There
are a lot of problematics associated with the fantasy Mexican
village located in the heart of the Old Town San Diego. What does
Bazaar del Mundo have to do with the city's dusty, fishy history?
Do the tropical plants and old adobe oversimplify (even misrepresent)
the more compelling reality that awaits tourists just an hour's
trolley ride south? Is there something suspiciously quaint about
the tortilla lady's brightly colored garb? And what does it say
about San Diego? That our real cultural history is so bland that
we have to borrow ours from the country from which we also stole
the land our city now sits on?
It would be
counterproductive not to explore these problems of representation
in one of San Diego's most lucrative tourist shopping districts.
Particularly when it is these same problematic fantasies that
seem to make the shopping district so popular. In a city that
is plagued with the same infectious homogeneity that has destroyed
anachronistic places throughout the U.S., it seems foolish to
let Bazaar del Mundo disappear before we consider what makes it
work. Problematic as it is, Bazaar del Mundo is undeniably a place.
By virtue of its theoretical incorrectness, it is an interesting
place. This doesn't seem to matter very much to the state, however,
which is eschewing Bazaar del Mundo in favor of something more
"historically accurate" (and more profitable to their
own coffers). The company selected to make this transformation
is Delaware North, which also runs concessions in the Grand Canyon
and Yosemite, and whose somewhat ineffectual subdivision brings
the beer to your seat at Petco Park.
The San Diego
Union Tribune reports that the Buffalo N.Y.-based company slated
to take over Bazaar in October will "introduce native plants,
strolling storytellers and townsfolk dressed in period garb."
On the surface, this would seem to be a step in a more historically
accurate direction. But how will Delaware North decide which stories
these "living history" interpreters will tell?
Living
history reenactments are very successful when the location in
which they are placed is specific to a moment in historical time.
A good example of a place where this works is Roanoke Island Festival
Park. This tourist attraction on the Outer Banks of North Carolina
recreates the 11 months in 1585 when a group of male adventurers
under contract with Sir Walter Raleigh
became the first (temporary) British settlement in the New World.
In terms of providing accurate historical information, the park
has a number of things going for it. First of all, the land on
which the park exists served no prior commercial purpose. Just
as the members of the first Roanoke expedition came to a swampy,
scrubby island so does todayís park sit on land which looks
very much as it did in the 16th century. The main feature of the
historic park is, appropriately, a replica of one of the boats
that made the voyage, whose historic accuracy is assured by plans
and receipts documenting the construction of 16th century merchant
ships. The historic
interpreters are also aided by the fact that the mission to Roanoke
was exploratory; detailed records were kept, descriptions of locations
made, impressions recorded. All of this means that it is possible
for interpreters to refer accurately to specific events and circumstances,
retelling them in much the same way as they are recounted in primary
historical documents.
The historical interpretation of the site occupied by Bazaar del
Mundo is significantly more complex.
Not only has the area of the Old Town Historic park been under
near continuous habitation and transition since the 1820s, but
the documentation of those various transitions and settlements
is relatively scanty. Unlike the voyage to Roanoke, which was
a singular event about which reports were written and documentation
was kept, the habitation of Old Town is a much more organic process,
changing with the people, the industries, and the governments
that inhabited the region.
So
what time period would the historic interpreters hearken back
to? The Mission Era? The Mexican Era? The Encomienda Era? The
early U.S. era? The Victorian Era? Who will they be? Franciscans?
Dons? Fisherman? Railroad workers? Land speculators? Ornately
dressed Victorian homemakers? Eastern Businessmen? In the worst
of all possible circumstances, they would try to be all of these
things at once, pureeing the history of the area into one big,
bland, California-style smoothie of confusion.
