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Supplementary Reading:
La Fiesta De Los Angeles: Race, Ethnicity, and History on the Parade in Los Angeles, 1894-1903.
By Rachel Grace Shuen
Scott Zesch illuminates the original outbreak of racial violence in Los Angeles in The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871[1]. Zesch describes the Chinese immigrant’s experience within the geographic boundaries of Calle de Los Negros, located near the center of developing Los Angeles. Zesch chronicles mounting racial tensions held by the Anglo-American Angelenos, vigilante justice culture, conflicting Chinese community associations, and neutral settlers. La Fiesta De Los Angeles: Race, Ethnicity, and History on the Parade in Los Angeles, 1894-1903[2] starts where Zesch’s evaluation of Los Angeles’ urban and social landscape ends. Shuen utilizes La Fiesta De Los Angeles, a multiethnic parade created by the Merchants Association, to examine the intersections of race, gender, class and nationality within late nineteenth century Los Angeles. La Fiesta utilized a forced diversity as an opportunity to highlight racial and ethnic distinctions in Los Angeles between Anglo-Americans and all other Non-Anglo Americans. Agreeing with Zesch, Shuen argues, “Experiences of people of color in Los Angeles demonstrate how immigrants and indigenous peoples were racialized in relation to one another. Racial stigmas persisted, and as a result, help to institutionalize racial hierarchy as well as local legislation that targeted specific ethnic groups.”[3] While Los Angeles tried to overcome the stigma of Chinese Massacre trails, both agree that it set racial epistemologies within the Los Angeles’s urban landscape discourse. La Fiesta was an attempt to regain back the city’s national identity as a diverse cultural space while attracting the traveling tourist and their dollars through the expansive development hotel, shopping, and cultural districts.
Dividing the project into two sections, Shuen first contextualizes the historical background of La Fiesta, by focusing specifically on tracing the history of the Chinese culture in developing Los Angeles. Shuen then examines La Fiesta itself: addressing the different cultural images portrayed in the parade planners and the first controversies involving the inclusion of the lawfully segregated Chinese community. She pointedly describes how race in Los Angeles focuses on the Mexican heritage gained and lost within the shifting geographic boundaries of Mexico within the annexed city. Utilizing parade photographs, newspaper articles, travel literature and eyewitness accounts captured by paper media outlets about Chinese parade participation, Shuen asserts the cultural commodification, segregation laws, cultural bias and urban development around these topics shaped the social structure in Los Angeles’ racial environment. Methodologically, Shuen interplays cultural authority and ethnic stratification in Los Angeles to question, ‘why the city’s leaders used the past as a cultural tool to build the city and its regional identity while also trying to “whitewash” Los Angeles’ early history.’[4]
A strong sense of identity began to rebuild Chinatown in Los Angeles after Black Tuesday[1]. Despite facing a fire in 1877, relocation in 1880 of the original Chinatown, by 1890 Chinatown was home to over 67 percent of the 1,871[5] Chinese in the city of Los Angeles. Shuen notes that the Chinese continued being accused of taking the larger stake in lower-paying jobs, from laundering clothes, cooking and railroad construction. Further, legal actions taken against the Chinese, in the form of anti-coolie clubs[2], laundry taxes, various municipal city taxes, a 1885 education segregation law, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act furthered Anglo-Angelenos discriminatory efforts to drive the Chinese community out of Los Angeles. Race in Los Angeles symbolized social meanings, signified political struggle and according to Shuen especially, “constructed nature of racial categories,”[6] thus, promoting geographic containers like previously studied in Stephanie Camp’s book Closer to Freedom[7].
