (or space station) their horizons defer further outwards, circumscribing more and more issues while leaving them no closer to grasping or acting on the issues that matter. But what if this yearning to climb is upended, and instead of seeking landscape Things up on hills, we think of Things as forming down in hollows? Once again, ancient Thingvellir offers guidance here, with the geologically fissured Icelandic landscape providing a range of crevices that drew in gatherings of varied scale and scope within their embrace.
Through the organizational pull of gravity, hollows instinctively collect things. Consider the dunes on the floor of California’s Death Valley, where over the eons each grain of sand made its way to a gathering of like-minded grains at the lowest point in North America. Or in a more general sense, consider how water—access to which is a defining wall-crossing issue of the twenty-first century—converges fluidly into hollowed out landforms.
And like the water that makes up about 60 percent of our bodily mass, hollows can also collect humans. If the people rolling off Australia’s parliament hill were to repeat their mass tumble from the rim of a hollow, they would all end up drawn together at the bottom. What they may find there could be confronting, since hollows have also served historically as dumping grounds; as places where all the things that humans discard end up, out of sight and out of mind. It turns out that many of these things are still there, decaying on a geological timescale. Confronted with these things, the parliamentary hollow impels its occupants to recall; not in the sense of officially ordering someone (such as a Governor) to return, but in the other sense of bringing an event or situation back into one’s mind.[23]
Hollows foreground these things by compressing space and time by retraining the horizons of those who enter them. When going down into a hollow, everyone’s personal horizon temporarily retracts to the rim of the concave landform.[24] A kind of horizonal hand-over occurs, whereby instead of retreating unceasingly into the distance (and off into the future) as each individual moves around, the horizon stays tethered to the landform. As a result, everyone in the hollow sees the same horizon. That is, they share a collective horizon with the many other things—human, non-human, and inanimate—that are gathered in the present moment.
Gathering things: the horizon as formed by the curvature of the Earth from (top to bottom) on the plain; up on the hill; and down in the hollow. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
The other thing about hollows is that they leak. Through either infiltration or evaporation, hollow landforms leak water (otherwise they would become lakes), and unfortunately hollows often leak toxins when associated with dumping grounds. Yet in a positive sense, hollows also potentially leak people and ideas. In contrast to the illusion of a hermetically sealed leak-proof house of parliament, the landscape parliament shaped as a hollow makes no claims to being watertight. Unlike a wall or fence, the rim that encircles the hollow landform remains permeable. Freed of the limitations that architectural containment places on access and participation, humans, along with many other things, can cross over this topographic threshold and gather to discuss matters of concern. And when the time for discussion has passed and the time for action is present, they can move back over the collective threshold and leave.
Outside of the hollow, the Earth’s horizon comes back into focus and the wider world, with its myriad issues, comes back into play. Out here individuals are potentially primed to extend issues of concern beyond a preoccupation with their own and immediate futures, which from ecological crises to genetic design, encompass vast and miniscule scales and temporalities.
However, potential does not necessarily translate into actuality. While this can be true in any situation, it is doubly so in the landscape. Whereas the programmatic capacity of buildings is reasonably predictable, predetermining the usefulness of a landscape in advance remains an imprecise art.[25] Buildings have doors and roofs with which to encapsulate and regulate the activities of their occupants. Landscape, on the other hand, is less obliging; think of landscape in terms of the vagaries of the weather upon which it is beholden, or in terms of the indeterminate flow of the rivers that run through it.
Fluid horizons: “View of Sacramento City as it appeared during the great inundation in January 1850 / Drawn from nature by Geo. W. Casilear & Henry Bainbridge. New York : Lith. of Sarony c1850.” Source: California State Library, image in the public domain.
The landscape’s inherent uncertainty can be extended to humans, who often do not adopt landscapes in the way in which planners intended. Part of this is undoubtedly down to the preponderance of poorly designed public spaces (in California and elsewhere) that fail both functionally and expressively. Yet even with the best intentions, landscapes can fall flat. In this context, expecting landscape parliaments to routinely perform as places for actual discussion could backfire. The weight of expectation could create intimidating spaces that people completely avoid, unwittingly adding to the existing trove of empty amphitheaters.
Instead of pressuring landscape things to be routinely parliamentary from the outset, perhaps their role needs to be initiated in more down to earth terms. Positioned more humbly, landscape Things would principally seek to simply collect people in situ, essentially drawing each of us out of our internet of things and into the shared world of Things. Once drawn—like moths to a lamp—into the public realm, we are more likely to participate in, and engage with, the issues (or things) that concern us all.
Drawn together: groups around bonfires on Ocean Beach, San Francisco. Image credit: Kim Komenich / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris, reproduced with permission.
From this unassuming basis, in certain situations where particularly potent matters of concern converge on the ground, contemporary landscape Things might emerge. While there is a great deal of indeterminacy involved, we can assume that these Things are unlikely to leaven on Capitol hills. Just as legislatures and issues are not progressing, forums and gatherings are not aligning. The forums that govern Californians are fixed at the center, on the hill, while the gatherings that matter dig in at the edges, in the fissures. It is here that shadow landscape parliaments are at most likely to be at home.
Given that they are not tied to the conventional apparatuses of federal, state, or local governance, to which other scales might landscape shadow parliaments extend? And, in addition to Friendship Park, where else in California might these reimagined landscape shadow parliaments (Things) be dispersed? As nature and politics increasingly converge, perhaps Things might draw within their horizons each of the world’s 867 bioregions, ten of which intersect with California.[26] Or, across the Sierras, perhaps Landscape Parliaments might grip onto the salty banks of the overdrawn Mono Lake, stripped of inflows that are gravity-fed southbound along the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Or, as traditional zoological gardens become less and less defensible, Things might colonize the naturalistic habitats of decommissioned animal exhibits in San Francisco zoo.
