Editors’ Introduction

We send this issue to press as the 2012 presidential election draws to a close—an election that puts before the American people radically different visions of the future of these United States. It is by good fortune rather than by predetermined plan that the essays in this issue speak to questions that are front and center in the political landscape—the character of democracy, the role of government, the nature of the public—and that will remain so regardless of who is elected the next president. Your editors recognize the merits of publishing planned special themed issues, but this is not one, even though it may seem as if it ought to have been. We trust that you, as dedicated vernacularists, will appreciate the decision to find and underscore common themes in what were conceived as independent investigations of public culture in the United States.

First and foremost, and critical to highlight during an especially bitter, nasty presidential campaign: our authors remind us of the importance of union, of finding common purpose while we critique democracy as it actually exists. Like Barack Obama, we agree that the “search for a more perfect union” is ongoing in the United States—and must be, given the country’s character as home to groups that are diverse in their past experiences, present circumstances, and outlooks for the future. In each article, the authors examine the struggle to give voice—in some cases literally, in others in a more conceptual sense—to the perspective of the disenfranchised, ignored, or unpopular.

Each of this issue’s authors also makes clear another allied, but perhaps less recognized point: democracies need physical spaces to thrive. As the theorist Henri Lefebvre argued in The Production of Space, appropriating places has an emancipatory potential in a liberal capitalist democracy.¹ In keeping with this line of thinking, our authors show that it is necessary to claim, to appropriate the physical—actual buildings, actual spaces, actual artifacts—to expand democracy, even if some of the power relations of the dominant society are replicated in and through material culture. This argument is one that Mary P. Ryan, historian of public culture in the United States, has applied to women and cities during the nineteenth century, and it comes as no surprise to students of her work that it is cited by more than one author in this issue.

For the Viewpoint essay, Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz steps out of his role as review editor to write “Latino Vernaculars and the Emerging National Landscape.” Building on essays published in this journal and discussions at the 2008 Vernacular Architecture Forum conference in Fresno, Sandoval-Strausz revisits a classic essay, “Chihuahua as We Might Have Been,” written by J. B. Jackson and published more than sixty years ago in Landscape. Sandoval-Strausz demonstrates that this essay remains relevant because it helps us understand and work with the spaces produced by Latinos, one of the fastest growing demographic groups in this country. By insisting that space is produced, in the Lefebvrian sense of the concept, and through a critical analysis of Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (2002) and a host of other texts, Sandoval-Strausz asks us to recognize the specific character of Latino place making, including the emphasis on public culture and public spaces. This expanded vision, Sandoval-Strausz insists, will not only aid our work as historians but also shape public policy.

Josi Ward also considers ethnicity, immigration, urban space, and buildings in “‘Dreams of Oriental Romance’: Reinventing Chinatown in 1930s Los Angeles.” Bringing us to the West Coast, she tracks the history of these two separate Chinese-themed districts that opened in downtown Los Angeles in the 1930s. The developers of each one claimed it to be the “authentic” replacement of the city’s original Chinatown, which was ruthlessly demolished to make way for Union Station. The creation of these two districts, one owned by whites, the other by Chinese from an established immigrant community, echoed events in the nearby city of Santa Barbara. By comparing the two replacement Chinatowns in Los Angeles...