Looking to tap Los Angeles booming tourist business, the La Fiesta was created with inspiration of the 1893 World’s fair, and Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses. The Merchants Association, specifically designed La Fiesta to target the exotic, yet the romantic allure of Los Angeles. An initial investment of $10,000, the parade comprised of concerts, marches, and various activities. The name La Fiesta de Los Angeles (presently named Fiesta Broadway) was the result of a city-sponsored naming contest, evoked thoughts of the city’s Spanish past. Shuen elaborates the city’s desire to have the parade showcase the history of Los Angeles by asking Mexican Americans to ride horses as Spanish conquistadores; Yuma Indians display their float and the Chinese to perform their dragon dance during the parade. Shuen argues that “not only were various cultures commodified for the purpose of economic boosterism, but these groups were expected to enact their own subjugation in this supposed “celebration” of Los Angeles’ historical past.”[8]
Shuen details the float processional, utilizing photographic primary evidence and newspaper articles written about the inaugural event. Describing how the parade progresses through various historical epochs, Shuen pointedly asserts parade organizers were committed to presenting a ‘monolithic ideology’ of Los Angeles’ history. Native American groups played into stereotypes of Native American practices and culture alongside the discovery of California in 1545, the first Anglo immigrants to California, gold mining period, water irrigation and the current prosperity of the last period of Los Angeles’ history. Spectators admired the elaborate displays that highlighted “typical Spanish life made quite real by the present of genuine senoritas and the company of gallant caballeros on prancing steeds.”[9] Shuen argues that La Fiesta gleaned over the city’s violent interracial history, in the guise of celebration, to allow Anglo-Angeleno leaders to “whitewash” and forget the city’s unpleasant recent past and appropriate different cultures for economic boosterism. The organization of the parade directly meant to demonstrate progress over time with the end of the parade’s Anglo-Angeleno float, representing a modern Los Angeles. “La Fiesta both reinforce old perceptions and created new ones of non-white groups in Los Angeles…La Fiesta’s history parade reaffirmed Anglo-American hegemony in Los Angeles’ racial hierarchy.”[10] As a carnival-sized manifest destiny, the Chinese community still made every effort to gain agency and authority through their Anglo set cultural boundaries.
Despite the constraints and problematic portrayal of La Fiesta, Shuen’s research sets to expand the state of the field within Los Angeles’ history. Arguing that “the contribution of the Chinese community…helped solidify Los Angeles’ multicultural image and that their cultural production impacted tourism in Los Angeles at the end of the nineteenth century. Shuen explores two examples of Chinese agency in Los Angeles. The first example illustrates how outside Chinese communities, from San Francisco and Marysville, transported and paid for the dragon and horses utilized for La Fiesta. Magnifying the external community, the illustration of photos, clothes, and Chinese language used on the floats provides further etching of the Chinese community belonging in Los Angeles. Shuen illustrates through detailed photos taken during the parade; straw boater hats were paired with Chinese shoes. Chinese characters expressed their Confucian teachings and values in extreme filial piety. The photographs utilized for Shuen’s work on La Fiesta shows the ways in which the Chinese were different that Anglo-Americans, but had adapted to American customs.
Evoking oriental splendor using acrobats and the best materials for the floats, point to the Chinese had an impact on the social perceptions that deviate from the organizers’ desire to narrate the story of racial hierarchy and urban growth. The primary sources, like pictures or postcards[3], along with recollections of eastern tourist opinions printed in the newspaper, defied the prevailing anti-Chinese sentiment published in Los Angeles. Shuen argued that all of these photographs, evaluated collectively, evoke “their [Chinese] very long past and status as important…thus constructing their own narrative…the Chinese were strategically inserting their history into the story of Los Angeles.”[11] The photographs examined, highlighting both the parade participants and the parade goers, illustrate Los Angeles’ burgeoning population and provides the Chinese community authority within cultural and geographic boundaries set by Anglo-Americans. Moreover, support of other regional Chinese communities and their elaborate artistic display connects transnationalism to the Los Angeles Chinese community. While Shuen utilized Zesch’s book for understanding racial tensions in Los Angeles, this reading on La Fiesta de Los Angeles provides reconcilement from the “boundaries of power”[12] created by white hegemony over the Chinese Community.
NOTES:
[1] Black Tuesday is a reference utilized in Scott Zesch’s book, The Chinatown War. He uses newspaper media coverage on the Chinese Massacre and the trials that occurred after that using Black Tuesday to signify the night when anti-Chinese riot commenced.
[2] Anti-Coolie clubs and their effect on cultural boundaries are discussed in chapter 2 of Gregory Downs and Kate Masur’s edited book titled The World The Civil War Made.
[3] Drew Gilpin Faust book titled This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is an excellent source that illustrates how pictures can portray collective memory and embody new community memories of death after the Civil War in 1865.
SOURCES:
[1] Scott Zesch, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
[2] Rachel Grace Shuen, La Fiesta De Los Angeles: Race, Ethnicity, and History on Parade in Los Angeles, 1894-1903 (n.p., 2014).
[3] Ibid., 5.
[4] Ibid., 9.
[5] Ibid., 14.
[6] Ibid., 21.
[7] Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
[8] Shuen, ibid., 23.
[9] Ibid., 26.
[10] Ibid., 28-29.
[11] Ibid., 41-42.
[12] Camp, ibid., 5.