Drawn to the edge: Sunken City, Sn Pedro, California. Image credit: Karl Kullmann.
Or, perhaps the position of Landscape Parliaments might be calibrated to sea level rise projections: not safely on higher ground, but at the waterline near vulnerable communities such as East Palo Alto, to be intentionally inundated as a wet-feet reality check on rising tides. Or, find niches amidst the fragmented ruins of the aptly named Sunken City near Long Beach, where buildings and streets slumped into the Pacific Ocean. Or, ride the precipice of vanishing ground, by convening Things on the concrete pads of recently demolished buildings atop Pacifica’s rapidly receding cliff line. Or, inhabit the new ground that results when landfill is decommissioned, such as that of the Albany Bulb wasteland that protrudes into the tidelands of San Francisco Bay’s eastern shore.
By gathering Californians together within the contours of these settings, Landscape Things might help us to recall the gravity of the things that matter, nearer to where they matter.
[4] Agust Gudmundsson, ‘Tectonics of the Thingvellir Fissure Swarm, SW Iceland’, Journal of Structural Geology 9/1 (1987): 61–69. Richard Beck, ‘Iceland’s Thousand Year Old Parliament’, Scandinavian Studies and Notes 10/5 (1929): 149–153.
[5] See Kenneth R. Olwig, ‘Liminality, Seasonality and Landscape’, Landscape Research 30/2 (2005): 259–271.
[6] Here I draw on Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in: Albert Hofstadter (trans.), Poetry Language Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 161–180, at 173.
[7] See Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, ‘Urbs in Rure: Historical Enclosure and the Extended Urbanization of the Countryside’, in: Neil Brenner (ed.), Implosions / Explosions (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2014), 236–259.
[8] See Kenneth R. Olwig, ‘Heidegger, Latour and the Reification of Things: The Inversion and Spatial Enclosure of the Substantive Landscape of Things–The Lake District Case’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 95/3 (2013): 251–273, at 256.
[9] See Karl Kullmann, ‘Route Fittko: Tracing Walter Benjamin’s Path of No Return”, Ground Up (Delineations) 5 (2016): 70–75.
[10] In the current epoch that Paul Crutzen famously labelled the Anthropocene, human activity is permanently recorded in the geological record. Paul J. Crutzen, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, in Eckart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (eds.), Earth System Science in the Anthropocene (Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer 2006), 13–18.
[11] Here I draw on Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
[12] Here I draw on Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 4–31. Bruno Latour, ‘A Cautious Prometheus?’ Keynote lecture for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, 3 September 2008.
[13] The public landscape is not limited to the bucolic countryside or the protected wilderness. Today it also includes the burgeoning urban landscape: the streets, the parks, the appropriated interstitial spaces, the postindustrial wastelands, the cultural precincts, and even the external surfaces of buildings.
[14] The archaic verb dispark means to ‘divest a park of its private use’ by ‘throw[ing] parkland open.’ Charles Talbut Onions (ed.), The Shorter English Dictionary on Historical Principals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 530.
[15] This is a reference to the Mauer im Kopf (the wall in the head), that persists in the psycho-geographies of Berliners long after the fall of the concrete Berlin Wall.
[16] This is a reference to the spontaneous airport demonstrations that followed the Trump administration’s January 2017 Muslim travel ban.
[18] See Karl Kullmann, ‘Thin Parks / Thick Edges: Towards a Linear Park Typology for (Post)infrastructural Sites’, Journal of Landscape Architecture 6/2 (2011): 70–81.
[19] For in depth explorations of the Mexico/US borderlands, see Michael Dear, ‘Imagining a Third Nation: US-Mexico Border’, Ground Up (Delineations) 5 (2016): 46–55.
[20] For a distinctly theological perspective on the California border in relationship to California citizenship, see Jason S. Sexton, ‘Borders and Barriers: Citizenship in California’, in Kirsteen Kim and Alexia Salvatierra (eds.), Los Angeles as a Global Crossroads: Migration, Transnationalism, and Faith (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022), 131–150.
[21] The return of border walls has revived some decidedly medieval devices for their circumvention in the form of ladders, catapults and tunnels.
[22] On the cultural impact of the whole earth image, see Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London: I.B. Taurus, 2008), chapter 1.
[23] As defined by The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
[24] See James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986).
[25] See Karl Kullmann, ‘The Usefulness of Uselessness: Towards a Landscape Framework for Un-activated Urban Public Space’, Architectural Theory Review 19/2 (2015): 154–173.
[26] As classified by the World Wide Fund for Nature, bioregions are ecologically and geographically distinct areas.
Karl Kullmann is a landscape architect, urban designer, and Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, University of California, Berkeley.
Drivers passing through the Salinas Valley from the San Francisco Bay Area to San Louis Obispo, Santa Barbara and points further south see a visually beautiful landscape. Strawberries, lettuce or artichokes stretch in neat rows to the base of steep hills blanketed with grasses that, depending on season, are colored alternately emerald green or golden. If the drivers notice workers in the fields, they will likely be small, distant figures who are quickly passed. In the place of actual workers, however, drivers may see one of the many attractive, larger-than-life cutout billboard murals of farmers and farmworkers.
