Tag: Gender

Articles

Organized Labor, Organized Home: Domestic Worker Organizing and the Contradictory Politics of Care in the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

Erika Grajeda and Erica Kohl-Arenas

There is a growing concern with the relationship between private philanthropy and nonprofit regional organizing and development efforts to address economic inequality and racial injustice. As shown in the groundbreaking book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (INCITE! 2007) and a growing body of ethnographic and historical research,[1] private philanthropy has influenced patterns of nonprofit professionalization and introduced individualistic and racialized market logics that limit and contain grassroots efforts to address structural inequality. Unlike the also important journalistic and philosophical texts on the power of philanthropy that tend towards broad claims about foundations and the wealthy elite[2], this body of empirical research grounds philanthropy in the power-laden relationships between funders, transnational actors, nonprofit institutions and staff, and local communities – echoing long standing concerns of nonprofit practitioners and movement leaders.[3]

Recently, development and philanthropy scholars critique the “philanthrocapitalist” turn where charitable institutions seek new profits through private-sector investments in major social policy arenas including global health, agriculture, education, workforce development, and disaster relief that create new markets of wealth production that in turn produce or maintain inequality.[4] A striking example of the philanthrocapitalist model provides a challenge to recent claims that philanthropic efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans represent a new model for social justice giving.[5] Vincanne Adams’ book Markets of Sorrow and John Arena’s book Driven from New Orleans provide detailed accounts of how, instead of delivering justice to displaced residents, philanthropic partnerships in post-Katrina New Orleans paved the way for private housing development and new debt structures that generated profit for private industry while making it extremely difficult for displaced homeowners and residents to stay or return.[6]

These trends are not new. Just as the Ford Foundation was heralded as a civil rights advocate in the 1960s, it was later critiqued for watering down the Black Power movement and the more radical wings of the United States War on Poverty community action programs.[7] In co-author Erica Kohl-Arenas’ study of funder investments in the California Farmworker Movement, the Field Foundation and the Rosenberg Foundation were valuable allies in the early days of the movement but were unwilling to fund union organizing, strikes, boycotts, or legal representation of farmworkers when the movement heated up in the fields of California’s Central Valley in the late 1960s.[8] Today, we see widespread congratulations for donors and nationally-scaled nonprofit organizations that support movements against the exploitation of poor people, women, immigrants, and communities of color. While these resources and professional forms of community organizing are desperately needed, do all strategies of nonprofit and philanthropic organizing matter equally? We propose that it is necessary, especially during times of crisis, to investigate how well-funded nonprofit organizing campaigns intersect with, sometimes support and catalyze, and yet sometimes overshadow or contain local struggles.

The case study featured in this essay shows how private and publicly funded domestic worker organizing projects that aim to empower women can weaken and redirect efforts away from building a broad-based worker and immigrant-owned movement and towards the needs of market owners. However, as we will also see in the featured case, the power of privately funded professionalized nonprofit organizing is not always represented in clear-cut capitalist agendas. Instead, professionals negotiate and adapt program strategies to align with the interests of partners with power and resources, in the end making poor people responsible for alleviating their own suffering while excluding questions of how structural inequality is produced and maintained.

The study takes on the difficult task of interrogating the risks involved in professionally organizing some of the most marginalized people in this country –undocumented immigrant women who clean homes for a living. While we believe that this organizing is urgently needed, we also found that incentivized volunteerism, required participation in national domestic worker efforts, and privately-funded media campaigns can run counter to building a strong movement of, by, and for immigrant women. Strategies to counter political, economic, and racial oppression are of utmost importance today. It is also important to pay attention to how organizing strategies that aim to also align with the interests of employers in rapidly gentrifying regions, may contain contradictions that risk compromising movements for social, economic, racial, gender, and political justice over the long haul. Central to these contradictions is the dilemma endemic to community organizing in the advanced nonprofit sector where movements that claim to embrace localized grassroots organizing, are often organized around “upward accountability” to professional staff, funding structures, and regional employers – not to the communities they aim to empower and mobilize.[9] This professionalized approach to organizing is not inherently bad. However, institutional arrangements and strategies are often disconnected from the daily struggles, critical analyses, and strategic engagement of those most impacted in the issues a movement seeks to address.

Based on the findings of co-author Erika Grajeda’s ethnographic research at an immigrant worker center in San Francisco, California, we make three specific claims about the problems presented by privately funded, nationally connected, nonprofit institutional worker organizing. First, we found that asking one of the most precarious workforces, predominantly undocumented immigrant women who clean homes, to participate in volunteer organizational maintenance activities replicates an increasingly common form of unpaid labor required of women who seek support through poverty alleviation programs throughout the global South.[10] In other words, economic opportunities extended to immigrant household workers were contingent upon unpaid nonprofit organizational care, duty, and labor. A second finding discussed in this paper involves the ways in which women participants themselves become a strategic site of intervention rather than the structural arrangements of domestic labor within the regional and national economy. Similar to transnational poverty eradication programs targeting girls/women, women workers are engaged as a malleable economic resource and investment. Finally, through public communications campaigns associated with the worker center’s funded programming, we found that by privileging employer audiences, largely imagined as middle-class Bay Area residents and tech workers, domestic workers emerged as selfless and industrious individuals while workplace challenges and regional structures of inequality experienced by domestic workers were made invisible.

In the following pages, we show how specifically gendered program frameworks, narrative tropes, and forms of nonprofit governance hold undocumented immigrant women responsible for solving problems produced by broader structures of inequality. Through privately-funded programmatic logics, they are at once told to evaluate their own self-worth based on volunteer labor and caring, and that worker organizing is about incentives, rewards, and communication campaigns alongside agreeable regional employers. We first provide a historical and geographic context for worker center organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area. The following sections share our findings around the three central themes of gendered and incentivized participation in nonprofit worker organizing, the project of making women responsible for their own suffering, and finally the politics of “win-win” public media narratives that aim to both empower women workers and make employers feel comfortable and charitable hiring immigrant domestic workers. We conclude by returning to the complicated question of the purpose and risks associated with critiquing one or the most important organizing agendas within a historical context of political oppression and urgency in the U.S.

The Worker Power Center

Scholars have long documented how the adversities faced by undocumented immigrants vary considerably across geographic regions in the U.S.[11] California, emerging in recent years as a champion of “immigrant rights,” has supported a host of policies intended to help undocumented immigrants.[12] Under threat of possible retaliation by the Trump administration, then Governor Jerry Brown signed landmark sanctuary state legislation vowing to protect “hardworking families” while continuing to target “dangerous criminals.” Within the state, cities such as San Francisco have upheld longstanding sanctuary policies or related law enforcement orders. Considered “as good as it gets” for undocumented immigrants, the San Francisco Bay Area is lauded as a racially heterogeneous and progressive setting that is accommodating and charitable to noncitizens.[13] This façade of tolerance and inclusivity, however, overstates the city’s ability to provide refuge and safety to undocumented populations, particularly in the post-9/11 era with the ascendancy of what some refer to as the Homeland Security State.[14] Importantly today, it also overshadows the Silicon Valley tech boom-induced housing and affordability crisis that has led to a rapid increase in homelessness and flight of working-class Black and Latino residents from the city.

Alongside these trends, a migrant civil society has flourished to deal with the crisis of social reproduction confronting low-wage, immigrant workers in the Bay Area.[15] Worker centers have been at the forefront, seeking to counter the process of labor subordination by helping immigrant workers navigate the landscape of substandard work. As “informal unions,” these mediating organizations are tasked with supporting immigrant workers through a combination of advocacy, organizing, and service provision.[16] Through their efforts to contest informal work practices, they not only aim to alter the terms of labor relations, but also create additional income-generating activities as alternatives to low-wage jobs. Worker centers are thus considered important agents for economic equity.[17] Contributing to a twenty-first century pro-labor moral economy which draws attention to the plight of low-wage immigrant workers, the nonprofit worker center model has emerged as a promising development that is reenergizing labor and immigrant social movements in the U.S.

The Worker Power Center (WPC) is a city-sponsored program that focuses on strengthening the individual well-being and collective power of low-wage immigrant workers in San Francisco. Previously part of La Raza Centro Legal, a community-based legal organization, the WPC currently falls under the fiscal sponsorship of Dolores Street Community Services, a nonprofit that was created in the 1980s to provide shelter and sanctuary to Central American refugees. With their institutional support, the WPC oversees two worker collectives, the Day Labor Program (DLP) and the Women’s Collective (WC). The DLP, which originated in the early 1990s as an outgrowth of a burgeoning immigrant rights movement across California, extended job development and social services to mostly undocumented and homeless men. The program is currently located in the historically Latino neighborhood of the Mission, near a corridor where immigrant workers have long gathered to solicit employment.[18] The worker center, in a display of converging interests of local authorities, neighborhood groups, and migrant justice activists over the growth of informal hiring sites and immigrant dispossession, emerged as a ‘win-win’ solution for the problems posed by informal day labor markets amidst rapid gentrification. Aiming to provide “support, structure, and resources” to both day laborers and their employers, it hoped to ensure a steady supply of “low cost, seasonal, [and] temporary” labor while simultaneously preserving the “dignity” of workers. Today, the worker center model is heralded as the best possible solution to the “crisis” facing many local governments over the growth of informal labor markets. [19]

In the early 2000s, the WPC created the “feminist wing” of the organization, the Women’s Collective (WC), to provide immigrant women laboring in household industries with an independent organizing space. As a standalone program with its own membership structure and decision-making procedures, the WC currently represents more than a third of the WPC membership base. In addition to extending job opportunities to a mostly Latin American, immigrant and female workforce, the WC offers members opportunities “to learn, work and participate” in local and national social movements. By providing Latina migrants with more than just “dignified employment,” the WC is a pioneer among worker centers which have traditionally been male-dominated spaces catering to industries such as construction.[20] Today, the WC is considered an incubator for immigrant household workers to hone their leadership and entrepreneurial skills, self-esteem, and political consciousness.

As founding members and leaders in the worker center movement that includes umbrella organizations such as the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON) and the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), both programs share a social justice orientation intended to incite collective mobilization. At the organizational level, however, a more disjointed picture unfolds as day laborers and domestic workers, through their respective programs, are treated as two distinct populations endowed with varying levels of political agency and potential. As we will illustrate in greater detail below, day laborers and domestic workers are incorporated into the organization through different membership and participation requirements. These differences, we argue, reflect and reinforce distinct funding imperatives, political agendas, and gendered expectations. We find, for instance, that while the WC is concerned with promoting immigrant women’s civic engagement and leadership, encouraging greater visibility in migrant justice movements, the DLP prioritizes men’s labor market integration and “community embeddedness.” DLP members are encouraged to await work indoors, venturing out collectively mostly to participate in community cleanup and volunteering efforts aimed at making a positive impression on neighboring communities. Women, however, take on a more visible and political role due to their distinct participation requirements. This means that while the worker center aims to function as an “organizing hub” for WC members, inciting personal transformation and empowerment, it often serves as a day shelter for immigrant men looking to secure work through the DLP.  

Funding streams for the WC and DLP also differ. The DLP receives roughly $250,000 per fiscal year from public grants offered by the City and County of San Francisco’s Office of Civic Engagement & Immigrant Affairs (OCEIA). According to the 2014 OCEIA’s Request for Proposal, the purpose of such grants is to provide “structure, job training, and support” to the informal day labor industry as well as to address community concerns over safety. These grants emphasize the dual goal of providing day laborers with a “structured” work environment to ensure their economic self-sufficiency, and securing a stable supply of low cost, on-demand labor for local industries and employers. The DLP then is tasked with ensuring a reliable supply of flexible labor while promoting immigrant integration and public safety. Alternatively, the WC receives funding from private foundations such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Benton Foundation, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation, which according to staff, is largely directed toward the “social justice” side of their operations. As an affiliate and founding member of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and the California Domestic Workers Coalition (CDWC), the WC receives additional funding to attend national retreats and participate in outreach and advocacy campaigns. While OCEIA grants for the day labor program emphasize economic self-sufficiency, safety, and greater oversight of informal economies, funding for the WC largely focuses on promoting civic engagement and leadership development. Both foundation funding and OCEIA grants, however, look to these community-based organizations to address the challenges experienced by and ensure the reproduction of low-wage immigrant workers in a gentrified and increasingly unaffordable city.

In 2016, the Worker Power Center celebrated its 25th anniversary with a relaunch and rebranding campaign. Envisioning itself as a full-service organization seeking to “unite, empower, and organize” low-wage immigrant workers in San Francisco, the Worker Power Center (WPC) has increasingly embraced marketplace solutions. These have included employing marketing strategies and media campaigns to create what they perceive to be a more sustainable and scalable organizational model. This new approach has also entailed expanding their employer base, particularly those in the tech industry, embracing innovative technologies such as apps to combat wage theft and expedite the hiring process, as well as experimenting with public-private partnerships. With this relaunch, the WPC seeks to enhance the individual lives of low-wage immigrant workers by providing them with greater employment prospects through professionalization and vocational training. They also seek to extend more opportunities for leadership development and civic engagement in migrant justice and labor movements.

In the remaining sections, we turn to our findings that complicate how these benefits are delivered to WPC members under the nonprofit organizational model. We highlight the three central themes of gendered and incentivized participation in nonprofit worker organizing, the project of making women responsible for curing their own “trauma,” and finally, the politics of “win-win” media narratives that aim to both empower members and compel employers to support immigrant workers. We conclude with a discussion about the practice of embracing nationally scaled and market-based solutions to address enduring labor challenges, particularly the extent to which privately funded nonprofit institutions are engaging workers in developing organizing strategies that hold employers and industries accountable to change.

Gendered and incentivized participation in nonprofit worker organizing

Membership in the Worker Power Center (WPC) is considered a “privilege” that is not automatic but must be earned.[21] While some worker centers offer multiple membership tiers with different levels of rights, obligations, and decision-making privileges, membership structures are generally devised with the goal of empowering members to serve as their own advocates of change.[22] At the WPC, prospective members have to fill out an application form, attend an orientation meeting, and pay monthly dues. Once established, membership extends job dispatching privileges to workers, which is one of the most important services the center provides. Although membership provides job allocation privileges to both day laborers and domestic workers, only for the latter is “active participation” a requirement for securing household employment through the Women’s Collective (WC). Day laborers, for instance, are allocated jobs using a rotating sign-in system, which requires that they be physically present at the center to be eligible for work on any given day. After every job placement, the Day Labor Program (DLP) requires that workers volunteer either by cleaning the facilities or distributing flyers throughout the city advertising their services. While encouraged, members of the DLP are not required to attend weekly member meetings.

For domestic workers in the WC, a point system is used to codify, track, and reward optimal levels of participation. While its exact origin is not known by current staff or WC members, household workers earn the “right” to jobs through the collective by what organizers refer to as “active participation.” Through an intricate point system, WC members earn a point for every activity or event they attend on a weekly basis. These can include flyering or advertising their services throughout the city, but also attending marches, protests, self-help meetings, theater group rehearsals and performances, making legislative visits, and at times, engaging in acts of civil disobedience. Women also engage in other “volunteering” activities, including organizational maintenance work such as cleaning and cooking for members during communal events. While expected, this type of gendered community care work—often attributed to a culturally-specific ethos of cooperation and conviviality—is not accounted for or tabulated into the point system.[23] Staff acknowledge that the point system is the source of much internal conflict, resentment, and surveillance among WC members—as well as a considerable amount of administrative work on their end. Still, the point system is considered a “necessary incentive” that serves to maximize women’s participation and more importantly, to develop their political consciousness.

Job allocation, which staff describe as a referral service linking prospective employers with job seekers, is considered secondary to the organization’s larger political goals, which is to “empower” immigrant Latinas. This message is delivered to women during an initial orientation meeting where prospective members learn about the WC’s “mission and vision,” but also at weekly mandatory meetings and events. Ana, a senior member of the WC, reinforced this point to a prospective member during an orientation meeting: “One can’t just show up and take up space.” After becoming a WC member, this woman explained that she understood that to secure jobs through the collective she would “have to work hard.” As part of the WC’s mission and vision then, immigrant women were being called to “join the fight” instead of remaining on the sidelines as spectators. Josefina, a cofounder of the Women’s Collective and a former domestic worker herself, elaborated on this point at a general member meeting:

“The women who are truly committed don’t just show up to earn points. They participate because they are truly concerned with what is going on in their communities, in the legislature, in D.C. They aren’t just a warm body on a chair. It is not greed or selfishness that motivates them but the belief that as immigrant women we all have to fight for what we want . . . it is not fair that some of us put in the time and effort to attend all of these events, participate, march, protest, share our stories, talk to politicians and journalists, while others simply get to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor.”

As the above quote suggests, “active participation” entails more than being a “warm body.” To secure household jobs through the collective, members are expected to “participate, march, [and] protest.” They also have to be willing to put their bodies on the line, at times quite literally, by engaging in acts of civil disobedience, risking arrest and even deportation, in their efforts to secure employment through the collective. When members have questioned or challenged the intrinsic value of participation, they are reminded that membership is a “privilege” and that the benefits extended include the “opportunity” to be part of a social movement in the U.S. As Victoria, a WC committee noted, members are often reminded that the opportunity to participate and acquire valuable leadership skills should be payment enough. However, as Victoria retorted, “We’re the ones out on the front lines,” adding that while the WC encourages women to fight for immigrant rights, members are not encouraged to apply those values internally, or to make changes to the collective’s organizational structure. Ultimately, she shares, “the compañeras give and give [and] not out of the goodness of their heart but out of necessity because they need jobs.”

Healing immigrant women

Providing members with ample opportunities to be politically engaged is part of the WC’s approach to empowerment. That is, domestic workers are incentivized to march, protest, fast, meet with public officials and in some cases, engage in contentious-style politics. Empowerment, however, also requires personal transformation. To that end, WC members are encouraged to “work on themselves” by engaging in transformative activities aimed at restoring and revitalizing their “body and soul.” These personal transformations are made possible through their incentivized participation in self-help groups, theater, retreats, and other activities that emphasize psychic and somatic healing. This emphasis on personal transformation and healing is inspired by the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s (NDWA) Strategy, Organizing, Leadership (SOL) initiative program. According to this initiative, skilled organizing requires a “centered, open and connected” individual who understands not only her own trauma and healing, but also the current and historical sociopolitical context.[24] As a program that aims to build resilient grassroots leaders who can “lead with skill and love,” SOL encourages worker leaders to tackle lingering traumas and other pathologies that can generate individualist and antisocial tendencies. Left unresolved, these pathologies are seen as potentially stifling political participation and community power. As such, healing the “body and soul’” of household workers is deemed imperative for building robust social movements and grassroots organizations.

