Monthly Archives: January 2017

Global, History, Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective

Globalization, Slavery and Pearls in the Age of Imperialism

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By Jasmine Marshall Armstrong

Although diamonds may be the gemstone commodity people currently associate with human rights conflicts, in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries, it was the luminous, natural pearl found in the Arabian Gulf that was widely desired, yet also connected to a persisting slave trade.

Matthew Hopper, an Associate Professor of History at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo explored this world during his recent seminar talk at the Center for the Humanities, entitled “Pearls, Slavery, and Fashion: Enslaved African Pearl Divers in the Persian Gulf in the Age of Empire.” Hopper’s book, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire, was published by Yale University Press in 2015.

During the pearling season of 1873, an enslaved pearl diver swam over and climbed aboard a British cruiser. What followed was a conflict between the British abolition movement, and the burgeoning craze for pearls brought about by increased wealth from industrialization in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

Describing the conflict as a “diplomatic hailstorm,” Hopper noted that the case became a cause célèbre that had lasting ramifications when enslaved pearl divers or pearling ship crew members attempted to seek asylum with the British. Fearing the diplomatic impact that granting asylum would have upon the pearl trade, the British decided against a policy of helping enslaved pearl divers.

Hopper noted that while the British were proud of their work in the abolition movement from the late 18th century on, and the United States had abolished slavery with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, both nations had a voracious appetite for Gulf Pearls, fed by a burgeoning print culture.

In the popular press, Queen Victoria, and French Empress Eugénie de Montijo were both depicted favoring pearls. The newly wealthy from trade and industrialization sought to emulate the nobility by purchasing and wearing pearls.

The practice of enslavement of people from East Africa for use in the Gulf pearling trade persisted into the 20th Century. Some of the enslaved came from Mozambique and Tanzania. Ships often featured crews that were mixed between those owning the boat, paid employees, and their slaves. Arabian ship owners worked in a network of global trade with merchants from India, who then funneled many of the valuable pearls into American and European markets.

In America, although a small industry of freshwater pearls from rivers existed, the newly wealthy Americans sought Gulf pearls. The American craze for pearls in fashion kicked into high gear in the second half of the 19th Century to the early 20th Century. The November 6 1895, wedding of Consuelo Vanderbilt to Charles Spencer-Churchill, the 9th Duke of Marlborough at St. Thomas’ Church in Manhattan was a turning point in the craze for pearls. The New York Times coverage of the wedding, engineered despite the bride’s objections by her socially ambitious mother, Alva Smith Vanderbilt, was called “the most elaborate ever in this country.” Press coverage noted that Consuelo Vanderbilt’s dress would be sewn with real pearls. After she became the Duchess of Marlborough, Consuelo Vanderbilt was frequently photographed wearing pearl chokers, and long pearl opera-length ropes. Hopper said the years 1910-1914 were the peak years of value for Gulf pears, representing the last years of the Gilded Age prior to the start of World War I.

It was an enterprising Japanese businessman, Mikimoto, whose development of the cultured pearl ultimately brought about an end to the demand for Gulf Pearls harvested by enslaved divers. In 1893, he created the first cultured pearl, and thus changed forever the value and consumption of pearls. Freed of the need to harvest oysters in the Gulf in hopes of finding priceless natural pearls, the public began to buy cultured Japanese pearls. “Mikimoto thought every woman should be able to afford a pearl necklace,” Hopper said.

Sadly, the collapse of Gulf pearling created other problems. The freed former pearling slaves now faced hunger and poverty, as they were left to their own devices in the years following World War I. In the 1920s, former enslaved pearl divers often approached British colonial experts saying that they thought they were still the property of those who had owned the Gulf pearling ships, and that such people were obligated to feed them.

Center for Humanities fellows noted after the talk issues of enslavement persist today, whether it be in sex trafficking, or the shrimp industry, which has been exposed for the enslavement of workers. Those in attendance discussed using research and apps to understand ethical concerns related to products.

Uncategorized

Water Rights and the National Land for People Movement in the West Valley

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By Jasmine Marshall Armstrong

Can water laws meant to protect small family farms be used to give Latinx farmworkers a stake in land ownership in the Central Valley?

This question was central to Mario Sifuentez’s presentation “Land, Food Security and Water Rights in the Central Valley: Farmworkers, the Westlands, and the National Land for People” on Oct. 7, at the UC Merced Center for the Humanities seminar.

