Storied Land: Community and Memory in Monterey (review)

Until recently, few historians paid much attention to their histories as stories. This oversight has been particularly true among historians of the American West. But changes are underway. Responding to the strong influences of Hayden White, Robert Berkhofer, and other cultural and social theorists, historians are scrutinizing more carefully their story telling. In the volume under review, John Walton, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, provocatively deals with the changing histories over time of Monterey, California. This is an important, thoughtful book deserving of a good deal of careful attention. Unfortunately, a few limitations mar its otherwise large contributions.

“History” has two kinds of meanings, Walton writes in his “Preface.” “We use it [history],” Walton writes, “to designate both history as a set of events and history as the story of those events” (p. xiv). The author devotes most of his stimulating volume to showing how these complementary kinds of history shape one another. Between his “Introduction” and “Conclusion,” Walton produces five lengthy chapters tracing the history of Monterey from its earliest Native societies to the present. Each of these chapters concludes with a section discussing the shaping influence of events or facts on the stories, narratives, and memories of those times. Walton states that he wants to know “how the stories of history are constructed by social groups and institutions; why they differ across social groups and over time” (p. xv). In addition, he is intrigued about which groups are sufficiently powerful to produce a “dominant narrative,” to “challenge traditional interpreters,” in short “to make history.”

Walton’s smoothly written volume makes several large contributions. Most of all, it is a thoughtful consideration of story telling, of the writing of several kinds of history about Monterey. In short compass, for example, the author delineates how Spanish and American entries into Monterey reshaped not only daily affairs of the region but also the kinds of stories written and told about that area. Walton often notes that the voices of Native Americans and Californios (nonelites) were silenced by more powerful invaders such as the Roman Catholic Church, American capitalists, and varied developers. Workers, unions, and strikes—the central ingredients of a working-class culture—receive particularly extensive coverage.

The author makes other important contributions. For instance, utilizing information from the most recently opened census of 1920, he revealingly profiles fishermen and cannery workers of that year. Later, Walton demonstrates the ways in which these working-class people helped spawn narratives of the past shaped by their laboring experiences, competing stories providing a past conflicting with but also complementing romantic Old California histories. The author also aptly utilizes the writings of such authors as Robert Louis Stevenson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and John Steinbeck, particularly, to point out how their nonfictional and fictional works became so influential in providing often-quoted even if factually inaccurate accounts of the past.

The largest contribution of Storied Land, however, is Walton’s forceful, illuminating discussions of the shaping power of sociocultural shifts on historical narratives of Monterey’s history. For example, the author utilizes the emblematic figure of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo to reveal how his account of early-to-mid-nineteenth-century California fell before an emerging California romance narrative fashioned by incoming Americans wishing to discount conflict and turmoil and to praise Yankee ingenuity and progress. In every chapter Walton provides similar examples of racial and ethnic, gender, and class changes dramatically altering the stories and memories of the past.

One wishes every part of Walton’s important book were as valuable as these achievements. But there are problems, major and minor. For one, Walton’s own story sometimes lacks balance. Perhaps the author’s comment in his “Preface” that his “sensibility and method were shaped foremost by the work of E. P. Thompson” should prepare most readers for Walton’s emphases and points of view. He is decidedly sympathetic to Native Americans, paisanos (Spanish and Mexican laborers), and other working classes. He is much less positive...