At the WC, women’s inability (or unwillingness) to be active in the local nonprofit organization and the nationally-scaled domestic worker movement is often attributed to moral and individual shortcomings. According to a WC cofounder and staff member, nonparticipation is rooted in low self-esteem, trauma and culturally-rooted pathologies that ultimately stifle collective action and create divisions within movements. Defining individuals through their assumed trauma – as victims of structural, physical and sexual violence – allows for interventions into their lives to be justified as a political obligation. Instrumentally, addressing these pathologies and lingering traumas is seen as integral for building robust social movement organizations and leaders. Here, again, is Josefina describing the collective’s “healing” mission:

“Many of the women that walk through that door are broken. They come from countries where women have no rights, no voice, and no way of providing for their children. They have been beaten, exploited, even raped, and so they come to the WC looking for someone to extend a helping hand. That is what we do here, we provide them the tools they need to reach their full potential as women, to expand their possibilities so that they can aspire to more in life than just cleaning houses, which is hard work . . . They come here broken and leave as heroínas.”

To ensure that WC members reach their “full potential” as entrepreneurs and social movement participants, the collective cannot thus merely “assist” them in securing household work. Instead, through a discourse of empowerment – borrowed from feminist thought and praxis – the WC aims to provide immigrant Latinas with the tools they need to “aspire to more in life than just cleaning houses.”[25] To cultivate empowered subjectivities, these assumed to be “broken” women must “work on themselves” by participating in self-help activities aimed at “restoring the body and soul.” This emphasis on psychic and somatic healing, borrowed from the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s (NDWA) Strategy, Organizing, Leadership (SOL) initiative, receives generous financial support from the Angell Foundation, Hidden Leaf Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Alexander Soros Foundation, Oak Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, NoVo Foundation, and Seasons Fund for Social Transformation.[26] As a holistic and transformative organizing model, SOL approaches personal healing as a political necessity.

To that end, WC members and staff receive financial support to attend the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s (NDWA) Strategy, Organizing, Leadership (SOL) retreats, where domestic worker organizers and leaders learn about the importance of both personal and social transformation. By developing the concept of “transformative organizing,” the SOL initiative aims to address the human needs of household workers by promoting embodied transformations, mindfulness, and developing healing and caring responses to ensure longevity and active participation. On a weekly basis, WC members also participate in a SOL inspired self-help group, Grupo SOL, which is designed to boost members’ self-esteem and develop peer group solidarity. In Grupo SOL, intimate disclosures are not only considered integral to personal healing and transformation but also to nurturing a more empowered sense of citizenship. While these types of disclosures can be potentially liberating, connecting the personal to the political in strategic and powerful ways, many of the women interviewed expressed feeling that they are deprived of an intimate or private sphere in their quest to secure employment through the collective. This emphasis on healing and self-help thus reveals a contradictory problematic. Whereas the women are asked to reveal the true nature of their own suffering, the foundation funded and professionally run program sessions were organized around the presumption that the root of women’s struggles is a lack of confidence, self-esteem, and voice and not the broader structural challenges such as seeking a living wage, affordable housing, or safety from immigration policing. Here we see a model that again is not “bad” in and of itself: healing from trauma is important and personal empowerment pedagogy has a long-standing movement history. However, it did not “land well” or as intended by virtue of being required within the context of an incentivized participation scheme and designed and delivered by remote nonprofit professionals. For WC members, tending to their “body and soul” is yet more labor they are expected to perform for community uplift.

Win-Win Organizing: public narrative and the politics of care

Unlike day laborers, domestic workers dedicate a significant amount of time and labor to the organization and to self-help. Their distinct participation requirements and funding streams incentivize optimum levels of engagement among women, alongside a gendered improvement program aimed at healing “broken” immigrant Latinas. We argue that the way women members are differently incorporated into the organization produce highly dependable and active members that are compelled to take on multiple roles as caregivers, entrepreneurs, and activists. Emerging as the best hope for a revitalized labor and immigrant movement, these women are continually called upon to “work on themselves,” thereby redirecting the responsibility for managing social risks such as unemployment, poverty, and “illegality” on individual immigrant Latinas.[27] Domestic workers have also been central figures in recent advocacy campaigns that aim to address “injustices of recognition.”[28] As others have documented, nonprofit worker organizations such as the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance have increasingly focused on the promotion of dignity and visibility of domestic workers through positive representational modes such as storytelling and legal advocacy. These efforts seek to remedy the legal exclusion of an entire industry while also to addressing the historical devaluation of household work and its gendered and racialized workforce.

The WC has paralleled these national efforts by seeking to situate immigrant household workers within the framework of recovery and redress through media marketing campaigns. In 2012, for instance, the WC launched the Domestic Worker Safety & Dignity Project, a three-year collaboration that included UC Berkeley’s Labor Occupational Health Program (LOHP) and Underground Advertising. With financial support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s national grantmaking program, New Routes to Community Health, the team designed a marketing and media campaign to promote dignity and health awareness among domestic workers and their employers. The campaign not only addressed occupational safety and health considerations associated with the reliance on toxic cleaning products. It also tackled the public devaluation of household work and its racialized workforce through storytelling strategies that emphasize pride, bravery, and respect. Their goal was twofold: to enhance household working conditions while simultaneously altering the perception of this industry from undervalued women’s work to a “respectable contribution” to the economy.

“Our name is La Colectiva. But you can call us Your Fairy Godmothers.” Images courtesy Joseph Cultice.

To promote the WC’s unique brand as a “conscientious cleaning service on a mission,” the team commissioned a photographer to shoot glamorous portrait photography that would be featured on billboards, buses, and other outdoor media in San Francisco. These images would also be featured on their website and printed on flyers to advertise their services. The messages accompanying the images of immigrant household workers referred to WC members as “angels,” “fairy godmothers,” and the “keepers” of their employers’ sanity. In mobilizing these gendered tropes, which focus on benevolence, resourcefulness, and magical qualities, the campaign not only reinforced stereotypical gendered views of domesticity and affect, but also portrayed these workers as a source of gentle reassurance for employers. That is, by presenting immigrant household workers as benign and selfless figures endowed with magical powers, these motifs glamorize marginalized women workers in subservient positions. Moreover, in depicting WC members as instrumental to their employers’ emancipation from the drudgery of household tasks, the campaign not only privileged the needs of employers but also projected an idealized image of this racialized and gendered workforce: industrious, resourceful, and most importantly, ephemeral.

“If cleanliness is next to godliness, then La Colectiva are Angels.” Images courtesy Joseph Cultice.  

In addition to glamorous photography and strategic messaging evoking the image of the self-sacrificing and magical doméstica, the campaign included an exhibit, “Profiles in Strength & Dignity”, which showcased “moving” autobiographical narratives of WC members. These curated autobiographical accounts offered potential employers “a glimpse” into the workers’ lives and the many roles they take on—as wives, mothers, domestic workers, and now, as activists fighting for “rights and representation.” “Profiles in Strength & Dignity” also reinforces the organization’s political and rehabilitative mission. Their autobiographical accounts highlight, for instance, how the WC provides recent immigrants with a ready-made community in addition to vast opportunities for political activism. For instance, Lorena, who worked as a nanny when she arrived to the U.S., contends that: “Before I came to La Colectiva, I felt like a scared little bunny rabbit—I was frightened of everything.” In these curated accounts, the WC is presented as providing Latinas with stewardship, protection, and care to ensure that they become self-sufficient, confident, and respectable. Domestic workers, portrayed as frightened and defenseless upon arriving to the collective (and the U.S.), are treated as redeemable and ripe with potential, which can be cultivated through proper guidance and care.

Featured on the collective’s website,“Profiles in Strength & Dignity” also promotes the notion of the potential “win-win” or shared prosperity for both workers and employers:

“When the women of La Colectiva pick up the broom and dustpan, they aren’t just clearing away dust—they’re clearing a path to respect and pride for domestic workers everywhere. It’s a win-win: employers get the peace of mind that comes from having a clean house, and the women get dignified work in a healthy workplace. But La Colectiva isn’t just a place to find work. It’s a community for recent immigrants, often separated from their families in a strange new environment. It’s an opportunity for civic engagement and activism towards social justice. And it’s a step towards a better life.”

As the passage suggests, what makes the WC different from its competitors—their distinct “brand”—is that they represent a “conscientious cleaning service on a mission.” Unlike for-profit agencies, the WC provides immigrant Latinas with the opportunity for empowerment through entrepreneurship and political engagement. Presenting “organized labor for an organized home” as a win-win scenario, beneficial for both workers and employers, parallels recent domestic worker organizing efforts at the national level. This is particularly the case with the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and its focus on forging strategic alliances with employers and other institutional actors. This “win-win” approach positions employers and workers on an equal footing through a presumed shared vulnerability (and prosperity), presenting their distinct goals and aspirations as perfectly compatible. It also appeals to employers’ moral sensibilities through the strategic mobilization of compelling personal narratives that renders their “conscientious cleaning service” as an “opportunity” for helping immigrant domestics to help themselves. This strategic branding constructs WC members as a worthy social investment, in their futurity as citizens, entrepreneurs, and pillars of the community. Employers, on the other hand, are viewed as conscientious consumers driven by compassion and social responsibility, without concern about the structures that generate such deep class divisions and categories of exploitable labor.

Conclusion

In this paper, we explored the central problematics presented by privately funded, regionally focused and nationally scaled, nonprofit worker organizing. First, we found that asking undocumented immigrant women to participate in volunteer organizational maintenance activities unintentionally promotes an increasingly common form of unpaid labor required of women in global poverty alleviation programs.[29] WC members were required to execute time intensive volunteer duties in exchange for jobs. In other words, economic opportunities in the domestic work economy were presented as contingent upon unpaid nonprofit organizational care and labor. In addition to institutional maintenance requirements, women were incentivized to participate in professionally orchestrated national domestic worker campaign actions, also in exchange for job referrals. This privately funded and professionally staffed institutional approach to mobilization presents a limited range of opportunities for women workers to define and lead organizing agendas on their own terms. It also puts women under additional pressure as they are asked to take a publicly visible stand which for some puts their immigration status at risk, and for others requires additional resources towards childcare and family support during hours of program participation.

Second, we showed how foundation funded program imperatives that make workers themselves the most important site of intervention fail to address the structural arrangements of domestic labor within the regional and national economy. For male participants, day labor centers function as a kind of shelter, or in the words of a staff member at a day labor center, “a homeless campsite.” [30] Considering the parallels between worker centers and non-profit poverty management institutions, these sites often serve as repositories for containing and making invisible “surplus” populations within gentrifying urban neighborhoods. As in the structural arrangement of 21st century racial capitalism, a pattern of urban “banishment” is performed as poverty programs intersect with real estate development and speculation, clearing streets to protect the view (and the opportunities) of middle class and wealthy residents concerned with urban “blight” and value.[31]

Whereas men are contained or managed within these spaces, women are disciplined as traumatized individuals in need of healing and care. When “fixed,” these once “broken” women are seen by funders, and thus by program managers, as holding great untapped potential as an entrepreneurial agent of development. Similar to transnational poverty eradication schemes targeting girls/women, women workers are engaged as a malleable economic resource. International development campaigns like #thefutureisfemale, or the Nike Foundation’s “The Girl Effect”are illustrative of gender-specific forms of holding women as responsible for unleashing new markets in the broader project of global economic development.[32] Programs designed to empower women have also become prominent in migrant justice and labor movements—at once providing critical leadership opportunities for immigrant women and re-inscribing racialized and gendered relationships of community responsibility and care.[33]

Finally, the funded public communications campaigns that claim to provide a “win-win” outcome for both workers and employers, privilege the perspectives of employers and middle-class Bay Area residents while avoiding the more challenging employment relationships domestic workers experience. The “win-win” oriented campaign, designed to both empower workers and make employers feel “safe” and “good” about hiring empowered immigrant women, ends up promoting essentialist narratives and racialized gendered tropes about the helpful, non-confrontational domestic worker who is proudly improving her own life while also improving the home life of her employer. Not unlike co-author Kohl-Arenas’ study of farmworker-grower philanthropic initiatives in California’s Central Valley “win-win” projects that aim to serve the interests of people with greatly unequal power often end up marginalizing or hiding the concerns of the weaker party.[34] An increasingly popular form of consensus politics is wielded by mass media campaigns that claim to improve the well-being of poor and marginalized communities, but often hide conflict, struggle, and the structural conditions that produce and maintain poverty and inequality. Often promising “mutual prosperity” for both worker and employer, simplified narratives of self-help and empowerment seldom put pressure on the employer or address regional patterns of inequality such as access to affordable housing and living wage jobs, presenting a limited range of organizing opportunities.

Ultimately, privately funded, institutionally managed, nationally scaled community organizing increasingly forgoes the hard work of long-haul person-to-person movement building. With program frameworks and outcomes mapped by donors, fewer resources are devoted to the daily work of convening community members to inform concrete strategies against the dominant economic structure and towards more equitable futures. Central to the contradictions presented in these stories is the specific arrangement of the advanced nonprofit sector where funders embrace the language of community organizing but are not prepared to take on the broader economic and power arrangements that make philanthropic wealth possible. Professionalized and mandated program participation, incentivized volunteerism, public-private market based partnerships, and self-help program frameworks are all familiar tropes of the advanced “Nonprofit Industrial Complex” (INCITE 2009).[35] In today’s political context, this incentivized organizing presents additional complications and risks for immigrant activists who are increasingly targeted and incarcerated.[36] At the same time, the increasing lack of trust, fear, isolation, seclusion and “hiding out” among previously active immigrant rights organizers does remind us that today all immigrant organizing tactics perhaps do matter.

We simultaneously conclude that, with organizations like the National Domestic Worker Alliance (NDWA) receiving record levels of funding from private foundations such as the Irvine Foundation, W.K. Kellogg, NoVo and Ford Foundation, and a practice of embracing nationally scaled and market based solutions to address enduring labor challenges, it is important to ask how privately funded nonprofit institutions are negotiating relationships with funders on behalf of their constituents. When do institutional negotiations and large-scale initiatives result in increased resources for labor organizing and when do they result in compromised agendas that fail to change the structures of inequality produced by industries and markets?[37] Yet, should we critique nonprofit and philanthropic efforts to support immigrant and worker rights during a time of political resurgence among right-wing, conservative, anti-state politics and white supremacist movements? Not to mention the difficulty of doing grassroots community organizing during a global pandemic, with disproportionate impacts on Black and brown communities. Our answer is yes, and no. No, there is no point in critiquing mainstream philanthropy when we need every penny and every ally to stand up against anti-immigrant hate, racism, and fear-mongering politics. On the other hand, yes, we must pay attention to the role of philanthropy in creating common-sense narratives that contribute to individualist solutions to collective structural problems. It is clear that philanthropy plays a prominent role in promoting narratives that muddy regional organizing strategies, in the end failing to reveal systems of power or align with the struggles of oppressed people.

In this context, critical philanthropy and nonprofit studies are more important than ever. Ethnographic research, such as the work featured in this article, reveals the complicated partial narratives, fragmented organizing strategies, and limited frameworks private donors present when engaging movements for economic equality and racial justice. The urgency of our moment calls for us to hold private funders and nonprofit organizers accountable to the people who increasingly struggle with political violence, economic insecurity, precarity, and banishment from social, economic, political and civic life.


Erika Denisse Grajeda is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Southwestern University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her research on intimate labor and immigrant social movements in the U.S. focuses on emergent forms of social control mobilized by state and non-state actors to manage illegalized migrants, and fashion idealized forms of employment and political participation. She is currently working on anarchist feminist collectives in Mexico City.

Erica Kohl-Arenas is an Associate Professor in American Studies at the University of California, Davis and the Faculty Director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. She is a scholar of the radical imaginations and deferred dreams of social movements that become entangled with the politics of institutionalization and funding. This work is captured in her book The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty (University of California Press, 2016) and in a diversity of publications including Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Social Movement Studies, Journal of Poverty, Geography Compassand HistPhil.


[1] INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (eds): The revolution will not be funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007); Ming-Francis, Megan. ‘The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture.’ Law & Society Review Volume 53, Number 1: 275-309 (2019); Grajeda, Erika. ‘Immigrant Worker Centers, Technologies of Citizenship, and the Duty to Be Well.’ Critical Sociology Volume 45, Number 4-5: 647–666 (2018); Kathryn Moeller, The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, ​Waste of a White Skin​: ​The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (B​erkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015); Erica Kohl-Arenas, The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty. (Oakland, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2016); Megan Tompkins-Stange, ​Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence. (C​ambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Education Press, 2016); Vincanne Adams, ​Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina.​ (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2013); Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. New York: Routledge, 2010).

[2] Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. New York: Vintage Books, 2019); Robert Reich, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How it Can Do Better (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018)

[3] See articles addressing nonprofit/foundation power relationships in the popular blog Nonprofit AF: https://nonprofitaf.com/?s=philanthropy

[4]Linsey McGoey. No Such Thing As a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy.​ (London, New York: Verso Press, 2015); Behrooz Morvaridi, ‘Capitalist Philanthropy and Hegemonic Partnerships.’ Third World Quarterly Volume 33, Issue 7 (2012)

[5] Darren Walker, From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth. (New York, New York: Ford Foundation, 2019).

[6]Vincanne Adams, ​Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina.​ (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2013); John Arena, ​Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization. (M​inneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Pres, 2012).

[7] Karen Ferguson, Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of

Racial Liberalism, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

[8] Erica Kohl-Arenas, The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty. (Oakland, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2016).

[9] James Petras,‘NGOs: In the Service of Imperialism,’ Journal of Contemporary Asia 29:

429-40 (1999)

[10] Tara Cookson, Unjust Conditions: Women’s Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer

Programs. (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2018); Kathryn Moeller, The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of

Development, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017)

[11] Monica W Varsanyi, ‘Immigration Policing Through the Backdoor: City Ordinances, The

‘Right to the City,’ and the Exclusion of Undocumented Day Laborers,’ Urban Geography 29(1): 29-52 (2008); Nicholas De Genova, ‘Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,’

Annual Review of Anthropology 31(1): 419-447 (2002).

[12] Allan Colbern and S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, ‘Citizens of California: How the Golden

State Went from Worst to First on Immigrant Rights,’ New Political Science 40(2): 353-367 (2018).

[13] James Quesada, Sonya Arreola, Alex Kral, Sahar Khoury, Kurt C. Organista, and Paula Worby, ‘‘As good as it gets’: Undocumented Latino Day Laborers Negotiating Discrimination in San Francisco and Berkeley, California, USA,’ City & Society 26(1):29-50 (2014).

[14] Nicholas De Genova, ‘Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,’

Annual Review of Anthropology 31(1): 419-447 (2002).

