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Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535–1846 ed. by Rose Marie Beebe, Robert M. Senkewicz

2003; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.2003.0020

1948-7142

Anne E. Goldman,

American Environmental and Regional History

B o o k r e v ie w s 501 viable and even life-enhancing South Central that has gone unnoticed beneath the media crossfire (142). In the last words of his book, Fine describes Los Angeles as “the place that forces one to look back to sources and origins” (257). This counterintuitive claim seems deeply right. California has always proven hospitable to overt acts of historical recovery, from the encyclopedic efforts of Hubert Howe Bancroft to the ongoing masterwork by Kevin Starr. It has long supported the nation’s most outstanding public university, as well as a tradition of poetry renaissances, bookselling and -collecting, research libraries, schools of plein air painting, and various seacoasts and deserts of bohemia. Along with this vital life of the mind has coexisted, of course, the merchandising of the various forms of illusion for which the state is less justly famous. But in the works of Los Angeles writers, produced smack in the middle of the “nowhere city” where the will to forget has been touted as the highest form of popular art, and which finds its fullest expression at Disneyland, we see represented again and again the fundamental logic of human experience: the repressed will return. Fine amasses his examples and lets the reader draw most of the interesting conclusions. He has by necessity written a survey; Imagining Los Angeles consists of plot summaries rather than strong or original readings. As I finished the book, I began to wonder whether, in its next phase of evolution, the writing about this place might find a more affirmative voice. The mass of most men, even in Los Angeles, do not after all live lives of quiet desperation. People everywhere believe in the value and reality of their lives. This is why Fine’s choosing to end with Carolyn See, and her novels of singing through the apocalypse, sounds such a pleasing note. See makes no apology for choosing to live in Los Angeles, nor for loving it there. Surely this is the future of the city in fiction, the strong unillusioned but fundamentally adaptive accounts of how the days unfold, merely in living where and as we live. Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846. Ed. Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz. Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2001. 544 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Anne E. Goldman Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California Fast on the heels of “Rancho Days,” Marin Elementary School’s one-day stumble down Mexican California’s memory lane (tin-omament making, tortilla eating, and Macarena dancing), my daughter Zoe and I found ourselves on a train headed for Sacramento’s Old Town. If the rancho celebration found us in unin­ tentionally campy versions of Ramona-pageant period clothes, the pilgrimage to the state capital rehearsed an equally calcified version of California history. The lesson here was lifted wholesale out of what appeared to be a nineteenth-century Wells Fargo-sponsored primer: riderless pony expresses rushed by and glittering golden spikes hovered fantastically overhead like the flying keys in a Harry Potter 5 0 2 WAL 3 7 . 4 W IN T E R 2 0 0 3 novel, but the only human faces to swim out of this historical miasma were haloed portraits of the Big Four (Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins), John Sutter, and Samuel Brannan. Fortunately, Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846 offers a corrective to prestatehood California history. Editors Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz signal the anthology’s different angle of vision from its outset. While the relatively brief period of American statehood has garnered sustained critical attention, their anthology explores the “long his­ tory of European presence in this region before the gold rush,” not from the eyes of strangers but from “the point of view of its residents” (xvii). Like David J. Weber’s pioneering anthologies of the Spanish and Mexican Southwest to which they are clearly indebted— two of his volumes are referenced in the book’s “Suggestions for Further Reading”— Lands of Promise and Despair gives us California from the perspectives of its native inhabitants, not...