This project explores the shared history of the Stanislaus River canyon and the Emigrant Wilderness, two places in the mountains of central California that changed the way Americans manage the country’s preserved wilderness. In both places, the environmental conditions that made them popular destinations for outdoor recreation – and, in turn, made them subjects of wilderness preservation campaigns – existed thanks to human artifice and engineering. And in both cases, that engineered infrastructure was connected to a single hydroelectric project in the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains completed shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. With predictable and controlled water flows, the stretch of canyon downstream from the project’s main power plant became in the 1970s the most popular rafting whitewater in the American West and remains today a national symbol for river preservation. Fifty years prior, the Emigrant Wilderness became a backcountry fisherman’s paradise thanks to a collection of small, hand-built dams constructed by a former employee of the company that built and maintained the electric power system. Both the canyon and the wilderness were accessible largely due to roads, reservoirs and other infrastructure built during the system’s initial construction and which remained over decades for its maintenance. In both cases, the human origins of these wild places took center stage in legal, political and regulatory contests over their preservation with one question driving the conflicts – are dams compatible with the wilderness? In telling this story, Building the Wilderness will cover approximately a century of people, places and events in central California, beginning in its industrial landscape during the 1890s and ending in its high-country wildlands in the early 2000s.

Increased immigration in the late nineteenth century and the boom of industrialcapitalism by the turn of the twentieth century revolutionized the Southwestern region of the United States, most notably the state of Colorado. Furthermore, this boom diversified the region’s people, capitalist industries, and strengthened political strongholds in the West, which hastened the establishment of the U.S.’s industrial, and urban infrastructures. The increase in population and industrialization of the state, prompted the evolution of Colorado’s built environment, provoking the expansion of its cities and a transformation in architectural functions and aesthetics. These urban and spatial changes altered the usage and construction of Colorado structures, which fostered significant change within ethnic communities, specifically Mexican and Mexican American communities. A critical analysis of these structural, architectural, and spatial changes illuminates the processes of urban growth and the consequences of industrialization. These consequences included, but were not limited to, the formation and perpetuation of a discriminatory racial ideology, which permeated the major labor systems of the region; the displacement of ethnic communities; and the instigation of violence for the sake of progress and monetary gain. Furthermore, the processes of industrial and architectural change disenfranchised Mexican and Mexican American communities by stripping them of their communal and spatial cohesion, while simultaneously trying to erase their culture and practices of everyday life. I argue these consequences and effects of industrial capitalism, along with the movement and formation of communities, and the dramatic and complex transition from rural enclaves to modernized cities and industrial complexes adversely affected the development, and survival of Mexican and Mexican American communities of Colorado. I will delineate the indelible effects of industrial capitalism on Colorado’s built environment and its ethnic communities by exploring the establishment and evolution of Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Trinidad, between the years of 1880 and 1920. I will also analyze the tapestry of labor, community and space and their interconnections to show a holistic overview of how industrial capitalism shaped Colorado. By putting the transformation of the state’s built environment at the forefront and using spatial relationships and spatial analysis as analytical tools, this dissertation reveals the histories of the rise of industrial capitalism, the everyday actions of people, the creation of interethnic relationships, and the formation of community to be mutually constitutive.

This dissertation explores select military bases within the United States’ Southwest and their relationship with Mexican American communities, in Atwater, California, Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. This study is explored in conjunction with an examination of the expansion of military bases and installations throughout the U.S. Southwest from 1942 to 1975. The establishment of military institutions initially prompted positive changes in the communities where they grew, but their presence and eventual absence brought devastating consequences. Military institutions and installments created new economic and labor opportunities and helped form new communities. However, when these bases were no longer needed, surrounding communities suffered due to significant economic downturn and detrimental environmental impacts.I seek to utilize an intersectional lens focusing on race, ethnicity, class, and gender to explore the transformation of Mexican American communities alongside the expansion of U.S. military bases. Furthermore, I will analyze the ways in which the U.S. military’s presence differed in California, New Mexico, and Colorado, due to regional factors, demographics, and the branch of military, demonstrating the unique development of each state and the Southwest region. The purpose for taking a cross regional approach is to provide a comparison of these regional factors in the different states to exemplify what differences and similarities developed alongside the establishment of certain military bases. Moreover, this analysis shows military bases had both positive and negative impacts on surrounding communities, especially on Mexican American communities. This approach emphasizes the need for further study on the impacts of military bases over time, taking into consideration, war time, social movements, and the evolution of labor and social standings held by Mexican Americans in the U.S. The U.S. military provided many benefits, however, as I show throughout this dissertation, for Mexican Americans and their communities, initial advantages and opportunities provided by the military’s presence did not last over time nor were they equally allocated throughout World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The most touted benefits of military service were financial security, employment with opportunity for growth, medical care and for some, a path to U.S. citizenship. This is contrasted with the harmful effects on families during war times and periods of conflict, the negative impacts on physical and mental health, and post service disappointment when promised benefits did not materialize. This is also evident when a military establishment leaves a community: their absence detrimentally effects the overall health and stability of the community. Additionally, this dissertation will focus on how, and if, Mexican Americans are remembered or honored for their military service, labor, political accomplishments, public service, education and activism within their communities. These acts are significant because they were often created or transformed by the U.S. military’s presence. This project aims to contextualize the relationship between Mexican American communities and the U.S. military beyond service and further examine the true benefits and damaging consequences of the military’s presence and absence.

"Liberatory Archives: Benevolence, Silence, and Power in California's San Joaquin Valley" is a conceptual study of the liberatory possibilities of UC Merced’s Special Collections and Archives. Based on my creation of the public history Livingston Centennial Guide and a paired teacher training digital ethnic studies syllabus, this dissertation explores the consequences of historical benevolence by mainstream collections in the San Joaquin Valley and builds a methodology on liberatory archives for and by Valley communities.

