Author: queenlove35

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Boosting Boundaries of Power:

Revealing Future Los Angeles in a 19^th Century Pueblo Town

Los Angeles is the city of the future. Urban destiny in the making, people, American and Non-American place their fears and dreams into its budding metropolis. Los Angeles plays a central role in defining malleable cultural, geographical barriers. Los Angles, centered as a geographic nucleus, many commuters situate their geospatial location on how far away they sit from Los Angeles’ destination and destiny.  However, commodifying and assigning Los Angeles’ borders commenced before California’s 1850 entry into statehood. City selling itself on the commodity of promise, appealed to both Anglo-Americans and non-Anglo Americans, much like the entire Western region in the nineteenth century. Inherently, the cityscape and its space promote a mythicized culture and consistent class shift resulting in Los Angeles’ geographic reassignment. In the twentieth-century, the term gentrification[1] is utilized to describe class shift within a geographic region. Historians utilize this social science term to describe a distinct pattern of cultural movement over a period. Notably, gentrification is defined by two greater areas[2]:

1. A class shift in a given area in which wealthier residents and consumers replace poorer residents and consumers, or in which residents and consumers with more cultural or financial capital replace residents and consumers with less cultural or financial capital.
2. The restoration, rehabilitation, or adaptive reuse of existing buildings rather than large-scale slum clearance and redevelopment.

Despite historians’ understandings of who created Los Angeles boundaries and discussions held on the treatment of non-Anglo elites, the two intersections are rarely discussed in conversation with one another. Historians, often focus on broader themes of nineteenth-century Los Angeles. Frameworks like the ‘stockade state,’ heterogeneous political responses, tourism of spatial memory, who qualifies as ‘American,’  transnationalism, booster industrialization and reconstruction in the West are analyzed with mono-lensed mentality of ‘us versus them’ methodology. Methodological approaches in nineteenth-century spatial and cultural assignment contain these frameworks, but seldom speak of how non-Anglo authority and identity is reconstructed with the influencing booster and working class Anglo-Americans. Further, works on Los Angeles infrequently examine how reassignment of cultural and geographic containment affected the established population of non-Anglo communities. These frameworks and methodologies accurately establish occurring pre-gentrification movements in the late-nineteenth century Los Angeles. Also, these systems grossly neglect the perspectives, principles, and cultural relationships in Orange County history. Cultural assignment of geography and stories of navigating built rival geographies rarely find their way out of the Orange County’s agricultural and citrus fields. Applying nineteenth-century frameworks to founding Orange County cities’ history, like Santa Ana, provides an opportunity for significant revisions to the way we understand Anglo American and non-Anglo-American cultures co-existing south of Los Angeles. Moreover, examining these cultural frameworks provides a new diversified perspective in early Orange County History. This essay considers why did Los Angeles Anglo-Americans transform geographic borders and shift cultural boundaries of non-Anglo groups? Also, how did this assignment of cultural boundaries affect non-Anglo groups’ identity and authority within the California? Examining these intersections provides new insights into how racial and economic perspective influences memory of non-Anglo groups?

Los Angeles adapted from a small pueblo city, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula, in the late eighteenth-century to a burgeoning metropolis by the early twentieth-century. Scott Zesch describes Los Angeles as “undoubtedly the toughest town of the entire nation during the 1850s and 1860s.”[3] The Union’s ‘stockade state’ amplified Los Angeles’ persona. Post Civil War, the United States operated a collection of outposts throughout Central and Western regions. Gregory Downs and Kate Mansue argue, these posts, limited in reach, were, “sometimes overpowered, almost always beset by both competing power centers and individuals who sought to live beyond the read of most authority.”[4] This lack of federal control aided in Los Angeles’ long history of vigilante justice. Limited federal power allowed space for vigilante justice to thrive in Los Angeles. Lawless vigilante’s were “successful tradesmen who believed the legal system…had failed to bring order to the community in which they were investing their lives work.”[5] Zesch asserts this violence, often inflicted on non-Anglo-Angelenos, “although both Anglos and Latinos participated in these illegal executions, roughly three-quarters of the victims were Latinos, leading some historians to speculate that ethnicity and class were driving forces behind the vigilantes’ killings.”[6] He states, “the people of Los Angeles paid lots of attention to those immigrants from the Far East who were engaged in high-profile criminal activities.”[7]

Contrary to this argument, Scott Truett argues the violence of vigilante groups detract the rich borderland history. “The borderlands remain ensnared in their ‘wild west past’….thus as unstable as they are divided.”[8] Forgetting the violent past of Los Angeles imposed by its citizens controls the city’s history and geography. Truett continues, “such ad hoc practices destabilized state power.”[9] Methodologically, limited reconstruction in the West restricted the access of federal protection for non-Anglo Angelenos. Violent vigilantes did not desire imposed federal government fortification. Successful political leaders are breaching their order and progress, via geographies of containment, challenged the federal government’s claim to authority. Truett’s theory of shifting territories allowed mapping, “out new geographies of labor, discipline, and economic exchange.”[10] These changes of social geography gentrified early Los Angeles.

