THE “OLDEST CITY” NARRATIVE: COLORBLIND SETTLER RACISM AND HISTORICAL STORYTELLING IN ST AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA
A dissertation presented
By
Camille Petersen
to The Department of Sociology & Anthropology
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
In the field of
Sociology
Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts November 2020
1 THE “OLDEST CITY” NARRATIVE: COLORBLIND SETTLER RACISM AND HISTORICAL STORYTELLING IN ST AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA
A dissertation presented
By
Camille Petersen
ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University November 2020
2 Abstract This dissertation examines place-based national origins stories told in the context of the City of
St Augustine and Florida tourism. Using data from two commemorations and a national monument, I examine how discourses of race and settler colonialism structure the narratives at the city, state, and national levels. Historicizing the USA as a settler colony brings together research from native studies and indigenous scholars to help sociologists move beyond the
Black/White binary and more fully understand the ideological work that historical storytelling does. The City of St Augustine and the state of Florida rely on heritage tourism and colonial charm to lure visitors and new residents by the millions each year. Using Critical Race Discourse
Analysis (CRDA) for this extended case study, I find that colorblind racialized discourses and representations function not only to promote racist attitudes but to shore up the dominant settler colonial ideology which claims that the USA is a White nation and White settlers are rightful owners of the land. Furthermore, the narratives dismiss colonial racist violence and centralize only White characters in the present, contributing to the maintenance of a Eurocentric White worldview in which Indians and Afro-Americans exist only in the past or on the margins.
Finally, tales of resistance to racialized domination are silenced in the tourism narratives, despite an accessible archive of Indian and Black resistance in Florida. In the first chapter I lay out the theoretical interventions made by scholars in various fields and position them as contributions to a historically specific sociological understanding of race and ethnicity as a global and local power structure, proposing a an analytic of historical storytelling rather than memory or heritage.
The settler colonial (as opposed to postcolonial) context of the USA is the key intervention from native/Indigenous and Settler Colonial studies and serves as the theoretical framework to understand the contradictory ideology of colorblind racism throughout the dissertation. In the following three empirical chapters, I identify the key tropes of colorblind settler racism as an
3 ideology which forms the basis of our national origins story and prevailing cultural norms of
Eurocentric Whiteness. In the first chapter I am analyzing ethnographic and textual data from the city of St Augustine’s 450th celebration, commemorating 450 years since the “encounter” between Pedro Menendez and Indigenous inhabitants at what would be named St Augustine and settled by the Spanish. As a commemoration, the 450th serves to celebrate settler colonial heroes who teach us lessons about meritocracy and the American Dream through the lens of the
‘moment of encounter’ in St Augustine as the birth of multicultural America. In the next chapter
I use data from the state-wide “Viva Florida 500!” marketing campaign and year-long commemoration, including a historical “courtroom drama” written and performed for the occasion and a promotional video from the “Florida Brand” advertising campaign. In this chapter
I show how settler ideology functions through historical storytelling in a knowledge economy at the confluence of history, archaeology, and marketing. Settler tropes pervade the heritage landscape through these various industries and are presented to the public as official truth, explicitly and implicitly in the images and characters chosen to represent the state. In the final empirical chapter, I analyze the historical storytelling at the Castillo de San Marcos National
Monument, finding that the stories told in the museum and by the St Augustine visual landscape at large are descendent from explicit settler colonial plans to make this land “our own” through institutional and legal means. The preservations of the National Park Service and Antiquities Act do ideological work to promote the idea of a White nation that “rightfully” owns land stolen through the Discovery Doctrine. Throughout this research, the findings show that diversity and inclusion of non-White historical figures in the ‘stock story’ narrative of the USA promotes racism and White Supremacy just as well as exclusion does, and both moves continue to coexist.
4 Acknowledgements
First, I would like to thank my committee for their thoughtful and engaged work to help me through this process. To Liza Weinstein, for being there from the early drafts to the final product, whose contributions helped me become a scholar and researcher in addition to helping me write this dissertation. To Chris Chambers, who since day one always believed in me and supported my intellectual and personal growth through the hardest of times. To Matt Hunt, whose class was my introduction to the sociology of race and ethnicity and whose commentary helped me ground my work in the discipline. Last but certainly not least, to Tiffany Chenault whose mentorship extends to teaching and navigating the politics of professional life. I thank the
Department of Sociology & Anthropology for funding the summer research projects that got this dissertation research off the ground. Steve Vallas, Linda Blum, Nina Sylvanus, and Carrie Hersh also extended helping hands to guide me through research and teaching, and I thank them for their time and contributions. I am also indebted to David Tames and Jean Ormaza who helped me see myself as they saw me, as a mentor, a teacher, and a rad person.
I want to extend especially heartfelt thanks to the close friends I made at Northeastern,
Miguel, Mollie, Lauren, and Elisabeth for their unwavering companionship and support over the years. To my cohort whose scholarship and activism continues to inspire me, and to all the musty bars and cafes in the greater Boston area which hosted our every grad school grievance and gaiety. Additional thanks to my mom, brother, and Floridian friends for keeping an open mind to my analytical deconstruction of our hometown. Finally, I would like to thank my mother and grandmother, whose support and upbringing allowed me to get where I am today, the first in my family to earn a doctorate degree. Special eternal thanks to my mother, who nurtured my creativity and intellect since before I can even remember.
5 Contents
Introduction: Historical Narratives of Race and Nation: Settler Storytelling and the Idea of America ...... 8 Ideologies of Race and the Coloniality of Power: The Whiteness of the Modern World System 12
Historical Storytelling: Race Ideology of the Nation in Place-Based Tourism Narratives ...... 21
Settler Colonialism and Historical Storytelling ...... 24
Florida as a Case Study in the Social Construction of National Racial Ideology...... 25
How to Deconstruct Discourses and Representations: Critical Race Discourse Analysis and
Visual Sociology ...... 29
Conclusion ...... 35
Theoretical Foundations: Heritage, Settler Colonialism, and White Supremacy ...... 37 Heritage ...... 48
Is Multiculturalism the Answer? ...... 50
Settler Colonialism, or, Why Whites Even Need Heritage in the First Place ...... 52
Race and White Supremacy in the Settler Colonial USA ...... 56
Internalizing the Nation: Settler Subjectivity and White Supremacy ...... 62
Florida as a Site in the Social Construction of Settler Subjectivity and Ideologies of Race ...... 65
“Unbroken History and Enduring Spirit”: St. Augustine’s ‘Oldest City’ Storytelling in the Narrative Construction of a White Settler Nation ...... 70 The St Augustine Story at the 450th ...... 74
Periodization in the Settler Project ...... 78
Construing “Race Relations” in Colonial Florida ...... 80
Florida: An American Story...... 85
6 Sociological Perspective on St Augustine’s Historical Storytelling ...... 89
The White Racial Frame in the Historical Storytelling Knowledge Economy ...... 94
The Colonial Episteme: Missed Opportunities for Counter-Storytelling ...... 100
Viva Florida 500! History and Power ...... 108 The Historical Story: Marketing and Educational Outreach for the 500th Anniversary ...... 109
Florida Heroes of the Past and Present: A Conquistador, a Capitalist, an Anthropologist, and a
Historian ...... 119
Authoritative Knowledge and Historical Storytelling in the White Racial Frame ...... 126
For a Postcolonial Sociology? Race and Historical Storytelling ...... 129
“America Begins Here”: History as Ideology at a St Augustine Landmark ...... 133 Settler Time and Space ...... 139
The Vanishing Indian ...... 143
The Fort as Frontier ...... 147
“Race relations” ...... 151
Discussion: Implications for Studying Race through Historical Storytelling ...... 153
Photos ...... 154
Conclusion ...... 158 References ...... 163
7 Introduction: Historical Narratives of Race and Nation: Settler Storytelling and the Idea of
America
Amid worldwide protests calling for an end to police impunity, White zealotry, and systemic racism in the “United States of America” following the high-profile murders of
Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, protestors across the Américas toppled monuments to Christopher Columbus, the USA’s Founding Fathers, and other historical figures who conquered or enslaved people. On June 26 and July 3, Donald Trump signed two executive orders first protecting public monuments and then ordering the building and rebuilding of statues to commemorate “American heroes.” These two orders establish what constitutes American heroism and define the nation’s values, to be expressed in creation of a national sculpture garden to be filled with realistic representations of approved historical figures. On September 22 these orders were followed up by a third order which charges diversity and inclusion training with promoting race and sex stereotypes, dividing the country, and fundamentally lying about the history and legacy of the USA at home and abroad. It prohibits federal funds being used for diversity trainings and demands that federal employees not “inculcate such views” in their employees. All three of these orders defend a myopic White narrative of American history and essentially forbid counter-storytelling outside the White worldview. Though based on a fundamentally flawed understanding not only of American history but of movements for equity and justice in general, which are considered nothing more than “fashionable,” these orders characterize a White worldview of which historical storytelling is essential in sustaining and expanding.
Moreover, the executive orders provide insight into the purposes of history and monuments for both White nationalism and decolonizing movements. The role of monuments is
8 defined in the July order entitled “Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes,” where monuments are “our silent teachers” whose purpose is to “preserve the memory of our
American story” and to “stir in us a spirit of responsibility for the chapters yet unwritten,” expressing our “noblest ideals” as a nation. Thus, American heroes are monumentalized to provide opportunities for continuous historical storytelling for the purpose of maintaining a hegemonic narrative of national history. The counternarratives of world history being targeted the most highlight not only violently Eurocentric imperialism and systemic White male privilege but also people’s resistance to what bell hooks has been aptly calling for decades “Imperialist
White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy,” instead of just their subjugation to it. Perhaps most importantly, these executive orders were made explicitly in the name of fighting racism.
Allegedly, diversity trainings and removals of monuments to conquest and slavery promote race and sex-based hierarchies, deny the values of individual freedom, equality, and meritocracy, and overall represent a “assault on American collective memory.” All three executive orders point to the importance of historical storytelling in upholding the racial ideology of White Supremacy, and the extent to which colorblind and antiracist rhetoric can be deployed in the service of White masculine power.
In St Augustine, Florida, only a few years after the multi-million-dollar celebration of
450 years since conquest as a permanent settlement, a confederate monument moved from the town square prompts not only racist vitriol but that which claims to be ‘not racist.’ Comments sections fill with ideas that Black Lives Matter activists are the real racists, that the Black
Reverend who helped lead the movement to remove the confederate monument from the central plaza is a terrorist, and that the city’s leadership is hopelessly corrupted with snowflake liberalism. Vocal local Whites with surnames on the monument take to Facebook to argue that
9 the removal of the confederate monument is the desecration of their ancestors and heritage, though it is less a removal than a move (the monument was carefully and expensively moved to a fishing preserve farther inland). Retorts like “what are they going to do next, tear down the fort?” show that the debate is not confined to monuments, an unintended admission to the fact that the whole tourism industry is centered around grotesque colonial violence repackaged as heritage and charm. Indeed, activists at the 450th celebration of 2015 did hold up signs calling to “tear down the fort,” and the local movement to remove the monument from the central plaza cites the menacing whiteness of the entire downtown tourist center.
However, the purported colorblindness of White heritage crusaders is betrayed when
Whites frame the fight to remove Confederate monuments as a historical reversal, the same reasoning behind Trump’s decision to ban diversity trainings in government funded agencies.1 In this narrative complaint vocalized by the administration and his supporters, radical leftists or anarchist liberals are the ones attempting to rewrite history, and in uncovering race and power they are racists. The central assumption here is that colorblindness equates to being beyond race, we don’t need antiracism because race wouldn’t be a problem if not for people “playing the race card” for some self-interested reason. Furthermore, the executive order ending federal funding for diversity trainings accuses this “ideology” of placing people in race and gender-based hierarchies, though it fails to explain how White men, for instance, are disadvantaged by this.
Instead, damages are framed at the nation level—(White) history is at risk of being forgotten and lost forever, the (White) USA is being portrayed in a negative light, and (White) American
1 In the presidential debate televised September 29th when Donald Trump was asked why he issued an executive order to end diversity trainings, he elaborated on his earlier comments saying that in these trainings “if you were a certain kind of person you had no value in life, it was a sort of reversal” perhaps referring to experiments like Jane Elliot’s Blues Eyes/Brown Eyes which has been criticized by white people since she began the exercise as a teacher in 1968. (Critical race perspectives launch their own critiques of this type of liberal white antiracism based on reason).
10 society and culture is increasingly polarized. Whiteness is an assumption because these facts only make sense if we think of the USA as a White nation. In fact, the idea of a “reversal” acknowledges the terror which peoples of color have been experiencing in this country since the beginning of its existence in the European geopolitical imaginary, however reluctantly and in unabashed ignorance of this fact the statement is made.
If counterstories of resistance to imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy are framed as an assault on collective memory, then who are our national heroes? A racialized national origins story lurks throughout Florida tourism narratives and St Augustine charm. The heroes of the historical narratives are conquistadors and a railroad baron capitalist, and though spotlighted in the city’s storytelling long before 2020 they would all be approved as proud monuments to the American spirit. Historical storytelling plays a central role in the social construction of whiteness and ‘the other’ against it. Narratives and storytelling is not a neutral process, nor does it take place in a vacuum shielded from the wider culture. Storytelling, in tourism destinations in particular, is both a public process and one in which the state substantially intervenes and manages through institutions dedicated to culture and heritage.
Historical storytelling serves manifest and latent purposes, and storytellers are complex people sharing racial ideologies of the wider culture. Whereas the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of heritage professionals would shed light on the attitudes and ideologies of actors involved in these social construction processes, in this dissertation I focus on the work done by the discourses themselves, the end product of heritage and history professionals which are consumed by the public, promoted by the government, taught to schoolchildren, and work to shore up the dominant ideology. I argue that historical storytelling and tourism narratives are relatively neglected but highly important sites in the social construction of race and national ideology.
11 Ideologies of Race and the Coloniality of Power: The Whiteness of the Modern World System
Debates over the content of history textbooks, ethnic studies courses, and public monuments abound in our time, publicly calling into question the role of historical storytelling in national race relations. Studies of whiteness in the US have found that among the privileges that accumulate to “Whites,” control over the historical narrative is significant. Sociologist Joe
Feagin (2013) refers to this as the “White Racial Frame,” an omnipresent ideology that both rationalizes and continues to structure racist policies, interpersonal interactions, representations, and material inequalities. Critical Race Theory (CRT) literature on storytelling has shown how racial stories are used to maintain in-group and out-group boundaries based on race, how hegemonic White narratives prevail against all others, and more broadly how race is socially constructed and maintained through discourse and representation (Aguirre 2000; Delgado 1989).
Therefore, a central aspect of maintaining White power and control is the advancement of White racial ideology and worldview. Ignorance and malice both contribute to the reproduction of a hegemonic ‘stock story’ of the USA, American origins seen through rose colored glasses.
A variety of counter-narratives of US history have begun to emerge that upend the predominant but ultimately thin narrative account of national origins. Howard Zinn’s A Peoples
History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples History of the
United States, and Paul Ortiz’s An African American and Latinx History of the United States have influenced the analysis of historical storytelling in this dissertation. For a sociologist, these texts filled in the gaps and made US history make sense in ways that it had not before. More than anything, the impact of colonialism in its many forms rises to the surface in each of the counter- narrative accounts.
12 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has most famously documented how Whites use the myths of meritocracy and equal opportunity to deny how they profit from systemic, structural racism.
However, Bonilla-Silva (2014) also draws our attention to how this is part of a larger problem of
Eurocentric modernity. Dubbed ‘the new racism,’ Whites who articulate racist views while denying they are racist are drawing on centuries-old traditions of the paternalistic White savior complex, cultural and biological inferiority arguments, and assimilationist inclusion that are characteristics of colonialism. Because of the systemic character of racism in the USA, racism also thrives without individual “racists,” meaning, institutions are set up to function based on racist assumptions and racialized peoples are historically disenfranchised. The systems operate simultaneously so that we witness extreme violent ‘old fashioned’ racism at the same time as we witness liberal Whites with good intentions coopting antiracist movements, appropriating cultures, and making policy decisions that either ignore or actively target people of color in order to ‘help’ or ‘fix’ them with myriad negative consequences. Looking back through the history of colonialism(s), liberal regimes of inclusion and exclusion including both outrageously violent and passively aggressive racism are hallmarks of Anglo-masculine power and control that have been applied around the globe through racialization, the creation of Eurocentric hierarchies and the ideologies to justify them (Bonilla-Silva 2019; Christian 2019; Mehta 1997; Quijano and
Wallerstein 1992).
In “The Souls of White Folk,” WEB Dubois (1896, 1999) urged sociologists to take two instantiations of racism seriously: liberal paternalism and ‘White Savior’ cultural racism, as well as ‘big stick’ imperial racism that both take place at local and global scales. In his analysis of the first world war, he deconstructs the dominant narrative that the US entered the war for democracy, demonstrating instead how the war was as a crusade in what he calls “the new
13 religion of whiteness” (18). At the same time as European countries are fighting for world domination, they “play the world fool” by denying the real reasons for war—not democracy but
“colonial aggrandizement.” Part of how this bait-and-switch takes place is through the discourse of benevolence; “to make the world safe for democracy” was the supposed reason for entering the war. In this familiar Western progress narrative, Europeans are bringing civilization and social-political-economic progress to the “darker nations” conceived in the European worldview since the conquest of the Americas as “half-devil and half-child” (24; also see contemporary readings of colonist’ accounts of the Americas cited in Bonfil 1996; Dunbar Ortiz 2014;
Greenblatt 1991; Sheller 2003; Zinn 1980).
With the concept of racialization, sociologists increasingly look at race less as a class or culture-based phenomenon and more as a socially constructed political category, consolidated through the law and the American ‘common sense’ for the purposes of White power and privilege (Omi and Winant 1986). Sociologists more recently have begun to advocate for postcolonial perspective in sociology (Go 2018; Steinmetz 2014) and for the recognition of the
USA as a settler colonial project (Glenn 2015). However, as McKay et al. (2020) and Fenelon
(2016) argue, indigenous scholarship and macro-level theories of Eurocentric colonial modernity and are rarely included in the analysis. Including the coloniality-modernity perspective in sociological analysis as elaborated most explicitly by Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, and
Anibal Quijano would incorporate a “view from the South,” answering the call for Southern
Theory in sociology (Connell 2007) and expand the study of global “deep and malleable whiteness” (Christian 2019). The coloniality-modernity perspective emphasizes the global scale of whiteness (Eurocentrism), the origins of our country and the modern world system in colonial genocide and land theft, and the birth of today’s race concept and categories in the European
14 conquest of the Americas (Christian 2019; Dussel 1995; Mignolo 2000; Mignolo 2008; Quijano and Wallerstein 1992; Quijano 2000). Quijano and Wallerstein advance a concept of
“Americanity” to urge sociologists to reflect on the significance of the colonial-modern origins of the Americas. As a historical moment, the conquest and enslavement of indigenous peoples in what we now call Latin America represents the origins of the colonial modern concept of race tied to land and labor, and the beginning of a “civilizational conflict” over the definition of life, livelihood, and death that continues to this day throughout the world (Bonfil 1987).
Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) argues that throughout its history, the USA has
“made Indian” any people or nation who stands in its way, connecting the racialization of indigenous nations and constantly renewed representations of “Indian-ness” to contemporary imperial battles couched in the expansion of freedom and democracy. Sociologist Evelyn
Nakano Glenn argues that indigenous native peoples were racialized as part of the process of genocide and Western settler expansion, parallel to racializations of ‘Chinese,’ ‘Mexican,’ and
‘Black.’ These labels we apply to ‘populations’ which are much more diverse in themselves than the label suggests but nonetheless flow directly from the country’s history of racialized land and labor (Glenn 2015). Anibal Quijano (2016) argues that the indigenization of the peoples of the
Americas, corresponding to their racialization as “Indians,” is part of the same colonial process under which Africans were first discursively turned into “natives” through European travelogues and scientific narratives, the Church, which represented them to bourgeois publics as primitives and savages, not only in need of colonization and enslavement by Europeans but destined for it.