The farm fields that form the paintings’ backdrops make up the “salad bowl of the world,” so-named for the region’s export-intensive cool weather crops. The people depicted look happy with their work. They are painted in bright, sunny colors, and stand alone or in groups of two or three. Press coverage of the billboard art describes it as celebrating the region’s agricultural economy and its people (Pogash 2005; Roth 2013). But there is more to these images, and to California agricultural history, than first meets the eye. By alternately obscuring the existence of farmworkers or suggesting to the broader population that farmworkers are happy and well-treated, this art draws on long-standing agricultural ideologies to sustain racial capitalism and inhibit organizing, ultimately rendering agriculture’s reform more difficult.
Image 1: Billboard mural of “field man” Bob Lyman holding sliced head of lettuce. Vernon Morris provides scale. Photo by Tracy Perkins. Mural by John Cerney.
Most of the cut-out billboard murals are painted by Salinas based artists John Cerney and Dong Sun Kim. Their murals often depict specific people, either current or past owners or workers at the farms where the billboards are displayed. Cerney grew up in the Salinas Valley, where he worked in the post-harvest lettuce industry before getting a college degree in art. He has been painting giant cutout billboard people since the 1990s, and estimates that he has completed about 300 in his career, 30-40 of which are scattered around Monterey County, where the Salinas Valley is located (Chatfield 2018; Roth 2013). Most of his work is commissioned by business owners, organizations and sometimes individuals, but as his career has matured he has also begun creating murals of his own design that he donates to towns around the country (Chatfield 2018).
There is little information available in the public sphere about Kim. He is a self-taught artist who emigrated to the Salinas Valley from Seol, Korea. His youthful art depicted nature scenes, but as he got older, he developed an interest in “all things American.” (Indeed, much of Cerney and Kim’s work fits into the larger category of Americana). Kim fed this interest by reading US history books and watching cowboy movies (Robinson 2012). After his emigration, he collaborated with Cerney for a time on Cerney’s cut-out billboard murals, and now paints these and other murals on his own.
Image 2: Farmers and their artichokes. Photo by Tracy Perkins. Mural artist unknown.
The Salinas Valley billboard people draw on familiar visual themes. For example, Image 2 shows two happy, friendly older white men. One has one arm casually around the other man, while his other hand, wedding ring visible, rests on the sign behind which they are placed. The other man holds three plump artichokes. Both wear old-fashioned glasses and coveralls with the “Ocean Mist” logo sewn onto the breasts. The billboard is painted in an Americana style reminiscent of the 1950s that evoke values of honesty, hard work, and thrift. The men’s weathered, smiling faces tap into agrarian tropes that suggest pride in work done well and according to the season’s changing patterns, and life in tight-knit rural communities in which people are both independent and yet also supportive of their neighbors when trouble strikes.
As a single image, this mural could be simply a historical representation of the two men in question. But images never stand alone. This mural is in the company of other such agricultural imagery in the Salinas Valley, across the nation, and indeed in food products at grocery stores seemingly everywhere. The regularity with which such happy, white, old-timey farmers appear in agricultural imagery is what signals that something larger than individual artistry is at work. In this case, that “something larger” is ideology (Althusser 1971). More specifically, it is the ideology of Jeffersonian agrarianism combined with a more recent and overlapping form of white nostalgia.
Ideologies are systems of ideas that either support or contest the way the world works. Dominant, or ruling ideologies combine with what Althusser calls repressive state apparatuses (i.e. the police, courts, prisons) to support existing economic structures (capitalism) and the multiple forms of exploitation that uphold it (1971). The ideology of Jeffersonian agrarianism is foundational to the widespread tendency in the US to associate farmers with positive moral values. Thomas Jefferson saw small-scale farmers as particularly virtuous members of society. He promoted an economy based on small-scale farming combined with a weak federal government as the best foundation for a healthy democracy (Jefferson 1982). However, Jefferson’s vision was meant for free white farmers who labored on land that they owned. It excluded enslaved Africans and those who worked land owned by others. These exclusions from the category of virtuousness and democracy, were necessary to support Jefferson’s own lifestyle. Jefferson owned 13,700 acres of land and at least 187 enslaved people at the time of the US Revolutionary War (Isenberg 2016). As a “founding father” of the nation, Jefferson’s agricultural ideology also had larger significance beyond his own household, directing attention away from the enslaved Africans and African Americans whose labor provided the foundation of much US agriculture and wealth (Baptist 2014; Carney 2002; Johnson 2013). Jeffersonian agrarianism thus upheld white supremacy.
Jefferson’s agrarian vision persists (Buttel and Flinn 1975; Wald 2011). Now, it is most explicitly called on by white advocates of small-scale, family farming (Rampell 2017). But even though Jefferson attributed unique worth to the small-scale, pre-industrial, white, land-owning farmer who supplies most labor needs with family members, his vision has also been bent to the purposes of large scale, industrialized agribusinesses owned by whites who employ vast numbers of largely non-white, non-family labor.
The idealization of white rural life embedded in Jeffersonian agrarianism strengthened after the Civil War ended legal slavery; as the US population changed from predominantly rural to predominantly urban in the 20th century; and again in the post-Civil Rights era. In each of these moments white nostalgia informed agrarian ideologies, and racial ideologies in general. White nostalgia functions, for whites, to cast in a warm glow of memory all-white spaces of the past, or racially mixed spaces in which whites were unquestioningly at the top of racial hierarchies. As Maly, Dalmage and Michaels write, “Nostalgia is a special type of memory, one that elevates pleasurable experiences… while scrubbing away stories that are unpleasant and even shameful” (2013:758–59), such as the horrific treatment of enslaved Africans, Black sharecroppers, and, more recently, Mexican farmworkers. As a result, the valorization of white farmers and erasure of workers of color has persisted across time in art, advertising, literature and politics (Alkon and McCullen 2011; Mitchell 1996; Sackman 2005; Wald 2011, 2016). When they are not simply erased, slaves and workers of color are typically portrayed as servile, simple, happy and/or exotic in ways that serve dominant economic interests (Adamkiewicz 2016; Besky 2014; Klein 2020).