Sifuentez, a Center for the Humanities Fellow and assistant professor who specializes in labor, immigration, food and agriculture at UC Merced, said that during the 1970s, The National Land for  People movement, based in Fresno, attempted to use a 1902 law on the books limiting farms that received federal irrigation to 160 acres.

The 1902 Reclamation law, passed during the Progressive Era, was intended to prevent federally funded irrigation projects from being used by robber barons and large corporations, including railroads, in land grabs.

Enforcement of this law on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley proved difficult, Sifuentez said, as family farming corporations would add to their ownership of land by having the title of farm land put in the names of employees, friends or neighbors to skirt the law.

A populist movement connected to the United Farm Workers was founded in 1964 by George Ballis, a populist activist. He envisioned enforcement of the Reclamation Act allowing those who worked the land as farm workers to be able to buy land and become small-scale farmers themselves.

The west side of the San Joaquin Valley is the site of some of the largest farms, Sifuentez noted. This has created vast wealth for family corporations who benefit from Federal water reclamation projects, but has also left Latinix farm workers living in conditions where they do not always have access to clean drinking water.

National Land for People focused their efforts on confronting the Westlands Water District, which stretches from Kettleman City in the south to land north of Mendota. Although National Land for People were successful in winning lawsuits to enforce the Reclamation Act, that progress came to a halt in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. The 1902 law was gutted by his administration, and land owners using federal reclamation water were subsequently allowed to own over 900 acres, and were no longer required to reside on the land.

Sifuentez plans to write his next academic book  on National Land for People and its quest to empower and give property to the people who actually planted, harvested and processed the crops on the west side of the valley. His first book, Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest, was published this year by Rutgers University Press.

History, Memory, Music, Uncategorized

Native Hawaiian Music and Cultural Capital in 19th Century Whaling

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By Jasmine Marshall Armstrong

When men went to sea in the nineteenth century whaling industry, they entered a working environment which was not only dangerous, demanding, and dirty, but also a space of cosmopolitan exchange with other sailors, according to Dr. James Revell Carr, an ethnomusicologist from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Carr recently presented “‘Selamoku Hula’: Native Hawaiian Music and Dance at Sea in the 19th Century” as part of the Merced Seminar in the Humanities. As part of his presentation, Carr taught those in attendance a chantey entitled “John Kanaka,” whose title refers to Native Pacific Islanders working on American whaling ships. “Kanaka” is a Hawaiian term for “human being.” Research into the origins of “John Kanaka,” which was used by sailors when hauling up the sails, led Carr to speculate that the song’s Hawaiian lyrics which included the term “stand your ground,” were in part instructions to keep one’s feet firmly on the decking in order to maintain safety standards.

Today, “John Kanaka” is learned by numerous school children, and is sung by park rangers and volunteers from the San Francisco Martime National Historical Park, where Carr previously worked as an interpretive specialist. The original meaning and context of the song did not begin to become apparent to Carr until an elderly woman approached him after a performance and introduced herself as a Native Hawaiian. In his book, “Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries and Minstrels,” Carr writes that the woman told him her father was a stevedore in Honolulu, who sang songs combining Hawaiian words with English sailors’ expressions such as “by gum” and “ahoy.” This piqued Carr’s interest, and was the impetus for the research project which lead to his book.

Beyond a means of inclusion within the whaling work space, Native Hawaiian music became an important part of cultural circulation and exchange on the seas. Carr said that whaling ships would often meet up in the waling grounds, during which sailors would trade scrimshaw, books, and music. One mariner’s diary he read an excerpt from noted that during an occasion in which his ship met up with several others, mariners sang songs representing their nationalities and  ethnicities, including Hawaiians. Another sailor, from New England, used his personal copy book to record in Hawaiian a song he learned from Native Hawaiian whalers. The sailors noted that they looked forward to impressing others with their knowledge of a Hawaiian song, reflecting the concept of cultural capital.

While Native Hawaiians were looked down upon by missionaries and those in the sugar plantation trade, in whaling, the working class masculine culture was based around mutual respect for hard work among sailors. “It mattered less if you were American or Hawaiian or English,” Carr said. “What mattered was if you worked hard, and had skills in seamanship, and bravery when facing the whale.” American missionaries attempted to keep Native Hawaiians working on the sugar plantations in Hawaii, but journals and letters Carr has found indicate that most preferred working at sea, where they were treated with more respect, and their culture was appreciated.

Although the cosmopolitan age of the whaling ships ended in the latter half of the nineteenth century, elements of native Hawaiian songs sung at sea continue to appear, whether reinterpreted as music for children or as a popular wedding song. Few Americans today are aware that Hawaiian music has a long history of popularity and inclusion in the repertoire of American popular music, Carr noted. Yet it was Hawaiians who “gave the world a unique combination of sliding steel guitar, driving ukulele, falsetto yodels, and loping, syncopated rhythms that have influenced America since the 1890s at least,” he wrote.

