In Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past, William Deverell argues, “Los Angeles came of age amidst (and in part because of) specific responses to Mexican ethnicity and Mexican spaces” (pg. 6). Further, “Understanding Los Angeles requires grappling with the complex and disturbing relationship between whites, especially those able to command various forms of power, and Mexican people, a Mexican past, and a Mexican landscape” (pg. 6). He uses the tools of cultural history and the spatial turn to demonstrate the role of place and geography in shaping culture. He further argues that a focus on the origin of racial conflict in Los Angeles reveals “that there may be promise embedded in the ethnic future of tomorrowland Los Angeles. But promise can be realized only as the result of difficult, even painful, history lessons” (pg. 48).
Deverell begins with an exploration of the lasting impact of the Mexican-American War, arguing, “Part of the Los Angeles ascendancy came about through rewriting history. In other words, to create the language of American-era, skyward trajectory – in commerce, in outlook, in urban enthusiasms – some merely resorted to casting even the recent past as the dark ages. Anything, then, would be substantial improvement upon what came earlier” (pg. 26). This teleology of progress played out in the popular Fiesta of the 1890s. Deverell writes, “The remarkably popular Fiesta was at the center of a number of contests over the Los Angeles future and how the city ought to get there. And the Los Angeles Fiesta, no matter how much its planner, participants, and observers wanted to think otherwise, was about ethnicity, too” (pg. 51-52). He continues, “There’s no question that La Fiesta was about race as well, or at least about the place of race and ethnicity in the agreed-upon fictions of regional history. From the parade’s Whiggish presentation of floats moving through both space and time, to the ways in which people of color found themselves portrayed on those floats, La Fiesta co-mingled racial triumph and regional identity” (pg. 84). Deverell concludes, “In the events ordered, even militarized movement through the streets and crowds of excited observers, La Fiesta offered pedagogical insights to those who would pay attention” (pg. 89).
With the Los Angeles River, Deverell turns to the role of space and geography. He writes that the river “has been a critical dividing line, not only between east and west, north and south, but between races, classes, neighborhoods” (pg. 93). He continues, “The river has also been a place where ideas and beliefs about the past, present, and future of Los Angeles have been raised and contested” (pg. 93). He concludes, “The river’s most critical transition (from river to flood control channel) is tied to a regional disassociation with a distinct ethnic past” (pg. 127). Further, while the concrete river fit the ideal of the city beautiful aesthetic and was intended to carve out space for Anglo Angelinos, the river currently plays host to the very people they intended to keep out. Examining the brick industry, Deverell argues, “Brick replaced adobe just as it had to, in the equations of the era, so that Los Angeles could become the much-boosted, much-boasted Anglo city of the western American future” (pg. 135). Of the 1924 bubonic plague epidemic, Deverell argues, “The municipal response to this public health crisis, refracted through a prism of stereotype, revealed anew the civic tendency to render Mexican lives, culture, and behavior as somehow typical, universal, and thus unquestionably understood” (pg. 176). He concludes, “The practice of assigning ethnic Mexicans to rigid social, cultural, and occupational containers, boxes even more rigid than those created by street or district boundaries, encourage Anglos to look at Mexicans in particular ways. Plague in 1924 offered a kind of proof of the theorem” (pg. 205). Deverell ends with The Mission Play, arguing, “Whatever [theatre critic Willard Huntington] Wright’s precise meaning, it is clear that he believed that Southern California’s racial environment had indeed reached that level of maturation to become invested with the ‘atmosphere of romance’” (pg. 217).
Deverell’s work is an excellent example of cultural history and the use of techniques developed during the spatial turn in U.S. history. He admits that there remains more work to be done as his narrative ends shortly after World War II. Further reading following this should include the Chicano movement and the growth of the Mexican American population and electorate. ( )