Many of these nostalgic visions now paint dreamy visions of white life in the 1950s which, not coincidentally, was the last decade before the bulk of the legal victories of the civil rights movement took place in the 1960s. Indeed, many of the Salinas Valley’s agricultural billboards depict aesthetics and agricultural technologies from the 1950s and earlier. These revered pasts took place before the disruption of (limited) racial integration in the 1960s, and, for the white lower middle classes, the economic erosion of the 1970s and beyond.
Romanticized depictions of white rural life and agriculture hide the foundational role of Latinx farmworkers in California; 90 percent of today’s crop-workers in California are foreign born, with only 3% self-reporting as neither Hispanic nor Latino (U.S. Department of Labor n.d.). For example, Image 3 shows a presumably white man holding a head of lettuce while kneeling next to a packed lettuce box and his trusty dog. The box of lettuce is labeled with the Dole logo. This depiction intimately associates the man in question with the packing of the lettuce. However, the man depicted was the real-life owner of an agribusiness that farmed 10,700 acres of vegetable crops in California’s Salinas and San Joaquin Valleys as well as Arizona; one of his customers was the multinational corporation Dole Food Company (Caprara 2010; Preston 2016). It is highly unlikely that business owners who are responsible for farming on this scale spend much time packing produce. And even if they did, the vast majority of the labor would still be done by the Latinx who overwhelmingly make up the California agricultural labor force.
Ocean Mist Farms, as depicted in Image 2, is also a large enterprise: they are the largest single grower of artichokes in the US, and grow in Arizona, Mexico, and four other regions of California in addition to the Salinas Valley (Anon n.d.-b). As such, they surely rely on Latinx farmworkers, despite the two kindly-looking white men featured on their billboard, and despite whatever their labor force may have looked like in the company’s early history.
Image 3: Owner of R.C. Farms, which sells to Dole, poses next to a packed box of lettuce. Photograph by Tracy Perkins. Mural artist unknown.
Large scale, industrial farms are not the only agricultural enterprises that regularly depict white farmers while relying substantially on Latinx labor. Smaller farms, and especially organic ones, are often associated with white family farmers and/or fair labor conditions for workers. Image 4, painted by Dong Sun Kim, shows two white people surrounded by bountiful produce (Ha 2007). The billboard depicts a man and a woman standing closely together, the man pointing the way to the farm, and the woman leaning into the man. The image suggests a couple, and therefore a family farm. At their feet, the name of a farm is printed on the side of a box full of diverse produce. A quick internet search confirms that the people depicted are indeed a couple and the real-life owners of the farm in question. They are the third generation of their family to live on the property, they farm organically, and have farmed a relatively small 50-100 acres (Anon n.d.-a).
Like this couple, whites in the Salinas Valley billboards are usually painted in ways suggestive of a status as farmers or farm owners by being positioned standing, with farm branding, and/or without hand-tools – see also Images 2 and 3. Latinx are typically depicted actively laboring on the land, and are less likely to appear with farm branding unless they are painted doing the work of packing branded boxes – see Images 5, 6 and 7. This representation of farmers/farm owners as white and farm workers as Latinx fairly accurately represents reality. Although there are important exceptions to this trend (Jett 2020; Mihesuah and Hoover 2019; Minkoff-Zern 2019; White 2018), across the US farm owners are largely and disproportionately white and farmworkers are largely and disproportionately Latinx. This racialized distinction between farmers and farmworkers depends in part on systems put in place across history to use people racialized as “other” than white as the foundation of agricultural labor. But it also depends on other systems that prevented people of color from owning land themselves, or that disappropriated or discriminated against those who did (Daniel 2007; Jett 2020; Matsumoto 1993; Minkoff-Zern and Sloat 2017; Ng 2002).
Still, the billboard depicted in Image 4 constructs a white understanding of farming that belies the state’s largely Latinx labor force on not just conventional but also most organic farms. In addition to the makeup of the workforce, there are also the working conditions to consider. Although consumers often assume organic farms treat their workers better, organic farms cannot be assumed to have better labor practices than conventional farms; some do, but plenty of others do not (Getz, Brown, and Shreck 2008; Guthman 2014).
Image 4: Billboard mural of the owners of Swank Farms. Photo by Tracy Perkins. Mural by Dong Sun Kim
In obscuring the labor of Latinx workers, much of the Salinas Valley roadside agricultural art also does something more: it hides the larger economic context of racial capitalism. This concept draws attention to racism’s important role in American capitalism, which both produces and profits from racism as it has been enacted in wages, working conditions, immigration policy and labor protections, or the lack thereof (Baptist 2014; Du Bois 1999; Robinson 2005).
