PART THREE—
CREATING COMMUNITY

14—
Crucifixion, Slavery, and Death:
The Hermanos Penitentes of the Southwest

Ramón A. Gutiérrez

There is in the remote mountain villages of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado a penitential confraternity known as La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, the Pious Confraternity of Our Lord Jesus Nazarene, popularly known as the Hermanos Penitentes. The group's devotion to the passion and death of Christ, still commemorated with rituals of crucifixion on Good Friday, has long fascinated believers and disbelievers, promoters and detractors of Hispano culture in the Southwest. Since 1833 when Josiah Gregg first described the penitential rituals he observed during Holy Week at Tomé, in his much-read book Commerce of the Prairies, wells of ink have been spent recounting the activities of the Hermanos Penitentes.^[1] Protestant authors in the nineteenth century focused on the brutality and barbarity of the bloody flagellants and their crucifixion rite to validate Anglo-American presuppositions about New Mexican Hispano Catholicism—namely, that centuries of Roman Catholic rule in what became the U.S. Southwest had bred a backward, primitive, and savage piety that hampered the civilizing mission of the Anglo capitalist gospel.^[2]

At the end of the nineteenth century, a host of pundits, visionaries, and pop-historians, individuals who as a group lacked the linguistic tools and cultural sensitivity to study much less understand the activities of the Hermanos Penitentes, focused a voyeuristic gaze on the group. "Orientalizing" the Upper Rio Grande Valley for touristic purposes, they painted pictures of a primitive, simple landscape and populace in the Southwest that resembled Egypt and offered a potential escape from the decadent industrial northeastern United States. In this frame of reference, even sympathetic advocates of the brotherhood depicted it as one of the "last vestiges of medievalism in America," as "mired in webs of iconographic confusion," and locked "in a time-warp oblivious to history."^[3]

This essay on the history of the Pious Confraternity of Our Lord Jesus Nazarene forms part of a larger research project on the history of Indian slavery in New Mexico. Much of the extant scholarship on slavery in the Americas has focused on the African experience. Reams have been written on the Atlantic passage, on the African slave experience in various plantation economies, and on the process of manumission, the meaning of freedom, and the stigma and meanings of color for these former slaves throughout the hemisphere. But except for Silvio Zavala's 1967 documentary history, Indian Slaves in New Spain, little attention has been given to the role of Indian thralls in the hacienda and ranch economies of the hemisphere.^[4] My goal here is to begin to fill this lacuna, if only very partially, by studying the cultural history of genízaros, as Indian slaves were known in New Mexico, focusing in this essay on their religious organizations and rituals.

Membership in the Pious Confraternity of the Our Lord Jesus Nazarene, even to this day, is considered a fundamental way of life. The confraternity offers its members a code for living that is marked by a year-long calendar of pious acts, a regimen of prayer, fasting, mortification, and social works of mercy. Confraternity activities reach a high pitch during Holy Week, when Christ's passion and death on the cross are commemorated. From Palm Sunday until Holy Saturday, members of the brotherhood reenact the Way of the Cross, which according to some late-nineteenth-century accounts, actually culminated in the death of the surrogate Christ.

To understand the historical and cultural meanings of the daily, weekly, and Holy Week rituals of the La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, one must approach their rituals like one approaches the careful analysis of an onion, peeling away layer after layer. The organizational form the brotherhood takes is the cofradía, or confraternity. The words confraternity and cofradía both derive from the Latin word confrater, which literally means a "co-brother." A confraternity was a group of persons who lived together like brothers in a larger fictive or mystical family. Confraternities had their origin in Europe during the twelfth century as voluntary associations of the Christian faithful committed to the performance of acts of charity. In an era before social services were provided by the state, the pressing social needs created by poverty and vagrancy accelerated the formation of religious brotherhoods. Victims of catastrophe, disease, or unemployment found their basic needs met through the works of mercy performed by confraternities. Members of confraternities, by performing such acts, gained grace and indulgences, which were deemed sure routes to sanctity and personal salvation.^[5]

Confraternities dedicated themselves to the promotion of particular devotions to Christ, to the Virgin Mary, and to various saints. They required episcopal sanction for formation and were governed by statutes that contained their rule, their prescribed ritual practices, their required works of piety, and festival days of observance. Despite great differences in devotional

practices, the common thread that bound brotherhoods was their obligation to lead model lives of Christian virtue, to care for the physical welfare of the locality's needy, to bury the dead, and to pray for the salvation of departed souls.^[6]

The familial language that confraternities employed made them vibrant organizational forms for the expression of broader social affinities. As equal members of the mystical body of Christ joined in spiritual brotherhood, for purposes of larger social good, residents of a community could momentarily put aside the enmities and distrust that typically marked the daily interactions of families, households, and clans. Indeed, through the creation of religious associations of co-brothers who were united in the mystical body of Christ with God as father and the Church as mother, Catholic prelates and theologians explicitly critiqued the secular, biological theory of family that had existed in Western Europe since the second century A.D.^[7]

Nowadays, when we speak of familia, or family, we equate it with our immediate blood kin. That which is within the family is intimate, within the private walls of the home, and devoid of strangers. But if we focus carefully on the historical genealogy of the word familia, on its antique meanings, it was tied neither to kinship nor to a specific private space or house. Rather, what constituted familia was the relationship of authority that one person exercised over another, and more specifically, familia was imagined as the authority relationship of a master over slaves. The etymological root of the Spanish word familia is the Latin word familia. According to historian David Herlihy, Roman grammarians believed that the word had entered Latin as a borrowing from the Oscan language. In Oscan famel meant "slave"; the Latin word for slave was famulus. "We are accustomed to call staffs of slaves families. . . . we call a family the several persons who by nature of law are placed under the authority of a single person," explained Ulpian, the second century A.D. Roman jurist. Family was initially that hierarchical authority relationship that one person exercised over others, most notably slaves, but in time, also over a wife, children, and retainers.^[8]

It was to temper this authority that a master exercised over his slaves or family that the Church elaborated the relationship of spiritual fraternity that was born of baptism. Through the sacrament of baptism one was born again a child of God, thus defining the person both as a natural and a spiritual being, with loyalties both to biological natural parents and to spiritual parents as well. For slaves, who often had no natural or genealogical relationships in a town, the confraternity served as an alternative kinship network morally obligated to offer protection and succor in times of need.^[9]

In every town and village, in both Europe and the Americas, vertical and horizontal confraternities existed side by side.^[10] The vertical confraternities integrated a locality's social groups, joining the rich and the poor, Spaniards and Indians, the slave and free. By emphasizing mutual aid and ritually

obliterating local status distinctions and social hierarchy, vertical confraternities diffused latent social tensions into less dangerous forms of conflict. In place of overt class antagonism, parish confraternities squabbled over displays of material wealth, the splendor of celebrations, and the precedence due each group.

If vertical brotherhoods integrated a town's various classes, horizontal confraternities mirrored a locale's segmentation, marking organizationally status inequalities, be they based on race, honor, property ownership, or other material and symbolic goods. Relationships of domination and subordination were often articulated through confraternity rivalries and their symbolic opposition throughout the yearly cycle of sacred rites. The social supremacy of the Spanish gentry, for example, was expressed through their opulent confraternity rituals and celebrations to various saints. Dominated groups such as Indians and slaves also expressed their dignity and their collective identity with acts of piety that rivaled those of their oppressors.

Such horizontal separation of social groups is clearly apparent in the symbolic opposition that has existed in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from the eighteenth century to the present, between the Confraternity of Our Lady of Light and the Confraternity of Our Lord Jesus Nazarene, popularly known as the Brothers of Darkness. During the colonial period, noted Fray José de Vera, the population of the Kingdom of New Mexico was divided into "three groups . . . superior, middle and infamous."^[11] The superior class consisted of noble men of honor, the conquistadors of the province. Below them were the landed peasants, who were primarily of mestizo or mixed ancestry but who considered themselves Spaniards to differentiate themselves from the Indians. At the bottom of the social hierarchy were the "infamous" genízaros who were dishonored by their slave status.

The Confraternity of Our Lady of Light, founded in Santa Fe in 1760, was largely composed of members of Santa Fe's Spanish nobility. The confraternity owned a private chapel, which by eighteenth-century standards was the most ornate in town, and had furnishings that were considered sumptuous, rich vestuaries, and a large endowment of land and livestock. On the feast days that commemorated Our Lady of Light's conception, purification, nativity, and assumption, her devotees carried her bejeweled image through the streets of Santa Fe accompanied by the royal garrison firing salvos, and ending in celebrations marked with dances, dramas, and bullfights.^[12]

Symbolically counterpoised to the co-brothers of Our Lady of Light were the Brothers of Darkness, whose devotion was to Christ's passion and death. The members of the Confraternity of Our Lord Jesus Nazarene were primarily genízaros. The Brothers of Darkness displayed their piety through acts of mortification, flagellation, cross-bearing, and the Good Friday crucifixion of one of its members. "The body of this Order is composed of mem-

bers so dry that all its juice consists chiefly of misfortunes," wrote Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, describing the confraternity's poverty in 1776. They had neither membership records, accounts, nor an endowment, and frequently had to borrow ceremonial paraphernalia from other confraternities for their services.^[13]

Between 1693 and 1846, approximately 3,500 Indians slaves entered New Mexican households as domestic servants, captured as prisoners of a "just war."^[14] As defeated enemies living in Spanish towns, these slaves were considered permanent outsiders who had to submit to the moral and cultural superiority of their conquerors. In addition to these slaves captured in warfare, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries New Mexico's slave population swelled to about ten thousand, out of a total Spanish population of thirty thousand, through the purchase of Indian slaves from the Apaches and Comanches, and through the incorporation into New Mexican villages of Pueblo Indian outcasts from their native towns.^[15]

Genízaro slaves residing in Spanish households and towns were convenient targets for Spanish racial hatreds. As captives and outcasts, the genízaros were considered infamous, dishonored, and socially and symbolically dead in the eyes of the Christian community. Though they lived in Christian households, they lacked genealogical ties to a kinship group, and had legal personalities primarily through their owners. The only public form of sociability open to them to express their common plight as slaves, and eventually to express their ethnic solidarity, were the confraternity rituals of the Catholic Church, which bound them as co-brothers in the mystical body of Christ.^[16]

With only few notable exceptions, scholars in the past have usually depicted the Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno in a rather static and timeless fashion. The documentary and material evidence clearly suggests various periods of development, transformation, and florescence, periods that are never easy to establish with precision and can only be considered rough approximations.

The confraternity's first period, difficult to recuperate given the paucity of oral and historical sources, begins with the colonization of the Kingdom of New Mexico in 1598 and extends roughly into the 1790s. Many of the ritual forms of the fraternidad were undoubtedly introduced in New Mexico by the Franciscan friars as part of their project to Christianize the indigenous population. Given the fear that the Franciscans had of imparting heretical understandings of the sacraments to the Indians, their Christianization project became that of teaching through paraliturgies, rites of sowing and harvest, didactic dramas, devotional practices tied to cosmological phenomena, and various Franciscan devotions to the Crucified Christ, such as the Way of the Cross. The cross was a symbol that many Indians had long

given special importance in their iconography, albeit because it represented the six directions of the cosmos. Ritual flagellation too was commonly practiced by Mesoamerican Indians as a purificatory rite for contact with the sacred.^[17] What occurred in colonial New Mexico under the rubric of Christianization was a process of cultural convergence between two systems of ritual practice; Franciscan Holy Week rituals substituted well for the Indians' warfare and masculine rituals of power, which under Spanish rule were prohibited. Historian William B. Taylor maintains that the great continuity and convergence between Christianity and Mesoamerican religions was in the ways of representing religious power, in the ways of conjuring the supernatural, in the substances that were deemed holy and polluting, in the ways of creating and entering sacred spaces, and in the ways of anchoring and linking the natural and supernatural to very specific localities.^[18]

The laws regulating slavery in New Mexico stipulated that thralls could only be kept in bondage for a period of ten to twenty years. In many cases slaves were freed upon a master's death.^[19] The manumission of slaves in New Mexican society produced a peculiar problem in terms of symbolic logic. How could a person considered socially dead and dangerous be given life again as a free and integral member of the community of Christians? The solution was to negate the negation of life—that is, to negate the slave's social death through a second ritual death.

I have long suspected that the rituals of the hermandad were initially rituals of slave manumission; and here I am offering nothing more than an educated hunch. The theology of Christ's crucifixion was a particularly appropriate metaphor for manumission as a death to the state of human bondage, for in it were the ideas of death and renewal. Just as Christ had died because of our slavery to sin and so had given us eternal life anew, so too the genízaro slave's social death was negated through a ritual death, bringing the person back to life. Christ's death brought us redemption. The word "redemption" means to ransom one from the bondage of slavery through the martyrdom of a sacrificial victim. Similarly, through Christ's death we atoned for our sins, and those separated by sin were brought back together. Here again, genízaros, who were outsiders and intruders in Spanish society, were reintegrated into the community.^[20] The crucifixion of Christ theologically represented a series of status elevations that paralleled the status changes that accompanied a genízaro's manumission: from spiritual slavery to freedom, from spiritual death to life, from social separation to social integration.

The rather fragmentary evidence seems to suggest that in the community's religious division of labor, the Franciscan friars localized the need for corporal penance on the genízaros, thereby gaining the genízaros' redemption from sin and their reincorporation into the community through manumission. Much of the symbolism of the Hermanos Penitentes' ritual is one of status elevation; being led out of darkness to the light, brothers of dark-

ness in time become brothers of light. Here again we have the Franciscan mystical formula for spiritual perfection. One kills the body to have mystical union with the father of light. Physical purgation prepares the soul for illumination, which, in turn, readies the soul for its mystical marriage with Christ.^[21]

A clearly distinct second period for the confraternity dates from approximately 1790 to the 1820s. In these years genízaros in New Mexico develop as a distinct ethnic group. Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez noted in 1776, "Although the genízaros are servants among our people they are not fluent in speaking or understanding Castilian perfectly, for however much they may talk or learn the language, they do not wholly understand it or speak it without twisting it somewhat."^[22] Fray Carlos Delgado observed in 1744 that the genízaros "live in great unity as if they were a nation." Delgado added that genízaros practiced marriage-class endogamy for "they marry women of their own status and nature."^[23]

Genízaros were stigmatized by their slave and ex-slave status. Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez reported that genízaros were "weak, gamblers, liars, cheats and petty thieves."^[24] When New Mexicans today say "No seas genízaro" (Don't be a genízaro), they mean, don't be a liar.^[25]

The threat Hispanos felt at having increasing numbers of members of the enemy group living within their towns led to the residential segregation and spatial marginalization of genízaros. In Santa Fe the genízaros lived in the Analco district, situated strategically across the Santa Fe River in a suburb established to protect the town's eastern approach from Apache attacks. By the mid-eighteenth century, manumitted genízaros were congregated into settlements along Apache, Navajo, and Comanche raiding routes into the settlements of the Rio Grande drainage. Belén and Tomé were established in 1740 to protect the southern approach, Abiquiu and Ojo Caliente both were founded in 1754 to protect the northwest, and San Miguel del Vado in 1794 to protect the northeast.^[26]

By around 1790, genízaros were perceived as a distinct ethnic group. Spanish society viewed them as marginal persons because of their slave and former slave status. They spoke a distinctive form of Spanish, married endogamously, and shared a corporate identity, living together as if they were a nation. And their liminality between the world of the Pueblo Indians and that of the Spaniards was marked through residential segregation and congregation in autonomous settlements. Membership in the Pious Confraternity of Our LordJesus Nazarene became an expression of ethnic solidarity. The position of this confraternity in the Church's horizontal system of pious organizations reflected their place at the bottom of the social order.

The third period of the confraternity's history roughly begins in the 1820s and continues with some modifications to the present. What is unique about this period is the confraternity's evolution into autonomous political and

economic organizations, which were eventually repudiated by the Catholic Church hierarchy. In the early years of this period we increasingly see the nominal Christian veneer in the ritual and ideological system of the hermandad being supplanted by cosmological beliefs and practices, as well as the development of the confraternity into a civic political body.^[27]

The first change observed in this movement toward political autonomy is the redefinition of the confraternity's sacral topography. Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez in 1776 reported that there were separate altars to Jesus Nazarene in the churches at Santa Fe, Santa Cruz, Albuquerque, Tomé, and Abiquiu.^[28] By 1814 the altar at Santa Fe's parroquia (parish) was replaced by a free-standing chapel in the church's courtyard.^[29] And by 1821 this chapel had been moved off church land and established as an independent morada, or penitente chapel, on private property.^[30] These moradas were maintained by the confraternity without any form of ecclesiastical supervision.

Starting in 1836, the Bishop of Durango (in charge of New Mexico until 1848), continually tried to assert his authority over the confraternity by imposing the rule of the Third Order of St. Francis. The bishop's hope was to regain control over branches of the confraternity that were increasingly aloof to clerical supervision, or so he asserted.^[31] In 1830 José de la Peña expressed succinctly why the Church hierarchy found the Hermanos Penitentes so subversive. Peña wrote: "They have a constitution somewhat resembling that of the Third Order, but entirely suited to their own political views. In fact, they have but self-constituted superiors and as a group do as they please."^[32] Fifty years later, in 1888, Jean Baptiste Salpointe, Archbishop of Santa Fe Archdiocese, similarly observed: "This society, though perhaps legitimate and religious in its beginning, has so greatly degenerated many years ago that it has no longer fixed rules, but is governed in everything according to the pleasure of the director of every locality; and in many cases it is nothing else but a political society."^[33]

Archbishop Salpointe was quite correct in seeing the confraternity as the corporate political body of genízaro communities. The ritual leader of the confraternity, the hermano mayor or the "eldest brother," was also quite frequently the town's civic leader. He administered justice, managed the locality's economic resources, and cared for the social welfare needs of the place. Of course, one should not minimize the organization's religious functions, which continued to thrive, particularly after the secularization of New Mexico's Franciscan missions between 1830 and 1850. Devoid of priest and access to the sacraments, the Hermanos Penitentes elaborated and evolved their own rites and routes to the sacred. According to anthropologist Munro Edmonson, the ritual calendar in genízaro villages did not correspond to the Christian one.^[34] The themes articulated in the alabados, the penitential hymns members of the brotherhood chanted in their rites, also changed

over time. Rather than the themes of death and darkness as a way to salvation, metaphors and symbols of illumination, which in American Indian religious thought signify utopia, started to figure more prominently.^[35] Similarly, the first report of a man actually dying on the cross on Good Friday comes from the 1890s.^[36] The mystery and legitimacy of Christianity comes from the fact that Christ descended to earth and was crucified for the sins of humanity. In the absence of priests, might the crucifixion of a Penitente similarly have given legitimacy to the confraternity's devotions and served as a symbol for their own resistance to outside domination? Perhaps.

What we do know for sure is that in the late 1880s and 1890s knowledge of the Hermanos Penitentes was widely disseminated throughout the United States to a broad reading public. The development of an integrated national market criss-crossed by railways and highways, and interpolated by print journalism, made it at last possible to imagine the nation on a continental scale and to travel to its remotest corners to see the odd customs of its exotics and view the most picturesque scenes imaginable.^[37] American nationalism produced and fed both the production and consumption of travel literature, and ultimately the touristic marketing of New Mexico.^[38]

At the end of the nineteenth century many luminaries, writers, artists, alienated intellectuals and social misfits came to New Mexico seeking a salubrious refuge from the machine age. In the quaint villages of what was to become the "Land of Enchantment" and in its prehistoric sites was a preindustrial America, a vestige from the past that offered mystical and romantic repose.

Charles Fletcher Lummis, the man who coined the slogan "See America First," was the individual most responsible for the initial marketing of New Mexico's cultures. It was Lummis who constructed the Pious Confraternity of Our Lord Jesus Nazarene as the savage and fanatic "Penitent Brothers" for the Anglo touristic gaze, simultaneously fixing for his readers the most enduring Anglo-American representations of the Pueblo Indians, the Navajo, the Apache, and especially of the New Mexican landscape.

Lummis came to New Mexico and the American West in 1881, seeking a cure for the "brain fever" he had developed at Harvard preparing for the ministry. In the West he found health and the city editorship of the Los Angeles Times, and it was from there, with extended forays to New Mexico, that he penned and preached about the corruption and decadence of Anglo-Saxon New England and the vigor and salubrity of the multi-ethnic West.^[39] Writing such well received and popular books as A New Mexico David (1891), Pueblo Indian Folk Tales (1891), A Tramp Across the Continent (1892), Some Strange Corners of Our Country (1892), The Land of Poco Tiempo (1893), The Spanish Pioneers (1893), The Enchanted Burro ( 1897), and The King of the Broncos (1897), Lummis took his readers on an "orientalist" adventure to New

Mexico through fantasies and hallucinations of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and deepest, darkest Africa.^[40] In The Land of Poco Tiempo Lummis writes:

The brown or gray adobe hamlets [of New Mexico] . . . the strange terraced towns . . . the abrupt mountains, the echoing, rock-walled cañons, the sunburnt mesas, the streams bankrupt by their own shylock sands, the gaunt, brown, treeless plains, the ardent sky, all harmonize with unearthly unanimity. . . . It is a land of quaint, swart faces, of Oriental dress and unspelled speech; a land where distance is lost, and eye is a liar; a land of ineffable lights and sudden shadows; of polytheism and superstition, where the rattlesnake is a demigod, and the cigarette a means of grace, and where Christians mangle and crucify themselves—the heart of Africa beating against the ribs of the Rockies. (4–5)

In chapter after chapter, in description after description, New Mexico was Egypt. Describing the unique light on New Mexico, Lummis wrote: "Under that ineffable alchemy of the sky, mud turns ethereal, and the desert is a revelation. It is Egypt, with every rock a sphinx, every peak a pyramid" (9). The residents of Acoma Pueblo were "plain, industrious farmers, strongly Egyptian in their methods" (69). The Indian pueblos at Taos, Zuni, and Acoma, had been built in the shape of "pyramid" blocks (51–52). Pueblo girls cloaked themselves in "modest, artistic Oriental dress" (53). The Indian pony-tail was "The Egyptian queue in which both sexes dress their hair" ( 111). In the wind-eroded sand sculpture of the desert, Lummis saw an "insistent suggestion of Assyrian sculpture. . . . One might fancy it a giant Babylon" (61). The Apache were the "Bedouin of the New World," and the land they inhabited, a "Sahara, thirsty as death on the battlefield" (175–76). The Penitent Brothers whipped themselves like "the ancient Egyptians flogged themselves in honor of Isis" (80).

When Lummis described New Mexico as Egypt and employed Orientalist tropes, he was mimicking what was standard fare in Anglo-American travel writing from the eighteenth century forward. Such images were employed to give readers unfamiliar with a particular place some readily identifiable imaginary markers drawn from their own colonial histories, from travels to the Holy Land by their compatriots, and from their own readings of the Bible.^[41] But equally important, writes Mary Louise Pratt, Egypt offered "one powerful model for the archeological rediscovery of America. There, too, Europeans were reconstructing a lost history through, and as, 'rediscovered' monuments and ruins." By reviving indigenous history and culture as archaeology, the locals who occupied those sites were being revived as dead.^[42]

What evoked the sights, sounds and smells of Egypt in New Mexico for Lummis were the women who carried clay water jars on their heads, the cool mud (adobe) houses that dotted the landscape, the donkey beasts of bur-

den, the two-wheeled carts, the desert sun, light, and heat, and the presence of sedentary and nomadic "primitives" amidst the ruins and abandoned architectural vestiges of former grand civilizations.

Lummis introduced the Penitent Brothers in The Land of Poco Tiempo, noting:

[S] o late as 1891 a procession of flagellants took place within the limits of the United States. A procession in which voters of this Republic shredded their naked backs with savage whips, staggered beneath huge crosses, and hugged the maddening needles of the cactus; a procession which culminated in the flesh-and-blood crucifixion of an unworthy representative of the Redeemer. Nor was this an isolated horror. Every Good Friday, for many generations, it has been a staple custom to hold these barbarous rites in parts of New Mexico. (79)

Lummis asserted that the brotherhood consisted largely of "petty larcenists, horse-thieves, and assassins" (106). The brotherhood was widely feared because it controlled political power in northern New Mexico. "No one likes—and few dare—to offend them; and there have been men of liberal education who have joined them to gain political influence" (106), Lummis attested.

The Penitente discourse Charles Lummis constructed was followed almost verbatim by most Anglo-American writers who described the brotherhood from 1890 on. The gaze he focused on the flagellation, the bloodletting, the use of cacti for mortification, the shrill of the pito, and the nature and extent of crucifixion framed numerous "eye-witness" accounts that are difficult to accept as such primarily because the descriptions so closely ape those written by Lummis. Lummis took the first, and one of the only, sets of photographs of a Penitente procession and crucifixion, and this visual record may also account for the linguistic framing of what subsequent "outsiders" saw.

Interestingly, Lummis narrates the taking of these photographs as if on a safari hunting large game animals with his camera as his gun. "Woe to him if in seeing he shall be seen. . . . But let him stalk his game, and with safety to his own hide he may see havoc to the hides of others" (85). Lummis recounts how he waited anxiously for Holy Week to arrive so that he could photograph the impossible—the Penitentes. "No photographer has ever caught the Penitentes with his sun-lasso, and I was assured of death in various unattractive forms at the first hint of an attempt" (87). But on hearing the shrill of the pito, his prudence gave way to enthusiasm and he set himself up waiting for what he called the "shot." Though the Hermanos protested, "well-armed friends . . . held back the evil-faced mob, with the instantaneous plates were being snapped at the strange scene below" (91).

Photographs of this barbaric rite were necessary, explained Lummis, because Mexicans were "fast losing their pictorial possibilities" (8–9). What Lummis failed to explain, but what did not elude the diary of Adolph Bandelier, was that Lummis and Amado Chaves had held up the Hermanos at gun point, to get these "shots."

The political subtext of Lummis's Penitente photographs and textual descriptions was a critique of New Mexican despotism and of religious fanaticism that had no place in a republic governed by Anglo Protestants. Like the Israelites who had been led out of the darkness and idolatry of their Egyptian captivity, so too the peoples of New Mexico had to be freed from their "paganism" (read Roman Catholicism) (5).

What Lummis did by hunting Penitentes, cunningly stalking his prey like game animals, trying to capture on film that which was sacred, was to begin the process of desacralization that was to mark the history of the Hermanos and their Fraternidad from 1888 to the 1950s. The Good Friday rituals of the Hermanos at the turn of the century became touristic spectacles for Anglo New Mexicans. According to Gabriel Melendez, it was not uncommon for outsiders to sit in their cars waiting for the Hermanos to emerge from their moradas. As soon as they did, a flood of auto headlights would illuminate their activities.^[43]

Once the rituals and processions of the fraternidad had been desacralized, their religious icons and statues soon suffered a similar fate. Mabel Dodge Luhan, in her autobiography, Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality, recounts how she and her friend Andrew Dasburg created the market for the religious icons that had once adorned moradas.

