It was a funny thing growing up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California in the 80s and 90s. Besides "Hammer" pants and Seattle "grunge," among other things, my community remained relatively isolated from national trends in fashion, music, & mass urban popular culture. The cities and "the city" (read San Francisco) were places far distant, but strangely familiar. However in the late 90s a new imagined California identity emerged. This new
northern California identity came with little fanfare, yet by the time I left high school in the late 90s it was clear that "NorCal," as one commercial brand put it, was more than just a state of mind, but an identity with varying levels of participation. Thinking about this regional identity in hindsight illustrates two distinct issues of regional identity. First, one is geographic. Simply living in Northern California, I was almost obliged to identify with "NorCal" or a Northern California identity. However, on the other hand, identity is also participatory. Did I participate in this
northern identity, or simply benefit from it?
This 21st century paradox of space and identity I imagine was not all that different from Northern California a hundred years prior as I look at it in San Francisco in the 1890s. By the time I left for the University of California in 2007, I seemed to almost appropriate this identity, not through comparison, but through contrast. I was
NOT Southern Californian! One factor which influenced my identification with Northern California was the urban spaces I associated with. As a rural resident, I identified myself as rural. But at the same time I wasn't just a citizen of Tuolumne County, but of California, and the United States. Psychologically my identity stretched to Washington D.C., San Francisco, other satellite urban spaces in which I interacted. While Sacramento provided a image of civic governance and state power, it was San Francisco which filled my visions of the quintessential city, the apex of urban development. It was images and visions of San Francisco when I thought of cities and the urban environment.
While certainly there are geographic levels of association to urban places. The nearest
city, Sonora, California, was for a long time my only reference to such an agglomeration of capital, people, and architecture. But as I widened my experience beyond my home county, San Francisco came to represent the center of Northern California culture. The apex of science, art, culture, and urbanity, could all be readily drawn from "the city by the bay." So when I evaluate regional identity in 1890s California, do we see a similar situation of geographically split identity as I experienced myself?
According to historian Glen Gendzel (
Pioneers and Padres: Competing Mythologies in Northern and Southern California, 1850-1930. 2001)
and others, two distinct regional identities existed in the late 19th century as well as into today. Centered on the "instant city," a Northern California identity matured as San Francisco and the northern part of the state developed into a wide and productive mining and commercial economy. In contrast, in the 1880s, Los Angeles began to see its own development mature into an urbane future. As the Southern Pacific Rail Road, floods of midwest migrants, as well as Mexican immigrants developed the southern part of the state, San Francisco began to see that the legacy of the Bear Flag Republic, the Gold Rush, and dominance of the Pacific market was being challenged by the supremacy of LA, its population, and its inland empire.
While San Francisco came to see its own past as based in "Pioneer Myth," it easily incorporated California's Spanish and Mexican heritage as subjugated historical memories. The Spanish and Mexican periods, the Pioneer myth illustrates, was supplanted by the more industrious and pious christians from the East. The 1894 California Mid-Winter Fair held in San Francisco was precisely this declaration of Anglo- and San Franciscan supremacy and dominance of the new emerging California. Perhaps in contrast to Gendzel, who points to two independent and competing regional identities based in the south and north, maybe it is more appropriate to argue that L.A. appropriated the Spanish and Mexican legacy out from under San Francisco's pioneer legacy as it rose to prominence in the 1890s and 1900s.
Therefore while we can agree that two distinct regional identities operated, derived from two urbane spaces and regional imiaginations (SF & LA), were they mutually exclusive? In other words are we still stuck in a theoretic rut by assuming that identity is static, conforming, or unintelligent? As I had difficulty when I was young figuring out which 'identity' to accept (Northern or Southern), identity in the 1890s was likely influenced by similar ambiguities. Thus, how are we to determine historically how a person identifies themselves? If we accept Mexican-American historian George Sanchez's model (
Becoming Mexican American, 1993) of cultural adaption, “any notion that individuals have occupied one
undifferentiated cultural position - 'Mexican,' 'American,' or 'Chicano'” must be abandoned for the sake of accepting "multiple identities." For me the new paradigm is
participation and multiplicity. How are we to understand Chinese and Japanese participation in the pioneer myth of San Francisco? What discourses played between these seeming contrasting identities? Or, as with my case, how do we reconcile a rural identity which is intimately bound to an urban space, like San Francisco and the pioneer myth? These are just some of the questions I am grappling with in my project blog,
Gilded Empire.