[15] Nina Martin, ‘The Crisis of Social Reproduction among Migrant Workers: Interrogating

the Role of Migrant Civil Society,’ Antipode 42(1): 127-151 (2010); Nik Theodore and Nina Martin, ‘Migrant Civil Society: New Voices in the Struggle Over Community Development,’ Journal of Urban Affairs 29(3): 269-287 (2007).

[16] Sebastien Chauvin, ‘Bounded Mobilizations: Informal Unionism and Secondary Shaming

Amongst Immigrant Temp Workers in Chicago,’ In Neoliberal Capitalism and Precarious Work, ed. Rob Lambert and Andy Herod, 72-95. Northampton: Edward Elgar (2016); Janice Fine, Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream, (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

[17]Cesar F. Rosado Marzán, ‘Worker Centers and the Moral Economy: Disrupting through

Brokerage, Prestige, and Moral Framing,’ University of Chicago Legal Forum Vol. 2017, Article 16, (2018) https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol2017/iss1/16.

[18] James Quesada, Sonya Arreola, Alex Kral, Sahar Khoury, Kurt C. Organista, and Paula Worby, ‘‘As good as it gets’: Undocumented Latino Day Laborers Negotiating Discrimination in San Francisco and Berkeley, California, USA.’ City & Society 26(1):29-50 (2014).

[19] Office of Civic Engagement & Immigrant Affairs, City and County of San Francisco, ‘Request for Proposals: San Francisco Day Labor Program,’ (2014) Available (consulted 12 May 2016) at: www.sfgov.org/oceia. ; Jill Esbenshade,‘The ‘Crisis’ over Day Labor: The Politics of Visibility and Public Space. WorkingUSA 3(6): 27-70 (2000).

[20] Ruth Milkman and Veronica Terriquez,‘‘We Are the Ones Who Are out in Front’:

Women’s Leadership in the Immigrant Rights Movement, ’ Feminist Studies 38(3): 723–52 (2012); Yolanda Alindor,. Bay Area Day Labor Programs: Services, Political Environment and

Priorities. Zellerbach Family Foundation. Available (consulted 12 June 2016) at: http://www.ca-ilg.org/sites/main/files/file-attachments/collab_strategies_final_9-15-11_4.pdf.

[21] Janice Fine, Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream, (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)

[22]  Jennifer Chun, George Lipsitz, and Young Shin, ‘Immigrant Women Workers at the Center of Social Change: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates,’ In Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age, ed. Nilda Flores Gonzalez, Anna Romina Guevara, Maura Toro-Morn, and Grace Chang, (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Pres, 2013)

[23] Paul Apostolidis,‘Day Laborers and the Refusal of Work,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 117(2): 439-448 (2018).

[24] Ito, Jennifer, Rachel Rosner, Vanessa Carter, and Manuel Pastor. Transforming Lives,

Transforming Movement Building: Lessons from the National Domestic Workers Alliance Strategy – Organizing – Leadership (SOL) Initiative. USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, 2014.. Available at: www.soltransforminglives.org

[25]  Emilie Hache, ‘La responsabilité, une technique de gouvernementalité néolibérale?’

Raisons politiques 28(4): 49–65 (2007)

[26] Ito, Jennifer, Rachel Rosner, Vanessa Carter, and Manuel Pastor. Transforming Lives,

Transforming Movement Building: Lessons from the National Domestic Workers Alliance Strategy – Organizing – Leadership (SOL) Initiative. USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, 2014.. Available at: www.soltransforminglives.org

[27] Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality.’ In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,

ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller  (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).

[28] Sujatha Fernandes, ‘Out of the Home, into the House: Narratives and Strategies in

Domestic Worker Legislative Campaigns.’ Social Text 34(3): 1-25 (2016); Sujatha Fernandes, Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2017).  

[29] Tara Cookson, Unjust Conditions: Women’s Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer

Programs, ( Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2018).

[30] Purser, ‘The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men: Boundary Work among Immigrant Day

Laborers.’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 38(1): 117-139 (2009).

[31] Ananya Roy, ‘At the Limits of Urban Theory: racial banishment in the contemporary

city,’ Lecture at the London School of Economics Cities (February 13, 2018).

[32] Kathryn Moeller,  The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of

Development (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).

[33] Ananya Roy, ‘Subjects of Risk: Technologies of Gender in the Making of

Millennial Modernity,’ Public Culture 24(1): 131-155 (2012).

[34]

[35] INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (eds): The revolution will not be funded: Beyond the non-profit industrial complex (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007)

[36] Maria Ibarra-Frayre, ‘Under the US Deportation Region, Activists are Policing Themselves,’

TruthOut (June 21, 2018)

[37] Fernandes, 2017

Interviews

Curating History in Southern California and Beyond

Editorial Introduction: Midway through volume 100 in its present ordering, Merry Ovnick has overseen tillers of California’s historical terrain as Editor of Southern California Quarterly for fourteen years, curating regional historical scholarship for readers eager to learn the shared history of this remarkable place. Published first in 1884 and running for 134 years as the scholarly publication of the Historical Society of Southern California, SCQ explores “the history of Southern California, California as a whole, and the American West.” Ovnick’s own expertise, though, is Los Angeles; specifically L.A.’s residential architectural history. Boom Editor Jason Sexton and SCQ Book Reviews Editor Allison Varzally sat down with Ovnick earlier this summer in a residential setting on L.A.’s Westside—not far from where Merry grew up—to conduct this interview.

IMG_1522ed4

Boom: It’s always good for Californians to come back to their roots. And having this conversation here is probably special because this is where you grew up, about two blocks from here. What is it like coming back to the old hood?

Ovnick: Well, I don’t come very often, and it was quite different during those days. We started school at Short Avenue Elementary, just around the corner, and we were its pioneer kindergarten class. At the end of this block was all fields—agricultural land, where beans and celery and things like that were farmed. They’d been Japanese farms before the relocation and in my earliest memory they were Mexican farms. This is home.

Boom: This is home, but now you are in the San Fernando Valley both living and teaching. But going back to your growing up years, what was it like growing up in L.A.? Were your parents from Los Angeles?

Ovnick: I don’t know what to compare it with, but it worked out. My parents came from Kansas and migrated during the Depression, and my dad worked at Douglas Aircraft during the war.

Boom: Now you are a historian interested in regional history, and have been editing Southern California Quarterly for fourteen years. When did you begin to think about California as a place? And specifically, to think of Los Angeles as a place?

Ovnick: I don’t think as a kid you think of such things. It’s just home. That’s what you know. You may travel, but then you come home and home is normal. Unless you’re a child whose parents moved around a lot so that you can understand how different a culture or lifestyle might be in different places, I don’t think you think comparatively. At least, I didn’t. We moved to Santa Monica when I was ten, but that was still local. And we did some camping things. Every so often we trekked to Kansas to visit my grandmother. But that was it.

Boom: What were your preferred hobbies or pastimes as a kid? Were you reading a lot? Nonfiction? Were you interested in history from the beginning? Or were you studying space?

Ovnick: Oh yes, I was a terrible bookworm. We went to the Venice Library, which was an Arts and Crafts style building at the time. By fourth grade I had read every book that I could in the children’s section. So the librarian—whose name was Faye—kindly said that I could use adult books as long as she or my mother approved of the books. I would get historical fiction things, and then the main character would snuggle up to somebody (graphically described) and I’d wonder, “Why would they be doing that?” But I knew better than to ask my mother. She would never let me read again. So I had to grow into with this mentality of, “Oh, now I understand the things that I had read.”

Boom: What led you down the career path into becoming a professional historian?

Ovnick: Well, I decided when I was thirteen that when I grew up I wanted to be a history professor. Mainly, in those days, history meant princesses and castles and that sort of thing. But I had understood that history professors got to teach what their favorite subjects are and they got to do research on those subjects and they could just dwell on this world that I had come to enjoy. The “history of what” changed as I grew older and a little more perceptive, outside of the princess mold.

Boom: Did you have inspiring history teachers?

Ovnick: No, it was books. And so public libraries meant a lot.

Boom: So what led you to become, then, not just interested in history but specifically a scholar of Los Angeles?

Ovnick: Well, I have an interest in architecture. I’m not sure exactly how that started, but I’m interested in buildings. The other was that as an undergraduate, at Santa Barbara then at UCLA, my field was Japanese history. That was my interest. I decided that to do graduate work I would need language and would have to go to Japan to do research. So, when I was proposed to I originally said “no,” causing a big flap. Then I said “okay,” but here’s the condition: I would get to do graduate work in Japan. My husband said “yes,” and we got married. Then he said he lied and I could never go. So I had to think about what I wanted to do when I eventually took up graduate studies in the U.S.

Boom: Was there a gap there at all? When you discovered you weren’t able to go to Japan to study where and what you wanted?

Ovnick: It was quite a crisis, and lasted a long time. I’ve now since been to Japan and enjoyed it very much. But at the time I figured California history has the Asian-American component, which was the next best thing.

Boom: Southern California Quarterly is more than Southern California history and more than California history. It includes the Far West, the American West, and the Pacific.

Ovnick: I’ve had articles on Hawaii, and there’s one in our Fall 2018 issue about British Columbia. But that article does mention there’s a parallel with what’s happening further down the coast.

Short Ave Elementary - Merry's School_ed2ex

Boom: But taking you back to 2005, when you took the helm as editor of the journal, why did you volunteer to take it up?

Ovnick: It was because I had done the book review editing at first. Clark Davis had been groomed to be the successor to Doyce Nunis (who was the editor for forty-three years), and started by becoming book review editor. The journal had fallen into trying times, with grammar errors, typos, and other things that the editor had missed. That was painful for Clark, who was quite the diplomat, to work on the book reviews when the journal was in such sorry shape. So we talked about it and I was the intern coordinator for the history program at CSUN. So, I said how about I get interns who are dual English/History majors and set them up under Doyce as copy editors? Doyce, who was missing teaching, would love to have the tutelary role and there would be an extra pair of eyes without Clark having to say something.

So, we did that for a while and that worked out well. He loved handling the interns. He had two interns and they both went on to Ph.D.s later. Then Clark died very suddenly at age thirty-seven—a tragedy for all who knew him. That then left a gap. That’s why I was moved in to be book review editor, and Doyce later retired as editor two years later.

Boom: Among the many exceptional articles you’ve published in SCQ, do you have a favorite?[1]

Ovnick: No—usually the one that is latest is my favorite.

Boom: So you didn’t have any doubts about assuming the editorship? Because it’s one thing to be book review editor, but a much grander responsibility to be the editor. What was the transition like? Can you describe what you see your role as editor being?

Ovnick: I work approximately twenty hours a week on the journal. At first it was very, very difficult and it was also just as I was starting to turn my dissertation into a book. So that got put on the back burner and it never got done because I do this instead.

The role of editor is a dual role and there’s a conflict between the two. One, the editor is the conduit for the author. The author has done the research, the analysis, the writing, and this is how the work gets out to the public. It also builds her CV and helps her survive “publish or perish.” So, the conduit role is one where the editor just helps the author shape things, getting them to publication.

The other role is to serve as the guardian of the history discipline’s standards. You’re the one who decides what the public should read and what kind of integrity it should have. So the conflict is, if you really need articles for the next issue and you have a poor article but you really need an article, do you relax the guardian role? One of the safeguards is the peer review process which we rigorously enforce. But even so, there’s that pressure from the two sides.

Boom: And at certain times has it been harder to secure potential articles?

Ovnick: I’m in one of those situations right now. I have one article that has to be totally revised and the author is incapable of doing so. I’ve worked on him for two years to get this wonderful research into publication shape and he can’t do it. I’m going to just shepherd this along. But that’s only one article out of the three that make up an issue, so I’m in one of those desperate spots.

I have actually had several times where I’ve needed to step in. Doyce admitted that many times he solved this “not having an article ahead” in one of two ways. Either he wrote an article himself and published it and admitted that he had not sent things out for review for several years because he thought he was capable of reviewing everything himself. The other way he solved it was to just not produce that issue. Instead of volume or issue one, two, three, and four for the year, he’d have one and two, then a combined three and four, which he got complaints about from people who were paying for a subscription. They got this type of reaction fairly frequently. During my tenure, though, we’ve never missed an issue, and we’ve never been late in fourteen years.

Boom: Obviously “quarterly” is embedded in the name of the Southern California Quarterly, but have you thought about—given the pressures of producing in such a regular fashion—producing less frequently? Like maybe once a year, or even twice a year?

Ovnick: In the early years of the journal, it was an annual publication in the very beginning. But that hasn’t come up with the historical society. If it does, we could do that. So far it hasn’t.

Boom: And is there significant direction that comes from the historical society?

Ovnick: Well, the money comes from them, and this is their most costly item. So, it’s a crisis for them, they’ve been doing a big fundraising job just to support the journal. We recently received a bequest.

Boom: That’s reassuring. Can you say anything about that?

Ovnick: As a bequest, it’s a will, and becomes active upon the passing of the donor, which is hopefully a long time from now.

Boom: We did spend some time going through the various issues you’ve produced as editor, and noticed a couple of innovations, like “The Historian’s Eye.” Can you tell us about that?

Ovnick: I did a number of those with the help from others. One of them was someone from the Auto Club, and one was from his wife, who is the historian or archivist at City of Hope. They asked to do them, and I have another author who suggested that we do little bio sketches. His first suggestion was Mira Hershey, you know, of Hershey Hall at UCLA, an early feminist who had money.

Boom: One of the images depicted folks getting into a street car and you brought up the theme “chivalry.” How do you choose images? And what are you looking for?

Ovnick: Just something interesting. I have to be careful to ensure it’s not just some image I like. I did this in the classroom, things like that chivalry one when you notice what the ladies are wearing, they have to step up fairly high to get off the dirt street and there’s that white dress dragging on the dirt street. Various little things like that.

Boom: In some decisions you’ve made of what to publish in Southern California Quarterly, what you’re highlighting isn’t your area of research, it’s rather a curatorial area of interest. I’ve noticed that during your tenure. I [Jason] remember the previous editor of Boom, Jon Christensen, with an issue of Boom we were working on where I said I didn’t want to strong-arm things related to my interests and views, to which he responded that I’m allowed to do some of that. But I noticed you haven’t really. You’ve focused mostly on racial, international, socio-political history, and social histories.

Ovnick: Yes, I admit that there’s probably more architectural articles early on because somebody would know me from my architectural interests and submit an article here rather than somewhere else. Likewise then for Japanese-American history, which I’ve probably done more than is quite even-handed. I have another one coming up in the next issue.

merryed.jpg

Boom: So, let’s bring us back into the areas you’ve published on, especially in L.A., and California, as these things also reflect some of Boom’s concerns related to the future of California. How do we curate this place and what’s here? From your work on residential architectural history, does Southern California have a best style of architecture, one most fitting for this place?

Ovnick: Well, the Spanish Colonial, which was deemed to be appropriate because of a romanticized version of a Spanish past. But I’ve seen Spanish Colonial houses in Utah and Wyoming where somebody just liked that style I guess and there it was. So that’s one we’ve appropriated.

Also, the California Bungalow, which was my dissertation topic. I have a particular soft spot for that. The Craftsman magazine, which was published in the East, after 1908 had a crisis where they let their entire art department go. There were drawings of ideal interiors that sold their style of furniture, but they had to fire their art department. They then became reliant on people near and far to send them photographs to use as illustrations. A great share of the ones that came during that period came from Los Angeles with photographs of small to large houses in the Arts and Crafts mode. But they were redone for California, with lightweight material, not the winter roofs or snow-shedding roofs or insulated walls. They featured the indoor-outdoor life with sweeping porches and cross-ventilation, and on-site trees intertwined with the house, that were indigenous to California.

It became The Craftsman look because of their lack of an art department. I later tracked down some of those houses and found them by looking through Ancestry.com and finding out where that architect’s address was. There is something about the appropriateness of that style for California.

Boom: Why do you have this kind of affection for the Bungalow style?

Ovnick: It just looks very cozy and comfortable. I wouldn’t mind living in one.

Boom: Does your own house reflect your architectural passions?

Ovnick: No, which of course destroys the entire premise of my first book.[2]

Boom: Your book and one issue of Southern California Quarterly noted the cross-pollination of East and West characteristic of Southern California architecture, which has also been characterized by experimentation and reinvention. Isn’t that a luxury, perhaps one that we’re not going to be able to afford much longer?

Ovnick: Oh yes, and the single-family residence is an albatross.

Boom: Okay, well that brings me to another question. Is a house an investment?

Ovnick: Absolutely. When you look at the early advertisements, they promised that when you buy a tract house in the 1920s it will double in value in a number of years. It is an investment and you could buy the empty lot next door and hold onto it, because the value of that land and that tract is bound to go up.

Boom: We can probably safely conclude that for twenty miles of coastal California, but what about the interior? The Central Valley, the Inland Empire?

Ovnick: Inland Empire has its own background because of the citrus boom and the railroads coming in there and other things. It might be special. For the Central Valley, Bakersfield and Fresno have taken the prize recently of being California’s fastest growing cities. I’m glad though that I don’t live in the Central Valley. It’s hot enough in the San Fernando Valley.

Boom: In some of your research you’ve shown that some developments here have been borrowed from elsewhere, especially from the American East. But have we and could we be developing ideas for residential housing from the Far East more then we have? Like Japan?

Ovnick: Well, the indoor-outdoor house with sliding panels is the Japanese aesthetic of simplicity. Those have influenced our architecture.

Boom: I [Allison] was also wondering how we might incorporate the density of Japanese cities, where they seem to be able to house a lot of people in very little space. I don’t know what that means if you don’t have the single-family home that has defined Los Angeles, but if we move toward that model of densification and more clustered living….

Ovnick: It could be, but you know what works in Japan is partly because of a cultural thing about privacy. You may have people very close together, but you’re very quiet and you don’t air your arguments because it just would not do. There’s a whole cultural thing that has to happen. You can’t just import the buildings from another culture and have any luck.

Boom: Of course, residential architecture relates very much in the title of your ’94 book, somewhat hidden in there is an echo of the California Dream. How that relates to the “working man,” buying a home in the post-war world. But how does the California Dream manifest in Los Angeles residential architecture?

Ovnick: In that case, how do you distinguish the California Dream from the American Dream? Success and being ahead of your parents’ generation was it, and the expectation that each generation would do that. Even if there’s a ceiling now that makes it not so likely. All those people who moved out here weren’t California-bred people to begin with, they came from Iowa or wherever and had an American Dream that they could realize in California.

Boom: I think a single-family detached house was part of that dream, so maybe that dream is changing as it becomes impossible to attain.

Ovnick: It needs to. Otherwise it becomes a disappointment. I think that’s a good thing to discuss in Boom particularly. In the world of Internet and Facebook and other things, that dream may be very real. There are all kinds of savvy people who can expect to make hay while the sun shines. But as a general thing, and when you have a classroom full of elementary school students, do you hold out that dream for them? For everyone, of every color, of every part of town or immigrant background, or in whatever economic situation? There needs to be some readjustments.

