Book Review on the Politics of Public Memory Tourism History and Ethnicity in Monterey

California Mission Landscapes

Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage

• Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize, Vernacular Architecture Forum

• John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, foundation for landscape studies

• elisabeth blair macdougall book honor, society of architectural historians

• Norman Neuerburg Prize, Historical Society of Southern California

How iconic American places cultivate and muffle contested pasts

California Mission Landscapes demonstrates how the gardens planted in mission courtyards over the final 150 years are non but anachronistic but have get potent ideological spaces. Until now no book has explored the mission landscapes as an avenue into understanding the politics of the past, tracing the continuum betwixt the Castilian colonial menstruum, emerging American nationalism, and the contemporary heritage industry.

California'southward Spanish-Mexican missions are amid the least known of America's significant historic sites. ElizabethKryder-Reid's pioneering report of the missions' gardens uncovers their roles every bit sites of forced labor, romantic nationalism, racial formation, indigenous experience, and religious devotion. Her eye-opening business relationship illuminates the tangled origins and meanings of these gardens, respecting the complexity that makes them so fascinating.

—Dell Upton, writer of Another Metropolis: Urban Life and Urban

"Nothing defines California and our nation's heritage every bit significantly or emotionally," says the California Mission Foundation, "equally do the twenty-one missions that were founded forth the declension from San Diego to Sonoma." Indeed, the missions collectively represent the state'due south most iconic tourist destinations and are touchstones for interpreting its history. Elementary school students today yet make model missions evoking the romanticized versions of the 1930s. Does it occur to them or to the tourists that the missions have a dark history?

California Mission Landscapes is an unprecedented and fascinating history of California mission landscapes from colonial outposts to their reinvention as heritage sites through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Illuminating the deeply political nature of this transformation, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid argues that the designed landscapes take long recast the missions from sites of colonial oppression to aestheticized and nostalgia-drenched monasteries. She investigates how such landscapes have been appropriated in social and political power struggles, particularly in the perpetuation of social inequalities across boundaries of gender, race, course, ethnicity, and religion. California Mission Landscapes demonstrates how the gardens planted in mission courtyards over the past 150 years are not merely anachronistic but have become potent ideological spaces. The transformation of these sites of conquest into concrete and metaphoric gardens has reinforced the marginalization of indigenous agency and macerated the contemporary consequences of colonialism. And notwithstanding, importantly, this volume also points to the potential to create very different visitor experiences than these landscapes currently do.

Despite the wealth of scholarship on California history, until now no book has explored the mission landscapes as an artery into understanding the politics of the past, tracing the continuum betwixt the Spanish colonial menstruum, emerging American nationalism, and the gimmicky heritage industry.

Awards

Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize, Colloquial Architecture Forum

John Brinckerhoff Jackson Volume Prize, Foundation for Landscape Studies

Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Volume Honour, Club of Architectural Historians

Norman Neuerburg Prize, Historical Society of Southern California

Elizabeth Kryder-Reid is professor of anthropology and museum studies and director of the Cultural Heritage Research Center in the Indiana Academy School of Liberal Arts (IUPUI) and former director of the IUPUI museum studies program.

California's Spanish-Mexican missions are amid the to the lowest degree known of America's significant celebrated sites. Elizabeth Kryder-Reid's pioneering study of the missions' gardens uncovers their roles as sites of forced labor, romantic nationalism, racial formation, indigenous experience, and religious devotion. Her eye-opening business relationship illuminates the tangled origins and meanings of these gardens, respecting the complexity that makes them so fascinating.

—

Dell Upton, author of Some other City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Commonwealth

This book must be read to sympathize the cultural retentiveness presented in the landscape of the California missions. Rather than truthful to the missions' actual wait and to the history of land use, the gardens create an imagined past and an aestheticized infinite. Elizabeth Kryder-Reid examines the creation of the celebratory narrative the missions acquired through their landscapes. Her exemplary study makes it possible to also envision them every bit de-colonial sites.

—

Lisbeth Haas, author of Saints and Citizens: Indigenous History of Colonial Missions and Mexican California

Out here in California, we're taught in elementary school that missions set up by Catholic missionaries during the Spanish era were necessary to relieve the Indians; in college, we're rightfully taught they were basically concentration camps. This University of Minnesota Press libro is of the latter schoolhouse, merely takes on the fascinating prism of gardens to tell its enrapturing narrative.

A case report for discussing the politics of memory for heritage sites worldwide, making it an advisable improver for any art library.

Kryder-Reid'southward strengths lie with her detailed interrogation of mission gardens, and California mission heritage more broadly, likewise as her ability to foster dialogue about colonialism and the germination of cultural memory.

—

Western Historical Quarterly

Poignant and timely... More importantly, information technology is a counter narrative that needs to exist told.

—

News from Native California

The book's greatest strength is in reinforcing the thought of landscape every bit text. Information technology is well written and reflect solid inquiry.

Using landscape every bit a starting betoken, Kryder-Reid marshals a truly impressive array of testify to prove how the California missions have been remade over time and to imagine what the future might hold for these historically and emotionally resonant places.

—

The Periodical of Colonialism and Colonial History

The book succeeds as a primer for those interested in the ways California's missions take been interpreted to date. Further, it successfully discusses how future interpretive plans that allow for meaningful conversations to take place at sites with difficult, contested histories might exist envisioned.

—

New Mexico Historical Review

California Mission Landscapes should take a prime number spot on the bookshelves of professional person and grassroots preservationists and heritage workers also as public historians, those in museums, memory scholars, and cultural historians broadly conceived.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Missions, Retentivity, and Heritage

1. Colonial Mission Landscapes

2. Inventing Heritage: Time Binding in the Mission Landscape

three. Cultivating Heritage: Race, Identity, and the Politics of the Mission Mural

four. Consuming Heritage: The Embodied Feel of the California Missions

Conclusion: 3rd Spaces and the Hereafter of Mission Memory Practices

Appendix: Plant Lists

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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Source: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/california-mission-landscapes

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