Andrew had started hunting, an instinct that awakened in him every once in a while, made him breathless, eyes darkened, fully engaged. He hunted the old Santos painted on hand-hewn boards that we had discovered soon after we came to Taos. No one had ever noticed them except to laugh, but here was an authentic primitive art, quite unexploited. We were, I do believe, the first people who ever bought them from the Mexicans, and they were so used to them and valued them so little, they sold them to us for small sums, varying from a quarter to a dollar; on a rare occasion, a finer specimen brought a dollar and a half, but this was infrequent. . . . Andrew was soon absorbed in sainthunting. . . . he went all around the valley looking for them. He became ruthless and determined, and he bullied the simple Mexicans into selling their saints, sometimes when they didn't want to. He grew more and more excited by the chase, so that the hunt thrilled him more than what he found; and he always needed more money to buy new Santos. . . . It was Andrew who started a market for them, and people began to want them and buy them; and I was always giving one or two away to friends who took them east where they looked forlorn and insignificant in sophisticated houses. People always thought they wanted them, though, and soon the stores had a demand for

them. Stephen Bourgeois finally had a fine exhibition of them in his gallery. All this makes them cost seventy-five, a hundred, or two hundred dollars today.^[44]

The bultos, santos, and the various religious icons and statues that adorned home altars and moradas slowly were commercialized, deconsecrated, robbed, and placed on display in museums.

A class of alienated Anglo-American intellectuals, writers, artists, and financiers packed their belongings and headed to northern New Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century and in increasing numbers after World War I. They came rejecting the tastes, aspirations, and pretensions of the "Blue Bloods" who mimicked European aristocracy. And by so doing they started to imagine a national culture that was rooted, not in Europe, but on this continent in the cultures of New Mexico.^[45]

The preservation of the simple authentic cultures these easterners found in New Mexico, and their implicit critique of the industrial age, was clear in such acts as the 1925 creation of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society by Mary Austin and Frank Applegate. They aestheticized religious expressions and revalorized colonial artifacts as commercial art best enjoyed by connoisseurs. The process of appropriation reached its greatest extreme when the Santuario de Chimayo, the religious pilgrimage site in northern New Mexico, was purchased by the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in 1929 in order to protect it from the local ignorant folk.

In Spanish colonial art products, in religious icons and handicrafts, Anglos imagined the possibility and romance of non-alienating labor. Such artifacts were not mass-produced and appeared to stand frozen in isolation, defying the principles of global capitalism.^[46] Mabel Dodge Luhan captured this flight from modernity to the cultural pluralism (read classless society) of New Mexico well when she instructed her son, "Remember, it is ugly in America. . . . we have left everything worthwhile behind us. America is all machinery and money-making and factories . . . ugly, ugly, ugly."^[47]

A whole generation of Anglo-Americans, under the influence of piedpiper Charles Fletcher Lummis, were lured to New Mexico hoping there to resist industrial capital, to preserve the quaint picturesque cultures they found, and to market Pueblo and Hispano handicrafts as an authentic American art that offered a solution to national alienation. We see these sentiments expressed very well in the very first page of Roland F. Dickey's New Mexico Village Arts ( 1949). "This book does not recount famous names and urbane schools of art. It tells of ordinary men and women who worked with their hands to create a satisfying way of life in the Spanish villages of New Mexico." Waxing lyrical for over two hundred pages, Dickey concludes: "Today it is possible to escape from the commonplaceness of the machine world by furnishing an adobe house in what is reputed to be the Hispanic manner. . . . Beautiful things made by hand provide a relief from the systematic lines

and textures of machine manufacture, and keep awake sensitivities that are dulled by standardization."^[48]

The fraternidad responded to the commercialization of their religious expressions and to their transformation into safari tour spectacles by going underground, seeking anonymity, placing a premium on secrecy, and eventually retreating into New Mexico's hinterlands. There they developed a deep spiritual and mystical sense of community. In interviews, conversations, and a recent conference on the Penitent Brotherhood, the Hermanos have consistently noted that the essence of the brotherhood is mysticism and faith. Hermano Larry Torres of Taos recently stated that to be an Hermano was to devote one's life to prayer, penitence, and sacrifice. Torres cited the Song of Songs and the life of St. Bernard of Clairvaux as his two models for reaching spiritual perfection. The two alabados, or prayers that captured the nature of his faith, were: Un ardiente deseo, which tells of lovers yearning for the beloved and the sweetness of their embrace, and Por ser mi divina luz, which describes how Christ is the beacon leading one from darkness to the light.^[49] Hermano Floyd Trujillo described his duties and commitments as follows: "When one becomes an hermano it is like the bond of sacred matrimony. . . . we know the role we accept and, like Christ, we take the cross and follow him. We help the people. We help those that need help. . . . We never say no. We see the needs of the community and we take care of them. We are the leaders of the community."^[50]

The Hermanos take this leadership role very seriously. Hermano Gabriel Melendez has explained that the role of the hermano is that of a mediator who makes reconciliation possible. To mediate conflicts between Hermanos, between husbands and wives, between the Church and the Brotherhood, between the saints and the local morada. It is only through such activities of mediation that social peace and reconciliation can occur.^[51]

One of the most eloquent members of the hermandad, Felipe Ortega, the master of novices at La Madera, New Mexico, clearly sees the fraternidad and the morada as an anti-hierarchical organization and sacred space for the experience of Christ and the community, that stands outside and in juxtaposition to the Catholic Church. Ortega notes that when members of a morada sing their penitential hymns or alabados in a cantor/response mode, a "unison is created, one spirit, one mind, one heart." Within the morada, people stand facing each other, rather than oriented toward a priest and altar, further inscribing the egalitarian sense of community among morada members. And when the Hermanos come together to celebrate rituals, they in fact create the very sacraments. For when the Hermanos sing "Venid. Venid. Venid a la mesa divina" (Come. Come. Come to the divine table), members of the brotherhood are called to feed their souls and their bodies in a common union, at a veritable communion, through the sharing of food.^[52]

I realize that this essay is both tentative and speculative, and perhaps devoid of the chronological precision one commonly finds in historical tracts. My main theoretical concern in this research has been to understand the dynamics of cultural systems of reckoning and relatedness that are imagined and spoken with the same language we use to describe biogenetic ties, but which are often deemed "fictive." Since the late nineteenth century our anthropological and historical understanding of kinship has been dominated by studies of kinship terms, componential analysis, and household structures. Simply knowing who is biologically related to whom, who co-resides, and who gave birth to whom tells us very little about how relationships are imagined and kinship obligations animated in any society. Kinship theory has been too tightly constrained by our own modern preoccupation with biology and the salience of biogenetic principles of descent. If we are to understand the meaning of kinship in the early modern period, we have to approach the topic culturally, sketching the parameter of thought by studying prescriptive literature and then exploring instances where thought was concretely negotiated in practice. Herein I have tried to show how Indian slaves or genízaros, individuals who had no kinship ties to the community of Christians in New Mexico, forged ties of affinity through the Catholic Church's structure of confraternities that were just as real, important, and vibrant as any biological link ever has been or can be.

My second explicit aim has been to focus intensively on religious thought and expression as a window into local politics. Perhaps because we live in a secular age, we often relegate religion and its rituals to the domain of magic and superstition. I have tried to show that if one is going to take politics seriously in the early modern period and to study the origins of political forms, one has to turn to religion, the idiom through which politics was expressed until quite recently. One cannot, for example, understand the appeal of the New Mexican 1960s land radical, Reyes López Tijerina, unless one understands the religious qua political organization of the villagers to whom he was appealing for help in reclaiming lands fraudulently stolen from Hispano villages in the 1850s. Reyes was the king, and he took New Mexicans, who prior to the 1960s had lived in darkness, into the light.^[53]

Finally, the Hermanos Penitentes teach us how deeply notions of ethnicity and kinship are intertwined. Whether one is a child of Abraham (as a Jew), a child of Malinche (as a Chicano), or a brother of Jesus Christ (as a genízaro), ethnic identity is tied to cultural conceptions of family. At a time when our civic fabric seems frayed beyond repair, when women are reinscribed as subordinates in patriarchal thinking, and single mothers are seen as pathologies in the body politic, we must reinvent new models of relatedness, based not on hierarchy but on egalitarian principles. This is the model for a better tomorrow that I think the Pious Confraternity of Our Lord Jesus Nazarene offers us all.

15—
"Pongo Mi Demanda":
Challenging Patriarchy in Mexican Los Angeles, 1830-1850

Miroslava Chavez

In 1850, Gregoria Romero went before the Los Angeles justice of the peace to ask that criminal charges be filed against her husband Manuel Valencia for abusing her physically and verbally. He "gives me a mala vida, " she told the judge, "mistreats me with beatings, defames me, . . . threatens me with death at every step, denies me indispensable nourishment, . . . and instead of giving good advice and sustenance as a husband should do, he gives me a distressing and miserable life. I request a separation." The judge took the case under submission, but before he could render a decision, Romero reappeared in court two days later with her husband at her side. "My husband has promised me that, in the future, he will treat me well and provide me with the considerations a wife deserves," she stated. "I retract my [criminal] charge, forgiving the mistreatment he has previously inflicted." Romero's husband affirmed that he had changed his ways. "Never, for my part, will there be cause for fights," he declared, "nor anger between us." He promised to "follow a straight path and subject [him] self to scrutiny by the civil authorities." The judge, already predisposed to salvaging marriages, agreed to Romero's request and dropped the charges against her husband.^[1]

By going to the judge with her complaint Romero had boldly indicated her unwillingness to tolerate her husband's repeated abuses. However, by later recanting her charges solely on his promise to reform, she revealed not only faith in the sincerity of her husband's pledges but also Mexican society's high regard for the inviolability of marriage and the husband's place as master of the home.^[2] Mexican and, earlier, Spanish legal and social norms were steeped in patriarchal ideology that recognized men as the heads of the households to whom wives and children owed their obedience. Those same norms also placed restrictions and responsibilities on men: they had to provide food, clothing, and shelter for their families and were forbidden to use

excessive force in guiding and instructing their wives, children, and household servants. The Los Angeles court records, as in the case of Gregoria Romero, reveal that men sometimes abused their authority, and women, when necessary, invoked the law to protect themselves and check errant husbands and fathers. The records also indicate that justice could elude women and that the courts often interpreted the law in ways that reflected deeply rooted gender biases.

In exploring women's experiences with the judicial system in Mexican California, this study relies on extant civil and criminal court cases that came before Los Angeles's Court of First Instance between 1830 and 1850. Though the tribunal existed prior to 1830, no earlier records have survived. In 1850 the court ceased to exist as a result of the ratification of California's state constitution and the introduction of the American court system. These records, which total 502 court cases, include 78 cases involving women in civil and criminal matters.^[3] Of these, 47 have been selected for study because they reflect the ways in which women of different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds dealt with husbands, fathers, and men in the larger community who violated their authority by physically abusing them, neglecting to provide for them, or unlawfully coercing them. These cases also illustrate how local leaders handled individuals who transgressed standards of propriety. Cases involving women's property disputes and other civil matters, while equally significant in elucidating their experiences with patriarchy in Los Angeles, are not treated in this discussion because of space limitations and because they deserve a paper of their own. The focus here is on those women who appeared in the civil and criminal conciliation courts (usually as the plaintiff but sometimes as the defendant). Though these women constitute a distinct minority (approximately 9 percent of the 665 women who resided in Los Angeles during the 1830s and 1840s), they represent a crosssection of gente de razón (non-Indian) women (500) and Indian adult females (165).^[4] They include married, widowed, and single women from impoverished, middling, and elite backgrounds.

Though recent historians have greatly enriched our understanding of the daily lives of women in Spanish and Mexican California, none has utilized court records with their abundance of first-person testimonies from women.^[5] Scholars have, with success, drawn on the narratives collected by Hubert Howe Bancroft and his assistants, but these accounts describe events long after they occurred and lack the immediacy of oral testimony describing life as it was being lived.^[6]

Drawing on sources such as court cases, which focus on adversarial relations, clearly skews our view of male and female interactions, and may suggest an inclination for men and women to engage in violent confrontations. Placing the material within its proper cultural context, however, allows for a more nuanced understanding of how and why gender relations

turned sour as well as the ways in which the community handled such strife. And, more importantly, the evidence reveals not only women's anxieties, expectations, and attitudes but also how women of different circumstances—gente de razón (non-Indians or, literally, "people of reason"), neófitos (baptized California Indians), and gentiles (unbaptized California Indians) fared in the legal system and in the broader society.^[7]

The discussion that follows begins with an examination of the gente de razón's understanding of marriage and the family, and then shows how women used local institutions to deal with heads of households who exceeded their paternal authority. The principal reasons women went to court—physical abuse, inadequate support, adultery, and unlawful coercion—receive close attention here. The essay also explores how women of different ethnicities and socioeconomic levels contended with men in the larger community who abused them, and the ways in which men responded to women's grievances. Finally, the discussion analyzes women's use of extralegal means to escape their troubled households, and shows how figures of authority sought to maintain their power.

Mexicans inherited from Spain strong convictions about the centrality of marriage and the family to the survival of civilized Catholic society. These convictions seemed self-evident to the residents of Los Angeles, a precarious and small community on the northern frontier whose gente de razón and Indian populations together barely numbered 2,300 as late as 1844.^[8] At the most elemental level, stable marriages and families produced the children who would secure the future and also ensure continuity in cultural and moral values as well as in the inheritance and transfer of property.^[9] To the clergy, marriage was a sacrament, a bond sanctified by Christ for the procreation and education of children as well as companionship. Except through death or a church-sanctioned annulment, marriages, preached the padres, remained indissoluble, even when one spouse was extremely cruel to the other.^[10] The clergy, in their goal to keep marriages intact, frequently sought the help of civil authorities and sometimes publicly berated them and went over their heads to higher officials if their support was not forthcoming.

Most local officials lacked formal legal training, but they familiarized themselves with the relevant civil codes on marriage and the family, most of them derived from Spanish laws and decrees.^[11] Permeating that law was the widely held tenet of paternal authority (patria potestas ) that came from deep in the Iberian past and was embedded in Las Siete Partidas and Leyes de Toro, thirteenth- and sixteenth-century compilations of law that located familial authority in male heads of household—fathers and husbands—the assumption being that such delegation of power ensured a well-ordered family and stable society. A man had virtually complete authority over his dependents—wife, children, and any servants in the household—who, in turn,

owed him their obedience. Qualifying a man's authority was his obligation to support, protect, and guide his dependents. The law and social mores also required a husband to respect a wife's person, but it conceded him the right to dole out mild punishment—the meaning of which varied with time, locale, and circumstance—to her and his other dependents as a way of guiding or teaching them. The ideal home (casa de honor ) was a place where husband and wife, regardless of socioeconomic status or racial and cultural identity, treated each other well, supported their dependents, practiced their religion, remained faithful to one another, and otherwise set a good example for their children.'^[12] Men who abandoned or neglected the well-being of their households or engaged in excessive punishment violated not only the law but also the norms of the community.^[13]

As members of the community, women had the right to hold men responsible for neglecting to fulfill their obligations or for exceeding their power and authority as heads of households. To deal with such men, women sometimes felt compelled to turn to the Court of First Instance. Depending on the matter at issue, the tribunal convened a civil or criminal trial in the first court (juzgado primero ), presided over by the alcalde, or a conciliation trial (juicio de concilio ) in the second court (segundojuzgado ), presided over by the justice of the peace, or juez de paz. In particularly violent and abusive relationships, the alcalde—with the consent of the individual issuing the complaint, usually the woman—would order a criminal trial, treating the physical violence in the home as a crime punishable by possible imprisonment or banishment. In matters that involved so-called "light" (leve ) crimes of physical abuse or some other transgression the court considered mild, justices ordered a civil trial or conciliation hearing, in which the aggrieved and defending parties each appointed his or her hombre bueno, or good man, who served as an advisor to the court. The goal of these sessions, which were common throughout Mexico and its possessions, was to reconcile the disputing couple, thus preserving the marriage for the good of the family and social stability.^[14] In the case of an unmarried couple living together, the purpose was to separate them.^[15] In many instances, women found that these sessions functioned only as "quick fixes" that failed to restrain a consistently violent husband. Women wanting legal separations or annulments usually received a hearing in the civil branch of the court, though the clergy preferred to handle such matters through ecclesiastical channels.

In the criminal, civil, and conciliation courts, women voiced a host of complaints against heads of households. Married women complained about husbands who physically abused them, failed to support them and their children, and otherwise set a bad example in the household. Luisa Domínguez's troubles with her spouse are representative. In 1843, she went to the conciliation court, complaining to the justice of the peace about her husband ángel Pollorena. "My husband's treatment is insufferable," she told

the judge and the hombres buenos. "At every moment he beats me [and] I ask for a separation." To prove how badly she had been abused, she exposed her body to the court, revealing the scars left from the wounds. Pollorena, also present in the court, responded, "my wife is a bad woman." "The fight began after I punished one of her children," he explained, "and, as she has [already] had three children outside of our marriage, she wants to return to the same [behavior]." "I have had two children outside of the marriage," Domínguez admitted, but "now that I am with him he does not support me."

The judge and hombres buenos believed that the marriage could be saved and ordered the couple to attempt a reconciliation. "I agree to reunite with my husband," replied Domínguez, but "with the condition that he treat me well, not punish excessively my children, or give them a bad example." Pollorena accepted her demands, though he, too, set a condition. "I promise to educate the children, comply with my obligations, and forget the past as long as she [is] prudent." To ensure that Pollorena kept his promise to Domínguez, the judge appointed several men to keep close watch over his behavior.^[16]

Complaints like those of Luisa Domínguez often accompanied accusations of infidelity from women as well as men. Adultery, which the authorities treated as a criminal act and flagrant threat to marriage and the family, prompted women to appeal to the conciliation court and, if they felt especially wronged, to file civil or criminal charges against their husbands. Sometimes they even asked for the indictment of his accomplice on the grounds that the other woman had provoked the marital troubles. In 1844, Francisca Pérez accused her husband and his lover (amasia ) of adultery, telling the judge that the other woman had "caused my husband's infidelity and refusal to give me sustenance."^[17] Marina García likewise informed a judge in 1845 that she had a "bad life with my husband Francisco Limón because of Manuela Villa, who is living" with him.^[18] To ensure an end to these relations, wives demanded the banishment of such women. "Having caught my husband in flagrante delicto with Nicolasa Careaga," Marta Reyes told the justice of the peace in 1843, "I ask that [the court] punish him and banish her from the town." When Reyes's husband admitted that he was "at fault" and "put himself at the court's disposal," the judge, with the agreement of the hombres buenos, ordered him to "treat his wife well" and sent Careaga to an undisclosed destination.^[19]

A woman's decision to file a formal complaint against her spouse for abuse or adultery did not come quickly or easily. In most instances, women turned to the courts only after a prolonged period of contentious relations. Their testimony is usually filled with numerous examples of earlier abuse. Typical were Ramona Vejar and Luz Figueroa, who, in the criminal court, described years of mistreatment. "My husband Tomás Urquides," Vejar stated to the alcalde in 1842, "hits me because of Dolores Valenzuela

[with whom he] has been living . . . for more than two years. . . . He has hit me so many times with a rope or whatever else he can find that I can not recall the exact number." Witnesses verified Vejar's account and also testified that Urquides had fathered a child with Valenzuela. Urquides admitted knowing Valenzuela but denied having an affair with her. He also acknowledged hitting his wife, though he said he did so in order to correct her insolence. "One day, she came to my mother's house," he informed the court, "looking for someone, and when I asked her what or whom she wanted, she responded, 'I am looking for that [sexually promiscuous woman] who is your friend and your mother who is an alcahueta [a mediator between lovers].' . . . I only hit her when she gives me cause to do so," he insisted, "not because [Valenzuela] tells me to do so; I do so when she neglects the children or leaves without my permission."

When Valenzuela was called to testify and admitted to a long affair with Urquides, the judge moved quickly to end the relationship. He ordered Valenzuela's banishment: she had to live at least ten leagues (thirty-five miles) from the town in a casa de honor where she and her children would be watched. Urquides, on the other hand, received only a reprimand for "correcting" his wife and a fine of ten pesos for his sexual misconduct. Within six months, Vejar was back in court complaining that Urquides had returned to his old habits. "I ran to take shelter [from him] in a nearby home," she told the judge, "but he pulled me out, beat me, and then tied me up with a rope." Before the authorities could apprehend him, Urquides fled from the town, forcing the authorities to drop the case until he could be located.^[20]

Like Ramona Vejar, Luz Figueroa experienced years of abuse from her husband, Juan Riera. Figueroa's problems, however, lasted more than a decade, culminating in 1849 with flight from her husband and an appeal for help from the local priest. "What should I do?" she asked him. His response: "return to your husband." Dutifully, she returned to the household only to be beaten again by her husband. This time she turned to the court for help, describing for the judge her husband's years of abuse and his latest attack. He "picked up a leather rope and he struck me once in the face, and did so repeatedly on my back," she stated. "Luckily I was able to escape . . . and found help in a nearby house. But soon my husband found me, and pulled me from the house, dragging me through the streets and telling me to follow him or else he would kill me with the knife he pulled out of his pants." She showed the judge the scars that the many beatings had left on her body. "What [punishment] do you request for your husband for having beaten and publicly humiliated you?" asked the judge. "I request his banishment from this city because I fear that a grave injury may happen to me. He has always given me a miserable life, and in the twelve years I have been married to this man, there have been numerous relapses into his bad habits."^[21] The judge ordered the arrest of Riera whom he questioned and then imprisoned

pending a full criminal investigation. What that investigation revealed is unknown, since the surviving records indicate only that Riera was freed but not the reasons why. What is clear was Luz Figueroa's attempt to have him removed from her life.

Women challenged not only abusive and unfaithful husbands but also coercive fathers. Though fewer women issued complaints against fathers than husbands, those who did so frequently won the support of local authorities. In 1842, for instance, Casilda Sepúlveda complained to the judge in the civil court that her father, Enrique Sepúlveda, with the support of her stepmother Matilda Trujillo and the local priest, had forced her to marry Antonio Teodoro Trujillo. She asked the judge "for the protection of the law against such an attack on my personal liberty" and to grant her an annulment. The judge examined witnesses and found that, indeed, she had been married against her will, and he nullified the marriage. The judge then informed the local priest at Mission San Gabriel, Tomás Estenaga, of his actions, prompting Estenaga, in turn, to notify Francisco García Diego y Moreno, the bishop of both Alta and Baja California, about what had occurred. The bishop, convinced that the judge had exceeded his authority by interfering in a religious matter, reacted angrily. "Judging the validity or nullity of marriage is absolutely reserved to the ecclesiastical domain," the bishop wrote to Santiago Argüello, head of the prefectura, or prefecture, the highest civil authority in southern California directly responsible to the governor.^[22] Bishop García then ordered Estenaga to speak privately with Sepúlveda and urge her to reconcile with Trujillo. If she refused to do so, then she and her relatives should go to Santa Barbara, the current residence of the bishop, and plead her case before the ecclesiastical tribunal there. At first, she balked at going, preferring to "present her reasons, in writing, to the Bishop," but under the prodding of Father Estenaga, she finally consented to go.

The hearing in Santa Barbara concluded with the bishop announcing that the marriage had been forced and annulling it. Sepúlveda's success in attaining an annulment, a rare occurrence in California and Mexico, was a triumph over paternal authority and her family's insistence that she marry a man whom she had refused as a husband.^[23] Her victory, however, did not come without consequences. Shortly after returning to Los Angeles, she was again in court complaining that her father had retaliated against her. "I don't want to return to my father's house," she declared, for "he refuses to support me[,] refuses to recognize me as his daughter[, and] wants to disinherit me. What shall I do?" The judge's response and her long-term relationship with her father and family are unknown, since the record ends abruptly. But even if the alienation from her family was short-lived, it reveals the risk that women in this frontier community took when they challenged patriarchal authority.^[24]

Sepúlveda, like all the women who used the courts to challenge male

heads of households, identified herself as a member of the gente de razón. The extant court records involving Indian women—a total of nine cases—provide no instance of a neófita (baptized Indian woman) or gentil (unbaptized Indian woman) bringing a complaint against a spouse or father. Perhaps the neófitas took their complaints against family members to the priests or governors who exercised greater direct authority over their lives than other non-Indians did. Similarly, the gentiles may have avoided the courts in favor of tribal customs when it came to similar problems. The evidence indicates, however, that Indian women did use local institutions in dealing with non-family members, both Mexican and Indian, who committed depredations against them.

Vitalacia, a married Indian woman who resided at San Gabriel Mission, was the only neófita to bring a complaint to the local court, in this case the criminal court. In 1841, she told the judge that Asención Alipas, a Mexican man who was not her husband, had "maimed and cut [her] with a knife." "Last week," she informed the court, "I was at the mission gathering wheat when Lorena [an Indian woman who worked at the mission] informed me that Alipas had arrived." With a knife in hand, he "approached me and in a derisive tone asked, 'why do you no longer want to be with me?' When I told him [again] that I didn't want to be with him anymore, he took the knife and cut my hand and my braid." Alipas told the judge, "I have been having relations with Vitalacia for about four or five years past, and have sacrificed the earnings of my work in supporting her." When "I arrived at . . . the mission . . . I saw a behavior in Vitalacia that I disliked, [and] I became violent and grabbed her, cutting her hair with a knife." The cut on her hand was of her own doing, he insisted. In "trying to take the knife away from me, she grabbed the blade, and because she refused to let go of it, I pulled on it, and she cut her fingers."^[25]

What angered the judge was their extramarital relationship. "What do you have to say about using a married woman?" he asked Alipas. "It is true," he responded. "I recognize my crime, but an offended man becomes violent." Puzzled, the judge pressed his inquiry. "What offense did she commit against you; she is not your wife." Alipas attributed his anger to Vitalacia's disregard for her obligations to him, particularly the sexual services that she owed him for his economic support. "She never appreciated that," he stated. The judge was unsympathetic. He found Alipas guilty of adultery and injuring Vitalacia and sentenced him to labor on public works. He urged Vitalacia, whom he also found guilty of adultery, to stay away from Alipas. Vitalacia's case is significant because it reveals that, although occupying a subordinate position in relation to the community of gente de razón, she used the court successfully to extricate herself from the grip of Alipas, whose gender and ethnic status would have normally placed him in a dominant position.

Women, whether neófitas, gentiles, or de razón, often had the assistance of their immediate families when they turned to the courts or other civil or religious authorities in dealing with men in the larger community. At times, family members, especially fathers or brothers, represented the women, particularly in instances of sexual assaults.^[26] The socially and politically prominent gente de razón viewed rape not only as a grave offense against a woman's reputation, or honor, but also as a stain on the family's honor. Hispanic law reflected this attitude, as it allowed male family members to kill a perpetrator who was caught in the act of rape.^[27] The threat that rape posed to elite females and their families emerged sharply in 1840 in a criminal complaint filed by María Ygnacia Elizalde, wife of the prominent José María Aguilar, a former local government official in Los Angeles who continued to have political influence.^[28] She accused Cornelio López with attempting to rape her. "López broke into my house and entered my room," she told the judge, "with the intent of wanting to use my person in the [sexual] act when he saw me alone. . . . With much struggle I managed to resist the force with which he surprised me. [It was not] until Raimundo Alanis arrived that López separated himself from me, giving me the freedom and opportunity to come [to the court] to report this."

The judge ordered a full investigation followed by a trial at which Elizalde repeated her charges. López, she testified, "tried to force me to have a [sexual act] with him, but I absolutely denied him. He told me, 'why do you not want to have relations with me? Have you not already been with others?' But I continued to resist and, eventually, he relented, but only momentarily. At that moment, he looked out the [bedroom] door to see if anyone else was around, and then returned to my bed to try and force me [to have relations]. He remained an hour, after which time he left, no doubt [because] he saw Alanis sitting outside the door. I then proceeded immediately to complain to the authorities so that they would restrain him."

When López took the stand, he denied forcing her to have sex with him. On an earlier occasion, he stated, she had promised to have relations with him, but, now, when he asked her to comply, she refused, causing him to become incensed. Making him even angrier, he declared, was the extramarital affair that she was having with another man, José Avila.

