Chicano, Folk, and Outsider Art in Fullerton!

I am proud to be part of an emerging arts scene in Fullerton, a city not historically known as a center of progressive cultural activity.  Things are changing.  The city is becoming more diverse--culturally, artistically, and politically.  My friend Stephan "Bax" Baxter has become one of the most proactive and interesting proponents of the arts in Fullerton.  At his smallish gallery in The Magoski Arts Colony, The Egan, Baxter continues to show fantastic emerging art, and he is a tireless champion of culture in this historically conservative city.

The next show at The Egan is perhaps his most ambitious and exciting yet.  It's a massive collection of Chicano, folk and other outsider art, ceramic sculpture, assemblage, paintings and rare oddities, which have been acquired by premiere local collector Enrique Serrato over the last 50 years.  Enrique’s collection, (over 6,000 original artworks) is one of the largest private collections of Chicano and outsider art in California.  It all began with a single small bowl by an El Sereno potter which he purchased in 1962 and his passion for art and collecting continues to this day. 

Here are some of the world-class artists from Enrique's collection which will be on display at The Egan this Friday, January 3 from 6-10pm during the Downtown Fullerton Art Walk...

Gronk!

Gronk was a founding member of the hugely influential 1970s Chicano artist collective known as ASCO.  The coolest story I've ever heard about ASCO is how, in the early 70s, they spray-painted their names on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), as a kind of protest against the museum's lack of representation of Chicano artists.  30 years later, ASCO had a major retrospective show INSIDE LACMA.  Take that, haters!

Lalo Alcaraz!

Alcaraz is the creator of the first nationally-syndicated, politically-themed Latino daily comic strip, “La Cucaracha."  His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, the L.A. Times, Variety, and many other publications.  Alcaraz and his work have been featured on CNN,  PBS, NPR, and lots of other places.  Lalo’s books include “Migra Mouse: Political Cartoons On Immigration, (2004).  He is is the co-host of KPFK Radio’s wildly popular satirical talk show, “The Pocho Hour of Power,” heard Fridays at 4 p.m. in L.A. on 90.7 FM, and co-founded the seminal Chicano humor ‘zine, POCHO Magazine. Alcaraz also co-founded the political satire comedy group Chicano Secret Service.

Esau Andrade!

Born in Tepic Nayarit, Mexico, Esau Andrade comes from a family of folk artists which includes his mother and his brother, Raymundo. Although largely self-taught, he attended La Escuela de Artes Plasticas de the Universidad de Guadalajara.  Esau's paintings are included in the collection of The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, CA as well as in the Downey Museum of Art in Downey, CA. He has had exhibitions at Galeria Uno (Puerto Vallarta), the Chac Mool Gallery (Los Angeles), Louis Stern Gallery (Los Angeles), Alene Lapides Gallery (Santa Fe, New Mexico) and Euroamerican Gallery, New York, among many others.

Diane Gamboa!

In the early ‘80s, Gamboa photographically documented the East Los Angeles punk rock scene.  She was associated with ASCO. Gamboa organized numerous site-specific "Hit and Run" paper fashion shows — created as easily disposable street wear. During the ‘90s, she found herself using the tension and stress involved in the urban environment to create new works, leading her to develop a Pin Up series of 366 ink drawings on vellum as an in-depth study of male-female relationships. These works led to her “Endangered Species” series, which recreates some of the Pin Up drawings in a three-dimensional form. Many of the figures in the Pin Up drawings are covered in tattoos, which is an ongoing fascination for Gamboa.

Gilbert “Magu” Lujan!

Gilbert "Magu" Lujan co-founded the famous Chicano collective Los Four, along with Carlos Almaraz, Beto de La Rocha (Father of former Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha), and Frank Romero. In 1974, Los Four exhibited LACMA's first-ever Chicano Art show, appropriately called "Los Four." This was quickly followed by several other exhibitions on the west coast. Los Four did for Chicano visual art what ASCO had done for Chicano performance art; that is, it helped establish the themes, esthetic and vocabulary of the nascent movement.  In 1990 Magú was commissioned as a design principal for the Hollywood & Vine station on the Metro Rail Red Line in Los Angeles.  His work uses colorful imagery, anthropomorphic animals, depictions of outrageously proportioned lowrider cars, festooned with indigenous/urban motifs juxtaposed, graffiti, Dia de los Muertos installation altars and all sorts of borrowings from pop culture.

Yolanda Gonzalez!

Ever since bursting onto the scene in the late 1980s, Yolanda Gonzalez has had a tremendous impact on Chicano art, producing work at a whirlwind pace. In less than ten years, Gonzalez has evolved from a talented hairdresser, taking part-time art classes, into one of the most prolific artists in Southern California, currently running the MA Gallery artspace in East Los Angeles. Her rapid ascent makes it hard to remember that she is really still one of the "new" faces.  Gonzalez, a California native, studied at Self Help Graphics in the mid-1980s and was formally introduced to the public at the First Annual Nuevo Chicano Los Angeles Art Exhibition at Plaza de la Raza in 1988. Since then she has traveled to Japan, Russia , Spain, and Scotland creating a number of commissions, notably a huge 15 foot retablo on canvas of the Virgen de Guadalupe for Floricanto USA.  In addition to her career as an artist, Gonzalez also teaches art at Inner City Arts, an organization for underserved youths.

De Batuc!

Alfredo de Batuc grew up in Mexico and his work shows the rigorous training in drawing of Mexican art schools. His work can be found in private and public collections including but not limited to: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California State Supreme Court Building (San Francisco), Museo Estudio Diego Rivera (Mexico City), Laguna Art Museum, Latino Museum (Los Angeles), and UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History (Los Angeles).

Tony de Carlo!