William Estrada argued, “when history and fantasy converge, both a profound political symbolism  and a clear expression of cultural hegemony emerge, particularly when we consider the dialectic relation between who is doing the “preserveing” and what is being “preserved.”[11] Hise focused on contested space and theoretically illustrated newly constructed geography becomes a place of political struggle. The industrialization of Los Angeles provided booster Anglo-Angelenos opportunity to generate wealth. City boosters, engaged in environmental cognition, created a complex Los Angeles urban environment by assigned social space, creating industry, and romanticizing mythical cultural of non-Anglo Angelenos. Navigating created ‘rival geographies,’ immigrant clusters of communities formed geographic space into place by creating enterprise through tourism, cross-ethnic communities, and established an agency within forced cultural boundaries.[12]

Boosters furthered their social and cultural discourse by relating race and ethnicity with land-use and value. “Industry, Political Alliances, and the Regulation of Urban Space in Los Angeles,”[13] by Greg Hise examined the Cudahy Packing Company. Arriving boosters created legislation, firms and crafted city alliances for industrial economic gain. Hise utilized association records, contracts, and legal proceedings to argue border-making processes through industrialization, created an immigrant removal strategy, thus defining the social geography of Los Angeles. The slaughterhouse located on Macy Street left the poor and ethnic minorities health concerns on city council deaf-ears. ‘You would not allow a slaughtering house in the west end among fashionable homes,’ minorities declared.[14] Hise asserts the 1904 Macy Street neighborhood petition, fighting new slaughterhouse encroachment boundaries, failed due to its geographic placement.  ‘East’ of the Los Angeles, thus, associated with common ground. Methodologically, Hise states “space, alliances and regulation are fundamental factors when analyzing why” of elite cultural assignment in Los Angeles.[15] Further, border-making processes defined Los Angeles’ social geography. These assigned ethnic groups formed a community in the topographical landscape. Theoretically, examining contested geographies and how Los Angeles boosters raise capital to intersect with specific industries “allow historians to articulate macro-scale processes such as capital flows and industrial location.”[16] The examination of nineteenth-century urban land development provides a new framework to examine twentieth-century joint public-private initiatives. Hise argues this framework as critical as enterprise “continues to be seen as private sector initiative.”[17]

Additionally, Greg Hise’s article, “Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles,”[18] he explained that Anglo-Angelenos, often Boosters, viewed both erected building structures and political legitimacy as their hegemony. The topography of Los Angeles served as a ‘punitive divide’[19] separating landscapes of leisure, production, labor, and privilege. Geographic directional boundaries like ‘North’ and ‘West’ and ‘East and ‘South,’ became associated with Angeleno-Angelo exceptionalism, and created social segregation and divided social relations. The larger framework of who is counted as American in the nineteenth-century, Hise’s methodology explores the functional separation of geography created social and racial divided Los Angeles’ past. “Functional segregation, zoning space in cities assigning these to discrete districts, is an equally powerful sign and structure for the modern city.”[20] He disagrees with the historical methodology of “social space (nearness and remoteness, us and them) being independent of the space of practice (territory, land use, locality).”[21] Field reinterpretation is required to understand the connections between social geography, cultural assignment, and geospatial assignment. Social segregation affects social relations, and they need consideration when placing value on Los Angeles’ future. Hise candidly states, “There are reasons why a zoning map registers so closely with a census map when one is overlaid on the other.”[22]

These border-making processes provided an opportunity to create ‘old world’ romantic Spanish and Chinese culture. The incorporation of these constructed spaces not only created boundaries of power but places of political struggle and reconciliation. Both William Estrada and Phoebe Kropp reconcile built environment through border making processes. William Estrada argues in, “Los Angeles’ Old Plaza and Olvera Streets: Imagined and Contested Space,”[23] Boosters saving the Avila Adobe space created political symbolism and Anglo-Angeleno hegemony preserving the preserved remembrance of winning in the Mexican War. The socially assigned space of Olvera Street provided a ‘renewed sense of identity’ where Mexican and Chinese could express their heritage through the monetization of culture. Methodologically, investigating the intersections of social, geographical assignment and business and political elite ideology provided new ways of exploring non-Anglo authority within assigned Los Angeles’ space. Estrada contends that assigned space of both Olvera Street and China City created by elite Los Angeles boosters’ continued their upward mobility via romanticized tourist consumption of traditional values. Los Angeles space turned into place created new political struggle and contested cultural memory.

Phoebe Kropp’s California Vieja[24] illustrated that Christine Sterling, the godmother of Olvera Street, utilized Booster Harry Chandler’s influence to raise money to save the Avila Adobe. However, occupying a significant urban space, established Anglo-Angeleno confidence in their regional and national image. Estrada propels hegemonic Anglo space further by examining both Olvera Street and China City. Although he agrees that space is assigned, within the space non-Anglo Angeleno agency is created through enterprise tourism. Both Mexican and Chinese cultures created agency heritage by capitalizing these old-world versions of culture within designated ‘heritage sites.’[25] On the contrary, Kropp argues “racial discourses were fundamental to the ways that Southern California Anglos defined local identity, made national claims, boosted economic progress and interpreted history.”[26] Focused on the same methods of exploring the interaction of ‘Anglo memory promoters’ and non-Anglo groups gave form and meaning to Southern California’s history. Theoretically, Kropp believes it is necessary to create a commodity-based memory to keep Los Angeles’ past in the present. Driving urban and cultural diversity through Los Angeles’ romantic history, “enabled Anglos somehow to comfortable maintain a stance that now appears to be a severe ideological fallacy.”[27] Creating this invented history, diverged from post-Civil War narratives. Pressing away from national identity forged through federal presence connects to Los Angeles’ focus on future, and not the past.

Scott Zesch illuminates the original outbreak of racial violence in Los Angeles in The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871[28]. 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 starts where Zesch’s evaluation of Los Angeles’ urban and social landscape ends.[29] 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.”[30] 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.