Presenting the case for the prosecution was Elizalde's husband, Aguilar. The court typically either appointed a prosecutor or asked the aggrieved parties to select one, family member or not. And, usually, those selected were socially or politically prominent in the community. "During my absence," Aguilar began, "in which I had to travel to Santa Barbara, Cornelio López took advantage of my wife's solitude, and with a bold move he profaned the home of an honorable citizen." He continued, "on the morning of the nineteenth of the past month, my wife was resting in her bed from her do-

mestic work, when suddenly Cornelio López appeared and, as if possessed with the devil and with the most obscene words, attempted to force my wife to have carnal relations; my wife, who was surprised to see this man, heroically resisted . . . this treacherous man, who . . . attempted to use her for his pleasure." López's attack, he argued, "disregarded the respect that [was] due to the institution of marriage and [that was among] the duties of a man in society." Upset about the effect of the attack on his social standing in the community, Aguilar declared that "López has made me look like a common alcahueta in public . . . and [has] offended my honor." Furthermore, he told the court, López's "immorality" had not only threatened his marriage, but also that of José Avila. To redeem the "offended honor of [my] wife and family," Aguilar asked the court to banish López for five years to the presidio (military garrison) of Sonoma "where work and reclusion," he continued, "will teach him not to commit such excesses and to respect the society in which he lives; and perhaps then he will be an honorable citizen."

The defense, headed by Juan Cristobal Vejar, argued that Elizalde's gender was to blame for López's behavior. "Man is susceptible to the inclinations of the female sex," Vejar argued. "That the defendant approached an honorable woman is not a crime." López's behavior may have been improper but not criminal. On the other hand, acknowledged Vejar, Aguilar had every right to be angry with López, for his anger is "founded on the insult that López caused by approaching his wife and disrespecting her [married] state." But, Vejar emphasized again, an insult is not a crime.

Before rendering a verdict, the judge waited for the authorities in Monterey to convene the first appellate court. Recent legislation, enacted in Mexico in 1837, required verdicts and sentences in criminal courts, including those in California, to be reviewed by a higher court.^[29] (Earlier, appeals had gone to the governor.) The Los Angeles judge waited more than two years for creation of the Superior Tribunal, composed of three justices. Following that action, the judge at last rendered a verdict on López, who all the while had been incarcerated, finding him guilty of the attempted rape of Elizalde. "For having wanted to use with violence a married woman . . . I condemn him for the public satisfaction of José María Aguilar so that the honor of this man's wife is free from damage." Since Lépez had been jailed for nearly three years, however, the judge believed he had served his sentence and so he set him free. The case then went on appeal to the Superior Tribunal, which responded with mixed approval to the courtroom proceedings as well as the sentence: "since the [court] proceedings lack the formal prerequisites that are necessary in overseeing personal injury cases . . . and given the time that Cornelio López has suffered in prison, the judge's decision to free López is approved." López deserved freedom, the Superior Tribunal continued, "not because of the [need for] public satisfaction" of

José Maria Aguilar, but because the Los Angeles judge had committed a procedural error that mandated López's release. To the tribunal in Monterey, the law took precedence over redeeming the honor of Aguilar and Elizalde.^[30]

While sexual assaults by Mexican men on Mexican women were considered an affront to the honor of the women and their families, similar attacks on unbaptized Indian women brought dishonor only to the Mexican men and their relatives. Indian women were seen as lesser beings possessing no honor or esteem that could be insulted. This was the message of a rape case involving an Indian woman in 1844. That year a gentil named Anacleto accused two Los Angeles residents, Domingo Olivas, an assistant of the court, and Ygnacio Varelas, a friend of Olivas, of raping his wife at their ranchería near San Bernardino. Anacleto filed his charges with the local judge in San Bernardino, José del Carmen Lugo, who gathered additional evidence and then persuaded a Los Angeles judge to hold a criminal hearing at which Lugo presented his findings. According to Anacleto and other witnesses, Lugo informed the judge, the incident occurred shortly after Olivas and Varelas arrived at the rancheria with the intent of taking Anacleto to the court in Los Angeles (for reasons that do not appear in the public record). They found Anacleto, who was blind, and his wife inside their home. The two then "took the woman," Lugo told the judge, "and used her by force, threatening her with a knife and saying they wanted to kill them both." About this time, "some Indians and a Mexican approached" whom Varelas threatened with the knife." When the "men warned Varelas that they were going to inform the local authorities about what had occurred, he fled the scene."^[31]

Varelas challenged Lugo's testimony, insisting that he and Olivas had not sexually assaulted the woman. Rather, they had offered her money for sexual relations, and she had consented. When Olivas testified, however, he contradicted Varelas and admitted to the crime which he attributed to drunkenness. Prior to the incident, he and Varelas had drunk aguardiente (locally brewed alcohol) that blurred their senses and led to the "lewd acts." He begged that the crime not be made public. "In view of my remorse and frank confession, please consider that I am married and have children, and I live in good harmony with my family. Therefore, I ask and beg you that this situation not be made public." He also pleaded with the judge for "a punishment that is prudent and discreet."

The judge was moved by Olivas's appeal. "The confession and guilt of Olivas and Varelas have been established," the judge ruled. "The former has violated a woman by force and the latter was his accomplice. I should condemn Olivas to service in public works," he declared, "but in order not to disrupt his marriage [or] . . . harm . . . his minor children . . . I order Olivas to pay a fine of twenty pesos and his accomplice to pay ten." The judge made no effort to compensate the Indian woman for her (or her family's) loss of

honor, nor did he, in fact, make any reference to a dishonored household. He obviously placed greater value on Olivas's public reputation and family life than on the crime committed against a gentil woman or on her reputation. Clearly, gender along with ethnic and class biases influenced the court's decision in this matter. How often the court demonstrated such prejudices is unclear, since the extant records are incomplete and this is the only surviving case illustrating such biases. Further research in other materials, including the legal records of communities elsewhere, should shed additional light on this important issue.

Beyond dispute is the evidence showing that both Mexican women and neófitas devised extralegal means to contend with figures of authority whose abuses were not effectively checked by local authorities. Some women simply fled from violent households. In 1845, María Presentación Navarro, a single Mexican woman, left her home in Los Angeles because she feared the wrath of her angry father. Earlier that year, she and Antonio Reina, a married Indian man who befriended her father and family, had engaged in sexual relations that resulted in her becoming pregnant. Frightened of her father's reaction, she asked Reina to "help me escape from my father's side. . . . I fear that he will kill me." Reina took her to Rosarito in Baja California. Learning of their flight, her father asked the authorities to apprehend them and to punish Reina who, he believed, "has forcibly pulled her away from her family."^[32]

The couple were captured and returned to Los Angeles where a full investigation and trial soon got under way. During the trial, the judge not only learned about the reasons for their flight but also about the tense relations between Navarro and her father. Recognizing Navarro's physical danger as well as the possibility that, in her emotional distress, she or perhaps even her father might kill the child, the judge ordered her "put in reclusion [in a casa de honor] . . . under the care of the owners of the house, [who] will oversee her pregnancy so that an infanticide will not be committed." Keeping her from the public's view would also lessen her and her family's dishonor in the larger community. As for Reina who had impregnated Navarro, the judge "banished [him] to the port of San Diego until Navarro reaches estado [twenty-five years of age] or leaves the municipality."

While the majority of flights involved Mexican women, neófitas also ran away from abusive households. And they, too, had to deal with disapproving male figures of authority, particularly husbands. In 1841, Manuela, a married neófita, left Los Angeles and fled to her mother's home at Las Flores rancheria because of prolonged mistreatment by her husband, a Mexican man. She employed a ruse to escape, asking him for permission to go to the center of town and then hiding in a nearby house, waiting for an opportunity to leave the pueblo. When two men approached on horseback, she asked them to take her to her mother's home at Las Flores. They agreed, but

in the meantime her husband alerted the authorities, who apprehended her at Las Flores and took her back to Los Angeles where she was brought before the judge. When asked why she had left her household, Manuela explained that her husband "always hits me and has me locked up." The judge refused to believe her, concluding that the two men had seduced and then coerced her into leaving her spouse. He ordered Manuela to return to her husband, found the two men guilty of abducting a married woman, and sentenced them to labor several months on public works. Though the court thwarted Manuela's effort to flee her abusive husband, she had nonetheless been willing to chance an escape.^[33]

Some women took even more drastic measures to get away from an unsafe environment. Rather than fleeing Los Angeles, they took up with other men in the town. By cohabiting with these men, they brought down on their heads the wrath not only of their husbands but also of religious and civil authorities and the entire community. Petra Varela's decision to leave her spouse for another man in 1847 resulted in her husband, Esteban López, bringing charges of illegal cohabitation and adultery against her and Antonio Valencia, a former employee of the household. "I found my wife and Antonio Valencia locked up in a bedroom," López reported to the criminal court, "and while I overlooked this incident, since then they have continued with their relations. I finally decided to leave the household," he continued, "and yet Valencia remained living there, giving a bad example to the family." When the judge questioned Varela about her behavior, she denied the charges. Valencia "is my servant," she told him. "Since the day he arrived he has consulted only with me; everything [in the household] belongs to me." Though she initially denied having relations with Valencia, under closer questioning she finally admitted to cohabiting with him. Her explanation: "my husband is disinterested and doesn't work . . . and fails to support me." Witnesses corroborated her complaints, testifying that her husband had not supported her for years, forcing her to work in order to pay household expenses, including the wages of several laborers. Even then, she had fallen into debt. López's failure to fulfill his obligations, she argued, had absolved her of any sexual obligations to him and freed her to live with Valencia. The judge held otherwise. "Petra Varela must reunite with her husband and carry out her obligations of matrimony," he ordered. As for her husband López, he "must [meet his obligations] because there are indications that he does not fulfill [his duties]." To guard against a reoccurrence of the incident, the judge banished Valencia to the port of Loreto in Baja California.^[34]

Religious authorities also vigorously condemned sexual improprieties like those of Varela and Valencia. When Juana Gómez left her husband in 1837 for another man, the clergy, as was their custom, denounced the couple and used the occasion to preach about the moral evils of adultery. Gó-

mez had abandoned her unhappy marriage in Sonora and gone north to live with Manuel Arzaga in Los Angeles, taking her two children with her. When Tomás Estenaga, the same Mission San Gabriel priest who had been involved in the Casilda Sepúlveda case, discovered that the couple were living as "husband" and "wife," he went to Narciso Durán, head of the ecclesiastical tribunal in Santa Barbara, and obtained permission to ask the civil authorities to end the scandalous relationship. "Arzaga is living with a Sonoran woman named Juana . . . and cohabits with her as if she is his proper wife," Estenaga wrote to Gil Ybarra, a local judge, whom he urged to apprehend the woman and confine her at San Gabriel Mission until her husband could take her home. Ybarra promptly approved the request.

With Gómez under the watch of the priest at San Gabriel, Ybarra traveled there to ascertain the reasons for her behavior. "Who is your spouse? Please state his name and where you were married." "I am a married woman," she responded. "They say I married in Sonora and [that] my husband is there, but it is false. . . . I consider Manuel Arzaga to be my husband. Since the first time we have been together, he has supported and maintained me and I have lived with him." Her explanation did nothing to change the civil and religious authorities' view that she and Arzaga had committed adultery. Durán declared them to be "sacrilegious profaners of holy sacraments," and recommended that she "be restored to the authority of her legitimate husband who will either forgive her or demand that she receive the appropriate punishment, which shall be best, as it will serve as a lesson to all." Judge Ybarra accepted Durán's recommendation, ordering Gómez to return to her husband and banishing Arzaga to San Diego, forbidding him to have contact with her.^[35]

Attempts to leave households sometimes led to violence. This was the experience of Ysabel, an orphaned Navajo woman, who, in 1843, attempted to depart from the family that had adopted her in infancy and raised her to be a servant. Ysabel was considered a genízara, or detribalized Christian Indian. In Abiquiu, New Mexico, the family's point of origin, genízaros were captured Indians, most often Navajo and Apache, whom Spanish raiders sold or exchanged for payments in cash or in kind. As spoils of war, they were pressed into domestic service and, for all practical purposes, were slaves.^[36]

After toiling nearly her entire life for Guadalupe Trujillo and her family in New Mexico and, later, San Gabriel, Ysabel made plans to leave. The first sign of her intention was her refusal one day in 1843 to complete her household chores. Trujillo reacted angrily to the disobedience. "Why do you refuse to do what I say? Since you haven't cooked the meal, why don't you go and complete the wash," she demanded. "I don't want to, I don't want to be with you any longer, I want to go wherever I please," Ysabel declared in defiance. "Why is it that the Indian women from the mission work less than

I do and [they] have skirts made of indianilla [presumably a fine cloth]? I am leaving the household." "You are not free to go anywhere because I have raised you since you were a child," Trujillo retorted. "I am too free," Ysabel countered. At that instant, Ysabel ran and grabbed a knife from the kitchen and threatened to use it. Alarmed, Trujillo asked, "what are you doing with that knife?" "You'll see," Ysabel responded. Trujillo then tried to take the knife away, and in the ensuing struggle Ysabel's throat was slashed and she fell to the floor, dying a short time later. The Los Angeles court, while not finding Trujillo guilty of murder, nonetheless concluded that she had unnecessarily contributed to Ysabel's death and banished her to Sonoma for three years. On appeal, the Superior Tribunal agreed that Trujillo had committed a crime but it believed that mitigating circumstances called for a different sentence. "It has been proven that Guadalupe Trujillo killed her servant, and for such an act deserves punishment; but as the [punishment] should fit the crime and as the crime Trujillo committed was a homicide done in self defense . . . [we] revoke the sentence of three years of seclusion." Instead, the tribunal ordered her to the port of San Diego for one year, allowing her to remain in proximity to her family in the San Gabriel-Los Angeles region.^[37]

The evidence adduced in this paper from the court records of Mexican Los Angeles show that women—Mexican, neófita, and gentil—suffered from discrimination. That same evidence, however, reveals that the discrimination faced by women of different ethnicities and socioeconomic levels did not prevent them from challenging and sometimes checking patriarchal authority whether manifested in the law, government, church, or family. The court cases demonstrate that women took legal and, sometimes, extralegal measures to protect themselves from men who abused them, neglected to provide for them, or unlawfully coerced them. While some women turned to the civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical courts for help, others took matters into their own hands and fled from intolerable lives at home even at the risk of severe punishment by secular and religious officials as well as family members. Despite frequently oppressive laws and cultural norms, there were women—Mexican and Native American—who boldly sought a better life for themselves and their families.

16—
Japanese American Women and the Creation of Urban Nisei Culture in the 1930s

Valerie J. Matsumoto

Poring over pictures of Shirley Temple and Marlene Dietrich in the newspapers, listening to Cab Calloway, and dreaming of dashing suitors and romantic evenings, young urban Nisei women of the 1930s were enthusiastic participants in popular youth culture, ingeniously coping with the limitations imposed by depression-era economics and West Coast racial barriers. They formed Girl Scout troops and baseball teams; they sent their poems to the ethnic newspapers and waltzed at Nisei club dances. For most of the twentieth century, historians and social scientists would have interpreted this behavior as part of a debate about whether or not ethnic Americans wanted to "assimilate" into the dominant society. More recently, scholars such as Vicki Ruíz and Judy Yung have reinterpreted the activities of second-generation women as a process of drawing from many possible models in creating their own cultural forms; Ruíz has termed the process "cultural coalescence."^[1] This essay examines the ways in which Japanese American women in 1930s Los Angeles engaged in cultural coalescence, giving rise to a vibrant urban, generational culture. To understand girls' and women's engagement in the creation of an urban Nisei world, it is necessary to study their impressive array of peer networks. The importance of such peer support emerges in sharp relief from young women's negotiation of the multiple pressures and influences they faced in the arenas of work, recreation, courtship, and ethnic cultural activities.

Women played energetic roles in pre-World War II Japanese American communities of the West Coast, where the majority of Issei immigrants had settled. The largest of these enclaves was Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, the focus of my research. The English-language sections of the Los Angeles Japanese American newspapers vividly reveal the variety of Nisei women's involvement in urban ethnic culture. The Kashu Mainichi (Japan-California

Daily News), one of the two largest Japanese American newspapers in southern California, was particularly noted for its extensive literary section, in which the Nisei found a welcoming forum for their poetry, fiction, and essays. Edited by Nisei, the English-language section itself constituted a kind of peer network, announcing milestones and club meetings, and facilitating discourse on a range of topics relevant to the second generation. The ongoing discussion of women's roles generated particularly lively, sometimes heated, reader response.

In the early twentieth century, gender role shifts stirred debate within ethnic communities as well as in the larger society over appropriate female activities. Vigorous club movements proliferated among black and white women, as middle-class matrons moved assertively into the public sphere, taking leading roles in Progressive reform. The "New Woman" emerged, hailed with pride and hope by feminists and viewed with alarm by conservatives who predicted the disintegration of the family and the American character. Yet both feminists and conservatives were disconcerted by the most flamboyant and youthful embodiment of the New Woman, the flapper, who seemed to combine personal independence and income with consumerism, lack of social responsibility, and overt sexuality. While probably only a fraction of middle-class European American women truly matched public expectations or fears about the "Jazz Baby," some of the attributes of the New Woman filtered across class and racial lines.

My research on Japanese American women, like Yung's and Ruíz's findings about Chinese American women and Mexican American women, reveals that a considerable number bobbed their hair and rebelled against parentally proscribed gender-role strictures. While remaining steadfast contributors to the family economy, they also hoped to choose their own spouses, enjoyed mainstream entertainment, and organized a variety of Nisei girls' and women's clubs. Their synthesis of interwar notions of "modern" femininity was, of course, complicated by racial discrimination in the larger society and by their ethnic community's own views with regard to female behavior. Nowhere did their efforts to come to terms with differing sets of expectations become more evident than in the urban setting of Little Tokyo.

Little Tokyo in Los Angeles served as a major cultural hub for the Issei and Nisei in southern California, growing rapidly in the two decades before World War II. Japantowns emerged in San Francisco, Seattle, Sacramento, Tacoma, and Salt Lake City, but Los Angeles boasted the largest. In 1910 the Census Bureau recorded 8,641 Japanese Americans living in Los Angeles County. By 1930 the number had swelled to 35,000, of whom half were American-born Nisei. The majority of these Nikkei (or persons of Japanese descent) resided in the area known as "Lil' Tokio," clustered around First and San Pedro Streets not far from City Hall. They ran shops and restaurants, and worked at the heart of the produce business, the City Market at

Ninth and San Pedro. The prospect of living in this bustling, vigorous community thrilled Nisei newcomer Mary Korenaga, who initially viewed California—and Los Angeles more specifically—as "the land of opportunity and fortune, the land of eternal sunshine and flower, and the land where the eyes of the Nisei are focused."^[2]

To Korenaga and many of her peers, city life glittered with the allure of modernity and excitement. Indeed, Nisei Ellen Tanna revealed in a prosepoem her identification with the urban ethnic enclave, likening it to a young woman, perhaps the sort of woman she envisioned herself to be: "Little Tokio stands poised, a modern maid . . . her arms flung wide to life and the world . . . eager, facing the sun . . . alive to the encompassing occidental sophistication . . . aware and youthfully impatient of aged traditions and hovering elders. . . . "^[3] In personifying Little Tokyo as a feminine gypsy, jeweled with light, serenaded, "the happiness of her own pulsing and sensuous . . . ," Tanna also wove a lively and romantic image of urban Nisei womanhood.

In contrast to Japanese American farm women, whose lives Evelyn Nakano Glenn characterizes as having retained "traditional peasant values," urban Nisei daughters had more comfortable, less arduous childhoods.^[4] Like their rural counterparts, they helped out in the home and family business, but they were more likely to have free time and, like the urban Mexican American women Ruiz has studied, greater access to commercialized leisure.^[5] As Mei Nakano suggests, the prewar period could be "a heady time for urban Nisei females, filled with the scent of gardenias, and the excitement of romance and dating."^[6] Certainly the packed social calendar of the Los Angeles Kashu Mainichi reflected their opportunities to engage in a range of cultural, recreational, athletic, and social service activities within the ethnic community.

By and large, the Nisei were a very young group. In 1930, the bulk of the second generation in Los Angeles County were under twenty-one years old. In 1934, a journalist reported that the majority of the Nisei in the United States were between the ages of fifteen and eighteen.^[7] Regardless of their youth, most Nisei did not lack responsibilities.

The labor of second-generation girls and adolescents proved essential to the support of the family wage economy and the ethnic community. City girls often helped clean and operate family businesses within the Japanese American enclave, sweeping a tofu shop, waiting on restaurant customers, or stocking the shelves of a grocery store. Girls' chores also included housework, from which their brothers were exempt, in addition to the supervision of younger siblings.

As adults, many Nisei women—like other racial-ethnic and working-class women—faced limited job prospects made grimmer by the fact that work outside the home was rarely a choice and more often a necessity. In the

prewar period, three narrow paths led urban Japanese American women to jobs inside the ethnic community, work outside the enclave, or—for a small minority—the pursuit of opportunities in Japan. One writer termed them, "Three Roads and None Easy."^[8]

Because of racial barriers and the Great Depression, full-time employment opportunities were limited, both within and outside Little Tokyo. Like their Chinese American peers, most Nisei found that in the larger job market, factors of race (and in the case of women, gender) outweighed their education and English proficiency.^[9] Educated women and men alike faced a discouraging paucity of jobs. "The chief problem of every nisei grad is that of vocation," asserted T. Roku Sugahara in a 1935 article. Although he believed it was not impossible to "find an opening in the greater community," he aimed to persuade the second generation to consider the "wonderful opportunities" in agriculture and fishing, or in revitalizing the flower markets and other businesses of Little Tokyo.^[10] The dearth of options led to a competitive scramble for the more desirable positions in the ethnic enclave.

A small number of Nisei women filled the needs of ethnic professionals and merchants for secretaries and clerks. Women coveted such positions, as Monica Sone recalled from her youth in Seattle: "I knew that the Nisei girls competed fiercely among themselves for white-collar jobs in the Mitsui and Mitsubishi branch firms downtown, local newspaper establishments, Japanese banks, shipping offices and small export and import firms."^[11] Some women, like Yoshiko Hosoi Sakurai, channeled their skills into a family business: after graduation from high school, she worked with her parents to operate Mansei An, a popular Little Tokyo udon (noodles) and sushi shop.^[12] Others worked as teachers, nurses, seamstresses, and beauticians within the ethnic community.

Domestic work proved the most readily available work outside the urban Japanese American enclave. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn found, domestic work constituted the primary area of nonagricultural wage-paid labor for Issei and Nisei women. In 1941, the Japanese YWCA in San Francisco estimated that two out of every five young women worked in domestic service.^[13] This pattern persisted: during the war, the greatest number of jobs advertised in the internment camps were domestic positions recently vacated by black and white women flocking to better-paid defense and industrial work.

It is difficult to estimate how many Nisei women and men decided to seek their fortunes in Japan. Judy Yung notes that more second-generation Chinese Americans than Mexican Americans or Japanese Americans set their sights on working in their parents' homeland.^[14] The ongoing discussion of opportunities abroad in the Japanese American newspapers of Los Angeles and San Francisco suggests that at least some gave it serious consideration. A 1926 interview with a Nisei collegian specializing in secretarial work underscores the limitations of the U.S. job market. She said, "After I graduate,

what can I do here? No American firm will employ me. All I can hope to become here is a bookkeeper in one of the little Japanese dry goods stores in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles, or else become a stenographer to the Japanese lawyer here."^[15] Instead she planned to go to Japan where a job in a large shipping company awaited her. Two of her Nisei women friends also intended to journey to Japan to teach English.

The smallest, yet most visible group of Nisei to turn their ambitions toward Japan were those pursuing careers in entertainment and the performing arts. Thwarted by racial barriers in the United States, some found a warm reception abroad. In 1932 the Kashu Mainichi reported that singer Agnes Miyakawa, violinist Alice Katayama, and pianist Lillian Katayama were "creating a sensational hit in the winter musical debut," and that Kyoko Inoue had gotten a role in a Japanese movie. Concluded the editor, "Japan is indeed the land of opportunity for the second generation who are talented in some special line of endeavor."^[16] The large majority of Nisei women and men, however, cast their economic lot with the land of their birth.

Because Nisei women not only brought wages into the family but also notions of how they might be spent, consumerism constituted a second expression of their significance in creating urban ethnic culture. Since the rise of advertising and mass media in the early twentieth century, women have been targeted for the sale of appliances, cosmetics, movies, clothing, home furnishings, and food. The reach of mainstream newspapers, magazines, radio, and film in the 1920s and 1930s made the latest consumer goods and popular icons appealing and familiar to a national audience, including Nisei girls like the protagonist of a Hisaye Yamamoto short story, "A Day in Little Tokyo." When a family beach outing is preempted by a sumo tournament, thirteen-year-old Chisato Kushida kills time in Little Tokyo by buying a newspaper, reading the "funnies," and poring over pictures of Marion Davies and Jeannette McDonald. Chisato wishes she had stayed home to listen to "the weekly fairy tale from New York City [on the radio], with kids like Billy and Florence Halop and Albert Alley always perfect in every story."^[17] Finally she begins to sing the Cream of Wheat advertising jingle, which she knows by heart.

Urban Nisei women, within their means, tried to keep abreast of current fashions in clothing and cosmetics. In Little Tokyo, a number of beauty salons competed for their patronage. In 1934, the Ginza Beauty Salon lured customers with "specials on shampoo and finger waves every Wednesday" and proudly announced, "The salon, to assure perfect service, now has with them another Nisei operator Miss Marion Miyamoto, who has attended the Paramount Beauty College."^[18] In addition, for those desiring instruction, a Miss Brain (who appears to have been a European American consultant) would demonstrate "fine cosmetics" and give makeup analyses.

Nisei discussions about cosmetics, as well as fads like gum chewing and

cigarette smoking, reflect more than the second-generation women's participation in popular trends; they also show their staging of the debate over the boundaries of sanctioned female behavior and appearance among their peers. For example, in a newspaper column on lipstick, Alice Suzuki invoked and poked fun at romantic imagery: "In olden times ladies used their ring for the seal of true love, but modern women leave their red lip-prints on the cheeks of the gallant knights—which have caused many heartbreaks and trips to Reno." Although she warned against the excessive use of "loud" red, she concluded by asserting women's right to employ cosmetic enhancement: "it is imperative that ladies must have lip-sticks and indulge in them."^[19]

Suzuki's writing reveals some ambivalence, even as she stakes claims to broader parameters of acceptable behavior for "modern women," including practices considered the purview of men. Utilizing and dismissing imagery often applied stereotypically to Asian and Asian American women, she notes, "In this day and age when women are no longer the dainty little creatures that used to flutter about like butterflies, it is not surprising to see them acquiring the habits of the male in landslide fashion. Take smoking, for example. . . . What is good for the men should be good for the women." She concludes, however, by declaring, "And now that we have granted the point that it is all right for women to smoke, may we suggest that they try smoking Havana cigars and be real, real men, or try a pipe—and smell like one."^[20] Her words convey the sense of smoking as unfeminine, a prevailing sentiment within the prewar Japanese American community. Another Nisei columnist commented that a "[m] ajority of the [ Japanese American] homes have a 'tabu' on women smoking."^[21] Playwright Wakako Yamauchi has remarked that smoking was one of the things that "nice girls" didn't do.^[22] Perhaps because of this, fewer Nisei women than men became regular smokers.