Tony de Carlo is a native of Los Angeles.  A self-taught artist, he has been creating art on a daily basis since his childhood.  His work is exhibited regularly in museums and galleries throughout the United States, and his paintings are in collections around the world. The paintings of Tony de Carlo have been exhibited at: Santa Monica Museum of Art, The Carnegie Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum Art, Laguna Art Museum, SPARC and UCLA Caesar Chavez Center, and his work was featured in the 2002 season of "Pageant of the Masters" in Laguna, California.

Margaret Garcia!

Garcia's work has been exhibited in group shows throughout Southern California as well as in Texas and Mexico. García teaches and lectures extensively on art in different cultures. She has said that her work "provides a look at my community through the presence of the individual." Although she does not consider her portraits overtly political or even socially conscious, in time she has come to realize that their very specificity belies the stereotypes given to any one culture by the media. 

Jose Lozano!

José Lozano was born in 1959 in Los Angeles. In 1960, he moved with his mother to her birthplace of Juárez, México. There, he found many of the cultural touchstones that continue to influence his work today-bad Mexican cinema, fotonovelas, ghost stories, comic books, and musical genres such as bolero and ranchera. He returned to Southern California in 1967 where he attended Belvedere Elementary School in East Los Angeles at which his teachers encouraged him to draw and paint. He began creating revealing, yet not always flattering, works about his neighborhood and its residents--demonstration parties, quinceañeras, weddings, and baby showers. Later, he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees from California State University at Fullerton. Lozano prefers to work in a series and focuses on particular themes and topics, such as Mexican wrestlers, paper dolls, Mexican movie imagery, clowns, lotería, and figures in midair. Most of his work is referred to as "morose," a trait of many artists that he prefers. 

These are just a handful of the many artists who will be featured in this exhibit.  Here are some more images of artwork from the show:

Ricardo Gonsalves, another integral part of Fullerton's emerging art scene, and a complete intellectual badass, is co-curating the exhibit. Other notable local art patrons like Alfredo Gutierrez and Michelle Buck & Jeff Middlemiss have been invaluable in narrowing the collection down to 100 of the best pieces. It’s a momentous task and an essential show.

Baxter said, "We have decided to curate the exhibit to give guests a hint of the feeling we first got when we walked into Enrique’s home. Upon our first glimpse of Enrique’s living room we were thrilled and overwhelmed, as I imagine everyone who has an appreciation of art would be. There was so much art in a small space. It was art, upon art, upon art, and everything I saw was exceptional. In order to reproduce this feeling we plan to stack sculpture and paintings from floor to ceiling. We will go so far as to enlist the aid of cabinets and shelving similar, to what one might find at Enrique’s house. It will be unlike anything ever exhibited at the Fullerton Art Walk and a rare opportunity for art walkers to benefit from Enrique’s critical eye and to do so at prices which reflect a collector who is motivated to share his art."

Enrique Serrato in his living room.

The opening reception for "The Enrique Serrato Collection" at The Egan Gallery is Friday, January 3, 2014 from 6-10pm during the Downtown Fullerton Art Walk.  The Egan Gallery is located inside The Magoski Arts Colony at 223 W. Santa Fe. Ave in Fullerton, California.  

Don't miss this amazing show!

What I was listening to in 2013

Someone once said, "Music is the soundtrack to our lives."  With 2013 drawing to a close, I find myself reflecting on the music I discovered and listened to this year.  Here's a list of the bands and artists that provided the soundtrack to 2013 for me.

1.) Youth Lagoon.  I picked up Youth Lagoon's record "Wondrous Bughouse" at Origami Vinyl in LA, and was hooked.  Their first record "The Year of Hibernation" is even better.  It's thoughtful, melodic music that deals with loneliness, inspiration, and snake hunting.

2.) The Mountain Goats.  The Mountain Goats have made a shit-load of records, and this year, I found myself listening to their album "The Life of the World to Come" over and over.  Each song is based on a Bible verse, and it deals with themes of death, faith, love, and loss in a simple and earnest way.  I think I especially resonated with this album because this year, I started having serious conversations with my parents about faith.  Even though I'm sort of an agnostic, we even started doing a Bible study together.

3.) The Minutemen.  Earlier this year, I had the privilege of seeing Mike Watt and his band The Missingmen perform at The Continental Room in Fullerton.  Watt was a founding member of the The Minutemen.  They came out of the early 80s punk scene, but their songs transcend traditional punk.  They are short explosions of creativity and emotion.

4.) Hott MT.  On Fridays, I DJ at Mulberry St. Ristorante in downtown Fullerton, and almost every week, I find myself playing a little pink 45 record by the band Hott MT called "Never Hate Again."  I may be a little biased regarding this band because my former roommate Adam Ashe is in it.  But they have an awesome sound, and this song features Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne.  There's a funny story with the song.  The members of Hott MT took a road trip to Oklahoma to find Wayne Coyne's house and give him a present.  Not only did Coyne accept the present, he invited this unknown band to stay at this house and record a song and a music video.  

5.) Thao & The Get Down Stay Down.  My friend Becky Holt (an amazing musician in her own right) introduced me to this band, and this album "We the Common."  It's a soulful, rocking set of songs about women living in a correctional facility, led by a short Vietmanese-American lady named Thao Nguyen.

6.) The Audacity.  I've been a fan of the Fullerton-based punk band The Audacity for many years, since their first album "Power Drowning" was released on Fullerton's own Burger Records.  Since that record, they have made two more, each more complex (and catchy) than the last: Mellow Cruisers and Butter Knife.  The Audacity always make me smile.

7.) The Middle Class.  Speaking of Fullerton bands, The Middle Class (arguably the first hardcore band in southern California) recently reunited and played some fantastic shows this year.  My friend Mike Atta (who runs Out of Vogue store) in downtown Fullerton is the guitarist for The Middle Class, whose ultra-fast songs and poetic lyrics seem as fresh today as when they were first recorded in the late 70s and early 80s.

