"Unsettled" Solvang, Danish Capital of America: A Photoessay

Imagine a hilltop village overlooking a green valley dotted by vineyards and orchards, farmhouses and grazing cattle, where the weather is rarely too hot or too cold and it seldom rains, with moisture enough borne by the summer breezes blowing off the nearby ocean. Idyllic and bucolic are words that come to mind, yet the township atop this hill, located just a few miles off California Highway 101 between San Francisco and Los Angeles, about forty miles north of Santa Barbara, can hardly be called rural or remote.

What Solvang calls itself— “The Danish Capital of America” —is the real key to its Gemeinschaft. A thriving tourist town, it has a visitor-to-resident ratio (1.5 million to 5,200) typical of U.S. leisure-industry Gesellschaft. Less than 20 percent of Solvang’s population (its senior citizens, for the most part) can now claim Danish descent, in contrast to 50 percent during the 1940s. Nor can many of today’s townspeople speak or even understand Danish (apart from such phrasebook standbys as goddag and god jul) in this community where business and worship alike were once conducted in the language of its founding fathers. That said, it is also the case that Solvang has never been more conspicuously danefied than it is now. As a result, there is no place in its Danish-signifying landscape for any other ethnicity’s representation—neither the area’s indigenous people, the Chumash (who now occupy a nearby reservation), nor the Mexican workforce on which the town’s tourist economy depends. Solvang’s Spanish history (and historic place in the colonization of Alta California) accords about as well with its Danish heritage

as the Mission Santa Inez, which abuts the town center, fits in with its windmills. The numerically and economically significant Mexican representation in this danefied Gesellschaft has not translated into a representative Chicano/a presence or role in the Solvang Gemeinschaft.

Settled in 1911 by Danish emigrants who were followers of N. F. S. Grundtvig, Denmark’s nineteenth-century priest and popular politician, Solvang was where they hoped to establish a range of cultural and social institutions that would preserve, and pass on to future generations, their own Grundtvigian principles. The settlement, founded on the site of an old Spanish land claim that the Danes bought up, grew rapidly. By the end of 1912, approximately 100 Danish immigrants had moved to Solvang mainly from the Midwest, where they had previously settled. The first building to go up, not surprisingly, was a hotel to accommodate newcomers upon their arrival. A second building—erected to house the folk high school that would be central to the founders’ Grundtvigian program, the Solvang Youth School—went up soon afterward.

The congregation of Bethania Lutheran Church, formed in 1912, held its Danish-language services in the same building occupied by the Solvang Youth School. It would not acquire its own meetinghouse—designed to resemble a Danish rural church—until 1928.

Solvang’s first bank opened in 1913, along with a dairy, a library, and the Solvang Store. Dania Hall, already under construction by then, would soon be up and running as the town hall.

Upon moving into new quarters—an imposing, three-storey wooden building—in 1914, the Youth School became Atterdag College. (Atterdag, meaning “[there will be] another day,” was also the name of the fourteenth-century king who had unified Denmark and thereby assured its independence.) In local lore, according to which Solvang’s development from a rural settlement into a tourist town was a smooth process, the natural...