As Vicki Ruíz has skillfully delineated, female participation in popular culture was complicated for non-white women by the multiple pressures they faced within the family, the ethnic community, and the larger society.^[23] At times, Nisei daughters, like their Mexican American sisters, felt torn between powerful mainstream notions of modernity and romance on one hand, and the feminine ideals inculcated by strict parents reared in another country (in this case, Meiji-Era Japan) on the other. As they struggled to integrate popular and parental values, they introduced a range of gender-role issues into the Japanese American community.

The tensions between competing notions of womanhood emerged most clearly in the discourse over romance and marriage—a discourse in which Nisei women took a vocal role. Like their mothers and most U.S. women then, they expected a future centering around marriage and family. In contrast to Issei women, they expected their marital relations to be based on romantic attraction and individual choice—the hallmarks of mainstream

ideals—as well as duty. Their preoccupation with "love" reflected the influence of popular literature, songs, and movies. As Lucille Morimoto wrote:

To-night
I want to feel your nearness,
To hear your husky voice fade into a whisper,
To me they will be like the sweetness of honey,
The cool breeze on my feverish face.^[24]

Margaret Uchiyamada likewise yearned and burned in cinematic style, as she lamented in a 1933 verse:

There's a reason why I cry at night
And writhe with pain in my heart,
While I curse the intervening miles
That relentlessly keep us apart.
I know that it's foolish to lie here and dream.
And wipe eyes that will not be dry,
But memories are all that I have left
Since the night we kissed good-bye.^[25]

Yet even while testifying to the popularity of heterosexual romantic ideals, one Los Angeles columnist, "Mme. Yamato Nadeshiko," deplored their impact. Her diatribe also underscored the effectiveness of mainstream media as a vehicle for these rosy notions. She felt that "seeing too many movies" and "reading too many novels" had caused Nisei women to harbor unrealistic dreams of "tall stalwart sons of men, bronzed by desert's noonday heat and whipped by bitter rain and hail. Hearts of gold, strength of steel, romantic Romeos." She warned women not to wait for a "Sir Galahad" but to recognize the "everyday heroes [who] exist all about us."^[26] Another columnist who identified herself as "a deb" similarly mused, "The trouble with us is—we build too many air castles. And we pick on a man, the dream of our 'teens as the 'one and only'—who not only seems sincere, but can do no wrong. But that's being over romantic and over idealized. Sort of dangerous, don't you think?" She advised her peers "to be hardboiled towards love" because "we're just bound to undergo some of its misfortunes."^[27] Her admonition transmitted not only caution about, but also an expectation of, romantic love.

Given these aims, it is not surprising that second-generation women increasingly challenged the practice of arranged marriage in favor of "love marriage." As Nakano Glenn states, "With the loosening of traditional family controls, the urban nisei had moved toward the ideal of 'free marriage' by the mid 1930s."^[28] Nisei women, who had far less veto power over the choice of marital partners than Nisei men, wrote frequently to Nisei advice columnist "Deirdre" to rail against arranged matches.^[29] Extensive and heated

dialogues among readers often raged for weeks in the popular San Francisco newspaper column. In a 1934 article in the Los Angeles Kashu Mainichi, Mary Korenaga passionately decried such unions, asking rhetorically if Nisei should allow themselves to "become a breeding machine to which we are forced by the third party merely for the purpose of keeping the world populated? Are we to lose emotions which we have harbored merely to become a human mechanism on the order of the common ant?" "No!" she declared. "A thousand times, No!"^[30] The priority Korenaga placed on individual choice and romantic love mirrors the Nisei's embrace of mainstream ideals of companionate marriage.

Wedding announcements also revealed the adoption of mainstream female rituals: The Kashu Mainichi reported in 1932 that Masao Oshima, who would soon "middle-aisle it with Mr. Eddie Izumi . . . was honored at a linen shower" hosted by her friends.^[31] In the same year, Yaeno Sakai was feted with a china shower given by "her feminine acquaintances."^[32] The ethnic newspapers also began to take note of honeymoons, as in the case of newlyweds Shigeo and Florence Kato who planned to go to the Grand Canyon.^[33] By the 1930s, the honeymoon was another mainstream middle-class practice followed by the second generation, or at least by those who were affluent enough.

Ironically, the dominant society not only broadened but also constrained Nisei marital choices, which were made within the framework established by state codification of racial discrimination, strikingly embodied in the anti-miscegenation laws that Peggy Pascoe examines. Like their mothers, Nisei women retained values of duty and obligation and expected to marry men of their own racial-ethnic group. This stemmed not only from the strong preference of the Japanese American community, but also from the even stronger opposition of the dominant society. In 1880 California's anti-miscegenation law was amended to include Asians. The marriage of a white person to a "Negro, mulatto, Mongolian or Malay" was illegal until the overturn of the law in 1948. By the 1930s, fourteen states—including Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming—had anti-miscegenation laws aimed at Asian immigrants and their children.^[34] In the arena of marital choice, as in other social and economic arenas, the Nisei remained highly conscious of the boundaries of race and gender.

Nisei women played a significant if sometimes stereotypical role as representatives of ethnic culture, both within and outside the Japanese American community. Kimono-clad young women and girls became a vivid image to other Nisei as well as to non-Japanese American schoolmates. As wartime events would subsequently show, European Americans on the whole viewed the Nisei as foreigners garbed in exotic robes. Ironically, unless they were learning traditional dance, most Nisei were unaccustomed to wearing kimonos, pulled out on rare occasions from mothball-filled trunks. Novelist

Yoshiko Uchida wove this situation into a scene in which an Issei mother helps her daughter and two other Nisei girls dress in kimonos for an International Club program at the daughter's high school:

The girls gasped for breath as Hana tightened the obi around their chests and tried to ease the pressure with their fingers. They stumbled clumsily about the room as the thongs of the zori dug at the flesh between their toes. Hana smiled at their awkwardness. Although wrapped in silken grace, their unaccustomed bodies resisted, and at least in Hana's eyes, they did not look like anything other than foreigners in Japanese dress.^[35]

To Hana, an Issei, the Japanese kimono in fact reveals the Nisei's "Americanness."

The teenaged Nisei protagonist of Yamamoto's story also retains a striking image of girls in kimono. Remembering a program of traditional Japanese dance performed in Little Tokyo, Chisato feels envious of "the child dancers with their faces painted dead white, their blackened eyebrows and bright red bee-stung lips. They seemed a world apart in their brilliant silken kimonos, in their gliding movements to the plucked music and wailing song, in their convoluted wigs adangle with chains of cherry blossoms."^[36] While Chisato considers them "privileged" to take odori lessons, it is also clear that she regards them as inhabiting "a world apart" from her in their elaborate costumes and makeup, as they dance to a "wailing" music quite different in rhythm and key from the Cream of Wheat song that she had memorized. From Chisato's point of view, becoming a performer of traditional dance seems glamorous and means receiving approving applause from the ethnic community; but it also appears somewhat alien.

To some Issei parents, the proper wearing of a kimono and the study of traditional dance became intertwined with socializing their daughters to behave with modest feminine grace. Ko Wakatsuki, the father of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, co-author of Farewell to Manzanar, fell into this camp. He became furious when he learned that Jeanne, dressed in a Dorothy Lamourstyle sarong, had been voted the high school carnival queen of 1947. In desperation he tried to bargain with her, saying, "You want to be a carnival queen? I tell you what. I'll make a deal with you. You can be the queen if you start odori lessons at the Buddhist Church as soon as school is out."^[37] Both Jeanne and her father knew, however, that it was too late for these classes to have the effect on her that her father desired.

Issei parents like Ko Wakatsuki worried about the impression their daughters would make not only on European American society but also within the ethnic enclave. In addition to being viewed by non-Japanese Americans as representatives of their ethnic group,^[38] Nisei women met the scrutiny of sharp-eyed Issei elders as representatives of their families. Community surveillance exerted great pressure on some young women, as reflected by the

case of one Nisei who suffered from uterine hemorrhaging. As Dana Takagi has related, the woman's mother waited for months to seek medical treatment for her, fearing that the family would be stigmatized if the Japanese American community found out about her disease.^[39] Ironically, because the mother insisted that the daughter's radiation treatment be kept secret, the ethnic community gossiped about the possible reasons for her regular trips to the hospital. Later she discovered that people believed she was sexually promiscuous and routinely going for abortions. While this may be an extreme example, it provides an illustration of the kinds of familial and community pressure with which single young Nisei women lived.

Less dramatic, more mundane pressures were familiar to most second-generation girls. Like Monica Sone, they found that Issei teachers and community leaders wished to mold them into "an ideal Japanese o-joh-san, a refined young maiden who is quiet, pure in thought, polite, serene, and self-controlled."^[40] As Sone remembered, this meant that children "must not laugh out loud and show our teeth, or chatter in front of guests, or interrupt adult conversation, or cross our knees while seated, or ask for a piece of candy, or squirm in our seats."^[41]

Adolescents and young women felt even more keenly the weight of expectations of proper female behavior. In 1934, one rebellious high school student in San Francisco bemoaned the limitations of "Girls who walk the usual tread of life all planned by society and family" and described a dreary round of domesticity, concluding that for women, "Life is a matter of surpressing [sic]."^[42] She made it clear that fear of community scrutiny enforced compliance: "We do our darnest [sic] to keep our self free from gossip. Anything different even in a form of an experiment will cause a riot among the sneeking [sic], whispering gossip-front."^[43] Although her outspoken defiance may have been unusual, her awareness of social pressure was not.

Once she reached her twenties, a second-generation woman faced increasing pressure to marry. Parental expectations were reinforced by those of the other Issei elders. A writer for the San Francisco Hokubei Asahi related the "typical case" of a twenty-four-year-old college-educated Nisei woman who had "staved off four proposals to her father by 'friends' of comparatively unknown or personally repulsive men." According to the author, "The matter becomes worse because of the girl's age, which is a terrible age for an unmarried Japanese daughter to be still on her father's hand—people are already beginning to ask what is the matter with her that she cannot secure a husband." He added, "She is not alone—there are hundreds like her in the same situation."^[44]

Given such pressures, Nisei girls and single women found much-needed camaraderie and peer-group understanding in a wide array of urban Japanese American organizations. As Harry H. L. Kitano states, "It would be dif-

ficult to overlook the vast network of services and opportunities available to the Japanese youth."^[45] There they also gained leadership training and built networks that would aid them in the trying years of wartime incarceration and postwar resettlement. Indeed, as Nakano Glenn suggests, women have "emerged over time as prime movers in the organizational life" of the ethnic community.^[46]

Southern California was rich in Nisei organizations; Mei Nakano has reported that more than four hundred could be counted in Los Angeles by 1938.^[47] Throughout the decade before World War II, the Nisei social calendars of the Kashu Mainichi and other newspapers bristled with meetings and events hosted by a burgeoning array of young women's clubs. In May of 1932, an annual Junior Girl Reserves conference drew members of at least seventeen clubs, ranging from Buddhist and Christian church-sponsored groups, YWCA affiliates, and Girl Scouts.^[48] Although clubs abounded for every age cohort, adolescents and college-age single women constituted the majority of those involved in Nisei female organizations. Full-time jobs and marriage no doubt cut into the leisure time of older Nisei women in addition to drawing them into different social arenas.

The youth groups served a variety of functions. According to Kitano, they were a means of social control and socialization: "During early and late adolescence, Nisei generally were controlled by organizations within the community. These often took the form of leagues and clubs . . . " Control of these organizations was often exercised by peers rather than parents; Kitano notes that "although the Issei periodically attempted to control them," the groups were "usually guided by the Nisei themselves. The youngsters were left pretty much alone, to make mistakes, to try new things, and to translate their understanding of large community models in ways that could be of use to them."^[49] For young Nisei women, who, like their Mexican American sisters "sought to reconcile parental expectations with the excitement of experimentation,"^[50] youth clubs afforded a heady opportunity.

These groups provided an important alternative for Japanese American children excluded from European American clubs or unable to assume leading positions in them. "If we hadn't had these ethnic organizations to join," Yoshiko Uchida writes, "I think few Nisei would have had the opportunity to hold positions of leadership or responsibility. At one time I was president of the campus Japanese Women's Student Club, a post I know I would not have held in a non-Japanese campus organization."^[51] Within their own organizations, Nisei members received reinforcement of generational and ethnic identification, often finding role models in more senior Nisei advisers. Both Christian and Buddhist churches fostered girls' and boys' clubs, although YWCA-sponsored activities were particularly extensive. The Nisei women who attended college established another tier of organizations,

such as the Blue Triangles and the Chi Alpha Delta sorority in Los Angeles. Women forged lifetime friendships in these clubs. The continued meetings of some groups, fifty years later, underscore their significance for the Nisei.

Women's organizations provided socialization in both mainstream and ethnic culture. Some, like the Sumire Kai, ajunior women's club, met to learn about the history of Japan and the intricacies of Japanese etiquette.^[52] A similar group, the Shira-yuri (white lily) club formed in Long Beach, vowing to speak only Japanese at their meetings.^[53] Other organizations provided a forum in which to explore peer-group and intergenerational issues, as well as to participate in a range of activities common to groups like the Girl Scouts of America. For example, the Junior Girl Reserves conference in 1932 included in its schedule swimming, hiking, handicrafts, nature study, music, and outdoor sports. The featured topics of discussion reflected the influence of popular culture: "What the Boy Friend Thinks?" "What is 'It'?" and "What We All Think of Dancing?"^[54] The leaders also hoped to facilitate intergenerational understanding by offering discussions of mother-daughter relations.

The reportage of club events reveals how such organizations established and sometimes gently pushed the boundaries of socially sanctioned activities for Japanese American girls, from charitable endeavors to recreation. The growing popularity of dances throughout the prewar years provides an example of changing cultural mores. In this respect, generally speaking, city youth had greater latitude than their rural peers, women as well as men. Indeed, women took the initiative in planning, regulating, and maybe even attending dances, as a stern admonition to southern California gate-crashers indicated in 1931: "Men and women who walked in without invites at the last Blue Triangle dance are getting into hot water and the sooner their crusts melt away the better."^[55]

Leap Year dances planned by the Blue Triangles and Chi Alpha Delta received special notice from the Kashu Mainichi in January 1932: "Already two dances are scheduled in February for the benefit of the supposed-tobe stronger sex by the weaker sex."^[56] The Cherry Blossom and Nadeshiko Clubs of nearby Gardena, California, also planned to sponsor jointly a Leap Year dance. The repeated mention that dances would be "strictly invitational" suggests their success in attracting Nisei youth eager to "glide to the strains of Jack Gary's 8-piece Masonic orchestra" and other ensembles.^[57] Such heterosexual couples-dancing would have been unheard-of for the Nisei's immigrant parents and still incurred the disapproval of rural Issei.

Many of the clubs had a social-service component. The first act of the newly formed girls' Calrose Club was to make a gift of a box of apples to a children's organization.^[58] Even recreational activities like dances provided opportunities for community service. Of the five spring dances announced in the Kashu Mainichi in 1932, three were "benefit dances." Admission to the

Savings Association Dance required "the presentation of the invitation cards and three large cans of food, preferably Japanese."^[59] Later in May, the Blue Triangles lured the light of foot to their "cabaret style" benefit dance with the promise of waltz and fox-trot contests and live music to be furnished by Dave Sato's Wanderer Orchestra.^[60] Through such measures, the Nisei responded to community needs while enjoying "the excitement of experimentation." As they maintained peer-regulated activities and developed their own forums for entertainment, exercise, creative expression, and leadership training, a rich Nisei social world coalesced.

In the decade before the Second World War, young Nisei women played important roles in shaping and sustaining urban ethnic culture, while developing a strong generational consciousness that still continues to permeate Japanese American organizations. Participation in a range of youth groups gave urban Nisei girls and single women high visibility in the ethnic community, which reinforced their position as cultural negotiators. Through service projects, social occasions, athletic events, and a range of cultural arts performances, second-generation women interacted with both the Issei generation and Nisei men, as well as with members of surrounding communities. And, as their poems, short stories, essays, and letters in the Japanese American newspapers testify, the process of defining a position in society engaged and challenged them from early adolescence. In this process they remained mindful of family responsibilities and cultivated ethnic pride, while striving to piece together a kind of modern womanhood appropriate to their dreams and circumstances.

World War II internment not only dashed many Nisei dreams and shattered Japanese American communities; it has, in the historical literature, overshadowed the vibrancy of Little Tokyo and other prewar ethnic enclaves. Researching Nisei women's writings and organizations in the 1930s reveals the complexity of the second generation's negotiation of roles within the urban ethnic community. Their labor materially supported their families through the Great Depression, during World War II, and in the critical period of postwar rebuilding. They have acted as primary conduits of genderrole debate into Japanese American enclaves. And they have earned reputations within the ethnic group for being its premier grassroots organizers.^[61] In the process of integrating the worlds of their parents and peers since the prewar period, urban Nisei women have created networks that continue to shape and sustain Japanese American communities today.

17—
Competing Communities at Work:
Asian Americans, European Americans, and Native Alaskans in the Pacific Northwest, 1938-1947

Chris Friday

In 1932, Edward R. Ridley of Ketchikan noted: "There are more than enough 'local residents' right here in this town without hav[ing] to import [workers] from other places."^[1] He emphasized to salmon canning companies operating in the town that his was no personal conjecture, but was the general opinion "of our people nowadays." By "our people" Ridley meant Native Alaskans—largely Tlingits—of southeast Alaska, and as the vice president of the Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB), he did indeed have insights into the concerns and needs of Native Alaskans.^[2] Ridley believed Asian American^[3] contractors not only mistreated Native Alaskan workers but also severely limited Tlingit employment opportunities in the midst of the Depression.^[4] In addition to arguing that canners might hire Native Alaskans more cheaply than Asian American crews, Ridley hinted strongly that the ANB might consider some form of collective action. Indeed, in the late 1930s, the ANB began to organize among Alaskans and it sought the federal government's approval to act as a union for Native men who fished and Native women who worked in the canneries.^[5] The presence of competing Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and American Federation of Labor (AFL) locals, whose respective memberships were largely Asian Americans—especially Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos—and European American residents of Alaska, complicated the situation.^[6] Through 1946, the jockeying among the ANB, CIO locals, and AFL locals to represent the residents of southeast Alaska who worked in canneries reveals how the members of these "communities" defined themselves, how they vied for jobs, and how they found fleeting possibilities for cooperation amidst that tremendous competition.

This story of intergroup rivalries and union affiliations is not some strange, exceptional story that played itself out in isolated Alaska, or one purely driven by competition from the national headquarters of the CIO and the AFL. It

is a quintessentially western story in which a multicultural populace leaned heavily on the federal government for resolution of its racial and class problems.^[7] It is also western in the sense that it illustrates how populist sentiments, or grassroots politics, make strange bedfellows, for in this region where party machines had at best a weak hold, institutions like unions and ethnic or fraternal brotherhoods carried much weight.^[8]

The very construction of the communities under consideration here also made them part of the Pacific Northwest, even the U.S. West, and not just Alaska. Asian immigrant and Asian American workers traveled in regular seasonal migration patterns through central and northern California, Oregon, and Washington on their ways to and from Alaska canneries; canning companies had their headquarters in San Francisco, Portland, Astoria, and Seattle, while their markets were global; and especially after the Jones Act of 1920, the territory was virtually a colony of Washington state. It is all too easy to isolate Alaska as some huge, underdeveloped behemoth to the north that is "outside" U.S. history, even the history of the U.S. West.

Rather than constituting an isolated, non-western case in which local labor stood against "outsiders," these three "western" communities, though different in type and constituency, overlapped in the salmon canneries of southeast Alaska. Asian American cannery hands, whom most in the industry referred to as "China gangs" or "outside crews," formed the bulk of those about whom Ridley complained. Recruited up to the mid-1930s by co-ethnic labor contractors, by 1938 these workers found representation in the CIO locals, often drawing upon a "community of association" held together by semipermanent co-ethnic residents in towns along the seasonal work cycle that many of the laborers followed in the U.S. West.^[9] In southeast Alaska, the resident Asian Americans, particularly the Filipinos, provided entrée into organizing "resident" and Native Alaskans for the "outside" unions.^[10]

Tlingit, as well as Tsimshan and Haida people living in southeast Alaska, in contrast to the outside crews, were important to the industry as a local source of labor.^[11] The men served largely as fishermen, the women in the canneries. Their participation represented an adaptation of precapitalist seasonal fishing and fish preparation activities to industrial wage labor conditions, replete with the older gender division of labor.^[12] Unlike Native Americans in Oregon and Washington, who by the beginning of the twentieth century had been marginalized in the political economy of those states, Native Alaskans played a central role.^[13] Largely through the auspices of the ANB and its parallel organization the Alaska Native Sisterhood (ANS), as well as through the often competing AFL unions, Native Alaskans gained institutional representatives in the struggle to control jobs. Especially among the Tlingit, who predominated in the region, the community base was an ethnic/clan/national one with separate village divisions, alliances, and loyalties.^[14]

Like Native Alaskans, resident Alaskans—European Americans who had

migrated to southeast Alaska towns—formed a local labor pool. Highly dependent on salmon canneries and related enterprises for their incomes, their competition for jobs with Asian Americans and Native Alaskans contributed to a common sense of shared "white" ethnicity as "Alaskans." They also developed strong populist-like resentments of the outside financial control represented by cannery companies headquartered in the lower fortyeight states and by outside political resentment epitomized by theJones Act of 1920, which gave Washington, especially Seattle, a virtual stranglehold on Alaskan shipping.^[15]

The culmination of two separate organizational thrusts brought these three communities into conflict. The first was the 1938 government-mediated decision that gave the outside, Asian American-led CIO locals the right to represent cannery workers. Having secured a foothold, Asian American unionists then moved to organize Alaska to protect against AFL counter-attacks and to strengthen workers' solidarity against cannery owners. They ran headlong into the second development, the ANB and ANS efforts to establish greater political representation for Native Alaskans. By the late 1930s, that included, as Ridley had indicated, a drive for recognition of the combined ANB and ANS as the collective bargaining agent for Native peoples in southeast Alaska. A few studies have begun to explore ANB/ANS activities in voting rights, school desegregation, and land claims, but scant attention has been paid to its collective bargaining role in spite of the importance to Native Alaskan livelihoods.^[16]

The ANB came together first in 1912, created by mostly Tlingit men under the influence of Presbyterian and Russian Orthodox missionaries in the territory who had organized church-based societies bent on providing vehicles for "civilizing" and "assimilating" Native Alaskans. Similarly, in 1915, various "Women's Village Improvement Societies" reorganized to form the ANS. In the 1920s and 1930s, the organizations moved from their earlier focus on assimilation and temperance programs to take up an extensive agenda for Alaska's native peoples that they pursued for the next half-century.^[17] While voting rights and other civil rights issues as well as land claims promised to provide long-term benefits, the question of collective bargaining promised more immediate returns.

Members of the ANB and ANS resented political and economic control held by "outsiders" to the territory and promoted the slogan "Alaska for Alaskans."^[18] In doing so, ANB and ANS members found that they had much in common with European American residents, but not enough to bridge racial divides. Through those organizations Native Alaskans used New Deal policies—Alaska's version of the Wheeler-Howard Act, the Alaska Reorganization Act of 1936, and the Wagner Act—to regain some measure of independence in the twentieth century.^[19]

ANB and ANS members tried to convince salmon canners, the federal

government, and labor unions that their organization had the right to represent its members and bargain collectively for them. The Alaska Native Brotherhood, the organization's mouthpiece, told readers late in 1938: "The final opinion of the [delegates at the 1938 ANB Grand Camp] Convention was that the ANB can do everything that other unions can do. If we are in the majority, we can still keep our identity and collect our dues exactly as do the CIO and the AFL where these unions are in the majority. In many cases, the officers of the ANB and the local union are the SAME PEOPLE, only that the money goes to San Francisco."^[20] As early as 1937 the ANB/ANS had entered into collective bargaining arrangements in Sitka, and by 1938 a number of the ANB/ANS camps (nearly each small town in southeast Alaska had one) sought to use the ANB to represent the interests of Indian purse seiners and cannery workers.^[21] By 1939, ANB and ANS activities as a bargaining agent for Native Alaskans were in full swing.

Native Alaskans used the ANB and ANS to express a strong strain of ethnic pride that merged into racialism at times. Native Alaskan FrankJohnson worked as an organizer and official of the AFL-affiliated fishermen's and cannery workers' locals.^[22] Along with the outside CIO locals, Johnson represented a significant competitor to ANB and ANS plans for labor organization. In 1940, Louis F. Paul, an important force in the ANB, confronted Johnson in a letter to the Ketchikan Alaska Fishing News arguing that he had "permitted the ANB to be used as a vehicle to increase [AFL union] membership."^[23] Paul warned Johnson:

You cannot be brown and white at the same time. . . . [F]undamentally it is impossible for the white people to overcome their racial prejudice; it is impossible for them to favor Indians over their own kind. . . . They will use you and when they are through, they will abuse you. And in the end you will come back to your own people even as our sisters have come back to us in their shame with their unfathered children.^[24]

Louis Paul thus signaled to Native Alaskans that they could not expect fair treatment by "outside," "white" unions. His allusion to unfathered children seemingly played on long-standing resentments about the conduct of the outside crews and the strong Christian element in the ANB and ANS as well as a not too veiled reference to what he believed the unions would do to Johnson.

Louis's brother William L. Paul did not mince words either. In an argument supporting the ANB and ANS as a bargaining agent he stated:

The unions will never take up the scope of activity of the ANB for our people. We will challenge any organization in the territory to show that they care enough for our people to step up and attempt to do even a small portion of the ANB work. It is not in the cards. No white man will take the punishment for his efforts.^[25]

William L. Paul believed that only the ANB had the interests of Native Alaskans at heart. In 1938, he explained to Wrangell ANB Camp President Frank Desmond that "the ANB was organized to give Indians an equal chance to make a living—to put bread and butter on the table for our women and children."^[26] Later, in 1942, he reportedly told Craig ANB Camp members: "Tell our young people to be proud of their race, do not be ashamed of it. We are Indians, we are not white people, and the white leaders of the CIO and . . . [AFL] do not work for the benefit of the Indians."^[27]

While William L. Paul and others in the ANB raged about outside control and white racism, they focused their concerns almost solely on fishing to the virtual exclusion of cannery work and women's employment.^[28] ANS members got involved in the organization of cannery workers, but when they took action, ANS members usually did so in concert with, or in support of, the fishermen. Fish prices and the status of traps, usually owned by canning companies, were the typical concerns of the ANB. The ANS was also very active in the movement to regulate and abolish traps in the territory. ANS leaders wrote letters to local and regional newspapers and to federal officers urging that traps be eliminated to "give fish and fishermen a chance!"^[29] The ANS and ANB often relied on the argument that traps hurt entire families, explaining that "most of us have families to feed."^[30]

When it came to organizing the women into a union, however, Native Alaskan patterns of work caused problems. Those patterns in the twentieth century were in part a continuation of long-standing practices in which women undertook a variety of seasonal tasks, of which the fish harvests were only one, and canning company strategies of using Native American women largely as a reserve labor pool to supplement the outside crews.^[31] Conrad Espe, business agent for the CIO cannery workers' local in Seattle, took advantage of those employment features and warned that neither the industry nor the unions could tolerate women's part-time work. Espe declared that

in the days of old there were whole families which . . . worked in the canneries from the 12-year-old youngster up to the grandmother. I don't think modern Industry can function along these lines. I don't think modern labor relations should be built so as to provide equal conditions for the entire family. . . . [It] must bring out the quality of the work; parity and equality of work must go hand in hand with the parity of ability to perform it. . . . A person who is a resident cannot continue, as has been done in the past in many instances, where they want to work if they feel like it and not work when they don't feel like it. . . . [T]here must be a stable work force.^[32]

Espe was right: Tlingit women and indeed Native American women generally, well into the twentieth century, continued to mix subsistence activities with wage labor. For example, Sally Hopkins, born in Sitka in 1877 and later resident of Dundas Bay and Juneau, worked in salmon canneries most of

her life. During the canning season, she and her children picked berries to be preserved between shifts and on off days.^[33] Indeed, nineteenth-century canners had long complained about the "irregularity" of Indian women as workers.^[34] They, like Espe, had wanted the women available at all times, but Native Alaskans were not willing to forego necessary and even fulfilling seasonal cycles for the sake of the canners. The ANS, however, tried to sponsor childcare facilities for families employed by the canneries during 1943 and 1944, but it was not enough to counter Espe's implications that outside crews provided a more stable work force than Native Alaskans.^[35]

When the ANS acted outside the camps, however, its leaders tended to use the organization to lobby alongside the ANB for civil rights. As a case in point, ANS Grand Camp President Elizabeth Wanamaker Peratrovich's 1945 speech before the Alaska Territorial Senate is generally considered to have been the telling factor in the passage of Alaska's anti-discrimination legislation. Moreover, ANS involvement in land claims was an essential part of that long struggle.^[36] Locally, in each camp, ANS activities centered around fund-raising, "mostly through Bingo games" and the sale of foodstuffs or arts and crafts; the money often went to build or maintain ANB halls or to support the civil rights issues. The ANS also embraced moral suasion harkening back to the ANS roots in the village improvement societies.^[37] Labor issues took a back seat in the ANS. When Native women in southeast Alaska chose to throw themselves into the field of labor organization, they tended to do so through established labor organizations—the various AFL or CIO locals—and that meant fostering cooperation with people from the other communities of workers.

