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AHR Review - February 2007, October 30, 2008
This review is from: The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940 (Hardcover)
Here is what the American Historical Review said about this book:
MATTHEW F. BOKOVOY, The San Diego World's Fairs and
Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press in cooperation with the San
Diego Historical Society, 2005. Pp, xx, 316. $29,95,
Memory and promotion are intrinsically tied to the fair
experience, be it the dusty fairgrounds of a western agricultural
community or the stately buildings of a
world's fair site. Dripping ice cream on scorching pavement,
the rush of crowds, and fantastic architeeture res-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2007
208 Reviews of Books
onant of nationalistic "progress" connect peopte to
places they visited as children or as adults. These memories,
Matthew F. Bokovoy argues, help to create regional--
and contrived--identities. Much has been
written about the role of memory and the construction
of what historians call "the modern Spanish heritage"
of Catifornia and the American Southwest. Bokovoy's
revisionist analysis finds that modern Spanish heritage
represented more than "a tradition of 'false consciousness'
" propagated by "Anglos to denigrate and erase
the contemporary presence of ethnic Mexicans and
American Indians" (p. xvii). While the composite portrait
of southern California envisioned and reinforced
by the San Diego expositions of 1915-1916 and 1935-
1936 was "insensitive" and "untrue" for Native Americans
and ethnic Mexicans, it was also a sympathetic
"set of political understandings" that celebrated cultural
pluratism and ultimately, if inadvertently, "contributed
to the realization of legal, civil rights" (p. xviii).
At the turn of the twentieth century, San Diego may
have been, in the words of D. C. Collier (director-general
of the Panama Exposition), the "gamest city in the
United States and probably the world" (p. 17). It was
also a city of 40,000 diverse residents and a place beset
with a violent colonial past and a host of racial, economic,
and ethnic troubles. Preparations for the 1915
Panama Exposition were hampered at various times by
International Workers of the World-sponsored labor
strife; border violence associated with the Mexican
Revolution; and the arrival of preemptive gambling institutions
and scores of prostitutes. Anglicized respectability,
San Diego's leaders believed, would not come
easy and would require federal funding. After they beat
out New Orleans for the Panama event, San Diego leaders
hired Boston city beautiful advocate John Nolen to
create a "fantasy land of Spanish colonial and missionstyle
architecture" (p. 50) and architect Bertram
Goodhue to create a singularly North American architecture
through the fusion of Indian and Spanish heritage.
Landscape architect Samuel Parsons was paid to
transform the formerly pueblo common lands of Balboa
Park from a rocky, scrubby landscape dotted with wildflowers
and cacti to a sea of "verdant foliage and ample
greensward" (p. 50).
The strength of Bokovoy's book lies in its exhaustive
research--conducted at the San Diego Historical Society,
Smithsonian Institution, Bancroft Library, and
Laboratory of Anthropology--and in its outline of the
evolution and meanings of the Panama Exposition and
its successor, the 1935 San Diego Fair. Fairgoers in
1915 entered grounds transformed by Spanish Renaissance
and mission-style architecture, enormous blooming
flowers, and plateaus graced with views of San Diego
Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The California Building
and its exhibits simultaneously represented the region's
fusion of cultures and the "progress" of humankind. If
visitors tired of Spanish architecture, they could venture
out onto the Painted Desert, a land of pseudopueblos
and Indian peoples engaged in sedentary, artistic
tasks. Anglo visitors could embrace the contrived
primitism of the Painted Desert--peopled with natives
from atl over the country enduring bad housing, degrading
comments, and uncomfortable "Indian" clothes--
"to assuage their anxieties about modernity" (p. 43).
If the 1915 fair solidified San Diego as the capital of
an heroic Spanish-Indian past, the 1935 California-Pacific
International Exposition positioned the city at the
center of the California dream of the future. Like other
national events during the 1930s, this San Diego fair
concerned itself with promotion of a brighter economic
future and sold southern California's unique combination
of weather, resources, and diversity (including a
modern nudist colony). The boulevard leading to Ford
Motor Company's massive circular art deco building
was weirdly reminiscent of Mayan cities. The layout of
the fair reflected architect Richard Requa's effort to
mix modernism with Meso-American elements. Fairgoers
could visit Modeltown, a pseudo-suburb that anticipated
what would become the tract housing developments
of ensuing decades. The fair's Roads of the
Pacific placed visitors in a new Ford and whisked them
along a progression of "great roads of antiquity," from
the Old Santa Fe Trail to the Inca Highway in South
America (p. 192).
The legacies of both of these expositions remain. Balboa
Park today bills itself as "the nation's largest urban
cultural park" (http://www.balboapark.org/). Bokovoy's
research shows that San Diego's fairs were as much reflections
of national culture as they were of local developments.
Bokovoy does little with gender at the
fairs, and his thesis meanders through the book's detailed
treatment of fair landscapes. Still, this trip to San
Diego's fairs should not be missed by cultural U.S. historians,
western historians, borderlands historians, or
fans of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (2003).
Like any good fair, it offers an enjoyable ride, along
with some cultural discomfort.
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