Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880-1930 (review)

Finally, Ms. Kropp takes up Olvera Street, a foul alley adjacent to Los Angeles’ mission-style Union Station which became a Mexican market and a major tourist magnet in the 1930s, under the guidance of Christine Sterling, would-be actress and historicpreservation activist. (Women get their due throughout!) The book is a goldmine of new information. Its argument, however, is somewhat elderly: namely, that Anglos took parts of the Spanish-Indian-Mexican past while mistreating and despising actual members of these groups. That they compensated for the perils of modernity by retreating into an imagined region of history. That memory’s mystic chords were played out of tune throughout. California Vieja could have benefitted from a less formulaic approach. Is escapism always a bad thing? Was California’s particular brand of historicism influenced by the movies? By the existing “fantasy” architecture of the region? How does the California Mission/Rancho fantasy stand up to all the others so vividly described in the fiction of James M. Cain and Nathanael West? Or the prototheme park proposed by Frank Baum, author of the Oz books, for Catalina Island? Less theory, perhaps—and more imagination! University of Minnesota Karal Ann Marling