The membership of the AFL locals consisted of Native Alaskans and resident Alaskans, fishers and cannery hands alike. These organizations also made greater efforts to represent cannery workers' interests than the ANB and ANS. Like the ANB, the AFL cannery workers' and fishermen's locals took up the slogan "Alaska for Alaskans." The cannery workers' leaders claimed that their members thought that "their jobs are menaced by . . . the CIO unions," that the CIO dues paid by Alaskans financed the "CIO drive to replace residents . . . [with] outside workers."^[38] Officials of the AFL locals also declared that they had "no quarrel with [the ANB] as a fraternal organization."^[39] They believed, however, that "certain self-seeking, power-hungry individuals in the ANB [are] seeking to pervert that organization, to reduce it to a union smashing weapon, a tool of the employers, and through the medium of the ANB launch a vicious slanderous attack upon the bona-fide resident labor unions of Alaska."^[40] The AFL cannery workers tried to paint their locals as the true defenders of Native Alaskan women and their employment. In 1939, the AFL locals publicized a case in which five women, "all Natives" and CIO members, were prevented from gaining employment

in a plant where they had worked for eight years. "Most of the women have children," the leaders explained, "and the cannery work they depend upon helps to support them the rest of the year. "^[41] The women thus quit the CIO local "in disgust" and "joined immediately" with the AFL local. The latter also countered a CIO media blitz in local newspapers and Ketchikan radio station KGBU, with the caution that it was only an attempt on the part of the CIO "to stem the ever increasing flow of cannery workers into the fold of the [AFL] Cannery Workers Auxiliary Union."^[42]

If it was accurate in its membership accounting, the AFL cannery workers' locals controlled a sizable portion of the resident workers in the region. After the 1939 season, the local claimed to have 1,300 of the approximately 4,500 resident workers on its rolls at virtually every southeastern cannery town, including Metlakatlah, Craig, Klawok, Hydaburg, Wrangell, Petersburg, Kake, Sitka, Hoonah, Angoon, and Ketchikan.^[43] When the CIO cannery workers' locals petitioned in 1939 for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certification election—the key instrument of federal involvement in this case—in southeastern Alaska, Marie Murphy, president of AFL cannery workers' local in Ketchikan explained that her organization "expect[s] to be the bargaining agency for Southeastern Alaska by the right of majority rule."^[44] It took until 1946 for the NLRB to begin to sort out representation for Alaskan cannery workers, and in the meantime the CIO locals began a concerted effort to organize Native Alaskans and Alaska residents.^[45]

As the ANB/ANS and AFL positions indicate, the CIO locals had to buck a strong tide of anti-Asian and anti-"outsider" sentiments. To counter that image, the CIO drew upon people in three areas: Resident Alaskan (European American) women, Native Alaskan women, and Filipinos residing in Alaska. Among the resident Alaskans were the handful of women in towns such as Ketchikan. Elizabeth Del Fierro, for example, was the daughter of an Italian American fisherman.^[46] She lived in Ketchikan and worked in a salmon cannery there, but unlike women and girls in other canning regions who developed work cultures that fostered pan-ethnic alliances among women and assisted in organizational attempts,^[47] Elizabeth Del Fierro and other women in southeast Alaska also worked with significant numbers of men. The work culture that developed there enabled men and women from diverse ethnic backgrounds to come together. Elizabeth, for example, married Salvador Del Fierro, a staunch supporter of the CIO locals and central figure as a local linchpin in Ketchikan of the "community of association" for Filipinos, with connections reaching to Seattle, Portland, and Stockton. Indeed, like the Fierros, a great many of the officers in Ketchikan's CIO local were married couples—European American wives and Filipino husbands.^[48]

The Seattle and San Francisco CIO locals began their organizing efforts among Ketchikan residents in 1937, but the NLRB certification election

struggles between the 1937 and 1938 seasons distracted the stateside locals from that effort.^[49] Beginning late in the canning season of 1938 and continuing into 1939, the Seattle and San Francisco locals renewed their efforts to bring Alaska residents under their umbrella. First, union leaders tried to blame canners for the "Alaska for Alaskans" sentiments.^[50] Fearful of an AFL counterattack on the newly won jurisdiction, the CIO locals also blamed the AFL for the popularity of the slogan. Publicist for the Seattle CIO local and prominent Nisei labor leader Dyke Miyagawa declared that the AFL created "a false race issue" in its organizing message to Alaskan residents. He claimed the AFL told "resident whites" that "the Filipinos, Japs and Chinks are trying to take everything away. . . . 'To protect yourself,' the resident organizers have been saying to the residents, 'you've got to drive out the Orientals—save Alaska for the Alaskans."'^[51]

Early in 1939, Filipino immigrant Salvador Del Fierro, "the progressive leader of cannery workers in Ketchikan," reported that "considerable headway has been made to bring about greater cooperation and unity between the workers in the Territory and those in the states." Leaders of the CIO locals agreed that in order to organize Alaskan residents as well as Native Alaskans it needed to "equalize the status" of the two groups and to bring their wages up to those "enjoyed by the cannery workers of Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco."^[52] In spite of the rhetoric, the stateside CIO locals placed Alaska organizing at the bottom of their priorities. In the Seattle local's list of five proposed actions for 1939, for example, cooperation with Alaskan locals stood in fifth place.^[53] When it did attempt to organize, the CIO sent men to the region and as a distant second alternative relied on people like Salvador Del Fierro to work in concert with their wives.^[54]

CIO locals made headway with resident workers, however, because they used the examples of Salvador and Elizabeth Del Fierro to argue that they represented resident interests. The ability of Ketchikan's Local 237 to make public its program through KGBU radio also won it some local recognition.^[55] Most telling, though, was the CIO's ability to deliver. Unlike the ANB and ANS, or the AFL locals, the CIO locals had a strong position with the canners because of the 1938 certification among "outside" workers who constituted the bulk of the workforce. The locals used that as leverage to negotiate minimum wage guarantees for Alaskan workers (resident and Native Alaskan alike).^[56]

During 1942, and even more so in 1943, wartime exigencies stalled the struggles between the three communities and created a brief and uneasy coexistence. The outside crews lost approximately seven hundred members when the U.S. government interned people of Japanese ancestry, and several hundred more (especially Filipinos) to the military service, to shipyards, and to other related war industries. Internal realignments and competition preoccupied the stateside CIO locals. Resident Alaskans, too, volunteered for

the military and migrated to Seattle, Portland, or other cities for wartime jobs, but because canners had negotiated contracts with the government to supply tins of salmon to the troops, those employed in the industry earned exemption from military service if they so chose, and many remained in Alaska. Unlike in the Alaska peninsula or Bristol Bay, where military concerns placed severe limits on salmon production, in southeast Alaska the war brought an intensification of the reliance on Native Alaskan employment as cannery hands and fishermen. Wartime travel restrictions further limited Native Alaskan movements, making them all the more dependent on wage labor in southeast Alaskan canneries than they might otherwise have been. For all three groups, the War Labor Board temporarily reduced competition over wages. Finally, a patriotic fervor encouraged people to set aside their differences for the national good.^[57]

Late in 1943 and early in 1944, the communities began to jostle for position again through the competing unions. They did so in anticipation of renewed negotiations at the war's end, but more immediately, in October 1943, the ANB/ANS publicized the possibility that it might entertain a merger with one of the other two labor organizations.^[58] Ironically, part of the pressure to merge was a result of earlier government pressure to expand ANB/ANS membership. In order to gain status as a bona fide labor organization, the NLRB required the ANB and ANS to admit non-Indians to their ranks, but they did so only as "associate members" with status as beneficiaries of any labor agreements and with no voting rights on other ANB or ANS matters. In the 1939 ANB convention, though, the ANB created the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska (also known as the Tlingit and Haida Central Council) at least in part to distinguish itself from the mixed membership of the ANB and ANS and to pursue the land claims issue separately from the organizations' roles as bargaining agents.^[59] The conflicting directives from various government agencies ultimately weakened the ANB/ANS position as a separate union and contributed to talk of a merger with one of the other unions. That news prompted unprecedented action on the part of the CIO locals—the dispatching of a woman to Alaska as a key organizer. In spring 1944, Rose Dellama went north from San Francisco to recruit resident and Native Alaskans into her union.^[60]

Dellama had grown up in the "Italian tenements" of Oakland, California, and had first come to labor concerns after having been fired in the 1934 newspaper strikes of the Bay Area. She subsequently joined the Communist Party and by 1937 had found a position as secretary for the San Francisco Alaska Cannery Workers Union, which shortly thereafter became a CIO local. The stateside struggle among cannery workers to gain certification had steeled her in the politics of union organizing. Upon her arrival in Alaska, she joined up with Marguerite Hansen, the business agent of Ketchikan's CIO local, and for the entire negotiating and canning season the two

stumped throughout southeast Alaska, especially in Ketchikan, Juneau, Hoonah, and Petersburg.^[61]

Dellama's leftist politics, experience with the San Francisco local, and Italian American background put her in good stead with certain portions of the resident population in Alaska. For example, Elizabeth Del Fierro, an Italian American married to a Filipino, had much in common with Dellama. While she no doubt drew upon these connections, Dellama also took great pains to reach out to Native Alaskans. "They all beamed," she recalled of her first arrival in Alaska, when she used the broken Tlingit she had learned to say, "I'm very happy to be here with you."^[62]

Dellama proved able to find ways to reach Native Alaskan women in particular. She explained, "These women expected the CIO to represent them in all sorts of things," including a ruling that no U.S. military personnel could associate with Native Alaskan women. Dellama approached the union leaders in Alaska about protesting the ruling, but, complained: "I couldn't get the bastards to do anything." Not content to accept the men's refusal to acknowledge women's concerns, Dellama managed to plead her case to Alaska governor Earnest Greunig. When the order was rescinded shortly thereafter, Dellama earned a reputation "as the CIO lady who got that thing repealed." While Dellama's account reveals no recognition of the substantial campaign against the order mounted by the ANB and ANS, her stance on the issue differed markedly from the CIO's male organizers who had preceded her.^[63]

While Dellama and Hansen negotiated for wage improvement in the form of higher seasonal guarantees and better hourly wages as had earlier male organizers, they added efforts to overcome the twin barriers of sexism and racism. They urged the locals to give dances, to hold bingo games, and to sponsor activities to raise funds for organizing in the region. By these means they hoped to link up with the type of activities that the ANS regularly conducted to generate interest in the union through channels that might appeal to women and that would be in relatively neutral social settings.^[64]

Dellama and Hansen, joined by the Del Fierros and others long familiar with organizing in the region, also made a special effort to publicize the efforts of Native Alaskans in the CIO locals. In May 1944, the national union newspaper for CIO cannery and agricultural workers, the UCAPAWA News, ran a picture of six Native Alaskans, five of them women, on a page of articles about the organizing campaign. The newspaper stressed the prominent role the women played in the union and the fact that the locals supported a family economy. "SUSAN BROWN," one caption read, "is an Alaskan native and has helped . . . [the CIO locals] win the benefits the workers now enjoy." Another lauded Ruth Hayes, whose mother, father, husband, and children toiled in the canneries, to indicate her long-standing association with native labor. "Sister Hayes," explained the paper, "has been largely

instrumental in organizing her Local and has been its Business Agent for the past 5 years." The paper presented Margaret Wanamaker as the centerpiece, touting her as "Vice-Pres[ident] of Local 269 in Juneau, . . . [and] secretary of the Alaska Native Sisterhood of Juneau."^[65] The pictures and captions reinforced the image that the CIO unions worked against discrimination, supported "bona fide" resident cannery workers, and, in doing so, helped foster the well-being of Native Alaskans.^[66]

In spite of the tremendous efforts by the international union, outside organizers like Dellama, and locals like Hansen, recruiting Native Alaskans was difficult because of the activities of the ANB and ANS. According to Dellama, the "Indians were interested in unions," but the ANB/ANS was "a big problem" because it attempted to spread "all kinds of rumors" about her. She complained that while she might sign workers in a particular village on one day, on the next day, "when the Native Brotherhood organizers came to the village they would all sign up with him [sic], too. Then I would have to go back to that village and organize all over again."^[67]

Dellama also had to confront cultural assumptions over which she and other non-Native Alaskans had little control. In June 1944, a dry summer, a tremendous storm, and a house fire. started a conflagration that leveled the town of Hoonah, killing one and resulting in the loss of many ceremonial and personal items. Hoonah's residents were "staunch Alaska Native Brotherhood people," but Dellama had been "making headway" until an investigation of the fire pointed to its origin in the home of a "known CIO man" where Dellama and other organizers had lodged. "Suddenly it was the CIO's fault," she recalled, and "people wouldn't speak to me."^[68]

After six months of organizing in Alaska, Dellama returned to San Francisco. "When I left, I told the Indians I'd be back in six months, but then I learned that the union wasn't going back. . . . The union never went back."^[69] That was unfortunate for the CIO, because Dellama's presence and the CIO's media campaigns tapered off just as the battle for certification as the bargaining agent for the region began to heat up again. During the 1945 canning season, the NLRB polled resident cannery workers, Native and non-Native, on their choice for union representation. In the NLRB tally the ANB/ANS earned 364 votes as the appropriate bargaining agent for southeast Alaska while the CIO and AFL registered 357 and 301 votes respectively.^[70] While the ANB/ANS achieved a plurality of the votes, NLRB officials believed the election was "not decisive" because no party had earned a simple majority. At the requests of the ANB/ANS and the CIO locals, the NLRB ordered a run-off to be completed by September 1, 1946.^[71]

In the interim, the ANB/ANS and AFL became much closer partners. By the November 1945 ANB Grand Camp Convention the die was cast. Louise Collier, one of three "fraternal" AFL delegates attending the ANB convention, told the assembled conventioneers:

Providing work is a matter of native politics. I pledge myself to fight for Indians. As my personal message, if cannery workers joined [the] CIO there would be no social work. . . . The AFL has more to offer as an affiliation. The CIO has no interest in social affairs and decisions are governed by the pocketbook. Alaska needs an all-Alaska union. AFL is for Alaskan workers. ANB is for placing natives in work first. The CIO doesn't care about placing anyone on a job [except outside workers]. What they do makes evil thoughts come.^[72]

A majority of the delegates approved the proposal to merge with the AFL cannery workers' locals. The AFL promise of "complete autonomy" for the local at each small town in the region—a cornerstone of the ANB—must have helped a great deal for it allowed each ANB/ANS camp to determine how to balance the concerns of its members and other non-Indian resident workers. Nonetheless, a third of the delegates either voted against AFL affiliation or were absent.^[73] A significant proportion thus balked at any alliance with the AFL.

That reluctance delayed the merger between the ANB/ANS and AFL, and showed in the NLRB election results. The new combined organization, the Alaska Marine Workers Union, struggled to keep its membership's divergent interests in check and ultimately joined with the AFL-affiliated Seafarers International Union, which provided some administrative assistance, but in spite of the merger and outside support, it garnered 465 votes to the CIO's 485 votes.^[74] The election came late in the year and although the NLRB made its decision in December 1945, as late as the end of January 1947 neither the CIO nor the AFL locals seemed to know with any certainty which party had won the election.^[75] By late March 1947, head of the Seafarers International Union Harry Lundeberg protested to Paul Herzog, chairman of the NLRB, that a "true election" among southeast Alaska resident workers, not one peppered with "outside" voters, would give his union a majority.^[76] In attacking the Asian American-led "outside" CIO union, Lundeberg connected the Seafarers' own anti-Asian and anti-CIO campaigns with those of some Alaskan workers.^[77] While the AFL contested several of the 1946 votes on these grounds, NLRB officials sustained the CIO locals as the bargaining agent.^[78]

With that decision, the joint ANB/ANS and AFL activity lost its currency and the organization's leader, William Lewis Paul, bitterly accused "whites" of "deserting" Native Alaskans while the union "silently folded up and died."^[79] In addition, the growing concern over communist infiltration in labor organizations, reorganizations of the internationals, and the continued struggle between the AFL and CIO once more distracted the larger stateside locals.^[80] The possibility that one labor organization might represent the entirety of Alaskan salmon cannery workers again disintegrated into its component parts. By that time, however, the ANB and ANS had moved beyond labor is-

sues to a wholesale attempt to regain rights to a land base.^[81] Filipinos struggled to maintain their positions against a growing corps of college students hired by canners, the continued attacks on them as "foreigners" and radicals, and the old standby that they were "outside" workers. Efforts to accommodate Native Alaskans, Asian immigrants and Asian Americans, European Americans, and men and women never truly took hold.

In spite of the tremendous competition among these three "communities" for employment and the attending racialism and friction, some opportunities emerged for building bridges between groups. Filipino residents of Alaska not only served as loci for the geographically diffuse community of co-ethnic migrant laborers, but also as links to local communities through marriage and labor organizing. Many "white" resident Alaskans played upon the image of Asian American "outsiders" to defend their positions, but ironically found themselves allied with Native Alaskans. Native Alaskans, especially women, played a central role as an important element in the economy and politics of Alaska and developed bridges to other groups.

Labor organizations and the federal government played significant roles, too. While the CIO's racially inclusive policies have been amply demonstrated,^[82] in this case the AFL's support of racial minorities is instructive.^[83] It occurred during a window of opportunity that opened in the late 1930s when it began to compete with the CIO for members and as the federal government ensconced itself as a permanent player in labor arbitration. Up to the mid-1940s, as Kevin Leonard has demonstrated for Los Angeles,^[84] that window remained open and the AFL continued to embrace a new racial consciousness. The onslaught of the anti-communist drives of the late 1940s and early 1950s slammed that window shut. In the meantime, both Native Alaskans and the AFL had used the opportunity to push forward their own separate, but conjoined, agendas.

The swirling tides of "community" cooperation and conflict in southeast Alaska confirm the centrality of cultural frontiers to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century West. How the people in those communities came to define themselves, sometimes in the context of discrimination, shifted over time. The ANB/ANS, for example, began as an assimilationist temperance organization, but then began to take up civil rights issues in the 1920S, combined those with labor programs beginning in the 1930s, and then transformed again in the postwar years to focus on land claims and camp-level activities. When different communities came into contact with each other at various historical moments the result was as often conflict as cooperation. Alliances were brief but promising. Maintaining them, sometimes quite literally against storms and fires, was never easy, particularly in the West with its multiplicity of active racialized peoples who were not just outsiders in the region's history.^[85]

Unlike the South or the unmarked North (or East), the U.S. West's narrative and rhetoric of race up to the mid-twentieth century was not calculated as a black-white binary.^[86] Instead, it held room for many players, who, though they operated under a system dominated by historically constructed "whites," struggled with each other for positions in the racial hierarchy. Social theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue that such a "war of position" (though perhaps wars is a better term) marked a transition from an earlier epoch when racialized peoples were excluded from the political system to one in which they gained access but not control.^[87] In the West, the federal government's presence and control of property (resources and land) and labor was far greater than in other regions. When shifts in federal policy occurred, such as the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively with representatives of their own choosing, racialized peoples seized the moment to press their agendas. Yet in places where no "majority" truly existed—as was the case in Alaska and throughout much of the West—these competing communities sometimes set aside the long history of divisive struggle at their places of work to create moments of cooperation. Their grassroots political concerns as "Alaskan" and/or "workers" sometimes overrode "Tlingit," "Indian," or "Filipino" issues. The story of the competition and cooperation among Asian Americans, Native Alaskans, and European American Alaska residents thus becomes part of the West's larger story, one that goes beyond isolated ethnic enclaves and embraces the "cultural frontiers" of the interactions among peoples.^[88] The West's complicated social relations force us to develop a narrative that refuses to essentialize racial, class, or gender categories. We need to dream of the shifting currents inside and between each. We also need to recognize that this is much more than a small vignette played out in distant Alaska or the U.S. West: it encompasses issues of interethnic relations that reach far beyond the region; it reveals how world markets shuffled people and resources around the globe; and more importantly, it demonstrates how people struggled at individual and community levels to make a reasonable life for themselves in the face of much larger constraints. If "western," this story is one of a cultural frontier fraught with competition and conflict often driven by national and even international market forces. Western visions thus cannot be narrow, exceptionalist explanations.^[89]

18—
Perceiving, Experiencing, and Expressing the Sacred:
An Indigenous Southern Californian View

Louise V. Jeffredo-Warden

As an indigenous southern Californian I have been asked to convey to you, in the next twenty minutes or so, something of my feelings for the sacred. What this means to me is that I will also be conveying to you something of my peoples' interactions with, and membership within, the natural world.^[1]

I would like to begin by discussing the actions of one of my antecedents, a young Shoshonean woman named Toypurina who on the evening of October 25, 1785, led a revolt against the priests and soldiers of Misión San Gabriel Arcángel.

Attest my elders: at that time, the mission was in a state of fluctuation and vulnerable to attack. Its oldest structures (established in 1771) were located at the outskirts of what is now Montebello. To some extent supervision of this site was maintained (structures of the mission were damaged or washed out by floodings along a segment of the San Gabriel River, but economic activities continued there) while its newest structures, located at the present-day site of the San Gabriel Mission, were still under construction (in 1774–75, the Spaniards moved their mission to what is now the city of San Gabriel, but construction on some of the principal structures there did not begin until 1790).^[2]

It would take much more time than I have here today to tell you what we know of Toypurina's life and this event.^[3] I will just summarize by saying that Toypurina, sister to a hereditary chief, was viewed by the Interior "Gabrielinos" as the wisest member of an elite stratum of persons known for their knowledge, power, and extraordinary intellectual and spiritual abilities.^[4] Though only twenty-four years of age at the time, Toypurina, with the assistance of ex-neophyte Nicolas José, organized an attack on Mission San Gabriel in which several lineages and villages of indigenous southern Californians participated. In so doing, Toypurina earned the distinction of

becoming the only Native American woman in the colonial records of Alta California said to have led a revolt against the Spanish mission system.^[5]

By all accounts, Toypurina's actions in this event have been described as unsuccessful because she and her associates did not succeed in overthrowing the mission; nor did she manage, even, to escape capture by the Spaniards (she and ten others were seized on the night of the attack).^[6]

Yet historical sources (both written and verbal) relate that Toypurina was an extremely intelligent and gifted individual—one surely capable of deducing the risks (cannons and muskets, for one) involved in attempting to overthrow the mission.^[7] Toypurina was also an individual with great personal power and social distinction.^[8] What this means to those of us with knowledge regarding particular roles and statuses in traditional Shoshonean societies is that Toypurina likely had social, moral, and religious obligations that far outweighed those of the common individual of her time—or of our time, for that matter.

Let me ask you, each one of you: Would you risk your life for an oak flat or river?

In January of 1786, Toypurina essentially stated during an interrogation for her supposed crimes that she had done as much, having fought for her traditional homeland. When asked, under the very real threat of torture,^[9] why she had organized a revolt against the Spaniards, Toypurina replied " . . . for I hate the padres and all of you, for living here on my native soil . . . for trespassing upon the land of my forefathers and despoiling our tribal domains."^[10]

Perhaps I should not attempt to envision Toypurina's beliefs surrounding the chances of her revolt succeeding, but I do—each and every time I visit the locales she sought to protect. And just as I was told, I tell my daughter: I do not think Toypurina actually believed she could win this battle, one of many waged against the mission since its establishment. Rather, I believe—as perhaps other Native Southern Californians with a knowledge of their traditional religions would—that Toypurina perceived this battle to be one for which she had an inescapable spiritual and moral responsibility to undertake. Indeed, even after her capture and interrogation Toypurina continued to fight to the best of her ability, enduring solitary confinement until she was baptized in 1787 and forever exiled by the Spanish from her homeland, probably in the year 1788.^[11]

I have summarized these features of Toypurina's story—long preserved through the folklore of indigenous and Spanish descendants alike—because I feel Toypurina's actions speak volumes regarding our views of the sacred, of the relationship, traditionally, that indigenous southern Californians had, and to some extent still have, with the natural environment.^[12] I have also related portions of Toypurina's story to emphasize the fact that for hundreds

of years now, Interior and Island "Gabrielino" peoples have been decrying and battling ecological destruction at the hands of invaders to our traditional homelands, on the offshore islands now called Santa Barbara, San Nicolas, Santa Catalina, and San Clemente, and in the regions presently contained in what are now called Los Angeles, Orange, and (parts of) San Bernardino and Riverside counties.^[13]

I spent the first eight years of my life in Montebello, being raised but a hop and a skip from the original site of the San Gabriel Mission, next door to an adobe that had once belonged to my great-great-grandfather, Don Juan Matias Sanchez. The former rancho where this adobe (now a museum) is located was called La Merced, and a good portion of the Río Hondo (a tributary of the Los Angeles River, the provider for life in the region) flowed through it.

I played in that river's wash—what was left of it—when I was a child. Sometimes, my father would try to tell me how much the river had changed since he was a child and had played there, too. But the pain engendered in my father by those discussions seemed so great that I understood, even then, when his voice trailed off and he dropped the subject altogether.

The subject of the River. The subject of the Sacred.

There is a seriousness and power in talking publicly about this subject, about our relationship with the natural world, that generally overwhelms me. How can I possibly explain to you something my own elders, my own father, could not explain to me?

When I was a child, I don't think a day passed that my father did not admonish me to feel, to become aware of, my nativeness. That blood in me, he would constantly remind, was special. Like many other indigenous persons, he believed that with it would come a certain sensitivity and sensibility, the very thing that, despite my lightness, would distinguish me from the majority; would empower me in ways I would grow to recognize. So many times was I to hear this that, one day impatient for this knowledge, I put my father to the test. "So explain to me what's so special about being Indian," I insisted. "Teach me, tell me, all the great things you've learned from your Indianness!"