I was talking to somebody in Paris about this recently, who was in awe that I came from Los Angeles, and asked, “What is Los Angeles like?” I said, “Well, we have 55,000 homeless that live on the streets,” and he was aghast. He asked what is being done about that? And what can we answer?

Gushed2.jpg

Boom: You’ve written on post-war Los Angeles, a long seventy-year moment that might be coming to a terminus soon, reflective of what we’re discussing. Could you thematize what’s happening in Southern California during those decades?

Ovnick: I think it was a turning point for gender issues, for one thing. Men had gone off to war and being macho was very much a part of it. Women might be Rosie the Riveter and they might have been capable during the war, except when you look at the ads. The Office of War Information monitored advertisement, and I have a small collection of ads from wartime popular magazines; they had the young woman with the stylish hat and her pocket book asking, “I earned it, why can’t I spend it?” Then, the stern response that she ought to save it for the home front and postwar when the boys come back from oversees and make new starts. The patriotic thing to do is to save your money, buy war bonds. There was this sense of women doing their part for the home front as just part of being the little woman helping the man. It reinforced a gender ideal that had been moderated in the ’20s and ’30s that has been reinforced as a macho thing.

The final chapter of my book where I deal with this happens to be my favorite chapter, but because nobody had done primary research on World War II at that time, I had no secondary sources. Everything had to be primary. Looking at the expectations for housing after the war, you know, “When I get home from this war I’m going to build a house and have hot running water and I’m going to have…,” and so on. They spun big dreams during the war about the house that they and Rosie the Riveter were going to move into at the end. Then the building trades and architects and building material suppliers and others were all busy gearing up for postwar, how they were going to change from making war items to making things for a housing boom that fed that dream or would make it come true for people.

There was such uniformity in the news that you also couldn’t show a picture of the coastline because a Japanese submarine might notice that a little notch there, which might lead directly to a war plant. With all those cautionary holds on what could be published, it’s no wonder that my parents and Archie Bunker and many others had such black-and-white, good-and-bad views that fit the Cold War. It was good guys and bad guys, and we were the good guys. It was just so sharp and clear—that generation spent their youth not seeing anything except black-and-white.

Boom: But the ’60s and ’70s started to challenge that.

Ovnick: Absolutely. It was their kids in the ’60s who saw grey and objected to Archie Bunker’s views—generational conflict as of about 1964, when the war babies grew into teenagers.

Boom: And how is that shaping the residential architecture? Thinking of young people living outdoors. Breaking free of their parents’ homes.

Ovnick: They turned their tie dye stuff into boutiques and joined the middle class.

Boom: And after the wave of white Buddhists moving to Japan and coming back….

Ovnick: That’s actually what this upcoming article is about—a person whose last name was Goldwater, who was the second cousin of Barry Goldwater, and who was a Buddhist priest during the war.

Boom: So the religious architecture in Southern California—especially Los Angeles churches, temples, mosques—especially if said communities are moving around a Buddhist temple, for example, how did religious architecture shape Los Angeles during this time, and is it having any influence on residential architecture?

Ovnick: Unfortunately, my book was just on residential architecture. But from the Society of Architectural Historians, which I’m heavily involved with, we do tours of churches and recently toured one by Ernest Coxhead that was where Cesar Chavez first raised the challenge over on the east side of Lincoln Heights. We look at church architecture, but is it a case of L.A. shaping the architecture or is it architecture shaping the people that are in it? For example, the Hompa Hongwanji temple, right across from the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), which has the traditional arch which faces outward and is now owned by JANM; it’s made out of concrete but it echoes the thatch roof of tradition, including echoing the cedar wood graining that a traditional Buddhist church in Japan would have had because it was built during the 1920s by an Anglo architect and some of the touches are neo-Egyptian because it was a stylish thing and the architect worked in theatrical things. I don’t think that’s new or unusual.

In Savannah, Georgia, there’s a Jewish synagogue that was built in the 1840s in Gothic Revival style. You know Gothic, with that window that’s split into two smaller Gothic arches, symbolizing the Trinity. The rose window with the twelve leaves to represent the twelve disciples. Those have iconographic meanings, but this was a Jewish synagogue and it was built in neo-Gothic because that was the stylish church-like architecture, and this was an affluent membership who were movers and shakers in their community and they particularly wanted a Jewish “church” that would fit in with other churches. They didn’t want to look strange. So, whether a time and a culture shape the building, or the building then shapes the culture—I mean, I doubt many people who went to that “church” thought about the nativity and the twelve disciples.

Boom: So, they like the style and don’t necessarily care where it came from.

Ovnick: I wrote and published in California History on motion pictures and how motion picture-making affected architecture in the 1920s, in the silent era. Without sound, the actors and cinematographers had to do other things—if the story was about a princess and a castle, the very first scene had to show the young lady, probably with a coronet on her head and crenellations on the top of a wall behind her, and maybe a moat. Then movie-goers would realize this was about a princess and didn’t have to have a big discussion. Things like style references that make a setting were exaggerated and clear to read in the silent film era. In the 1920s we get the little castles and Tudor houses and the Spanish Colonial. All these easy to read make-believe backgrounds. Then, likewise, cinematographers used heavily rusticated surfaces so light and shadow would play off them so they wouldn’t look too flat in the kind of film and lighting they had at the time. We had those exteriors with what they called jazzed stucco, the troweled-on stucco that were supposed to look like adobe houses (that never had such a rough looking job) because light and shadow worked. Other parts of the house like columns or door arches or whatever had to be projected in a certain depth, so they cast light and shadow.

Our culture changes, and of course movies are shown nationwide. So you see make-believe architecture in Utah and Wyoming, and you see that heavy use of shadow and texture on buildings—it “took” across the country. It took especially hard here because this is where movies are made. So many people are in the industry, and in fact many of the set designers in Hollywood were also doing residential architecture on the side.

chris-erlandsen-652822-unsplashed.jpg

Boom: There’s a great chapter in Day of the Locusts that talks about the crazy diversity of architectural styles that come back in the movies. And we keep telling ourselves stories, projecting. The last line of your book captures this, where you conclude that Los Angeles is “a durable dream.” A beautiful line. But in light of things like the current enormous homeless crisis, do you still believe that Los Angeles is a durable dream?

Ovnick: As a matter of fact, I wrote that book so long ago that I’d forgotten all about that last line. In 1994, who could predict the Northridge earthquake, which hadn’t happened when I wrote that.

Boom: But it’s interesting how just a couple years after major riots that make people doubt whether this region is sustainable.

Ovnick: That’s not maybe just this region. Polar ice caps are melting and other things. People in Venice are doing these elaborate mega-houses on these tiny lots. Society of Architectural Historians was showing one of these houses and the architect was telling us that one of the things she had done was to look at the underground water flow, because it was basically on marshland, and at the topography. So, she built hers in a part of Venice that was several feet higher and away from those underground stream flows, which are ancient stream flows. She wanted to build a one hundred-year house, so it would be there for her kids.

Boom: Forward-thinking. And do these kinds of questions shape your work as editor of SCQ?

Ovnick: You never know what the next article is going to bring, and it’s going to be on some topic you’ve never addressed before hopefully because if it’s something you’ve done already you don’t want it. Each piece needs to contribute something, and every one is a learning experience from an editor’s point of view. I learn things every time, and if I didn’t, then there’s probably something wrong with the article. So how significant is it? What kind of insights does it give on things like homelessness and earthquakes and all those other things, or perhaps on a path that can be constructed? We look at things with a more empathetic eye because of a particular historian’s work, and that has an impact on our current times. It’s not that history repeats itself, it’s just that we open up our mind when we read history, which is a human subject. We’re gaining a wider understanding of our fellow men and women.

Being an editor, then, is like having your finger on a pulse of what’s out there being done and what its possibilities are when it reaches a reading audience. I think that was one of my biggest accomplishments was to get SCQ online. At the beginning, before there was a regime change at the Southern California Historical Society, there used to be a board that I spoke to on multiple occasions about the importance of going online, and their eyes would just glaze over since they were absolutely uninterested, didn’t want to think about it, and didn’t want to know the mechanics of how this could be done or who could do it. It was like talking to the wall.

As the board eventually changed and got some newer members, it happened. I think an all-print journal is not a viable entry. I’m old, so I like reading things in print, and I like having the covers, and enjoy working on the covers. But I know that print things are a dying breed. Whether you can reach an audience, the right audience or a big enough audience with what you put online, that’s a concern.

I think one of the solutions is a journal like ours that has multiple subjects. Every issue has a real diversity of topics that are there, even when they’re a set. But even as a set, each article expresses different viewpoints. A person who’s reading something they got online and sees the title of the article above and below might be intrigued and might read things they wouldn’t otherwise. But if it’s not in that very journal issue as something that might be important to them, are they going to go back and look at past ones? So, one of the concerns of the marketing people at UC Press is how to keep reminding people of good stuff that’s in the past issues. Doing special online issues introduce readers to something covered back in 1920 or 1942 that might be of interest work to send people looking backwards.

Boom: Deeper into the archives, and the online archives.

Ovnick: That’s a possibility, and I hope it works. The current president of the HSSC reached out to four grad students at three different institutions and got them to do bibliographic essays on subjects like Native Americans. They looked through back issues of SCQ and put together a bibliography of articles that have been done on a particular subject. They did one on the mission, noting the articles on the mission era back in the 1920s were romanticizing the padres and the adoring Indians. Then in the 50s they were doing thus and so, which leaves a track that they’ve analyzed. How we change how we view the past, missions being a particularly good example, puts us in mind not to just think in black-and-white, but enables us to think critically about what is the “historical truth.” Twenty years later, something else was the “historical truth.” I think that’s broadening, and it will hopefully work to send others to past issues of SCQ.

Boom: I think that’s something that is hard for undergraduates to grasp, the idea of historiography. That the interpretations change by what you’re reading.

Ovnick: And why does it change? It’s very important. The journal is a form—both SCQ and Boom—of public history. Because they reach out not just to the profession, but to a wider public. And I think that’s very important.

PORTRAITed

Notes

[1] Out of an extensive list of well-written articles, reflecting good research, and worthy contributions to their fields of history, there are a handful that stand out for their ground-breaking discoveries, exceptional research depth, and insightful analysis. Dr. Ovnick is especially proud to have had a hand in bringing these to publication in the Southern California Quarterly during her tenure (2005-2018; volumes 87-100):

Scott Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles in 1870-1871: The Makings of a Massacre,” SCQ 90.2 (2008).

Kelly J. Sisson, “Bound for California: Chilean Contract Laborers and ‘Patrones’ in the California Gold Rush, 1848-1852,” SCQ 90.3 (2008).

David Igler, “Captive-Taking and Conventions of Encounters on the Northwest Coast, 1789-1810,” SCQ 91.1 (2009).

Emily Bills, “Connecting Lines: L.A.’s Telephone History and the Binding of the Region,” SCQ 91.1 (2009).

Kim Hernandez, “The ‘Bungalow Boom’: The Working-Class Housing Industry and the Development and Promotion of Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles” SCQ 92.4 (2010).

Hillary Jenks, “Bronzeville, Little Tokyo, and the Unstable Geography of Race in Post-World War II Los Angeles,” SCQ 93.2 (2011).

Patty R. Colman, “John Ballard and the African American Community in Los Angeles, 1850-1905,” SCQ 94.2 (2012).

Mary C. Greenfield, “Benevolent Desires and Dark Dominations: The Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s City of Peking and the United States in the Pacific, 1874-1910,” SCQ 94.4 (2012).

James Tejani, “Dredging the Future: The Destruction of Coastal Estuaries and the Creation of Metropolitan Los Angeles, 1858-1913,” SCQ 96.1 (2014).

Andrea Geiger, “Reframing Race and Place: Locating Japanese Immigrants in Relation to Indigenous Peoples in the North American West,” SCQ 96.3 (2014).

Erica J. Peters, “A Path to Acceptance: Promoting Chinese Restaurants in San Francisco, 1849-1919,” SCQ 97.1 (2015).

Benjamin Cawthra, “Duke Ellington’s Jump for Joy and the Fight for Equality in Wartime Los Angeles,” SCQ 98.1 (2016).

Barry Read [3-part set], “Building Mulholland Highway: The Road to Mulholland Drive. Part I: The Campaign; Part II: Construction; Part III: After the Celebration,” SCQ 99.1-3 (2017).

[2] Merry Ovnick, Los Angeles: The End of The Rainbow (Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 1994).

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

Uncategorized

Gender|Sex|Sexuality & California

Boom California seeks proposals for a series of essays on the theme, “Gender, Sex, Sexuality & California: part of the problem & solution.”

We expect this to consist of a range of features related to California’s contributions to these issues, both positive and negative. This includes historical, social, cultural, ethical, medical, psychological, technological, theological, and other features widely represented in interesting ways. Boom’s focus remains the question and contribution of the world in California and California in the world, but we especially invite unique takes on California’s contribution to these matters, including what California may have made possible (or impossible) in light of its particular ordered ways of being.

Issues for exploration may consist of freedom and exploitation, agency and consent culture, the contribution of legislation, criminalization, ‘coming out,’ the Hollywood ‘casting couch,’ Silicon Valley ‘bro’ culture, new and unique liberative movements, as well as the stereotypes propagated by California’s culture-making factory with the very actors, directors, or other figures’ personal lives standing inconsistent with images portrayed in public and through popular media.

Of interest is feminism’s various waves, masculinity, transgenderedness, plastic surgery, STDs, stigma, and class. Of consideration may also be California’s definition of the family, abuse, and California’s contribution to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, and to various forms of establishing and reinforcing new and old social, religious, racial, and other norms. Further considerations may relate to sexuality and sports, LGBT ‘safe-spaces,’ California ‘cruising’ culture, Proposition 8 and the definition and purpose of ‘marriage,’ sex and California religion/s, prison sexuality, AI innovations, along with California’s own contribution to the development of queer theory (Foucault, Butler, etc.), sexuality and the California environment, among other subjects of inquiry under the broad topic above as related to California.   

We invite 100-word proposals for short (800–2,000 words) and long form (5,000-10,000 words) essays as well as proposals of significant books for review, or possible art or other creative forms of media, exhibits, events, etc. These short proposals should be submitted directly to boom@ucpress.edu by Sunday 15 July, with a deadline of 1 October for final submission of the completed piece for the review process. We anticipate a fast turnaround and to publish this series toward the end of 2018 or the beginning of 2019.

 

GSSC_single_v2

ArticlesPhotography/Art

Queering Desire from California

Việt Lê

During and after my father’s two-year terminal illness, and my own simultaneous cancer scare (2000-2003), I became concerned with individual illness as a metaphor for the failure of ideology and the political body, and called this series, “Still.” At the time, I was also dealing thematically with loss and the long shadow of HIV/AIDS in a continuing body of work entitled, “Pictures of You.” I was thinking of Susan Sontag,[1] Douglas Crimp, Joan Didion,[2] and Foucault. Above all else, I was thinking of two things: trauma and desire.

Lê girlhood among ghosts_L

untitled (girlhood among ghosts)

Desire denotes emptiness, a void, an impossibility, an ethical conundrum. Desire unattainably sits on the horizon. What do we desire most in this political moment? What really ails us?

I have been rethinking illness and failure after reading and teaching Anne Cvetkovich’s Depression, Anne Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief, Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, and Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness,[3] in conversation with other texts, artists, and thinkers.

I now understand “illness” as being culturally constructed—systemic failure. On one hand, with continued systemic oppression (along the lines of class, gender, race) minoritarian subjects would be ailing, not particularly content with the status quo. Critical voices of dissent are “killjoys,” as Sarah Ahmed[4] and Jan Bernabe[5] have observed. Postmodernity and its discontents: to be a killjoy is to be attuned to—and respondent to—a range of violence from micro-aggression to lethal force. Neither of these come with a trigger warning.

10 The Death of Marat

untitled (The Death of Marat)

According to the Washington Post’s real-time National Police Shootings Database,[6] there have been 408 fatal shootings by officers already this year (987 in 2017; daily the list grows). We are cannibalizing ourselves. These killings on our streets can be linked to longer histories of violence and empire, which is obscured under different guises. This mentality to “Make America Great Again” has viably amounted to making America hate again.

On top of all this, the U.S. Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 barred Asians and Arabs and also restricted immigration for Eastern and Southern Europeans. The Obama administration deported more than 2.7 million immigrants—a record for any presidency.[7] October 2017, President Trump proposed restricting the number of immigrants to 45,000,[8] down from 110,000 in 2016. But this isn’t limited to our gold coasts and miracle miles. Brexit and the outcry over the European refugee “crisis” suggest an unnerving political pendulum swing. Political victories and losses do not compare to and nor do they make up for the loss of rights, livelihood, and of life itself.

What do we do as a (social) body with threatening growth? We isolate, excise: through incarceration, corporal punishment, banishment (think about deportation, travel bans, and Muslim bans). Although, we can combat this mindset of threatening isolation through the Enlightenment discourse of rational helpfulness; racial uplift; liberté, egalité, fraternité; and the disguise of love. As Marguerite Duras writes of colonial desires: “love unto death.” Death is the end-logic of disease, of dis-ease, of being ill at ease.

The real illness lies in our fear of others—of terrorists, immigrants, refugees. Vietnamese refugees. Californians are not exempt from this, and have historically exhibited some of the more extreme versions in racist policies that get exported throughout the nation, and tend to fester here, hidden under the blinding sun. But refusing these, wherever they come from, is an option—an opting out of the ideological and real violence of empire, patriarchy, hetero- and homo-normativity. We do not want to be #winning (#whining?), if success means capitulating to capitalism’s misogynist, racist, ageist demands. We don’t have to give in, give up, cede to others, secede from ourselves (or the nation) to succeed. If to “succeed” under heteronormative patriarchy means to follow an ideal weight, age, skin color, (re-)productive timelines, ad nauseam, we would rather choose to fail, to un-follow, be fallow. The embrace of failure, indeed, opens up critical and creative possibilities. Muñoz admits, “Within straight time the queer can only fail; thus an aesthetic of failure can productively be occupied by the artist for delineating straight time’s measure.”[9] Artist Sowon Kwon notes that being perfect and perfectly average—exceptional yet unthreatening (model citizen, model minority)—strands us intersectional feminists in no man’s land.[10]

As our American idols fall (Weinstein, Rose, Spacey, Cosby, et al)—the fathers falter—their embodied pinnacles of success and predation display a pestering symptom. “A festering pustule in a diseased industry,” director/actress Sarah Polley called Weinstein in a New York Times op-ed.[11] Beyond op-eds, there’s no option: up end, opt out.

