The Archaeology of Citizenship

4. The Archaeology of Citizenship

4 The Archaeology of citizenship While tourists were riding the Incline Railway; hiking in the lush, green canyons embracing the resort; and playing astronomer while peering into the Lowe Observatory’s magnificent magnifying lens, the resort’s workers were repairing and maintaining the railroad, cleaning guest rooms, and burning piles of waste and trash in the resort’s incinerators. As the end of the day neared, Mount Lowe’s tourists would head back to and rest comfortably in their clean, Craftsman-style cabins and rooms while the resort’s railroad workers of Mexican heritage would retire to a mountain far from the tourists where they would share a hot, cramped household with two to three families of similar ethnicity. In the morning the workers would awake and return to work, repairing tracks in a pit located above their homestead and burning the tourists’ trash in incinerators that the resort owners strategically placed next to the laborers’ home. At the same time, tourists passed overhead on the railroad train and observed the Mexican immigrants’ work and activities from above. Placed in a “section house”—a phrase used by railroad companies to refer to houses where workers who repaired “sections” of the railway lived, Mount Lowe’s Mexican immigrant workers were situated in a visible, panoptic landscape that allowed every action and behavior to be monitored by their employers and tourists traveling on the railway above their homestead. This surveillance was not limited to activities performed on the public, exterior landscape of the section house, which were witnessed by tourists and managers at the resort. The railway workers’ indoor and private lives were also placed under intense surveillance by reformers and inspectors hired by the resort. This chapter examines several competing processes of citizen-making at work at Mount Lowe. The resort’s reformers and owners held conflicting The Archaeology of Citizenship · 95 beliefs about Mexican immigrants, selecting material culture and imparting behaviors they saw as fitting of a Mexican immigrant living in American society and working at the resort. The reformers, who were typically young, single Anglo-American women who worked as volunteers, also engaged in voluntary reform with the hope of securing pay for their work, respect outside of the domestic sphere of the home (Camp 2012, 2011c), and to be considered equal citizens and counterparts to men. At the same time, Mexican immigrants voiced their own beliefs about citizenship in songs and in oral histories collected from this region, commentaries that often ran counter to the expectations of Mount Lowe’s reformers. This chapter looks at how these competing discourses and tensions about consumption and citizenship were expressed materially at the resort . I begin by reviewing the scope and intentions behind Mount Lowe’s Americanization program and the reformers who carried it out. I also explore the reformers’ citizenship aspirations and how such aspirations determined their willingness to see Mexican immigrants as fellow American citizens. Finally, I turn to archaeological data recovered from Mount Lowe’s railway workers’ household as well as associated documentary and oral history resources to assess how workers responded to their company ’s definition of what it meant to be a Mexican American citizen. Reform at Mount Lowe Resort and Railway When thousands of Mexican immigrants entered the United States during the early 1900s, Americanization instruction was proposed as a solution to quell cultural diversity and reinforce Anglo-American hegemony (McClymer 1991; Barrett 1992; Sánchez 1994; Van Nuys 2002; González 2004). The Pacific Electric Railway Corporation (PERC) contributed to this racial panic by hiring female teachers, camp managers, nurses, and reformers to impart American “ways” to its employees of Mexican descent (Camp 2012; Lewthwaite 2007). The PERC’s Americanization program was designed to, in their own words, “educate these immigrants in cleanliness and right living” so that they could “become good American citizens ” (PERC 1928). Becoming a “good citizen” in early-twentieth-century America meant consuming the right products, having a tidy and properly decorated home that emulated middle-class fashion sensibilities, eating “American” foods, and wearing American fashions. Toward this end, 96 · The Archaeology of Citizenship PERC claimed to provide training in “English, reading, writing, domestic science, thrift, economy, and marketing” (Elliott 1918, 152). To ensure compliance with Americanization efforts, PERC’s staff policed and inspected its employees’ homes as well as provided demeaning demonstrations on “proper” bathing and bed-making (Carr 1919, 1921). To encourage Mexican immigrants to adopt...