I watched my father search himself. Seriously, and I think with a little sadness at my ignorance, he looked at me, just quietly looked at me. When he did decide to speak he said, "I can't explain it to you, Louise. It's not something anyone can explain. One day you'll feel it; one day you'll understand." Pointing to the southern California soil beneath our feet, he again reminded me, "It's just good to know this is home, and has been so for thousands of years."

By this time my immediate family had moved to a very rural area of north San Diego County, to the outskirts of Fallbrook (located within the traditional territory of some of my grandmother's ancestors, the "Luiseños"). I

had trouble acclimating myself to Fallbrook, so different was life there from my days in Montebello. But at the age of fourteen or so, I stopped to look out over a small ravine that forever changed me. It was a place that, over the years, I had passed practically every day.

When I was small—and against the wishes of my parents—I liked to play there, exploring the intricate coyote trails, looking to spy wood rats high in the trees rimming the creek's edge, listening carefully for snakes. There, while admiring the soft hues and pungent aromas of the pale summer brush, while playfully tracing Coyote's distant trails with my finger, I was suddenly stopped by the question: "Who, before me, also stood here to contemplate this place?"

That must have been the jackpot question, the one the First Ones found acceptable before revealing themselves to me, for that connectedness my father so often spoke of, that power in being and in being one home in one's homeland, suddenly rushed my senses. Now my grandmothers and grandfathers were all about me, I could feel them all about me—in the sand, in the brush, in the rocks among the brush. Now there was not only beauty, but sheer, overwhelming sense in that ravine—in all its components, both physical and spiritual. The ravine, as well as my place within it and within this world, I was beginning to understand. But the beginning to that understanding did not come without my first achieving a greater recognition of and appreciation for the subtleties in the every day, in the environment of my every day.

There is a Native Southern Californian story, which I think appropriate to tell here, about Coyote's flagrant immaturity and egoistic belief that he was the most superior of beings—just the handsomest, strongest, cleverest, fleetest of all:

Coyote liked to hound River for a race, so much so that River finally gave in one day. "Okay," she said, "We'll race." So Coyote took off and he ran, and he ran, and he ran, and he ran until he couldn't run any more, and he stumbled and he stopped and he fell. And when he turned to look at River, he saw that she was still running.^[14]

So you see, Coyote didn't understand his place in relation to everyone and everything else. He learned that, no matter how hard you run that race, you can't beat the natural order. There's just no getting around fundamental ecological principles.

Although this is a Gabrielino story in origin, I believe its sentiments are such that it could have originated among any one of the Native Southern Californian nations: Chumash, Island "Gabrielino," Juaneño, Luiseño, Cupeño, Diegueño, or Cahuilla, to name but a few.

Understanding one's place in relation to the physical and spiritual world

of which we are a part necessarily entails understanding the interconnectedness of all beings, of all life and matter, inanimate and animate. It entails nurturing a holistic way of thinking about and seeing this world, a way in which seemingly unrelated factors and relationships are effectively brought together in experience and thought.^[15]

This way of experiencing, thinking and seeing our world is, of course, well evidenced in indigenous southern Californian religious traditions. In particular, Luiseño songs contain metaphoric elements which have been referred to as "ceremonial couplings." A ceremonial coupling is a pair of words that, when spoken or sung together, evoke or reference particular reciprocal relationships, often ecological or co-evolutionary in nature. For example, the cyclic coupling Suukat^[*]Kwii la—the Luiseño words for deer and Black Oak acorn—at once symbolizes our spiritual and material relationship to these First Ones (for both deer and acorn were favored, principal foods for us), as well as S uukat's relationship to Kwiila (for acorn is also a favored food of deer). Like the elements of any ecosystem, the words of a coupling are viewed as inseparably interconnected; they therefore cannot, appropriately, be sung apart. As the late Luiseño elder Villiana C. Hyde often explained to me, to separate a coupling means "you're not making sense. "

That underlying sense I believe our elders often refer to—and that I have briefly addressed beginning to discover in my own story about the ravine—is also evidenced in the everyday topics and organization of our discourse. I am thinking about how my elders generally refrain from telling about their lives in a linear or sequential fashion, and often relate incidents back to back that may not initially seem to share a relatedness. But I have learned to contemplate such story pairings in much the same way as I have the ceremonial couplings in our songs: as metaphoric avenues through which our elders articulate, teach, and reinforce the balance and cyclical interrelationship in power and being, in elements—aged and young, human and non-human, female and male, spiritual and material—of this world.

Each time I hear my elders' stories, I find new lessons in them. That is because the poetry of our elders, when taken to heart, when planted and nourished within, grows. In the myriad circumstances of our lives, new meanings and understandings continually branch and blossom. There are times when these branches are sharp, startling lessons, and there are times when these branches meander a while before making their point, or their connections to other branches, known to us.

Yet in the indigenous southern Californian community, we do not learn from our human antecedents alone. We learn, as well, from those who came before us all, from the First People: the insects, animals, mountains, hills, valleys, rocks, minerals, plants, trees, sands, soils, and waters. When our behavior is improper, greedy, or destructive, the First Ones teach us, ultimately,

by not assisting us in our efforts to meet our needs: by decreasing the shortand long-term resources available to us all.

Long before Europeans had a scientific inkling regarding the beginnings of human life on this earth, my ancestors knew we were not the first to inhabit this planet. Given that they often referred to mountains and other geological formations produced over thousands and thousands of years as their ancestors or elders, my ancestors probably also had an accurate feeling for the relatively short time, in comparison to many other entities, human beings have inhabited this earth.

Only in this century has the dominant Western world begun to investigate what our oral traditions attest my ancestors, thousands of years ago, had a complex understanding of: the ultimate relatedness of all life on earth, and the indissoluble energy continually creating, constituting, and flowing through the universe, all life, and all systems of life support.

More than two centuries have passed since Toypurina confronted the Spanish for torturing her relatives—the land and all of its inhabitants, including her people. I hope when you consider the life choices that she made, you will bear in mind that many of the species and ecosystems she fought to protect are either gone or gravely threatened today.

Although "California is home to more plant and animal species than any other state," writes Sally Smith, it is also "the epicenter of extinction in the continental United States, with more than twice the number of federally listed endangered species as any other western state."^[16] And as Tim Palmer has noted: "It seems that the plunder of almost everything in California's natural world is up in the 80 percent or 90 percent bracket: Pacific Flyway wetlands, 96 percent gone; native grasslands, 99 percent gone; wilderness, 80 percent gone; riparian woodlands, 89 percent gone; salmon and steelhead, 90 percent to 100 percent gone; valley oaks, 98 percent gone; and all major rivers but one dammed at least once."^[17]

You have asked me to speak about my feelings for the sacred. In return, I urge each one of you to consider these statistics, and to ask yourself: Will the majority of Americans continue to crazily run, as did Coyote against River, or will they heed the lessons of our elders, the lessons of the First Ones? Will they collectively catch their breath long enough to start making sense?

19—
Dead West:
Ecocide in Marlboro Country

Mike Davis

Was the Cold War the Earth's worst eco-disaster in the last ten thousand years? The time has come to weigh the environmental costs of the great "twilight struggle" and its attendant nuclear arms race. Until recently, most ecologists have underestimated the impact of warfare and arms production on natural history.^[1] Yet there is implacable evidence that huge areas of Eurasia and North America, particularly the militarized deserts of Central Asia and the Great Basin, have become unfit for human habitation, perhaps for thousands of years, as a direct result of weapons testing (conventional, nuclear, and biological) by the Soviet Union, China, and the United States.

These "national sacrifice zones,"^[2] now barely recognizable as parts of the biosphere, are also the homelands of indigenous cultures (Kazakh, Paiute, Shoshone, among others) whose peoples may have suffered irreparable genetic damage. Millions of others—soldiers, armament workers, and "downwind" civilians—have become the silent casualties of atomic plagues. If, at the end of the old superpower era, a global nuclear apocalypse was finally averted, it was only at the cost of these secret holocausts.^[3]

Part One—
Portraits of Hell

Secret Holocausts

This hidden history has come unraveled most dramatically in the ex-Soviet Union where environmental and anti-nuclear activism, first stimulated by Chernobyl in 1986, emerged massively during the crisis of 1990–91. Grassroots protests by miners, schoolchildren, health-care workers and indigenous peoples forced official disclosures that confirmed the sensational accusations by earlier samizdat writers like Zhores Medvedev and Boris Komarov

(Ze'ev Wolfson). Izvestiya finally printed chilling accounts of the 1957 nuclear catastrophe in the secret military city of Chelyabinsk-40, as well as the poisoning of Lake Baikal by a military factory complex. Even the glacial wall of silence around radiation accidents at the Semipalatinsk "Polygon," the chief Soviet nuclear test range in Kazakhstan, began to melt.^[4]

As a result, the (ex-)Soviet public now has a more ample and honest view than their American or British counterparts of the ecological and human costs of the Cold War. Indeed, the Russian Academy of Sciences has compiled an extraordinary map that shows environmental degradation of "irreparable, catastrophic proportions" in forty-five different areas, comprising no less than 3.3 percent of the surface area of the former USSR. Not surprisingly, much of the devastation is concentrated in those parts of the southern Urals and Central Asia that were the geographical core of the USSR's nuclear military-industrial complex.^[5]

Veteran kremlinologists, in slightly uncomfortable green disguises, have fastened on these revelations to write scathing epitaphs for the USSR. According to Radio Liberty and Rand researcher D. J. Peterson, "the destruction of nature had come to serve as a solemn metaphor for the decline of a nation."^[6] For Lord Carrington's ex-advisor Murray Feshbach, and his literary sidekick Al Friendly (ex-Newsweek bureau chief in Moscow), on the other hand, the relationship between ecological cataclysm and the disintegration of the USSR is more than metaphor: "When historians finally conduct an autopsy on the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism, they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide."^[7]

Peterson's Troubled Lands and especially Feshbach and Friendly's Ecocide in the USSR have received spectacular publicity in the American media. Exploiting the new, uncensored wealth of Russian-language sources, they describe an environmental crisis of biblical proportions. The former Land of the Soviets is portrayed as a dystopia of polluted lakes, poisoned crops, toxic cities, and sick children. What Stalinist heavy industry and mindless cotton monoculture have not ruined, the Soviet military has managed to bomb or irradiate. For Peterson, this "ecological terrorism" is conclusive proof of the irrationality of a society lacking a market mechanism to properly "value" nature. Weighing the chances of any environmental cleanup, he holds out only the grim hope that economic collapse and radical de-industrialization may rid Russia and the Ukraine of their worst polluters.^[8]

Pentagon eco-freaks Feshbach and Friendly are even more unsparing. Bolshevism, it seems, has been a deliberate conspiracy against Gaia, as well as against humanity. "Ecocide in the USSR stems from the force, not the failure, of utopian ambitions." It is the "ultimate expression of the Revolution's physical and spiritual brutality." With Old Testament righteousness, they repeat the opinion that "there is no worse ecological situation on the planet."^[9]

Obviously Feshbach and Friendly have never been to Nevada or western Utah.^[10] The environmental horrors of Chelyabinsk-40 and the Semipalatinsk Polygon have their eerie counterparts in the poisoned, terminal landscapes of Marlboro Country.

Misrach's Inferno

A horse head extrudes from a haphazardly bulldozed mass grave. A dead colt—its forelegs raised gracefully as in a gallop—lies in the embrace of its mother. Albino tumbleweed are strewn randomly atop a tangled pyramid of rotting cattle, sheep, horses, and wild mustangs. Bloated by decay, the whole cadaverous mass seems to be struggling to rise. A Minoan bull pokes its eyeless head from the sand. A weird, almost Jurassic skeleton—except for a hoof, it might be the remains of a pterosaur—is sprawled next to a rusty pool of unspeakable vileness. The desert reeks of putrefication.

Photographer Richard Misrach shot this sequence of 8 x 10 color photographs in 1985–87 at various dead-animal disposal sites located near reputed plutonium "hot spots" and military toxic dumps in Nevada (see fig. 19.1). As a short text explains, it is commonplace for local livestock to die mysteriously, or give birth to monstrous offspring. Ranchers are officially encouraged to dump the cadavers, no questions asked, in unmarked, county-run pits. Misrach originally heard of this "Boschlike" landscape from a Paiute poet. When he asked for directions, he was advised to drive into the desert and watch for flocks of crows. The carrion birds feast on the eyes of dead livestock.^[11]

"The Pit" has been compared to Picasso's Guernica. It is certainly a nightmare reconfiguration of traditional cowboy clichés. The lush photographs are repellent, elegiac, and hypnotic at the same time. Indeed Misrach may have produced the single most disturbing image of the American West since ethnologist James Mooney countered Frederic Remington's popular paintings of heroic cavalry charges with stark photographs of the frozen corpses of Indian women and children slaughtered by the Seventh Cavalry's Hotchkiss guns at Wounded Knee in 1890.^[12]

But this holocaust of beasts is only one installment ("canto VI") in a huge mural of forbidden visions called Desert Cantos. Misrach is a connoisseur of trespass who, since the late 1970s, has penetrated some of the most secretive spaces of the Pentagon Desert in California, Nevada, and Utah. Each of his fourteen completed cantos (the work is still in progress) builds drama around a "found metaphor" that dissolves the boundary between documentary and allegory. Invariably there is an unsettling tension between the violence of the images and the elegance of their composition.

The earliest cantos (his "desert noir" period?) were formal aesthetic experiments influenced by readings in various cabalistic sources. They are

Figure 19.1
Richard Misrach, Dead Animals #327,  1987.
Copyright Richard Misrach.

mysterious phantasmagorias detached from any explicit sociopolitical context: the desert on fire, a drowned gazebo in the Salton Sea, a palm being swallowed by a sinister sand dune, and so on.^[13] By the mid-1980s, however, Misrach put aside Blake and Castaneda, and began to produce politically engaged exposés of the Cold War's impact upon the American West. Focusing on Nevada, where the military controls 4 million acres of land and 70 percent of the airspace, he was fascinated by the strange stories told by angry ranchers: "night raids . . . by Navy helicopters, laser-burned cows, the bombing of historic towns, and unbearable supersonic flights." With the help of two improbable anti-Pentagon activists, a small-town physician named Doc Bargen and a gritty bush pilot named Dick Holmes, Misrach spent eighteen months photographing a huge tract of public land in central Nevada that had been bombed, illegally and continuously, for almost forty years. To the Navy this landscape of almost incomprehensible devastation, sown with live ammo and unexploded warheads, is simply "Bravo 20." To Misrach, on the other hand, it is "the epicenter . . . the heart of the apocalypse":

Figure 19.2
Richard Misrach,  Bombs, Destroyed Vehicles, and Lone Rock , 1987.
Copyright Richard Misrach.

It was the most graphically ravaged environment I had ever seen. . . . I wandered for hours amongst the craters. There were thousands of them. Some were small, shallow pits the size of a bathtub, others were gargantuan excavations as large as a suburban two-car garage. Some were bone dry, with walls of "traumatized earth" splatterings, others were eerie pools of blood-red or emerald-green water. Some had crystallized into strange salt formations. Some were decorated with the remains of blown-up jeeps, tanks, and trucks.^[14]

Although Misrach's photographs of the pulverized public domain, published in 1990, riveted national attention  on the bombing of the West, it was a bittersweet achievement. His pilot friend Dick Holmes, whom he had photographed raising the American flag over a lunarized hill in a delicious parody on the Apollo astronauts, was killed in an inexplicable plane crash. The Bush administration, meanwhile, accelerated the modernization of bombing ranges in Nevada, Utah, and Idaho. Huge swathes of the remote West, including Bravo 20, have been updated into electronically scored, multi-target

Map 19.1
Pentagon Nevada.

grids which, from space, must look like a colossal Pentagon videogameboard.

In his most recent collection of cantos, Violent Legacies (which includes "The Pit"), Misrach offers a haunting, visual archeology of "Project W-47," the supersecret final assembly and flight testing of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hangar that housed the Enola Gay still stands (indeed, a sign warns: "Use of deadly force authorized") amidst the ruins of Wendover Air Base in the Great Salt Desert of Utah. In the context of incipient genocide, the fossil flight-crew humor of 1945 is unnerving. Thus a fading slogan over the A-bomb assembly building reads BLOOD, SWEAT AND BEERS, While graffiti on the administrative headquarters commands EAT MY

FALLOUT. The rest of the base complex, including the atomic bomb storage bunkers and loading pits, has eroded into megalithic abstractions that evoke the ground-zero helter-skelter of J. G. Ballard's famous short story "The Terminal Beach." Outlined against ochre desert mountains (the Newfoundland Range, I believe), the forgotten architecture and casual detritus of the first nuclear war are almost beautiful.^[15]

In cultivating a neo-pictorialist style, Misrach plays subtle tricks on the sublime. He can look Kurtz's Horror straight in the face and make a picture postcard of it. This attention to the aesthetics of murder infuriates some partisans of traditional black-and-white political documentarism, but it also explains Misrach's extraordinary popularity. He reveals the terrible, hypnotizing beauty of Nature in its death throes, of Landscape as Inferno. We have no choice but to look.

If there is little precedent for this in previous photography of the American West, it has a rich resonance in contemporary—especially Latin American—political fiction. Discussing the role of folk apocalypticism in the novels of García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes, Lois Zamora inadvertently supplies an apt characterization of Desert Cantos :

The literary devices of biblical apocalypse and magical realism coincide in their hyperbolic narration and in their surreal images of utter chaos and unutterable-perfection. And in both cases, [this] surrealism is not principally conceived for psychological effect, as in earlier European examples of the mode, but is instead grounded in social and political realities and is designed to communicate the writers' objections to those realities.^[16]

Resurveying the West

Just as Marquez and Fuentes, then, have led us through the hallucinatory labyrinth of modern Latin American history, so Misrach has become an indefatigable tour guide to the Apocalyptic Kingdom that the Department of Defense has built in the desert West. His vision is singular, yet, at the same time, Desert Cantos claims charter membership in a broader movement of politicized western landscape photography that has made the destruction of nature its dominant theme.

Its separate detachments over the last fifteen years have included, first, the so-called New Topographics in the mid-1970s (Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, and Joel Deal),^[17] closely followed by the Rephotographic Survey Project (Mark Klett and colleagues),^[18] and, then, in 1987, by the explicitly activist Atomic Photographers Guild (Robert Del Tredici, Carole Gallagher, Peter Goin, Patrick Nagatani, and twelve others).^[19] If each of these moments has had its own artistic virtue (and pretension), they share a common framework of revisionist principles.

Figure 19.3
Richard Misrach,  Princess of Plutonium,
Nuclear Test Site, Nevada,  1988.
Copyright Richard Misrach.

In the first place, they have mounted a frontal attack on the hegemony of Ansel Adams, the dead pope of the "Sierra Club school" of Nature-as-God photography. Adams, if necessary, doctored his negatives to remove any evidence of human presence from his apotheosized wilderness vistas.^[20] The new generation has rudely deconstructed this myth of a virginal, if imperilled nature. They have rejected Adams's Manichean division between "sacred" and "profane" landscape, which "leaves the already altered and inhabited parts of our environment dangerously open to uncontrolled ex-

ploitation."^[21] Their West, by contrast, is an irrevocably social landscape, transformed by militarism, urbanization, the interstate highway, epidemic vandalism, mass tourism, and the extractive industries' boom-and-bust cycles. Even in the "last wild places," the remote ranges and lost box canyons, the Pentagon's jets are always overhead.

Secondly, the new generation has created an alternative iconography around such characteristic, but previously spurned or "unphotographable" objects as industrial debris, rock graffiti, mutilated saguaros, bulldozer tracks, discarded girlie magazines, military shrapnel, and dead animals.^[22] Like the surrealists, they have recognized the oracular and critical potencies of the commonplace, the discarded, and the ugly.^[23] But as environmentalists, they also understand the fate of the rural West as the national dumping ground.

Finally, their projects derive historical authority from a shared benchmark: the photographic archive of the great nineteenth-century scientific and topographic surveys of the intermontane West. Indeed, most of them have acknowledged the centrality of "resurvey" as strategy or metaphor. The New Topographers, by their very name, declared an allegiance to the scientific detachment and geological clarity of Timothy O'Sullivan (famed photographer for Clarence King's 1870s survey of the Great Basin), as they turned their cameras on the suburban wastelands of the New West. The Rephotographers "animated" the dislocations from past to present by painstakingly assuming the exact camera stances of their predecessors and producing the same scene a hundred years later. Meanwhile, the Atomic Photographers, in emulation of the old scientific surveys, have produced increasingly precise studies of the landscape tectonics of nuclear testing.

Resurvey, of course, presumes a crisis of definition, and it is interesting to speculate why the new photography, in its struggle to capture the meaning of the postmodern West, has been so obsessed with nineteenth-century images and canons. It is not because, as might otherwise be imagined, Timothy O'Sullivan and his colleagues were able to see the West pristine and unspoiled. As Klett's "rephotographs" startlingly demonstrate, the grubby hands of manifest destiny were already all over the landscape by 1870. What was more important was the exceptional scientific and artistic integrity with which the surveys confronted landscapes that, as Jan Zita Grover suggests, were culturally "unreadable."^[24]

The regions that today constitute the Pentagon's "national sacrifice zone" (the Great Basin of eastern California, Nevada, and western Utah) and its "plutonium periphery" (the Columbia-Snake Plateau, the Wyoming Basin and the Colorado Plateau) have few landscape analogues anywhere else on earth.^[25] Early accounts of the intermontane West in the 1840s and 1850s (John Fremont, Sir Richard Burton, the Pacific railroad surveys) chipped away eclectically, with little success, at the towering popular abstraction of

"the Great American Desert." Nevada and Utah, for instance, were variously compared to Arabia, Turkestan, the Takla Makan, Timbuktu, Australia, and so on, but in reality, Victorian minds were travelling through an essentially extraterrestrial terrain, far outside their cultural experience.^[26] (Perhaps literally so, since planetary geologists now study lunar and Martian landforms by analogy with strikingly similar landscapes in the Colorado and Columbia-Snake River plateaux.)^[27]

The bold stance of the survey geologists, their artists and photographers, was to face this radical "Otherness" on its own terms.^[28] Like Darwin in the Galapagos, John Wesley Powell and his colleagues (especially Clarence Dutton and the great Carl Grove Gilbert) eventually cast aside a trunkful of Victorian preconceptions in order to recognize novel forms and processes in nature. Thus Powell and Gilbert had to invent a new science, geomorphology, to explain the amazing landscape system of the Colorado Plateau where rivers were often "antecedent" to highlands and the "laccolithic" mountains were really impotent volcanoes. (Similarly, decades later, another quiet revolutionary in the survey tradition, Harlen Bretz, would jettison uniformitarian geological orthodoxy in order to show that cataclysmic ice-age floods were responsible for the strange "channeled scablands" carved into the lava of the Columbia Plateau.)^[29]

If the surveys "brought the strange spires, majestic cliff facades, and fabulous canyons into the realm of scientific explanation," then (notes Gilbert's biographer), they "also gave them a critical aesthetic meaning" through the stunning photographs, drawings, and narratives that accompanied and expanded the technical reports.^[30] Thus Timothy O'Sullivan (who with Mathew Brady had photographed the ranks of death at Gettysburg) abandoned the Ruskinian paradigms of nature representation to concentrate on naked, essential form in a way that presaged modernism. His "stark planes, the seemingly two-dimensional curtain walls, [had] no immediate parallel in the history of art and photography. . . . No one before had seen the wilderness in such abstract and architectural forms."^[31] Similarly Clarence Dutton, "the genius loci of the Grand Canyon," created a new landscape language—also largely architectural, but sometimes phantasmagorical—to describe an unprecedented dialectics of rock, color and light. (Wallace Stegner says he "aestheticized geology"; perhaps, more accurately, he eroticized it.)^[32]

But this convergence of science and sensibility (which has no real twentieth-century counterpart) also compelled a moral view of the environment as it was laid bare for exploitation. Setting a precedent which few of his modern descendants have had the guts to follow, Powell, the one-armed Civil War hero, laid out the political implications of the western surveys with exacting honesty in his famous 1877 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region. His message, which Stegner has called "revolutionary" (and others "socialistic"), was that the intermontane region's only salvation was Cooperativism based

on the communal management and conservation of scarce pasture and water resources. Capitalism pure and simple, Powell implied, would destroy the West.^[33]

The surveys, then, were not just another episode in measuring the West for conquest and pillage; they were, rather, an autonomous moment in the history of American science when radical new perceptions temporarily created a pathway for a utopian alternative to the future that became Project W-47 and The Pit. That vantage point is now extinct. In reclaiming this tradition, contemporary photographers have elected to fashion their own clarity without the aid of the Victorian optimism that led Powell into the chasms of the Colorado. But "Resurvey," if a resonant slogan, is a diffuse mandate. For some it has meant little more than checking to see if the boulders have moved after a hundred years. For others, however, it has entailed perilous moral journeys deep into the interior landscapes of the Bomb.

Jellyfish Babies

If Richard Misrach has seen "the heart of the apocalypse" at Bravo 20, Carole Gallagher has spent a decade at "American Ground Zero" (the title of her new book) in Nevada and southwestern Utah photographing and collecting the stories of its victims.^[34] She is one of the founders of the Atomic Photographers Guild, arguably the most important social-documentary collaboration since the 1930s, when Roy Stryker's Farm Security Administration Photography Unit brought together the awesome lenses of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and Arthur Rothstein. Just as the FSA photographers dramatized the plight of the rural poor during the Depression, so the Guild has endeavored to document the human and ecological costs of the nuclear arms race. Its accomplishments include Peter Goin's revelatory Nuclear Landscapes (photographed at test-sites in the American West and the Marshall Islands) and Robert Del Tredici's biting exposé of nuclear manufacture, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb.^[35]

But it is Gallagher's work that proclaims the most explicit continuity with the FSA tradition, particularly with Dorothea Lange's classical black-and-white portraiture. Indeed, she prefaces her book with a meditation on a Lange motto and incorporates some haunting Lange photographs of St. George, Utah, in 1953. There is no doubt that American Ground Zero is intended to stand on the same shelf with such New Deal—era classics as An American Exodus, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and You Have Seen Their Faces.^[36] Hers, however, is a more painful book.

In the early 1980s, Gallagher moved from New York City to St. George to work full-time on her oral history of the casualties of the American nuclear test program. Beginning with its first nuclear detonation in 1951, this small

Figure 19.4
Carole Gallagher,  Ken Case, the "Atomic Cowboy, " North Las Vegas.
Copyright Carole Gallagher.

Mormon city, due east of the Nevada Test Site, has been shrouded in radiation debris from scores of atmospheric and accidentally "ventilated" underground blasts. Each lethal cloud was the equivalent of billions of x-rays and contained more radiation than was released at Chernobyl in 1988. Moreover, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in the 1950s had deliberately planned for fallout to blow over the St. George region in order to avoid Las Vegas and Los Angeles. In the icy, Himmlerian jargon of a secret AEC memo unearthed by Gallagher, the targeted communities were "a low-use segment of the population."^[37]

As a direct result, this downwind population (exposed to the fallout equivalent of perhaps fifty Hiroshimas) is being eaten away by cumulative cancers, neurological disorders, and genetic defects. Gallagher, for instance, talks

Map 19.2
Downwind.

about her quiet dread of going into the local K-Mart and "seeing four- and five-year-old children wearing wigs, deathly pale and obviously in chemotherapy."^[38] But such horror has become routinized in a region where cancer is so densely clustered that virtually any resident can matter-of-factly rattle off long lists of tumorous or deceased friends and family. The eighty-some voices—former Nevada Test Site workers and "atomic GIs" as well as Downwinders—that comprise American Ground Zero are weary with the minutiae of pain and death.