We want to fail. We want to fail if corporate excess (cum execs, sex) and captains of industry are quietly complicit in perpetuating decades and centuries of trauma.

How do we question, query, and queer our inherited timelines, cultural mythologies, and individual myths? To use Halberstam’s term, this is the queer art of failure. Muñoz observes that utopia is even predicated on failure. It comes to be this impossible horizon. This is the paradox of desire—love, beauty, community. Yet, they are implausible ideals that we as a people continually strive for. This desire to fare better, then, is to fail better.

Illness and its metaphors. We cannot “be illin’” (Netflix-and-chillin’) when our bodies, our political bodies, and our earth is in a state of emergency. In critical condition, we need critical mass, creative intervention—an ethics of refusal—in our despair and desires. And here, in this ascesis, we may eventually find better ways to truly hope.

4 kitchen window

untitled (kitchen window)

5 garage

untitled (garage)

6 yellow

untitled (yellow)

9 temple drum

untitled (temple drum)

11 waking alone

untitled (waking alone)

7 laundry, after Vermeer

 untitled (laundry, after Vermeer)

12 ants

(untitled) ants

13 flowers

untitled (flowers)

 

Notes

  • All photographs taken by Việt Lê, 2001-05, Lambda print face-mounted on Plex, Edition of 5 + 1 AP 36″ L x 36″ W x 1″ D framed (91.4 x 91.4 x 2.5 cm). Used by Permission.

** This short essay is excerpted and expanded from Madalyn K. Le and Việt Lê “CA+T (Center for Art + Thought) Interview with Việt Lê,” 28 December 2017,  http://centerforartandthought.org/cat-interview-vi%E1%BB%87t-l%C3%AA.

[1] Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2001).

[2] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Vintage, 2007).

[3] Anne Cvetkovich, Depression (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), and Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

[4] https://feministkilljoys.com/.

[5] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/queering-contemporary-asian-american-art-986825.

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/.

[7] https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/22/advocate_trumps_deportations_are_possible_because.

[8] Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Miriam Jordan, “Trump Plans 45,000 Limit on Refugees Admitted to U.S.,” New York Times, 27 September 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/us/politics/trump-plans-45000-limit-on-refugees-admitted-to-us.html.

[9] Cruising Utopia, 174.

[10] http://archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/196.

[11] Sarah Polley, “Sarah Polley: The Men You Meet Making Movies,” New York Times, 14 October 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/14/opinion/sunday/harvey-weinstein-sarah-polley.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0.

Việt Lê is a Vietnamese artist, writer, and curator whose work focuses on trauma, modernity and popular cultures in Southeast Asian diasporas. He is Assistant Professor (Visual Studies) at the California College of the Arts. His art and research has been featured at H Gallery Bangkok, the Shanghai Biennial and the Smithsonian. Recent publications include “White Gaze” with Dr. Michelle Dizon and “Myriad Modernities,” a Visual Anthropology special double issue coedited with Dr. Lan Duong. For more of his work, see vietle.net.

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

 

Articles

From the Green of Vietnam to Toes Painted with Nirvana

boom-2016-6-4-10-f01

Photograph by Doug McCulloh.

Susan Straight

They came here because of war, though people might not think of it that way when sitting down in the massage chair to have Anna Nguyen or Ly Ngo bend gracefully over their fingertips and sit with curved back over their feet. But from the years of brutal conflict in Vietnam, the farmlands and jungles and colonial-era streets of Saigon, men who fought alongside Americans were sent to reeducation camps, tortured and starved, and their wives and children had to fend for themselves in the ruined land.

Now nail salons anchor nearly every strip mall and upscale shopping plaza. Excellent Nails, Star Nails, Hot Nails—thousands of doors out of which float the sharp smells of acetone and the lilting voices of women who paint delicate flower petals onto toenails, with a flick of the fingers and concentration.

At Nail Spa Boutique in Riverside, Kim Ngo sits on a low stool where she spends her eight-to-ten-hour days, tonight trimming excess cuticle from Charlie Freeman’s toenails, then rubbing off dead skin with a pumice tool, then rinsing the feet, and then massaging lotion into Freeman’s calves. Freeman, a realtor, comes here once a month, and so do her husband, daughter, son, and her seven-year-old granddaughter. She considers pedicures a necessary part of life, saying with laughter, “Red makes my toes look better.” Ngo finally strokes on the color. Twenty toes—Too Red.

Kim Ngo came to Riverside twenty-two years ago from Saigon. She murmurs in Vietnamese that she doesn’t miss Saigon so much because she makes a lot more money here, but there is wistfulness in her voice. Her husband was in a reeducation camp after the war. I saw Ngo last week in Target, and she gave me a hug. We stood in line together, her cart holding only bottled water and French-style baguettes for lunch at the salon; she glanced at other full shopping carts and said softly to me, “Americans all so tall—they have so much food. Look how short—I never had food in Vietnam.”

“Mani-pedi” is now a part of American lexicon because of women like Ngo, who left home. Minh Pham is here at Nail Spa today, translating. His sister-in-law Nga Pham is working on a manicure at the table near the door. Minh’s mother, age sixty-one, worked for twenty years at Nail Tyme in Corona and now works at Nail Soleil there.

Minh Pham:

My father was in reeducation camp for ten years for fighting alongside the Americans during the Vietnam War and for trying to flee the country by boat. He saw many of his comrades die from starvation, illness, and being overworked. My father was forced to go into a land-mine-filled forest and clear trees and till the land to grow fruits and vegetables. Once a day, he was fed a small bowl of rice and a tablespoon of saltwater. While working, he would pick wild mushrooms and vegetation from the forest to eat. To keep him alive, my mother quit college to sell cigarettes and used clothes in the streets of Saigon to buy my father medicine and dried fish to eat.

My mother had to find work less than a month after coming to America in order to keep our family from becoming homeless. Working in the nail shop was the best fit because she was not required to know English and she knew family friends who owned Nail Tyme. She liked working in the nail shop because the tips helped her pay for food and she could learn English from talking to her customers. But over time, she developed asthma from breathing in the fumes. Her only dreams were for her two sons to graduate from college and to visit her seven siblings still living in Vietnam.

The chairs are all filled on a Friday night just before Memorial Day. Ten women work at Nail Spa in a Target shopping plaza, opened fifteen years ago. My daughters came here for prom manicures, once or twice a year, and then for their brows. No one does my daughter Rosette’s brows like Kim Dang, who was always so kind, so patient, and when she asked about my family, I realized I knew little about hers. Her husband was also in a reeducation camp, and she came here twenty-two years ago from the Vietnamese city of Cuu Long.

The culture of Vietnamese-owned nail salons began in 1975, when twenty women refugees arrived at a tent city called Hope Village near Sacramento. The actress Tippi Hedren, famous for Hitchcock films, visited the refugee camp, and the women were fascinated with her painted nails. She arranged for them to attend beauty school, and an industry was born. Now, more than 80 percent of California nail salons are owned by Vietnamese-born or Vietnamese Americans, an estimated 50 percent of all American nail technicians are Vietnamese, and Orange County is the capital of the technology. From Florida to New York to Los Angeles, Vietnamese women dominate the business in salons that also offer eyebrow waxing, facials, and hair services. But sometimes customers forget how physically hard the technicians work, or that they’ve spent their own savings on technician training and licensing and the equipment of a salon, where specialized chairs cost $5,000 to $10,000. Now and then, customers berate technicians for a smudge, complain about a fill, make fun of their language, or accuse them of talking about customers in Vietnamese. Nail technicians say sadly that their work isn’t always appreciated, but men seem to love the pampering. Minh’s cousin’s favorite customer in Corona is an African American construction worker who comes for a mani-pedi twice a month, leaves big tips, and smiles.

Tonight, fifty to sixty women will relax in the big chairs, and ten women will pull up stools and sit and bend and stand and stretch, with the tiny bottles of vivid paint beside them like totems, like the big Buddha who graces the altar. Every salon has a Buddha surrounded by flowers and incense and fruit—offerings for a good day.

Ming Ming finishes Devan Benter’s toes with a hot pink called New York Summer. Ming came here in 2000 from Saigon, because her husband’s family was already in Riverside. Nearby, Sylvia Villa’s toenails are painted in the milky brown shade of Nirvana (reminding me of the color of the Mekong River), with an overcoat of Big Money, and she smiles.

Ly Ngo came here twenty-two years ago from Saigon, and now is the manager of Nail Spa. She works at the opaque Lucite table near the front, doing French tip manicures, keeping an eye on the sign-in sheet and the money, helping a customer into the ubiquitous flat-plastic sandals to wear while the polish dries. She listens patiently to a regular customer speak about her family, her work. Ngo and the others overhear cell phone arguments with boyfriends, sad stories of love lost. Do they whisper to each other about the past, about the foods or cousins they miss in Vietnam? Their customers will likely never know.

boom-2016-6-4-10-f02

boom-2016-6-4-10-f03

Photographs from the Pham wedding.

In a 1970s television commercial for detergent, Madge the manicurist would listen sympathetically to a story about a woman with dishpan hands, and Madge would say, “Try Palmolive; you’re soaking in it!” Back then, my girlfriends and I painted our own fingernails, inexpertly, with polish we bought from Kmart. I had never met a manicurist in my life. Manicures cost $70 or more and were the province of the wealthy.

But during that same time, on that same television, images of America’s war in Vietnam terrified those watching as napalm fires raged to the sky and children ran away, as soldiers were airlifted in helicopters and fleeing Vietnamese civilians were huddled in those same helicopters, leaving their country behind.

Minh Pham:

The boat people left during the late 1970s. A lot of the people who escaped had to stay in the refugee camps until a country allowed them to enter. If they were not allowed to enter, then they were shipped back to Vietnam. Boat people landed everywhere: Southeast Asian countries (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines). They waited to enter European countries and the U.S.

In the late 1980s to early 1990s, under Humanitarian Operation, families of Southern Vietnamese soldiers who suffered persecution from the Communists were allowed to come to America. Our family came under HO in 1994. My mother was studying literature and law in Vietnam before the Viet Cong invaded Saigon. My parents chose to come to America so my brother and I could go to college. My mother told me that if I stayed in Vietnam, I would be selling lottery tickets on the streets or making carpenter nails in a factory. My eighth aunt and her daughter, my female cousin, actually worked in a factory hammering nails until about two years ago. My other aunts helped their sister get a job selling clothes in the outdoor market.

Minh Pham graduated in 2013 with a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of California, Riverside, where he worked for three years on a book of essays and poetry about his parents. For him, his mother has bent over thousands of feet every year, and his father has worked hundreds of hours in a Chinese buffet restaurant. After twenty-two years, his mother has asthma, joint pain, and some trouble breathing. But she still works six days a week, brushing onto nails, ten at a time, the small strokes of color that will dry under her breath.

boom-2016-6-4-10-f04

Photograph by Doug McCulloh.

Susan Straight is an award-winning novelist and essayist from Riverside, California. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Prize, and the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from The Los Angeles Times.

Articles

Seeing Orange County

Tom Zoellner
Elaine Lewinnek

Editor’s Note: This Boom conversation brings together an English literature scholar and an urbanist American Studies professor to reflect on Orange County’s role in the California imaginary. Beginning with reflections on literature and geography, the particular and surprising stories come to life within the diverse landscape that breaks through the common clichés of one of the Golden State’s most important places defining both California’s present and future.


Orange County and the Written Word (Tom Zoellner)

I teach a class at Chapman University on the literature of Orange County that covers the historic poems, stories, and nonfiction portraits, which give this newish megalopolis a sense of place and continuity. Since the class is listed as a creative writing class, I also ask undergraduate students to write their own interpretations of what they see around them.

“Uniformity” is a constant theme: the perceived sameness of the physical landscape, as well as the nagging sense that the region—despite its documented levels of racial and economic diversity—works too hard to promote the image of a palm-sculpted and surgically-aided paradise for affluent Anglos, reminiscent of the “California dream” marketed nationwide in the 1950s.

But just as often, students write about themes of “uncertainty” when it comes to Orange County—a sense of bewilderment about what the region is supposed to mean for them as either a temporary address for their education or as a possible place to start a career, a family, and a meaningful life. For young adults about to join what sociologist Richard Florida described as the “creative class,” the tract-home-and-freeway vocabulary of Orange County does not immediately seem to offer the accouterments that have attracted artists, actors, designers, and small business entrepreneurs to cities with more dense clusters of older architecture and walkable public spaces with interesting street-level retail. One of my students described the county as a “string of contradictions” as puzzling as the interconnected and similar looking municipal groupings that were, as he put it, “moonlighting” as a real city.

The syntax of our built environment, which tended to fall on the geometry of square-mile farm roads and fallen orchard subdivisions, is attractive to retired couples and young families, and generally not those who hunger for unorthodox methods of expression.

One recent set of events here in the City of Orange is illustrative of how geography and culture conspire against the forces that make places interesting. Weary of loud parties and of historic homes chopped up into multi-unit dwellings, the city council made it easier to police to levy stiff fines for both: an action that many perceived as taking direct aim at Chapman’s student culture and of Old Town Orange for welcoming anybody but established families of high income.

When you add in the previous worries about uniformity and uncertainty, it makes for an ominous diagnosis: expensive, yet uncool

“This is a conservative town,” Mayor Tita Smith said when the ordinance passed, and she meant that descriptor to go beyond the usual binary political definition. Orange was a place that embraced the status quo, resisted the influx of young people, preserved existing neighborhoods to the point of inaccessibility and stagnation and clung to its identity as a nineteenth century railroad village surrounded by a postwar ranch-house grid spread out in all other directions.

This may not be a formula to build cultural capital in the twenty-first century. Orange County’s cities risk the impression of tastelessness—in the bland sense, not the rude sense—if they wholeheartedly embrace the idea of freezing the 1950s or the 1980s in a snow globe. Demographers believe that half of the county’s millennials do not plan to stay here beyond their early adulthoods, mainly because of the lack of quality affordable housing and the flight of jobs from the high-technology sector. When you add in the previous worries about uniformity and uncertainty, it makes for an ominous diagnosis: expensive, yet uncool.

The high housing costs not tethered to an “interesting” local narrative is a deadening factor when it comes to recruiting new companies that bring in creative workers, as well as artistic entrepreneurs looking for funky cheap spaces. Economic data from this university’s former president Jim Doti, also a distinguished economist, indicates that Orange County lost 16.3 percent of its high-tech jobs since the beginning of a 2008 recession. This happened even as the region suffered a decline in the growth of its population with university degrees. A report called, “OC Model: A Vision for Orange County’s Future” from Chapman’s Center for Demographics & Policy ends on a note that would sound at home in a Dickens novel, predicting the current economic winds might leave the county “like some aging but still attractive dowager, into long-term stagnation and eventual decline.”[1]

Economic lassitude, and a lock on the door to the fresh and the cool, can create a cultural lacuna. In the opinion of Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin, the authors of the OC Model report, the traditional prescriptions of New Urbanists—spending big money on mass transit, dense apartment blocks and walkable downtowns—may have some beneficial effects on legacy cities with nineteenth century street patterns, but would have little salvific effect on a multi-polar geography like Orange County. Competitive comparable cities with a strong local narrative and recognizable iconography—Boulder, Austin, Raleigh, even Detroit—at least have a “sense of place” that invites new residents to participate. Orange County has an obvious and immortal beach culture as an attractive signifier. But is there anything else here that tells us who we are?

02ed

Countering the oncoming cultural malaise may not require building something new, in the way that “The Block at Orange” or “Downtown Orange County” were physical attempts at slapping a band-aid on our self-inflicted wound. When it comes to literature, the point is to engage in a rediscovery process of what already exists—“shopping your own closet,” to borrow a retail clothing term. Because despite the perception of a bland homescape free of any history except Mission Revival architecture and a railroad, Orange County has a robust literary tradition that remains all-too underappreciated.

The textbook in my Southern California literature class has the title, Orange County: A Literary Field Guide, which some might consider a joke if they look only at the surface. But there is a rich sense of literary place and continuity here that may elude the casual observer. Literature can provide both a portal and a foundation for uncracking the seeming randomness of where we happen to have taken a new job, or bought real estate, or moved to retire in the sunshine, or even have been fated to be born.

This anthology—published last year by Berkeley’s Heyday Books—was edited by the married couple Lisa Alvarez and Andrew Tonkovich is a much-needed statement that Orange County has an intricate soul and that beauty can be found in its unexpected places. Some of the literature within functions as a retort and a rebuke to those would write off Orange County too quickly as a place too new to have an indigenous literary tradition, or even anything worth writing poetry about. In fact, the utilitarian core of the county’s visual aesthetic is a rich vein to be mined. Just as Edward Hopper tapped into to the darkness on the margin of cities as a powerful animating force in his paintings, Orange County writers make ample use of the plainspoken California sunshine and repetitive housing vocabulary as a source of narrative energy in their writings.

The poet Grant Hier, whose poem “Untended Garden” is included in the anthology, writes of running down a concrete-clad river, its walls “rising on either side like wings.” The author Victoria Patterson—who spent a turbulent adolescence in Newport Beach—uses the Fashion Island shopping mall like Charles Dickens used London: it is a spiritual center and locus of action for her novel, This Vacant Paradise. In the Orange County anthology, she writes of the San Onofre nuclear plant (now decommissioned but still an inescapable sight for anyone driving The 5 down to San Diego). Patterson writes of the “breast-like” domes covered in bird dung “like frosting on cupcakes”—a startling image. “At the tip of each dome,” she writes, “there was a red light blinking slowly—like the bell buoys—not in unison, and never completely off: barely red, and then all lit up red.”

Literature will not save the county. But it will enrich the perception and the experience of those who live here and choose to engage in a personal process of dialogue with their environment.

Another unexpected lovely set of images appears in the poem “Santa Ana of Grocery Carts” by Aracelis Girmay. “Santa Ana of AquaNet,” she writes, “altars, the glitter & shine of 99 cent stores, taco trocas, churches, of bells, hallelujahs & center fields, aprons, of winds, collard greens, & lemon cake  in Ms. Davenport’s kitchen, sweat, sweat over the stove.” This takes the banal and forces it into fresh new light.

I was asked to contribute an essay to this anthology and chose to focus on a subject that I wanted to learn more about—the influence of the citrus business in shaping the enduring culture of Orange County, even though the orange orchards are long gone. As a result of reading old newspaper clippings and the reminiscences of the old fruit-packing lords, I now see the physical environment differently and perceive the lurking ghosts of the megaranch archipelago that we used to be.