8.) David Bazan.  When I was a young college student going to a small private Christian University in Seattle, Washington, a little band called Pedro the Lion were my "gateway drug" into indie music.  Since I first heard them in 1998, I have been a fan and follower of the career of Pedro the Lion, and (after their break-up) frontman David Bazan.  His second solo album, "Curse Your Branches" is a catchy and introspective exploration of spirituality, booze, and family.  It's heavy, but very good.

9.) Hunx and his Punx.  2013 was the year I discovered my first openly gay punk band, Hunx and his Punx.  In a year that saw the overturn of Califoria's discriminatory Prop 8, Hunx and his Punx provided a nice soundtrack of unabashed same-sex love and celebration.

10.) Los Tigres del Norte.  2013 has been a year of debate over immigration reform, and the band Los Tigres del Norte has provided me with a window into the Mexican-American immigrant experience.  My favorite song by them is "La Jaula de Oro (The Golden Cage)" which is the most honest and heartbreaking songs about this topic I've ever heard.  I think every American should listen to this song.  

For those of you who don't speak Spanish, I recorded my own version in both English and Spanish.

The Dark Legacy of Father Junipero Serra

As research for a novel I'm working on, I just finished reading a new book called Junipero Serra: California's Founding Father by Steven W. Hackel, who is a professor of history at California State University, Riverside.  Hackel, who has written extensively on this topic, is also curator of a current exhibit at the Huntington Library entitled Junipero Serra and the Legacies of the California Missions.

Every fourth grader in California learns about Father Serra and the California missions.  I remember having to build a model of a mission along with all of my classmates.  The picture of Father Serra I got from fourth grade history lessons was that of a kindly, determined Spanish priest who helped found the missions, which were nice places of cultural exchange between Spain and the Native Americans of California.  

Hackel's book seriously complicates this picture.  In the "Epilogue" to his book he reflects on the darker legacy of Father Junipero Serra, a legacy filed with cultural desolation and death.  Here are some excerpts from Hackel's epilogue:

"What Serra helped to initiate in California--colonization via an extensive "ladder" of Catholic missions, where tens of thousands of Indian lives were monitored, modified, and frequently shortened--was by every measure far more complex and destructive than he could have imagined...The California missions in his day formed a shaky bridge for Indians between the world of their ancestors and that of Spaniards.  What Serra did not live to see and understand was that later, for many Indians, this bridge led to a graveyard.

Thus, in a morbid irony, the concentration of Indians in the missions--the first and necessary step in Serra's plan--allowed for the wide and ready transmission of disease that only accelerated new baptisms and expanded death's work.  This became the missions' undoing and Serra's albatross.

Across the California missions one in three infants did not live to see a first birthday.  Four in ten children who survived their first year perished before their fifth.  Between 10 and 20 percent of adults died each year, with women of reproductive age suffering the most because of the dangers associated with childbearing and introduced venereal diseases…the high mortality rates were unrelenting, year after year for decades.

Of those who survived at the missions, some would become practicing Catholics.  Some would not.  Some would flee what they saw as an oppressive institution...Most went along with the missions because they appeared to represent the best of a few terrible options, to try to sustain their families, their culture, and their heritage in the bleakest of times.

By the time the missions were secularized in the early 1830s, more than 80,000 Indians had been baptized between San Diego and north of San Francisco, but almost 60,000 had been buried, nearly 25,000 of whom were children under the age of ten.

By 1855, after the gold rush and the establishment of American rule in California, the Indian population of the state stood at around 50,000, reduced from the 310,000 who lived in California in 1769 and a mere vestige of what Serra had seen when he came north from Baja California.

Today, the legacy of the California missions and Junipero Serra cannot be separated from these terrible events.  This has only been acknowledged relatively recently.  By now, Serra is  remembered in not one way but three: as a pioneer, as a religious icon, and as a colonial imperialist.  To many, Serra is the man who brought agriculture to the Golden State and who laid the foundation for California's future greatness.  To some Catholics--some of whom descend from the mission populations--he remains a heroic and saintly embodiment of the religion's timeless virtues.  Pope John Paul II accepted Serra's cause for canonization in 1985 and declared him venerable, the first of three steps to sainthood.  In 1988, the pope beatified Serra.  To others, however, Serra's life embodies the evils inherent in a colonial system that promoted cultural genocide, sanctioned corporal punishment, and brought about the devastation of California's native peoples.

What makes Serra such a necessary figure to get right is that he embodied a history of Indian-missionary relations nearly hemispheric in its scope.  Serra, although he stands out as exceptional among his Franciscan peers, in his practice of Catholicism was typical of the thousands of Catholic missionaries who came to the Americas during the early modern period.  His dismissive assumptions about the Indians' religious practices and his belief that that Indians had to be saved from their own barbarousness were likewise standard.  It is hard to imagine that any other group played a larger role in shaping the early period of Indian-European relations than these men, who were called to these shores by their own religious desires and by a Spanish state looking to expand and secure its American territories.  Millions of Indians, from the southern tip of South America to the northern hinterlands of Canada, and from the shores of the Chesapeake to the coves of Monterey Bay, were introduced to a central part of European culture and society by men in black or gray or brown robes who preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ and who attempted to reorganize their ways of life."

The Truth Machine

The following is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress called An American History.

One invention that I think would change the world would be a machine that is able to quickly distinguish between truth and bullshit--a machine that is constantly updating itself with all the world's collective knowledge.

"Wait a minute!" one might interject, "We already have that invention.  It's called a computer.  It has access to the world wide web!"

It's a point well taken, but unfortunately the world wide web is not simply a repository for all the world's knowledge.  It's also  repository for advertisements, celebrity gossip, millions of silly pictures, human opinions, prejudices, conspiracy theories, and lots of stuff that is probably false.

The proposed Truth Machine would be able to sift through all the bullshit, and emerge with pure truth.  It would be a very useful tool for winning arguments.  In fact, it would probably render arguments obsolete, providing both parties had a Truth Machine.  The disagreement could be efficiently solved by consulting the machine.

