HIST 240 Lecture Notes
Date: 10/30/12
By Valerie Slitor
Professor Block was out sick and the TA’s led a brief
Q&A session. Questions were focused on the novel the class is currently
reading. What came out of this was the thematic issue of
Hollywood/LA/California normally being thought of as a place where people come
to heal/become well/be better (as in the precedent of people coming to the
state as a cure for TB) and the ways in which West writes against this as
Hollywood/LA being a place where dreams (and people) come to die.
The vision of LA in this novel is grim, apocalyptic (the
painting being painted is one of Los Angeles on fire). West writes about IDEAS
about PLACES… something to consider thinking about. In what ways are those
ideas mythologies? What happens when someone writes AGAINST that idea?
A question was asked about LA’s Chinatown which was
established in 1865 following the SF fire (SF’s Chinatown was destroyed and the
population was told they could rebuild if they built it to the city’’s
specifications – many relocated to LA instead.
The TA’s then showed several clips from
whitewashedadobe.com. Very interesting perspectives and a continued
conversation about these less told versions and what it means/has meant to
white-wash the history of California. The first clip was of Mission San
Gabriel’s Playhouse. It featured some commentary on the restoration and
construction of the building (that the ceiling is a “floating ceiling” built
from hundreds of wire cables so that when the building moved in an earthquake
the ceiling would move with it rather than be destroyed) and a ghost story. The
clip lead to a conversation in class about The Mission Play, a stageplay first
staged in 1912 (that was quite popular at the Playhouse) that told a
white-washed version of Father Serra’s California. This was a response to the kind of epic Cecil
B Demille vision of history… and was well received.
A point was made that as California expanded, and as the
Boosters continued to lure more people into the state (with Rail Road, Oil, and
Real Estate…) a white-washed version was a much more preferable, marketable way
to sell the state as a place to come to.
The TA’s talked about Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, a novel
that did for Native Americans what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for African Americans
(that the only way “up” for the minority group is through white intervention)
and how the national response to the book lead to a Mission Revival period in
California (in restoration and architecturally, etc) and how that cultural
imagination coincided with increased the
expanding railroad increasing easy, transcontinental mobility into the state…
and a boom in tourism (post cards, Ramona related merchandise, attractions,
etc).
A brief video was shown featuring George Sanchez discussing
how California/Los Angeles is/was seen as a place to come to from somewhere
else, a destination. The TA’s mentioned that until 2010, the majority of the
population was born somewhere else.
Another video was shown, this time telling the story of a
woman who grew up in a Mexican community built around the Simons Brick Company.
She speaks with great emotion about what it meant to grow up in that community,
the simplicity of her father’s vision and hope (not aspiring to have great wealth
or a car but to just provide a house and life to his family) and how as a
child she did not feel poverty as long
as she felt loved and cared for. She told the story of the day that a white
school teacher came into her yard to check on her and how she as a child did
not feel the effects of prevalent racism/anti-mexican sentiment. The community,
it was discussed, was a self sustaining construct – the laborers were kept
within a small community that provided them with essential needs (schools,
markets, etc) and the population was rewarded for producing more laborers (a
silver dollar was given to a family that bore a male child). Bricks were
produced in mass quantity, quickly, and used in construction immediately as Los
Angeles expanded rapidly.
The TA’s spoke about Boosters again (rail, journalism, and
oil...) and how as something like the RR or the trolley line expanded, tracks
of land were sold around it for housing and development. As California
continued to expand in this way, as controlled by these capitalist forces, the
unions were kept out and LA was seen as the ideal place for the “open market,”
without unions and teeming with cheap labor, a far cry from the state of the
competing major city, San Francisco.
A note was made that WATER was a major issue as this
expansion sprawled and that Mullholland made his fortune by figuring out a
means to bring enough water into the city for the population.
The last video focused on the Plague of Los Angeles
(Halloween 1925) and the institutional response to the outbreak. Within the
shanty communities of Mexican laborers and their families, the Bubonic Plague
killed 40 people. The city was quick to respond (primarily by quarantine, rat
killing, the burning/destruction of housing in effected areas…). The spread was
controlled but after that, the city instituted strict quarantining of Mexican
people in the city, thinking that the plague was a Mexican illness (viewing the
issue of outbreak and disease not as a matter/result of POVERTY but of
ETHNICITY). This response reveals the city immaturity in terms of what we would
view as multiculturalism… LA was not as enlightened as the white-washed history
would have us believe.
This lead to an interesting discussion of Race, Disease and
Eugenics in California.
·
The quarantine showed a gendered bias in the
understanding of disease as women and children were kept within the boundaries
yet men, laborers, were allowed in and out to continue working.
·
There was a profound lack on infrastructure in
place to REMEDY the problems that resulted in diseases being so readily spread
(better sewage etc) which lead to a self fulfilling prophesy that those
ethnicities kept in living conditions that were left, by the city, in
unhygienic conditions would invariably become sick and spread more disease.
o
There was, it should be mention, push back.
People understood that it was through legal action that change would take
place. People knew too that under the 14th Amendment, their children
were considered citizens even if they themselves were not – change must be made
for the future.
·
Eugenics and California – California was the 3rd
state to legalize sterilization of those deemed genetically unfit, many of whom
were ethnic women. It reveals the relationship between the way that disease,
race and poverty were viewed in that time (and beyond). 1/3 of the
sterilizations under this principle were done under this guise… and as the
understand was that those in poverty were at fault and would not be able to get
themselves out of it, that it was not in fact a failing of the system or the
state, that the solution was just to control the number of new poor people
born.
o
The outside control of those deemed incapable of
controlling themselves.
o
This was a multi-pronged attack in which social
workers were sent to ethnic women and urged (and sometimes forced) them to
undergo a sterilization procedure.
o
This is an issue relevant in LA as recently as
1979 when healthcare providers were giving non-english speak women in labor a
contract to sign that said they agreed to have their tubes tied after delivery
– and were informed that their baby would not be delivered until the form was
signed. In court proceedings, the doctors were acquitted as they were, “trying
to do the right thing for those women.”
o
Frequent mention was made in class of the
report, “The Culture of Poverty.”
At the end of class, the Chinese Massacre of 1871 was talked
about. 2 rival gangs fought and a white man was caught in the crossfire and
killed, leading to Chinatown being shut down. When the mob saw that it was a
white man killed, they attacked and by the end of that night, 19 Chinese men
and boys had been lynched.
Which is a story definitely not told in \the white-washed
version of California’s history and the history of the City of Los Angeles
