| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Phoebe S. Kropp. California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 364. $39.95.
Historian Phoebe S. Kropp draws from the study of place and memory, and environmental, urban, and western history to deliver a richly nuanced book that examines the development of a southern California mythology that colored everything from how tourists experienced the region to how American newcomers lived in it. It was a mythology rooted in a fictional, romantic Indian and Spanish history that rationalized the American takeover of California by creating a narrative of succession that naturalized conquest and relegated Mexican Americans and native peoples to the past. The text dates the mythology's development to the 1884 publication of Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (although Kropp points out that Jackson's tale was derivative, borrowing from Californian narratives to create a nationally popular novel). The mythology began to unravel in the 1930s as "imperialist nostalgia" gave rise to cynicism and a noir version of the California present in the midst of the Great Depression (p. 250).	1
Kropp explores how Californians and outsiders viewed the region through four case studies and divides the book into two sections, "Locating the Past" and "Living with the Past." El Camino Real, a road that connected twenty-one Spanish missions, and San Diego's 1915 Panama-California Exposition form the first half of the book. Both cases reveal how boosters "created a time and place that never existed" in an effort to celebrate a carefully constructed past to justify an American future (p. 121).	. . .

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