A vast array of different racialized groups provided the labor on which the agricultural economy depended across California history. Indigenous peoples formed the primary agricultural labor force from colonization until the mid 1850s; first those brought from what is now the Mexican state of Baja California, and after too many of them died en route, later from what is now California. Catholic missionaries were a leading edge of colonialism, and indigenous people were not allowed to leave the missions without permission. Those who fled were often tracked down and returned by soldiers, and sometimes whipped and jailed. They were neither paid for their work, nor could they typically own personal property, marry of their own accord, move about at night, or raise their own children. The status of Indigenous farmworkers changed little after Mexican Independence, when modern day California changed hands from Spain to Mexico in 1821, nor after it changed hands again to the United States in 1846 (Street 2004). Disease and genocide decimated Indigenous populations, and survivors fled farm work.
The Salinas Valley’s roadside agricultural art evokes the feel of small, mom-and-pop farm businesses. But the size of California agricultural enterprises was enormous almost from the start, set into place by Spanish and Mexican land policies that granted huge tracts of land to favored colonial elites (Daniel 1981). Farmworkers, not family members, provided the labor on the majority of California’s vast farms – California was one of the few places outside of the slave south in which farming was not largely a family effort (Street 2004). California agriculture was also firmly capitalist by the time it joined the United States, with few of the subsistence or semi-subsistence farms more prevalent elsewhere.
Workers from many other groups assumed the positions of the early indigenous farmworkers over time, including those from Asia (China, Japan, Korea, India, and the Philippines), Europe (Ireland, Germany, Britain, Italy, Portugal) and Latin America (Chile, Mexico, Central America), as well as Black workers from the US South and other American-born people (Daniel 1981; Street 2004; Walker 2004). To counter the organizing of existing workers, foreign born workers were brought in whenever possible in order to create an oversupply of labor that helped maintain low wages. Many were recruited from parts of the world suffering economic and social upheavals, and were often misled about the nature of the opportunities that would be available to them in California. Conditions of travel and life upon arrival were often harsh. Chinese workers were subject to mob violence and individual assaults by whites, some of whom were organized in parallel to the Ku Klux Klan through the Order of Caucasians (Street 2004).
Widespread Depression-era labor unrest ultimately extracted new labor protections from the federal government, but key reforms that created a national minimum wage and protected the right to unionize were denied to agricultural workers. This national carve-out was a result of a political deal made to appease Southern Democrats intent on preserving Jim Crow by blocking any possibility of improving the circumstances of the region’s mostly Black agricultural workers (Farhang and Katznelson 2005). Then, from 1942 to 1964, the Bracero program formalized the pattern of supplying plentiful foreign-born laborers at low wages – this time from Mexico. Close to five million people were issued short-term worker permits during the lifetime of the program, and others came without official paperwork (Mitchell 2012). The industrialization of agriculture also intensified during this period – poisons were increasingly applied to crops to control pests, and workers suffered the consequences (Walker 2004).
Ever since the Bracero era, California agricultural workers have remained predominantly Mexican. The latest wave of workers to occupy the bottom rungs of the agricultural work force are indigenous Mexicans whose numbers began to grow in the 1990s. Some speak neither Spanish nor English and are thus particularly vulnerable to abuse. Indigenous farmers are especially concentrated in Coastal California, of which the Salinas Valley is part (Mines, Nichols, and Runsten 2010).
Across all of this time, whites racialized agricultural workers to justify their exploitation, arguing that people of color were less susceptible to disease, and that particular racialized groups, which changed over time, were “naturally suited” to backbreaking agricultural work (Holmes 2013; Maldonado 2009; Omi and Winant 2015; Street 2004). White farm owners and politicians also racialized agricultural workers to build up social barriers between groups in order to make cross-racial organizing more difficult (Valdés 2011). As a result, since colonization farmworkers have worked under changing legal circumstances that have had them work without wages or have kept those wages low. These systems have been extraordinarily effective. In 2019, the state earned over $50 billion in cash receipts from agriculture, making it the leading agricultural state in the nation (USDA Economic Research Service n.d.). The devaluation of agricultural workers of color that many white farmers both benefited from and helped create enabled white agricultural capitalists to pay lower wages and provide worse working conditions than they might have otherwise, thus generating more profits. In other words, racial capitalism provided a foundation for California agriculture from its origins to the present day, even though at certain moments of history poor whites also formed significant parts of the exploited class of farmworkers.
***
The tendency for white farmers to be valorized and for people of color farmers and farmworkers to be obscured is deep and long-standing. But while most of the agriculturally themed Salinas Valley cut-out billboard murals depict white-presenting people, what makes the collection more interesting are the murals that call attention to Latinx farmworkers. The paintings of them are dignified and show them as contributors not only to the local economy, but also the global food supply. For example, in Image 5, a Latino worker carries a long length of irrigation pipe on one shoulder in front of text that reads, “Salinas Valley: Feeding Our Nation.” The mural connects Latinx agricultural labor to masculinity, pride of place and pride in farmworker contributions to the global food supply. These images uniquely stretch the Jeffersonian valorization of white farmers to include Latinx farmworkers as well. This is significant in light of the systemic erasure of farmworkers from the public imagination of agriculture (Alkon and McCullen 2011).