Literature will not save the county. But it will enrich the perception and the experience of those who live here and choose to engage in a personal process of dialogue with their environment. We “make” the places where we live based on a sense of history and narrative, both of which can be supplied by the animating force of literature. In the concluding lines of his book, The Geography of Nowhere, the social critic James Howard Kunstler writes that we are all on a lifelong journey towards an unknown destination and that along the way, we yearn to experience an environment that means something and has intrinsic significance[2]. He was speaking about the need to enrich public spaces, but the exhortation also applies to the interior life of the mind, which experiences the world as an unfolding story. Lifting up an Orange County literary tradition and a habit of “belonging through words” is not necessarily going to summon high-wage jobs or instantaneous high culture. But we can mine the record for old words, and create new words, which gives some distinction and texture to the streetscape. We have more than we know.

feature image


The Orange Holy Land
[3] (Elaine Lewinnek)

It is worth remembering that Orange County’s residents are not just the folks who want manicured suburban lawns, but also those who want to work as landscapers of those lawns. People come here from across the Pacific Rim and beyond the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, filling Orange County with the diversity that makes it interesting and with the workers that make it possible. As Tom Zoellner pointed out, this county flourished during the Cold War because of military-industrial jobs but also international refugees. Now that the Cold War has ended and some of those military-industrial and high-tech jobs have evaporated, I believe there is still a strong economy, including banking and mortgage-lending, real-estate development, higher education, service-workers in the tourist economy, and vibrant religions.

Although Tom’s students perceive the risk of tastelessness in this expensive yet uncool space, I wonder whether Orange County cares about their departures. For every “creative class” person who finds this space unhip, others keep pouring in. Property-values do not suffer here; I am not sure this space is declining. There is, in fact, now an “Orange County” gated community outside of Beijing and another “Orange County” pair of luxury resorts in India: our reputation as a name brand is that appealing, transnationally.

Some of my students do share Tom Zoellner’s disappointment in the lack of public space and paucity of community here. Yet, maybe because I’m in an American Studies department and not an English department, my students look for more than literature to anchor themselves here. For them, family stories, subgroup’s stories, and cultural history stories help provide a sense of place. Let me mention a few of my favorite Orange County stories that I have discovered while conducting research for the forthcoming, A People’s Guide to Orange County.

If you are black in Orange County, there are very few places you can get your hair done. The Cut & Curl at 4th and Bristol Streets in Santa Ana was one of those places. In the early 1960s, Dorothey Mulkey was getting her hair done and chatting about the challenge she faced finding a decent apartment to rent. The hairdressing customer next to her happened to work for the NAACP, and encouraged Mulkey to bring her case to court. In 1967, in Reitman v Mulkey, California’s supreme court overturned Proposition 14, California’s anti-fair-housing bill, the first time the supreme court had overturned a voter-approved initiative. It is the basis for our fair housing laws today—and it is thanks to one Navy veteran, Dorothey Mulkey, and one conversation at a Santa Ana barbershop.[4] Stories like that are worth remembering.

It is neither a simple dream nor absolute nightmare, but a more complex vernacular worth getting to know.

It is too easy to drive past the parking lot of the former Hunt/ConAgra/Val Vita packing factory without knowing that in 1943 the Latina women who worked there successfully fought for onsite childcare because before that time they had to lock their children in their cars during their 8-hour shifts. Knowing that story, a vacant parking lot suddenly has resonant depth.

Orange County has also led the way in privatization. We have the first modern gated community in Rossmoor, Seal Beach; first age-segregated community in Leisure World; first modern Home Owners Association in Huntington Beach (quickly followed across this county and nation); and first toll road in California. Yet we also have resistance to those forces, from the nineteenth-century utopian experiments such as the Placentia “Grass Eaters,” Societas Fraternas, to the seminal school desegregation case Mendez v Westminster, to the recent defeat of a toll road proposed for Trestles Beach. That proposed toll road was defeated by a coalition of surfers, environmentalists, and some indigenous activists concerned with protecting Panhe—but Panhe is a story that very few people know.

Panhe is a 9,000-year-old village mentioned in the baptismal registry of Mission San Juan Capistrano. Whenever a developer’s bulldozer unearths a skeleton that is many centuries old, in most of America, this brings a halt to construction. We have rules against building atop indigenous graves elsewhere, but not in Orange County. Here, many of the coastal and canyon spaces where the Acjahmen/Juaneno people lived are incredibly valuable real estate. Since the 1970s, Orange County’s developers have worked with Acjahmen people to ceremonially rebury any skeletons found across the county, placing them at Panhe. You can see Panhe from The 5 freeway if you know where to look, near Camp Pendleton, the closed nuclear reactors, and the immigration checkpoint—but all there is to see is a chain link fence. Without knowing the story, you might drive right by.

Just up the road from Panhe is the former TRW/Northrop Grumman test facility, a military-industrial research site which a 1988 forest fire exposed as the secret location of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars Initiative lasers. That, to me, is the story of Orange County. The Acjahmen activists who regularly gather at Panhe do so in the shadow of the Star Wars missiles. Our county may look like the Geography of Nowhere, and indeed the hypercapitalistism, attenuated community, and amnesiac history that James Kunstler describes is here—but it is also the site of deeply fascinating history with a wonderfully mind-spinning diversity.

From the quotidian Fullerton apartment made famous in The Adolescent’s 1979 punk song, “Kids of the Black Hole,” to the easily-overlooked Placentia river channel whose flooding killed forty people, forgotten for a long time except for a 1939 corrido—we have a history remembered in songs, murals, and some family stories, if not in widely-recognized literature.

In her seminal, Suburban Warriors,[5] Lisa McGirr writes that, perhaps because the built environment is not designed to foster community, Orange County’s postwar newcomers sought community in evangelical Protestant megachurches, which aimed to moor themselves with conservative ideas of tradition, even as they also used cutting-edge technologies. She may be right, but others of my students find community in the underground music scenes here, or in traditional Mexican dance troupes, or niche sports, or other subgroups that do not make it into the mass-cultural representation of this space.

ben-white-126974

We are not just the county that developed Taco Bell and Botox, as Tom Zoellner mentioned. We also developed the science-fiction genre of steampunk—appropriate to this alienating, high-tech landscape—and the Vietnamese diaspora’s musical revue extravaganza videos. There is much to be proud of, and a deep heterogeneity lurking beneath a surface that can appear homogeneous.

Orange County is full of the kinds of spaces that D. J. Waldie has called the “sacred ordinary”: flawed, human, commonplace, often overlooked, and, arguably, even holy.[6] It is neither a simple dream nor absolute nightmare, but a more complex vernacular worth getting to know. As Waldie wrote in the 2005 afterword to his memoir, Holy Land—set just over the border from Orange County, in Lakewood—“Too many accounts of a suburban life fall into the trap of sentimentality or contempt. I have no desire to romanticize my past or set fire to it. This suburb hasn’t any barriers to tragedy. It’s a place that’s just as mortal as me.”[7] It is mortal, not a perfect paradise nor a despicable hell, but a very human middle ground.

The idea of the “sacred ordinary” brings us back to Eritrean-American poet Aracelis Girmay, whom my students embrace as much as Tom’s students do, especially her description of her childhood home, Orange County’s capital city of Santa Ana:

Santa Ana of grocery carts, truckers,
eggs in the kitchen at 4 am, nurses, cleaning ladies,
the saints of ironing, the saints
of tortillas. Santa Ana of cross-guards, tomato pickers,
bakeries of bread in pinks & yellows, sugars.
Santa Ana of Cambodia, Viet Nam, Aztlán….
Patron saint of kitchens, asphalt, banana trees,
bless us if you are capable of blessing.[8]

We need more literature about this space, as Tom Zoellner suggests. We need more understanding of the sacred ordinary—if only because it is, often, extraordinary.

Notes

[1] Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky, “OC Model: A Vision for Orange County’s Future,” 43.

[2] James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

[3] The term “Holy Land” draws from D. J. Waldie’s magnificent memoir, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005).

[4] Dorothy Mulkey, interview with Santa Ana Oral History Project, 13 December 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoaFdCfyAkg&list=PLuXEcCp7eWwnWOwbiqc-pSIJ0eFhgSUea.

[5] Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[6] See Waldie, Holy Land; and also his “What Does It Mean to Become Californian?” Boom California, 28 March 2017, https://boomcalifornia.com/2017/03/28/what-does-it-mean-to-become-californian/.

[7] Waldie, Holy Land, 182.

[8] Aracelis Girmay, “Santa Ana of Grocery Carts,” in Teeth (Evanston, IL: Curbstone Books, 2007), http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07202007/girmay3.html.

Tom Zoellner is a journalist, Associate Professor in the English Dept. at Chapman University, and Politics editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has written five nonfiction books, including Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World–from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief (Penguin, 2014), and his book Uranium won the 2011 Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics. His portion of this essay was adapted from a white paper delivered at a conference on the future of Orange County at Chapman University on 23 February 2017.

Elaine Lewinnek is professor in the department of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (Oxford, 2015), and is currently working on a bottom-up history of Orange County with Gustavo Arellano and Thúy Võ Đặng, titled A People’s Guide to Orange County (UC Press, forthcoming).

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

Articles

The Big Siesta

Siesta_Chandler-2

Blake Allmendinger

In Playing In the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison studies the impact of African slaves and their descendants on “canonical American literature,” primarily produced by white male writers. This “black presence” is often absent in works that celebrate the United States as a nation of free and equal citizens. The myth of America as the New World can only be sustained by the refusal to acknowledge people who were brought to this country against their will and as enslaved individuals more than four hundred years ago. By enforcing the ideal of “invisibility through silence,” writers create ghostly lacunas, allowing “the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body.”[1]

Hispanics have posed a similar problem in the U.S. West, where people of Spanish and Mexican descent are sometimes referred to as “undocumented workers” or “illegal aliens.” The politicians and voters who use these terms imagine immigrants sneaking into the country and disappearing into ethnic neighborhoods and communities, undetected by legal residents and law enforcement agencies. The Hispanic presence is also depicted as a menacing absence in regional western literature. One such case is Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), a classic example of American noir that features a Mexican American family living in Los Angeles during the Great Depression.

Chandler portrays the city as a place where desperate people do anything to ensure their personal and economic survival. While working for his client, General Sternwood, private investigator Philip Marlowe discovers that nothing is what it seems to be. A rare book store is actually a front for a pornographic lending library. A dilapidated mansion houses an illegal gambling den. A seemingly innocent woman is really a dangerous femme fatale. Wherever Marlowe goes, he encounters serpents in the Garden of Eden.

The Sternwood family gives truth to the saying that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. The General is an oil baron who lives in a modern-day castle, symbolizing his wealth and social respectability. His daughter Carmen is a drug addict being blackmailed by a man with a glass eye. Meanwhile, his other daughter, Vivian, is cheating on her husband. The estate is designed in the faux Spanish style—with tile floors and wrought-iron railings[2]—referencing the European empire that once ruled California. It also resembles Greystone Mansion, built by real-life oil tycoon Edward Doheny (Greystone/Sternwood). The property later became notorious as the site where Ned Doheny, Jr. and his male secretary (as well as rumored lover) died in an alleged murder-suicide pact.[3]

The Big Sleep exposes the guilty deeds and sordid histories of the city’s so-called upper-class. Yet one mystery still remains unsolved: the origin of the Sternwood family. The first clue appears in the opening chapter when Marlowe arrives at the Sternwood estate, and a butler ushers him into the main hallway. The detective notices a large oil painting hanging below “two bullet-torn or moth-eaten cavalry pennants crossed in a glass frame.” The picture features a man posing in a military uniform. Marlowe identifies the subject as someone who fought during “the Mexican war. The officer had a neat black imperial, black mustachios [and] coal-black eyes…. I thought this might be General Sternwood’s grandfather” (4).

Caucasian writers have been fantasizing about the elimination of the Hispanic presence since the conclusion of the Mexican-American War.

The black eyes and swarthy appearance indicate that the officer is a non-Caucasian. Mexican cavalry commanders often remained in California after the war, marrying wealthy white women in order to maintain their economic standing and social status. This theory explains another unanswered question of why the current General has given one daughter the Anglo-Saxon name Vivian and the other one the Hispanic name Carmen.[4] The painting is also a subtle reminder that Catholic missionaries and military leaders used religious iconography and visual symbols of authority to convert and subdue non-Spanish-speaking natives when they first arrived in California.[5]

Unions between high-ranking Mexican military officers and daughters of prosperous American families created “ethnic alliances,”[6] allowing whites to gain access to Mexican wealth, while enabling the newly defeated Mexican aristocracy to become absorbed within the expanding white power structure.[7] One historian views these matrimonial mergers from a noir perspective, suggesting that women were essentially trafficked “between the old and the emerging ruling classes,”[8] or even sold into sexual slavery.

Siesta_Chandler-1

This model of interethnic relations is consistent with Chandler’s portrayal of California as a site of contested space where races and empires have battled for centuries to control the region’s people and natural resources. The Spanish colonization of Native America was followed by Mexico’s brief period of rule, its secularization of Catholic missions, and the enrichment of its landed gentry. The Mexican-American War ended with whites and rancheros continuing to struggle for economic and political dominance. The subsequent Gold Rush led to a new form of environmental exploitation. It was succeeded by the discovery of oil in the late nineteenth century. By the time Chandler published The Big Sleep that industry had begun to decline.

Evidence in the novel suggests that the original General married his daughter to a white man named Sternwood to secure the fortunes of the newly dispossessed Mexican gentry. The couple had a son (Marlowe’s employer) who at some point in the past married for money. In the first chapter, the reader learns that Sternwood got married in his fifties to a younger woman, who bore him two children and later died (13). Chandler never explains what caused the wife’s premature demise, thus creating another unsolved mystery. But he indicates that the wife had money of her own, which she bequeathed to her daughters in her will (14). The General is unable to access this money, though he may have invested part of her remaining fortune in the oil business. The Sternwood derricks appear in the background throughout the novel, uneasily coexisting with the palm trees and Southern California foothills.

The Spanish colonization of the region “conferred upon Mexicans a ‘white’ racial status.” Thus, anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited marriage between Caucasians and blacks or Asian Americans, wouldn’t have applied to the Sternwoods.[9] Indeed, Chandler had written an earlier short story entitled “Spanish Blood” (1935), featuring Los Angeles policeman Sam Delaguerre. The protagonist is proud of his grandfather, deeming him “one of the best sheriffs this county ever had.” He is equivalently proud of his European lineage, claiming, “My blood is Spanish, pure Spanish. Not nigger-Mex and not Yaqui-Mex.”[10]

Some Americans questioned the purity of the Mexican gentry, who identified as white Europeans.[11] Chandler portrays Delaguerre as one of the good guys—a prototype for Marlowe, “who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”[12] But he also describes the character as “very brown” (22). Delaguerre pursues a Filipino man called the Caliente Kid, a Spanish-speaking criminal who is dark like the hero (44, 46). The similarity between the “spig” and the “flip” (53, 46) blurs the distinction between Spaniards and Filipinos. Chandler also portrays General Sternwood and his daughters as if they were the products of miscegenation, with the alleged mental and physical defects sometimes attributed to mixed-race people. Confined to a wheelchair, Marlowe’s employer blames his poor health on a life of debauchery (9). Unlike Vivian, his Spanish-named daughter, Carmen, has certain abnormalities, including pointed incisor teeth and thumbs that lack the prehensile ability to grasp objects, a quality found in the most evolved species of mammals. Members of the Mexican ranchero elite were referred to as gente de razon (people of reason), suggesting that they were more refined and intelligent than mestizos and working-class peons.[13] However, Carmen is intellectually stunted, as well as subject to seizures (220), indicating that she is either epileptic or mentally “abnormal” (223, 229).

Chandler was an admitted Anglophile and the non-white characters who appear in his fiction are usually associated with deviance, decadence, and moral corruption.

Westward expansion seemed to confirm that the U.S. had a divine right to the land stretching from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast. However, one historian has argued that “the desperate effort of the vanquished to maintain their birthright even in defeat [explains] the central meaning of Manifest Destiny.”[14] That effort appears to be doomed by the end of The Big Sleep. The oil wells are “no longer pumping” (218), suggesting that the general’s fortune has been depleted. His daughters are childless, and have failed to make matrimonial alliances that would secure the fortunes of the next generation.

A Protestant, Chandler once admitted that he “grew up with a terrible contempt for Catholics.”[15] But noir has more in common with the Catholic notion of eternal sin than with the Protestant belief in the improvability of the human race and Manifest Destiny’s triumphal narrative of predestination. As a side note, the title for the Spanish version of the novel, El Sueño Eterno, equates death with eternal oblivion. In The Big Sleep, California is a postlapsarian Eden, inhabited by people who are deeply flawed. “Vivian” alludes to the Lady of the Lake, an enchantress who ruled the mythical kingdom of Avalon. Ironically, “Carmen” means “garden” in Spanish. The novel is a contemporary urban version of the medieval romance. Marlowe is the knight who has been hired to rescue the general’s daughters, and Los Angeles is the corrupt Arthurian realm in which these seductresses masquerade as damsels in distress.

This Anglo-Saxon myth also has its counterpart in Spanish renaissance literature. The name “California” was first used to refer to the region by Garci Rodriguez Ordóñez de Montalvo in his sixteenth-century medieval romance, Las sergas de esplandián (The Exploits of Esplandián).[16] Fittingly, the novel’s climactic scene occurs in an abandoned oil field, which appears “lonely as a churchyard” (218). The Catholic missions have been replaced by Sternwood’s derricks, and at the bottom of one of the wells lays the body of a white man whom Carmen has killed.

The foreshadowed extinction of the Sternwood family may be a form of white wish-fulfillment. Caucasian writers have been fantasizing about the elimination of the Hispanic presence since the conclusion of the Mexican-American War. Morrison suggests that the alleged savagery of African slaves, and later African American men and women, made it necessary to erase their existence in literary and artistic works that depicted idealized versions of American civilization. White authors who wrote about California and the U.S. West were faced with the opposite problem. Many of the Spaniards and Mexicans who had earlier resided in the region—the Catholic clergy and military elite, the wealthy rancheros and other landed gentry—were more “civilized” than poor whites who immigrated there in the late 1840s and afterward, squatting on property they didn’t own and plundering the area’s mineral resources. Writers had to ignore this historical fact, or reimagine Mexicans after the war as being members of a supposed inferior race.

Chandler was an admitted Anglophile[17] and the non-white characters who appear in his fiction are usually associated with deviance, decadence, and moral corruption. In addition to the Hispanic presence, there are numerous references to the Orient, which contributes to The Big Sleep’s sinister atmosphere. However, most of the characters in Chandler’s novels are white, and they commit the majority of violent acts and criminal misdeeds. The hard-boiled detective novel can be read as the second chapter in frontier history, indicating how the land-grabbers, cattle rustlers, and gunslingers in the early U.S. West moved to cities such as Los Angeles, where they evolved into the blackmailers, bootleggers, and gangsters of the 1930s and ’40s.