Modernity is the prototypical stock story of the dominant group, a progress narrative of world history in which Europeans are the “here and now” compared non-White peoples around the world who come to be figured as “stuck in the past” or premodern “ghosts” of a foregone
15 conclusion (Dussel 1995; Mignolo 2000; Mignolo 2008). However, we must be careful to realize that the project of genocide was never completed, and in the US, indigenous people have legal treaty rights to sovereignty and self-determination as autonomous nations. The racialization of the inhabitants of Turtle Island as ‘Indians’ was a tactic of White settlers, and thus it should not be assumed that “Indian” is simply an identity, special interest, or community. Fenelon argues that we must centralize the role of the state in perpetrating war and genocide against indigenous nations, and that instead of isolating settler colonialism as the unique American experience we think of Spanish conquest in the Caribbean as the beginning of a continuous process of genocidal conquest that lays the groundwork for and occurs throughout settler colonialism. Militant state racism and conquest must be centralized throughout the analysis (Fenelon 2016). Resistance to the settler colonial project is continuous and accomplished in part through the persistence of
Indigenous people and their communities which Whyte (2013) calls “collective continuance”
(quoted in McKay et al. 2020).
In addition to the coloniality of the modern world system, we must also attend to the specificity of colonialism in the USA and to the continued resistance to this paradigm from
Indigenous nations across the Americas and in a global, pan-indigenous movement against genocide, assimilation, and the ‘Washington Consensus’ bio-political and economic order spread through imperialism. Settler colonialism is defined as having initiated in the 13 colonies by
British subjects more than 100 years after the first scenes of conquest in the Caribbean and
Mexico and is differentiated from other European colonialisms because these British subjects
‘came to stay’ and brought their own women and families, leading to less miscegenation and a different racial system (Quijano and Wallerstein 1993; McKay et al 2020). However, while I do use settler colonialism as a frame for analyzing historical storytelling in the USA, I follow
16 Fenelon (2016) in arguing that we think of localized colonial projects more in terms of a continuous and united project than as discrete categories with unique lineages. Both colonizing projects came with religious zeal, both used racial categories to subjugate and attempt to eliminate natives in order to steal their land, labor, and resources, and by virtue of coming after there is reason to believe that the seventeenth century British colonizers learned from all those who came before them. Therefore, I follow McKay et al. (2020) in proposing an interdependent theoretical framework of intersectional critical race theory, indigenous/native/first nations theories of settler colonialism, and the coloniality of the modern world system.
The theoretical framework of settler colonialism also works with and expands the development of theories of whiteness as property. The Doctrine of Discovery began with a mandate from the Pope that in 1455 permitted the Portuguese to seize West Africa, later extended to Spain after the Columbus voyage, and manifested as international law in the 1494
Treaty of Tordesillas which divided the globe under the Iberian empires and dictated that all and only non-Christian lands fell under the Discovery Doctrine, paving the way for French and
British settler colonial projects, thus severely limiting the autonomy and sovereignty of who we now call “indigenous” “native” peoples and nations around the world (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).
Thus, the Doctrine of Discovery is also a legal consolidation of the definition of whiteness as connected to private property and the extent of domination legally permitted to Christian
European White males. In his global theory of race that has yet to be closely analyzed and incorporated in the sociological canon, WEB DuBois defines White subjectivity at the turn of the
20th century as “ownership of the earth forever and ever, amen!”, arguing that the impetus for the first world war was the White desire for possession of land and control of the labor power of
“black, brown, and yellow” people worldwide (DuBois 1896, 1999). Cheryl Harris argues that
17 whiteness as enshrined in American law is conceived as a property right based on status, which centers on the right to exclude. Furthermore, private property itself is founded in racial domination and the interactions between conceptions of race and private property over time have been essential in the maintenance of White racial domination. Indigenous and African people and lands were considered the objects of White property rights, thereby conflating race and property.
Slavery and the theft of native land were legal endeavors as much as economic and military, and they necessitated the definition of racial categories in the law (Harris 1993). George Lipsitz similarly defines whiteness as the “possessive investment” in racial inequalities, wherein Whites work continuously to maintain exclusive control over land and space through gentrification, discrimination and segregation in education and housing, and even as the ultimate enforcers of individual freedom and liberty through ‘stand your ground’ self-defense laws which empower
Whites-only to take matters of justice into their own hands (Lipsitz 1995). Jenny Reardon and
Kim Tallbear extend Harris’ whiteness as property argument, showing how today’s genomics is complicit in constructing whiteness as property. Anthropologists and genomic scientists make legal claims to collect indigenous DNA without compensation or debriefing, coupling their possessive exploitation with the narrative that today’s living indigenous peoples’ DNA offers a look into the European (global settler) past and is thus considered White collective “heritage” or, as the authors put it succinctly in the title, “your DNA is our history” (Reardon and Tallbear
2012). Whiteness as property is explicitly reinforced through the doctrine of discovery in the national origins stories of today’s settler states. Australian pop history and national mythology bears striking similarities to the national origins stories told in Florida tourism narratives— indigenous dispossession is erased from the narrative in favor of a story of hard work, sacrifice
18 and ingenuity, and the conquest of a harsh landscape. The national narrative functions to signal the virtuousness of the “white possessive” settlers (Moreton Robinson 2015).
This dissertation intervenes in the sociology of race and ethnicity through an analysis of the settler colonial and white-supremacist tropes that comprise the dominant historical narratives of Florida tourism and the “historical gem” of a city in Northeast Florida, St Augustine.
Historical storytelling, rather than cultural memory or heritage, highlights the inherent social constructed-ness of the stories told about the city, the state, and ultimately the nation while drawing attention to the fact that the narrative is not shared among an “imagined community” but rather highly contested for its lack of rigor and nationalist intentions. As storytelling, we can begin to think less about “History” and more about power. Dominant narratives are keystones of ideology, the veneer of myths like the American Dream and Enlightenment universals which serve to justify past and present injustice and inequity. As a central piece of the national origins story, narrative crafted for Florida and St Augustine tourism today always frame these places as the sites of the origins of the USA. The central focus on the moment of ‘the encounter’ between
Europeans and indigenous peoples in these narratives forces us to consider them in the context of the colonial modern world system. The museums, promotional materials, and interests of experts like historians and archaeologists are screaming for us to recognize the continuing importance of racist conquest and genocidal settler colonialism, though not framed to expand consciousness to these present-day colonial dynamics. Instead, they adopt a colorblind framework of inclusion and diversity, claiming to tell the stories of African Americans, Indians, and Hispanics as the genesis of a modern American multiculturalism which in fact struggles to exist and is internally flawed itself. The historical storytelling fails to include indigenous nations and Afro-Americans as the present-day communities of resistance they are, instead opting not only to locate their stories in
19 the past but to include only the “good Indians” and “black conquistadors” despite a wealth of knowledge on Black and Indigenous transnational resistance to slavery and genocide in Florida, specifically.
Critiques of the Black/White binary paradigm in the sociology of race and ethnicity point to the paucity of studies on other race and ethnic categories (Perea 1997; Bonilla-Silva 2015), a critique parallel to the fact that sociologists have yet to adequately and systematically include indigenous peoples and perspectives in their analyses (Fenelon 2016; Mckay 2020). Thus, this study contributes to sociology’s move beyond a black/white binary paradigm in the study of race and ethnicity by linking the sociology of race to native/indigenous perspectives and studies of settler colonialism. The coloniality-modernity global theory of race also moves sociology beyond the “add + stir” variety of moving beyond the Black/White binary by forcing us to analyze the categories themselves (Christian 2019). Although racisms are of course not identical, placing the
US in the context of settler calls for a study of the ideological structure that underpins racism against a variety of people who fit into the socially constructed categories of the settler imagination such as “Mexicans” “Chinese” or ‘Indians” (Nakano Glenn 2015). St Augustine historical storytelling constructs the categories of “Black,” “White,” “Hispanic,” and “Native
American” in public tourism discourses and representations, thus providing a unique opportunity to witness the ideological construction of racial categories beyond Black and White. Where postcolonial studies call attention to the need for considering the US in its colonial context but lack the historical specificity, native/indigenous studies perspectives contribute a historically specific (and thus presently more precise) settler colonial framework to the study of race and ethnicity in the US to fill the Black/White binary gap. Furthermore, Bonilla Silva (2019) argues that more non-survey research is needed on the various contours of the racial ideology of
20 colorblindness today. Following Bonilla-Silva, this study contributes to our understanding of colorblind racial ideology in the USA through the analysis of historical storytelling. Historical tourism narratives are the final product of a variety of actors who created and approved them, and thus also the conduit of officially approved messages from the state to millions of visitors each year. Following McKay et al (2020), I use the frameworks of colorblindness, settler colonialism, and coloniality of the modern world system together to analyze the narratives and build theory on how racial categories are constructed and deployed as national ideology through historical storytelling.
Historical Storytelling: Race Ideology of the Nation in Place-Based Tourism Narratives
Since what is described as the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences and humanities, storytelling is now acknowledged as a primary mode of human experience and thus important as data and method (Agger 1991; Ewick and Silbey 1995; Loseke 2007; Maines 1993; Polletta et al.
2011). Research in diverse areas has shown how stories script private identity narratives, and how even subordinated and subversive identities are at least partly scripted by dominant discourses and representations. In the storytelling literature, stories that are driven by the dominant ideology are called “hegemonic narratives” (Ewick and Silbey 1995), “formula stories”
(Loseke 2007), “stock stories” (Delgado 1989), “majority stories” (Aguirre 2000), or “dominant stories” (Polletta et al. 2001). In addition, some authors also identify the “subversive stories”
(Ewick and Silbey 1995), “critical tales” (Aguirre 2000), and “counter storytelling” (Delgado
1989) which run counter to and often call into question the hegemonic stock story of the dominant group. Narratives, like myths, transmit ideologies and are concrete, empirical elements of discourse. Narratives are social practices whose content and structure either contribute to the maintenance of hegemony or actively seek to dismantle it (Ewick and Silbey
21 1995). A story is a narrative structured by time, plot, and characters which always through these elements makes a larger point, the ‘moral of the story.’ This way, stories construct worldviews that either justify or expose the status quo. Hegemonic stock stories construct identity templates or subjectivities by inspiring the listener to relate to or empathize with certain characters or situations, a rhetorical move that can be used by anyone from individuals, to institutions, to diffuse imagined communities such as ‘the nation (Loseke 2007).
Among many definitions, ideology is at least partly defined as a “consent generating mechanism,” by its function in maintaining inequalities through justification and legitimation of the status quo (Hunt 2014: 331). Sociological analyses of dominant ideologies of inequality and race in the US show that discourses can be broken down into their formal components to access values, beliefs, and attitudes that form a system of thought to not only explain but justify existing social inequalities arranged by race, class, and gender. Furthermore, these explanations and justifications figure into power relations at all levels, from individual psychology to personal interactions to national and international politics. As ideology, dominant national origins stories serve as the background for all political actions and the basis for collective consciousness through the formula of description, explanation, and evaluation, in the end providing a plausible answer to uncomfortable moral dilemmas in the past and present (Delgado 1989; Polletta et al.
2006). The national origins story ideology builds a mindset, defined as “the bundle of presuppositions, received wisdom, and shared understandings against a background of which legal and political discourse takes place” (Delgado 1989), a sort of cognitive frame which allows only certain conclusions and ways of thinking within the frame. Moreover, narratives necessarily involve “a selective appropriation of past events and characters” (Ewick and Silbey 1995: 200), temporally ordered and related to one another to make a statement about how and why those
22 events occurred. This element of closure is part of why stories work so efficiently as cognitive tools; narrative structures seek lifelikeness and verisimilitude, playing on human emotions, presumptions, and the desire for authenticity. Thus, hegemonic narratives and their stories function in human society by doing the ideological work of dominating forces in society— reconciling the past and justifying the status quo in the present.
Heritage tourism destinations work ideologically as sites for the socialization and enactment of larger master categories and organizing principles of society, race, gender, coloniality, modernity. Racialized and gendered language permeates storytelling in tourism, so that oftentimes tourism narratives are telling tales not only of cities and histories, but of race and gender in the United States. This kind of research is mostly being done in the Southern United
States, where tourist cities have to ideologically reconcile violent racial histories and current racialized inequalities with highly profitable leisure and heritage economies. These studies show how the tourism narrative can reproduce racial ideologies, and they interrogate the performative aspect of tourism in an explicitly racialized site. Living history as well as the wax figurines, cardboard caricatures, and dioramas are examples of how tourism constructs subjectivities by linking our current racialized categories and bodies into romanticized historical narratives of the present. These examples show that tourism narratives tell their stories in terms of racialized and gendered relations of domination prevalent in the culture at large. The critical lens that Florida studies is missing has been applied in studies of tourism in New Orleans, the Caribbean, and
Hawaii, each telling us something about the ways in which tourist destinations tell national stories of race, gender, history, and subjectivity.
In this dissertation, I am primarily concerned with the ways in which historical stories construct racial categories and justify the status quo through narrative. I am also interested in the
23 ways in which tourist spaces, including landscapes, restaurants and hotels, and museums reproduce an ideology of white supremacy through a variety of rhetorical and visual strategies, consolidating the dominant discourse in a charming visual package and sensuous experience.
Urban spaces are inherently racialized and furthermore serve as sites of “public pedagogy,”
(Lipsitz 2011:15) where we learn who belongs and what makes certain places and people desirable. Although Lipsitz does not include tourist spaces in his list, his argument is exemplified in the case of St Augustine, Florida. A public space for locals and tourists alike, the downtown tourist area is a primary site to learn the meaning of race in the United States, and to construct subjectivities in the context of colonial-modernity. Cities employed branding strategies throughout the late 20th century to survive the crises of neoliberal capitalism (Greenberg 2000).
Though many southern cities do not attract international capital and investment, they still had to pull themselves out of the economic slump following the 2008 crisis, and many relied on a now- familiar strategy—tourism. Since even before city branding became prevalent, heritage tourism has been and continues to be a significant factor in the economic strategies of many southern cities. Historical narratives and representations crafted for tourism destinations offer for a deeper look into the brand cities promote as well as a focus on how the city’s stories interact with national narratives of conquest and settlement.
Settler Colonialism and Historical Storytelling
Native studies and indigenous scholarship highlight how representations of ‘native
Others’ can be harnessed by the state and included in the national narrative without deviating from the dominant white historical story. The institutions and disciplines through which natives and Others are understood, such as the museum, natural history, archaeology, and ethnography, are bound up with the race and gender projects of the imperial, neoliberal state. Characters and
24 storylines developed through these institutions have more often than not been racialized and sexualized to meet white, patriarchal, settler colonial ends—conquest, expansion, privatization, progress, etc.—and these images of the Other have proliferated, “ethnographically entrapping” so-called minorities in the dominant narrative as stock-story special-interest identities in a white settler world (Smith 2014). Jodi Byrd (2011) argues that proto-inclusive white representations of
Indians actually reinforce US imperial dominance as symbols of triumphant Western conquest, reminders that white definitions of law, justice, history, and democracy rule the world.
While the local context is different, studies of the local sites in the Southern US heritage tourism industry would bridge native studies and sociologies of race and ethnicity to understand how local ‘historical storytelling’ is put to work in the constructions of national subjectivities based on “race.” The romantic paradigm of heritage tourism, preservation, and historical memory in the US South rebrands colonialism, slavery, and displacement in order for it to be consumed by tourists who desire to experience an authentic “way of life” in the past (Cox 2012;
Hartnell 2009; Mooney-Melvin 1991). In the context of genocide and slavery, it becomes obvious that only Whites (and for other reasons maybe only white males) would want to experience what it would have been like to live ‘back then.’ Tourism studies of settler colonial society ask what strategies of the imagination we employ today to rationalize a history of violence and (dis)possession.
Florida as a Case Study in the Social Construction of National Racial Ideology
The site of this research is a small but rapidly growing tourist town in Northeast Florida known as the “nation’s oldest city” for its history as a Spanish and British colony beginning in
1565, the ‘colonial period’ before Florida officially became a state in 1845 The boundaries of
25 this case study were defined by the geographical limits of the St Augustine tourist “downtown” which, confined by intercoastal waterway to the South, East, and West, effectively ends at the waterfront. Intercoastal rivers border the peninsula and the downtown tourist space ends in quaint San Marco Avenue merging with bustling Highway US1. Within these limits, the story of the city is under constant construction and contestation as events take place, museums and historic places tell stories, and subjectivities are called into question through reenactment, caricature, and leisure.
Most of the peer-reviewed research is published in history and archaeology. St Augustine is viewed in the historical literature about the city as both Spanish and American borderland,
America’s first melting pot, or civil rights center, depending on the epoch and perspective (Davis
1944; Deagan 1973, 1980; Hann 1989; Manucy 1944; Slate 2006). In 1950, the Florida
Historical Quarterly published a call to hire three historians from outside the state to “examine the historical evidence of all prominent sites” in St Augustine in order to “rescue and assure her imperiled dignity,” so that St Augustine might have a chance at becoming a “foremost historical gem” (1950). Today the city employs a city archaeologist to lead the city archaeological association and protect cultural heritage, mostly from construction and development projects.
One recent city archaeologist, Kathleen Deagan, is celebrated for putting St Augustine on the historical map with her excavation projects of colonial sites like the first Spanish settlement, which scientifically established the city as the oldest in the nation in the 1970s (Appler 2013).
The Florida Historical Society together with the City Archeologists contribute the bulk of St
Augustine literature that is turned into public knowledge, and research which breaks from archaeology is eclectic, spanning topics such as ghost stories and the history of the datil pepper
(Andrews 1995; Hamilton 2015; Harris 2015). Harris (2015) interprets recently popular local
26 ghost lore and tours in St Augustine as the legacy of the town’s violent history. Ghosts in St
Augustine memorialize past ethnic tensions and infinitely punish dead violators of norms like
Osceola, a leader of the Seminole resistance against US settlement famously tricked by the US military and captured under a truce. These “ghostly matters” are signifiers for what is hidden and lingering in postcolonial social life, and they can be accessed in literature and images (Gordon
2008).
This dissertation is based on a multiple case, holistic design which required the use of several individual sub-units analyzed individually, the empirical results of which are drawn together to provide an overall picture. The holistic perspective is achieved through systematic and detailed analysis, or coding, of each case according to the research questions and theoretical propositions (Yin 2018). To carry out this research, I utilized a multiple case study research design with critical discourse analysis as the method for carrying out analysis of each case consisting of textual, visual, and direct (participant) observation data. The unit of analysis is the story, so each case consists of some ‘story’ that is told about the city of St Augustine
‘downtown’ tourist destination. Case study research is relevant because it is formulated to ask
‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about a contemporary context. Case studies begin with theory, as abductive logic guides analysis of the data to text, corroborate, or update existing theories and make holistic analytical generalizations above the level of the individual case. Classical sociological theory has helped to define the selection of cases, method, and analytical strategy of this project. The work of Marx, Weber and Durkheim provide insight on the sociological perspective and a framework for understanding the role of ideas in society. The writings of these important sociological theorists lead me to questions about stories, as they are constitutive elements in the social construction of reality.
27 Case studies have been used throughout social science research to study current times.
Researchers have been working on developing the case study as a rigorous method in the social sciences for about thirty years, following criticisms of the method based on non-academic, non- research case studies (Yin 2018). Case studies answer ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions using a variety of evidence, and they are particularly well-suited to new research areas or questions not adequately explained in the existing literature, particularly about contemporary events over which the researcher has little or no control. Case studies are especially useful for the fact that they investigate a phenomenon in its own context, allowing for cutting-edge research that uses an abductive logic of inquiry, updating inductive and deductive perspectives (Yin 2018). Abductive theory focuses on surprises that come from the data, acknowledging that researchers come to a certain set of questions through preexisting theoretical knowledge. These surprises lead to a redefinition of the case and other facets of the research design so that case study research is a reflexive science, inquiry is constantly in reference to both guiding theories and discoveries that come from the data (Timmermans and Tavory 2012; Yin 2018).