Returning to Althusser’s theory of ideology is useful here. In his accounts, ruling ideologies that support the status quo coexist with challenger ideologies that contest the status quo. But, ruling ideologies often incorporate parts of these challenger ideologies in ways that blunt their impact. As a result, ruling ideologies change over time, responding to changing political conditions in ways that sustain capitalism. Indeed, dominant agricultural ideologies in the US have changed over time in ways that parallel broader ideological change: from Jeffersonian agrarianism (Jefferson 1982), to white nostalgia (Adamkiewicz 2016; Maly et al. 2013; Mann 2008), to, most recently, symbolic multiculturalism (Gunderson 2021).[i]
Multiculturalism potentially functions as a challenger ideology, but, when reduced largely to symbolism, becomes another facet of ruling ideologies. The Latinx workers depicted in the Salinas Valley billboard art can be read as examples of symbolic multiculturalism, which showcases people of color without fundamentally challenging their (collectively) subordinate place in the economy. Symbolic multiculturalism can do more than simply fail to make things better – in depicting people of color as happy and empowered, it can actively undercut efforts to reduce racism by promoting the idea that racism no longer exists.[ii]
Image 5: Billboard mural visible from highway 68 when entering Salinas from the south. Photo by Tracy Perkins. Mural by John Cerney.
These outcomes can occur even when they are not the intention of the artist nor of the person commissioning the art. The first billboard cut-out people that artist Cerney created were commissioned by the owner of a local produce company to honor his workers, many of whom are Latinx, and to draw attention to their contributions to the food supply (Pogash 2005). As the farm owner says, “I was tired of people bad-mouthing agriculture… thinking everything comes out of a bag or carton. I was trying to show the community it takes a lot of people to grow food, that farming is a good occupation and that people work in the fields to produce good food for us” (Paris 1999). The figures were modeled on employees, and one was even painted to honor a specific worker who had been with the company for over fifty years on the occasion of his 80th birthday (see Image 1) (Cerney n.d.). The website of the company that commissioned and displays the 18-foot-tall murals describes the labor that each of the billboard people are conducting: thinning, harvesting, packing, and weighing boxes of harvested lettuce, as well as overseeing the irrigation and the farm as a whole. The billboards and website together educate the public about the specific, diverse skills need to accomplish the tasks required of farmworkers and farm managers (Anon n.d.-c).
Commentators quoted in press coverage of the billboard murals respond with enthusiastic endorsements, from the president of Salinas Valley Chamber of Commerce to a dean at nearby Hartnell College to a spokesperson for Salinas’s National Steinbeck Center (Garcia 2017; Paris 1999; Pogash 2005; Roth 2013). The latter says that the billboard murals “do what public art is supposed to do, it enriches the landscape visually and emotionally” (Pogash 2005). Journalists call the work empowering and heroic (Garcia 2017; Pogash 2005), or comment on the likeness between Cerney’s work and that of famed local author John Steinbeck, writing, “In a certain light, Cerney’s plywood figures are an extension of Steinbeck’s lifelong passion for giving voice to the voiceless” (Roth 2013). The only slightly sour note is sounded by the chair of the Visual and Public Arts Department at nearby California State University Monterey Bay, who notes that the murals do not show, “poor working conditions, illnesses from pesticides and bad housing,” which is “a whole other story that’s never told” (Pogash 2005). However, she is quoted as saying that this is because the farmer who commissioned the farmworker billboards is “positive and fair with his workers.”
Herein lies the crux of interpreting the Salinas Valley agricultural billboard art, and other images like it. The intent of the artist and the person who commissions the art matters, as do the labor practices of the farm owners who commission the work and the experiences of the workers depicted. But what is more significant is, first, the way the art will be read by the general public, who know little to nothing of these individual level details, and second, the structural conditions that continue to leave most farmworkers vulnerable to violence and abuse. Even if the farm owners who commission images of farmworkers are all fair-minded employers who go above and beyond existing labor law, the structurally vulnerable position of most farmworkers remains. This vulnerability is not accidental. It has been reproduced at great cost to farmworkers over and over across California history, via, in part, racial capitalism and the ideologies that support it. In sustaining exploitative agricultural economies, these ideologies work in tandem with Althusser’s repressive state apparatuses (1971): the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcements, and the courts.
And, despite the above assertion that the farmworker murals give “voice to the voiceless,” this is not actually true. While the murals draw attention to the often-unacknowledged labor of farmworkers, they are painted by artists at the request of farm owners, not farm workers. The results depict a uniformly positive experience of farmwork, despite many farmworkers’ actual claims of difficult working conditions, low pay and abuse, and efforts to have their children enter occupations other than farmwork. None of the press coverage I found included any quotes from farmworkers. Rather, press coverage “gives voice” to the artists, the commissioning farm owners, and at times an array of other local business, cultural and educational leaders. In only one case were the opinions of farmworkers even tangentially referenced. Below, artist Cerney describes a conversation with the farmowner who first commissioned billboards depicting workers, showing how Cerney came to use real farmworkers as the models:
On his first commission, [the farmowner] said, “use your own people [as models].” I said “well, it’ll be more intimate, and you’ll get more of a kick out of it, if you use your own people.” So he relented and I used some of his farmworkers, and now, boy I hear stories of one of these guys who comes out here and cleans it off every couple of weeks, and they’re all proud of it, and it turns out to be a good thing. (Anon 2006)
Of all the existing coverage of the art that I found, this story told by the artist, as told to him by, presumably, the farmowner, is the closest thing to providing insight into farmworker reception of the art. Although the story could have been distorted as it was passed along from farmowner, to artist, to audience, there likely are indeed farmworkers who are pleased to be commemorated in art, or pleased to see images of other farmworkers so commemorated. But such a reception does not affect the billboards’ broader ideological impacts. Despite showcasing the role of Latinx farmworkers in the regional economy and the global food supply, the Salinas Valley agricultural murals also obscure the actual conditions in which much of this labor takes place.