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 the 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.[31]

William Deverell in Whitewashed Adobe, the problem revolved around culture and cultural space. Examining the density of the Mexican population in ninetieth-century, threatened the creation of booster cultural space.[32] Agreeing with Hise and Truett examining neighboring border relationships to Mexico allows Los Angeles businessmen to distort geographic boundaries. “In thinking of Mexico, elite Anglos deliberately muddied the distinctions between what is “ours” and what is “theirs.” Anglos tried diligently to do the same to the Mexicans in their midst, to fix them in space and around a particular set of characteristics or traits tied to  social and ethnic categories.”[33] The maturation of Los Angeles through race and ethnicity relied solely on ‘specific responses to Mexican ethnicity and Mexican spaces. Deverell argues examining the excluders is “critical to the forging of a city true to a different Southern California future.” Analyzing the growth of Los Angeles examines the intersections of ethnic relations, ethnic contact, and conflict and ethnic representations. Looking at city-building whites specifically elites, he focuses on how space reassignment created social and racial tensions in Los Angeles.

These social and racial tensions are examined in On Gold Mountain. Lisa See chronicles her Chinese-American family lineage starting with her great-great grandfather’s journey from Canton to America.[34] See’s great-grandfather, Fong See, traveling from China to Sacramento spoke with his uncle about the opportunities for Gold Mountain financial success. His uncle dashed Fong See’s dream by explaining the ‘white demon’ does not desire more Chinese entering the country, proclaiming, “We are the ones who risk out lives and sometimes die to build the railroad that opened this land to them. Now they forget.”[35] His uncle asserted the fortune in California is for the ‘fan gway’ only. He continues this argument by explaining that the ‘white demon’ desired to work and wanted their jobs and for the Chinese to go away. Their conversation illustrates the change in Chinese immigrant’s life. When California experienced depression in the 1870s, “30 percent of the people of California lost their jobs, had contributed significantly to the antagonism between Caucasians and Chinese.”[36] With dropping gold production, and a tourism drop, Anglo-Americans felt entitled to the working-class positions that Chinese immigrants held. This entitlement leads to hostilities toward the Chinese culture and would give rise to the national ‘Chinese Question’ and many exclusionary laws for Chinese immigrants. In an 1886 California Congressional hearing Geo. D. Roberts argued that the Chinese labor class be a significant advantage within the workforce to provide upward mobility to booster Anglo-Americans.[37]

“Q. Do you believe that the tendency of the Chinese laboring classes of this country is detrimental to white labor?—A. possibly, to a certain class of white labor; but, to the general prosperity of the country, I think the wealth they product stimulates prosperity to such an extent that it give white men higher positions.”

See’s assessment of Fong See’s disappointment in working opportunities continued the social history of her Chinese immigrant family by providing an additional story that Fong See desired to become his boss as a western merchant. Scott Zesch agreed boundaries of power Chinese working-class labor jobs, was a probable tension before Los Angeles’ Black Tuesday.[38] Moreover, federal and state Chinese exclusionary laws created a legally binding boundary of power for Chinese immigrants. These tax regulations and immigration exclusion reforms created liminal space for current Chinese immigrants. See exemplifies the threat to ‘racial impurity’ as an inflammatory side-effect to Chinese exclusion. She argues “whenever the Chinese began making a profit; the Caucasians took it from them by enacting laws- laws not only acted as a constant, niggling persecution but denied this specific race the very things that brought most European immigrants to American shores.”[39]

By setting up boundaries of power, hegemonic Angelo-Americans contained cultures, like the Chinese community. Examining works like See as a primary source allows us to further the field by expanding sources taking a ‘bottom up’ approach. Utilizing oral histories, and ephemera sources provide additional avenues for more of the discourse of cultural boundaries in nineteenth-century America. Theoretically, oral histories recalled after the initial event provide a genuine challenge. Further, taking oral histories from an aged interviewee creates problems of exaggerated collective memory and facts. Booster-created borders, through the geographic assignment and the industrialization of Los Angeles, created a new transnational identity for non-Anglo Angelenos. See illustrated many boundaries of powers, created by Anglo-Americans, her family encountered. However, examining these sources many years after they occurred and analyzing her families history, creates difficult navigating. Examining this with other oral histories and period periodicals, On Gold Mountain provides an opportunity to explore an individual like Fong See as a founding entrepreneur that faced diversity. The challenges that See’s great-grandfather Fong See encountered establishing his lingerie garment factory provided opportunities to gain authority, transnational identity, and sole proprietorship amidst assigned geographies. Examining similar non-Anglo stories assist in validating See’s family claims. Transnational History of a Chinese Family examines how Chinese immigration history inhabits two spaces at once, creating a transitional identity. Inhabiting transitional spaces, both geographical and cultural, allowed the Chang’s family to establish their transnational identity. Liu argues that immigrating Chinese viewed the United States as an opportunity for upward mobility and not a short adventure. Aspiration of social advancement and creating new identities through immigrant social networks, her work explores “how transnational social and cultural networks created adaptive strategies use collective by Chinese immigrants to ensure their survival and social mobility in a hostile racial environment.”[40]

Transnationalism and Globalization shaped and confined Los Angeles nineteenth-century urban culture geography. Thematically, many reviewed sources share arguments that border-making processes have defined 19th century Los Angeles social geography. Immigrant clusters of communities formed geographic space into place, within the social boundaries created by Los Angeles Anglo-American boosters and working for classes. The future of Los Angeles lays within understanding its past.

