In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

158 In 1808, well before Sacramento became a diverse multicultural metropolis (the twenty-seventh largest in the nation) housing about 1.4 million people by the start of the twenty-first century, Spanish army officer Gabriel Moraga reached the site of Sacramento by trekking upstream along a big river. Moraga’s horseback expedition had already spent two years exploring the California Central Valley for Europeans, despite the fact that the land had already been discovered, explored, and even settled by native Americans for thousands of years. As one local historian wrote, “The air was like champagne, and the Spaniards drank deep of it, drank in the beauty around them.” Moraga then exclaimed, “Es como el sagrado Sacramento!” (This river is like the Holy Sacrament!). Thus the river, then the metropolis later hunkering on its banks, got its name. The naming of Sacramento, while reflective of Spanish culture and Catholicism, comes from seeing a natural resource as a blessing (one compared to the blood of Christ).1 In fact, during the 1950s, Sacramento ’s chamber of commerce offered a booster pamphlet (Sacramento Facts) with the tagline “The Land the Lord Remembered.”2 Moraga and the chamber offer snapshots of a mind-set characterizing a view of the environment as simultaneously something to exploit and something in which to find deep personal meaning. These worldviews have driven and defined Sacramento’s suburban growth and metropolitan makeup. Sacramentans’ perception of and relationship with the environment, and hence their willingness to alter it or not, are largely the result of sustained urban boostCHAPTER 8 Both “Country Town” and “Bustling Metropolis” HOW BOOSTERISM, SUBURBS, AND NARRATIVE HELPED SHAPE SACRAMENTO’S IDENTITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SENSIBILITIES Paul J. P. Sandul both “country town” and “bustling metropolis” 159 erism, suburban development, and local historical narratives that tout Sacramento and its suburbs as an agrarian and industrial paradise (the proverbial “machine in the garden”). Put differently, the massive transformation of the land that accompanied the development of a sprawling metropolis both came about because of and influenced Sacramentans’ view of the environment and themselves. Such a view is not an organic phenomenon, however, but rather a narrative invention first crafted by Sacramento’s boosters to reap profits and later legitimated by local historical narratives and spectacles. Ultimately, the original and subsequent publicity campaigns of Sacramento area boosters have had long-lasting consequences because they have effectively crafted a sense of place that informs the construction of local identity, that conditions and shapes the lives of those who live there, and that moderates behavior and beliefs.3 The sense of place the boosters and others have crafted has mandated that the environment is a blessed resource—one that can be used, however. Such a narrative exposes an identity for Sacramento that is ensconced within the exceptional paragons of the rural and the suburban, the traditional and the modern. The actual process of suburbanization in Sacramento bears this out. The promotional literature, actual design, and subsequent histories of suburban housing subdivisions in Sacramento reveal the striking extent to which developers, real estate firms, and later suburbanites constructing local histories employed the language of Sacramento’s early urban boosters and, ultimately, contributed to the overall commercial packaging of a metropolis—a branding that has helped shape how many in Sacramento view the environment and, likewise, themselves. These views of the environment and self then guide how Sacramentans interact with, shape, and treat the actual environment. Suburbia and the Transformation of an Environment Much of the narrative construction concerning Sacramento is a result of local boosters and developers appropriating the popular imagery of the rural and suburban ideals that romantics began to spread in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Famously extolling a “rural virtue” and lamenting the effects of industrialization, romantics contributed to an early and growing hostility to the city and a romanticized celebration of nature.4 In this view, the city emblematized a menace and lacked the means to support a moral life. According to romantics, a home in the countryside provided families a safe, simple gathering place in an environment of natural surroundings far from the oppressive modes of city life. The image of picturesque cottages and villas in a bucolic landscape subsequently became a commodity eagerly consumed by middle-class Americans.5 This rural (and suburban) antidote to a growing urban disease celebrated an agrarian past, linked an egalitarian republic with rural life (with or without agriculture), and represented a place for experiencing what it meant to be...

Share