There are, of course, some inherent problems with the Truth Machine that would have to be worked out.  Fact-based questions like, "What are the major commercial exports of Indonesia?" could be easily answered.  But what about more complex/abstract questions like, "What were the social impacts of World War I on Finland?"  The Truth Machine could answer this, but it would require a lengthy answer that would necessitate much patient reading, listening, and critical thinking on the part of the inquisitive humans. 

And what about subjective questions like, "Is it morally praiseworthy to build a machine that can answer any question?"  What would the Truth Machine do if it was asked to justify its own existence?  Would it self-destruct?  Would it go out of its digital mind?

It seems, for the time being, that the best Truth Machine remains the human brain, but it is a very imperfect machine.

Merman: a poem

On a whim, out for a walk,

I decide to get a haircut.

It's been too long.

My hair keeps falling in my eyes

and I'm constantly brushing it back

and this makes me self-conscious,

like people will think I'm 

some vain hair-obsessed guy,

when the truth is that it's just

annoying to have hair in your face,

and I rarely think about haircuts.

Like my beard, I let it grow 

until it gets too long and uncomfortable

to ignore.

So I pop into a barbershop

which has the look of an "old timey"

joint, even though it just opened last month.

It's got the old school barber chairs

and vintage posters of people 

like Elvis Presley and Humphrey Bogart.

Men with nice, classic hair cuts.

There are, as far as I can tell,

three options when it comes 

to men and haircuts:

1.) Do it yourself at home with clippers

and probably end up with a "buzz"

2.) Go to a salon and get your hair

washed, cut, and styled in a modern style.

3.) Go to a barber shop 

and get a nice, classic hair cut.

There's an air of masculinity

about this barbershop:

a pit bull leashed to a barber chair,

and the barber is a big, tough-looking bald dude.

One modern element to this barbershop

is the flat screen TV hanging from the ceiling.

There is a show on called 

"Mermaids: The New Evidence"

which is about a few "scientists"

who found a weird humanoid skull

in South America and determined

that it belonged to a mermaid,

or, more probably, a merman.

The show is presented documentary-style

with interviews with the "scientists"

and digitally reconstructed scenes

of merpeople swimming about.

"Do you believe that bullshit?"

the barber asks.

"No way," I say,

"Those people probably aren't real scientists.

They're probably actors."

When the barber asks me what 

kind of haircut I want, 

I point to the clean-cut host

of "Mermaids: The New Evidence"

and say, "I'll have one like that guy."

The pit bull is sleeping on the floor.

For some reason, every time I look at the dog,

I notice his balls.

They are weirdly-shaped and large.

The "scientists" blather on

about non-existent mermaids

and I wonder,

Why do mermaids get all the press?

They're just half of the species.

What about mermen?

Disney is probably to blame.

I want to write a movie called

"The Little Merman"

It's about a little merman who is 

constantly struggling with his masculinity,

because he is part of a species that 

is generally lumped together

into the category, "Mermaids."

The little merman looks at the tough-looking

sailors who sail the seas

and dreams of being one of them.

After many difficult soul-searching years,

the little merman

comes to terms with his identity,

and learns to accept himself as he is.

The barber asks me if I would like pomade.

"Sure," I say, and he styles my hair 

into a sleek pompadour, so that

I look like a bearded Morrissey.

He wheels me around to the mirror

for the big reveal and I say,

"Now that's what I'm talking about."

Incarnation: a poem

I. White Christmas

"I want to spend all my money on some crystal methamphetamines,"

said the homeless guy outside Fedex Office, and then started singing,

"I'm dreaming of a white, crystal meth Christmas."

I'm waiting for my parents to pick me up,

sitting near this guy, as he asks everyone who walks by for money

for crystal methamphetamines.

It's hard, even on Christmas, to feel good will toward a guy like that.

I feel bad because he's homeless, of course, but

the more he talks, the more I want to slap him across the face

and yell, "Get your shit together, man!"

But I do not slap him across the face.

Instead, I sit quietly, reading A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle.

And then a homeless girl who appears drunk and/or high

walks up to me and grabs her crotch all raunchy-like and says,

to no one in particular, "Christmas fuckin' sucks!"

And then she laughs a crazy laugh and gets in an argument

with the crystal meth guy over cigarettes or something.

It's a rough start to my Christmas.

That crystal meth guy and the crotch-grab girl will haunt me all day.

II. Impossible Love

In the car, on the way to my cousin's house,

I tell my parents about the homeless people 

and the crystal methamphetamines and the crotch grabbing.

"It's impossible for me to be sentimental about these homeless people,"

I say, "They are unpleasant.  It's easy to love people who are lovable,

but how do you love those obnoxious fuck-ups?" (I didn't say "fuck-ups")

My dad thinks a moment and says, "You made a choice to sit

near them as you waited for us.  You could have waited somewhere else,

but you sat near them."

"But, dad," I said,  "I didn't DO anything.  I just sat there reading 

and feeling uncomfortable and unpleasant,

and I was relieved when you got there to pick me up."

(Actually, I gave the crystal meth guy my pack of cigarettes,

but I don't like to talk about the fact that I smoke with my parents,

even though we all know I smoke.  It's just one of those things.).

And what good is it really to give a homeless guy a pack

of cigarettes?  They're not food.  They're bad for him.

I guess, if you are homeless, a smoke can be a small comfort.

We drive in silence for a while, as I wrap presents with the Orange County Register.

III. God Made Meat

The word "Incarnation"

means roughly "the embodiment of the divine in an earthly form"

This is what Christmas is about.

The word Incarnation has the root word "carne",

or meat, inside it, like a tamale, or carne asada.

The word made flesh could also mean "The word made meat."  God made meat.

At my cousin's house, we eat ham and tamales.  Christmas tamales are tits.

The Los Angeles side of my family is half-Mexican.

I play Wii bowling with an elderly man named Pancho.

Incarnation also has the word carnation inside it, which has nothing to do with it's meaning.