Furthermore, rather than focus on generating mid-level theories about the specific case as prescribed by grounded theory, case study design requires that the researcher make analytic generalizations at a conceptual level beyond the context of a specific case. These are not statistical generalizations, but modification, corroboration, rejection, or addition to existing theories that, if well supported, can lead to insights into the “how” and “why” questions guiding the research and thus contribute to the study’s external validity (Yin 2018). For Michael
Burawoy, case study research exemplified in his extended case method is a methodology that incorporates rather than dismisses the epistemological critique of positive science. The extended case method is a way of doing sociology that remains scientific even as it criticizes the idea of
28 positivism (Burawoy argues that even survey methodology does not adhere to the positive science model). This ‘third way’ in between positivism and postmodernism is reflexive science, the interpretive method first proposed by Max Weber in his Methodology of the Social Sciences
(Burawoy 1998).
Researchers relying on survey and interview research methods to study ideologies cite the complexity of human thought—people combine ideologies, maintain contradictory beliefs, and experience ambivalence in their thought process (Hunt 2014). By using narrative analysis, I shift the focus away from the subject towards the story itself to understand the formal logic of a story told again and again, no matter how much contradiction or ignorance it is received with. While research studying the reception of a message by tourists is valid and interesting, less attention has been paid to the stories themselves and the contexts in which they are created. Thus, in this current research I followed the classical sociologists to investigate the dominant ideology expressed through the national narratives told in local museums, guidebooks, and living history to investigate social constructions.
How to Deconstruct Discourses and Representations: Critical Race Discourse Analysis and
Visual Sociology
Discourse studies in general is concerned with how social meaning is constructed through language, discourse, and visual representation. Whereas discourse theory focuses on the nexus of power, knowledge, and subjectivity, discourse analysis is the practical study of language, practice, and context that produces those theoretical fields. Discourse studies is preeminently sociological in its focus on the sites of the social construction of reality—media, texts, and communications of all kinds that create ideology which buttresses the social structure
29 (Angermuller et al. 2014). Critical Discourse Analysis offers a systematic and unified analytical strategy which, through systematic and reflexive application to data, lends validity and reliability to the case study method. As an analytical tool, systematic CDA for empirical textual and visual data can illuminate the rhetorical moves inherent in any historical narrative that give us clues as to whose story is being told and what is being left out in tourism’s dramatizations, however multicultural and inclusive they claim to be. For critical discourse analysts, rhetorical tactics in everyday language, texts, and visual representations as a method of dominance that constructs reality in the framework of the dominant group. In terms of race, the dominant group's stock stories work to justify the racial order with whites at the top, thereby assuaging guilt for the racial status quo and maintaining racial hierarchy. Critical Race Discourse Analysis has been used mostly by education scholars (see Briscoe and Khalifa 2013; Poon and Segoshi 2018), but the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in concert with CDA can be extremely useful to sociologists who study racialized power and ideology in discourse and rhetoric.
Like Frankfurt School sociology, the primary concepts in Critical Discourse Analysis are that of power, history, and ideology. It is important to note that the concept of history has to do with the ideology and power, the ideological function of (his)tory-telling more than "historical" research per se. Thus, CDA is concerned with the construction of subjectivities that result from the macro-level representations which are resources to individual thought and self-formation. In
CDA, discourse is a tool of power and control, a social practice that constructs reality to certain ends, and thus a central aim of CDA is to deconstruct, expose, and demystify dominant ideologies or hegemonic narratives (Wodak & Meyer 2012). CDA embodies the sociological imagination as a research paradigm that seeks to ‘lift the veil’ on power and ideology, exposing over-simplifications and false dichotomies through systematic analysis and triangulation of data.
30 Researchers are abductive rather than inductive or deductive, meaning that they acknowledge their social position as well as prior theory in searching the data for surprises which generate theoretical nuance (Wodak 1999).
As an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented, and critically historical method, CDA is well suited to analyze the racial narratives embedded in all sorts of cultural productions like museums and tourist sites. Furthermore, CDA explicitly rejects calls to academic "objectivity" which bears the cloak of white dominance. CDA represents academic activism in its insistence to take a stance on social problems. CDA also refuses the narrow bounds of disciplinarily; although indebted to linguistics, CDA is now used widely in sociology and focuses on semiotics rather than getting bogged down in syntax. Inter-disciplinarity, trans-disciplinarity, and post- disciplinarity are all used to describe this method (Lazar 2007). CDA analysis employs a general strategy that looks at how rhetorical devices are used to certain ends without losing sight of how the text is received by those other than the critical analyst. CDA works at multiple levels to identify rhetorical moves like omissions, metaphor, and connotation. At the level of the text as a whole, one might look for how the text is framed, what information is foregrounded, and what presuppositions are made. At the sentence level, agent-patient relations create subjects as passive or active (lots of work on this in gender studies) and presuppositions and insinuations guide the meaning of the general text. Finally, even an individual word carries a connotation, a tone, and presuppositions when read in context of the story and social reality in general (Huckin 1997).
Using this method to study the social construction of race and nation in tourism narratives adds to work already being done in Critical Race Theory and narrative analysis, while investigating a neglected site in the social construction of reality: historical storytelling.
31 Scholars across disciplines have also noted the massive influence of visual culture on society, representations that align with and signify entire discourses just in a picture. Because touring and living in St Augustine is a visual experience, visual methodologies are required to study the many representations of the city as a destination and the story it tells. Landscape, archive, architecture, and archaeology are elements of visual culture that are produced, composed, and circulating meaning in the city for the visual consumption of tourists and locals alike. Furthermore, visual analysis was called for to interpret representations included in my data. I coded visual images alongside the texts, looking for the ways in which images and texts are related and what that means for the story being told. Representations of racialized characters have been thoroughly studied by race scholars as well as by feminists, most famously by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins who shows how “controlling images” of black womanhood have shaped racial ideologies, and Dorothy Roberts who shows how these images make their way into policy decisions. Thus, the images of racialized characters in the St Augustine tourism narrative must mean something. Visual analysis of the city’s museums and public representations helped me get to the question of why it is that this particular cast of characters has materialized, and how it is they help tell the story.
Throughout history, tourism has been an essential site in the visual production of colonial difference; tourist destinations are socially constructed through stories and images which circulate inside and outside of the place, the dynamics of which reflect “well-established conduits” of romantic colonialism (Salazar 2012). Thus, tourism narratives and representations of the landscape (which includes built and natural) are infested with the race and gender tropes of coloniality and whiteness. My method of data collection consisted of visiting the sites that comprise the cases, photographing the data for transcription. For case data collected by
32 participant observation at a certain place, I photographed the surroundings of the site as well.
These photographs formed an archive which lends to the replicability of the research and aids in exposition of the argument as well. Visual sociology consists of visual analysis as well as the collection of visual images as a research method (Suchar 1997).
I used CDA within a case study design as a strategy to empirically and systematically
‘deconstruct’ the museum texts in question. CDA begins with a social justice goal and attempts to maintain a real-world perspective, keeping in mind the average lay reader and the messages the text sends through grammatical structure and connotation. Following the abductive method, which builds on grounded theory to incorporate theory into the analysis much in the same way as
Burroway’s extended case study method, I let the texts guide my analysis. In the first round of coding, I looked for broad themes to “chunk” the data into, finding that specific historical characters played central roles in each of the visual and written texts analyzed. Out of this first round of coding came a general idea of the historical tourism narrative teleology. Then in the second round of coding I analyzed the characters stories at the sentence and word level to understand how that story contributed to the overall themes at the text level. Analytic memos were important for identifying particularly rich parts of the written or visual text and in the second round of coding I also analyzed these denser parts of the text, with special attention to how the characters in the stories line up with stock stories of enlightenment liberalism that sociologists have previously identified. This allowed me to place the texts in the larger context of
American society and racial ideology, and the congruence of these local stories with the national metanarratives shows the importance of historical storytelling in tourist destinations like St
Augustine for furthering a White national worldview.
33 In the first chapter, I map out the theoretical frameworks of heritage and memory, settler colonialism, and White supremacy and explore these theories in depth as the foundations for this dissertation. Historical storytelling is often thought of in terms of heritage and collective memory, but I argue these are misnomers of the White racial frame. Heritage and memory are both social constructions, acknowledged as such by theorists and professionals alike, and the terms in themselves thus obfuscate power dynamics and history. I draw on theories of settler colonialism and White supremacy, delving into the argument that sociologists need to incorporate a historicized understanding of coloniality in order to study race and ethnicity in the
USA. In the second chapter, I analyze how racial ideology is constructed through historical storytelling and visual iconography at the Castillo de San Marcos national Monument, locally known as simply The Fort. A central landmark and tourist destination, the fort tells the story of
St Augustine curated by the National Park Service thus explicitly linking the story of the city to the story of the nation. In this chapter, I apply settler colonial theory to think about how time is structured by the settler colonial landscape to craft national settler subjectivities that become widely available to tourists through the historical storytelling and experience of the landscape. In chapter 3, I utilize date from a state level celebration of settler heritage, the Viva Florida 500!
Campaign which was designed as a year-long celebration and promotion of Florida as a tourist destination through historical storytelling. I argue that historical storytelling functions at the state level through a knowledge economy of history, archaeology, and marketing expertise to construct the idea of Florida based on settler colonial heritage. A promotional film, a “courtroom drama” written by a Florida historian and acted out in a courthouse by judges, and the Florida
Brand advertising campaign comprise the data for this chapter. In the fourth and final empirical chapter, I analyze historical storytelling at the city level through Critical Race Discourse
34 Analysis as well as ethnographic observation conducted during St Augustine’s 2015 450th celebration. The texts and visual displays of the museum exhibition constructed for the 450th anniversary of conquest celebration and the commemorative book published for the occasion comprise the textual and visual data analyzed for this chapter. In this chapter I observe popular myths of American exceptionalism and the American Dream constructed at the city level and linked explicitly to the birth of the nation. I argue that the historical storytelling is an inherently settler colonial story and serves to reinforce land claims and settler subjectivity through the historical narrative, aided by prominent White historians and archeologists who control the narrative from positions funded by the city and state governments. This chapter includes the most detailed textual analysis, bringing the analysis down to the word and sentence level and highlighting the characters who functions as heroes of the historical story of the city as well as the nation. In concluding chapter, I place my findings back into the context of the sociology of race and ethnicity, coming back to the importance local historical storytelling in the construction of White-settler subjectivity and the contradictions of nation built on racialized hierarchy that purports freedom and liberty for all.
Conclusion
Today we realize that narrative and storytelling hold an important place in the human experience, social life, and institutions (Loseke 2018). Historical storytelling in tourist destinations tells a local and national narrative of the beginnings of the US nation, inviting tourists and locals alike into the story to ‘travel back in time’ and experience the past. But whose past? When we hear the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,” we have to ask for whom because for many women and minorities, a trip back through time would be dangerous. In St. Augustine, counterstories have arisen to say that the city’s glamorization of its past through narratives of
35 discovery and settlement may include the diverse populations in the story, but on what terms?
Gentrification of historically black neighborhoods is coupled with civil rights tours; native histories are told without participation of actual native communities or existing native scholarship; characters like the black conquistador who are not documented as existing in reality tell a multicultural story of inclusion and diversity. These contradictions between the reality and the storytelling throw into relief the complex connections between knowledge production, profit- driven urban tourism, local politics, and national racial imaginations that go back to the founding of the Américas. Through a critical discourse analysis and visual sociology of these historical stories, this study provides a clearer look at how public knowledge may reflect, reinforce, and reproduce racial ideologies and a racialized national narrative. Looking at the United States in postcolonial perspective shows how historical stories are useful in the settler colonial mission to resolve contradictions between the ideal of ‘freedom and liberty for all’ and the reality of slavery, displacement, genocide, imprisonment, and objectification for all but the privileged few.
How does this story work through language, images, and characters to justify the past and the present United States?
36 Theoretical Foundations: Heritage, Settler Colonialism, and White Supremacy
As a tourist town whose claim to fame as ‘The Nation’s Oldest City’ draws millions of visitors each year who tour the charming waterfront city and its historic colonial streets, basking in the Spanish renaissance architecture and reliving the past through reenactment and colonial old towns. Tourists are embodied in the colonial past, sensuously immersed in the sights, sounds, and smells of another time in the same place. Colonial villages are complete with farm animals, candle making, and career reenactors who don’t break character downtown. Even outside of the surrealistic colonial villages, there’s cobblestone streets, the perfect combination of grandiose and shabby architecture, church bells on the hour, and the unique odor of the scene—sweat, cigarettes, garbage, pizza and chocolate fudge. Not to mention the horse-drawn carriages, waterfront views, and strategically placed cannons and fountains. In the past decade, restaurants offering historical experiences have flourished—The Floridian offers local farm fare on a seasonal menu, Prohibition Kitchen offers a period experience, Datil peppers and Minorcan clam chowder are on every menu as heritage-foods.2 For locals the ‘downtown’ tourist area is also a sensuous experience filled with desire and consumption—the tourist center is the closest thing to an urban atmosphere for miles, a place to “walk around” and hang out in public with the ‘big city’ feeling of malls as opposed to the abundant car-centric strip malls. The heritage branded restaurants have some of the best food and undoubtedly the best nightlife in the city. Old town problems like traffic, overcrowding, and frequent flash flooding punctuate the experience of going through downtown in a car. Tourists and even historians who study the city (but do not
2 Minorcan clam chowder is tomato-based soup that is named after a group of European immigrants to St Augustine in the late 17th and early 18th centuries from Minorca in the Mediterranean sea. In St Augustine the datil pepper is claimed for Minorcans though the evidence is divided—some say it originated in Europe, some in the Americas citing reports that the first datil peppers came to St Augustine from Cuba. The pepper is as hot as an habañero and easy to cultivate in St Augustine with one plant yielding anywhere from 30-70 peppers.
37 live there) report feeling enchanted, adventurous, and nostalgic in the face of preserved
American heritage—St Augustine is an attraction, a sight designed for seeing, and thus a desire at once fulfilled (MacCannell 2011).
In the historical narrative, the city makes claims to a rich and diverse past, and their storytelling is inclusive on the surface—the tapestry of African-Americans, Native Americans, and European settlers come together to form the origins of multicultural America. But what lies beneath the surface of this nostalgic representation of the colonial past? What heritage is being celebrated, what stories are being silenced, and why? Historical narratives are unquestioningly presented as representation of the city’s colonial heritage; however, heritage is just as much about remembering as it is about forgetting. Collective memory, especially in the South, is also invariably about race. What does the city accomplish by celebrating Spanish colonial heritage, which only accounts for roughly half of the city’s historical timeline? How does historical storytelling about a diverse cast of characters represent race to the millions of yearly visitors?
What role does the visual landscape play in heritage storytelling? In this chapter, I will frame these questions in terms of the interdisciplinary theories of heritage, race, and landscape which guide my empirical critical discourse analysis research.
In St Augustine, the historical ‘facts’ historical storytelling is based on are embedded in a state-sponsored knowledge economy. Marketing teams hired by cities and the state use the work of historians and archaeologists to frame the presentation of history to a tourist public, who are urged to take the trip ‘back through time’ to Old Florida, even act it out in one of the ‘colonial quarter’ living history museums. Tourism in St Augustine is visual and experiential, as tourists are invited to explore and discover. Reenactment is a large part of the tourist experience in St
Augustine, whether tourists witness a reenactment or perform it themselves in a ‘living history’
38 museum or ‘old time’ photo shop. Furthermore, reenactment happens downtown without any special occasion; on any given night one could encounter pirates, British colonial guards, or
Spanish royalty downtown. The effect is a feeling of really going back in time, a nostalgia for colonialism that produces “Historic, Romantic St Augustine” (Florida Trend magazine’s Viva
Florida 500 Travel Guide 2013).
Heritage tourism is expanding across the nation, characterized by reenactment and living history in places of national historic significance. Sociologist Karl Spracklen (2013) argues that heritage tourism functions to maintain white nationalist identity covertly, “to make the case that the existing white, western hegemony is one based on well-established roots that are exclusive to only those who have blood links with the past society that is being re-created” (167). Living history and reenactment serves tourists with a sense of identification and belonging through a connection to the past, where white people uncomfortable with multicultural America can retreat into ‘cultural chauvinism’ (Spracklen 2013). Historical memory is as much about what is remembered as what is forgotten, and groups with more power in society can mobilize the past to serve political, commercial, and identity needs in the present. Cultural heritage performances inform everyday life by giving people morals to live by based on the past and its heroes, as they express the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ through performance (Hoelscher 2003).
Michel Rolph-Trouillot argues that commemorations are a way for the nation-state to enact its particular version of events as the natural way of the world. As set events rather than processes, set events like the anniversary of “The Discovery” as enacted in Columbus Day serve to “anchor the event in the present,” (4) taking it out of context and repacking it as an object for consumption. In this way, anniversaries especially function as selling points for travel—festivals, new museums, tours, and performances anchor the past event in the present through consumption
39 and the identification that comes with it. This is not just an anchoring of all past events, but a selective anchoring of settler-colonial events into the present-day national consciousness.
Furthermore, the specific stories that commemoration celebrations tell “fill the silence that they impose upon the historical past with narratives of power, projections about the present and the future” (6). Therefore, it is not just that the events focus too much on the past or exclude minority histories. These celebrations actively work to shape thinking about the present society and the future, as lessons from the past rather than mere celebrations. In St Augustine, the education outreach desire proves that part of the goal of history is to teach a lesson. Before St
Augustine had begun plans to revamp its historical district and renew celebrations of various moments of “Discovery,” Albert Manucy writes in his “Review of the St Augustine Historical
Program” that any research program in the city must serve as a means of historical education, ending his review with the question: “For of what use is history if history remains untold?”
(1944: 356).
Sociology of race and ethnicity must begin with the acknowledgement that the United
States has a colonial history, and that this history consists of a series of political economic, race, and gender mythologies that work as ideologies to justify the contradictions between freedom and liberty for all alongside genocide and slavery as the USA expanded West. Sociology, as well as other social sciences like anthropology and psychology, developed in the era if high imperialism. Postcolonial studies arose as activist social theory amongst intellectuals from the colonized world. The basic principles of postcolonial studies have yet to be applied in American sociology, despite the fact that the discipline and the society is still characterized by the colonial power dynamics of race (Go 2016). Following Julian Go, I approach this case study from the postcolonial perspective that any celebration of heritage in St. Augustine is a piece of a world-
40 historical narrative born in Eurocentric colonial discourse and surviving today through the constitution, classical and neoliberal thought, and color-blind equal opportunity ideology. The inclusion/exclusion dynamic of colonialism has been investigated by feminist postcolonial scholars in volumes like Tensions of Empire and Haunted by Empire, but sociologists of race and ethnicity have largely neglected the colonial past in their studies of the present. Even fewer realize the importance of historical sites and the stories they tell in the formation of a set of place-images that come together to construct the Eurocentric American national origins story. On the ground in St Augustine, the situation is much different, as colonialism takes on a romantic connotation. Historians, archaeologists, and tourism marketers seize on the colonial past as a selling point for the diversity and multiculturalism of Florida. Furthermore, the construction of memory and heritage is a hegemonic but not necessarily a top-down only process; power is diffuse in modern society and though norms and values are consolidated through claims to authoritative knowledge, ordinary people construct, internalize, and reproduce these hegemonic narratives and dominating practices in their identities and everyday lives. Tourist sites are places of performative reenactment, places for the interpellation of colonial subjectivities.
The Idea of St Augustine: Tourism Imaginaries as Ideologies
History with an interest, even and especially a “national interest,” is ideology (Zinn
1980). To understand how heritage is represented and used in St Augustine, it is helpful to locate the city within the regional context of the American South. Though the city boasts Spanish heritage and a 1513 founding date, a twenty year ‘British period’ followed by 40 more years of distracted Spanish rule from afar set the stage for Florida statehood in 1821. Florida before statehood was an undeveloped frontier; few people lived there or even visited, but it was the scene of Indian wars and battles for freedom or slavery. The Seminole Indian tribe was
41 constituted by groups of Native Americans from across the southeast who were undefeated by the settler colonists and escaped slaves who found refuge with them in the subtropical territory.
