Random Readings Redux: Faux fiesta

Here's a review that ran well over a year ago in the Herald Mexico. It deals with how Americans perceive Mexico and Mexicans. Much of the way the two populations see each other is demonstrably misguided, of course, but much of the false perception is not just the result of ignorance but also the heritage of consciously constructed myths. This is a look at how the newly installed Anglo leaders of Los Angeles re-created the city's Mexican past (more often called the Spanish past) in order to prevent Mexicans and their descendants from having a role in the city's future.


Whitewashed Adobe:
The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past
By WIlliam Deverell
University of California Press (2004)

Romanced to Death
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

That U.S. expansionism in the 1840s cost Mexico half its territory is something Mexican commentators need no coaxing to bring up. Outsiders, in fact, are struck by how often they do bring it up. Regrettable as the Treaty of Guadalupe obviously was from the Mexican point of view, why the need to repeatedly remind the world of it more than a century and a half later?

“Whitewashed Adobe,” California historian William Deverell’s relentless examination of Mexicans’ fate under U.S. rule, suggests some answers. The book details how, starting in the post-war 1850s, the new Anglo-Los Angeles elite socially engineered the conquered Mexican population right out of the city’s future.

What we also see, however, is how the strategies for doing that — especially the one-two punch of discrimination and romanticization — allowed the dominant society to effectively freeze Mexicans in time and space. Such “cultural cryogenics” (Deverell’s phrase) made it easy to ascribe to all Mexicans general character traits, and Deverell’s list of the historical stereotypes sounds as up-to-date as a weather report: “childlike, simple, quick to anger, close to nature, primitive, hard-working, lazy, superstitious, possibly criminal.”

In other words, relegating the Mexican population in California to a colorful, sleepy “Spanish” past not only marginalized the longtime area inhabitants as the rest of Los Angeles grew, but also created what Deverell calls “an Anglo cultural stance toward Mexicans.” That harmful stance persists today, complicating L.A.’s transition to a multicultural metropolis. It also continues to trouble U.S-Mexico interactions.

Most Mexicans today understand on one level or another that Americans’ self-serving vision of them — the ongoing “cultural stance” — is in a large part an inheritance of the U.S.-Mexican war and its aftermath. So one explanation of the still burning obsession with the consequences of that war might be that it’s still doing damage.

Another explanation is that the U.S.-Mexico war didn’t end with the takeover of California and other former Mexican lands in 1848. Though Anglo settlers in the past had acknowledged and even adopted the ways of the old Californios, once in charge they would have none of it. Eliminating Mexican rule was not the whole battle. Mexican influence, Mexican culture, and as far as possible the Mexican presence itself, all had to go too.

Terror and violence were the initial methods of choice. The Mexican-American war morphed into a war against Mexican-Americans. “The bloody 1850s sent Los Angeles spinning with such ethnic hatred that it has yet to fully recover,” Deverell tells us. The strategy, combined with Anglo in-migration, worked well. L.A.’s population went from 80 percent Mexican to 20 percent in one generation.

After the newly arrived railroads converted Los Angeles into an 1880s boomtown, the city boosters turned to subtler tactics for keeping ethnic Mexicans down while simultaneously disguising southern California’s violent recent past. They chose obliteration through appropriation, a clever plan that has colored U.S. perceptions of ethnic Mexicans for more than a century. It was the remaking of a Mexican past that the book’s subtitle alludes to, and Deverell’s penetrating analysis of the phenomenon is what makes “Whitewashed Adobe” so fascinating for anybody who cares about the overlapping story of Mexico and California.

Essentially, the Mexican presence was turned into a historical pageant, a nostalgic fiction drenched in the romance of missions, rodeos, dances and festivals. The notion was wildly popular among the city’s transplanted residents; it gave them an unthreatening regional identity free of any effect on their day-to-day lives.

At the same time, it allowed the elite to contrast Anglo progress with pleasant but sleepy Spanish and Mexican periods. With things Mexican safely relegated to a long-gone past, flesh and blood Mexicans were now relics, virtual non-entities assigned to unsanitary barrios near the flood-prone Los Angeles River and to low-wage manual labor.

Deverell explains developments not through generalities but by looking into specific manifestations of the whitewashing of the region’s Mexican-ness. Two fascinating examples — the “typical” La Fiesta de Los Angeles in the 1890s and the quaint, sentimental Mission Play starting in 1912 — are described in intricate detail, perhaps too much detail for many readers. But we get the picture: “From the vantage of a century later, La Fiesta looks like the party white Los Angeles threw to celebrate the triumph of Manifest Destiny in the Far West.”

Deverell isn’t of the school that requires history to read like a novel. He has a point to make, and he eschews entertainment in favor of countless contemporary source citations to bring it home. But he does have a deft touch for passing along, without comment, particularly telling quotes by the beneficiaries of the whitewashing.

In a chapter on the L.A. area’s biggest brickyard, where the all-Mexican and Mexican-American workforce was confined to company housing and starvation wages, Deverell quotes a newspaper reporter attending the annual brickyard Christmas party for the workers’ children: “To see those merry-faced, brown-skinned youngsters carrying off their treasures ... is to get a new light on the melting pot of America.”

“Whitewashed Adobe” stops at the onset of World War II, after which the stirrings of Chicano political activism began to change the equation. But the U.S. “cultural stance” continues, played out on a broader, NAFTA-era stage.

As I read “Whitewashed Adobe,” I kept thinking about two movies. Mexican director Paul Leduc’s subtle and political biopic of Frida Kahlo screened for the Motion Picture Academy of America as a Best Foreign Picture hopeful in 1985. The huge theater nearly emptied by the time it was half over.

In contrast, some two decades later, the Hollywood version was a box-office success. The Mexican movie was infinitely better, not to mention more accurate. But the Hollywood movie delivered the Mexico that plays best stateside: bright colors, romance and pretty people speaking in charmingly accented English. It reflected a U.S. cultural stance 150 years in the making.