Ethnicity is heavily inscribed onto the landscape. Ethnic enclaves or ghettos are excellent places to practice reading the cultural landscape. African-American, Latino, Armenian, Chinese, Irish, Greek, and Polish neighborhoods each feature unique elements. Because housing in ethnic neighborhoods was most often not built by minority residents themselves, but rather by Anglo-Europeans, and later inhabited by another group, urban architecture rarely offers few clues to the cultural values, beliefs, or histories of the ethnic minorities. So, geographers focus their attention on other landscape elements in ethnic neighborhoods, including the distinct businesses, the variations in the use of public space, public art, and graffiti, as well as yard ornamentation and statuary to extract insight from the built environment. Next time you find yourself in a neighborhood dominated by an ethnicity different than your own, look for visual clues on the landscape that characterize the neighborhood as distinct. What elements of the landscape are common to all neighborhoods? Consider how income factors into the “look” of an ethnic neighborhood? What differences can be found in the landscapes where middle-class Whites, Blacks, Asians, or Latinos live?
Figure 9-32: Columbus, OH - Restaurants, pubs, churches and other institutions sometime linger on long after the initial immigrant group has moved away. This old German restaurant indicates a legacy ethnic enclave.
Ethnicity Based Tourist Landscapes
The landscape also can be misleading as well, bolstering stereotypes and eroding a healthy understanding of ethnic differences via a process called othering. Touristic landscapes are a prime source of simplified ideas about some ethnic minorities because they tend to exaggerate aspects of ethnic-themed destinations.
Figure 9-33: Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA. Buildings with Chinese architectural motifs mark this area as a tourist zone because they evoke the exotic. Asian neighborhoods in the suburbs do not use these designs.
Ethnic enclaves often try to attract visitors by theming their location as a tourist destination. Many cities’ Chinatowns have done so successfully, turning run-down ghettos into fun, profitable, and visually interesting tourist traps. One of the key strategies used by almost all designers in Chinatowns is to create landscapes with many exaggerated architectural motifs that conform to touristic expectations about what Chinatown should look like, even if one would be challenged to find actual examples of such architecture in China itself. Chinese-Americans have every right to cash in on the erroneous beliefs held by tourists, but it can also be argued that places like Chinatown reinforce stereotypes about Chinese people. On the other hand, if such destinations did not build upon the stereotypes held in the imaginations of tourists, then tourists might not visit at all, perhaps foregoing any opportunity for them to learn any at all about Chinese culture.
Tourist attractions, playing upon both the real and the imagined ethnic histories of many dozens of locations across the US, attract millions of tourists. Some claims to authenticity are dubious at best. The towns of Kingsburg (Swedish) and Solvang (Danish) in California both attempt to leverage muddled Scandinavian imagery to attract visitors. For example, both make ample use of windmills on the landscape, partly because few Americans are aware that the Dutch (Netherlands) are the ones who are famous for windmills (not the Danes or the Swedes). Still, visitors crowd the streets, particularly of Solvang, happy to be strolling along, buying sweets and trinkets in a miniature, but vaguely Danish-Dutch-Germanic European fantasyland.
Figure 9-34: Santa Nella, CA - This restaurant uses a Dutch-style windmill to attract tourists. The windmill is an icon that evokes Europe, excitement and expectations about the food and atmosphere inside.
American Indians
Perhaps the most unfortunate representations of ethnicity in the US involve American Indians. Business people use American Indian imagery to sell everything from trinkets at roadside stands to motel rooms to slot machines. Surely no other ethnic group is so consistently utilized as a tool for commerce. The commodification of “Indian”, in the generic, may help explain why Indians remain the only ethnic group so consistently misused as mascots for sporting teams (see below).
Figure 9-35: Indio, CA. The Riverside, California fairgrounds, like many other landscapes in this desert community adopted an exotic Arabian motif to attract visitors in the post war era. Since the 1970s, the imagery has lost some appeal, but remains. Note the small irony of the sponsor.
Part of the reason Indian imagery is so compelling is that it is hopelessly tied to our collective fantasies about the frontier era in the American West. Most people have little idea of the staggering diversity of languages and cultural practices among the hundreds of Indian nations, tribes, and bands that continue to exist in the United States. Instead, most Americans, at least casually, think of Indians as a monolithic ethnicity; noble warriors, silent, primitive and respectful of nature; but mostly extinct. Americans have learned little of substance about American Indians because we instead rely upon the misinformation and stereotypes about Indians perpetuated by the movie industry. Hollywood chose a few tribal practices, common only among Plains Indian cultures, modified them, and muted any other representations.
