Saved: Locke, CA.

Star Theater, Locke, California.  Photo found on flickr by Kansas Sebastian

The Sacramento River's ebb and flow mimics the rhythmic changes in migrant labor throughout California's Central Valley history, where ethnic groups coursed from farm to farm in search of seasonal work as unpredictable as any undercurrent.  Harsh living conditions, abusive employers, a nomadic lifestyle, but mostly a story of perseverance all contributed to a life of uncertainty in a foreign landscape.  Life was (and is) challenging for migrant workers and best encapsulated by author Richard Steven Street in Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913.  Yet we can moor our preservation barge in Locke, California and wander through what remains of one town that immigrants called home...even if they intended to leave sooner rather than later.

There is no better way to experience places than to visit them firsthand.  Sometimes however, we need to rely on others: Bitter Melon, Inside America's Last Rural Chinese Town by authors Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow offers readers a view that is both sensitive and articulate.  Originally written in 1987, the 2006 fifth edition includes an afterword by the authors that contemplates Locke's future. Today, stakeholder groups including Locke's ethnically diverse modern population, California State Parks, the National Parks Service, and local governments have all dropped anchor within the community.  Locke is indeed a place to watch as it draws upon its past to navigate its future.

Perspective: Siskiyou County Museum, Yreka, CA.

Siskiyou County Museum, Yreka, California.  Photo by Thomas Eddy

A gold mining town from its inception, Yreka still reflects how we envision the western frontier...providing visitors ignore the strip malls and big boxes south of downtown. Conifers protect themselves by growing only on the northern slopes of the surrounding hillsides while sage chaparral, juniper trees, and field stones scatter throughout the seemingly barren landscape.  Caught in the rain shadow of Mt. Shasta, its aridness is expressed in silvered wood of old barns and the rusted decay of farm equipment forever at rest.

Yreka is the Siskiyou County seat where I found the Siskiyou County Museum along the main drag just outside of downtown.  Inside, the museum is divided into three primary exhibits: Native Peoples and Anglo-American settlement patterns separated on the first floor, and vignettes of early interiors on the second.  Managed by the Siskiyou County Historical Society, the interpretation and displays succeeded in telling regional stories of people and place...complete with maps, photos, and artifacts in professional exhibits.  Despite this polished appearance, I left unsettled and confused by some of the interpretative materials.

Some of my discomfort was intended, as in the display showing how Americans have exploited First People's image for product branding. Greater emphasis was appropriately placed on innovations in Native design, spirituality, and social structures, to name a few, but it gave an appearance of being squarely set in the past.  To combat with this notion, visitors were reminded that "Native American cultures are alive and well today, and there is a resurgence of interest in and respect for their traditional ways," yet declined to interpret modern First People's lives balanced between traditional and American culture.

A similar but more brief exhibit on early Chinese settlement presented perseverance and ingenuity within the adverse conditions of a rural mining town, yet left visitors wondering what happened to Yreka's early Chinatown...short of a highly decorative, almost kitschy, Chinese restaurant on Miner Street.

Fair interpretation with not so subtle jabs at American capitalism, I felt the interpreters dodged a few political bullets while holding their subject in high regard.  Yet with all the innovation and genius of pre-contact people, why did the museums stakeholders usurp the narrative in the museum's interpretation of early trappers?  Here, "The Quest for Beaver" begins by stating the following:

The Mountain Man, in a very true sense, is a real American frontier hero who roamed the land still virgin and unpeopled in search of beaver?  No other country or period in history has produced such a distinctive breed of men.  America owes much to these trappers, for they opened the land to the pioneers and settlers who made it great.

The land was not "virgin and unpeopled," as clearly and previously exhibited.  Who indeed were the people who inhabited this land for over 10,000 years if not a "distinctive breed?"  We have a long ways to go in our interpretation of the people and places of California.

Remembered: Anti-Chinese Violence throughout California

San Francisco's Chinatown.  Photo by Tim Greyhaven and found at his website, No Place for Your Kind.

Cal-Tales highlights preservation stories throughout California, for the purpose of never forgetting our collective history.  As a preservation blog, Cal-Tales strives to tell the stories of California places saved, threatened, or lost...patterned after the National Trust for Historic Preservation's national listings...but also places forgotten and remembered. At the crossroads of preservation and history, we are sometimes reminded of places that represent a painful past that is not limited to European wars or Southern racial tensions. California too, has a racially charged past that is still relevant today.

The New York Times' Lens recently highlighted photographer Tim Greyhaven's online photographic essay, No Place for Your Kind, which highlights todays places where 19th century anti-Chinese violence occurred.  Chinatowns were well established throughout California where farm and industrial labor was greatly needed.  As Chinese populations grew, some Anglo groups became increasingly agitated and set fires to Chinatowns that all too often included outright murder.  The nation's legislation past laws making immigration difficult at a time economic stress or when labor forces were greatly in need.  Both the New York Times article and Greyhaven's project well capture this part of California's past that should always be remembered.  Greater detail can be found in Richard Steven Street's seminal history of California, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913.

To learn more about Asian preservation projects specific to California, check out the National Asian Pacific Islander American Historic Preservation Forum.