In the British period at the end of the eighteenth century, Northeast Florida was drawn further into the plantation economy, with the British governor managing indigo, sugar, and rice plantations based on African and Indian slave labor. Shortly after becoming a state, Florida joined the confederacy and St Augustine became a refuge for confederates as it was a refuge for
British loyalists during the American revolution. Free blacks and Indians who had evaded slavery in the Spanish periods fled to Haiti and Mexico or risked being sold into slavery or transported to Indian territory on the trail of tears. The Florida plantation economy was driven by slavery just as much a s Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas, and Florida was a key strategic borderland in the slave trade between the Caribbean and the United States. In the years after the civil war, Henry Flagler built a network or railroads and hotels for wealthy Northern tourists, bringing the first significant wave of tourism and residents to Florida in its long history.
Drawing on more than a hundred years of travel narratives written by the father-son
Bartram duo, Henry Flagler consolidated Florida’s place in the American imagination as an exotic Eden-like paradise, where visitors could journey into the idyllic past as explorers, just like the Spanish has done years before (Rowe 1992). Writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe continued this literary tradition of imagining exotic timeless Florida, and Henry Flagler’s renaissance revival architecture that sprouted up around the state drew visitors further into a land of charming colonial enchantment. At the same time as this romantic place-image of Florida was penetrating the national imaginary, the economy was being built by slave labor and later debt peonage and convict leasing; Black Codes and Jim Crow segregation immediately following the civil war disenfranchised and criminalized the black population, bringing Florida into the
42 twentieth century. In Florida, the old adage goes, the farther north in the state you travel, the deeper south you will find yourself. Northeastern Florida, then, bears more resemblance economically, socially, and culturally to Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas, than it does cosmopolitan ‘South Florida’ which includes the metropolises of Orlando, Tampa Bay, and
Miami. An hour away from Georgia and just as steeped in confederate heritage as Spanish, the city of St Augustine and the stories it tells about itself need to be viewed in the historical context of the Deep South. The continuities of the corresponding racial ideology and relationship to the nation can be seen in the still very segregated landscape of the city, political affinities for Trump so strong that he held a rally in a what is in reality a relatively unimportant tourist town, and perhaps most of all in the silences of the historical narrative the city promotes. Understanding that St Augustine did not go straight from Spanish colony to Disneyfied tourist destination leads us to ask questions about the role of Spanish heritage in the historical storytelling as well as the broader historical narrative of the nation.
St Augustine tourism emerged in the context of reconstruction after the Civil War, or reconciliation, as it is referred to when the subject is the mending of relationships between white
Northerners and Southerners. Reiko Hillyer (2014) looks at the St Augustine built landscape as material evidence of the historical alliance between Southern boosters and Northern entrepreneurs in the Gilded Age or ‘New South’ period at the end of the nineteenth century.
During this time, Southern businessmen used tourism to lure Northern investment for development in Southern cities. Whereas much work has been done on the idea of the “Old
South” as plantation paradise, this only came to be alongside an equally mythic imaginary of the
New South, both of which are rewrites of history used to promote industry and development.
Both a time period and a scene in the public memory, the idea of the New South was predicated
43 on place-specific versions of the historical past. Boosters produced historical narratives of various cities with different relationships to the recent confederate past, and architects and developers literally built the landscape to order. For example, boosters were successful in promoting Florida as a healing destination’ Henry Flagler first visited the state when his wife received doctor’s orders to spend some time in there. Flagler then returned to Florida to build the booster promise of Florida as the American Riviera, building the Spanish Renaissance Revival hotels in St Augustine that remind everyone of Florida’s Spanish (not confederate) past.
Investors and developers could increasingly think of places like Florida not only as stable and civilized, but as business friendly. Investors were further enticed by the Jim Crow promise of cheap and subordinated labor, far different from the unions and enfranchisement of the North.
Tourism and industry’s attendant narratives of progress and development were central to the abandonment of the reconstruction in the New South. Instead, boosters and city designers worked to manufacture a unique urban personality that would make cities intelligible to tourists through historical storytelling. Thus, in the New South, public spaces were not designed to support democracy. Instead, cities were built to serve as sites of capitalist development—under this regime, tourism served to simultaneously subordinate workers (in construction, hospitality, and agriculture) and promote white supremacy among visitors.
The idea of St Augustine was raised anew in 1950 by the Florida Historical Quarterly journal. Leading up to 1940 there had been a growth in historical societies across Florida, but the state in general was known more for “historical fakes for personal profit.” The society suggests that the Southern Historical Association request historians from outside the state “whose report would be accepted without question” to examine the historical evidence at tourist sites so that St
Augustine could “rescue and assure her imperiled dignity…that our Ancient City could become
44 one of the foremost historical gems of our whole country “(Florida Historical Society 1950). By
1965, the city of St Augustine was celebrating their 400th year with a “year-long birthday party” consisting of restorations, performances, festivals, and museum and library openings. For this celebration, the city built its amphitheater which today hosts some of today’s most well-known entertainers and politicians from Aretha Franklin to Donald Trump. Beginning in the quadricentennial year and for 30 years after, a musical drama entitled “Cross and Sword” was performed for 10 weeks each summer to 2,000 seat audience of the amphitheater, becoming a
Florida tourist attraction and in 1973 designated as the state’s official play by the Florida
Legislature. The US government even printed a special stamp to commemorate the occasion.
President Kennedy is quoted to have said “When I recall how Colonial Williamsburg has served so effectively as a symbol of the bond between English-speaking peoples on both sides of the
Atlantic, I can see how valuable it will be to have a similar symbol of the cultural heritage which came to us from Hispanic-American sources. This can be a most important new symbolic bond with our Latin American neighbors to the south, as well as Spain across the ocean.” (quoted in
History News 1965). Similarly, then vice- President Johnson visited St Augustine in 1963 to dedicate the first group of restored buildings, saying “the Spanish heritage in this country is one of the greatest among those which today blend to form the United States, and it is a source of great satisfaction to me to note the growing movement in this country to recognize this contribution.” (quoted in History News 1965).
Thus, this redevelopment of the city’s historic status through museums and research libraries, building restorations, and reenactment performance is geared towards the recognition of European heritage. Like the Italians and the Irish, the Spanish effectively ‘become white’ when they enter the United States racial ideological system. Whereas the court, science, and
45 ‘common white man’ defined whiteness as pertaining or not to immigrants of various national origins throughout the twentieth century, the Spanish are subject to a litmus test of conquest and masculine valor. The proof of this test is accomplished not through literature or the law, though these mediums are accomplices. Instead, historical storytelling does the ideological work of interpreting world history through the Anglo lens and thus defining the Spanish as white through conquest of Indians. This serves the larger purpose of telling the grand national origins story as a white conqueror’s story. At the same time, this storytelling can serve as proof of the exceptionally benevolent diversity of the United States because Spanish-speaking peoples,
Latino/as, come to the United States as racialized Others. The origins of their language may be
European, but the common white man knows that their ethnic origins are ‘not white.’ Maria
DeGuzman (2005) argues that representations of Spain and ‘the Spanish’ have played key roles in consolidating US imperialism and imperial identities. From the Monroe Doctrine to Manifest
Destiny to the Good Neighbor Policy to the Cold War, the US consumed Spanish identity as an imperial identity that justifies incorporation of “Spanish” land into the US empire (of course it is indigenous land, and many Latino/as claim mestizo or indigenous heritage rather than Spanish, thus the rejection of the term “Hispanic” as the identity of the conqueror) (de Guzman 2005).
By propping up St Augustine as a symbol of Hispanic heritage in the 1960s, at the same time as brutal CIA-led dictatorships tortured Latin American societies, the hegemonic narrative ideology may be a way to reconcile guilt by claiming ownership through heritage. The contribution of
Spanish heritage to white nationalism is thus not only in the past through conquest and settlement, but in the present through the national origins story.
Surrounding the announcements of the historical commission by John F. Kennedy in
1963 was a civil rights battle over the city’s historical storytelling. The invisible series of events
46 that accompanied this commission is chronicled in a timeline available on the website of the city’s newspaper, the St Augustine Record. Just months after George Wallace stands on a confederate star to declare “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in
Birmingham Alabama, Lyndon B. Johnson is urged by the NAACP not to visit St Augustine to swear in the all-white National Quadricentennial Commission. Promising not to attend segregated events and to meet with local civil rights leaders, Johnson swears in the members of the commission and invites a dozen African American guests who reportedly sit together, in the back, guarded by Secret Service. Johnson leaves town before his meeting with the local NAACP, sending a tape recorder in his place. In the following months Dr. King would send his letter from a Birmingham jail, and St Augustine would begin to take center stage for a series of brutal acts of white power that shocked the nation, including shootings, mob violence, hate speech, and the events captured in the famous photo of a white hotel manager pouring acid into a pool where black activists were wading in. Thus, civil rights activists at the time as well as white supremacists knew the power of historical storytelling. The all-White National Quadricentennial
Commission made decisions and conducted educational outreach initiatives that would shape the city for decades to come. Some of the same attractions and museums funded by the commission are of the utmost importance in St Augustine tourism and historical storytelling today. The Viva
Florida 500th launched the Statewide Historic Preservation Plan, set on presenting the history of
Florida as multicultural, diverse, and Spanish, considered part of a national recognition of
Hispanic heritage which disregarded the important historical and political differences between
Spain and Latin America.
The creation of public space through White settlement and the revitalization of false
White narratives through the same space is one example of how decolonization is not a metaphor
47 (Tuck and Yang 2012)—It’s not just epistemic or psychological, it is material and has to do at the deepest level with land and selfhood—space and ownership. All places have a history just as old, but Historic places facilitate storytelling about the past which demands to be accepted as the nation’s collective history. That’s why the monuments matter. They matter to the people who want them down, and they matter to the people who want them to stay. Monuments are symbols of a white supremacist racial order. The argument in favor of keeping them swirls around the ideas of History and Heritage, a profound attachment to the narratives of the past that tells people who they are in terms of the nation, and thus not only who belongs but who is a hero worth remembering. In a city whose economy depends on its ‘heritage tourism’ offerings, History and
Heritage are intimately intertwined. However, this conflation of heritage with history or vice versa is a result of the problematic assumption that History is Truth, and that heritage is everyone’s. The confederate monuments point out the fallacy of universalism, and the silences in the narrative about the country’s origins and the progress that has been made.
Heritage
Heritage is defined by scholars and practitioners as a social construction; decisions are made on an intellectual and cultural level about what counts as heritage, and then made concrete through the techniques of preservation and management, which of course is always dependent on funding and personnel. More than the presentation of historical facts, heritage is a representation of specific pieces of history according to the demands of the present, whether they be economic, cultural, psychological, or ideological. Similarly, history, memory, and tradition are also social constructions of the past. The present guides not only interpretation but selection of artifacts, stories, and heroes onto which meaning is attached. Since heritage today is more often than not connected to some economic interest, the selective representations of the past that circulate in
48 culture today also influence the individual’s socialization and identity through consumption. For this reason, heritage is contested as different actors with different worldviews and senses of belonging confront the hegemonic narratives told in heritage sites. But in addition to the micro level of identity and belonging, heritage sites are framed within a larger national narrative, the hegemonic story of the nation-state which heritage sites are a part of. That heritage is often managed at the local or regional level, often in service of the nation, is an example of the ways in which power has become diffuse in modern societies. Heritage shapes power networks as a means of communication, by transmitting ideas and values as knowledge. Thus, the stories told in tourist sites through narrative, landscape, and historical preservation are highly selective accounts that exclude as much as they include, forget as much as they remember.
Archaeologist Laurajane Smith (2006) theorizes heritage as a social practice. Whereas heritage is often conceived as historical truth or just plain facts, heritage is manufactured through the acts of preservation, management, and celebration. Rather than having intrinsic meaning in themselves, heritage designations and practices give certain places and events symbolic cultural meaning. As a discourse, heritage involves constant negotiations and the authorization of certain stories above others in the end result of the museum, attraction, or holiday commemoration.
According to Smith, even the idea of heritage itself is a Western discourse, authorized and made hegemonic through the practices of management and preservation that sustain it. Furthermore, the meaning and value given to heritage is explicitly tied to identity construction. Since the
1990s, museums professionals and cultural organizations have highlighted the ways in which representations of human history and national origins stories serve to create a national identity, and many tourist sites and museums have responded with an increasing concern for multiculturalism and diversity in the stories they tell with varying success. This ‘new museology’
49 self-consciously promoted the museum as a place of identity construction and historical storytelling (Karp et al 2006; Munson 1997; Ross 2004; Smith 2006; Vergo 1989). To say that heritage is a social practice, a discourse, is to say that there is some work that heritage is doing.
The ‘authorized heritage discourse’ does naturalizing work for the concept of heritage itself, using claims to expert knowledge and expertise to reinforce the national myths it reproduces on a local scale. As knowledge, heritage has a variety of uses coexisting all at once, but it is nonetheless always a cultural product and at times a form of ideology complicit in the legitimation of existing power structures (Graham 2002). The cultural knowledge-economy of heritage tourism links the multiple scales in which identity is created; identity tied to a sense of place is produced through the connections between local and national, individual and community, present and past. Commodified for tourist consumption, heritage in cities promote a sense of belonging or exclusion among visitors that mirrors the existing social realities.
Is Multiculturalism the Answer?
Cities multicultural moves to represent the formerly excluded remains within the national ideological frame, thus representing “minorities” as but one part of the historical story or telling their stories only within specified locations rather than throughout the heritage consumption center. Multiculturalism becomes a choice for cities and tourists alike, and the existence of multiple affinities sets the scene for a dismissal of the claim that tourism historical stories represent but one hegemonic version of history. Whereas cities proclaim multiculturalism in their storytelling, the sense of hybridity engendered by these claims is often superficial and limited, even masking the long-term social and political patterns of exclusion and exploitation by telling a happy story of diversity. Thus, multiculturalism in heritage may be less progressive than it seems and usually remains within the broader national discourse or hegemonic narrative frame.
50 Heritage planning can even become an ideological tool of the state, where states can use multicultural heritage representations as a method of social control, selectively conceding to demands for diversity and inclusion (Graham 2002).
Marketing and PR firms are key actors, alongside more traditional knowledge producers in history and archaeology, in the construction of heritage narratives for public consumption.
They could even be considered as leaders in the decision-making process, for their research guides states in defining which parts of the historical narrative are “valuable” enough to make it into the latest state-sponsored campaign to draw in touring consumers. As an ideal, multiculturalism in US society consists of tolerance for difference and cultural relativism. In practice, multiculturalism played out to look a lot like the assimilationist ideal of the melting pot—Americans would abandon their old cultures and identities, or at least prioritize
“American” culture while keeping their ethnicities in the private sphere of home and family.
“American” however is more of a code-word for “white” than it is an indicator of citizenship and residence; whites are already American so they wouldn’t have to give anything up. This newfound tolerance for diversity worked out to be a sort of a pupu platter of free choice identity making for whites, who could pick and choose where to live, what music to listen to, and what to order for dinner from a panoply of “ethnic” options (Chang 2014; Chow 2002).
Whereas racial inequality was consolidating through mass incarceration, residential segregation, and civil rights retrenchment, the twin ideals of multiculturalism and colorblindness assured that attention would be redirected from racism to consumerist identity construction. In the idealized multicultural world of whiteness, liberal free choice and individualism could prevail—from the standpoint of many Americans, representation and celebration was overcoming whatever barriers that laws and policies could not surmount. In the context of
51 marketing and commerce, multicultural representation has a somewhat different valence.
Concerned with profit first and foremost, television marketers in the second half of the 20th century turned to a strategy of “market segmentation,” pursuing what they considered niche markets based on ethnic groupings or so-called race (Chang 2014). Thus, multiculturalism should be considered less of an ethic than a profit-making strategy, the results of which consolidated whiteness as the invisible norm of society by representing the apparent difference of only non-whites. To think about heritage, it is helpful to think about the markets that might be responsible for driving profits. First there is the “great white middle,” the majority of the population that marketers have to consider a wide audience. Then, we might also think about the niche market, which in the case of Florida or any Southern state, would consist of white supremacists. Though ethnic markets are sizable in Florida, any marketing or publicity consultant would realize the need to play to the white center.
Settler Colonialism, or, Why Whites Even Need Heritage in the First Place
Settler Colonialism is the specific postcolonial modality of the United States, and it differs first and foremost from the postcolonial for its inherent logic is to continue, to never be
‘post.’. Though settlement seems to connote stasis, native studies scholars have documented and analyzed the essential locomotive nature of colonialism in the settler variety. Patrick Wolfe
(2006) highlights the importance of what territoriality or expansion in the settler ethos, and he argues that the settler colonial project is inherently modern, an overlooked counterpart of industrial revolution. The eliminating logic of the settler was directly related to the industrial appetite for raw materials, which required land. Settlers were also entrepreneurs; they were not just looking for home. The Cherokee removal is instructive as to the relationship between assimilation, genocide, and settler colonial society. The Cherokee were known as one of five
52 “civilized tribes” who assimilated to white ways—in clothing, language, agriculture, and government, many of them even owning slaves. Though they seem to have lived up to the cultural standards set out by the white civilizing mission, they were still unceremoniously expelled from the Southeast in the Trail of Tears along with many of their counterparts. Was not cultural genocide enough? For the “frontier rabble” who burned their homes, the Cherokee represented a permanence of Native peoples on the land that was threatening to their own sovereignty.
Settler colonialism thus denotes the difference between the historical context between
Anglo North America, where colonists came to stay, and Latin American colonies where early colonists did not intend to make their home. The fact that settlers came to the US to make a home led to different relationships to the people indigenous to the continent in the present-day United
States versus in Latin America, where indigenous people still represent a majority of the population in many states. In the United States, settler ideology has required that ‘home’ and nation is defined in the terms of Anglo settler identity—legally and culturally, the United States is defined as a white nation despite mixing and diversity throughout its history. Part of this is because rather than glorify race mixing (even if for the end of whitening the population as was done throughout Latin American history), in the United States race mixing has been legally prevented, especially among blacks and whites. However, a less talked about element of mestizaje-thinking is the claiming of indigeneity as collective ancestry even as the nation makes claims to Whiteness. The evolutionary enlightenment-progress narrative of modernization which all American nations’ bourgeois national origins stories portray is dependent upon racialized characters—Indians in the past and Whites in the present (Bonfil 1987; Escobar 2012; de la
Cadena 2001). This is the mestizaje of Vasconcelo’s “raza cósmica” and Jose Marti’s “Nuestra
53 America” which has less to do with actual “race mixing” and is more of a literary trope and nationalist subjectivity, an ideological move to claim the indigenous past as national heritage while making living indigenous people invisible in modern society and even enemies of the modern state.
The mythology of Indians vanishing from the land to naturally make room for the settlers is evident in the institutionalized nostalgia of preservation law and museum collections around the Western world (Glenn 2015; Verancini 2010). Indians are portrayed in popular culture from movies to advertisements as pure, natural, and innocent, peoples forever fixed in the past and slowly fading away in the present (Merskin 2001). The ‘vanishing Indian’ trope is a settler move to innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012) which claims that the elimination of the native (Wolfe 2006) is a complete project accomplished through natural means rather than genocide. In the conclusion to the vanishing Indian narrative, settlers construct an “American” identity out of chosen elements of Indian culture. Settlers carried out ‘savage war’ against noncombatants in an attempt to eliminate native communities from the landscape, and they also took on native identity for their own purposes of claiming the land. Representing the native through naming, symbolism, and performance helped to reclaim indigeneity for the white settler. Philip Deloria
(1998) analyzes the history of settler performance of indigeneity in his book Playing Indian, showing how settlers mimicked and mocked Indians as a way to create a common national identity, which had the effect of eliminating real native peoples who still existed. Participants in the Boston tea Party dressed as Indians as part of their protest, and Indians are included as
American collective heritage.