In pursuit of both cultural geography and economic factors, the historical field has many new opportunities to observe Los Angeles in its previous form. There are many uncovered histories associated with Los Angeles’ wild west identity. The state of the field speaks of elite boosters industrializing and creating an economy out of a small pueblo town. Further, the field speaks of marginalizing the established non-Anglo groups. However, the assignment of culture and the interactions between both the excluders and the excluded are not quite explored.

 

 

Boosting Boundaries of Power Sources Cited

Primary Sources

Bee, Fred A, B F. A, and F. A B. 1971. The Other Side of the Chinese Question: Testimony of California’s Leading Citizens; Read and Judge. (Saratoga: R and E Research Associates, 1971 reprint of 1886).

Bell, Maj. Horace. Reminiscences of a Ranger; or, Early Times in Southern California. Los Angeles. Yarnell, Caystile, & Mathes, 1881.

David, Leon Thomas. “The Oral History of Leon Thomas David: This History of Los Angeles as Seen from the City Attorney’s Office”. California Legal History, (2011).

See, Lisa. On Gold Mountain: The One-hundred-year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. New York: Vintage Books, 2012.

 

Secondary Sources

Camp, Stephanie M. H. 2004. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Deverell, William. 2004. Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Downs, Gregory P., Mansur, Kate. 2015. The War the Civil War Made. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Estrada, William D. “Los Angeles’ Old Plaza and Olvera Street: Imagined and Contested Space.” Western Folklore. 58, no. 2: 107-129.

Hise, Gregory. “Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles.” American Quarterly. 56, no. 3:545-558, http://jstor.org  (accessed Oct. 25, 2016)..

Hise, Gregory. “Industry, Political Alliances, and the Regulation of Urban Space in Los Angeles.” Urban History. 36, no. 3 (2009), 473-497, http://jstor.org  (accessed Oct. 27, 2016).

Kropp, Phoebe. 2006. California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Liu, Haiming. 2005. The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse Migration. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Osman, Suleiman “Gentrification in the United States,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, May 2016, accessed December 1, 2016, http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-135.

Shuen, Rachel. 2014. La Fiesta De Los Angeles: Race, Ethnicity, and History on Parade in Los Angeles, 1894-1903. n.p. http://jstor.org  (accessed Nov 8, 2016)..

Truett, Samuel. 2006. Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Zesch, Scott. 2012. The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871. London; New York: Oxford University Press.

 

[1] Coined by Sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964, defined geographic reassignment of poor East London families. Similarly, the United States utilized the term gentrification around in the late 1970s describing a similar trend.

[2] Suleiman Osman, “Gentrification in the United States,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, May 2016, accessed December 1, 2016, http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-135.

[3] Scott Zesch, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[4] Gregory P. Downs and Kate Mansur. The War the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 6-7.

[5] Zesch., p. 30.

[6] Zesch., p.30.

[7] Zesch, 34.

[8] Samuel Truett. Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S- Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 5.

[9] Truett, 66.

[10] Truett, 22.

[11] William Estrada. “Los Angeles’ Old Plaza and Olvera Streets: Imagined and Contested Space.” Western Folklore 58, no. 3 (Winter, 1999), http://jstor.org  (accessed Oct. 20, 2016), 118.

[12] Stephanie M. H Camp. Closer to Freedom Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004).p. 7

[13] Greg Hise. “Industry, Political Alliances, and the Regulation of Urban Space in Los Angeles.” Urban History 36, no. 3 (2009), http://jstor.org  (accessed Oct. 27, 2016).

[14] Hise, 495.

[15] Hise, 495.

[16] Hise, 474.

[17] Hise, 474.

[18] Hise, Greg. “Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles.” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Sep., 2004), http://jstor.org  (accessed Oct. 25, 2016).

[19] Hise, 550.

[20] Hise, 549.

[21] Hise, 549.

[22] Hise, 549.

[23] Estrada,

[24] Kropp, Phoebe S. California Vieja: Culture and memory in a Modern American Place. Berkeley: University California Press, 2006.

[25] Estrada, 112.

[26] Kropp, 7.

[27] Kropp 7.

[28] Zesch.

[29] Rachel Grace Shuen, La Fiesta De Los Angeles: Race, Ethnicity, and History on Parade in Los Angeles, 1894-1903 (n.p., 2014).

[30] Shuen, 5.

[31] Shuen, 9.

[32] William Deverell. Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

[33] Deverell, 32-32.

[34] Lisa See. On Gold Mountain: The One-hundred Odyssey of My Chinese American Family. (Vintage Books: New York, 2012).

[35] See, 23.

[36] See, 43.

[37] Bee, Fred A, B F. A, and F. A B. The Other Side of the Chinese Question: Testimony of California’s Leading Citizens; Read and Judge (Saratoga: R and E Research Associates, 1971 reprint of 1886), 26.

[38] Zesch., p.67.

[39] See, 43.

[40] Haiming Liu. The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse Migration. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), p. 12.

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Warwick Anderson’s Colonical Pathologies American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (one of the coolest names ever besides Crockett) utilizes cultural and environmental lenses to examine how medical and racial intersect with imperialism and American boosterism and exceptionalism. Dividing the book into sections examining engagement of American military medicine, how Americans reshaped both public and private spheres, and reviewing case studies that further his stance. Utilizing this new history from the Pan-Pacific side, Anderson asserts that all medicine is colonial in its relation to the body. This ideology evolves over time into racialized epistemologies that change Filipino cultural discourse. ‘Medical Mobilization of civic potential ‘(p.4), combined with the bureaucratic boosters backing, creates this cultural change.