In part, Chandler blames members of the degenerating Sternwood clan for the evils in society, pitting the characters against a white private eye and police department in a racial conflict that has continued since the end of the Mexican-American War. Frequently, noir examines issues about “national belonging” and racial dispossession. As a nation with competing claims to the region in The Big Sleep, Mexico serves as a “spatial other to the United States.” It is “American noir’s geopolitical unconscious,” its dark double; an invisible threat to the nation—not only in Chandler’s fiction, but in our current culture as well.[18]

 Siesta_Chandler-4

Notes

[1] Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 4-5, 10.

[2] Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, 1939; (reprint, New York: Vintage, 1988), 4. Subsequent references to this edition appear within the text of the essay.

[3] Chandler worked for a California oil company from 1922 to 1932. He was fascinated by the Doheny murder case, which Marlowe alludes to in The High Window (1942). See Robert F. Moss, ed., Raymond Chandler: A Literary Reference (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003), 88-98.

[4] Despite her name, Vivian also has dark and wiry hair, as well as the same “hot black eyes of the portrait in the hall” (17).

[5] Lisbeth Haas, “Indigenous Peoples Under Colonial Rule,” in Blake Allmendinger, ed., A History of California Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 37.

[6] Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley: UC Press, 1966; reprint, 1998), 124-25.

[7] Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: UC Press, 1994), 58. William Deverell also suggests that these unions were seldom based on mutual affection. “Many of the genteel Californios… displayed unusual, though largely unspoken, hostility toward Americans. It was rumored that they washed their hands after touching American money.” See Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: UC Press, 2004), 15.

[8] Ibid., 59.

[9] Ibid., 4, 58.

[10] Raymond Chandler, “Spanish Blood,” 1935; reprint. in The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage), 40. Subsequent references to this edition appear parenthetically within the text of the essay.

[11] Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 4.

[12] Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in The Simple Art of Murder, 18.

[13] Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), xiv; and Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines 46.

[14] Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, xiii.

[15] Raymond Chandler, in a letter to Charles Morton, dated 1 January 1945. As cited in Moss, Raymond Chandler, 15.

[16] Vincent Pérez, “Spanish and Mexican Literature,” in Allmendinger, ed., A History of California Literature, 43.

[17] See Frank McShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: Dutton,1976); William Marling, Raymond Chandler (Boston: Twayne, 1986); and Judith Freeman, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (New York: Pantheon, 2007).

[18] Jonathan Auerbach, Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 15, 24, 123.

 

Blake Allmendinger is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he specializes in western American literature. His books include The Cowboy (Oxford, 1992), Ten Most Wanted (Routledge, 1998), Inventing the African American West (Nebraska, 2005), The Melon Capital of the World: A Memoir (Nebraska, 2015), and A History of California Literature (Cambridge, 2016).

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

ArticlesPoetry

Feelings

Jie Tian

“The moment when a feeling enters the body is political.” -Adrienne Rich

Feelings well up in the Women’s March
Feeling mauve, Santa Ana, I grieve for the broken river bank
        the homeless  an ancient rage
        —the thirst to kill  the drive to war

Feeling angry at the deceit in the inauguration address—
        power to the people
        a masquerade disrupting the symphony and California air

Feeling ashamed of our unscrupulous race and pursuits
Feeling dis-eased
       there are lies, lies, lies in the human mouth

Feeling an ache for asking again
        when shall we ever learn

Feeling wanting to tell the truth, mouth cracked
        drought-intolerant
Feeling opened & tender
        longing for green rain   wisteria   sustenance

Feeling partially irresponsible for preferring to retreat to Mount Baldy
        comforted by friendly snow      intelligent pine
        the swirled knots of kindness

Feeling pulled to the streets of Santa Ana
        the energy field of feelings    the humanly love and struggle

Feeling the intensely worried brown eyes of a handsome young father
        the older child sleeping in his arms   the infant strapped to his shoulder
        clearly feeling an uncertain future

Feeling unrest and agitation
        feelings of crisis criss-cross   faces   signs    and hearts
Feeling respect for the devotion to order and peace

Feeling reassured women who marched in the sixties rejoin the march today
        in vivid colored clothes and lipsticks and beliefs
Feeling we come from a long history of making public our feelings

Feeling a flash of recognition of a kindred spirit
        as a winged couple pass through—
        Hope is the thing with feathers

Feeling innocent and trusting again     seeing a girl’s smile
        and her sign   with the bold pink words   close to her heart—

        BUILD      KINDNESS               NOT    WALLS

Feeling humbled by the clear vision of the young
Feeling a secret conviction that our words can heal our warring worlds

Feeling into dreaming
Feeling into believing
Feeling into dancing

Feeling warmth now    in January    in genuine California sun and light
Feeling awe—           our bodies still blaze like the many colors of dawn
                —how we come together    how we will go on

Feelings-4

Jie Tian is a poet, librarian, ecological artist, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside. Her work appears in Spillway, Solo Novo, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Asian American Short Story Writers, and Asian American Playwrights. She is completing her poetry manuscript, Migration, and learning book arts.

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

Articles

Shouldn’t You Be in California?

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Wellness. In 2018, it’s at once omnipresent and misunderstood—a buzzword from campus health centers to high-end real estate to pet food to preschool marketing. In a culture otherwise riven by stark divides of ideology and sensibility, wellness enjoys weirdly wide appeal. Who doesn’t aspire to “more than the absence of sickness,” as it’s commonly described, even if particular wellness totems, from organic kale to healing crystals, can seem annoyingly bourgeois or suspiciously woo-woo? Notably, the otherwise polar opposite online worlds of the upscale “curated” lifestyle (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop) or right-wing conspiracy theory (e.g., Alex Jones’s Infowars) peddle surprisingly similar wellness products.

The few holdouts that most strenuously resist wellness are disproportionately concentrated among social critics and my fellow academics. In growing chorus, they smartly if at times snarkily point out limits of a vision that emphasizes individual wellbeing over collective action and they snub science. They also illuminate inequality, noting that processed food is cheaper than the greenmarket, making time to hit the gym is harder when you work an unpredictable shift job, and a sage-scented home is indulgent if not outright luxurious.

However valid these critiques may appear to be, they have mostly forestalled an exploration of the specific spaces in which wellness culture originated. Postwar California, ever the American frontier, was hugely important. There emerged a wellness culture defined by the at-times contradictory liberation, celebration, and beautification of the body: At countercultural retreats in places like Big Sur’s Esalen, the feminist self-care clinics increasingly dotting university campuses and ethnic neighborhoods, and Southern California’s multiplying gyms. From countercultural yogis to Bay Area love-your-body feminists and San Diego Jazzercisers, wellness has become so ubiquitous by uniting an unlikely range of players in the embrace of once-marginal mind-body holism and self-care as the basis of the good life. The wellness culture they forged has spread far beyond California the place but remains bound up with California the idea. Reflecting broader social and economic inequalities, wellness culture is not necessarily an engine of such malaise, contra many of its critics, but a potentially powerful counterweight to them. History uncovers these counter-narratives easily obscured in 2017.


What is Wellness?

“Wellness, there’s a word you don’t hear every day,” ran as the opening sentence of a 1979 60 Minutes feature on Marin County’s Wellness Resource Center (WRC). Host Dan Rather offered a glimpse as to how “wellness” became the household term it is today.[1] Hardly so accepted in Rather’s day, “wellness” was a fledgling movement that earned skepticism as a “middle-class cult.” The thirty or so mostly white enthusiasts who appeared on national television imparted a common experience that had led them to wellness—suffering caused by ailment that had stumped western doctors. Often desperate by the time they arrived to WRC, they found there a refreshing new set of assumptions: that mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing were interconnected; and that regardless of their expertise, they were uniquely qualified to lead their own healing processes, often through preventative measures. To skeptics, these premises conjured the vacuousness of what Christopher Lasch lambasted that same year as a creeping “culture of narcissism.”[2]

Expansive economic, political, and cultural changes keenly felt in postwar California gave rise to this phenomenon. Increased, if unevenly enjoyed, affluence inspired an appreciation of therapeutic interventions that elevated “emotional balance,” and later “healthy narcissism” and “self-esteem” as social goals, a distinct break from a public health discourse that had emphasized staving from polio, depression-era privation, and wartime venereal disease.[3] Cold War warriors like John F. Kennedy celebrated a corporeally and intellectually agile citizen as the paragon of civic virtue. California public school curricula—from quaint 1950s filmstrips about proper “attitudes and health” to the famed 1960s La Sierra High School physical education curriculum now the subject of a nostalgic 2017 documentary and the 1980s self-esteem commission that appeared on Oprah and are chronicled in the 2017 book Selfie—revealed this sustained new focus on holistic wellness, and anxiety about achieving it, gaining national attention then and now.

The privileges of increased affluence enjoyed mostly by whites were hardly the only impulse galvanizing the pursuit of wellness. Women, racial, and sexual minorities incorporated the cultivation of their own holistic health as a form of political resistance. Historian Alondra Nelson has charted how the Black Panthers established community-run East Bay medical facilities to foster wellbeing, “body and soul.”[4] Unwittingly, in this endeavor, this radical African-American group subscribed to an emergent worldview resonant with that in physically near, but culturally and socioeconomically distant, Marin, as well as growing communities statewide. This essay will consider three of these.

Wellness3


The Retreat

Established in Big Sur in 1962 by two Stanford graduates whose studies of Eastern religion and culture had left them disenchanted with American attitudes toward religion and mental health, the expansive Esalen Institute cultivated countercultural approaches to wellbeing ranging from the spiritual to the psychedelic.[5] As it became a national attraction, Esalen’s pedagogy exceeded the religious abstractions to focus on the body as a vehicle for transcendence. Nude “encounter sessions,” cultivation and consumption of organic foods, and yoga all juxtaposed the “natural” body and earth with the materialistic, technocratic, corrupt realm beyond its gates. Unabashed nudity and non-procreative sex, sustenance unspoiled by laboratory intervention, and “being in your body” were sufficiently subversive to be explored in secluded enclaves. Yet these sensibilities were going mainstream. Esalen’s founding yoga instructor, Pamela Rainbear Portugal, tellingly recounted one purpose of this elevated self-awareness: Enduring bourgeois domesticity. “Punch a punching bag instead of secretly—even to you—sniping at your mate,” she advised. “Otherwise you might someday ‘accidentally’ run the family Buick over him.”[6]

Integral to the Esalen mission was the pursuit of “self-actualization, creativity, and human potentiality,” and one way this mind-body ethos found expression was through yoga.[7] In keeping with the institute’s philosophy, development of a strong sense of self was the goal of embodied asana: “As long as you use your senses, you can do whatever YOU WANT,” Portugal wrote.[8] This actualized self was unapologetically corporeal but liberated from conventional beauty standards in a way that feels astonishing given the airbrushed aesthetic of today’s commercial yoga imagery. Line drawings depicted a woman whose ample figure, unkempt hair, and bulbous nose figured almost as conspicuously as the poses she modeled. Portugal also openly extolled the “release” of regularly vacating one’s bowels.[9]

Similarly, historian Sam Binkley relates the establishment in 1973 of Esalen’s sports center in which the customary goal of vanquishing an opponent was supplanted with “non-competitive organized play and deeper experiences of self-exploration, spiritual community, and transcendence.” A staff member remarked that this program was especially effective in implementing Esalen’s core principle “that the body and mind are so closely related.” A reporter agreed, musing that the “the clout generated by Esalen” might effect “a change in sports” as dramatic as “the storming of the Bastille.”[10]

Such innovations both reflected and shaped broader politics. In 1972, MAD magazine featured a grid portraying defining characteristics of “Liberals”: taking up yoga, feeding one’s pets organic foods, “walking around nude in front of the children,” and “making it a habit to call Negroes ‘blacks’” all made the list.[11] Holistic wellness, this mockery illuminates, was perceived as a liberal fascination. Meanwhile, in suburbs like San Mateo, Anaheim, and the Sacramento environs, burgeoning right-wingers simultaneously articulated an opposing sensibility that invested the body with reactionary political significance: Massive resistance to sex education, pornography, and the sexual revolutions ensued.[12] Lasch reflected in the New York Review of Books on these twin movements born in seemingly distant universes of the suburban subdivision and the spiritual retreat: “A growing despair of changing society has generated on the one hand a revival of old-time religion, on the other a cult of expanded consciousness, health, and personal ‘growth.’”[13]

If this historical moment spawned these divergent sensibilities, the ubiquity of twenty-first-century wellness culture relies on their peculiar convergence: The National Wellness Institute (1977) enjoys the support of both Mike Huckabee and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. A Republican lawmaker cheered the defeat of a bill regulating yoga studios by taking crow pose atop his desk; and wellness luminaries are at the same time progressives, like recent congressional aspirant the Los Angeles-based spiritual leader Marianne Williamson, or libertarians, like Lululemon Athletica founder Chip Wilson. This broad appeal at times signifies co-optation—which movements like Decolonizing Yoga have emerged to combat—but it also highlights how the previously marginalized, from the elderly to disabled, to fat, to queer, to Christian communities, now make claims to wellness culture and its benefits.

Wellness2


The Feminist Health Clinic

Reluctantly, Dan Rather’s interviewees skeptically embraced wellness as a last resort for mundane ailments like strained wrists and chronic back pain. Esalen’s patrons were drawn to its potential for spiritual emancipation, though as Betty Friedan commented after visiting, the retreat didn’t always challenge entrenched attitudes and hierarchies that lionized “macho mountain men.” Still, Esalen maintained a strong commitment to the thorny task of defining personal growth and political liberation as inextricably intertwined, welcoming Black Panthers, dissident intellectuals, and political figures alike to Big Sur.

Echoing this blend of politics and practicality, feminist health advocates also celebrated self-care and mind-body holism. Interweaving structural analysis with self-help, they blamed a male-dominated medical industry for limiting access to contraception and for dehumanizing women. In 1971, Belita Cowan of the Los Angeles Feminist Women’s Health Center taught herself how to use a plastic speculum, flashlight, and mirror to perform an examination on her cervix—which she then turned into a public teach-in inside of a feminist bookstore. In promoting unembarrassed physical self-knowledge and connecting female nudity to empowerment rather than objectification, Cowan inspired similar demonstrations all over the country. Such political spectacle could inspire sustained activism: In 1975 Cowan co-founded the National Women’s Health Network that laid bare the complicity of the medical industry and the Food and Drug Administration in concealing the harmful impact of many drugs on women’s health.[14]

These clinics cultivated a coherent notion of wellness, even as they provided different services based on community need. Facilities sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity (1965) offered otherwise financially prohibitive services such as basic exams and safe abortions in rural and inner-city communities. Like clinics run by the Young Lords and Black Panthers, these sites also offered an environment that challenged the “white coat” of the (often white, male) doctor to welcome communities long marginalized by mainstream medicine.[15] Inspired by women’s liberation on campus, colleges often operated clinics or recommended community centers. In 1972, the Stanford Women’s Center’s “A Guide for Stanford Women” listed female-staffed clinics that “provide good, low-cost care… to women and minorities.” The pamphlet’s emphasis on birth control and “menstrual extraction,” a measure that terminates pregnancy before detectable, suggested its focus on the needs of sexually active college women.

Such particular interventions were undergirded in a philosophy considered so new that a separate section called “MIND AND BODY” spelled out: Women are fundamentally different from men in their physical and psychological health needs; mental and physical health are inextricably intertwined; and “self-help,” inspired by the pioneering Los Angeles Feminist Women’s Health Center, seeks to “change women’s consciousness about their own bodies,” and “provide them with skills to maintain and improve their own health.”[16] The communities such clinics cultivated cast a wide net in promoting preventative health: One San Francisco outfit advertised consciousness-raising, another in Palo Alto was “a place to just go read a book.” By the 1980s, historian Jennifer Nelson describes an Atlanta clinic’s “Healthy Love” celebrations that framed women’s health as worthy of a party rather than pathologizing.[17]

Perhaps the strongest evidence of how effectively feminist health advocates promoted wellness as key to female self-determination was in its ready commodification. In one case, an Orange County used-car salesman-cum-abortion-provider, opened “Women Helping Women” in 1974. Devoted to helping “women [with their] special needs, special problems,” the clinic engaged in questionable practices such as compensating employees with breast enlargement surgeries, prompting denunciations by both anti-abortion picketers and the director of Santa Ana’s Feminist Women’s Health Center.[18] The clinic was “jammed” with prospective clients, reported the Los Angeles Times, intimating that a considerable segment of women were more interested in how “affordable care for women” translated into cut-rate plastic surgery than with the incongruity of such marketing with the feminist politics that birthed such clinics. As “wellness” became more broadly defined in the 1970s, it was marketed in ways that obscure its radical, communitarian origins.


The Gym

It was in the gym where notions of bodily transcendence and self-determination converged with beauty culture in an earnest embrace that remains passionate today. With little of the political or spiritual purpose of the retreat or health clinic, gyms also promoted mind-body holism and self-care, often wrapped in an unapologetic pursuit of beauty.

Working out was considered a bizarre, even suspicious, undertaking until the 1960s and ’70s.[19] In 1936, when exercise enthusiast Jack LaLanne opened his first gym in Oakland, the resistance he encountered foreshadowed the attitudes that would so irk feminist health advocates: “People thought I was a charlatan and a nut,” he remembered. “The doctors were against me—they said that working out with weights would give people everything from heart attacks to hemorrhoids; that women would look like men.”[20] On his television show, which ran for over three decades until 1985, LaLanne reassured the homemakers who comprised most of his viewers that physical training would not “ruin their figures with exercise” but would improve every aspect of their lives, from the emotional to the aesthetic.

Brick-and-mortar fitness clubs built by LaLanne and other Venice Beach entrepreneurs established arenas where exercise became about more than physical culture. [21] By the 1980s, such health clubs were multiplying, and were not necessarily temples of transcendence. A 1983 Rolling Stone cover story and the feature film it inspired, Perfect (1985), likened these gleaming successors of “sweaty dungeons” to “the wailing wall of West Coast fitness religion,” but they also resembled a somewhat seedy, spandex-swathed annex of the “sex-charged” L.A. dating scene.[22] A former patron agreed, remembering that the multi-level Sports Connection—where Perfect was filmed—was better known as “the Sports Erection.”[23] Training one’s body had not only somatic, but increasingly social payoffs.

But it was California’s peculiar postwar context that blended experimentation, political self-determination, and body-consciousness into a distinct culture and ideology.