Image 6: Billboard mural of worker bending over to trim iceberg lettuce. Photo by Tracy Perkins. Mural by John Cerney
What the images show is as important as what they do not show: sexual violence, hunger, injury, exposure to poisons, wage theft, labor regimes that profit from racial hierarchies which leave farmworkers vulnerable by design, and the threat of deportation imposed by a nation that cannot stomach their presence and yet cannot do without their labor. In Fresno County, the most agriculturally productive county in the country with $3.7 billion dollars of annual farm sales, nearly half of farmworkers go hungry (Brown and Getz 2011; Wirth, Strochlic, and Getz 2007). Farmworkers also suffer from multiple, layered health problems that evolve over time in response to pesticide exposure, stoop labor, injuries, violence, and inadequate health care (Holmes 2013; Saxton 2015). Many are part of binational families and remain separated from loved ones for long stretches of time; their opportunities to visit home involve dangerous crossings of the US border that risk their lives (Holmes 2013; De León 2015; Lopez 2007). Women, who make up 29% of California farmworkers (U.S. Department of Labor n.d.), are particularly at risk of sexual violence at work (Waugh 2010; Yeng and Rubenstein 2013). One Salinas Valley field is known among workers as the “field de calzón,” or “field of panties,” because of how many rapes take place there (Tamayo 2000). But the Salinas Valley billboards do not show these grim realities. Instead, the billboard workers often look happy, as in the smiling lettuce worker in Image 6 who is bent over in the form of stoop labor that has long debilitated farmworkers. Crucially, what also is not shown is farmworkers’ long history of collective organizing against these abuses. Rather, the billboard murals depict individual farmworkers contentedly going about their daily labor in the fields in ones, twos and threes, as in Image 7.
Image 7: Billboard mural of woman weeding and thinning early crops. Photo by Tracy Perkins. Mural by John Cerney.
Though you would not know it from looking at the roadside agricultural imagery of the Salinas Valley, farmworkers consistently found ways to organize for improved working and living conditions across Spanish, Mexican and US rule. In the first 13 years of the 1900s alone, Japanese farmworkers created successful labor associations, Japanese and Mexican sugar beet workers struck in Oxnard, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) organized farmworkers known as bindlemen, and hop pickers staged the largest strike of farmworkers in California history at that time (it became known as known as “Bloody Sunday” or the Wheatland hop riot) (Street 2004). The Communist Party, Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the American Federation of Labor also all organized agricultural workers through the 1930s. California was a hot-spot: half of the more than 275 agricultural strikes of the 1930s took place there (Valdés 2011:6).
Although Braceros were brought to the US under conditions designed to limit their ability to organize for improved working conditions, they too undertook such efforts (Loza 2016). Mexican workers organized strikes starting in the very first year of the Bracero Program, 1942. Farmworkers kept striking through, among others, the DiGiorgio farm strike of 1947-1950, the Imperial Valley lettuce strike 1961, and the Delano grape strike of 1965. The latter led to the creation of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), launching the farmworkers movement (Mitchell 2012; Valdés 2011). During the 1960s and 1970s, farmworkers increased their wages, improved working conditions, signed union contracts with employers that banned the use of highly toxic pesticides, strengthened pesticides regulation and helped legalize collective bargaining (Pulido 1996; Wells and Villarejo 2004). Other victories included banning the use of the short handled hoe, called el cortito, which required its users to damage their bodies by staying bent over as they used it, hour after hour, day in and day out (Jourdane 2004). However, many of these gains were later eroded as growers fought against their victories, as Republicans newly voted into public office in 1982 undermined their legislative victories, and as the UFW moved away from its early strategy of on-the-ground organizing (Wells and Villarejo 2004). Knowing this history is vital to developing the ability to see the ‘work’ that ideology does to deflect attention away from the long history of racial capitalism in agriculture, and the long history of resistance to it.
***
Although all ideology has a relationship to the economic order of the day, the Salinas Valley agricultural billboards have a particularly close relationship to the local economy. While the billboard murals are regularly described in the press as public art, they are also commercial. Many of the images advertise the businesses in question. In some cases this is explicit, as in Image 8, which uses nostalgic, old-timey imagery featuring a 1940’s era tractor and oversized artichokes, a regional specialty, to draw people into a roadside store. Indeed, several of the agricultural billboard murals, such as Image 4, have run into problems with the government resulting from conflicting opinions about whether the images were advertisements, which have size and location restrictions, or art (Anon 2006, Ha 2007; Chatfield 2018). In other cases, the billboards themselves are objects of interest. For example, Images 1, 6 and 7 are listed as attractions at the demonstration farm and visitor center where they are located. Indeed, several of the farms that display the murals run agritourism projects on their properties (corn mazes, pumpkin patches, etc.), and thus need to find ways to encourage visitors (see Image 4). Many of the murals sell an image of agriculture that benefits the farms in question by tapping into nostalgia for purportedly better, simpler times to generate visitors and sales.
Image 8: Roadside mural features a wagon of oversized artichokes, one of the region’s specialties, being pulled by a 1940s-era tractor. Photo by Tracy Perkins. Mural artist unknown.
