Entry tags:
Part the First: In Which I Discover What Is Already Found.
I'm going to break this into two parts, because it's long and because it's late
For a while now, I've been trying to read Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon by Eduardo Obregón Pagán. I've become a slow reader, and much of my leisure time is dedicated either to puzzles or television. I've returned it to the library twice and gone back for more. I will probably continue to do so. Today, on my shiny, new, one-hour lunch break, I walked to the LA Central Library and pulled it off the shelf again.
Right now, I'm reading about the lead-up to the "Zoot Suit Riot." In the forties, a Naval Reserve Armory was erected in the middle of a poor, predominantly Mexican-American community in Chavez Ravine. It was used as a training center during the war, which brought a huge influx of men with privilege into that community. Pagán opens the chapter by giving us a sense of the "social geography" of the area before the Armory. For example:
In describing how things changed after the armory was built and the training center was established, Pagán talks about conflicting geographies, and the quote really stuck with me.
Which, obviously, made me think of MammothFail.
If you're not familiar with MammothFail, or RaceFail continued, or RaceFail 2.0, or RaceFail Section 13(c), the short version is this: Patricia C. Wrede wrote a book called Thirteenth Child. Jo Walton wrote a review of the book, including a very particular line which concisely summarizes the world-building assumption of the book:
A more detailed recount is being compiled by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
naraht here. With my new job, I haven't kept up with the minutiae of this one (I've barely had time to check my standard journals.) That's important to remember—I don't know everything that's been said, and I don't know how much of what I'm saying has been said before.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ojouchan and I had almost identical reactions to Walton's precis: "But that's what happened!" That is, if you were to ask any number of White people (very likely including Columbus himself) throughout totally non-alternative history whether America was "discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical," they would say yes, or close enough. So it's not really an "alternative" history, then.
Many other brilliant people have had different and similar takes on the problems presented by such a story, looking at the role of fiction within history, the relationship between history and narrative, the role of both in maintaining oppression, and the context of eliminationism in which Wrede's built world is the wet dream of racist mass-murderers.
The thing is, what's in contention here is not only history, it's geography. And it's a socio-geographical conflict that's similar to the one which, today, I saw described by Pagán. Here's how he describes the decision to use "blighted" areas like Chavez Ravine:
The pioneer story is critical to supporting this social geography. Little House on the Prairie is cited as a major influence on Thirteenth Child, but Wilder's influential "historical" (that is "non-alternative-historical") young adult novels also presupposes an "empty" land that, in actuality, was already filled with a people with their own pre-existing geography:
In comparing Pagán's thoughts of geography as seen by the privileged to the history of geography in North America (and in many other places), I started thinking about three aspect:.
And in thinking about these concepts, it's hard to limit that thought just to space. I start thinking about the way this kind of geography maps onto ideas and culture and discourse. I think about cultural appropriation, in which the privileged learn about something only through the distorted tales of other privileged, decide what it means based on faulty information, and take for themselves whatever they wish from wherever they wish. I think about Led Zeppelin "forgetting" to credit its sources.
And I'm backing into what I was really thinking about when I read that chapter. Reading about civilian Mexican-American youths contesting white military youth's privileging a "public" reading of their "private" spaces, I was thinking about the way that similar contests have played out, and are playing out, in the virtual spaces of ideas, discourse, journals, blogs, conventions, and fandom in the dialogue of RaceFail, and now MammothFail.
But I'm going to have to try to bring out my thoughts tomorrow night (or hopefully by Friday).
For a while now, I've been trying to read Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon by Eduardo Obregón Pagán. I've become a slow reader, and much of my leisure time is dedicated either to puzzles or television. I've returned it to the library twice and gone back for more. I will probably continue to do so. Today, on my shiny, new, one-hour lunch break, I walked to the LA Central Library and pulled it off the shelf again.
Right now, I'm reading about the lead-up to the "Zoot Suit Riot." In the forties, a Naval Reserve Armory was erected in the middle of a poor, predominantly Mexican-American community in Chavez Ravine. It was used as a training center during the war, which brought a huge influx of men with privilege into that community. Pagán opens the chapter by giving us a sense of the "social geography" of the area before the Armory. For example:
Segregation cut a deep swath through Los Angeles, disfiguring how residents interacted with one another and dividing areas of town, employment, recreational sites, cultural production, and even material consumption along racialized lines. Conversely, . . . local clubs, cafes, restaurants, and movie houses owned and operated by Mexican Americans or African Americans became important loci of communal interaction, where social ties could be reaffirmed and renewed in private by peoples otherwise disenfranchised from "public" Los Angeles.The people of these communities became deeply invested in these "private" geographies as a matter of necessity. So much was closed off for various reasons that what remained was vitally important.