For example, tipis (or tee-pees) a tent-house once widely used by nomadic tribes on the Great Plains of North America, including the Lakota, Sioux, and Blackfoot, are the only Indian housing form regularly used in Hollywood movies. As a result, tipis dot the landscape at tourist destinations from California to Maine to Florida, though there is ample evidence that tipis were little used outside the Great Plains region. Indian headdresses, beaded moccasins, tomahawks, bows and arrows, horseback riding, and other symbols associated with the Hollywood stereotype of Indians dominate references to American Indians on the tourist landscape of America in happy or willful ignorance of the myriad traditions and symbols of actual Indians cultures across North America. Perhaps the only exception to this rule is in parts of New Mexico and Arizona, where Navajo and Hopi people are numerous enough to provide an effective counter-narrative to the stereotypes commonly advanced elsewhere.
Washington R*dskins
One of the most controversial uses of Indian imagery is for sports mascots. Most teams eliminated Indian mascots decades ago (Stanford, Syracuse, etc.) but a few teams (Florida State, Cleveland Indians, Chicago Blackhawks, etc.) cling to controversial mascots. None are more controversial than the NFL franchise in Washington D.C. that uses an offensive racial epithet for the team name.
Figure 9-37: The federal capitol building, source of many racist policies, serves as a background for a racist mascot.
Geographers would point to the role of space and place in creating and maintaining these racist structures. First, spatial thinkers would point out that American Indians were ghettoized in mass reservations which prohibited other Americans from coming to know Indians and Indian culture in any meaningful manner. The spatial isolation of Indians has not only helped impoverish American Indians but prevented the rest of America from the kind of direct interpersonal contact that might undo the lasting effects of Hollywood stereotyping. No other ethnic group could be so consistently stereotyped and used for commercial purposes without a significant cultural backlash from within and beyond that ethnicity. Geographers would also argue that because the federal government in Washington D.C. has been the primary source of racist policies (though it’s ultimately the American population at large), having an Indian mascot for a team from Washington DC is especially irritating to Indians. The fact that many other victims of structural racism, like African-Americans, play and/or root for the team from Washington DC, and perhaps even defend the use of the mascot or epithet, indicates the deep power of structural racism upon everyone.
9-38: Touristy tipis. Clockwise from upper left - Upstate New York, San Bernardino, California; Moab, Utah and Holbrook,
Arizona. None of these locations were likely to have had Indians that used this sort of housing. Why are people drawn to this
imagery? How do they help maintain simplistic, erroneous, stereotypes about Native Americans?
TERMINOLOGY
What to call Indians is another source of controversy that is instructive on several levels. The ability to name or label anything is an important indicator of the locus of power, a term that points to “where” power is held – a spatial concept. The most popular theory regarding the word Indian suggests that it was Christopher Columbus who mistakenly believed that he had landed in South Asia, rather than the Caribbean in 1492. Columbus assumed, incorrectly, that the people of the Caribbean were therefore from the country of India. The exonym stuck even though the indigenous people of the Americas were not from India.
During the Civil Rights era in the 1960s, American Indians, like other minority groups did a good deal of agitating in favor of policy changes. In response, the United States government adopted the term “ ”, because somebody considered it less offensive, or more accurate than “Indian”. However, since the expression “Native American” was imposed upon American Indians by the US Government, many Indians rejected the term as just another symbol of abusive government power, preferring instead of the age-old term “Indian”, or “American Indian.” This text regularly uses “American Indian” in deference to what the author perceives to be the preference of the people to whom it refers. Other terms are occasionally used as well. “First Peoples”, “First Nations” and “First Americans” are terms that include peoples from Canada and Alaska as well. “Indigenous Americans”, “Amerind” and a handful of other terms have been forwarded as well to include a greater geographic range of persons from both continents and adjacent islands. Ideally, we should use specific endonyms referencing specific national identities, like “Cherokee”, “Ute” or “Chumash” where possible.
Similar care should be used when referring to Asians. Most people today recognize that the term “Oriental” refers to things like rugs and food, rather than people from East Asia. When possible, we should try to identify specific ethnicities (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Bengali, Tajik) rather than lumping diverse groups into a single blanket term. To do so is to demonstrate respect for people’s chosen identity After all, that simple courtesy is generally extended to citizens of the United States. All people of the western hemisphere (Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, Cubans) could be called, “Americans”, but they are generally not referred to with that overly broad term – but instead are given the courtesy of country-specific identity by people from Asia, Europe, and Africa.
9-39: Three Rivers, CA. This sign welcomes visitors to a national park. Is this an appropriate representation of American Indians? Why would this imagery be linked to a park known for large trees? Would the imagery of any other ethnic group be used in such a manner?
LINK LOCKER
James Allen and Eugene Turner’s website featuring outstanding maps and data regarding ethnicity, especially in Los Angeles and Southern California: http://www.csun.edu/~hfgeg005/eturner/books.html
9-39: Three Rivers, CA. This sign welcomes visitors to a national park. Is this an appropriate representation of American Indians? Why would this imagery be linked to a park known for large trees? Would the imagery of any other ethnic group be used in such a manner?