Although Cerney says money is not that important to him and that he leads a simple lifestyle (Anon 2006), the practicalities of making a living as an artist still require finding a way to financially support the art. Cerney says, ruefully, “When I can do exactly what I want to do without anyone telling me, that’s what I really love to do. I wish money wasn’t a factor. I would do nothing but my own work, place it in the field, and if my bills were paid I would do nothing but that” (Anon 2017). Instead, as he says elsewhere, “I do a lot of farm stuff because I live here and people ask me to do that” (Paris 1999). Roth makes the connection between Cerney’s art and the regional economy more explicit: “Farm life holds no special appeal for [Cerney], but given that his plywood people are placed in fields and he’s based in one of California’s most profitable farming regions, farm paintings are the ones that bring him the most attention” (2013). Cerney speaks further to the impact of the commission process on subjects of his art, saying that early murals he did on the side of barns,
led to, eventually, people seeing your work and calling you, commercial businesses, “What can you do for me.” Because my work was realism. It was easy for the average person to take in and understand. My thought process, my way of working, was a little Norman Rockwellish, with a little sense of humor. Which everybody got, and everybody understood. So it was easy to sell to make a living doing that. So I got on that treadmill and started doing that. (Anon 2017)
Cerney’s explanations of the financial constraints on his art, and the commercial interests that have led to the creation of much of his agriculturally themed work, underscores the relationship between ruling ideologies and the economic systems in which they are enmeshed. Indeed, the murals are commissioned by people who can both afford the fee and either own or rent property on which to display the billboards, both of which tilt the art away from representing the ideas of poor people such as farmworkers. And given the long-established hostility of many farm owners to organized labor in the region (Flores 2016; Frank Bardacke 2011; Neubeurger 2013), depictions of farmworker organizing would not only not be commissioned by most farm owners, but to many would be unwelcome additions to the regional landscape.
Imagine, for example, artist Ester Hernández’s 1982 redesign of the famous “Sun Maid” raisin advertisement. The original advertisement features a young white woman wearing a red bonnet and holding a basket of grapes, referencing an Edenic agricultural environment, abundance, purity, and femininity. However, Hernández’s version features the harm experienced by grape workers. She replaces the fresh-faced girl with a skeleton that wears the same red bonnet and holds the same basket of grapes. Hernández’s text tells viewers that “Sun Mad” raisins are “unnaturally grown” with insecticides, miticides, herbicides and fungicides (Hutchison 2013). A subsequent image made in 2008, titled “Sun Raid,” recasts the original advertisement again, this time to critique workplace raids and the deportation of Mexican workers.
Or, consider Octavio Ocampo’s work, “Cesar Chavez: Portrait of La Causa,” which superimposes UFW leader Chavez over a landscape that could well be the Salinas Valley. An airplane sprays pesticides over skulls on one side of the valley, and crosses float above the mountains at the top of the image. The skulls and crosses represent harm and death to farmworkers, while on the other side of the valley, and showing through Chavez’s translucent face and body, are masses of farmworkers holding banners and signs, representing the farmworker movement. Such artistic representations underscore how far removed the Salinas Valley billboard art is from any critique of the agricultural industry. It is no accident that Hernandez and Ocampo’s paintings are displayed in museums rather than on the properties of commercial farming enterprises.
***
The Salinas Valley’s roadside agricultural imagery offers lessons bigger than their local impact. Some of them show that Jeffersonian agrarianism and white nostalgia continue to frame much of the public view of agriculture. Others show that even when these narratives are pierced with depictions of the nation’s Latinx agricultural workforce, just inserting into the public consciousness people whose contributions to society have been systematically minimized is not enough. American history is full of examples of workers who, when they are not erased, are depicted as happy in their circumstances or romanticized in other ways (think, for example, of the “happy slave” tropes present in so many depictions of plantation agriculture (2020)). Such depictions contribute to the continuation of exploitative labor regimes by associating the status quo with warm, happy feelings. As one admirer writes, “Every time I cruise by one of Cerney’s pieces, I think of the thousands of drivers and passengers locked in their cars. Suddenly, a purple and orange cow appears on a roadside field. Moods improve. Life seems simpler and easier. Even if it’s just for a moment. That, to my way of thinking, is the highest form of public art in public places” (Nordstrand 2014). This writer references a quirky mural of a multicolored cow as an example, but their comments also apply to the murals depicting the human components of agriculture – the farmers and farmworkers that make it all happen. But what is needed is not public art that reassures, but art that unsettles. Art that reifies old, romantic tropes of agricultural labor serves the ideological and commercial interests that have exploited farmworkers for centuries. What is needed is art that challenges ruling ideologies by centering workers’ interests rather than those of their employers.
Acknowledgements
Christopher Gunderson’s generous suggestions provided much of the theoretical framework of this paper. The author would also like to thank for their comments Ruben Espinoza, Rodney Green, Vernon Morris, Manuel Vallée, Lauren Richter, Christie McCullen, and participants in the fall 2019 “Currents: Humanities Work Now” series at the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Dresher Center for the Humanities, at which an early version of this work was presented.
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[i] Christopher Gunderson provided this term as I have used it here. I have since found that there is also limited, overlapping use of the term in the published literature, used primarily to describe Canadian politics (Roberts and Clifton 1990).
[ii] Symbolic multiculturalism thus overlaps significantly with what other scholars have called color-blind racism, racism without racists, and multiracial white supremacy (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Omi and Winant 2015). All of these respond to claims of racism with surface-level improvements that allow some few people of color to rise to elevated social and economic positions without fundamentally challenging racism at its roots, thus sustaining overall racial inequality.
Tracy Perkins is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She specializes in social inequality, social movements, the environment, agriculture and the politics of knowledge, and produces traditional written academic output as well as photography and digital humanities websites. Her book Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism (University of California Press, 2022) examines the political evolution of the California environmental justice movement from the 1980s to the mid 2010s. Dr. Perkins has degrees from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and UC Santa Cruz, and previously worked as an Assistant Professor at Howard University. See more of her work at tracyperkins.org.