Anthropology, Art, Geography, History

Water Architecture: When Aesthetics Mirrors Social Values

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By Jasmine Marshall Armstrong

When most people look at a pumping station or dam along California’s intricate water supply systems, they may think of technology, drought and the Golden State’s insatiable thirst.

Rina Faletti, a Postdoctoral Scholar for the UC Merced Center for Humanities and an art historian who studies the history of urban water systems, sees much more.

Trained in landscape theory and cultural geography at the University of Texas, Austin, where she received her doctorate, when Faletti looks at the 1910 neoclassical Sunol Water Temple in southern Alameda County, she sees an embodiment of the values of the culture which designed and built these water supply features into the temple’s architectural details.

“When someone looks at or imagines a ‘landscape’—whether it is a landscape painting or a garden, ‘wilderness’ or ‘nature’—that viewer perceives ideas and feels emotions that are a reflection of that culture’s ideas about what is beautiful and valuable,” Faletti explained. “My contention is these buildings were just as important as banks or churches, in their time, in conveying values.”

Using the example of the Sunol Water Temple, designed by Willis Polk in 1910 and built by the Spring Valley Water Company, which provided water service for San Francisco from 1860 – 1930, Faletti noted that neoclassical designs for waterworks structures shape the way we think about water.

“Viewers might admire the temple form of the buildings, and in turn admire the patrons of the buildings; in a sense this is a way in which art has been used to ground the public support of industrial capitalism, as a basis for American urban development. From another point of view, just as valid, the associations with ancient Greece and Rome confirm political foundations of a representative republic. Third, the neoclassical aesthetic permits an association with the Romans, whom American culture traditionally laud as being the most forward-thinking engineers in history. These are just three possible ways to interpret the aesthetic form of a neoclassical waterworks structure on a city water supply system,” she explained.

In her studies of water architecture in the American West, Faletti confronts the mythos of the landscape as something to be conquered and dominated, a philosophy writ large by historian Fredrick Jackson Turner during his 1893 talk on the significance of frontier during the Chicago World’s Fair.

“Turner interpreted the West in Romantic terms. The idea viewed settlers and explorers as independent heroes who represented Americans as a whole, who conquered a hostile land by continuously and ceaselessly moving across it,” Faletti noted. The American West was postulated as a ‘savage’ landscape in need of ‘civilization,’ and this point of view ignored the cultures of Native Americans, which already existed, and other perspectives besides those of male explorers and historians, Faletti said.

The “civilizing” values suggested by Greco-Roman water temples of the 19th and early 20th centuries also gave way to a romantic look backward at California’s own past in the Mission architecture of some water conveyance structures. Just east of Merced, beside Highway 140, sits a Pacific Gas and Electric substation built during this period which Faletti said provides a great example of Mission Revival in historic water architecture.

As the 20th Century moved into the Art Deco period, dams built as water reclamation projects often featured ornamental details and motifs. One such dam was the Hollywood Reservoir’s 1924 Mulholland Dam, named for Los Angeles Department of Water and Power engineer William Mullholland.

“It could be seen from everywhere in Hollywood,” Faletti said.

Today, the beauty of the dam is no longer visible, for a surprising reason: The failure of another Mulholland dam. In 1928, the St. Francis Dam, spanning the San Francisquito Canyon 40 miles north of Los Angeles, collapsed, resulting in a catastrophic flood which killed as many as 600 people.

Following the St. Francis Dam failure, the Department of Water and Power covered the Mullholland Dam with millions of acre feet of dirt backfill, according to Faletti. This took place during the height of the Great Depression, a time when Californians’ confidence in the state had been undermined.

“The politics of buttressing a dam that did not need bolstering were about the public perception of safety, not actual structural soundness,” Faletti said. Echoing her contention that a time period’s and a community’s values are reflected in its water architecture, Faletti noted that one engineer at the time denigrated aesthetic design elements of dams, which he saw as “feminine.”

Faletti said her scholarship has been enhanced by her time as a Postdoctoral Fellow for the Center for the Humanities at UC Merced, and noted how much she enjoys refining her water architecture scholarship.

“Water and power are beautiful problems to have, and both as human and as technological problems, they are not going away anytime soon. My job is to observe, record, and comment on the process, and it’s a privilege to provide that service to humanity,” she said.