It's just an accident of linguistics

that there is a flower inside the meat of God.

Incarnation also has the words "Inca Nation" inside it,

which was an ancient South American civilization

that was obliterated by Christians.

Back home, I look up at the stars for inspiration,

for incarnation, but they are veiled by clouds, except sirius,

the double star--two suns swirling in a violent vortex, farther away than I can imagine.

Was that the star the wise men saw in the old gospel story?

Christmas Tamales

A Brief History of the American West

I've just finished watching the PBS documentary series The West, which gives a fascinating history of the American West.  I feel like a lot of people's ideas of the history of the west is shaped more by movies than reality.  So, in an attempt to educate myself and share what I learn, here's my brief history of the American West...

Part 1: The People (the beginning to 1806)

For thousands of years, the American west was populated by Native American tribes, with thousands of languages, cultures, and religions.  Beginning in the 1500s, Spain began expeditions of conquest into the west.  One of the first Spaniards to explore the west was a man named Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, who came not as a conqueror, but as a shipwrecked sailor.  He ended up living among various tribes in the Southwest, and he was appalled by later attempts at conquest.

Alvar Nunez Cabeza deVaca

The next wave of Spanish exploration and conquest turned out to be a really bad deal for the Native Americans.  In the mid-1500s, the conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado began an expedition through the American Southwest.  Unlike Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado wiped out lots of tribes, like the Zuni, in his failed search for gold

Not surpirsingly, the native Americans whom Coronado sought to convert or kill did not take kindly to this intrusion.  There was a member of the Pueblo tribe named Po-pay, who led a successful rebellion against the Spanish, forcing them to return to Mexico.  They would be back, though.  

One of the good things that Spain brought to the New World was horses.  Horses transformed life for many tribes like the Cheyenne and the Lakota, enabling them to travel greater distances more efficiently.  The rise of horse culture gave rise to the famous Dog Soldiers, who were Cheyenne warriors.

One of the bad things that Spain brought to the New world was disease, many of which the Native Americans had no immunity to, like smallpox, cholera, and diphtheria.  European diseases wiped out thousands of Native Americans.

In the 1700s, Spain returned to the Southwest on a mission of conquest and Christianity.  Father Junipero Serra was one of the first "pioneers" to California, and he is the guy who established many of the Californai missions, which were a way to control the thousands of Native inhabitants through forced labor and conversion to Christianity.  Father Serra is often portrayed as a gentle old friar, but the missions were, in retrospect, a pretty bad deal for the Native Americans.

In 1781, some Mexican settlers founded the city of Los Angeles.

In the early 1800s, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson sent two explorers named Lewis and Clark on a mission he called the Corps of Discovery.  They were looking for a passage to the Pacific Ocean, which would be good for trade.  They made it to the Pacific with a lot of help from their Native American interpreter Sacagawea.

Lewis and Clark with Sacagawea, Clark's slave York, and two other men.

Part 2: Empire Upon the Rails (1806-1848)

As the United States grew in power and people, some politicians got it into their heads that it was their God-given right to own all of the land, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  By the middle of the 1800s, through purchase and conquest, they would get their desire.

Some of the first white pioneers into the western frontier were so-called "Mountain Men" who sought to make their fortune trapping beavers.  Beaver hats were very popular among the wealthy people of New England, so there was quite a demand.  One such beaver trapper was Joe Meek, who eventually would become a politician in Oregon.  

Joe Meek

Other early settlers were missionaries like Marcus and Narcisa Whitman, who sought to convert the Indians to Christianity.  Eventually the Whitmans would turn their backs on the Cayuse tribe by helping American settlers arriving on the Oregon Trail to take their land.  The Whitmans were ultimately murdered by the Cayuse.  A band of US militia then hunted down and murdered the Cayuse, who were already on the decline from diseases brought by US settlers, like measles.

As the US expanded westward, they created Indian territory or "reservations" for the Indians to move to.  One of the saddest displacements of a tribe was the displacement of the Cherokees out of Georgia.  This sad exodus became known as the "Trail of Tears."  

Another group of pioneers who settled in the west were the Mormons, who were originally from New York.  The Mormons, led by their charismatic leader Joseph Smith, were often persecuted for their strange beliefs and practices.  Joseph Smith was murdered for heresy.  After the death of Smith, another Mormon leader named Brigham Young sought to lead his people to a new land where they could practice their religion freely.  He ultimately settled around the Great Salt Lake in Utah, which is where many Mormons still live today.

Up until 1848, most of the Southwest belonged to Mexico, and thus American settlers in the Southwest had to get permission from Mexico.  At first, Mexico encouraged Americans to settle.  One early American settler was Stephen F. Austin, who brought many families and their slaves to settle in the Mexican state of Texas.  Another one was named Sam Houston.  As more Americans settled in Texas, they started to feel that the land belonged to them, sort of like squatters.  There were eventually military conflicts between the Americans in Texas and the Mexicans who owned the land.  Sam Houston and his men fought against the Mexicans under general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna

The Alamo was the site of an early battle that the Americans lost against Mexico.  Juan Sequin was a Mexican-American man who helped the Americans in their struggle for control of Texas.  The conflict in Texas over land would ultimately spark the Mexican American War, which the United States would win.  The result of this was was that Mexico lost almost half of their territory to the US, which included the present day states of Texas, Colorado, California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona.

At the end of the Mexican American War, when the US had succeeded in its "Manifest Destiny," president James K. Polk erected the Washington Monument.

Part 3: Speck of the Future (1848-1856)

One year after Mexico lost California to the United States in the Mexican American War, gold was discovered there, and settlers started pouring in, hoping to strike it rich.  The first gold was discovered by John Sutter at the now famous "Sutter's Mill."

The Transcontinental Railroad had not yet been built, so the journey out west was a slow one.  Some came by boat, around the tip of South America.  Most came by wagon train, like the famous 49ers.  In the span of a year, over 30,000 people emigrated west.

