Remembering California
1999; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1999.0093
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoC a l i f o r n i a D r e a m i n g 1 5 5 works include Other Destinies, Mixedblood Messages, and the novels The Sharpest Sight, Bone Game, and Wolfsong. R e m e m b e r i n g C a l i f o r n i a A n n e E . G o l d m a n In spite of the unimaginable crimes that occurred, little punishment followed. The City of Los Angeles fell into a state of historical amnesia. —Alejandro Morales, The Brick People (1988) In pointed contrast to florid myths of “Arcadian” California (“Pacific Arcadia,” in fact, is the organizing principle of paintings currently on show at Stanford University’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts), or the chirpy optimism of turn-of-the-century real estate boosters, The Brick People charts California’s growth through the lives of the Mexicanos who work as bricklayers and literally lay the state’s foundations. A far cry from the Ramona pageant, Morales’s Southland is framed from the start by raced tensions, imperial aggran dizement (the Rough Riders on San Juan Hill, the collusion of the Porfiriato with American capital), and too rapid an industrialization that blights the living conditions of the people who make it possible in the first place. Historical amnesia as the keyword of the state? I try resuscitating images from the past, but focusing on what materializes from the depths of historical memory is like looking for answers from the black eight ball we played with as children: the same conventional pictures swim into vision over and over. Instead of substantive answers to my questions, a standard set of images surfaces like the plastic ball’s ready made oracles: crumbling missions glazed by the setting sun, pony express riders driving their horses into white-foamed exhaustion, rail road spikes waiting to be struck into track ties, prospecting pans and picks spangled with gold. This collective, richly misguided fantasy life makes remembering the past, and looking critically at its links with the present, difficult. As Gerald and Janice Haslam note, Los Angeles and San Francisco occupy only a fraction of the state’s geography, but they monopolize its image in the media. As Texas is to the South, so California is to the West, except that for every rerun of Dallas, there are probably 100 episodes of LA Doctors; Baywatch; Melrose Place; and Beverly Hills, 90210. To recycle some discarded phrases from the 1 5 6 W A L 3 4 ( 2 ) S u m m e r 1 9 9 9 dumping grounds of literary theory, the Golden State is “always already” “overdetermined.” The Haslams’ essay, for all the care with which it dismantles the puffed-up images of California as so many overblown Rose Bowl floats, provides a case in point. The authors close by invoking “this western edge of the West— with its seething com bination of the traditional (abundant rodeos) and the nontraditional (intimate links to Asia and Latin America).” However, to identify rodeos as closer to “home,” I would ar gue, is to mistake Turnerian visions of “the frontier” with a land mass that has “tradi tionally” had as many “links” with both Asia and Latin America as it has with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. 1will return in a moment to Turner, but let me point out the obvious here: the (literary) ground continuously shifts under our feet. To reconsider the boun daries of the state, regardless of which parameters we use (geographical? legal? José Montoya and the Royal Chicano Air Force. CHJCANO PARK FREE WAY PYLON. 1975. Acrylic on concrete. 30' x 35'. Courtesy the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), Venice, Calif. • In 1968, Cal State Sacramento art professors José Montoya and Esteban Villa established the Royal Chicano Airforce (RCAF)—made up of “pilots,” “co-pilots,” and “impudent young pilots” who fly “adobe airplanes” for “Aztlân Airlines”—to promote community activism by uniting political action and artistic expres sion. In the mid-1970s the RCAF, with many other Chicano art collectives, painted murals on freeway pylons to turn a junkyard area in the middle...
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