In describing how things changed after the armory was built and the training center was established, Pagán talks about conflicting geographies, and the quote really stuck with me.
"Different societies," wrote Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, "practise different kinds of geography," and the conflicts between local youths and military men grew, in part, out of competing fictional geographies of Los Angeles. In expanding public space, the city of Los Angeles imposed its own vision of geography upon the land in erasing the past and erecting a "modern" city over the "condemned" Mexican American neighborhoods that once stood there. White naval officers stationed in the Chavez Ravine and the sailors who trained there "saw" the streets as public venues and acted upon assumptions that they were entitled to a free and open access to all of Los Angeles by virtue of their citizenship, race, class, gender, and military service. However, the local youth who patronized these same clubs, cafes, and movie theaters "saw" that same space very differently. Their places of socialization had yet to become "public" regardless of the changes around them, and they actively resisted the unwelcomed presence of outsiders, particularly those who tried to exercise assumed privileges of whiteness.The youths of these and other areas of Los Angeles refused to cede their social geography to the "privileged" geography of the interlopers, and the methods of resistance became a sequence of escalating events leading up to what became known as the Zoot Suit Riot.
Which, obviously, made me think of MammothFail.
If you're not familiar with MammothFail, or RaceFail continued, or RaceFail 2.0, or RaceFail Section 13(c), the short version is this: Patricia C. Wrede wrote a book called Thirteenth Child. Jo Walton wrote a review of the book, including a very particular line which concisely summarizes the world-building assumption of the book:
This is an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America ("Columbia") was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.Several people pointed out that the racial issues raised by such a story were problematic. Several other people objected that no such issues were raised.
A more detailed recount is being compiled by
naraht here. With my new job, I haven't kept up with the minutiae of this one (I've barely had time to check my standard journals.) That's important to remember—I don't know everything that's been said, and I don't know how much of what I'm saying has been said before.ojouchan and I had almost identical reactions to Walton's precis: "But that's what happened!" That is, if you were to ask any number of White people (very likely including Columbus himself) throughout totally non-alternative history whether America was "discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical," they would say yes, or close enough. So it's not really an "alternative" history, then.Many other brilliant people have had different and similar takes on the problems presented by such a story, looking at the role of fiction within history, the relationship between history and narrative, the role of both in maintaining oppression, and the context of eliminationism in which Wrede's built world is the wet dream of racist mass-murderers.
The thing is, what's in contention here is not only history, it's geography. And it's a socio-geographical conflict that's similar to the one which, today, I saw described by Pagán. Here's how he describes the decision to use "blighted" areas like Chavez Ravine:
Since the 1930s, city planners and politicians envisioned a modern city connected by extensive roadways, with a civic center in the heart of the downtown surrounded by cultural sites that celebrated the diversity of the populace and the advancements of the arts. Yet that vision of modernity projected into the future the racialized realities of the day. The envisioned citizens who staffed and utilized that civic space, the patrons of the arts, and the consumers of local "culture" were, without question, white. City planners furthermore inscribed the growth of public space not over unused and unpopulated lands or even through neighborhoods of the white middle class. Much of the reconstruction of Los Angeles would pave over neighborhoods long occupied by predominantly Mexican American families.It's a meme that began during colonization and has, clearly, continued into the 20th Century. Those places over there are functionally empty, and we must make good on them. And so the Europeans began moving into occupied lands in the name of building a "New" World.
The pioneer story is critical to supporting this social geography. Little House on the Prairie is cited as a major influence on Thirteenth Child, but Wilder's influential "historical" (that is "non-alternative-historical") young adult novels also presupposes an "empty" land that, in actuality, was already filled with a people with their own pre-existing geography:
Little Laura Ingalls, her sisters and their beloved Ma and Pa were illegal squatters on Osage land. She left that detail out of her 1935 children's book, Little House on the Prairie, as well as any mention of ongoing outrages—including killings, burnings, beatings, horse thefts and grave robberies—committed by white settlers, such as Charles Ingalls, against Osages living in villages not more than a mile or two away from the Ingalls' little house."Little House on the Osage Prairie," Dennis McAuliffe, Jr. It's part of Oyate's series of because of their inaccurate and insulting portrayals of Native Americans.
