| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place. By Phoebe S. Kropp. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xx, 364 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-520-24364-1.)
Phoebe S. Kropp's elegant examination of California's built environment from 1880 to the recent past is nothing less than a tour de force of American social and cultural history. It offers deep engagement with the production of history and memory in the nation's most important state. Like the eminent critic Carey McWilliams, Kropp convincingly addresses the Golden State's most vexing cultural dynamic: the simultaneous promoting of Spanish colonial and Native American heritage, finding of security amid modernity in nostalgic commercial traditions, and disdaining of both American Indians and ethnic Mexicans.	1
In six thematic chapters, Kropp highlights four nationally renowned venues in which this schizoid heritage took physical form: the promotion of the El Camino Real and preservation of the California missions; the San Diego Panama-California Exposition of 1915–1916; the development of the racially exclusive and faux-Spanish suburb of Rancho Santa Fe; and the ersatz historical restoration of Olvera Street in Los Angeles. In the end, Kropp believes that rosy, boosterish efforts were not benign commercial garnishments of Spanish and Indian history. The rise of Spanish "fantasy heritage" speaks to deeper concerns where "memory places are sites of cultural production and venues for struggles over public space, racial politics, and citizenship" in America (p. 15).	. . .

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