| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Matthew F. Bokovoy. The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880–1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press in cooperation with the San Diego Historical Society. 2005. Pp. xx, 316. $29.95.

Memory and promotion are intrinsically tied to the fair experience, be it the dusty fairgrounds of a western agricultural community or the stately buildings of a world's fair site. Dripping ice cream on scorching pavement, the rush of crowds, and fantastic architecture resonant of nationalistic "progress" connect people to places they visited as children or as adults. These memories, Matthew F. Bokovoy argues, help to create regional—and contrived—identities. Much has been written about the role of memory and the construction of what historians call "the modern Spanish heritage" of California and the American Southwest. Bokovoy's revisionist analysis finds that modern Spanish heritage represented more than "a tradition of 'false consciousness'" propagated by "Anglos to denigrate and erase the contemporary presence of ethnic Mexicans and American Indians" (p. xvii). While the composite portrait of southern California envisioned and reinforced by the San Diego expositions of 1915–1916 and 1935–1936 was "insensitive" and "untrue" for Native Americans and ethnic Mexicans, it was also a sympathetic "set of political understandings" that celebrated cultural pluralism and ultimately, if inadvertently, "contributed to the realization of legal, civil rights" (p. xviii).

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