The dissertation begins with a story about how the early 20th century residents of Livingston's Japanese colonies secured a place as model minorities by assimilating into the white, Christian, agriculturalism of the region. As a result, Livingston public memory experiences a false impression that people of Asian descent have been wholly welcome and equal residents throughout the town's history. In reality, many of the Valley's white agriculturalists at the time devised violent race-based extralegal abductions and deportations targeted directly at Asian farmers. I share very similarly structured stories from the Livingston Centennial Guide throughout each chapter to show the disconnect between public memory and the realities of the agricultural-industrial complex as it variably transpired in people's day-to-day lives. I contend that a conflict-avoidant, friendly portrayal of history effectively silences whole communities by removing their stories from mainstream discourse, public memory, and institutional archives. By bringing historical silences into sharp relief, we decolonize knowledge production, engender a sense of belonging, and enact anti-racism to build equitable systems. These efforts, most commonly accomplished through ethnic studies education, create affective benefits and a sense of belonging that is engendered from realistic portrayals of history.

Next, I contend with the broader geopolitical context for why community histories in the San Joaquin Valley might be hidden, underfunded, scattered, deprioritized, undervalued, incarcerated, abandoned, and silenced. Located in the 365-mile stretch of land sometimes known as “Prison Alley,” I argue that the UC Merced Library’s struggles have as much to do with the agricultural-industrial complex as they do with austerity politics at the state and national level. I explore how the decrease in state funds to public universities ultimately impacts the liberatory possibilities of university special collections and archives. Specifically, I look at how the University of California Library system has had to pivot in response to austerity measures—even as budgets for law enforcement and prisons swell—and how that pivot has tended to look like digital scholarship.

Later, I demonstrate how austerity at the UC Merced Library has looked like embracing a collaborative opportunity with the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE), as well as the Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon (SEKI) National Parks. Here, I examine the consequences of an uncritical representation of land-grant institutions in the archives. Primarily comprised of the UCCE and national parks collections, the UC Merced Library's Sierra Nevada-Central Valley Research Archive is deeply wanted and needed, but its main materials thus far romanticize a Western domination of nature and scientific prowess. I flip this narrative on its head to analyze the historical context of UCCE to situate the university as a crucial element of what I call the agro-academic-industrial complex. Connected to the previous chapter, I illustrate that even though the university has experienced massive state budget cuts since the 1980s, it continues to play a foundational role in shaping California's agricultural economy. I then look at the broader framework for how national parks are maintained through first legal removal and criminalization of Indigenous peoples, and then law enforcement who patrol and implement those laws under the guise of environmental conservation, which I call conservation cops. The Sierra Nevada-Central Valley Research Archive fails to think critically about how land-grant institutions came to be and continue to function. I use my analysis to urge for the archive to center communities who have been most negatively impacted by the land-grant system: Indigenous peoples, im/migrants workers, and prisoners.

The epilogue draws a line between the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the antebellum U.S. South to the rural American West to collapse time and space to show that an abolitionist praxis is always already relevant. One might not typically associate a small, rural town in the Western United States with plantations in the U.S. South. Through this connection, however, we see a timely conversation surrounding state's rights, limited government, unpaid and forced labor, and Manifest Destiny in the Antebellum South and the ways in which these values came to shape new towns in the U.S. West. As a result, archives in the region have historically tended to overemphasize heroic stories of land-owning Protestant settlers, and silence the stories of im/migrant laborers, prisoners, and others removed from society. This dissertation has attempted to understand how this archival dissonance came about, as well as advocate for the communities who have been prevented from narrating their own stories. By understanding these connections, we can imagine a more just world. Through a review of other U.S.-based community-driven archives, I explore what an abolitionist, community-driven approach to archives might look like in the San Joaquin Valley context.

What consequences materialize when community-engaged projects tell benevolent stories from dominant communities? Does this create silences for exploited communities? How might silences further exacerbate exploitation? To what extent do archival silences reify the conditions which allow labor exploitation, slavery, and prisons? What does it look like for archival work to be in service of the abolition of oppressive systems? What does an ethics of care in the archives look like in the San Joaquin Valley context? Altogether, the dissertation attempts to understand what is politically and socially at stake by how we build archival collections, what cultural and institutional limitations have prevented the UC Merced Library from materially realizing these stakes, and what the library can do to do right by the San Joaquin Valley's most exploited communities.

My dissertation situates issues of urban space, place and renewal within a larger context of historical social memory.An open urban space that celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2014, the once-beautiful urban Fulton Mall in Fresno, CA served as abandoned parkland contested by city leaders and community members alike until a controversial infrastructure project began in 2016. I developed an ethnographic project of the site and the dynamics of local narrative. My research agenda concerns several key questions: How does social memory influence the construction of identity and citizenship at the local political level? How does the revitalization of open urban space play into this construction as the mechanism of a changing sense of citizenship? This small local contest about space is theoretically significant to the broader urban anthropology discipline, and was investigated ethnographically to best capture this particular contestation as historically and culturally-situated.The Fulton Mall’s revitalization serves as a test case for issues of space and community all urban centers will eventually confront,and are important to the master narratives of placemaking.Redevelopment construction on the mall happened during my fieldwork(2015-2017) and added a component of urgency to my research while also affording me the opportunity to see continuing citizen action unfold. My ethnographic evidence suggests that the political discussion engendered by the proposed changes and current revitalization of the Fulton Mall in Fresno is really a contestation of identity, in which the social memory of a community is highlighted and positioned in direct contest to the larger forces of a postmodern movement to manufacture space first, community second. My research highlights the focus on fiscal matters driving local planning projects as they relate to economic markets and city boosterism, not community desires, needs or history.