Mark Rifkin (2017) calls for a history of the history to correct this representation of
Indians as fixed in the past and disappeared in the present. Rather than inclusion in the historical
54 narrative, we should focus on an analysis of the historical narrative itself. Rifkin develops the concept of settler time to shift attention away from broadening the historical narrative to include
Native Americans to problematizing the historical stories we tell in the first place. Settler time is a specific way of narrating, conceptualizing, and experiencing history as time—Western conceptions of history tend towards a timeline of human progress, where Western societies are considered a civilized end point of history, the present, as opposed to non-western cultures seen as frozen in time or living in the past. In reality, many Indian people exist today and lead complex lives on reservations but also in cities, universities, and government. Indians are not essentially past; settler colonialism depends on this elimination of the native in part to ideologically justify the confiscation of their land and even their tribal identities.
Charles Mills (2014) suggests that we must explore a white temporal imaginary alongside
Lipsitz’s white spatial imaginary. Similar to how other scholars have critiqued the temporal assumptions in phrases like postcolonialism, modernity, and globalization, Rifkin calls our attention to the socially constructed-ness of historical imagination. The civil war is another example of the ways in which periodization functions in history—affective investment in the civil war as a decisive moment in US history represents national history after the civil war as a return to equality. Grace Hale (1995) also speaks to how historiographic periodization in US history ‘makes whiteness’ by representing the period after the civil war as a time of reconciliation, a return to enlightenment values of freedom and liberty for all, instead of representing the realities of debt peonage, convict leasing, lynching, Indian wars and continued physical and cultural genocide against native peoples in this same time period. Postcolonial scholar Anne McClintock similarly identifies the phenomenon of ‘panoptical time and anachronistic space,’ the Eurocentric worldview that places native people and places outside of
55 modernity, frozen in the past and passively awaiting the benefits of colonization. Thus, taking a hard look at historical narratives and the stories told to support them can help deconstruct the settler colonial ideologies that uphold the white racial frame.
Race and White Supremacy in the Settler Colonial USA
Critical Race Theory shows that liberalism has forever been a theory contradicting practice, exemplified in the history of rights and law in the United States. (Neo)liberalism simultaneously includes and excludes; in the story of the birth of the multicultural nation in St
Augustine, a race-relations perspective “includes” (consumes, exploits) Historical racial diversity but denies the full reality of racism in the past and the present. Inviting visitors to tour the city marking off destinations on their “explorer’s passport,” the city of St Augustine tourist scene caters to white tourists for whom the past can be imagined as romantic and nostalgic. For others, like black residents who spoke at the live-streamed county commission meeting, the confederate monuments in what is referred to as “the old slave market” and the whole downtown area of restaurants, bars, monuments, and waterfront fort reminisce for the good old days of overt and violent white supremacy. It is not only that St Augustine tells a story of romantic colonialism and perpetuates myths like the equal playing field of race-relations, but that it beckons the tourist into the story. Visitors are always invited to imagine themselves in the past, to wonder what they would do and how they would live in “Old Florida.” For those looking to make America
“great” again, St Augustine offers the aesthetic; a destination paradise for the masculine imperialist psyche where settler, explorer, cowboy, conquistador, and pirate subjectivities unite in the context of a Florida imagined for tourists as southern frontier and racially mixed borderland. The political significance of the swing-state tourist destination calls attention to the significance of socialization and learning processes going on in “Historic” public leisure spaces.
56 Racial ideology aids members of the dominant group in explaining and justifying the racialized inequalities that characterize our nation and even the world. Ideologies, or ‘common sense’ frameworks for understanding social phenomenon, are social scripts that people rely on to justify and explain the existence of inequalities in society. Historians such as Ibram Kendi and researchers like Dorothy Roberts argue that racism comes before race. Whereas it is the
‘common sense’ to believe that humans socially constructed racism as a response to apparent physical differences between the races that left them scared and confused, the use of the word race to refer to humans and denote hierarchy only began after the conquest of the new world, as justifications for colonization, genocide, and the emerging global division of labor with racialized people the world over performing the most inhumane and deadly tasks. Kendi argues that racist ideas are actually concocted in order to justify racist policies, not the other way around. Racist ideas do not sprout from ignorance and hate, they are generated self-consciously by those in power to obscure and occlude the racist policies that create inequalities.
Discrimination and hierarchy come first, and then racist ideas show up to justify it, often promoting ignorance and hatred to meet their ends of naturalizing domination and resultant inequities. Thus, the victim is blamed for their social and economic status in the underclass or even working poor, and therefore declared deserving of their condition. As Kendi insightfully observes, “when you truly believe racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination” (11)—false consciousness of the meaning and function of race throughout history persists in liberal arguments which locate the causes of current racial disparities in minority cultures, pathological families, or a vicious cycle of poverty.
Ideologies take the form of narratives and stories which reinforce the dominant race by promoting their particular racial worldview as the mainstream ‘common sense’ way of thinking
57 about race. Ideologies are frameworks and scripts whites can draw upon to understand and explain race, a topic which whites typically do not encounter in everyday conversation and thus have little experience discussing. As personal sense-making devices, ideologies are flexible and fluid but since whites benefit in a society structured by white supremacy, they almost always are in service of the status quo. Colorblindness, then, works to stem progress on racial issues and maintain the dominant group position of whites. As explanatory and justification devices, ideologies shape collective practices that help reinforce the disparate racial order as it stands
(Bonilla-Silva 2017).
Storytelling does the work of teaching, reflecting, and reinforcing ideologies of the white racial frame. It is important to note that while whiteness denotes a group position, it does not necessarily refer to all white people—as a subjectivity, whiteness can be thought of as a hegemonic frame or script, a template for thought and action that anyone can employ but which most benefits those members of the dominant group. One aspect of this white racial frame is the hegemonic narrative or dominant ‘stock story’ of history (Delgado 1989; Ewick and Silbey
1995; Poletta 2011). Worldviews correspond to social position in that intergenerational experiences and knowledge will be different if viewed from the top or the bottom. After the civil rights movement, Critical Race Theorists start to talk about the stock story or the hegemonic narrative of American history that emanates from the group at the top of the racial hierarchy, which sociologist Joe Feagin names the white racial frame (2009). Before them, Web DuBois had identified not only that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line, but that those on the bottom of the social hierarchy had a ‘second sight’ or ‘double vision,’ a privileged position from which to view the workings of the dominant society through the combination of structure and ideology. Furthermore, this second sight provided a worldview
58 in which race could be seen as a global phenomenon, the ideological structure legitimating violent conquest, imperial expansion, and the colonization of consciousness around the globe by the North Atlantic countries. This colonization began in 1492 with enslavement and genocide, and eventually grew into the global slave trade, which morphed into the racialized and gendered division of labor under globalization; though the formal ties of colonialism have been dissolved,
‘postcolonial’ society has been just as elusive as a society that is conclusively post-racial or post- patriarchal.
What white masculinity means in the context of the settler state is possessive individualism. This is important because it is a relationship to land, to property, and to society that is individualized opposed to collective. Race and gender hierarchy also offered the ideological justifications settlers needed to claim land they were foreign to. The role of gender here is important—not only were settler wives denied independence and legal identity, but gender roles of the Native society were scrutinized and judged to be inferior. Because masculine whiteness was the status tied to property ownership and political sovereignty, the state and institutions were modeled on the paternalism and brute force of the heteropatriarchal family. The frontier settler came to symbolize America through the mythologized practice of settlement and the specific relationship to land that came of it. Europeans could come to America and gain citizenship as settlers—the new white identity ensured equality among them that was not available in Europe, the colonial metropole. Moreover, the most mythologized and iconic among settler heroes actually appropriated indigenous cultural symbols and practices, like riding in dugout canoes and wearing buckskin. (Glenn 2015).
It is extremely important to note that American empire, and colonialism everywhere, has always worked through the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, hatred and sympathetic
59 sentiment. The white clansman and the white savior peddling a different method of the same madness. Because these logics work together, whites conceptualize the American nation not only in terms of citizenship to exclude outsiders, but in terms of inferiority to eliminate insiders, either altogether through death or through bureaucratic-symbolic disempowerment in institutions and national narratives. White supremacy is central to the Settler claim to land, and settler tactics are central to the maintenance of white supremacy. This is how the American nation is constructed as white, even if it’s not whites only.
Many people still hold dear the notion of a colorblind, post-race society. This is the form white supremacy takes today. I am not talking about liberals, though they may be included. I am talking about the white supremacists who will declare that Black people are dying excessively today because they are criminals with poor health, that they don’t see color and it’s racist to point out racism. This is a color-blind argument not because it ignores race, but because it at once utilizes race and denies racism. This is a denial of history—white history. The stock story of the
American past denies that white people ever were in power, and that Black people ever were systematically subjugated, and thus that this system thrives today. Colorblindness is the denial of white power—adapted to the times, racism today is about the claim to fairness and equality in the face of all the evidence to refute it. This is the problem with colorblindness, that it works to maintain the status quo of structural violence—state terrorism and individual racism against
Black people which repeats the history of the US nation in a single interaction. That the same word, ‘encounter,’ is used to reference the police killing a Black man and Europeans arriving on
Florida shores to begin genocide against the Native Americans is telling. In fact, the killing of innocent Black people by police or by COVID-19 is part of the deep structure of American
60 settler colonialism, one pillar in the upholding of white supremacy which seeks to kill all those except the divine white ‘rightful owners’ of the American nation.
Racial categories and their common sense definitions are cogs in the racial ideology machine. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2015) strives to uncover the articulations among different racisms to argue not that all racism is the same but that forms of racism work together to consolidate the White settler project and to stem coalition resistance politics. Settler colonialism is not an event, a point in time, but a structure or project that continuously adapts to the times to maintain settler sovereignty above all else. Settler colonialism is characterized by the logics of
White supremacy. Though Native and Black and Brown peoples have different experiences of racism, settler colonialism set up a system under which all non-whites in the US would be eradicated or contained to benefit Settler property and profit. Whiteness was created in US law to maintain settler sovereignty above all others, at the level of the national or individual body.
Interrelated and distinct logics characterize US settler history, each targeted to the specific task of maintaining white supremacy as Nation. Though distinct from each other, we can see each logic working across various populations to the end of white supremacy and its cognate,
American exceptionalism: slavery upholds capitalism by creating a racialized division of labor, genocide anchors colonialism as a project to create the conditions for unopposed settlement and the White possession of all cultures as their own, and orientalism facilitates xenophobic wars and border obsessions with the help of discourses and representations of dangerous ‘Others.’ (Smith
2012)
61 Internalizing the Nation: Settler Subjectivity and White Supremacy
Southern boosters frequently used discourses of the American West to frame Florida as a frontier. Western boosters had used tourism narratives to bring in investment and development, and tourism in the Western US has been thought of as a citizenship and nation-building ritual
(Hillyer 2012). Richard Slotkin (44) uses narratives as a window into the puritan psyche, the minds of the settlers who were foundational in the creation of an American mythology based on their experience as settlers on the frontier. Through the lenses of their religious worldview, early
American settlers processed their encounters with Native Americans in dichotomous terms of good and evil. The Indian Wars carried out by the US military as well as individual citizen- settlers coincides with the era of the captivity narrative, which sets up a “myth world-picture”
(44) of evil Natives, damsels in distress, and hunter-hero figures like Daniel Boone. He looks at these stories as insights into American psyche and character, settler subjectivities that appear as tropes in American historical storytelling to this day. In what he calls the “myth of regeneration through violence,” the captivity narrative is generalized to the American nation—Puritans perceived their race wars and conquest of the natural world as necessary battles between good and evil, violent but cleansing and ultimately redeeming.
In her interdisciplinary book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination, Avery Gordon writes that sociology is the history of the present. Like the classical trinity of sociological thinkers Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, Gordon turns away from psychology and seizes on the idea that society and history cannot be reduced to the sum of individual pathologies. Rather, ‘the social’ is made up of an adaptive yet enduring set of social forces, ideologies, and worldviews that act as a social force on human collectivities, shaping identities and constraining choices. Whether a result of the exploitations of capitalist class, the
62 protestant ethic of asceticism, or the social pathologies of alienation and anomie, worldviews are formed based on the (false) consciousness of societies rather than individuals. The ‘imagined community’ of the nation is the container for scripted subjectivities that correspond to hierarchical social statuses of race, class, and gender; performative identities that are created by agentic individuals but always in reference to past performances and intelligible only insofar as they adhere to the predetermined script. But at the same time as the nation constructs the ideal self it also constructs its other; worldviews, Marx’s Weltanschauung, construct identities insofar as they provide a single story of world history and its relation to the present, through which individuals find their place in the hierarchies that structure history and the present.
Haunting, spectrality, and the uncanny are terms used by scholars to refer to the internalization of history, specifically the history we might like most to forget. Toni Morrison’s
Beloved is a preeminent starting point for theorizing the ghosts of slavery—the ghost of a child killed by her enslaved mother, who only killed her to keep her free from slavery, comes back to haunt the family in Ohio where they have escaped from slavery, isolating them from the rest of the Black community there and driving wedges between the family members. Though interpretations of the novel’s exact meaning vary, the takeaway is the link between America’s quiet obsession with the creepy, macabre, and violent in the past and present. In the nineteenth century, American authors began to write ghostly Indians into their Jeremiads, woeful lamentations of a society raging towards imminent downfall. Today’s Jeremiads feature familiar spectral Indians as well—the ancient Mayan calendar predicts the world will end in June.
Spooky stories in many genres today revolve around the foundations of the ‘Indian burial ground’ plot, voodoo priests and medicine men, vampires and werewolves terrorizing Indian lands, and the ‘magical negro’ are tropes of the American national imagination that get played
63 over and over in popular culture. Avery Gordon uses the concept of haunting as related to the sociological imagination; haunting is the individual’s internalization of the relation between present and past.
Where are ordinary people learning and internalizing world history, and constructing racialized worldviews? Two important places where historical narratives are disseminated are the museum and in historical heritage tourism destinations. Museums and tourist attractions both use historical storytelling to construct a sense of ‘place’ which functions as a brand to sell to visitors but also conveys the meaning of the place in the national context. Heritage tourism, for example, which consists of living history enactments, natural history museums, and archaeological exhibits, is focused on showing how the place and its history fit into the national story— battlefields, first settlements, so-and-so landed here, or this event took place right where you were standing, hundreds of years ago (and the ghosts still haunt). All of this constructed to place the tourist in history and the place in the national imagination. In St Augustine, Florida, the tourist storyline even says that the city is the birthplace of America, where the real firsts happened.
By looking in leisure places, we can see racialized social processes at work that delve deep into the American imagination and worldview. Feminist and postcolonial critiques add dimensions of coloniality and subjectivity to analyses of race in the US that get us closer to understanding the dynamics of racism today. The American South, and Florida in particular, has been largely neglected as a site in the construction of the national racial imagination, despite the fact that it has been a tourist destination for the entire country since colonial times. Toured by millions per year, the “Nation’s Oldest City” of St Augustine sells a romantic colonial narrative and landscape to residents and visitors alike, attracting everyone from schoolchildren on field
64 trips to partiers, honeymooners, families, and retirees from all over Florida, the United States, and the world. St Augustine’s racialized picturesque evokes what Renato Rosaldo (1989) terms
“colonial nostalgia,” reminiscing both the Spanish conquistadors and the Native Americans they destroyed. Moreover, the idea of nostalgia points to the emotion of race and history; nostalgia for a “structure of feeling” defined by power relations based on race. Bell hooks theorizes that the colonial picturesque is another way in which we ‘eat the other;’ tourists desire to consume liberal narratives of past colonialism and the Other which function in the present to obscure racism and inequality.
Florida as a Site in the Social Construction of Settler Subjectivity and Ideologies of Race
St Augustine talks about itself as the birth of a multicultural nation asks to be analyzed as a site in the reproduction of racialized (racist) nationhood. White male conquistadors literally hail the visitor to enter the museum with their "explorer's passport," interpellating the tourist as explorer citizen, coded in language and represented visually as white and male. The wax figurines present at the entrance of the 450th "anniversary" museum vividly represent what the crowd is supposed to take from the story. A Spanish conquistador, a Timucuan Indian, and a contrived Black Conquistador greet the visitor and begin the storytelling predicted in the title of the museum: "Tapestry: The Cultural Threads of First America." The museum continues with a natural history of Florida Indians and to a lesser extent Black folks, leaving out women by literally placing them in corners and ignoring the nasty business of miscegenation alluded to in the entire exhibition. As refuge from the heat, many of the millions of 450th visitors toured the museum in typical "museum effect" (Levitt 2015; Smith 2014) fashion, savoring and soaking in the curated information as much as the air conditioning. Museums like the one set up at the 450th
Castillo drive visitors center litter the tourist center, and stories told there are repeated on trolley
65 tours, in living history museums visited by k-12 students, and even in St Augustine themed restaurants and bars frequented by tourists and locals alike.
Florida studies and tourism studies, however, have neglected the state as a site of the construction and reproduction of power relations, instead maintaining more of a tourism marketing paradigm in research. Literature on Florida history makes clear the state's history as a frontier or borderland in the settlement of the United States; the former inhabitants expelled and new cities built up, both these would-be Americans and the imagination of the place they created is crucial to the national narrative which must continually justify settler colonialism and racist inequality. John Urry (1992) ties the tourist gaze back into the dominating importance of the visual in Western society. Everywhere from science to porn, to the way we have become trapped in our screens, the visual remains the privileged sense in modernity. The role that visualizing plays in “the imaginative history of western culture” prompts us to consider the darker side of this marvelous sense; Foucault thinks of the gaze as an empire, for sight allows us to classify deviance from a norm and allocate domination accordingly at the same time as it hides so much from sight. Tourism becomes the search for authenticity in the Other the same way the doctor looks for illness in the patient behind bars; many tourists are intuitively aware of the discomfort of “sightseeing” and the parallels between a camera and a gun—even if they do not act on that discomfort by stopping the tour. Nature as landscape is one of the ways in which the environment is shaped in the image of the tourist gaze.
The critical lens that Florida studies is missing has been applied through studies of tourism to the Caribbean, Hawaii, and New Orleans, each telling us something about the ways in which tourist destinations tell stories of race, gender, history, and subjectivity. “Tourism imaginaries” are collections of representations that interact with personal imagination and
66 subjectivity as “meaning-making and world-shaping devices,” wherein the imagination is both a process and a product structured by colonial-modern dichotomies. Furthermore, tourism is essential in the production of difference; imaginations of place are socially constructed yet tangible in material culture of images and stories circulating inside and outside of destinations, moving through “well-established conduits” of romantic colonialism (Salazar 2012).
Florida, especially since statehood, has been a paradise in the tourist gaze, a natural and historical gem that transports visitors 'back in time.' Florida tourism marketing has changed over the years but the architecture and historical storytelling sediment different periods of Florida tourism history, so that pieces of each age come together visually in the city of St Augustine. For example, the era of St Augustine as the "American Riviera," parallel to the changing image of the South as a healthful destination and the white settlement of Florida, lives on through the city's beautifully Flagler-era architecture. Henry Flagler becomes an American hero of industrial- modern expansion with his railroad, supplementing the Spanish conquistador of another century.
In St Augustine tourism, the Flagler picturesque blends seamlessly with the Spanish story, in fact defining St Augustine much more than Spanish architecture which was, besides the coquina fort, destroyed in fires centuries ago. Flagler’s Florida beckons the tourist to a past not so long ago, never described as slavery, Jim Crow, sexist or racist. Feminist and critical race scholars have shown how the picturesque is entangled with a racialized imagination of the primitive, held together by imperial nostalgia which desires that which has been destroyed long ago (hooks
1992). Both studies of Florida and studies of tourism lack a focus on the ways in which the
Florida tourism narrative is implicated in the larger trends of the nation, with both taking an apolitical "Historical" approach to the study of tourism in the state (with a capital H because this
67 is official State business of preservation that marks only certain old buildings and places as properly historical).