Diana Nguyen stated in her post, “What I found most intriguing was that Anderson never truly defines the concept of “biomedical citizenship” throughout his book but rather instead, her merely infer that compliance with medicalized colonial regimes would be interpreted as evidence for citizenship. “

I completely agree with this as I never actually could locate anything that nailed down what seemed like a key term and a critical point to the argument as Anderson states that the intention of the book is to “chart the colonial development and deferral of what might be called “biomedical citizenship,” (p.3). However, I do see the points that he laid out is defining what biomedical citizenship is within Americanization and its self-exceptionalism to desire to make non-American’s clean and fit for the new globalizing world. Characterizing both Filipino body and culture to show both progress and modernization creates a manufactured sense of place and self within the medical space. What he argues is an experience between both race and empire within the medical field. The result of this faux created citizenship through American medical exceptionalism is biomedical citizenship.

The other readings that came to my mind are Camp and her utilization of racialized agency within cultural boundaries set by Americans. Using the medical field as space, American’s cultural assertion on Filipino culture creates a myth of the culture as something less than American exceptional. The idea of how one’s body can not only be utilized to create mythicized agency and colonial boundaries of non-American cultural is apparent throughout the book. Another theme throughout the reading selections has been issuing authority over people’s body. How does one obtain it, keep and utilize tactical strategies to deploy faux agency? Moreover, with assigning authority, what history is left to be examined against the grain? I find this true with both this book and our covered histories like Commanche Empire, Fugitive Landscapes, A Misplaced Massacre, Chinatown War and Closer to Freedom.  Imperial order always has a cost and is often at the expense of the people who live in created marginalized boundaries (both geographical and cultural). The last chapters of the book were by far my favorite as they examined boosterism group The Rockefeller Foundation and created racialized agency by associating disease with Filipino culture.

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Bell, Maj. Horace. Reminiscences of a Ranger; or, Early Times in Southern California. Los Angeles: Yarnell, Caystile, & Mathes, 1881. https://archive.org/stream/reminiscencesofr00bellrich/reminiscencesofr00bellrich_djvu.txt

Bell’s first penned memoir discusses the Los Angeles Rangers establishment and becoming founder of Los Angeles’ earliest paper The Porcupine. Defending the Californios and the Chinese Community, and mentioned in a variety of my secondary and primary sources on eighteenth century life in California, his ‘colorful’ commentary on cultural life in Los Angeles provides a first-hand perspective of cultural conflict and the creation of cultural geographic boundaries. Note: This original item was located at the Huntington Library, however is not accessible without a written request for PhD research.

 

California. 1850. Reports on cases determined in the Supreme Court of the State of California. San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney.

This primary source document describes the legal case surrounding the damage incurred during the Chinese Massacre of 1871. Chinese merchants collectively sued the Mayor, City Council, and the City of Los Angeles for repair costs of destroyed goods. This primary source, in conjunction with the estimated costs, illustrates bias cultural segregation in the development of nineteenth-century Los Angeles. This is available by public access of the Orange Legal Law Library computers only, but located my remarks online through Google.

 

David, Leon Thomas. “The Oral History of Leon Thomas David: This History of Los Angeles as Seen from the City Attorney’s Office”. California Legal History, (2011). 277-319.

Judge David recalls his oral history and interactions on his experience and empirical research on Los Angeles in 1950. Becoming a pioneering legal historian, his service in the City Attorney’s office provides a direct perspective and specific aspects on Los Angeles’ changing cityscape. This modern oral history discusses key topics in my research; including the city attorney’s reaction to 1871 Chinese Massacre trails and cultural exclusion changed the Los Angeles cityscape. This was accessed through CSUF’s database.

 

See, Lisa. On Gold Mountain: The One-hundred-year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. New York: Vintage Books, 2012.

Beginning with her great-great grandfather, Lisa See examines her heritage from Canton to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Organized, as Drew Faust’s This Republic of Suffering¸ she utilizes cognitive mapping of Los Angeles, her two-family linage, census records, and oral histories to track their trek to Gold Mountain in California. Using her first hand experiences as a ‘red-haired girl with a Chinese heart’, pointing to her privileged merchant family history, she argues late nineteenth-century non-Anglo Angelenos melted into a blended formation of American-Chinese This book assists discusses first hand-accounts of her grandfather’s prostitute undergarment factory coming under scrutiny for hiring Chinese workers during 1882 Exclusion Act. Also ties to the transnational and cultural authority themes of my topic. This was accessed through CSUF’s database.

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

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.

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Los Angeles adapted from a small pueblo city, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciúncula, in the late 18^th century to a burgeoning metropolis by the early 1900s. Immigrant clusters of communities formed geographic space into place, within the social boundaries Anglo-Americans, created. My historiography focuses on how transnationalism and globalization shaped and confined urban culture geographies in the 19th century, Los Angeles. Thematically, my sources share arguments that border-making processes have defined 19th century Los Angeles social geography.

Utilizing the legal history perspective of The History of Los Angeles: As Seen from the City Attorney’s Office provides consistent issues that concern all of my sources: housing, land, water, transportation, immigration, and integration of the newcomer. Erika Lee’s book At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Action 1882-1943, asserts that the United States ceased being a nation of welcoming immigration and integration without restrictive borders. Its policy of becoming a ‘gate-keeping’ nation with an active federal control set the standards of race and class. This new policy shift affected immigrant patterns, communities, and racial identities and led to America’s exclusionary culture. Los Angeles culture becomes affected by 18th-century European colonization ideologies and its 19th-century expansion and area migration of immigrants. The culture mixture and clashes of perceived identity and community are formed by American’s industrialization and desire for globalizing dominance.

