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C Ch ha ap pt te er r 1 15 5 Reading and Mapping America’s Changing Ethnic Geomorphologies and Palimpsest Geographies STANLEY D. BRUNN INTRODUCTION This chapter explores the concept “ethnic geomorphology,” which describes the mosaics or mixtures of ethnic groups that have existed and exist in America’s rural areas, small towns, and large metropolitan areas. The “geomorphology” depicts the surface features of a place and those forces or processes that are responsible for what exists at any point in time. A related concept, “ethnic geology,” which refers to strata of ethnic uniformity or complexity, is also presented. Just as some landform surfaces are static, so are some “ethnic surfaces .” Others devolve, that is, they lose distinguishing features, and still other surfaces contain remnants of previous occupants, that is, they have a “palimpsest nature.” The chapter concludes by suggesting some areas for future research. ETHNIC GEOLOGY The inspiration to delve into the concept of “ethnic geomorphology” derives from a similar term “ethnic geology” coined by political scientist Daniel Elazar (1966) in his scholarly treatise American Federalism: A View from the States. Elazar is best known to American political geographers for his pioneer thinking on the characteristics of regional political cultures and his maps of these cultures at state and substate levels. He identified the salient attributes of early European settlement in various sections of the U.S. and used them to describe Traditionalistic (T), Moralistic (M), and Individualistic (I) political cultures, and varying combinations, across the country. For example, the dominant political culture in northern New England and the Upper Middle West states was Moralistic; Colorado, Utah, and Oregon were also in this culture. Traditionalistic cultures were in a cluster of southern states from Virginia to Arkansas and Mississippi; Individualistic cultures existed in a band of states from Pennsylvania to Illinois. Texas and Florida were classified as TM; California and Kansas as MI; Arizona and New Mexico as TM, and Washington, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, and Iowa as MI (Elazar 1966, p. 108). Elazar writes about the difficulties of mapping these political subcultures: The overall pattern of political cultures is not easily portrayed. Not only must the element of geography be considered, but also a kind of human or cultural “geology” that adds another dimension to the problem. In the course of time, different currents of migration have passed over the American landscape in response to the various frontiers of national development. Those currents, in themselves relatively clear-cut, have left residues of population in various places to become the equivalent of geological strata. As these populations settled in the same location, sometimes side by side, sometimes overlapping, and 220 Stanley D. Brunn frequently on top of one another, they created hardened cultural mixtures that must be sorted out for analytical purposes, city by city and county by county from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Quite clearly, the various sequences of migration in each locale have determined the particular layering of the cultural geology of each state. Even as the strata were being deposited over generations and centuries, externally generated events, such as depressions, wars, and internal cultural conflicts, caused upheavals that altered the relative positions of the various groups in the community. Beyond that, the passage of time and the impact of new events have eroded some cultural patterns, intensified others, and modified still others, to make each local situation even more complex (pp. 95–96). Furthermore, he notes that: The simple mapping of such patterns has yet to be done for more than a handful of states and communities, and while the gross data which can be used to outline the grand pattern as a whole are available in various forms, they have been only partially correlated (p. 96). Extending Elazar’s thinking on “ethnic geology” to “ethnic geomorphology,” one must consider not only the subsurface and also what is at the surface, but also the contemporary processes that are bringing new ethnic group features to rural and urban landscapes. These features include: surnames, place names of towns, streets, public buildings, schools, places of worship, cemeteries, etc., organizations, speech patterns, and other cultural features (music, hobbies, diet, reading and television preferences, entertainment and sports preferences), and major economic activities. Agocs (1981) extended our thinking of ethnic patterns and communities and suggested a typology that included ghettos, immigrant reception centers, urban villages and integrated communities. She also described “small islands of ethnic communities remaining in neighborhoods that had passed on to other groups” (p. 137). Her discussion...

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