This case study of historical storytelling in the heritage tourism narratives of St
Augustine, Florida, makes an intervention into the sociological literatures on race and ethnicity; leisure studies; and knowledge production. As a national origins story, the tourism narrative of St
Augustine Florida as a tapestry of the diverse and inclusive United States of America represents a key arena in the production of racialized national identity. Heritage in the South is contested on a daily basis, from the debates over confederated monuments and flags to the everyday mobility of people of color navigating the enduring culture of segregation. The Florida and St Augustine stories are history as knowledge, heritage as truth. Through racialized characters in performances and museums, the city constructs a narrative of itself as diverse and inclusive. However, the findings of my study suggest that for all the representation happening in the tourism narratives, diverse stories remain untold. Despite projecting an idea of historical truth based on colonial archives, the stories told during two commemorations remain within what sociologist Joe Feagin terms ‘the white racial frame.’ This is the dominant colorblind stock story of white America— meritocracy, equal opportunity, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work hard and you will succeed. In the face of this ideology, poor Americans who are disproportionately people of color are theorized as deserving of their condition; if the playing field is even, winners and losers are made fair and square. Many white Americans believe that racism is a thing of the past, and this plays out in the ways in which tourism narratives proclaim diversity and inclusion by representing characters of color, but do not include stories of resistance to slavery and forced migration for presentation to the public. Furthermore, they do not include the stories of rebellion
68 and resistance that disprove the concomitant myths of American exceptionalism and natural white supremacy.
69 “Unbroken History and Enduring Spirit”: St. Augustine’s ‘Oldest City’ Storytelling in the
Narrative Construction of a White Settler Nation
Two years after the Florida Brand marketing campaign and year-long celebration of the anniversary of the 1513 founding and naming of the state, the city of St Augustine celebrated their own Founder’s Day anniversary commemorating 450 years since Pedro Menéndez landed on the shores of the area. People typically associate the city of St Augustine with its history, whether they believe the claim to fame as “first and oldest” is contrived for tourism or legitimately based in scientific historical research. The city records millions of visitors per year to the downtown tourism district, consisting first and foremost of the pedestrian way, St George street, known for its restaurants, tourist shops, and living history museums. A few blocks east lies the Castillo de San Marcos fort and scenic waterfront overlooking the inter coastal waterway. To the North is the visitors center, where the museum is exhibited, and commemorative book sold. Dotted throughout the landscape are historic inns and bed and breakfasts, many of which promote a historic experience alongside comfort and luxury. Streets like St George are lined with balconies and buildings, all falling somewhere on the spectrum of preservation and outright reproduction. Much of the discussion in the city and among tourists comes down to: is it real? How old is it really? Every attraction has a date, and only a few can reasonably make claims to be “the oldest” house, drugstore, schoolhouse, jail. While many of the buildings date to the 19th century, none date back to the Spanish period. The overwhelmingly
Spanish feel of the city is produced through the Flagler-era buildings built in renaissance revival style, meant at the time of their construction to recreate a Mediterranean riviera vibe for wealthy
Northern visitors. The fort is actually the oldest attraction, dating back to the late 17th century.
70 Of the historical moments the city highlights in its history, the moment of ‘first contact’ and colonization is especially visible and well-researched, presented to the public in a variety of styles and particularly important to the city’s 450th “anniversary” celebrated in 2015. ‘The 450th’ as it is widely known in the local parlance, is part of a tradition of commemorating city history or more evocatively put, heritage. Michel Rolph-Trouillot (1995) argues that commemorations not only simplify a messy and unknown past, but they work as “a tool of historical production,”
(117) anchoring a past event in the present through naming and dating, building an annual cycle to remind the public about important dates and people that define the national mythology.
Commemorating a select date or event is itself part of the myth-making process because it silences all events it does not celebrate and fills the void with “narratives of power” (118), thus recreating the mythology over and over on a yearly cycle. Commemorations are part of the process of reproducing settler time and packaging it for public consumption, in this case with the pretext of “celebration.” Civil Rights activists in the 1960s understood how important the commemoration of St Augustine’s history was for the consolidation of white national identity.
Dr King’s visit and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference campaign to support the local desegregation movement was organized to parallel the city’s preparations for their 400th anniversary in 1964, the same year the Civil Rights Act was stalled in congressional filibuster.
Brittany Cooper (2016) argues in her TedTalk “the Racial Politics of Time” that racial struggles are struggles over space and time. Civil Rights, Gentrification, and History itself are sites where whites control the time it takes to make progress, the desirability of space throughout time, and the purpose of timelines and commemorations to make history in the white racial frame.
The museum created for the 450th and exhibited in the Visitor Information Center entitled
“Tapestry: The Cultural Threads of First America” highlights diversity and inclusion, portraying
71 the confluence of European, African, and Native American cultures as the beginning of what would become multicultural America. This is done visually and spatially through the wax figurines of three men placed at the entrance to the exhibition, one Spanish, one, Native, and one
Black. The museum’s claim to the connections between this colonial moment and the present day is emblematic of the neoliberal multiculturalism of the city’s tourism narrative, which highlights friendly ethnic relations, individual entrepreneurial success stories, and naturalistic reconstructions to transport visitors into a romantic past, leaving power and violence out of the story altogether. When violence does enter the narrative, it is between Europeans. The historical storytelling even leaves women out, most starkly in the idea that Americans descend from three men, and through powerful silences regarding women in the historical narrative. Furthermore, the narratives leave out stories of resistance that could include diverse voices and further illustrate the historic and global role of the city.
Settler colonialism makes sense of all these themes. Without the settler imperative to prove the land is European and thus white, there would be no need for the dramatization of the past through characters and storytelling. The present is the impetus for any reformulation of the past into narrative for tourist consumption. Part of this is a profit impetus, but another reason is ideological. Political economy, as articulated by feminist thinkers such as Patricia Hill Collins and Angela Davis, is not simply the structure of capital accumulation in a society. It is the web of ideology and bodies necessary to maintain the social structure that upholds society-as-enterprise for a few wealthy individuals. In their research and theorizing, they unveil how caricatures of black masculinity, femininity, and family ideologically justify the savage mechanisms of the plantation economy which exploits real black bodies for real white profits. Therefore, political
72 economy is inextricably tied with racial hierarchy and the racial thinking that upholds it; white supremacy is not the result but the momentum of political economy.
The historical storytelling in St Augustine is also important because it represents regional
Heritage, in part defined by the colonial political economy. Northern Florida and St Augustine specifically are included in a Deep South heritage narrative in ways that South Florida is not.
Small tour companies and Frommer’s EasyGuide groups St Augustine with Charleston and
Savannah, not just due to geographical closeness but to the fact of shared colonial histories and plantation economies that survive to this day for tourist consumption, visually and in each city’s labor and housing markets. The visual tourist landscape of each city in this region is a mix of
‘Old South’ and ‘Southern Charm’ made of waterfront downtowns, Gilded Age architecture, and a bustling food and nightlife scene. History with a capital H dominates the tourist narratives of each city. Of course, there are many cities in between with just as much history which don’t get the same attention, like Jacksonville in between St Augustine and Savannah, a city with substantially less ‘charm’ that isn’t recommended for tourists. The three cities connect Florida,
Georgia, and South Carolina in a postcolonial, settler plantation society whose beautiful parts are packaged up for tourist consumption with the unseemly bits, the dynamics that actually characterize the nation we live in today, remaining hidden from view under the auspices of southern charm and authentic heritage.
Though it is a city narrative, the museum curators, author of the commemorative book, and collective archaeologists and historians who write the city’s historical narrative make it clear that the city represents an origins story of the nation. The way the narrative presents the characters, the historical storytelling, tells us more about the present than it does the past.
Foucault defines discourse as the conditions of possibility for speech or storytelling in the
73 present. The characters and their stories presented as History in St Augustine are selected, consciously or not, because they fit into myths and ideologies that present-day Americans widely subscribe to.
Following Foucault’s general intellectual contributions and postmodern critiques, truth itself is not only impossible to arrive at but anything portrayed as authentic truth is only seen as such through the eyes of the uncritical beholder. Within the settler colonial episteme that has created the disciplines that tell the truth of history to a touring audience, authenticity goes unquestioned. However, using Foucauldian archaeology we can begin to see the direct lines between settler colonial ideological justifications and history in the present. Sociologist Avery
Gordon writes in her exposition of the concept of haunting that sociology is a “history of the present”—not historical but archaeological or genealogical in the Foucauldian sense of the term.
Though Foucault traced institutions from their birth in European consciousness through their changing-same nature over time to their present instantiations, we can use his work as a method for tracing discourses and representations that the institutions have provided. Discourse, in this sense, is authorless. This does not mean that it comes from nowhere, but rather that it comes from the constricted space of a certain power knowledge formation that allows only certain stories to be told, certain characters to be remembered, and certain methods of research to be utilized at the expense of others which fall outside of the epistemological grid of authoritative knowledge as well as the regime of truth known as authenticity.
The St Augustine Story at the 450th
Right at the north end of pedestrian St George street lies the Visitors Information Center
(VIC), renovated in 2006 alongside a new parking garage as part of a plan to manage tourists and
74 traffic in the city’s downtown. Tourists pay fifteen dollars per day to park in this $20 million facility, which was funded mostly through federal grants. St George Street is just a few steps away as is the fort, Ripleys Believe it or Not! museum, and the “uptown” area of downtown where the giant mission cross is located. Inside the Visitors Center today, museum, information, and gift shop merge in an open airy space that functions as a meeting and rest place, with bathrooms and air conditioning as additional attractions. For this reason, there is a constant flow of people in and out of the museum space, especially on the weekend of the 450th. Outside is landscaped to perfection from the parking garage to the entrance to the Visitors Center, with palms and fountains to complement the building’s arches and red tile roof. The ground leading to the entrance is an enlarged tile mosaic map of 1769 St Augustine, surrounded by artistic embellishments of tropical foliage. Once inside, the space is recognizable as a museum by the larger-than-life displays of timelines and archival photographs, and the sight and smell of a reconstructed palm frond “first house” described as a “reproduction of an early Spanish-adapted native American building that once stood at the original Menendez settlement site.” Central to the exhibition and still on display today as focal points of the Visitors Information Center are the three wax figurines created for the 450th, meant to represent the title to the exhibition, “Tapestry:
The Cultural Threads of First America.” Throughout the museum storytelling these characters are developed with specific reference back to the wax figures.
The museum was a mixture of dioramas and figurines, documents and images on display from the archives, and current experts all telling the story of the city through the lens of the museum’s claim that St Augustine represents “the very birth of our nation and the American culture.” Further, the museum curators are clear in explicitly stating that “St Augustine is a living classroom for people of all backgrounds to learn about hope, freedom, tradition, opportunity—
75 and even defeat. It is the story of America.” Alongside these words on one of the first displays, the historical moments of discovery and first contact are highlighted visually, depicted literally through a period painting as well as represented through two present-day photographs—a
“Spanish ship appears on the horizon,” a “Spanish supply boat” travels on the salt marsh at dawn.
The commemorative book is a glossy coffee-table volume published expressly for the
450th. J. Michael Francis comes from Canada, has his PhD from Cambridge, and is now a professor of history at University of South Florida St. Petersburg (USF St. Pete). Through his participation in the 450th Commemoration Commission and as the author of the commemorative book, he has more of a public forum than most scholars and historians. The audiences at his talks are not necessarily academic, he gives frequent talks at historical societies and public libraries, and he also writes about “the African American experience.”
Books were sold inside the Visitors Information Center, and the inside cover inscription in my second-hand copy implies was given new as a gift to guests at a downtown inn—
“Compliments of Bayfront Marin House September 2015.” The first page of the book is an advertisement with copy that reads the following, original emphasis included:
Saint Augustine
HISTORIC INNS
Where Romance & History Come Alive
Thank you for joining us in the celebration of our city’s 450th anniversary
SAINT AUGUSTINE AMERICA’S FIRST CITY
Congratulations on your Exploration, Innovation, & Enduring Spirit.
1565-2015
76 www.StAugustineInns.com
The text is bordered by architectural photos of building façades—the city’s historic inns. Before the contents page we are reminded of the title of the book, “ST. AUGUSTINE AMERICA’S
FIRST CITY A Story of UNBROKEN HISTORY AND ENDURING SPIRIT.” The phrases
“first city,” “unbroken history,” and “enduring spirit” are all identifiable as tropes of the settler imagination, the leaps of faith/mental acrobatics necessary to claim the USA as a White nation.
Legal and symbolic settler colonial claim to the land in these turns of phrase relies on the colonial-modern dichotomy of primitive and civilized, embedded with a linear and evolutionary development concept of time and history. Indigenous peoples are figured as primitive prehistorical earth beings compared to the Europeans figured as rational settlers, a word which invokes such sentiments as order, permanence, and most importantly, an inevitable accomplishment, a historical development. New England history texts throughout the colonial period and after continue to use this “firsting” convention in their titles, using European settlement as a starting point for their histories and labeling Indian peoples millenniums-long presence on the land as ‘prehistory’ only (O’Brien 2010). This move operates as part of the
“inherently eliminatory” nature of settler colonialism, it is an ideological component of the genocide settler colonialism needs to displace and replace the original owners of the land it claims (Wolfe 2006). “Unbroken history” and “enduring spirit” represent the continuing project of settler colonial claims which makes it a structure (Wolf 2006; Glenn 2015); settler colonial genocide is an incomplete and volatile project in constant need of performative warrants to its claims.
77 Periodization in the Settler Project
The periodization of the text follows this naming, and in St Augustine as in New
England, Indian history is relegated to prehistory in the first chapter of the book entitled “Before
Menendez” which, furthermore, focuses almost entirely on ‘the encounter’ between Menendez and the indigenous people. A “settler move to innocence” (Tuck and Yang 2012) completes the discovery doctrine stock story—Menendez “could not have known”3 that the land was not his own.,” There is natural history and archaeological information on the Indians who once populated Florida. This naturalism also functions to place indigenous peoples in prehistory, literally bones in the earth when framed as objects of the archaeological gaze. Natural history adds component of biologism and associates indigenous peoples with nature as opposed to humanity, furthering the settler ideological project that claims, “Indians can never be modern”
(O’Brien 2010: xi).
In the following chapter Francis debunks the popular myth of another well-known explorer, Juan Ponce de Leon, who was not looking for a fountain of youth and probably never set foot in St Augustine. Though Francis claims to debunk the myth that Juan Ponce de Leon discovered Florida at St Augustine where he found the Fountain of Youth, he reinscribes the myth through the performative act of using chapter two to retell the story. Ponce de Leon cannot be left out because his mythology is another ‘firsting’ stock story, the naming of “La Florida” by
Europeans operates as a claim to White settler ownership of the land. The next three chapters frame the city as European by placing it in the context of struggles between European nations for territory, and explicitly mark this period as the beginning of Florida history “The Florida
3 The text states Menendez “could not have known that his new settlement was on a site that already had a long history of uninterrupted human occupation.”
78 Enterprise Begins: Pedro Menendez de Aviles and the Establishment of America’s “Oldest”
City,” which tells the story of the contest between France and Spain for Florida and importantly identifies the settler colonial project in the state as “enterprise,” a business. The next chapter is a continuation, starting right where the previous chapter left off, narrating the naval battle between
French and Spanish at what is now known as Matanzas (translated to massacre in English) Inlet.
It is important to note that the massacre is of fellow Europeans, echoing the idea that world history is Eurocentric, and that modernity is exclusive to “Whites only.” Chapter five “Worlds
Come Together: St Augustine Before Jamestown” serves as an introduction to the chapters that follow, introducing St Augustine as a Spanish colony in the context of the thirteen colonies. This is the strategic re-entry of non-whites into the historical narrative:
“In 1607, when a small band of Englishmen founded Jamestown, St Augustine already had existed for forty-two years. By then, St Augustine possessed many of the qualities and features of other Spanish settlements in the Americas. It was a diverse community, inhabited by a mixture of noble families, soldiers, sailors, slaves, free blacks, and Indians…Life was not extravagant, but St Augustine’s residents rarely suffered starvation.” (71) The chapter goes on to highlight “St. Augustine’s Early Settlers,” “Women in St Augustine,” and
“Struggle and Survival” through subtitled break out boxes and ends with the refrain “Yet against overwhelming odds, the town survived.” Survival and endurance become key themes throughout
St Augustine historical storytelling as settler ‘proofs’ anchoring White claims to Indian land in hard work and “survival against the odds” which implies a type of White worthiness also seen in natural selection theories. The next chapters all cover the same time period from 1565-1763, each with a different theme or perspective. Chapters six through eight are entitled, respectively,
“Priests, Friars, and Missions, 1565-1763,” “Spanish-Indian Relations in St Augustine, 1565-
1763,” and “Africans in La Florida, 1565-1763.” The chapter on missions begins with the idea that “In a town characterized by racial and ethnic diversity, Catholicism promoted a sense of
79 shared identity” (96) and is careful to maintain that “violent encounters were rare, and friars often boasted about the numbers of converts. Indeed, seventeenth-century Florida produced few martyrs, and most friars lived peacefully with mission Indians.” (100) The same thread is continued in the next chapter, entitled “Spanish Indian Relations.”
Construing “Race Relations” in Colonial Florida
Francis opens this “Spanish Indian Relations” chapter with an archival image on an unnamed Indian person and two quotes from letters to King Phillip III in 1600. The “race relations” paradigm this invokes functions to obscure the nature of the relationship between
European colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the Americas, mirroring the ways in which the phrase “race relations” has persevered in sociology despite all evidence that points to oppression and domination between people with disparate power, not even-handed “relations” between equals (Steinberg 2007). The quotes that frame the chapter are instructive. The first is from an Indian woman identified as “Doña Maria, cacica (chief),” the second from St
Augustine’s then Governor. In the quotes, Doña Maria explains that she has been a Christian since childhood and her town of St Augustine always serves the Spanish, and the Governor explains that in her capacity as an Inn keeper “she encourages other Indians to render their obedience…Her mother was also a very good Indian” (106, quoting St Augustine Governor
Gonzalo Mendez de Canzo letter to King Philip III in 1600). Doña Maria also has her own inset on page 109, complete with a picture of the document quoted and an artistic rendering of her likeness.
Chapter eight “Africans in La Florida” begins with a present-day photo of a black reenactor at Fort Mose. Fort Mose makes some appearances in the St Augustine historical
80 storytelling, but its place in the storyline mirrors its marginal location in the city and in the tourism scene. If you know where to look, you’ll find it. Located north of the tourist downtown on US 1 right before speed limit goes up to 65 and you are officially out of the city, the street leading to the park is marked by the city gates and conquistador statues on either side and of course one of those small brown street signs connoting heritage hides among the oaks and
Spanish moss. The park educates visitors about African American history including slavery, and hosts reenactment events and a society of Black reenactors. It is a site on the Florida African
American Heritage Trail, the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, and the National
Underground Railroad to Freedom. However, in contrast to the Fort Mose Historical Society website where the park is promoted as an educational and cultural destination and “community of freedom,” the park is promoted by the Florida State Park website as a nature park, birdwatching destination, and place to experience musket firings by reenactors (they shoot cannons from there too which can be heard from miles away). History is mentioned as one draws of the park among many others, though the cover image is one of mostly Black reenactors, all men, in period attire. According to Florida State Parks, The Fort Mose site is a “HISTORIC
SITE OF A FREE-SLAVE SETTLEMENT, PRESERVING HISTORY AND NATURAL
BEAUTY” [sic]. Most egregious, the Florida State Parks system refers to Fort Mose as a “free slave settlement,” a revealing contradiction and expose exemplified in the quote chosen to begin the chapter on “Africans in La Florida.”