In Williams Estrada’s article Los Angeles’ Old Plaza and Olvera Street: Imagined and Contested Spaces and Phoebe S. Kropp’s book California Vieja reconcile Los Angeles’s cultural Spanish past through investment of cultural memory through the creation of built environment. In an ambitious attempt to create Southern California a geographical space of work, live and play, and desire to honor local history, they focus on the romanticized memory of Olvera Street. Anglos’ primary vision to desire yet disdain non-Anglo culture is a consistent strategy found in the 19th century and 20th century. The incorporation of constructed places becomes a place of political struggle and reconciliation. Historical areas like China City, now Chinatown, and Senoratown, now Olvera Street are created out of space for Anglo-American’s consumption of traditional culture. On the other side, it forces the excluded to create personal ecologies within these jarred landscapes in Los Angeles. Forming ethnic enclaves into the physical landscape is a theme throughout all of the works when building the industry in the Los Angeles area. The public practices of social distinction are organizing culture through Anglo-American cultures and traditions a reader can gain a sense of how Los Angeles creates these boundaries.

 

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

 

In Drew Faust’s book, she assigns authority to all aspects of death during and after the Civil War. She points out that war about union, citizenship, freedom and human dignity required a transformation of the federal government.  Arguing that it takes equally as much ‘work,’ effort and impact, to deal with death as it does to create and fighting wars. She continues to illustrate that Americans had to redefine their roles in self-identity because of the massive number of deaths caused by their own hands. It is interesting to point, all of the books read this thus far, talk about American’s fighting other cultures and the boundaries but never speak really about the aftermath of fighting and the reconcilation of death.

 

Agreeing aly692 that Faust redefines the American Civil War with this study of death. It is less focused on the actual military history of it and paints the faces and lives that were involved through the Civil War. The soldiers and supports become more than just a part of the battle. They are given a humanity normally not covered in Civil War books and poor sappy movies, that don’t quite get the picture (I think one of the modern movies getting assigning authority is Glory, and I cannot get through that movie without bawling my eyes out).

The least talked about chapter so far in the postings is chapter 6 Believing and Doubting. Faust takes her argument and reconciling. Death required meaning, and to cope with new identities. Before I proceed, these new ‘widow’ identities given to wives, children and the childless, locating ways to cope with their new term ‘widow’ strongly reminded me of Stephanie Camp’s assigned identities to bondswomen and bondsmen. She describes in her book that they actively sought out ways to not only resist, but would abscond with dresses, materials and sometimes, themselves, to cope with their identify as a slave. Secretly crafting and making food for late-night bondspeople parties, were equivalent to widow’s identifying with spiritualism. Chapter 6 discusses the sudden rise again in spiritualism after the Civil War. After the first wave of spiritualism, it was its ideologies that were directly connected to dealing with their new identity. Traditional religious arguments did not allow people to reconcile the loss of their loved one. The idea that rejecting something a popular like Christianity, and embracing spiritualism are very powerful. People believing in heaven, even more, coming from a place of a reunion was a change in American’s assignment to death. Living just beyond the veil, allowed widows to believe that this plight and assignment is life, was only a temporary way of being. Spiritualism and the idea of consoling a widow by telling them that their loved one died on the principles of ars moriendi, the good death, provided ways for people to reconcile post-Civil War death. Faust also connects the North and South, like Beckert/Rockman, by comparing death to industrialization. “northerners and southern lie mingled together, “fame or country least their care.”” (page 202). Both the idea of industrialization/to raw cotton to death/to speechlessness undoubtedly tied the states together.

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic presents a collection of cultural essays. The goal of each piece recognizes the shifting differences from old political history, from the top down, towards new social history, from the bottom up. While this was sorely attempted by Sim in A Union Forever, this collection provides the background context of its founding settings to explore foundation nation ideals through the cultural history historical lens. While not a main point in the introduction to the collection, reading them, I located a common theme throughout some of the ideas: Grassroot ideologies. While I would consider this a modern term in explaining how the marginalized communities to grant authority, and contributed to the community narrative. Beyond take this authority to illustrate how the community ‘outsiders’ were main players America’s framework, creating the first party system (chapter 4 with women strategically building male political alliances), and then a bifurcated party system (chapter 13 and the anti-renters providing the ideologies of the Republican platform). Walsticher, Newman, Pasely and Huston all point to some grassroots movement shaping the cultural identity if America’s framework. Throughout the collection of essays, I am often reminded of Camp’s work (notably in the Dress and Mobilization, Women in Party Conflict chapters) BeckertRockman’s book (Dress and Mobilization), Gould’s law of nations (Dress and Mobilization, Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere ‘tactic consent’ chapters) in this collection of essays. While Gould focuses on law and how this formed our transatlantic foreign relations, I could not help but connect his argument in a ‘cultural’ sense when reading how our new American dress shaped how foreign countries viewed us as a new nation.

Beyond classifys the cultural essays into the following sections:

• Section I Democracy and Other Practices; Examines cultural politics/studies to understand how politics how partisan strategies shape founding American politics (Page 10).
• Section II Gender, Race, and other Identities; Studying the politics of identity is a legacy of the early republic (page 13).
• Section III Norms and Forms; Rethinking how political language within the Revolutionary era, constitution/law formations are important in shaping the nation (page 15).
• Section IV Interests, Spaces, and Other Structures; Viewing the cultural-historical ‘other’ and how these groups contribute to events, institutions, thus shaping the nation’s identity (page 16). The writers agree the other groups are the less successful than other working frame workers.