What
of the site of Bazaar del Mundo itself? Which time period would
the land be restored to? And if it were to be restored to a particular
time, say the 1840s, would that deal fairly with the rest of the
history of that particular piece of land? As the State Park leans
towards a more strenuous depiction of the areaís history,
they must consider that to convey the history of the area's first
twenty years would be to leave out over a hundred and fifty years
of equally significant history. Furthermore, to recreate "Old
Town" as it might have looked in the mid 19th century would
require a good deal of guesswork, and all of the historical inaccuracy
that is inherent to guessing. At the same time, the "new"
park would be touted as "more historically accurate"
than the park as it exists today, thereby lending authority to
an version of history that is in no way foolproof.
And
all this, of course, is a best-case scenario, which assumes that
the motivation of Delaware North and the State is to create a
park designed to explicate the history of San Diego. The motive
in this situation is more likely financial, perhaps combined with
the perception that the tropical, Latin American-themed spectacle
of Bazaar del Mundo is not a politically correct use of California
State Park land.
Which
brings up the point of how Bazaar del Mundo came to be the way
it is; a story which is perhaps more revealing of the history
of San Diego and US-Latin American relations than could be told
through the frame of Old Town's 19th century history. Were the
State Parks to to level the structure that now houses the Bazaar
and re-plant it with native shrubs (which is they way the land
ought to be if it were to be restored to its mid-nineteenth century
condition) they would be destroying a very significant artifact
of San Diegoís fantasy relationship with Latin America.
The
structure that houses Bazaar del Mundo was originally the Casa
de Pico Motel, designed by San Diego architect Richard S. Requa
in 1937, and typical of his Spanish-revival architecture. Requa
was one of the forces responsible for the preservation of the
Worldís Fair Buildings in Balboa park. Requa was very much
influenced by the success of these Spanish Baroque replicas in
San Diego's environs and became a student and revivalist of Spanish
Colonial architecture himself. San Diego's Balboa Park and Requa's
Spanish revival architecture were not isolated instances of American
fascination with Latin America. From Mexico itself, with itís
nationalistic
interpretation and reinterpretation of its indigenous history
by artists like Orozco, Rivera,
Kahlo, and emigrees like Ed Weston, all the way to Chicago, where
Wanamakerís, (the Nordstrom's of the late 19th century)
had an all out Maya-themed jubilee, selling huipiles
and huaraches to fascinated shoppers as early as 1917, America's
Southern indigenous cultures have long been called on to add flair
to U.S. commercial enterprise.
This
was particularly a theme in Southern California, where the Alta-California
era gave us the ranch-style homes, Hollywood Westerns, an inspiration
for the majority of San Diego's public buildings. Alta-California
became an important part of our cultural imagination, as movie
stars wore Mexican dresses, and shopped on Olvera St. in downtown
Los Angeles, across the street from the beautiful Spanish Revival
Union-Pacific station. Bazaar del Mundo, created in the 1970s,
inherited not only the 30s Spanish Colonial revival structure,
but also the American fascination with the perceived "colorful"
culture of an imagined Latin America. Now, as times and trends
have
changed, the history of our fascination with Latin Culture seems
to have fallen into disfavor. Are we, perhaps, so embarrassed
by our obsession and all of its postcolonial baggage that we want
to hire a company from New York to do away with it for us? To
make Bazaar del Mundo "historically accurate," and cleanse
it of San Diego's dominant cultural fantasy?
Bazaar del Mundo as it stands today in all its commercial glory
does represent an important part of San Diego's history. The process
of going to Bazaar and seeing Latin America as it is imagined
through the eyes and the pocketbooks of Gringo California is an
important chance to reflect on our confusing, often contradictory
relationship with our neighbors. A savvy California State historic
park would try to keep Bazaar del Mundo intact, though perhaps
with a sign or an exhibition that would explain itís importance
as part of our cultural imagination.
Old Town State Historic Park has a number of different buildings
that date from different, specific time periods. In this situation
it would be very foolish to homogenize the park, setting the entire
district to a single historic clock in the fashion of Roanoke
or Colonial Williamsburg. Instead, each of the historic structures
within the park should be allowed to tell its own history, as
is done today in the Governorís House Museum. An important
part of such a park would be Bazaar del Mundo, which should remain
as a sort of living
museum to our Cultural Imagination (of lack thereof).
