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Book Review
| The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880–1940. By Matthew F. Bokovoy. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xx + 316 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
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Matthew Bokovoy looks at two world's fairs staged in San Diego: the Panama-California Exposition of 1915 and the California-Pacific International Exposition of 1935–1936. The book's greatest strengths are its exploration of developments in the field of ethnography as played out in the planning for the 1915 fair, Native American performers' ethnic representation in the same fair, and Depression-era strategies of economic recovery incorporated in the exhibits of the 1935 fair. |
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Bokovoy seems intent on establishing a paradigm shift in ethnography from (1) a racial hierarchy explanation of civilization's advancement to (2) a view of all humans as a single species culturally differentiated by environmental circumstances. But his champion of the latter view, ethnographer Ales Hrdlicka, embraced racist views. |
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The author claims Native Americans' agency in how they presented their cultures in the living habitat exhibit. He succeeds in showing that individual performers followed "a strategy to bring revenue into their villages," that they occasionally mocked rude visitors, and that an unauthorized film of sacred rituals was destroyed (p. 128). But the performers were hired employees, obliged to suppress their familiarity with modern life, and there is little evidence of representational autonomy. |
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The main contribution to the reader's appreciation of the 1930s fair was the account of exhibits by corporations such as Ford and Bank of America and by the Federal Housing Authority to encourage spending through a vision of middle-class abundance. Needless distractions include a titillating account of adult entertainments. |
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This book is not as easy to read as its subject implies, partly due to editorial oversights. The reader stumbles over ambiguous constructions such as "the 1935 exposition had shaped public morality about mass culture and anti-Mexican stereotypes from competition by Tijuana's declining, yet still popular, tourist economy" (p. 195). Inaccuracies plague almost every reference to architecture. Labor issues in both sections are mentioned inconclusively. |
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A tantalizing theme of ethnic representation could have been teased out to unify the book. Bokovoy identifies a "modern Spanish heritage" theme (by which he means the romanticized "Spanish" fantasy) in the 1915 fair's evocation of the grandest monuments of colonial Spanish America intended to establish continuity with San Diego's progressive ambitions. The fair contrasted the most advanced pre-Columbian cultures with the picturesque primitivism of the southwestern habitat exhibit. Forty-five pages into his discussion of the 1930s fair, Bokovoy introduces a theme of uplifting progress brought to the Americas by Spain, but later argues that the 1935 fair portrayed white American progress triumphant over a Spanish past doomed by racial inferiority. His conclusion voices current platitudes on multiculturalism, averring, in spite of his revelations about ethnographers' biases in the 1910s and the context of race conflict in the 1930s, that the regional Spanish fantasy "rarely embraced racism to denigrate and erase the presence of contemporary Indians and ethnic Mexicans" (p. 225). By retracing his own findings on ethnic representation throughout the book, the author might have distilled a historically significant pattern. |
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| Merry Ovnick
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| California State University, Northridge |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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