In comparing Pagán's thoughts of geography as seen by the privileged to the history of geography in North America (and in many other places), I started thinking about three aspect:.
- Discoverability. Spaces do not exist unless and until they are learned of by the privileged. A continent's existence begins when it is first seen by a European. A restaurant does not exist until it's reviewed in a magazine, or on yelp.
- Emptiness. Once discovered, all spaces are empty until they are filled with the privileged. They can (and truly must) be modified at will and whim. They have no meaning or importance until it has been constructed by the privileged. Continents are empty until filled by Europeans. Neighborhoods are bad until filled by the rich (or at least richer).
- Bordelessness. Because empty spaces cannot have any meaning, there can be no barriers of access into and within the space that applies to the privileged. There are no distinctions of nations within an empty continent. There is no country into which modern Americans cannot enter and still demand the security and privilege they expect.
And in thinking about these concepts, it's hard to limit that thought just to space. I start thinking about the way this kind of geography maps onto ideas and culture and discourse. I think about cultural appropriation, in which the privileged learn about something only through the distorted tales of other privileged, decide what it means based on faulty information, and take for themselves whatever they wish from wherever they wish. I think about Led Zeppelin "forgetting" to credit its sources.
And I'm backing into what I was really thinking about when I read that chapter. Reading about civilian Mexican-American youths contesting white military youth's privileging a "public" reading of their "private" spaces, I was thinking about the way that similar contests have played out, and are playing out, in the virtual spaces of ideas, discourse, journals, blogs, conventions, and fandom in the dialogue of RaceFail, and now MammothFail.
But I'm going to have to try to bring out my thoughts tomorrow night (or hopefully by Friday).
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on the Zoot Suit topic...
(Anonymous) 2009-05-13 11:37 am (UTC)(link)no subject
"For SPAIN" became one of my dad's favorite catch-phrases when I was a kid to point out when an argument made no sense, but the really remarkable (sad) thing about this routine is that while the nonsense of this construction of "discovery" is immediately obvious to everyone who hears it, that "discovered FOR PRIVILEGE" explanation is pretty much exactly how that conversaton has always gone - and I've had it, paraphrased one way or another, tens of times, with many more people than just my history teachers.
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This certainly applies to a lot of situations; for example, the powwow I just went to last weekend, where white people who were complete strangers insisted in standing in front of or even in our tent.
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You've done a wonderful job of linking physical and metaphorical spaces here, and I'm really impressed both as a reader in MammothFail and a (former) student in critical geography. You might be interested in Mike Davis's work on Los Angeles (City of Quartz & Ecology of Fear) and Neil Smith's American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization and The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. But, basically, I agree with you wholeheartedly: getting to define a perfectly empty continent was an exercise in power both for European colonists and then again for Wrede.
Oddly, I just finished James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere, which has a fictionalized account of the Sleepy Lagoon murder. I don't recommend the book in the least, but I'm amused by all the coincidences.
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I like to tell people when they recommend books I've already read or been intending to read because it's an indication that they did a good job in their recommendations.
socio-geographical conflict
Re: socio-geographical conflict
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Also, for a while, Tommy Chong lived in Vancouver on a street that was gated at either end. At night, the gate would be locked out to keep out white people looking to fight.
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I could geek a bit here about the discovery doctrine, in which native peoples were held to merely occupy the land, rather than own it: the European nation that discovered it got to own it. (Oddly enough, this was a roundabout way for the Supreme Court to protect tribes from settlers encroaching on their territory, not that it helped all that much in the long run.) My point being that it's another way in which land held by non-privileged parties is seen to be "empty"--or that they are seen to not have the same kind of rights to land that privileged (white) parties do.
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I'm Australian, and your post reminds me of being in primary school and reading stories about the empty land that Cook discovered and singing eco-songs about how the "people who once used to roam" had gone away (just like seals and whales) while there were at least three Aboriginal kids in the room. Terra nullius is the specific legal fiction used here, and it's really disturbing to see it portrayed as a "what if" alternative history.
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*Carnadosa on LJ*
(Anonymous) 2009-05-18 03:16 am (UTC)(link)In conclusion, thanks for the book rec!