In most of these individual stories there is one single moment of recognition that distills the terror and awe of the catastrophe that has enveloped their life. For example, two military veterans of shot Hood (a 74-kiloton hydrogen bomb detonated in July 1957) recall the vision of hell they encountered in the Nevada desert:

We'd only gone a short way when one of my men said, "Jesus Christ, look at that!" I looked where he was pointing, and what I saw horrified me. There were people in a stockade—a chain-link fence with barbed wire on top of it. Their hair was falling out and their skin seemed to be peeling off. They were wearing blue denim trousers but no shirts. . . .

I was happy, full of life before I saw that bomb, but then I understood evil and was never the same. . . . I seen how the world can end.^[39]

For sheep ranchers it was the unsettling spectacle they watched season after season in their lambing sheds as irradiated ewes attempted to give birth: "Have you ever seen a five-legged lamb?"^[40] For one husband, on the other hand, it was simply watching his wife wash her hair.

Four weeks after that [the atomic test] I was sittin' in the front room reading the paper and she'd gone into the bathroom to wash her hair. All at once she let out the most ungodly scream, and I run in there and there's about half her hair layin' in the washbasin! You can imagine a woman with beautiful, ravenblack hair, so black it would glint green in the sunlight just like a raven's wing, and it was long hair down onto her shoulders. There was half of it in the basin and she was as bald as old Yul Brynner.^[41]

Perhaps most bone-chilling, even more than the anguished accounts of small children dying from leukemia, are the stories about the "jellyfish babies": irradiated fetuses that developed into grotesque hydatidiform moles.

I remember being worried because they said the cows would eat the hay and all this fallout had covered it and through the milk they would get radioactive iodine. . . . From four to about six months I kept a-wondering because I hadn't felt any kicks. . . . I hadn't progressed to the size of a normal pregnancy and the doctor gave me a sonogram. He couldn't see any form of a baby. . . . He did a D and C. My husband was there and he showed him what he had taken out of my uterus. There were little grapelike cysts. My husband said it looked like a bunch of peeled grapes.^[42]

Figure 19.5
Carole Gallagher, Baby photographs of Sherry Millett, before
and during the leukemia from which she died, with the
1957 Atomic Energy Commission propaganda booklet.
Copyright Carole Gallagher.

The ordinary Americans who lived, and still live, these nightmares are rendered in great dignity in Gallagher's photographs. But she cannot suppress her frustration with the passivity of so many of the Mormon Downwinders. Their unquestioning submission to a Cold War government in Washington and an authoritarian church hierarchy in Salt Lake City disabled effective protest through the long decades of contamination. To the cynical atomocrats in the AEC, they were just gullible hicks in the sticks, suckers for soapy reassurances and idiot "the atom is your friend" propaganda films. As one subject recalled his Utah childhood: "I remember in school they showed a film once called A is for Atom, B is for the Bomb. I think most of us

who grew up in that period . . . [have now] added C is for Cancer. D is for Death. "^[43]

Indeed, most of the people interviewed by Gallagher seem to have had a harder time coming to grips with government deception than with cancer. Ironically, Washington waged its secret nuclear war against the most patriotic cross-section of the population imaginable, a virtual Norman Rockwell tapestry of Americana: gung-ho Marines, ultra-loyal Test Site workers, Nevada cowboys and tungsten miners, Mormon farmers, and freckle-faced Utah schoolchildren. For forty years the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the Department of Energy, have lied about exposure levels, covered up Chernobyl-sized accidents, suppressed research on the contamination of the milk supply, ruined the reputation of dissident scientists, abducted hundreds of body parts from victims, and conducted a ruthless legal war to deny compensation to the Downwinders.^[44] A 1980 congressional study accused the agencies of "fraud upon the court," but Gallagher uses a stronger word—"genocide"-and reminds us that "lack of vigilance and control of the weaponeers" has morally and economically "played a large role in bankrupting . . . not just one superpower but two."^[45]

And what has been the ultimate cost? For decades the AEC cover-up prevented the accumulation of statistics or the initiation of research that might provide some minimal parameters. However, an unpublished report by a Carter administration task force (quoted by Philip Fradkin) determined that 170,000 people had been exposed to contamination within a 250-mile radius of the Nevada Test Site. In addition, roughly 250,000 servicemen, some of them cowering in trenches a few thousand yards from ground zero, took part in atomic war games in Nevada and the Marshall Islands during the 1950s and early 1960s. Together with the Test Site workforce, then, it is reasonable to estimate that at least 500,000 people were exposed to intense, short-range effects of nuclear detonation. (For comparison, this is the maximum figure quoted by students of the fallout effects from tests at the Semipalatinsk Polygon.)^[46]

But these figures are barely suggestive of the real scale of nuclear toxicity. Another million Americans have worked in nuclear weapons plants since 1945, and some of these plants, especially the giant Hanford complex in Washington, have contaminated their environments with secret, deadly emissions, including radioactive iodine.^[47] Most of the urban Midwest and Northeast, moreover, was downwind of the 1950s atmospheric tests, and storm fronts frequently dumped carcinogenic, radioisotope "hot spots" as far east as New York City. As the commander of the elite Air Force squadron responsible for monitoring the nuclear test clouds during the 1950S told Gallagher (he was suffering from cancer): "There isn't anybody in the United States who isn't a downwinder. . . . When we followed the clouds, we went all

over the United States from east to west. . . . Where are you going to draw the line?"^[48]

Part Two—
Healing Global Wounds

Yet, over the last decade, Native Americans, ranchers, peace activists, Downwinders, and even members of the normally conservative Mormon establishment have attempted to draw a firm line against further weapons' testing, radiation poisoning, and ecocide in the deserts of Nevada and Utah. The three short field reports that follow (written in 1992, 1993, and 1996–97) are snapshots of the most extraordinary social movement to emerge in the postwar West.

Humbling "Mighty Uncle"

Flash back to fall 1992. The (private) Wackenhut guards at the main gate of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site (NTS) nervously adjust the visors on their riot helmets and fidget with their batons. One block away, just beyond the permanent traffic sign that warns "Watch for Demonstrators!" a thousand anti-nuclear protestors, tie-dyed banners unfurled, are approaching at a funeral pace to the sombre beat of a drum.

The unlikely leader of this youthful army is a rugged-looking rancher from the Ruby Mountains named Raymond Yowell. With a barrel chest that strains against his pearl-button shirt, and calloused hands that have roped a thousand mustangs, he makes the Marlboro Man seem wimpy. But if you look closely, you will notice a sacred eagle feather in his Stetson. Mr. Yowell is chief of the Western Shoshone National Council.

When an official warns protestors that they will be arrested if they cross the cattleguard that demarcates the boundary of the Test Site, Chief Yowell scowls that it is the Department of Energy who is trespassing on sacred Shoshone land. "We would be obliged," he says firmly, "if you would leave. And please take your damn nuclear waste and rent-a-cops with you."

While Chief Yowell is being handcuffed at the main gate, scores of protestors are breaking through the perimeter fence and fanning out across the desert. They are chased like rabbits by armed Wackenhuts in fast, low-slung dune-buggies. Some try to hide behind Joshua trees, but all will be eventually caught and returned to the concrete-and-razor-wire compound that serves as the Test Site's hoosegow. It is October 11, the day before the quincentenary of Columbus's crash landing in the New World.

The U.S. nuclear test program has been under almost constant siege since the Las Vegas—based American Peace Test (a direct-action offshoot of the old Moratorium) first encamped outside the NTS's Mercury gate in

1987. Since then more than ten thousand people have been arrested at APT mass demonstrations or in smaller actions ranging from Quaker prayer vigils to Greenpeace commando raids on ground zero itself. (In Violent Legacies Misrach includes a wonderful photograph of the "Princesses Against Plutonium," attired in radiation suits and death masks, illegally camped inside the NTS perimeter.) Dodging the Wackenhuts in the Nevada desert has become the rite of passage for a new generation of peace activists.

The fall 1992 Test Site mobilization—"Healing Global Wounds"—was a watershed in the history of anti-nuclear protest. In the first place, the action coincided with Congress's nine-month moratorium on nuclear testing (postponing until this September a test blast codenamed "Mighty Uncle"). At long last, the movement's strategic goal, a comprehensive test ban treaty, seemed tantalizingly within grasp. Secondly, the leadership within the movement has begun to be assumed by the indigenous peoples whose lands have been poisoned by nearly a half century of nuclear testing.

These two developments have a fascinating international connection. Washington's moratorium was a grudging response to Moscow's earlier, unilateral cessation of testing, while the Russian initiative was coerced from Yeltsin by unprecedented popular pressure. The revelation of a major nuclear accident at the Polygon in February 1989 provoked a non-violent uprising in Kazakhstan. The famed writer Olzhas Suleimenov used a televised poetry reading to urge Kazakhs to emulate the example of the Nevada demonstrations. Tens of thousands of protestors, some brandishing photographs of family members killed by cancer, flooded the streets of Semipalatinsk and Alma-Ata, and within a year the "Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement" had become "the largest and most influential public organization in Kazakhstan, drawing its support from a broad range of people—from the intelligentsia to the working class."^[49] Two years later, the Kazakh Supreme Soviet, as part of its declaration of independence, banned nuclear testing forever.

It was the world's first successful anti-nuclear revolution, and its organizers tried to spread its spirit with the formation of the Global Anti-Nuclear Alliance (GANA). They specifically hoped to reach out to other indigenous nations and communities victimized by nuclear colonialism. The Western Shoshones were amongst the first to respond. Unlike many other western tribes, Chief Yowell's people have never conceded U.S. sovereignty in the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah, and even insist on carrying their own national passport when travelling abroad. In conversations with the Kazakhs and activists from the Pacific test sites, they discovered a poignant kinship that eventually led to the joint GANA-Shoshone sponsorship of "Healing Global Wounds" with its twin demands to end nuclear testing and restore native land rights.

In the past some participants had criticized the American Peace Test encampments for their overwhelmingly countercultural character. Indeed, last

October as usual, the bulletin board at the camp's entrance gave directions to affinity groups, massage tables, brown rice, and karmic enhancements. But the Grateful Dead ambience was leavened by the presence of an authentic Great Basin united front that included Mormon and Paiute Indian Downwinders from the St. George area, former GIs exposed to the 1950s atmospheric tests, Nevada ranchers struggling to demilitarize public land (Citizen Alert), a representative of workers poisoned by plutonium at the giant Hanford nuclear plant, and the Reese River Valley Rosses, a Shoshone country-western band. In addition there were friends from Kazakhstan and Mururoa, as well as a footsore regiment of European cross-continent peace marchers.

The defeat of George Bush a month after "Healing Global Wounds" solidified optimism in the peace movement that the congressional moratorium would become a permanent test ban. The days of the Nevada Test Site seemed numbered. Yet to the dismay of the Western Shoshones, the Downwinders and the rest of the peace community, the new Democratic administration evinced immodest enthusiasm for the ardent wooing of the powerful nuclear-industrial complex. Cheered on by the Tory regime in London, which was eager to test the nuclear warhead for the RAF's new "TASM" missile in the Nevada desert, the Pentagon and the three giant atomic labs (Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia) came within a hairsbreadth of convincing Clinton to resume "Mighty Uncle." Only a last-minute revolt by twenty-three senators—alarmed that further testing might undermine the U.S.-led crusade against incipient nuclear powers like Iraq and North Korea—forced the White House to extend the moratorium.

Although the ban has remained in force, there is some evidence that the Pentagon has participated in tests by proxy in French Polynesia. In 1995 the White House, breaking with the policy of the Bush years, allowed the French military to airlift H-bomb components to Mururoa through U.S. airspace, using LAX as a stop-over point. The British Labor Party, echoing accounts in the French press, charged that Washington and London were silent partners in the internationally denounced Mururoa test series, sharing French data while providing Paris with logistical and diplomatic support.^[50]

More recently, the spotlight has shifted back to Nevada where peace activists in spring 1997 were preparing for protests against NTS's new program of "zero yield" tests. The Department of Energy is planning to use high explosives to compress "old" plutonium to the brink of chain reaction, an open violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban agreement, in order to generate data for a computer study of "the effects of age on nuclear weapons." This is part of the Clinton administration's science-based Stockpile Stewardship program, which, critics allege, has merely shifted the nuclear armsrace into high-tech labs like Livermore's $1 billion National Ignition Facility where super-lasers will produce miniature nuclear explosions that will in

turn be studied by the next generation of "teraflop" (1 trillion calculations per second) supercomputers. Great Basin peace activists, like their Global Healing counterparts fear that such "virtual atomic tests," combined with data from "zero yield" blasts in Nevada, will encourage not only the maintenance, but the further development of strategic nuclear weapons. In the meantime, motorists will still have to "Stop for Demonstrators" at the Mercury exit.^[51]

The Death Lab

January 1993. It has been one of the coldest winters in memory in the Great Basin. Truckers freeze in their stalled rigs on ice-bound Interstate 80 while flocks of sheep are swallowed whole by huge snow drifts. It is easy to miss the exit to Skull Valley.

An hour's drive west of Salt Lake City, Skull Valley is typical of the basin and range landscape that characterizes so much of the intermontane West. Ten thousand years ago it was an azure-blue fjord-arm of prehistoric Lake Bonneville (mother of the present Great Salt Lake), whose ancient shorelines are still etched across the face of the snow-capped Stansbury Mountains. Today the valley floor (when not snowed-in) is mostly given over to sagebrush, alkali dust, and the relics of the area's incomparably strange history.

A half-dozen abandoned ranch houses, now choked with tumbleweed, are all that remain of the immigrant British cottonmill workers—Engels's classic Lancashire proletariat—who were the Valley's first Mormon settlers in the late 1850s. The nearby ghost town of Iosepa testifies to the ordeal of several hundred native Hawaiian converts, arriving a generation later, who fought drought, homesickness, and leprosy. Their cemetery, with beautiful Polynesian names etched in Stansbury quartzite, is one of the most unexpected and poignant sites in the American West.^[52]

Further south, a few surviving families of the Gosiute tribe—people of Utah's Dreamtime and first cousins to the Western Shoshone—operate the "Last Pony Express Station" (actually a convenience store) and lease the rest of their reservation to the Hercules Corporation for testing rockets and explosives. In 1918, after refusing to register for the draft, the Skull Valley and Deep Creek bands of the Gosiutes were rounded up by the Army in what Salt Lake City papers termed "the last Indian uprising."^[53]

Finally, at the Valley's southern end, across from an incongruously large and solitary Mormon temple, a sign warns spies away from Dugway Proving Ground: since 1942, the primary test-site for U.S. chemical, biological, and incendiary weapons. Napalm was invented here and tried out on block-long replicas of German andJapanese workers' housing (parts of this eerie "doom city" still stand). Also tested here was the supersecret Anglo-American anthrax bomb (Project N) that Churchill, exasperated by the 1945 V-2 attacks

on London, wanted to use to kill twelve million Germans. Project W-47—which did incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki—was based nearby, just on the other side of Granite Mountain.^[54]

In the postwar years, the Pentagon carried out a nightmarish sequence of live-subject experiments at Dugway. In 1955, for example, a cloud generator was used to saturate thirty volunteers—all Seventh-Day Adventist conscientious objectors—with potentially deadly Q Fever. Then, between August and October 1959, the Air Force deliberately let nuclear reactors melt down on eight occasions and "used forced air to ensure that the resulting radiation would spread to the wind. Sensors were set up over a 210-mile area to track the radiation clouds. When last detected they were headed toward the old U.S. 40 (now Interstate 80)."^[55]

Most notoriously, the Army conducted 1,635 field trials of nerve gas, involving at least 500,000 pounds of the deadly agent, over Dugway between 1951 and 1969. Open-air nerve-gas releases were finally halted after a haywire 1968 experiment asphyxiated six thousand sheep on the neighboring Gosiute Reservation. Although the Army paid $1 million in damages, it refused to acknowledge any responsibility. Shrouded in secrecy and financed by a huge black budget, Dugway continued to operate without public scrutiny.^[56]

Then in 1985 Senator Jeremy Stasser and writer Jeremy Rifkin teamed up to expose Pentagon plans to use recombinant genetic engineering to create "Andromeda strains" of killer microorganisms. Despite the American signature on the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention that banned their development, the Army proposed to build a high-containment laboratory at Dugway to "defensively" test its new designer bugs.^[57]

Opposition to the Death Lab was led by Downwinders, Inc., a Salt Lake City–based group that grew out of solidarity with the radiation victims in the St. George area. In addition to local ranchers and college students, the Downwinders were able to rally support from doctors at the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Hospital and, eventually, from the entire Utah Medical Association. Local unease with Dugway was further aggravated by the Army's admission that ultra-toxic organisms were regularly shipped through the U.S. mail.

The Pentagon, accustomed to red-carpet treatment in super-patriotic Utah, was stunned by the ensuing storm of public hearings and protests, as well as the breadth of the opposition. In September 1988 the Army reluctantly cancelled plans for its new "BL-4" lab. In a recent interview, Downwinders organizer Steve Erickson pointed out that "this was the first grassroots victory anywhere, ever, over germ or chemical warfare testing." In 1990, however, the Dugway authorities unexpectedly resurrected their biowar lab scheme, although now restricting the range of proposed tests to "natural" lethal organisms rather than biotech mutants.^[58]

A year later, while Downwinders and their allies were still skirmishing with the Army over the possible environmental impact of the new lab, Desert Shield suddenly turned into Desert Storm. Washington worried openly about Iraq's terrifying arsenal of biological and chemical agents, and Dugway launched a crash program of experiments with anthrax, botulism, bubonic plague, and other micro-toxins in a renovated 1950s facility called Baker Lab. Simulations of these organisms were also tested in the atmosphere.

The Downwinders, together with the Utah Medical Association (dominated by Mormon doctors), went to the U.S. District Court to challenge the resumption of tests at the veteran Baker Lab as well as the plan for a new "life sciences test facility." Their case was built around the Army's noncompliance with federal environmental regulations as well as its scandalous failure to provide local hospitals with the training and serums to cope with a major biowar accident at Dugway. The fantastically toxic botulism virus, for example, has been tested at Dugway for decades, but not a single dose of the anti-toxin was available in Utah (indeed in 1993, there were only twelve doses on the entire West Coast).^[59]

In filing suit, the Downwinders also wanted to clarify the role of chemical and biological weapons in the Gulf War. In the first place, they hoped to force the Army to reveal why it vaccinated tens of thousands of its troops with an experimental, and possibly dangerous, anti-botulism serum. Were GIs once again being used as Pentagon guinea pigs? Was there any connection between the vaccinations and the strange sickness—the so-called "Gulf War Syndrome"—brought home by so many veterans?

Secondly, the Downwinders hoped to shed more light on why the Bush administration allowed the sales of potential biological agents in the months before the invasion of Kuwait. "If the Army's justification for resuming tests at Dugway was the imminent Iraqi biowar threat," said Erickson, "then why did the Commerce Department previously allow $20 million of dangerous 'dual-use' biological materials to be sold to Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission? Were we trying to defend our troops against our own renegade bugs?"^[60]

In the event, the Pentagon refused to answer these questions and the Downwinders lost their lawsuit, although they remain convinced that bioagents are prime suspects in the Gulf War Syndrome. Meanwhile, the Army completed the controversial Life Sciences Test Facility, and rumors began to fly of research on super-lethal fibroviruses like Ebola Fever. Then, in 1994, Lee Davidson, a reporter for the Mormon Deseret News, used the Freedom of Information Act to excavate the details of human-subject experiments in Dugway during the 1950s and 1960s. Two years later, former Dugway employees complained publicly for the first time about cancers and other disabilities that they believe were caused by chemical and biological testing. The

Department of Defense, finally, admitted that clean-up of Dugway's 143 major toxic sites may cost billions and take generations, if ever, to complete.^[61]

The Great "Waste" Basin?

Grassroots protest in the intermontane states has repeatedly upset the Pentagon's best-made plans. Echoing sentiments frequently expressed at "Healing Global Wounds," Steve Erickson of the Downwinders boasts of the peace movement's dramatic breakthrough in the West over the past decade. "We have managed to defeat the MX and Midgetman missile systems, scuttle the proposed Canyonlands Nuclear Waste Facility, stop construction of Dugway's BL-4, and impose a temporary nuclear test ban. That's not a bad record for a bunch of cowboys and Indians in Nevada and Utah: two supposedly bedrock pro-military states!"^[62]

Yet the struggle continues. The Downwinders and other groups, including the Western Shoshones and Citizen Alert, see an ominous new environmental and public-health menace under the apparently benign slogan of "demilitarization." With the abrupt ending of the Cold War, millions of aging strategic and tactical weapons, as well as six tons of military plutonium (the most poisonous substance that has ever existed in the geological history of the earth), must somehow be disposed of. As Seth Schulman warns, "the nationwide military toxic waste problem is monumental—a nightmare of almost overwhelming proportion."^[63]

The Department of Defense's reaction, not surprisingly, has been to dump most of its obsolete missiles, chemical weaponry, and nuclear waste into the thinly populated triangle between Reno, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas: an area that already contains perhaps one thousand "highly contaminated" sites (the exact number is a secret) on sixteen military bases and Department of Energy facilities.^[64] The Great Basin, as in 1942 and 1950, has again been nominated for sacrifice.

The Pentagon's apocalyptic detritus, however, is a new regional cornucopia—the equivalent of postmodern Comstock—for a handful of powerful defense contractors and waste-treatment firms. As environmental journalist Triana Silton warned a few years ago, "a full-fledged corporate war is shaping up as part of the old military-industrial complex transforms itself into a new toxic waste-disposal complex."^[65]

There are huge profits to be made disposing of old ordnance, rocket engines, chemical weapons, uranium trailings, radioactive soil, and the like. And company bottom-lines look even better when military recycling is combined with the processing of imported urban solid waste, medical debris, industrial toxics, and non-military radioactive waste. The big problem has

been to find compliant local governments willing to accept the poisoning of their natural and human landscapes.

No locality has been more eager to embrace the new political economy of toxic waste than Tooele County, just west of Salt Lake City. As one prominent activist complained to me, "the county commissioners have turned Tooele into the West's biggest economic red light district."^[66] In addition to Dugway Proving Ground and the old Wendover and Deseret bombing ranges, the county is also home to the sprawling Tooele Army Depot, where nearly half of the Pentagon's chemical-weapons stockpile is awaiting incineration. Its non-military toxic assets include Magnesium Corporation of America's local smelter (the nation's leading producer of chlorine gas pollution) and the West Desert Hazardous Industry Area (WDHIA) (see map 19.3), which imports hazardous and radioactive waste from all over the country for burning in its two towering incinerators or burial in its three huge landfills.^[67]

Most of these facilities have been embroiled in recent corruption or health-and-safety scandals. Utah's former state radiation-control director, for example, was accused in late December 1996 of extorting $600,000 ("in everything from cash to coins to condominiums") from Khosrow Semnani, the owner of Environcare, the low-level radioactive waste dump in the WDHIA. Semnani has contributed heavily to local legislators in a successful attempt to keep state taxes and fees on Environcare as low as possible. Whereas the two other states that license commercial sites for low-level waste, South Carolina and Washington, receive $235.00 and $13.75 per cubic foot respectively, Utah charges a negligible $.10 per cubic foot. As a result, radioactive waste has poured into the WDHIA from all over the country.^[68]

Meanwhile, anxiety has soared over safety conditions at the half-billion-dollar chemical-weapons incinerator managed by EG&G Corporation at Tooele Army Depot. As the only operational incinerator in the continental United States (another, accident-ridden incinerator is located on isolated Johnson Atoll in the Pacific), the Depot is the key to the Pentagon's $31 billion chemical demilitarization program. Vehement public opposition has blocked incinerators originally planned for sites in seven other states. Only in job- and tax-hungry Tooele County, which has been promised $13 million "combat pay" over seven years, did the Army find a welcome mat.^[69]

Yet as far back as 1989, reporters had obtained an internal report indicating that in a "worst case scenario" an accident at the plant could kill more than two thousand Tooele residents and spread nerve gas over the entire urbanized Wasatch Front. (The National Gulf War Resource Center in Washington, D.C. would later warn that "if there is a leak of sarin from the Tooele incinerator or one of the chemical warfare agent bunkers, residents of Salt Lake City may end up with Gulf War illness coming to a neighborhood near you.") Federal courts nonetheless rejected a last-minute suit by

Map 19.3
Location map of Tooele Valley and the West Desert
Hazardous Industry Area, Tooele County, Utah.

the Sierra Club and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation to prevent the opening of the incinerator in August 1996.^[70]

Within seventy-two hours of ignition, however, a nerve gas leak forced operators to shut down the facility. Another serious leak occurred a few months later. Then, in November 1996, the plant's former director corroborated the testimony of earlier whistleblowers when he publicly warned EG&G officials that "300 safety, quality and operational deficiencies" still plagued the operation. He also complained that the "plan is run by former Army officers who disregard safety risks and are too focused on ambitious incineration schedules." Environmental groups, meanwhile, have raised fears that even "successful" operation of the incinerator might release dangerous quantities of carcinogenic dioxins into the local ecosystem.^[71]

Indeed, there is disturbing evidence that a sinister synergy of toxic environments may already be creating a slow holocaust comparable to the ordeal of the fallout-poisoned communities chronicled by Carole Gallagher. At the northeastern end of Tooele Valley, for example, Grantsville (pop. 5,000)

is currently under the shadow of the chlorine plume from Magnesium Corporation, the emissions from the hazmat incinerators in the WDHIA, and whatever is escaping from the Chemical Demilitarization Facility. In the past it has also been downwind of nuclear tests in Nevada and nerve-gas releases from Dugway, as well as clearly from the open detonation of old ordnance at the nearby but now closed North Area of the Army Depot.

For years Grantsville had lived under a growing sense of dread as cancer cases multiplied and the cemetery filled up with premature deaths, especially women in their thirties. As in a Stephen King novel, there was heavy gossip that something was radically wrong. Finally in January 1996, a group of residents, organized into the West Desert Healthy Environment Coalition (HEAL) by county librarian Chip Ward and councilwoman Janet Cook, conducted a survey of 650 local households, containing more than half of Grantsville's population.