As the story goes, Captain Fransisco Menendez escaped slavery to Spanish Florida where he was “granted freedom” on the condition of military service at Fort Mose, where he became military commander. In a 1740 letter, he writes the following in a letter to King Philip V asking
81 to be financially compensated for his work leading “his free black militia” (as the texts puts it) on dangerous missions to protect Spanish St Augustine from British attack:
“My Lord: As your humble slave, I fall to Your Excellency’s feet. I beg and implore you to help me secure my confirmation as Captain of the Free Blacks of this garrison, and I ask that you provide me with some renumeration for all the services I have performed on your behalf. I also request an annual salary of any amount Your Grace sees fit.” (116) This quote comes from Menendez after decades of military service. He is at this point a decorated military general who has served the crown loyally. Therefore, the way he frames his request should force one to question the extent of his status as a free person. Furthermore, Fort
Mose is on the northern margins of the city, so the ‘free’ blacks at the Fort Mose site were the first line of defense against the French and British to the north. Thus, the text relays that they were often “swept up” into these conflicts as bargaining chips and the Menendez chronicle shows that before he finally departs for Cuba after Britain took control of Florida. It would be hard to argue that a person with no choice but to defend the people who would enslave them is free, especially considering the evidence provided by the letter. The other character developed in this chapter is Juan Garrido, who “enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a conquistador,” (a
Black conquistador) supposedly freely accompanying Ponce de Leon on his first expedition to
Florida in 1513, and later helping Hernando Cortes conquer Mexico. After quickly detailing the number of "slaves” in early colonial St Augustine and providing the obligatory archival documentation of human trafficking, the chapter finished with several pages on the history of
Fort Mose—after all, “by the second half of the seventeenth century, St Augustine’s black population became increasingly important for another purpose: defense” (122). In what must be one of the most lucid passages of the chapter, the author admits that Black people in the past were treated much like they are in today’s “race relations” politics—as pawns in White dramas
82 and power plays. However, this is not an explicit lesson of the text. The main characters chosen as heroes to represent African Americans in Florida colonial history are those who defended and participated in colonialism. To whom today do these characters bear resemblance? People of color who do the master’s work will always be honored in White supremacist settler narratives.
If you have to be diverse and inclusive, best to include the “good ones” because characters in historical storytelling are role models, our “silent teachers” from the past as the executive order on monuments and American heroes4 puts it.
Moving from how and on what terms the historical storytelling includes Black and
Indigenous people to how the narrative functions to legitimize White settler possession of the land and space through landscape, the next chapter covering this same time period is entitled,
“Defending the Empire: Pirates and Pillaging on a Spanish Frontier, 1586-1763.” It tells the story of the city’s non-human defenses as Europeans, including the pirate Sir Francis Drake, battle over control of Florida. This is the story of how the fort was built and why we have the city gates. Non-Europeans are referred to in this chapter only to advance the European-centered storyline, for instance in the sentence: “Florida suddenly found itself in the backdrop of a bitter and violent conflict between competing European nations and their Indian allies, altering the peninsula’s political and economic landscape. The struggle for Florida was just beginning.”
(147). There are also a few casual references to slaves, and the “free black militiamen from Fort
Mose” appear in the end of the chapter when they “joined with Spanish soldiers and their Indian allies” to defend the city from the British. The hero of this chapter is the fort. Nearly 8 full pages of photos and archival images of the fort, officially named the Castillo de San Marcos, fill the pages of this chapter plus two of Fort Matanzas located at the original inlet miles south of the
4 Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes signed by Donald Trump
83 city. These are the city’s defenses and as such are credited with allowing the city to prevail despite constant armed attack and several transfers of power between European nations. As elements of the storytelling, the battle between European nations for control of the city gives the impression of healthy competition or fair play. The tone of the text is unbothered by war and violence, with an air of swashbuckling hubris. Black and Indian people are not characters or heroes but allied armies. There is no room to resist when the battle isn’t about you—though many battles were indeed fought over the status of so-called races and many non-whites of various nationalities did virulently resist colonization, enslavement, and displacement, the historical narrative occludes these facts by portraying White territory wars as dramas between
Europeans in which the only characters of color are cast as “allied” extras.
Chapter ten “A New Frontier: British Florida, 1763-1784” covers the British period in
Florida,” highlighting the accomplishments of British plantation owners and developers in this roughly twenty-year period. The chapter is highly visual and filled with present-day photos of buildings and architectural facades in the “colonial quarter” and around downtown. The inclusion of so many present-day images makes a special connection between this time period and the present, though the connections between British plantation society and our current society is occluded. We also learn about East Florida’s first British Governor, described in the following passage:
“a highly capable governor, managing his own successful indigo plantation. Grant actively promoted the expansion of East Florida’s plantation economy, and he proved to be a skilled administrator and diplomat. He understood the importance of maintaining peaceful relations with East Florida’s Seminole, Creek, and Cherokee populations, and his Indian policies emulated earlier Spanish strategies, with generous gift-giving and regular conferences at the core of his diplomacy.” (163) Another detail glossed over in this chapter is that “plantation owners introduced thousands of slaves into Florida, who soon outnumbered whites two to one” (158). Despite this fact, the author
84 chooses to tell the story of the Menorcans or Minorcans, immigrants who came to St Augustine from the Mediterranean as laborers during this period. Many people who claim generations of St
Augustine heritage identify as Minorcans, and Minorcans who saw their surnames on the confederate monuments spoke out against their removal earlier this year. This is the first chapter with over twenty images, over half of which are present-day photos. This visual emphasis is important because it connects the reader to the past through visualization—images from around the city which they can remember visiting or plan to visit, making the visual connection between the present and the European past. The next chapter covers “The Second Spanish Period: 1784-
1821” in the explicit context of a post-revolutionary America and Spanish decline, weaving eclectic bits of information on slavery and revolutionary wars together to come to the ultimate conclusion and narrative resolution: “Two years later the Spanish flag was removed from the
Castillo de San Marcos, replaced by the Stars and Stripes. More than 230 years of Spanish governance in Florida had come to an end” (188). Finally, we are in familiar historical territory,
Florida statehood. This is the cognitive resolution Ewick and Silbey (1995) argue serves as closure for the reader, the pleasure of arriving in familiar territory. As a resolved narrative of settler time, this resolution supports the idea that the settler project is completed.
Florida: An American Story
“From Territory to Tourism, 1821-1885” begins with the hoisting of the American flag witnessed by a private in the military at the time, and quickly moves to narrate both Florida’s
Seminole Wars and Florida’s involvement in the Civil War. This chapter is filled with nineteen images, all but six of which are present-day images of buildings, cemeteries, and monuments around downtown. Not only do these images serve to connect the reader to the here and now, but highlighting the built landscape also operates as a settler claim to land—proof of having been
85 living on the land and permanently altering it. According to the text, “Increasingly hostile relations with the Seminole Indians and their black allies led to the outbreak of the Second and
Third Seminole Wars, 1835-1842 and 1855-1858. Casualties on both sides were high” (196). The text covers the moment before the civil war, when women marched in the streets to demand secession from the Union, and the moment after, through the stories of former slaves:
“[St Augustine resident] General Kirby-Smith was one of the last confederate Generals to surrender to union forces...From 1855 until the end of the civil war, Darnes was one of Kirby-Smith’s slaves and served as his valet. When the war ended, General Kirby-Smith provided financial support for Darnes to attend Lincoln University. Darnes later earned a medical degree from Howard University and practiced medicine in Jacksonville, Florida… Another fascinating local figure was the African-born slave Sitiki, whose slave name was Jack Smith. Following the war, in 1867, Jack “Uncle Jack” Smith became St Augustine’s first black Methodist minister…Together with his former master, the famed historian Buckingham Smith, Sitiki wrote a remarkable memoir of his life, beautifully edited in Patricia Griffin’s recent book, The Odyssey of An African Slave” (200)… When the war ended, many of the veterans returned to St Augustine where they formed the community of Lincolnville, in honor of President Lincoln. (202) Today, one monument commemorates Dr. Darnes and Confederate General Kirby-Smith
(together). It is important that the two men are monumentalized in stone together, rather than as separate individuals, because it portrays their relationship as an exemplary and instructive one.
Just like Sitiki, who doesn’t have a monument, we are reminded that success comes best through a relationship with a White man. Furthermore, the idea that a Confederate General and the man he enslaved can become friends after the war promotes the idea that race politics is just
‘difference of opinion’ rather than life or death struggle. Lastly, the General and the Historian are portrayed in the text as moving easily from human traffickers to benefactors. This could and should be an opportunity to question the role of charitable giving and benevolent philanthropy in the maintenance of systems of oppression. If meant to include Black people, the narrative only
86 reinforces White savior tropes and marginalizes Black stories. This marginalization of non-
White narratives is most evident in the claim that the most “dramatic changes” to the city had nothing to do with Black folks or the end of slavery—the book cites that the catholic diocese of the city was founded, the city became a winter resort destination, the lighthouse was completed, and the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind opened. Setting up the next and penultimate chapter, this one ends with the fort:
“Fort Marion continued to be an important military installation, serving in the 1870s and 1880s as a prison for western Indians, including Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne. As the nineteenth century came to an end, St Augustine experienced one of the most dramatic transformations in its history, sparked by the arrival of one of the country’s wealthiest men, Henry Morrison Flagler.” (206) This statement is paired with images of imprisoned Indians wearing military uniforms, and includes a full page spread of pictures of the “art” they created on the walls of their cells that was sold to tourists at the time and on display in museums today. I dedicate a chapter to unpacking in detail the ways in which the fort narrative supports the White supremacist settler colonial project.
The penultimate chapter entitled “The Flagler Era, 1885-1913” follows the Flagler thread and can be summed up with the statement that “Henry Morrison Flagler shaped present-day St
Augustine’s physical landscape and its skyline more than any other person in the city’s history”
(211). Flagler also changed the city’s landscape by filling marshes, building a jail, and changing street names to Spanish all with the vision of St Augustine as an American Riviera. This image- heavy chapter includes twenty-four images, all photos of buildings and architecture, the city’s skyline, or Flagler himself. Again, the visual nature of the chapter compared to others is not only attention grabbing. It relates the present to the past through the lens of a “great man” in Florida history, and highlighting the importance of the built landscape (though not identifying why it is so important). The list of Flagler’s accomplishments operates as another proof of settler land
87 claims: not only did he build landmarks, but he conquered nature, made Florida livable and accessible to tourists. The fact that the state today survives by tourism drives the argument home, leaving the impression that if it weren’t for Flagler, Florida might still be the “uninhabited swampland” it never was but was always imagined to be. Furthermore, “the Flagler era” is also the reconstruction era, the Jim Crow era, the Indian extermination policy era, the colonial era.
Naming the period after Flagler only disconnects the place from the rest of US and world history.
Finally, fourteenth and final chapter entitled “St Augustine in the Twentieth Century” begins with the early consolidation of the city’s heritage tourism industry and brings us all the way through to the present. The historical society is formed in 1883, the government and private organization fund preservation and infrastructure, and the 1965 quadricentennial spurs extensive reconstruction and restoration. This chapter contains all of the book’s information on the civil rights movement in St Augustine—the city is acknowledged as a catalyst in the civil rights movement for a few reasons, most notably for Dr King’s time there and the highly publicized photos at the Monson hotel of a white man throwing acid into the hotel pool where black activists were “wading in” to protest segregated swimming. The beginning of the section on the civil rights movement begins with the epigraph: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody
Knows but Jesus. -Old Slave Song,” but does not detail the state terrorism of Jim Crow segregation that spurred the movement. This section on the civil rights movement ends by telling us about the self-guided tour in Lincolnville and the Accord Civil Rights Museum that opened in
2014, leaving it up to the reader to find out if any African Americans live in the city today. The subheading “St Augustine at 450” and a photo of a colonial quarter woman closes out this last chapter: “Over the past few decades, major public improvement projects, new attractions, exhibitions, and architectural restorations have helped the city maintain its status as one of the
88 country’s most desirable tourist destinations…” (249) The epilogue comes after a full-page- spread landscape of the fort at dawn—a photo of a 1650 bocce ball courtesy of City
Archaeologist Carl Halbirt, the 1827 poem “Farewell to St Augustine” by Ralph Waldo Emerson which ends with the lines “Be to thee ever as the rich perfume/Of a good name, and pleasant memory,” and three present-day photos of archaeological digs. Before the book closes, there is one last full-spread photo of the city gates, and just as a tourist would the reader leaves the city the same way they entered it, transformed. The whole twentieth century is collapsed into once chapter because it is simply not what the St Augustine story is about. That the most recent century is elided gives yet another clue to the importance of colonialism in promoting a White settler narrative of the nation’s history.
Sociological Perspective on St Augustine’s Historical Storytelling
Sociologist Avery Gordon writes that sociology should be practiced as a history of the present, as way to look at the how we use the past to fulfill current cognitive needs to reconcile the current state of affairs. Haunting is what happens when the past cannot let go, when the present is too filled up with the past, and when the societal ghosts haunting individuals rear up their ugly heads to be seen and heard and viscerally felt. Haunting, then, is a metaphor for social memory. In the US, the social memory of race looms large. Not just racialized slavery, but the displacement of Indians and extermination policies against them, the forces of imperial white capitalism that destroyed land and life to build cities and sprawl, and the policy of rugged individualist assimilation that led only European immigrants to be considered white. In historical storytelling in St Augustine, the past is always present, whether it be in a particular attraction or the general landscape aesthetic. In tying the past to the present in the 450th museum and commemorative book, the past is tied to the present constantly. Three main themes appeared
89 through this research as ways in which the city is working to tie the past into the present, and I will show how these main themes work to consolidate a settler colonial mindset in the white racial frame.
First, the historical storytelling is clear that St Augustine is “the first permanent European settlement” in what is the present-day USA. “First” and “oldest” designations rule the day— oldest house, oldest school, oldest town plan, first city government, first free black settlement, first catholic church, first tavern, and the list goes on and on. “First” is one of the ten most frequent words throughout the entire 450th museum, and the city even claims to have had the actual first thanksgiving. What does it mean to make claims to first and oldest? Julian Go (2018) calls for more research on the ways in which white greatness is figured in settler colonial narratives of the nation. What he calls the “discourse of white agency” pervades the St Augustine story, albeit with a slight twist. In the St Augustine-as-national-origins-story narrative,
Europeans arrived and turned Florida into the American state it is today. The natives helped, benefitted, and then kindly disappeared for the white settlers, who can now claim the place as their oldest settlement. Indians are included in the story as contributors, supporting characters as the plot moves along. This is evident in the unfolding of the book’s chronology—Indians predominate the storyline in the early chapters, and after the chapter entitled “After Menendez,” they all but disappear except for the occasional mention of “Indian allies” and a couple paragraphs on Indian imprisonment at the Fort. The British and Henry Flagler are given the most credit for their developments in St Augustine, both credited with making the city what it is today. The Spanish are notable in the city’s history as an attraction, one that Henry Flagler drew upon when he landscaped the city as an American Riviera. Thus, the city escapes claims to broader Hispanic heritage that could align with a positive attitude toward Latino immigration.
90 While the Spanish discovered the city, the settlers are portrayed in the narrative as broadly
European, and audiences are reminded through storylines in the museum and book and monuments throughout the city to the Greek, Menorcan, British, and other European “settlers” of
St Augustine. This amounts to a sort of American mestizaje, in which Black and Indigenous categories are portrayed as the collective past and deployed to support the White settler progress narrative; BIPOC are included in the national narrative which is inevitably marching past them.
Second, throughout the history-telling the city itself is personified. The classic hero narrative identified by Joseph Campbell as ‘the hero’s journey’ applies to the city of St
Augustine as well as the landscape. According to the museum and text, the city has struggled and survived, emerging from historical circumstances transformed. Survival is a keyword throughout the city’s historical storytelling, and the “enduring spirit” of St Augustine is highlighted again and again. Whether it be hurricanes or fires, pirates or revolts, the city has survived. On the other hand, when we look at the first free black settlement or the Indian villages, they have not survived. The narrative about Indians is a familiar one—they disappeared, died out from
European disease, or gratefully assimilated to European culture. As far as Africans, whom the story is keen to suggest came both as slaves and conquistadors themselves, they are only present in the narrative past. Though many black people call St Augustine home and many of them can trace their roots in the city back generations, all we hear in the storytelling is that there was a free black settlement called Fort Mose in the Spanish periods, only imaginable now looking out over the water on the salt marsh, and that the civil rights movement had a chapter in the city.
Furthermore, when black people are discussed they are most often referred to simply as “slaves” an objectifying dehumanization coming from 21st century writers and a clue into how black residents of the city are considered to this day. The overwhelming narrative thrust is that the city
91 of St Augustine is wholly European, and that the European is what has survived against all odds, in comparison to the non-European which has intermittent appearances in the plotline or is relegated “historical” through language in the past tense. The narrative and images work together to promote settler conceptions of time and space, and they operate as settler proofs attempting to justify today’s erroneous land claims.
Third and lastly, narratives of neoliberal ‘bootstraps’ myths pervade the historical storytelling. St Augustine itself is a tale of survival against the odds, replete with stories of individuals working hard, overcoming obstacles, and getting ahead. The narratives of people of color we do get are well within the limits of this White neoliberal frame. We hear stories of
“good Indians” and African conquistadors, individuals who not only assimilated to European values but who ostensibly succeeded within the bounds of white-supremacist European society through hard work. Including those stories of people who suited European imperial powers at the time, but were dispensable along the way, reinforces an assimilation ‘bootstraps’ myth that says if you work really hard and do it our way then you might have a chance. Take for example the story of Francisco Menendez. Though he is only referred to briefly in the museum, one of three wax figurines is dedicated to his memory and the commemorative book makes Menendez a main character of their chapter on Africans in La Florida. Captured in Africa and brought to the
Carolinas as a slave, Menendez escapes to Spanish St Augustine, where he is recaptured and enslaved multiple times as he serves in the Spanish military for his freedom. Through all of his oppression as a slave, he is undeterred. He struggled for his freedom legally and accepted military service as a condition, he distinguished himself as a soldier for the Spanish army, became a pirate for the Spanish just to be enslaved by the British again, only to be “freed” again after Britain relinquished Florida back to Spain. Through this ordeal, Francisco Menendez did
92 not worry about being a pawn between European powers. He was never resentful or traumatized.
He got on with his life after every setback and used every opportunity at his disposal. He was never a vocal critic of slavery and didn’t start any rebellions, no matter what job he was told to do he knew it was in his best interest to listen to Europeans. He took pride in his work defending the Spanish, even without the monetary compensation he petitioned for. This way, Menendez is representative of the idea that Africans were just fine with the idea of slavery if not their individual situation, indeed if they just worked hard enough through the proper channels, they could better it.
The moral of the story is clear, that Menendez is a “good” African for putting up with his own dehumanization and only accepting freedom through legal means. Obviously, we know that this is a shallow representation. Not only do we not know what he was truly like as a person— what he said behind closed doors to his family or his role in the community of Fort Mose, besides as military leader—but we do not know what the colonial archive doesn’t tell us. In his position as an enslavable person, the archive of him is through a European lens. The story we get of him is already filtered through the European frame, even before we get any stylization that may come with a present-day narration. The work that this story of Pedro Menendez does is to construct the liberal idea of American society as a level playing field. This plays along with the bootstraps myth to produce a worldview where there is and always has been equal opportunity. If
America has always been a meritocracy, today’s grievances about inequalities can easily be dismissed and denied because what the world looks like today is for a reason. The discourse on
Menendez is strikingly similar to discourses we hear about African Americans today. The idea that one can simply escape from slavery and move up in the world parallels the present-day idea that if you want a better life you go out and find it, no obstacle is unsurmountable. After all, look
93 at what this man did as a slave! How could anyone complain today? The story seems to ask, what obstacles today are bigger than those Francisco Menendez faced?
All of these moves serve to connect the past to the present. The cast of characters gives more clues into the moral of the story, whether it is the intended takeaway or not. Who is a main character and why? Why are certain historical figures chosen over others? How are certain events hidden while other events are made visible? Who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out?’ The cast of characters from the past includes Indians, African Americans, and Europeans, and the dynamics between them are key to understanding how these stories relate to present-day racial categorizations and ideologies. Divided into settler time periods, the story of St Augustine retells a familiar political economic mythology of the American Dream and a racial ideology of the
American nation.
The White Racial Frame in the Historical Storytelling Knowledge Economy
In the 450th narrative, the categories of European, Hispanic, African Americans, and
Indian are represented partly through the characterization of important figures in the city history.