John Sutter

With all these new settlers pouring through their lands, the Gold Rush proved disastrous for the Great Plains Indians.  Settlers began hunting buffalo, and competing with the Indians for resources.  Also, cholera, brought by the settlers, decimated the Native American population.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was one of many treaties the U.S. government made (and broke) with the Indians, to try to get them to get out of the way of settlement and westward expansion.  In exchange for money, the Indians were to stay inside specific areas, and to conform to lines on a map.

But in 1854, peace came apart, as it would many times thereafter, with a clash between U.S. soldiers and Lakota warriors.  It was around this time, as the west was being peopled, that stories of legendary Indian fighters and frontiersmen like Kit Carson were popular in magazines and dime novels.  Usually, these stores glorified the white pioneers, and vilified the Native Americans.  It was a weird, inverted version of reality.  A more accurate reflection of history was the Lakota historian Long Dog's Winter Count, which was a visual representation of his people's struggles.

One infamous group of pioneers who were headed for California was The Donner Party, who lost their way and resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Too many miners flocked west.  Most didn't make their fortune.  The people who made their fortune were often not the miners, but the shrewd businessmen who sold implements to miners, like Levi Strauss, who sold pants to them.  Luzena Stanley Wilson ran a successful lodge for miners to sleep and eat.  John Sutter didn't make his fortune from gold, but from selling wheat to miners.  Miners included freed slaves, Indians, Chinese, Californios.  In these years, and the years to come, California had more immigrants than any other state.

California during the Gold Rush was often seen as a sinful place.  The numerous mining camps were dens of gambling, drinking, and prostitution.  The prostitutes' lives were especially miserable.  Women who were not prostitutes were very rare.  

With mining claims diminishing, frustrated white miners looked for an excuse, a scapegoat for their failure to make money.  They sought, through legal means and vigilante means, to exclude Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, and basically anyone why wasn't white from the bounty of California's supposed riches.  Discriminatory taxes, based on race, were levied.  Chinese were denied citizenship. 

Emperor Norton I

California became a state of the Union in 1850.  This would prove disastrous for Mexican landowners like Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, one of the oldest landowners in California, who lost most of his vast estate because U.S. courts did not consider Spanish or Mexican land grants valid, even though the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo stated otherwise.

Another consequence of the Gold Rush was the rapid development of San Francisco.  Because of its proximity to mining operations, the population of San Francisco exploded from 2,000 to 35,000 in  just one year.  By the 1850s,  it became one of the great metropolises of the world, mostly due to gold.  Most of the gold then flowed to the businessmen who took the miners money.

One failed San Francisco businessman was Joshua Norton, who lost his mind and declared himself Emperor of the United States.  Though he had no real power, he became very popular in San Francisco as a kind of novelty.

During the Gold Rush, Indians of California were enslaved, killed, and driven from their land.  Laws favored whites and often sanctioned the killing of Indians.  Bounties were sometimes payed for Indian scalps and heads.   In the mid-1800s, the Indian population of California declined from 150,000 to 30,000.  The worst slaughter of Indians in US history occurred in California during the Gold Rush.

Part 4: Death Runs Riot (1856-1868)

As the U.S. expanded west and more states were admitted to the Union, the question arose every time whether the new state would be a "free" or a "slave" state.  This conflict became very intense in Kansas.  In the years leading up to the Civil War, there were armed militia conflicts in Kansas over the issue of slavery.  This was known as "Bleeding Kansas."

Further west, in Utah, Mormon leader Brigham Young had 27 wives.  Most Americans were appalled at the idea of Mormon polygamy.  In an attempt to divert attention away from the divisive issue of slavery, president James Buchanan sent 2,500 troops to Utah to reassert federal control over a perceived common enemy--those polygamous Mormons.  

This so-called "Mormon War" was overshadowed, however, by the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormon militia, under the command of John D. Lee, slaughtered men, women, and children on a wagon train headed west, and then blamed the massacre on the Paiute Indians.  Attention, however would soon be diverted away from the Mormons, and on a more immediate and widespread issue--slavery and the Civil War, which began in 1861.

John Chivington

When most people think of the Civil War, they think of battles on the East Coast, and in the South, but the war extended into the western states as well.  A large company of Confederate Texans marched through the Southwest.  They were stopped by the army of John M. Chinvington, a Methodist preacher turned Union soldier from Colorado, who beat back the confederate army at The Battle of Glorieta Pass, sometimes called the Gettysburg of the West.

Because there was less federal government presence in the West, guerrilla warfare was more common, in which not just soldiers, but civilians were killed.  In Missouri, whole towns were sacked and burned by the confederate William Quantrill, and "Bloody Bill" Anderson. The massacre and looting of Lawrence, Kansas was especially devastating.  Many civilians were killed, including women and children, and 185 homes were burned.

To escape the war, a young man named Sam Clemens went West to become a silver miner in Nevada, then a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise.  He began writing as a humorist and changed his name to Mark Twain.

In California, New Mexico and Colorado, relatively new U.S. territories, Mexicans were denied the right to vote, and their property was often taken from them in court, because U.S. land agents didn't recognize Mexican and Spanish land grants.

Into this injustice arose a man named Juan Cortina, who became a kind of champion of the people, specifically people who'd lost their land to U.S. land agents, like displaced ranchers.  Cortina and his men took back the lower Rio Grande.  Americans viewed him as an enemy, and sent Texas Rangers, backed by federal troops, against him.  Cortina was known as The Robin Hood of the Rio Grande.

Juan Cortina

Meanwhile, on the great plains, as more settlers moved west, the Indians continued to proved to be a "roadblock" to progress.  Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle was once again forced to move his people, this time to the Sand Creek Reservation.  It was here, at Sand Creek, that one of the worst Indian massacres in U.S. history took place.