To their horror, they discovered 201 cancer cases, 181 serious respiratory cases (not including bronchitis, allergies, or pneumonia), and 12 cases of multiple sclerosis. Although HEAL volunteers believe that majority Mormon residents reported only a fraction of their actual reproductive problems, they recorded 29 serious birth defects and 38 instances of major reproductive impairment. Two-thirds of the surveyed households, in other words, had cancer or a major disability in the family: many times the state and national averages. As Janet Cook told one journalist, "Southern Utah's got nothing on Grantsville."^[72]

"Most remarkable," Ward observed, "was the way that cancer seemed to be concentrated among longtime residents." One source of historical exposure that Ward and others now think has been underestimated were the Dugway tests. "One respondent, for example, reported that she gave birth to seriously deformed twins several months after the infamous sheep kill in Skull Valley in 1968. Her doctor told her that he'd never seen so many birth defects as he did that year."^[73]

But more than one incident is undoubtedly indicted in Grantsville's terrifying morbidity cluster. Environmental health experts have told HEAL that "cumulative, multiple exposures, with 'synergistic virulence' [the whole is greater than the sum of the parts] " best explain the local prevalence of cancers and lung diseases. In a downwind town where a majority of people work in hazardous occupations, including the Army Depot, Dugway, WDHIA, and the Magnesium Corporation, environmental exposure has been redoubled by occupational exposure, and vice versa.^[74]

Consequently, West Desert HEAL, supported by Utah's Progressive Alliance of labor, environmental, and women's groups, has been demanding increased environmental monitoring, a moratorium on emissions and open detonation, complete documentation of past military testing, and a baseline regional health study with meaningful citizen participation. By early 1997

it had won legislative approval for the health survey and a radical reduction in Army detonations. The Magnesium Corporation, however, was still spewing chlorine and the Pentagon was still playing chicken with 13,616 tons of nerve gas.^[75]

From a bar stool in the Dead Dog Saloon, Grantsville still seems like a living relic of that Old West of disenfranchised miners, cowboys, and Indians. Yet just a few miles down the road is the advance guard of approaching suburbia. Since 1995 metropolitan Salt Lake City has expanded, or, rather, exploded into northern Tooele Valley. The county seat, Tooele, has been featured in the New York Times as "one of the fastest-growing cities in the West," and a vast, billion-dollar planned suburb, Overlake, has been platted on its fringe.^[76]

Although local developers deride the popular appeal of "tree-huggers" and anti-pollution groups, significant segments of the urban population will soon be in the toxic shadow of Tooele's nightmare industries. "When the new suburbanites wake up one morning and realize that they too are downwinders," Chip Ward predicts, "then environmental politics in Utah will really get interesting."^[77]

20—
La Frontera Del Norte

Jesús Martínez-Saldaña

This work analyzes aspects of the artistic production of Los Tigres del Norte, a Mexican immigrant norteño group with great appeal in the United States and Mexico. It examines themes in their songs relevant to the ongoing debate over immigration in contemporary American society. This study of popular cultural expressions of Mexican immigrants is part of a broader research effort that is focused on addressing a question rarely considered in the relevant scholarship: How does participation in the process of international migration influence the politics of the millions of Mexicans who cross, on a temporary or permanent basis, the border into the United States?

Today, a full century after Mexican migration to the United States began, the political experience of this social group remains virtually uncharted territory. Scholars have not managed to identify and document their historical trajectory in a satisfactory manner, and they have had even less success explaining the group's views and activities. A principal reason for this dismal state of affairs is the tendency to view Mexican immigrants in reductionist terms. This is evident in the immigration-related scholarship, which devotes much attention to the Mexican immigrants' linkages to the labor market and disregards their relations to the Mexican and U.S. national polities.

A major consequence of this conceptualization is the narrowing of the political rights and spaces for Mexican immigrants in the two national societies. In the contemporary United States, for example, it is once again popular to perceive and treat Mexican immigrants simply as a disposable labor force that should be imported and deported as the economic needs of the nation dictate. The passage of Proposition 187 in California and restrictive immigration laws by Congress reveal the unwillingness of the electorate and legislators to view as full members of their national community the economic

immigrants who ensure the international competitiveness of the American economy.

Unfortunately, the circumscribed economic approach to Mexican immigration also prevails in Mexico, where the government has consistently excluded from the policymaking process the millions of citizens who participate in international migration flows. The nation's immigration-related policies reproduce the authoritarian character of the political system, as these are formulated and frequently imposed by the federal executive, without any semblance of democratic input by the immigrants themselves. Even when important reforms like the "dual nationality" and "right to vote" laws approved by the Mexican Congress in 1996 are discussed in the national legislature, no actual mechanisms are created or considered to foster formal, effective, and adequate immigrant input. It appears that, to the Mexican government, Mexican immigrants are simpleminded laborers who lack the capacity to identify and represent themselves.

The employment of this dominant approach to interpret Mexican immigration is lamentable for many other reasons. In particular, it is objectionable because it does not consider other roles Mexican transnational migrants play in the sending and receiving nations. Their treatment in purely working class terms does not permit us to appreciate in an adequate manner other aspects of their existence, nor the relations they develop with markets, administrative systems, or polities. Specifically, they are not seen as consumers who demand and receive goods and services, nor as clients of administrative systems who exchange taxes for public services, and certainly not as full and mature citizens of national polities who have the capacity to exchange loyalty and consent for favorable political decisions.^[1]

Due to the weight of the dominant interpretation, we are unable to find in the existing literature on Mexican immigration a theoretical formulation which approximates the framework developed by Don T. Nakanishi to examine Asian American politics or the conceptualizations of international migrants made by scholars such as Yasemin Soysal.

Nakanishi presents a model which suggests that empirical and theoretical studies of the electoral politics of Asian American can best be conceptualized by integrating three distinct but interrelated approaches: the interplay between domestic and non-domestic activities, electoral and non-electoral behavior, and micro and macro lines of inquiry. In this model, Nakanishi calls attention to the significance of non-domestic affairs and processes which, at times, may prove to be more important in explaining developments within the Asian community. He identifies at least five major issues relevant to his model: the transnational activities of Asian Americans in relation to Asia; the transnational activities of Asian governments and quasi-governmental institutions in U.S. communities; the impact of bilateral relations on Asian

Americans; the attempts by Asian Americans to influence the relations between the United States and Asia; and the influence of international processes and policies dealing with the flow of people, capital, goods, and ideas on Asian American politics.^[2]

In turn, Soysal argues that the relationship between international migrants and nation-states has undergone a recent transformation, deeply influenced by a shift in the global discourse and models of citizenship. What has emerged in regions such as Western Europe is a new model of membership which she calls "postnational," and which is characterized by the extension to noncitizens of rights that in earlier times were exclusively reserved for citizens. Moreover, she justifies this emerging model of incorporation by arguing that international migrants, such as the Turks in Germany, exercise in their daily praxis a membership "that is multiple in the sense of spanning local, regional, and global identities, and which accommodates intersecting complexes of rights, duties, and loyalties."^[3]

By continuing to rely on the dominant approach to the study of Mexican immigrants, scholars remain unable to understand in a satisfactory manner issues as fundamental as the meaning of naturalization to Mexican immigrants in the United States or the group's preferences for Mexican political parties and presidential candidates. This leads us to a situation in which we are unable to explain how the individual and collective identities of Mexican transnational migrants are transformed by their participation in a process of migration that simultaneously links them with two distinct societies and their powerful national cultural myths, including the notions of the Raza Cosmica and the melting pot.

It is time to reconceptualize the Mexican immigrant political experience. I offer an alternative interpretation influenced by works such as Nakanishi's and Soysal's: the interpretation of Mexican immigrants as citizens of a binational system, with rights and responsibilities in the two republics to which they are linked by historical accident, social networks, and/or economic necessity.

Employing this approach would improve our current understanding of the migrants' relationship with both the sending and receiving nations. As Nakanishi and Soysal suggest, approaches which limit their scope to the established territorial boundary of a single nation are ill-suited for social groups with a transnational character. The migration process links Mexicans to (at least) two national economies, societies, and political systems. This reality may imply playing distinct roles in the two nations to which they are connected. For example, an individual migrant may hold a position of relative privilege in one society and a subordinate one in the second. Their character as transnational migrants may lead them to hold parallel identities/roles and contribute to the emergence of a binational or postnational consciousness.

Historically, Mexican immigrants have had low rates of naturalization in the United States, thereby making electoral politics a matter of secondary importance. While post-Proposition 187 reports indicate that the number of Mexican immigrant applications for naturalization has increased, it is not clear if this is a conjunctural phenomenon or a long-term trend. After all, the continuing economic crisis in Mexico has made the return to the home nation less attractive to individuals and families who may have originally intended to migrate temporarily. Needless to say, it is also unknown yet if the increased naturalization is mostly a response to the fear of denial of public services to non-citizens in the future, an actual desire to participate in the electoral process, a strategy of migrants to facilitate the legal migration of family members, or a combination of factors. In any event, for the purposes of this essay, I also argue that the political experiences of Mexican immigrants are better understood by adopting an expansive notion of politics in order to incorporate both electoral and non-electoral interests, concerns, and activities.

Similarly, the utilization of the concept of citizenship in the proposed approach is not intended to be limited to the legal definitions that center on the process of naturalization. Rather, I prefer to emphasize a definition that can link immigration to the discourse on democracy in nations as distinct as the United States and Mexico. Despite the existence of differences in the definitions of citizenship and democracy in the relevant literature, it is widely assumed democracies can only exist if the members of the polities have the power and means for effective participation in the transformation of their world. I do not believe that at present Mexican immigrants enjoy full citizenship in the United States or Mexico.

The issue would not be significant if the group in question consisted of a handful of individuals. However, Mexican immigrants number in the millions and their importance to the two nations grows as the process of economic integration proceeds with the approval and implementation of accords such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. If this is the case, what kinds of democracies are we creating in the two countries if present trends point toward the increasing exclusion of international migrants? Does it matter to the United States and Mexico what Mexican immigrants think or do?

A Collective Autobiography

Social groups excluded from national political systems eventually find ways of expressing their views and interests. One of the channels worth considering is popular culture. In the case of Mexican immigrants, we find that popular songs serve as an important outlet for individual and collective

expressions. The topics of these expressions may range from the expected references to love and scorn commonly requested by callers to commercial radio stations to the more serious attempts at social commentary which rarely receive air time in an entertainment-oriented industry.

Nevertheless, it is precisely within this context that the work of commercially successful groups such as Los Tigres del Norte needs to be examined. Contributions by other scholars help us to understand the value of popular songs. For example, in his pioneer works on Mexican immigration, anthropologist Manuel Gamio considered the songs of Mexican immigrants "a sort of collective autobiography." According to the researcher, undeniably influenced by the male-centered approach to migration studies at the time of his research, the songs provide information "on his likes and his dislikes, his hopes and his disappointments."^[4]

This discussion of Mexican immigrant interpretations of race relations in the United States follows this tradition by analyzing the songs of Los Tigres del Norte, one of the best known norteño groups in the United States and Mexico. The collective autobiographical approach proposed by Gamio is valuable for three basic reasons: the group members are Mexican immigrants who reside in California's Silicon Valley; they have developed a musical trajectory characterized until recently by a consistent production of immigration-related songs; and a majority of these were composed by Enrique Franco, also a Mexican immigrant living in Silicon Valley.

The site of residence of the group members and Enrique Franco is significant for another reason. As the most important center of high technology research and development in the world, Silicon Valley plays a symbolic role in the national imagination; it is the one location in the nation which best represents the mythical American pioneer spirit. In the national consciousness, Silicon Valley is perceived as the future, the region in which Americans push forward the contemporary frontiers of technology and capitalism. President Clinton's frequent visits to the region and his laudatory remarks about the achievements of the area's high technology scientists and entrepreneurs reinforces such an assessment.

Moreover, corroborating views of local residents are reflected in their public comments. A local executive who once held public office confirms the existence of such views when he highlights in a nationally distributed advertisement for the city of San Jose the qualities he considers unique to the region:

What to us seems normal, starting new businesses, creating community projects . . . , taking risks, exploring new ways to do things, don't happen in many places. . . . We don't appreciate this until we go to other parts of the country where such approaches are not prevalent. In some parts of the country, if one leaves a strong, established company to go it on his own, he is considered some

kind of maverick. Here, if you don't leave a strong, established company to start your own business, people wonder if you've got what it takes.^[5]

In turn, an executive of an international firm combines social Darwinism and inspiration drawn from Hollywood films to assert: "Silicon Valley is the Wild West of private enterprise. . . . It's survival of the fittest."^[6] In such a highly competitive society ruled by information-age cowboys and gunfighters, there is little room or tolerance for the weak, for the losers in this battleground of postindustrial capitalism.

The success of the high technology economy in Silicon Valley also influences the local political system, as well as the governing style and agendas of elected officials. According to the advertisement: "The same kind of innovation that characterizes Silicon Valley business management also applies to government. Public officials say they too have to be lean, creative and competitive."^[7]

In this vision of Silicon Valley, market efficiency becomes more precious than democracy, and citizens are replaced by consumers, elected leaders by political entrepreneurs. Since Mexicans, native and foreign born, cannot compete successfully in the labor or political markets because they are presumed to lack a competitive spirit or other essential qualities possessed by William Hewlett, David Packard, and other high technology pioneers, one can surmise that the local hegemonic culture can only consider them losers in this competition for social supremacy.

To some social sectors, Mexicans also constitute an undesirable element. A November 1992 letter to the editor published in the San Jose Mercury News expresses these sentiments.

The No. 1 issue bothering me in this election year is immigration. The voter pamphlet I received in Spanish was the last straw.

I am confronted on a daily basis with the nightmare that has become my beloved California. Our state's population grew from 23 million to 30 million from 1980 to 1990! . . .

Solutions: no new immigrants, unless they can prove they have a skill we need; much more intense work with Mexico and other countries on illegal immigration; beefed up border patrols; a scouring and subsequent booting-out of all illegal aliens; better interdiction of illegals as they enter the country.

You can call me a racist, call me whatever you want. But I am tired of seeing my beloved state and country having certain areas (including the Bay Area) overrun with immigrants. The environment can't take the added people, nor can the economy, the schools, the government, the cities or taxpayers. I don't feel that I or other long time citizens should have to put up with this nightmare.^[8]

The existence of these views raises the question I wish to address in the rest of this essay: How do Mexican immigrants, in this case Los Tigres del

Norte and Enrique Franco, interpret their experience in this Wild West of private enterprise?

El Norte

Before initiating my analysis, however, a clarification is in order.

The American West does not exist only in the collective consciousness of this country. It is also present in the imagination of people in other nations. For example, there are many manifestations of what is now the American West in the Mexican national consciousness. Two are rather easy to recognize. One is el territorio perdido, the unknown but much celebrated portion of the national territory lost through an unjust war to the aggressive forces driven by Manifest Destiny. And thanks to the Spanish-language versions of Hollywood films and Madison Avenue publications, the American West is also el viejo oeste, a site inhabited by fictitious blond-haired, blue-eyed cowboys, valiantly creating a society of law, order, and progress amidst the instability fomented by war-mongering, uncivilized pieles rojas ("red skins") and wicked outlaws.

A third conception of the American West exists and is now profoundly rooted in Mexican society. It is el norte, the temporary or permanent destination for millions of Mexicans who have been forced to cross the northern border into the United States, at times searching for political stability and refuge, but generally seeking better economic opportunities than those found in the nation of origin, la patria.

These and other visions are not necessarily exclusive of each other. They may co-exist and reinforce each other under the proper circumstances. For example, a child belonging to a family with a long history of international migration might learn about the "lost territory" in school textbooks, fantasize about the "Old West" while reading vaquero comic books or watching reruns of Bonanza on Mexican television, and imagine other features of the foreign land while hearing accounts of life in California from migrant relatives, friends, or neighbors.

Frontera, Frontera Internacional

In the songs of Los Tigres it is apparent that, despite the relatively familiar nature of el norte, Mexicans experience a disturbing encounter with social injustice upon arrival at la frontera, the international border shared by Mexico and the United States. In fact, the reality of the border begins to define the immigrants' relationship to the United States. According to the songs of Los Tigres, at this gateway there is no Statue of Liberty welcoming Mexican immigrants, only a border guarded by the hated migra (Immigration and Naturalization Service). To Mexicans intent on crossing into this country, the

border represents an artificial sociopolitical trench which divides human beings along national and racial lines; it must be defied, whether to seek work, unify the family, or carry out other activities, including the smuggling of contraband.

Many Tigres del Norte songs focus on this space in which social and political frontiers coexist. In fact, the group members owe their rise in popularity to a mid-seventies recording, "Contrabando y Traición," a love and drug smuggling corrido (ballad) featuring the adventures of Emilio Varela and Camelia la texana, two fictional characters who are now as deeply ingrained in Mexican popular culture as the fabled corrido figures Juan Charrasqueado, Gabino Barrera, Simon Blanco, Valentina, Adelita, and Rosita Alvírez.

The principal virtue of Los Tigres del Norte is that in the years following their commercial success based on drug smuggling corridos they managed to distinguish themselves from competitors by recording dozens of songs that directly explored distinct aspects of the Mexican immigrant experience. This was most successfully carried out during the phase of their career when they established an artistic partnership with Enrique Franco. When Los Tigres and Franco joined forces in the late seventies and he became the group's principal composer, the content of the group's songs shifted from drug smuggling and crime to a direction characterized by an exceptional social awareness mirroring the concern of Mexican immigrants with the often hostile immigration debate that was engulfing the nation. The character of the songs and their accelerated production and commercialization during the first years of the decade of the eighties reflected in a unique manner the increasing anxieties found among Mexicans in the United States, particularly as the dates for the approval and implementation of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 approached. A clear pattern emerged in the artistic production of Los Tigres, linking the immigrant experience, specifically the concerns over immigration policies, and the thematic evolution of their songs.

By the mid-eighties, Los Tigres had already established themselves as exceptional articulators of the Mexican immigrant experience, with dozens of serious, insightful, and predominantly denunciatory songs on U.S. immigration policy. In this collective autobiography composed of largely original compositions, one finds a consistent defense of Mexican immigrants. The songs criticize the imposition of political borders which divide Mexicans and other peoples, espouse Latin American and universal brotherhood, and celebrate the Mexican racial miscegenation known as mestizaje.

From a broader perspective, the songs may be considered surprisingly consistent with the ideology of revolutionary nationalism that has prevailed in Mexico during the post-revolutionary era. As Roger Bartra has indicated, it is an official ideology which has been imposed on Mexican society by the

state-party system first created by Plutarco Elias Calles in 1929.^[9] It is an ideology that is also espoused and transmitted to the Mexican masses on a daily basis by Televisa, the media conglomerate which had a virtual monopoly over Mexican television for decades. Fonovisa, the group's recording label since the mid-eighties, is affiliated with Televisa. Thus, it is possible to argue that the artistic work of Los Tigres del Norte is simultaneously conventional, within the Mexican cultural discourse, and oppositional, or at least denunciatory, with respect to the United States. In the case of Los Tigres, popular music reproduces the dual roles individuals play once they begin participation in the process of transnational migration.

An important quality of the songs recorded by Los Tigres del Norte during the decade of the eighties is their refreshing and innovative approach to issues which are linked to a historical phenomenon a century old. An awareness of this context is essential to appreciate the significance of the songs. They are fully understood only if one associates them with the migratory experiences of the composer, musicians, and a consumer market which exists on both sides of the international border.

An extraordinary exposition of these ideas is presented in "Frontera Internacional," a melancholic appeal directed at the international border itself by a Mexican who lost a brother in an attempt to cross into the United States. The individual returns to the scene of the tragedy, driven by the same forces which have perpetuated migration from the traditional sending regions of Mexico. This time, he intends to cross the river with his loved woman, notwithstanding the potential risks involved.

"Frontera Internacional" informs us of the social repercussions of successful and unsuccessful migration, acknowledges the economic origins of this process, calls attention to the unfair social divisions found by Mexicans in the United States, and affirms the need for the receiving society to consider more tolerant and humane immigration policies.

In the songs of Los Tigres one finds danger permeating the border region. As reports by human rights organizations repeatedly indicate, death is not an entirely unfamiliar occurrence at the border. It can be the result of an accident, an inability to swim, suffocation in a sealed railroad car, a robbery or rape, a high-speed automobile persecution, or the aggression of a U.S. border patrol agent.

As expected, Los Tigres have captured the essence of this dangerous passage into the unknown in another song in which la frontera becomes "La Tumba del Mojado." This composition is a first-person account of the difficulties associated with border crossing, subsequent persecutions and arrest, and the national-origin-based discrimination experienced by Mexicans without documents.

The initiation of conflictive relations with U.S. authorities begins as soon as la frontera internacional is crossed and the immigrants encounter the gatekeepers of a nation which may offer economic opportunities but is nevertheless perceived as unfair and discriminatory. This is illustrated in an eloquent manner in "Los Hijos de Hernández," a composition which examines and describes a confrontation between a legal immigrant and a border official. The conflict is the consequence of anti-Mexican remarks made by the official while inspecting the Mexican's immigration documents. Charges that Mexican immigrants steal jobs from American citizens, an accusation frequently made by contemporary politicians, intellectuals, and nativist groups, does not go unanswered. The immigration official is startled to see "the Other" talking back, transmitting in a heartfelt and reasoned manner the ire Mexicans feel upon hearing offensive statements.

In "Los Hijos de Hernández" the common immigrant assumes a position of power and moral authority, based on the use of reason, to chastise the official for holding prejudicial views against Mexicans. The representative of the State is criticized by the apparently passive Mexican for dismissing the immigrants' economic and social contributions to the United States, and for not acknowledging the many military sacrifices generations of Mexican Americans have made on behalf of this country. A common immigrant questions the lack of respect for others like himself as well as their U.S.-born youth who, ignoring prejudice and discrimination, take up arms to defend their country, serve courageously, and even lose their lives or remain missing in action.

Despite the conflictive nature of the song, reason finally prevails at the end with the repentance of the authority figure, the recognition of legal permission to enter American territory, and the validation of the male immigrant's once questioned manhood. Vindication is achieved with the change in attitude of the authority figure.

"Sin Fronteras" reaffirms pride in the Mexican's national origin, way of life, cultural values, male world view, and mestizo heritage. However, it de-

parts from other Mexican nationalist songs in a number of ways. In particular, it offers an interpretation of the immigrant identity that embraces the universality of life and liberty. The immigrant experience is compared to the life of an eagle in order to impress upon the audience the natural origin of freedom and the artificiality of earthly divisions.

Such expressions of universal ideals placed Los Tigres del Norte at a considerable distance from their competitors in Mexican popular music. Their uncommon exploration of these themes is found in works such as "Tres Veces Mojado," a well received composition that extends the scope of the group's subject matter (and potential market) by presenting a song dealing with Central American migration to the United States. This extension of the collective autobiography is the account of a Salvadoran who flees the violence and poverty of his country, crosses three international borders with respective rivers, and encounters hardships in the three foreign countries (Guatemala, Mexico, the United States) before obtaining legalization in this country and achieving a satisfying lifestyle that more than makes up for the suffering previously undergone.

In two other recordings, "América" and "El Sueño de Bolívar," composed by Franco, Los Tigres present songs which further examine identity terms that become particularly relevant to a Mexican only when the international border is crossed into the United States. "América" manifests a strong attachment to the migrant's Latin American heritage. It defies conventional wisdom in the United States by seeking to reappropriate a term, "American," which this country has sought to monopolize.

In turn, "El Sueño de Bolívar" appears to adopt a more conformist, perhaps assimilationist, position by suggesting that liberator Simón Bolívar's nineteenth-century dream of a united America could be materializing, of all places, in the United States, due to migration and the development of ties between the different national origin groups established here. Moreover, it calls for the acceptance of the "Hispanic" identity label, a term generally preferred by the more conservative sectors of the Mexican origin community and repudiated by others who view it as a governmental and corporate imposition. In an interview, Franco declared the song was primarily an

idealistic call for unity among the Latin Americans who immigrate to the United States.^[10]

Franco has also indicated the most important song produced during his association with Los Tigres del Norte was "Jaula de Oro." This 1985 song was released in an interesting historical period: at the height of the restrictionist anti-immigrant debate which culminated in the approval of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. "Jaula de Oro" presents the plight of an undocumented immigrant parent, alienated from society at large, haunted by the fear of persecution by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and growing increasingly detached from children undergoing a process of socialization which makes them ashamed of their Mexican heritage. To individuals such as the principal character of the song, the United States constitutes a gold cage; salvation, as well as the restoration of his humanity, can only be obtained in the idealized home country. The land of the mythical American dream has become dystopia. The song has a predictable but nevertheless disturbing climax, as the U.S.-raised child refuses to return to Mexico and leaves the parent in a state of despair and frustration.

And They Keep Going . . . and Coming

The growing success of Los Tigres during the eighties led to an increased involvement in the Mexican movie industry. In the decade of the seventies the corridos recorded by the group were exploited and utilized as the basis of a thriving border film industry. In some of the films the musicians even appeared in minor roles performing their songs. By the mid-eighties they made a substantial jump to the level of stars and producers. The first film they co-produced was a cinematic version of "Jaula de Oro."

The film version differs from the song because it has a happy ending. The final moments of the film consists of two interchanging events: one consists of the father figure, played by well known Mexican actor Fernando Almada, who drives from Los Angeles to the Mexican border in the company of a young son; the second is that of Los Tigres del Norte, in the role of older children, who are performing at a dance-concert organized to raise funds for the legal defense of undocumented immigrants.

One of the group members pauses during the performance to inform the audience of his parent's departure and express support for the father's decision. The singer then proceeds to dedicate a potpourri of Mexican nationalist songs to his father and others like him.

The final image is that of the smiling father arriving at the border. As the credits roll and the film ends, a still image presents a border sign reading "Mexico" while Los Tigres play "Que Bonita Es Mi Tierra." The film ends with the immigrant's return to the homeland. Yet, the cam-

era ignores the Mexicans crossing la frontera in the opposite direction, leaving behind a nation that fails to provide them with an acceptable living standard.

A decade later, a different camera did capture the northward flow of Mexicans across the same border checkpoint. California Governor Pete Wilson's reelection campaign utilized video images of undocumented Mexicans running past la frontera and across a freeway to influence public opinion in support of the anti-immigrant measures known as Proposition 187. The successful initiative denies education, health, and other public services to undocumented immigrants in the state. In the much televised political advertisement, a narrator's divisive message warns the predominantly Europeanorigin, conservative, and middle class electorate of Mexican immigrant hordes invading the state and the nation: "They keep coming."

To Governor Wilson, and the political forces who support measures such as Proposition 187 in the NAFTA era of liberalized transnational flow of goods and capital, "they" not only do not belong in California, but their presence and activities undermine national integrity, the rule of law, and the democratic political system.

Then again, even the Pete Wilson family has had the need to hire a good, cheap, and undocumented Mexican immigrant maid.

Selected Tigres del Norte Recordings

Unidos Para Siempre. Musivisa TUR/1672, 1996.

El Ejemplo. Fonovisa SDCD-6030, 1995.

Los Dos Plebes. Fonovisa SDCD-60 17, 1994.

La Garra de . . . Fonovisa FPCD-9085, 1993.

Con Sentimientoy Sabor. Fonovisa FPCD-9044, 1992.

Incansables. Fonovisa FPL-90 13, 1991.

Para Adoloridos. Fonovisa FPL-9001, 1990.

Triunfo Solido. Musivisa KMUPR-8002, 1989.

Corridos Prohibidos. Fonovisa FPL-8815, 1989.

16 Superexitos. Fonovisa MPCD-5084, 1988.

Idolos del Pueblo. Fonovisa FPL-8800, 1988.

Gracias! . . . América . . . Sin Fronteras. Profono PRL-90499, 1986.

El Otro México. Profono MPC-5043, 1985.

Jaula de Oro. Emi Capitol POP-849, 1985.

16 Grandes Exitos. Profono TPL-90379.

Carrera Contra la Muerte. Profono MPC-5034, 1984.

Internacionalmente Norteños. Profono MPC-5003, 1984.

Exitos Para Siempre. Fama 624, 1983.

Un Día a la Vez. Fama 607, 1981.

En la Plaza Garibaldi. Fama 594, 1980.

El Tahur. Fama 577, 1979.

Número Ocho. Fama 564, 1978.

Vivan los Mojados. Fama 554, 1977. Also Profono PRL-90398, 1984.

Pueblo Querido. Fama 538.

La Banda del Carro Rojo. Fama 536. Also Profono PRL-90396, 1984.

Contrabando y Traición. Fama 528.

Sí, Sí, Sí/Chayo Chaires. Fama 519.

Sufro Porque Te Quiero/La Cochicuina. Fama 516.

Juana la Traicionera/PorAmor a Mis Hijos. Fama 507.