Drawing on the same ideas of David S. and andrewjarralkelly, I agree that the reader needs to understand what the essay author is trying to challenge. This makes some of the essay’s great, but not very assertive on what top-down perspective problem it is trying persuade the reader to rethink. The introduction of the book makes it very clear that these essays will challenge traditional ‘founding’ epistemologies (Pg 18). However, while all of the essays do not come out and argue what area they are challenging, I often found myself spending longer times in the footnotes of the articles, trying to grasp an understanding of why the essay was written. The variety of sources utilized in each essay provided a starting point and new key terms to source search for my annotated bibliography.

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

My paper titled Colonial Construction of “Other”: Cultural Displacement in 19^th Century America, explores the historiography scholarship of marginalized culture boundaries within urban spatial settings. The 19^th century developed collective agents desiring to preserve the founding American spirit. These collective agents, largely women-ran organizations, sought new opportunities outside of the domestic sphere. Excavating new white-collar working class needs, women created Anglo-American cultural value centered in renovating real and personal property. Renovating rooming homes into single apartment upstarts, provides professional opportunities in real estate speculation, but, in turn, displaced impoverished industrial families, often first generation immigrants and established African-American communities.

I would like to review if upward mobility provided to women, through preservation, justify renovating established minority spatial environments. Specifically, why renovating established ethnic working class neighborhoods provided upward mobility to working-class women? How does spatially examining colonial construction of ‘other’ through romanticized views of the past exemplify perception of racial identity? Does the creation of the middle class create and jar cultural boundaries, as white-collar working class furthers economic opportunities? Does the Anglo-American group’s desire to create new spatial boundaries, based on regional and racial identity, embody myth building collective memories? How does the foundation of preconceived ‘other’ identities shape communal civic relationship between Anglo-American groups and diverse ethnic communities? Examining Chinese ethnic communities in San Francisco,  African American Communities, like Cabbage Row and the Jewish community of Brownsville will provide spatial boundaries for this research. Does the cultural displacement of ethnic neighborhoods effect the minority communities upward mobility in obtaining the American Dream?

Currently reviewing 19th century redeveloped communities has lead me to uncover a few 19th century communities. I would like to further investigate potential primary sources by locating secondary sources on the Renovation Movement. Researching secondary sources like Roberta Brandes Grantz, Robert Young, and Ann Laura Stoler will assist in the forward projection of securing primary sources. Creating of a key-term list has proven essential in uncovering new insights on seeding gentrification in the 19th century. Terms like ‘white painting’ and disphoric identity along with colonial mentality are assisting in locating secondary and primary scholarly work. Looking at the idea of ‘Chinatown’ in Los Angeles, San Francisco, displacing true cultural, historical narratives in the 19th century will also aid in this research. My goal is uncover how gentrification is more than just the spatial removal of living environment and resources. Further, identifying how seeding gentrification in early 19th century grounds the idea elitist ethnic control of how define cultural importance and extracting acceptable ethic culture at an arm-length reach.

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Key Terms: 

Quotidian plantation relations (p.3), Boundaries of Power (p.5), Geographies of Containment (p.6), Rival Geography, Third Bodies (p.10), Principles of Restraint, (p.13), Slave Patrols (p.25), Absentees, (p.35),  Enslaved Healers (p.46), Collective Action (p.49)

Key Quotes: 

“Space mattered; places, boundaries, and movement were central to how slavery was organized and to how it was resisted,” (p.6).

“No moment in the life of the world is ever static, but if words such as “revolution” and “transformation” mean anything, they imply that change is faster and more profound in certain times than in others.” (p.9).

“Revolutionary moments may make spectacular breaks with the past, but they also are formed by them, spilling over from the old constraints and making the most of the new opportunities to do visibly what formally had been cloaked,” (p.10).

“Duty, affection, and conceptions of black womanhood tightened and complicated women’s attachments to the South,” (p.37).

“Many people in enslaved communities recognized absenteeism… as social protest in which many bonds people participated collectively for political and personal reasons,” (p.51).

 

 

higbeejonathan identifies Camp’s key slave resistance argument, I can agree him that Camp’s reinvents the idea of how resistance is illustrated by pointing to the obvious historical events of Nat’s Rebellion and the Underground Railroad (brillant). Camp appeals to interdisciplinary fields with statistics, legal and economic facts to create historical foundations and credibility. Refreshing the way to introduce data-driven fields into the cultural, environmental history fields. Utilizing slave hymns, diaries, journals, newspapers and statistical data she furthers her argument by effortless combining these elements to explain harder to digest epistemologies transitions of patriarchy to paternalism in the plantation south.

She has clearly done her homework of her fellow field scholars by emphasizing how technologies for punishment and work along with left-handed resistance, from Baptist, becomes useful asserting planter geographic containments for bonds people. Explaining how planters often methodologically planned their estates, like careful gardeners tending to God’s land, while utilizing paternalistic values of working the grounds with the bare hands of others (page 5). Reminding me of Doug Sackman’s Orange Empire. He asserts that citrus tycoons of the West dominated their lands by honoring the founding fathers who toiled soil to grow better opportunities. When opportunities required managed hands, they acted in a paternalistic manner to feel they were directly contributing directly to the land in a master/worker relationship (Often as God would mold his children). Her digestible version of Gould’s legal laws on geographic containments illustrates that legal history can be incorporated (in not such a dry way, sorry Gould).