John Chivington, who commanded Third Colorado Volunteers, sought to rid Colorado of Indians.  It was Chivington who orchestrated what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre, in which U.S. soldiers brutally attacked Black Kettle's Cheyenne village.  Men, women, and children sere slaughtered.  Although Black Kettle raised a large American flag, a gesture of peace, troops opened fire anyway, bodies were mutilated, and by the end of the day, nearly 200 Cheyenne lay dead, most of them women and children.  No one was punished for this crime, not even Chivington.

In 1865, the Civil War ended.  Many war veterans, from north and south, sought a new life in the West.  Others, like General Philiip Sheridan and General William Tecumseh Sherman, continued to do to the Indians what they'd done to the South--crush them.  George Armstrong Custer made a name for himself in the so-called Indian Wars, killing and forcing more and more tribes onto reservations, 

Chief Black Kettle was killed in another massacre committed by U.S. troops, the Wachita River slaughter, in which General George Armstrong Custer and his soldiers charged through Black Kettle's camp, killing men, women, and children, including Black Kettle and his wife.

The Sand Creek Massacre

Part 5: The Grandest Enterprise Under God (1868-1874)

After the Civil War, America sought to re-unite itself with the building of the transcontinental railroad.  Congress gave charters and subsidized loans to two railroad companies--the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, in a race to build a railroad that would unite the east and west coasts of America.  Huge sums were paid to these companies, along with thousands of acres of land grants, so eager was the government to build this railroad. 

Leland Stanford, who was governor of California, was also president of the Central Pacific Railroad, which was building eastward.  He made lots of money from the railroads.   

Tens of thousands of rail workers flocked to build the railroad: Irish immigrants, former slaves, Mexicans, Chinese.  The work crews averaged 2-3 miles of track a day, every day, for six days a week.  The camp which followed the rail workers was known as Hell on Wheels.  It was a camp of prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, and businessmen who sought to take the rail workers' money.

Native Americans like the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota didn't like the intrusion of the railroad into their lands, so they derailed trains and sometimes ransacked freight cars.  5,000 federal troops were sent west to "protect" the rail workers.  Whether through peace or violence, the railroad had to be built.  It was "Manifest Destiny."

Leland Stanford's Central Pacific Railroad got stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and they had-difficulty keeping workers for the hard and dangerous work of blasting through the mountains.  Stanford found a solution by recruiting Chinese workers.  11,000 Chinese workers blasted their way through the mountains, building 15 tunnels through solid rock, sometimes advancing only 8 inches a day.   It was very dangerous work involving dynamite.  This was a time before worker protection laws.  More than 1,200 Chinese died building the railroad.

At Promontory Point, on May 10, 1869 the two rail lines (The Central Pacific and The Union Pacific) were joined with a golden spike.  Leland Stanford drove in the final spike.  Not accustomed to hard work, Stanford missed the spike at first, then drove it in.  There were celebrations all across the country.  A journey that had once taken months, could now be completed in a matter of days, with the transcontinental railroad.

Meanwhile, on the great plains, in the path of the railroad, the Kiowas and their main food source, the buffalo, were rapidly declining because of westward American expansion.  The Kiowa's life was based on buffalo--for food, clothing, shelter, even religion.  At one time, as many of 30 million buffalo roamed the west.  

The main reason for the decline and near extinction of the vast buffalo herds was the greed of Americans.  American buffalo hunters like Frank Mayer saw a quick and easy way to fortune, and wiped out buffalo for hides and bones, horns and hooves.  Over 3 million buffalo were killed in just two years.  In 1874, with the buffalo driven to the brink of extinction, congress passed a law to protect buffalo, but President Ulysses S. Grant vetoed it.

Pile of buffalo skulls

The railroad passed through Utah, bringing nonbeliever settlers into Brigham Young's previously isolated Mormon kingdom.  This created conflict.  Americans did not like the Mormons, mainly because of polygamy.  However, the Mormons were a complex people.  One of the first advocates of giving women the right to vote was Emmeline Wells, a Mormon "plural wife."  The Utah legislature gave women right to vote in 1870, well before anywhere else in the country.

Now that the west was truly "opened" by the railroad, the country needed settlers to populate its vast spaces.  The Homestead Act was one way to do it.  It promised free land, hope for poor immigrants to get a slice of the American pie.  Many of the early settlers under the Homestead Act lived on isolated farms.  Millions of acres of land were plowed under for crops.  New towns began to form in the west.

In Texas, the cattle industry was booming, giving rise to a mythical western hero, the cowboy.  Cowboys were, as the name suggests, workers who drove cattle herds from one place to another.  They were usually poorly paid.  Cowtowns emerged in the west, giving meaning to the term "wild west."  The cowboys were generally a wild, unruly bunch.  Gun control ordinances were common in western towns, because cowboys had a tendency to get drunk and start shooting people.

Part 6: Fight No More Forever (1874-1877)

In 1868, gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and white settlers started pouring in, in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty, which said Black Hills would belong to the Lakota "forever."  The miners pouring into the Black Hills in violation to this treaty called their trail the "Freedom Trail."  The Lakota called it the "Thieves Road."

In response to this situation, the U.S. government offered to purchase the Black Hills from the Lakota for 6 million dollars.  Chief Sitting Bull refused the offer.  The conflict between the U.S. government and the Lakota over the Black Hills led to the famous/infamous Battle of Little Big Horn, in which General George Armstrong Custer and his men were defeated by Sitting Bull and his men.  It was a great victory for the Lakota, and a crushing defeat for the United States.

Sitting Bull

The U.S. sent more troops into the Black Hills, and Sitting Bull and his people took refuge (in Canada.

Meanwhile, the U.S. cavalry was driving another tribe out of their land in Oregon--the Nez Perce, led by Chief Joseph.  The cavalry pursued the Nez Perce throughout the northwest, and finally the Nez Perce surrendered, on the condition that they would be allowed to return to their homes.  General William Tecumseh Sherman, however, overrode this promise, and the Nez Perce were never allowed to return to their beloved Wallowa Valley.  Chief Joseph would die in exile.  He said, "Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

Part 7: The Geography of Hope (1877-1887)

Between 1877-1887, 4.5 million people migrated west.  