Women like dancer Judi Sheppard Missett and Hollywood star Jane Fonda, however, launched fitness studios in the 1970s and ’80s out of frustration with the assumptions about women’s abilities that shaped the emergent fitness scene. In the late 1960s, Missett had been confused by the results of a physical fitness test administered at her local YMCA; she was matter-of-factly explained that the exam was geared to male physiology. Disturbed by this exchange, by low participation in her technically sophisticated dance classes, and by her sense that “mothers believed they should sit on the side watching their daughters rather than dance,” in 1969 Missett founded the inclusive dance-exercise format that evolved into Jazzercise.

A recent transplant to San Diego, Missett papered supermarket bulletin boards with flyers advertising her classes, in which women of all ages gathered to exercise free of the usual intimidation of the mirror, which she pointedly removed. When the devoted military wives who attended Missett’s classes inevitably faced relocation, these students became instructors themselves rather than abandon the exercise rituals some described as “life-affirming.” Missett and her acolytes actively linked physical exercise to fulfillment (and a global franchise), if not to overtly feminist politics, which had little currency in conservative San Diego County.[24]

Meanwhile, in Hollywood Jane Fonda built a fitness business that reflected the city’s more progressive sensibility.[25] Early profits of her Robertson Boulevard studio (opened in 1979) funded her activist husband Tom Hayden’s antipoverty nonprofit, California’s Campaign for Economic Democracy. Yet in 1969, the same year Missett launched Jazzercise, Fonda was flummoxed by a feminist who pointed out how the erotic film Barbarella objectified her: “I did not even know I had been. The burgeoning new women’s consciousness had not yet found its way into my mind and heart.”[26] Exercise was ultimately an important avenue for the development of Fonda’s feminist consciousness. The dance-aerobics she popularized in her three freestanding California studios and wildly popular VHS tapes and books inspired her to “create more realistic, less anxiety-ridden standards” for women—from “women judges to women janitors,” as her second book declared—also struggling with body image and sexual exploitation.[27]

Were Missett and Fonda deliberately endorsing wellness? In 2015, Missett told me, “the main focus here is continuing to help women understand that they can take possession of their lives by being healthy and fit” and “cultivating joy through music.” She targeted suburban women likely “intimidated” by swanky, “big-city” clubs like Sports Connection. Thousands of notes from students revealed that Jazzercisers gained more than physical benefits, relaying personal accounts of achieving the confidence to “get married or divorced or go on a safari or climb a mountain.” Fonda also recalled that women socialized to eschew exercise flouted conventions to do her videotapes; as far away as in “mud huts in Guatemala” working out galvanized female self-actualization. Indeed, in the United States countless women recalled that Fonda’s prominence made it acceptable “to sweat in public.” And increasingly, to find community therein: Gloria Steinem wrote in Ms. in 1982 that the “Family of Woman” engendered by the intimacy of the locker room at her women’s gym made “great beauties seem less distant and even mastectomies seem less terrifying.”

The same year that Steinem published that elegiac essay, titled “In Praise of Women’s Bodies,” Missett taught a Jazzercise class at the University of California’s San Diego campus as part of the fitness program for Wellness Week, so declared by Governor Jerry Brown. Not until the early 1990s, however, did Missett remember using the word wellness to market her own classes; she described herself as “tuned in” and influenced by the mind-body practices such as yoga and Pilates since the 1960s, but “it wasn’t marketable” until three decades later. In the 1982 follow-up to her 1981 bestseller, Fonda was more open about her grand ambitions for exercise. This close-range regional history of contemporary wellness illuminates a far more variegated landscape than most critiques permit. If wellness culture has created new arenas for the twin forces of narcissism and neoliberalism to flourish, so too have its arenas—yoga studios, gyms, farmers’ markets—cultivated resistance to the individualizing, stratifying dynamics that have come to structure our political economy, culture, and identities.

California of course had no monopoly on the varied spaces that birthed American wellness culture. In the era this essay spans, we might consider the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York (1977), the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1969), the Lotte Berk Brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (1970), or the tens of New Jersey rec rooms where Jacki Sorensen launched Aerobic Dancing (1969). But it was California’s peculiar postwar context that blended experimentation, political self-determination, and body-consciousness into a distinct culture and ideology of wellness so regionally specific but nationally resonant that when I told a curious patron in a Long Island coffee shop that I was writing about the history of wellness, he quipped: “Shouldn’t you be out in California?”

Wellness1

 

Notes

 [1] “Wellness Resource Center with Dan Rather,” 60 Minutes, 1979, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAorj2U7PR4.

[2] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979).

[3] Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Eva Moskowitz, In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Coronet Instructional Films, “Emotional Balance: Snap Out of It,” 1951, accessed via Archives.org: https://archive.org/details/SnapOuto1951.

[4] Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

[5] Jeffrey Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

[6] Pamela Rainbear Portugal, A Place for Human Beings, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Homegrown Books, 1978), 95.

[7] Kripal, Esalen, 105-106.

[8] Portugal, A Place for Human Beings, 73.

[9] Portugal, 38-39.

[10] Sam Binkley, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 230-31.

[11] Frank Jacobs and George Woodbridge, “The Mad Guide to Political Types,” MAD, October 1972.

[12] Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Clayton Howard, The Closet and the Cul de Sac (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming); Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Rise of Interfaith Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[13] Christopher Lasch, “The Narcissist Society,” New York Review of Books, 30 September 1976.

[14] Sandra Morgen, Into Our Own Hands: The Women’s Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 15; Marlene Cimons, “Women’s Group to Sue Maker of Contraceptive,” Los Angeles Times, 11 January 1983.

[15] Nelson, Body and Soul, 84.

[16] Stanford Women’s Center, “A Guide for Stanford Women, 1972,” Marjorie L. Shuer Papers, Box 1, Folder 11, Stanford University Special Collections.

[17] Jennifer Nelson, More Than Medicine: A History of the Women’s Health Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

[18] Shearlean Duke, “Clinic for Women Only Surrounded by Controversy,” Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1974.

[19] Daniel Kunitz, Lift (New York: Harper Collins, 2016).

[20] Bill Morem, “Fitness Guru Jack Lalanne, 96, dies at Morro Bay home,” San Luis Obispo Tribune, 23 January 2011.

[21] Shelly McKenzie, Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013); Jonathan Black, Making the American Body: The Remarkable Saga of the Men and Women whose Feuds, Feats, and Passions Shaped Fitness History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

[22] Aaron Latham, “Looking for Mister Goodbody,” Rolling Stone, June 1983; Neil Karlam, “Jamie Lee Curtis Gets Serious,” Rolling Stone, 18 July 1985.

[23] Oral history interview with Leslie Kaminoff, 2016.

[24] Oral history interview with Judith Sheppard Missett, 2015; Michael Schroeder, “Looking for a Bigger Slice,” The Detroit News, 20 September 1985.

[25] Black, Making the American Body, 85; Nikki Finke, “Aerobics Videos Get Some People All Worked Up,” Los Angeles Times, 12 November 1987, http://articles.latimes.com/1987-11-12/news/vw-20528_1_aerobics-videos.

[26] Jane Fonda, Jane Fonda’s Workout Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 18.

[27] James Spada, Fonda: Her Life in Pictures (New York: Doubleday, 1985); Alan Citron, “No Sweat: Jane Fonda Closes Her Beverly Hills Aerobics Studio,” Los Angeles Times, 3 April 1991; Femmy DeLyser, Jane Fonda’s Workout Book for Pregnancy, Birth, and Recovery (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 19, 164; Spada, Fonda, 194.

 

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is an associate professor of history at The New School. She is the author of Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford, 2015) and working on a book about fitness culture. She is a co-host of the Past Present podcast. Follow her on twitter @nataliapetrzela or through her website www.nataliapetrzela.com.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interviews

Michel Foucault in Death Valley: A Boom interview with Simeon Wade

Simeon Wade
Heather Dundas

Editor’s Note: Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault in 1926) was one of the central thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Neither a traditional philosopher nor a trained historian, Foucault examined the intersection of truth and history through the specific historical dynamics of power.

In France, Foucault was a major figure in structuralist thinking of the 1960s and in the years that followed. However, in the United States, especially in popular culture, Foucault is often thought of as an inciter of the “French theory” movement that swept through American universities in the 1970s and 1980s. Often controversial, Foucault’s analyses of the uses of power in society, as well as his concerns with sexuality, bodies, and norms have been pivotal in the development of contemporary feminist and queer theory.

One early follower of Foucault’s thinking was Simeon Wade, assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate School. A native of Texas, Wade moved to California in 1972 after earning his Ph.D. in the intellectual history of Western civilization from Harvard in 1970. In 1975, Foucault was invited to California to teach a seminar at the University of California, Berkeley. Following a lecture, Wade and his partner, musician Michael Stoneman, invited Foucault to accompany them on a road trip to Death Valley. After some persuasion, Foucault agreed. The memorable trip occurred two weeks later. This interview was conducted by Heather Dundas on 27 May 2017, and has been edited for length, clarity, and historical accuracy.

Foucault and Stoneman in Death Valley

Foucault and Michael Stoneman in Death Valley.


Boom
: What can you tell us about the above photo?

Simeon Wade: I snapped the above photo with my Leica camera, June 1975. The photograph features the Panamint Mountains, the salt flats of Death Valley, and the frozen dunes at Zabriskie Point. In the foreground, two figures: Michel Foucault, in the white turtleneck, his priestly attire, and Michael Stoneman, who was my life partner.

Boom: How did you end up in Death Valley with Michel Foucault?

Simeon Wade: I was performing an experiment. I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in history would be affected by an experience he had never had before: imbibing a suitable dose of clinical LSD in a desert setting of great magnificence, and then adding to that various kinds of entertainment. We were in Death Valley for two days and one night. And this is one of the spots we visited during this trip.

Boom: What can you say about this photograph? Were Foucault and Stoneman already tripping when it was taken? And wasn’t it incredibly hot, Death Valley in June?

Wade: Yes. We rose to the occasion, as it were, in an area called Artist’s Palette. And yes, it was very hot. But in the evening, it cooled off, and you can see Foucault in his turtleneck in the cool air. We went to Zabriskie Point to see Venus appear. Michael placed speakers all around us, as no one else was there, and we listened to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sing Richard Strauss’s, Four Last Songs. I saw tears in Foucault’s eyes. We went into one of the hollows and laid on our backs, like James Turrell’s volcano,[1] and watched Venus come forth and the stars come out later. We stayed at Zabriskie Point for about ten hours. Michael also played Charles Ives’s, Three Places in New England, and Stockhausen’s Kontakte, along with some Chopin…. Foucault had a deep appreciation of music; one of his friends from college was Pierre Boulez.[2]

Boom: That’s quite a playlist. But why LSD?

Wade: The revelation of St. John on the Isle of Patmos is said by some to have been inspired by the Amanita muscaria mushroom. LSD is a chemical equivalent to the hallucinogenic potency of these mushrooms. So many great inventions that made civilization possible took place in societies that used magic mushrooms in their religious rituals.[3] So I thought, if this is true, if the chemical compound has such power, then what is this going to do to the great mind of Foucault?

PICT0013

Foucault and Michael Stoneman, Death Valley.


Boom
: But why go so far for this experience? Why drive five hours from Claremont to Death Valley?

Wade: The major reason was that Michael and I had had so many wonderful trips in the desert. Death Valley, many times, and also Mojave, Joshua Tree. If you take clinical LSD and you’re in a place like Death Valley, you can hear harmonic progressions just like in Chopin; it is the most glorious music you’ve ever heard, and it teaches you that there’s more.

Boom: Until recently the very 1970s idea of, as you put it in your manuscript,[4] a “magic elixir” to expand consciousness, was so out of fashion as to be ludicrous. But current research has called this quick dismissal of the psychedelic experience into question.[5]

Wade: And about time! [During these trips] I saw the firmament as it truly is, in all of its glorious colors and forms, and I also heard the echoes from the big bang, which sounds like a chorus of angels, which is what the ancients thought it was.

Boom: So you wanted to give Foucault LSD so he could access this “glorious music”?

Wade: Not only that. It was 1975, of course, and The Order of Things had been published for nearly a decade (published in 1966 in French). The Order of Things treats man’s finitude, his inevitable death, as well as the death of humanity, arguing that the whole humanism of the renaissance is no longer viable. To the point of saying that the face of man has been effaced.

Boom: There’s the famous passage at the end of The Order of Things, postulating a world without the power structures of the Enlightenment: “If those arrangements were to disappear… then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”[6]

Wade: I thought, if I give Foucault clinical LSD, I’m sure he will realize that he is premature in obliterating our humanity and the mind as we know it now, because he’ll see that there are forms of knowledge other than science, and because of the theme of death in his thinking up to that point. The tremendous emphasis of finitude, finitude, finitude reduces our hope.

Boom: So you took Foucault to Death Valley for a kind of rebirth, in a sense?

Wade: Exactly. It was a transcendental experience for Foucault. He wrote us a few months later that it was the greatest experience of his life, and that it profoundly changed his life and his work.

Foucault and Stoneman Death Valley 2

Foucault and Stoneman, Death Valley.


Boom
: At the time of this trip, Foucault had just published the first volume of his projected six-volume work, History of Sexuality. He’d also published an outline of the rest of the work, and apparently already had finished writing several volumes of it. So when did this post-Death Valley change become evident in his work?

Wade: Immediately. He wrote us that he had thrown volumes two and three of his History of Sexuality into the fire and that he had to start all over again. Whether that was just a way of speaking, I don’t know, but he did destroy at least some version of them and then wrote them again before his premature death in 1984. The titles of these last two books are emblematic of the impact this experience had on him: The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, with no mention of finitude. Everything after this experience in 1975 is the new Foucault, neo-Foucault. Suddenly he was making statements that shocked the French intelligentsia.[7]

Boom: Such as?

Wade: Statements more confidently out in the open, like that he finally realized who the real Columbus of politics was: Jeremy Bentham. Jeremy Bentham had been up to around this time a very respected figure, and Foucault had begun to find him an intellectual villain. And Foucault denies Marx and Engels, and says we should just look at Marx as an excellent journalist, not a theorist. And all of the things Foucault had been inching toward were bolstered after the Death Valley trip. Foucault from 1975 to 1984 was a new being.[8]

Boom: You’ve mentioned that some people disagreed with your experiment and thought you were reckless with Foucault’s welfare.

Wade: Many academicians were very negative on this point, saying that this was tampering with a great person’s mind. I shouldn’t tamper with his mind. But Foucault was well aware of what was involved, and we were with him the entire time.

Boom: Did you think about the repercussions this experience would have on your career?

Wade: In retrospect, I should have.[9]

Boom: Was this a one-off experience? Did you ever see Foucault again?

Wade: Yes, Foucault visited us again. Shortly after his second visit, which was two weeks after this, where we stayed up in the mountains—it was a mountain experience.

Boom: Also with music and LSD?

Wade: No LSD, but everything else. After he left the second time, I sat down and wrote an account of the experience, called Death Valley Trip. It’s never been published. Foucault read it. We had a robust correspondence. And then we spent a fantastic time with him again in 1981, when he was at a conference at the University of Southern California.

Boom: Did you save Foucault’s letters?

Wade: Yes, about twenty of them. The last one was written in 1984. He asked if he could come live with us in Silverlake, as he was suffering from a terminal illness. I think he wanted to die like Huxley.[10] I said yes, of course. Unfortunately, before he was ready to travel, the trap door of history caught him by surprise.[11]

Foucault and Simeon Wade, Claremont, after the Death Valley experience.

Simeon Wade and Foucault, Claremont, after the Death Valley experience.


Notes

  • The Editor wishes to thank Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, and author of Foucault’s Last Decade and Foucault: The Birth of Power (Polity Press) for clarifying a number of factual matters in this interview. Thanks also to Jonathan Simon.

[1] James Turrell, Roden Crater, http://www.rodencrater.com.

[2] Editor’s note: According to Stuart Elden, “Foucault was much closer to Jean Barraqué, with whom he had a friendship and for a while a relationship. Barraqué was another significant modernist composer and this may be who is meant [here]” (email correspondence, 29 August 2017).

[3] “…such as the Sumerians, who invented everything, including writing, and the Essenes, who invented Christianity.” Wade’s thinking aligns with John Allegro’s theories presented in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (London: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 1970). Most scholars rejected Allegro’s book immediately. However, the book was reissued in 2008 with an addendum by Professor Carl Ruck of Boston University outlining the continuing mushroom controversy.

[4] Simeon Wade, Michel Foucault in Death Valley, unpublished manuscript.

[5] The recent explosion of research into LSD and its effects is too vast for this article to document, yet some notable publications include Robin L. Carhart-Harris et al., “Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging,” PNAS 113 (2016): 4853-4858; Stephen Ross et al., “Rapid and sustained symptom reduction following psilocybin treatment for anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer: a randomized controlled trial,” Journal of Psychopharmacology 30 (2016): 1165–1180; Felix Mueller et al., “Acute effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on amygdala activity during processing of fearful stimuli in healthy subjects,” Translational Psychiatry (April 2017), http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v7/n4/full/tp201754a.html?foxtrotcallback=true.

[6] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 387.

[7] Editor’s note: The actual published vols. 2 and 3 were written to an entirely different plan than the original one, and several years later with completely different material content. So the claim that he destroyed and then rewrote is contestable. Furthermore, the original plan for vol. 2 was a discussion of Christianity, which was rewritten and yet was also reconfigured later down the publishing pipeline to be vol. 4 of the project. According to Stuart Elden, this volume is projected for publication in French in 2018 by Gallimard.

[8] Foucault discusses the change in his thinking and writing in interviews conducted in 1984, at the very end of his life. See “The Ethics of the Concern for Self,” “An Aesthetics of Existence,” “The Concern for Truth,” and “The Return of Morality,” all reprinted in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984 (Sylvère Lotringer, ed. Semiotext(e), 1989, 1996). Editor’s note: Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison was published February 1975 in French, and therefore with the Death Valley trip being June 1975 it is impossible for this later event to have influenced Foucault’s reading of Bentham, &c., as the critiques are laid out in Surveiller et punir, the English translation of which, under the title, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, was not published until 1977. The Editor wishes to thank Stuart Elden for clarification on this point.

[9] Simeon Wade left Claremont Graduate School in 1977. After adjunct teaching as an instructor of history and art history at several universities, he obtained a nursing license and spent the balance of his working life as a psychiatric R.N. at Los Angeles County Psychiatric Hospital and Psychiatric R.N. Supervisor at Ventura County Hospital.

[10] The novelist Aldous Huxley asked his wife to inject him with LSD as he died on 22 November 1963. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/03/most-beautiful-death.html

[11] Michel Foucault died in Paris, 25 June 1984 at the age of 57. Simeon Wade and Michael Stoneman remained close until Stoneman’s death in 1998. Wade for many years lived in Oxnard, California, where he wrote and played the piano. Wade died 3 October 2017.

 

Heather Dundas is a candidate for the Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her website is www.heatherdundas.com.

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