Reviewed by Andrew Wiese | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.3

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Reviewed by Andrew Wiese | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

*California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place.* By Phoebe S. Kropp. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. xx + 364 pp. Maps, photos, illustrations, tables, notes, and index. $39.95 (cloth).
For decades, scholars and pundits have plumbed the meanings of Southern California's affair with a romantic Spanish past. None have done so with as much depth or balance as Phoebe Kropp in her delightful new book. California Vieja is both a detailed exploration of the relationships between place and memory in the modern United States and a sharp cultural history of urban boosterism, race, and regional identity.	1
Kropp illustrates that from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, varied coalitions of Southern California Anglos (an idiosyncratic regional moniker for non-Hispanic whites) appropriated and reimagined elements of California's pre-Anglo history. They produced a usable past suited to boosting tourism and urban growth and to selling real estate and urban renewal, but also to confirming their own place in the nation's expansion and marking the distance between themselves and the people with whom they lived. Southern California Anglos, Kropp argues, deployed their nostalgia for Spanish heritage to thoroughly modern ends.	. . .

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