Further, I view early developments of commerce and capitalism ideologies from the Beckert/Rockman book, drawing from ideas that presented in the ‘age of improvement’ argument (p.20). Industrialism influences plantation ideology juxtaposed Beckert/Rockman’s argument and slavery is the nucleus to all economy traded markets within this time frame. This argument is very thought-provoking as an idea of inverted influence as we often see how the cotton industry changed and propelled capitalism in 19^th century America. The cherry on top of Camp’s argument is she points to “familiar framework, the young colony showed its Caribbean roots,” (p15), by commodifying people, but doing ‘one-up’ by adding temporal and spatial contours and boundaries for bondspeople’s lives and selling it as paternalism when the slave trade exploded from “700,000 in 1790 to almost 1.2 million just twenty years later,” (p.18). I also find it incredible work to illustrate how women were often truants as it was utilized as their getaway due to their mental, emotional and physical desires to support their fellow bondsmen. Further, I find it very smart to overcome this challenge of absenteeism, paternalist planter’s utilized bondsmen to control and assert dominate power of fleeing bondswomen in this gender-driven society and ideology of ‘black womanhood’ in its infancy stages(37).

This idea leaves me to my one question connecting Camp’s Argument of spatial and geographic influences to Gould’s argument of ‘borrowing’ from British international affairs to create our American government. If both Camp and Gould argue that our global neighbors were great influences on our American government and our capitalistic economy, would a larger geographic space between the Caribbean and Southern states affect planter slavery epistemologies? We can all agree that British outlawed slavery before the United States did, but was this influenced partially by their geographic gap between the slave commodity of the Caribbean?

It is truly awe-inspiring a little book could have such powerful influence and forever effect the feminist historical studies. Drew Faust, the author of This Republic of Suffering, was just as inspired and it is truly tragic that someone this brilliant was taken from our field too soon.

.

 

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Key Quote: “If a new consensus is emerging, one that instead treats slavery as the interstate high system of the American past, its origins can be traced to several distinctive conversations in the scholarship, as well as to a swell of public interest and social activism.” (6)

Key Terms: “Slaveholding Republic”(1)

In the new perspective in American’s slaveholding past, Slavery’s Capitalism, Sven Beckert, and Seth Rockman pull together an essay collective based on a  2011 conference entitled as the book (sponsored by Brown and Harvard Universities). They explore how the slavery labor regime, to innovative technologies like the whip, places the United States with a globalizing economy based on slavery. Each essay explores different aspects of slavery, like how the whip increases cotton productivity and how the gin was innovative it not solve the labor that goes into growing and seeding cotton.  Other essays cover, planter bookkeeping, valuations of human capacity, to local credit lending keeping the economy going.  The ultimate goal is to allow this collection to envision not just slavery an economy but widening this framework with new scholarship that creates an authentic capitalist market economy.

The essays all have similar formats to keep the book’s message cohesive, starting out with a primary account of a particular role of the slave/slaveholding narrative (Charles Ball, Eli J. Capell, Helena and her two daughters, Mathew Carey to English settlers).  The collection of essays embodies slavery as a national economy dependency for the United States. I appreciate the time spent on reflecting not just on the slaveholding planters, but the economy and forward effects it had on industrialization. In Gould’s book last week, we agreed that American essentially copied British Imperialist powers and utilized treaties that provide us global recognition through this “pushing” for recognition. Dshanebeck points out this idea of both Gould and Becket/Rockman book that American at this stage is trying to prove something globally, at any cost. This push that Beckert and Rockman essay book asserts are we quickly turn our emerging society into a global dominating force through various aspects of slaveholding. Moreover, they come right now and admit that new scholarship points to the North’s industrialization success that utilized all of the raw cotton to produce textiles, therefore benefiting directly from slave hands as well.

Now here are my only criticisms of the book. First, Beckert claims his is cutting edge scholarship, however, fails ever to mention his article he produced in the December 2004 American Historical Review titled Emanicpation/Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War.  In this article, he asserts the southern cotton industry climbed to global capitalist heights, making it cheaper to sell, export and ship over the Atlantic and were still beating the costs to create textiles with British cotton. He already spins this as a capitalist market in this article. My other disappointment with this read, is they mention many scholars that have spoken about cotton economics. However, he fails to mention Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul. This book Walter utilizes Narratives by former slaves, docket records of disputed slave sales, notarized acts of sale, letter written by slaveholder and newspaper editorials to reinforce southern paternalism and create a cotton economy. Johnson argues the chattel principle that is the “abstract value that underwrote the southern economy could only be made material in himan shpae-frails, senitent and resistant. And thus the contraditiocn was daily played out in a contest over meaning (Johnson, 29). Also, Johnson utilizes the same Charles Ball and gives him agency to his slave-life. In the first chapter of the Beckert book, they paint Charles Ball as a man that quickly figures out that southern slavery is how quickly you can pick and how much you can pass through your hands in fear of the whip technology. Johnson exemplifies Ball illustrated the Acts of Sale (Chapter 6 Johnson) on the idea of extensive accommodation of human labor. As two buyers examine Ball, he overhears that a purchaser has specific needs for a slave to be phuscally stonr and to be good in the field. he utilizes these coversations from the slave pen to share his slae to a potiential buyer that would best suite his ideal master. Ansering to potenial slae holders in the affirmative assithim him to extection holder information while particpating int he patriarch replationships between hold and the slave withing the slave pen.