African Americans who still faced discrimination in the South, like Jim Crow laws, saw hope for a new life in the west.  Pap Singleton was an African American man who led thousands of recently-freed slaves west to Kansas, to a new life of opportunity.  They called themselves the Exodusters.  By 1880, more than 15,000 African Americans had moved from southern states to Kansas.

There were huge advertising campaigns to lure settlers west, and the population in the west exploded.  Homesteaders, under the various Homestead Acts, settled in places like Nebraska, and tried their hand at farming.  It was a hard life.

By 1881, most Native Americans had lost their freedom, and been forced onto reservations.  It was a devastating blow to tribes like the Lakota, a people who were used to roaming the great plains and living off buffalo.  Now they were confined and couldn't leave their reservation without a pass.  With the buffalo basically exterminated, the Lakota had to live off governemnt rations, which often didn't arrive.  Hunger and disease became common aspects of reservation life.   The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs also ordered Indians like the Lakota to abandon their language and religion.

Native children were often sent to Indian Training and Industrial Schools, where all their native possessions  were burned.  Boys were given English names like Ulysses S. Grant.  One politician stated, "Education should seek the disintegration of the tribes."  In these Indian Boarding Schools, children were forbidden from speaking their native tongue.  If caught speaking their native tongue, their mouths were sometimes washed with lye soap.  The skills Native American youths learned in the boarding schools were often not useful in their communities, when they returned.  The Indian Boarding schools, some of which still exist today, have been a pretty bad deal for Native Americans.  

By 1880, there were over 300,000 Chinese people living in the west.  When an economic depression hit, Chinese people were blamed for economic hardships.  Anti-chinese violence broke out.  Chinese people were murdered, forced to leave towns, and not hired for jobs.  California passed a law which made hiring a Chinese worker illegal.  In 1882, following public anti-Chinese outcry, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which forbade Chinese people from entering the US.  It was the first time a group of immigrants had been excluded on the basis of race.  

Los Angeles, a city founded by Mexican settlers in 1781, was beginning to change by the 1880s.  Political power was passing from Spanish-speaking "Californio" families to Anglo-Americans.  A fare war between railroad companies allowed massive immigration to Southern California.  120,000 people, mostly Anglos,  moved west in 1887 alone.  By 1890, the Anglo population of Los Angeles had exploded, and Mexican- Americans found themselves a minority in a city founded by their ancestors.  They began to experience discrimination that would continue for decades.

Meanwhile, on the east coast, a man named William Cody began calling himself "Buffalo Bill" and orchestrated a wildly popular Wild West Show, which ran for over 30 years.  It was a gawdy, rowdy entertainment show with cowboys and Indians.  It helped create the "myth" of the west that many western films would continue.  In this mythic version of the west, whites were the victims of the Indians.  It was a weird, inverted version of the truth.  It was a story of inverted conquest, in which the conquerors were presented as the victims.  What this did for Americans was give them a guilt-free story of how the west was "won."  It wasn't true, but it was wildly popular.  

Part 8: One Sky Above Us (1887-1914)

In 1887, the Dawes Act was passed, which sought to divide up tribal lands into individual properties.  This proved disastrous.  It broke up communities, devastated the Indians, and led to the loss of millions of acres of tribal land.  In fact, the Dawes Act took away about 2/3 of Indian lands.  Ironically, the people who conceived of and carried out the Dawes Act called themselves "Friends of the Indian."  People like Alice Fletcher came to "save" tribes like the Nez Perce.  The Nez Perce called Fletcher "The Measuring Woman."

By the 1880s,  mining had become industrialized in the west.  A good example of this would be the city of Butte, Montana, where copper was discovered (which was useful for the new electric age).  The copper miners of Butte had the most dangerous job in America.  Eventually, due to industrialized mining, Butte became a desolate landscape devoid of green, thick with heavy air pollution.  Some days, it was dark by noon.  The General Mining Act of 1872 allows for total exploitation of mineral resources without restoration or concern for ecological impact.

By 1890, with increasing devastation of Indian tribes, there emerged a new religious movement among some tribes, led by a man named Wovoka called the Ghost Dance.  The new message combined Christian and Indian elements and promised a day when there would be no white men. It was a desperate prayer that would not come true.

On December 29th, 1890, perhaps the worst Indian massacre in U.S. history occurred on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, near a creek called Wounded Knee.  The infamous 7th cavalry, commanded by U.S. General James W. Forsyth surrounded a camp of several hundred Lakota.  The soldiers opened fire with rifles and cannons, and killed 250 men, women, children.  Their frozen bodies were dumped in a pit.  This became known as the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Indian Bodies Being Cast in a Ditch at Wounded Knee

In 1893, the United States celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of America with the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  It was a giant, self-congratulatory celebration of American conquest.  24 million people attended.  In a speech, Frederick Jackson Turner declared the American frontier closed.

Between 1890 and 1904, the population of Los Angeles quadrupled.  The city of Los Angeles has no business being a giant metropolis with millions of people.  The ecology of the landscape cannot support this kind of settlement.  Over the course of a few decades, LA had depleted its groundwater.  Rather than scale back consumption and growth, city leaders simply looked for more water elsewhere.  William Mulholland, who was head of the LA water department, in conjunction with business leaders and politicians, essentially stole water from the Owens Valley by building a giant aqueduct that cost 23 million dollars.  43 men died in the six years it took to build the aqueduct.  The Owens Valley dried up, killing the livelihood of the small farmers who lived there, and allowing LA to have water, and keep growing artificially.

In his later years, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce traveled many times to Washington DC to plead with various U.S. presidents for the return of his tribal land in the Wallowa Valley, but the land was not returned.  It was now "owned" by white settlers.  Chief Joseph died in exile from what the attending physician called "a broken heart."