Watching the Tides

Shaping the Shoreline reveals the gritty, smelly, and contentious underpinnings of Monterey’s famous Cannery Row and aquarium. Chiang’s deeply researched and gracefully written history unites disparate tales of manual labor, immigration, elite leisure, economic decline, and urban development. The fishing and canning industries rose and fell alongside tourism and real estate development, always in tension with and in relation to one another. The shoreline functions here as a metaphor and a very real place, and it is where Chiang and Monterey both find significance. Chiang works where social and environmental history overlap; the city developed where waves and fish met tourists and canneries. The history of Monterey is all about how different people envisioned and manipulated nature, she argues, and the consequences of those visions have been far reaching. Labor and leisure, industry and nature, and fishing and tourism—not to mention social and environmental history—represent easy dichotomies that have been used to place blame in one camp and let the other off the hook. By revealing the historical interdependence of these categories in Monterey, Chiang says much about the history of this place, the work of place making, and the social significance of environmental history.

The book begins in the late nineteenth century and follows more or less competing story lines of fishing and tourism development until the old Hovden cannery becomes home to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1984 and the two stories turn into one of memory and urban revitalization. The 1906 Point Alones fire represents the conflict between immigrant fishermen and the Pacific Improvement Company (PIC) with its fancy Hotel Del Monte. In the late nineteenth century, Monterey’s fishing industry became home to a series of immigrant groups. Chinese fishermen found a foothold, despite widespread discrimination, by fishing for squid at night and collecting specimens for Stanford scientists from their Point Alones village. The stench of drying squid and “suspicious” nocturnal activities fed into contemporary stereotypes about race, however, and also put the Chinese in direct conflict with developers courting tourists and tourists seeking (good-smelling) healthy retreats. The 1906 fire that ultimately forced the Chinese to resettle further away highlighted this conflict and made it easier to overlook the manipulation of nature, social divisions, and pollution that both industries produced. Chiang is careful to point these commonalities out, however, as well as the moments when tourists embraced the Chinese fishing culture—seeking out Chinese-made souvenirs and enjoying dramatized fishing traditions at the Feast of Lanterns.

Examples of the industries overlapping give way to a story of independent development based on contrasting visions of the shoreline, each with its own environmental and social consequences. The PIC’s new Pebble Beach resort, a variety of hotels, campgrounds, and real estate developments, appealed to an economically diverse audience in the early twentieth century. This group’s ideas of forest management had everything to do with aesthetics and nothing to do with healthy trees, however. Industrialized canneries sprouted up along the city-owned waterfront after 1900, creating a multiethnic community and reaching into the ocean to process fish. Lampara nets increased the catch and fueled nativist attacks against the Sicilian fishermen who used them, although the concern was over empowered immigrants rather than damage to the fishery. As Chiang makes clear, issues of nation, race, and color permeated the fishing industry; ideas about society and ideas about the environment infused each other.

From World War I through World War II, the fishing industry grew increasingly significant in Monterey due to wartime demands for sardines and the constant need for fish meal and oil in poultry feed, soap, linoleum, and paint. Just as industrial technology boosted the ability to catch, unload, process, and reduce sardines, the California Fish and Game Commission tried to restore and preserve the fishery within its designated three-mile limit. Profits led canneries to build floating reduction plants beyond...