Europeans are the most prominent, with a great deal of discussion of Indians in the sections that deal with the past. The only present-day characters are the white city archaeologists and historians, who are credited with rescuing lost artifacts from obscurity beneath the earth. In the past, Europeans are the characters who make world-historical change happen, and who bring life and civilization to make St Augustine the city what it is today. While the narrative acknowledges the contributions of Africans and Indians in the beginning, their influence is framed in the context of “helping.” Indians “helped” colonists adapt to the land, “Indian allies” and free black militias helped European powers fight their wars, and both groups “built the foundation” for
94 European (read: better) civilization to take hold. However, the story lacks a consistent focus on non-Europeans. Narratives about non-whites are confined to a few chapters or museum displays and the non-white heroes chosen by these storytellers always conform to the white racial frame—they are good Indians or black conquistadors, and they are always in the past.
The only conflict worth more than a couple words is that between British and Spanish colonizers. Violence between Indians and Europeans, and against blacks who were enslaved, never meets the eye of the viewer. When it is mentioned, as in the case of the incarceration of
American Indians in the Fort, the authors are careful to remind us that they were good to the prisoners, allowing them to see tourist visitors and sell their art. The fact that their imprisoned display constitutes a disciplinary colonial gaze eludes the writers, who are the same ones to characterize drawings on jail-cell walls as flourishing Indian culture. Violence against enslaved people is also swept under the rug, as are slave revolts and collaborations between Indians and enslaved people to overthrow their colonizers. This amounts to epistemic violence in that the only stories about non-whites are about either suffering or assimilating, both portrayed as passive endeavors as opposed to the agentic actions of the White settlers. In the White stock story of an imagined American past, the only “agents of destiny” are White.
The main characters of the present are not African Americans or Hispanic Americans or
Indians. Though St Augustine has black and Latino communities with many people living to tell the stories of their past and present; though living Seminole communities exist in South Florida,
Oklahoma, and Mexico. Instead of following the storylines of these characters throughout history to the present, the historical storytelling leaves them as characters in the past. The one present day person we meet is one placard at the end of the museum, and she is speaking as a self- proclaimed “hybrid,” born to a Seminole father and Irish American mother. Otherwise, we might
95 forget that black people and Hispanic people and Indian people are still living today. The silence is most explicit when talking about black history. Even though Lincolnville has museums and cultural centers and archives, the book and museum use only a select few pictures of the most famous and mainstream figures. There is no discussion of the present-day black community in St
Augustine, nor do we hear from any African Americans even though there are many living people who can recount the civil rights movement and other black history events in the city. The most we see is a couple photos of black reenactors at Fort Mose, but even those photos are left out of context and underexplained.
Instead, the present-day characters center around knowledge production about the past.
Archaeologists and historians are the heroes of the present for the past, saving historical artifacts from oblivion and unearthing ancient cultures for tourist consumption. The city archeologist is one of few present-day people pictured throughout the museum and commemorative book, and he is the only person from the present-day who is not a reenactor. As the only present-day character, the city archeologist represents the type of knowledge about the city that is respected.
With claims to science and history alongside the affective dimensions of exploration (unearthing secrets of the past), the archeologist is a settler hero. He is necessarily white, an outsider seeking knowledge of the other through objective scientific methods like carbon-dating and
DNA testing. The city archaeologist is also responsible in part for the neoliberal maintenance of the city for consumption. New digs yield new artifacts, as well as new museums to display them and new storytelling to explain them, both of which bring tourists to the city year after year
96 whether they are interested in the history itself or the theme restaurants and attractions that come along with it. Furthermore, the evident importance of the city archaeologist versus other possible present-day characters shows who is important and what matters to the city. History matters in the present through science and Historical societies, but it does not matter for the purpose of context, to trace a regular person or community throughout history to the present. The history as portrayed during the 450th is ahistorical. Lastly, the archeologist is a settler hero because he is acting out the most current phase of manifest destiny, the study of “lost” (targeted for elimination) cultures. Just like the generals who fought against Indians in the expansionary period of US imperialism, archaeologists are “agents of destiny” for a different time.
One of the ways we know that the story of St Augustine is written in the white racial frame is because it echoes tropes identified by indigenous and native studies scholars as key components in settler colonial ideology. Settler moves to innocence are frequent throughout the historical narrative as well as other claims to ignorance in regard to the slave trade. These claims to innocence and ignorance have been discussed in the whiteness and native studies literatures as key aspects of white identity and strategies to reconcile unjust contradictions in order to maintain
(wittingly or not) the current racialized and gendered system of privilege which is incompatible with professed American values (Mueller 2017; Steinberg 2007; Tuck and Yang 2012). Native studies scholars Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang are more specific in identifying these moves to
97 innocence as an aspect of settler consciousness—in order to construct a just claim to stolen land, the settler must constantly recite a series if myths that make America the European settler’s rightful home and moral domain.
One of the images that comes about clearly in the beginning of the story, retold over and over again as the “encounter,” is that of the helpful Indian who realizes European civilization is superior and willingly passes the baton to the settlers when they arrive. Indians are portrayed as
“helping” and “assisting” the colonists, “giving” them their houses and “allowing” them to make modifications to the structures and the land, “providing food for the settlers” and otherwise
“peacefully coexisting.” Furthermore, the Spanish were “well-received” and the Indians “were impressed” by them. Clues into not-so-rosy dynamics come in the form of occasional casual references to “tense relations.” In the book, the Indians are even portrayed as settlers themselves; they are said to have been seasonal migrants to the area before establishing a permanent settlement there. This idea is offered as proof to the statement that “the history of St Augustine’s occupation extends much further back in time than the last 450 years,” which functions not only as an exoneration of the European settlers who we can think of as just another wave of migration but also as proof for the settler cause: the Indians were settlers just like Europeans, not innocent or exalted
In St Augustine storytelling, the narrative about indigenous peoples is overwhelmingly of disappearance. In some cases, the storyline jumps ahead and talks about Indians “dying off” due to disease beginning with discovery. This narrative dismisses the Indians who never surrendered and still live in Seminole communities in the Florida everglades, in Oklahoma, and in Mexico and Cuba. This narrative also dismisses the hundreds of years in which the US waged literal war on Indian communities through brutal violence, literal and symbolic commerce in dead Indian
98 bodies, rape, slavery, child abduction and abuse. Throughout this time period, Indians enter the storyline as “Indian allies” to the British or the Spanish, with one exception being when they enter the story as prisoners at the Fort. The story tells of passive Indian disappearance starting in the 16th century, rearranging the historical facts with sentences like “it was mostly this devastating pestilence that led to the demise of a widespread and complex Native American culture in Florida.” With passive language like “their numbers began to decline” we are left with the story of no-one-to-blame, effectively naturalizing what has in reality been designated as a genocide by many scholars and even the United Nations. To ignore the historical evidence of an entire time period while at the same time claiming any appeal to a multicultural America is another function of the settler colonial nation’s ignorant claims to innocence.
Settler colonialism is self-conscious because of the issue of land and belonging brought as enlightenment values of productivity and order. Since settlers are colonizers here-to-stay, they have to deal with the “problem” of land ownership vis-à-vis the rightful owners of the land they want to settle on. Peaceful coexistence is not possible because the settler-colonizers have different worldviews and cultures of property, ownership, and land use; the European imagination requires a wilderness free of people and careful cultivation of land to prove ownership. Because of this worldview of conquest and utter domination, Europeans cannot be coexisted with. The US waged “total war,” military and vigilante extermination campaigns against all Indians in the Western and Southern borderlands to eliminate or assimilate (cultural extermination) the people who stood in the way of colonial settler expansion (Dunbar-Ortiz
2014). These events are well documented across the Americas information is widely available, and yet they are only hinted at in St Augustine historical storytelling.
99 The Colonial Episteme: Missed Opportunities for Counter-Storytelling
It may be tempting, in these times, to present positive stories with happy endings.
Africans were conquerors too, the Indians were happy to give up their land, and Spanish masters were good to their slaves. While these are the kinds of stories that can be read as uplifting and inspiring, they bear striking similarity to stories we hear today with different characters, stories we would not hesitate to swiftly debunk with the ‘social facts’ of these times. We know that the stories of ‘race traitors’ represent different things to different people. These characters could alternatively be viewed as model citizens or sellouts, depending on who you talk to. In sociology and critical race studies, these figures are characters in the national drama of ‘race relations’ and they do ideological work for white supremacy through the colorblind narratives they are built on.
As tokens, these characters allow the status quo to be preserved because they are deployed as
“proof” of the American bootstraps myth, that race or racism is never a barrier to success, if you just work hard enough.
In St Augustine tourism, the characters may be different, but their function is the same.
These stories are meant as examples, there is a moral of the story and each character plays their part in relaying the message. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2015) contends that part of what emerged out of settler colonialism was a race-gender national identity, composed out of an ideology of race, ownership, and land. White masculinity similarly pervades the St Augustine story. By making heroes out of conquistadors, pirates, and slave owners, the narrative glorifies colonialism and a certain enlightenment expansionist rational-violent masculinity. Further, references to their family values make them into good guys to sympathize with and model oneself after rather than the profiteering villains they are. Women appear in the story in strategic ways, as good examples
(Maria the “good Indian”) or as exhibits to assimilation (“I am a hybrid”) or as defenders of
100 slavery (“Civil war in St Augustine”). Today, we talk about white nationalist masculinity when we think about figures from school shooters to Donald Trump. The main characters of the St
Augustine story demonstrate those same values of crass self-interest, unabashed profiteering, and domination of people and nature —they are historical role models of manhood and success.
Questioning the models of American manhood and success we criticize today must include a critical analysis of these types of heroes in the historical storytelling disseminated in tourist destinations like St Augustine.
Julian Go (2018) shows that the difference between centralizing race and centralizing colonialism is taking race for granted. Centralizing race assumes race as timeless natural fact, starting with race as an explanation without questioning it as a concept. Postcolonial theory, on the other hand, starts from the worldview that race was constructed by and for colonial powers, a modern invention of what has come to be known as whiteness. Eurocentrism informed the construction of the European and Anglo as standard, good, and superior as opposed to racialized, essentialized, dehumanized Others. Race is often taken for granted in St Augustine tourism.
Historical storytelling centers on relations between ethnic groupings and uses today’s racial categories to talk about the past. The narrative uses racially coded language such as “slave and master” without explaining who is black and white thereby refusing to acknowledge white bondage5, and white and Anglo names for Indian communities rather than what they call themselves. Both of these examples show that the curators and authors are well-versed in the language and codes of race in the 21st century, using it as a starting assumption for their study of
5 This is important thinking about book Racecraft because it shows that the authors are using slave as a cognate for black, and assuming that a condition of blackness is slavery without acknowledging that it was a construction of whites with a specific purpose, and whites were enslaved early on and even later were taken advantage of for labor and they had occasion to collaborate with blacks. Race is not an age-old thing that naturally separates us is a dangerous concept and always has been.
101 the past. This reading of history is ahistorical, it begins in the present and frames the past in current terms, to suit contemporary understanding of race and nation. The story of St Augustine could be an occasion to teach about the ways in which race facilitated imperial interests, and how people have resisted the idea of race and the interests of the colonizers for generations. An explicit critical tone would develop critical consciousness in visitors as they experience history around them.
It is not that the storytelling is leaving out stories of “pain and suffering,” though it arguably does that. But to be precise, the historical storytelling in St Augustine is also leaving out tales of resistance, excellence, and heroism. In the 20th century storyline, it is striking that
African American, Indian, and Latino art and literature are left out of the story. In the more
“historical” or colonial timeline, the most striking elision is that of the many rebellions and revolts against slavery and capital, the memory of which today is vague but felt by many across the world. In the story of St Augustine as presented though the lens of heritage tourism,
European empire is hardly contested as it spreads its good graces across the New World. For most of the world population however, the memory of conquest is different. While a white minority inhales a rom-com version of conquest and nonconsensual settlement, the rest of us are left with a memory of constant contest. Revolts and rebellions would betray the fact that this version of history is not universal, that European supremacy is not the inevitable tide of time and progress. This can only be remedied through a combination of the good and the bad—the force whites have exerted to gain and maintain power, and the revolts against that forced supremacy, the important contributions non-whites have made, even and especially if they inherently question the ideology of white supremacy and threaten its existence.
102 One example would be the story of John Horse and the black Seminoles, referenced only once in the book and completely left out of the museum. Though the phrase “the underground railroad ran south” is repeated throughout the book, the museum, and any interview J Michael
Francis does, it is either assumed or explicitly promoted that that is because Spanish slavery was kinder and gentler than British and American slavery. What is left out is the fact that the refuge enslaved people sought was with Indians living in the Florida interior, themselves fleeing slavery and extermination. John Horse led a successful slave revolt, and eventually led a band of Black
Seminole people to Mexico rather than submit to slavery in the US. An extensive website exists that chronicles the life of this hero his historical context, as well as several avenues for archival and historical research through the Seminole Tribe of Florida, yet none of this information is utilized by St Augustine historians or curators.
There is also the story of Georges Biassou, a leader in the Haitian revolution who lived in
St Augustine at the end of the 18th century. During his residence in the city, he fought for the rights of himself and other freed men, a struggle which betrays the idea that the Spanish system of enslavement that allowed for freedom through military service was a kinder and gentler form of slavery. Through multiple thwarted attempts to find greater freedom through appeals to the law, Biassou’s story reveals how the Spanish colonial society used bureaucracy to stall freedom through mundane legal means, and how the legal status of free people of color was tied to the colonial government in power (when the Spanish turned Florida over to the English, the English brought the plantation system with them and free people of color, for example those defending the border of St Augustine at Fort Mose, fled for the Caribbean, Mexico, or Europe). Colonial governments took slow action on formal legal complaints, operated their racial caste systems differently on paper versus in person, and allowed only certain people of color to make
103 advancements with conditions such as military service and work on slave-patrols. This all sounds strikingly similar to how the liberal, “post-racial” state uses bureaucracy and “strings attached” to nullify resistance by keeping it within the constraints of White society, slowing struggles for freedom and liberation without doing so explicitly. The case of Biassou illustrates how colonial governments placed bureaucratic roadblocks in the middle of their so-called avenues to freedom, and how elusive of a notion “freedom” is in the USA in the first place. That these strategies sound familiar shows how important the stories of figures like John Horse and Baissou are—not only does the racial state use similar methods to stymie racial equality, but bureaucratic measures like those he had to navigate are central to the White Masculine claim to objectivity and the continued operation of systemic racism through institutions in the past and knowledge production in the present.
The museum attempts to tell the story of a Seminole person living today, but in vain by leaving out her resistance practice at the expense of highlighting her “hybridity.” In the museum, her narrative is placed at the end of the exhibit amongst pieces of material Seminole culture— textiles, children’s dolls, and artifacts. The narrative is one of identity—she explains being ashamed of her Seminole identity as a child, before she finds peace in her identity through art.
The narrators neglect to mention Jessica Osceola’s activism and education—she gained publicity for showing her artwork in a show entitled “Not Yours, Not Ours, Not for Sale,” critically addressing designer Donna Karan’s spring 2012 appropriation of Seminole designs. So, while the museum focuses on the apparent pain of a mixed identity, Osceola’s MFA education and activist artwork remain invisible. Diversity and inclusion are selective, restricted, and inherently limited principles at best.
104 The culture of empire in St Augustine becomes increasingly apparent through the lens of knowledge production. Beyond the obvious imperialism of romanticizing colonialism through the celebration of the “anniversary” conquest, the entirety of the museum and book is put together from an imperial viewpoint marketed as scientific knowledge. The travel narratives, colonizer’s archives, natural histories and archaeologies, and national park service representations cited throughout are presented unproblematically as knowledge of the past, without any discussion of the limitations of each as a source of data. Furthermore, this universalizing of knowledge and truth presents this story as the story, without acknowledging the possibility of other worldviews or perspectives. Julian Go (2018) calls this the “episteme of empire,” a worldview that perpetuates itself as scientific knowledge, which under-educated viewers perceive as objective, natural, and unchallenged truth. In other words, ideology.
Through this lens, it becomes clearer why there are not more stories of “resistance” included in the historical stories that the state of Florida tells, though not for lack of material.
Within the settler colonial imagination, not only do some stories “matter” more than others, but they are also considered more authentic and legitimate signs of the current place we imagine to be “Florida.” The prevalence of talk and imagery about “old Florida” is instructive here, as it always connotes a familiar picturesque, images of tropical paradise. However, these same place- images of paradise are also actual places which have been nothing further from paradise for those non-whites who experiences them: the plantation, the sugar mill, the railroad, the mission, even the place where land meets water that is immortalized as the moment of “first contact,” the beginning for settlers, the beginning of the end for natives, the beginning of a nightmare for captured Africans. Depending on the audience’s regime of truth, the iconic images of forts and waterfronts take on different connotations and tell different stories (Moreton Robinson 2015). In
105 the Florida story, the water’s edge is not only the moment of European cultural conquest but also the conquest of nature—the taming of the swamp, the departure into space, the use of water to transport labor and industry. Within every episteme, the signs all make meaning for the same larger purpose.
Today we realize that narrative and storytelling hold an important place in the human experience, social life, and institutions (Loseke 2018). Historical storytelling in tourist destinations tells a local and national narrative of the beginnings of the US nation, inviting tourists and locals alike into the story to ‘travel back in time’ and experience the past. But whose past? When we hear the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,” we have to ask for whom because for most women and minorities, a trip back through time would be traumatic and violent. In St.
Augustine, some critics have emerged to ask, if the city’s glamorization of its past through narratives of discovery and settlement may include the minority populations in the story, on what terms? Gentrification of historically black neighborhoods is coupled with civil rights tours; native histories are told without participation of actual native communities or existing native scholarship; characters like Menendez are brought in to represent “Hispanics” in a multicultural story of inclusion and diversity. These contradictions between the reality and the historical storytelling throw into sharp relief the complex connections between knowledge production, profit-driven urban tourism, local politics, and national racial imaginations that go back to the founding of the Américas. Through a critical discourse analysis and visual sociology of these historical stories, this chapter provides a clearer look at how public knowledge may reflect, reinforce, and reproduce racial ideologies and a racialized national narrative. Looking at the
United States in postcolonial perspective shows how historical stories are useful in the settler colonial mission to resolve contradictions between ‘freedom and liberty for all’ and slavery,
106 imprisonment, and objectification for all but the privileged few. The goal of a critical and activist sociology of race, on the other hand, would be to critique the very colonial archive that historical storytelling in St Augustine relies on. Decolonizing consciousness, in this case, would require not only the explicit critique of colonial wrongdoings and constructions of race that persist today but also the representation of diverse and possible dissenting voices.
107 Viva Florida 500! History and Power
Historical storytelling in St Augustine tourism is part of larger statewide emphasis on heritage and memory. In 2015, cities across Florida commemorated the 500th anniversary of the naming of the state by Ponce de Leon, a moment mythologized in St Augustine tourism. The state of Florida branding campaign is based on a ‘frontier’ image of the state that is deeply connected to and promoted through historical tourism. Through examining two sources in the recent celebration of the so-called Florida 500, we can begin to see how the White racial framing of the state and city heritage brand perpetuates White supremacy and the settler colonial project.
The stories that the state tells attracts visitors and new residents alike; Florida is a tourist destination known for theme parks and beaches, but it is also a populous swing-state that deeply influences national politics. In addition to the millions of yearly tourists, almost 1,000 people move to Florida every day according to the 2020 ISG (International Sales Group) Miami Report.
Florida has become known for criminal oddities committed by ‘Florida Man’ (a result of lax rules around access to public records) and as a right-wing extremist outpost with a governor who has used the COVID-19 crisis to prove he is “Trumpier than Trump” and plans to run for president in 2024. This makes an examination of historical storytelling at state level even more important. The following case study of two performative texts created for the state-wide celebration unveils the political economy of knowledge production in historical storytelling and demonstrates the White settler framing of historical storytelling at the state level.
This chapter will begin by telling the story of the Viva Florid 500! celebration. The landscape of Florida history and its main characters are marketed through the lens of heritage. St
Augustine plays a main role in connecting the Florida story to the national origins story, and the
“rich history” of the state and the city is a highlight of the anniversary. Many of the same
108 knowledge producers who participated in narrating the state level celebration would go on to narrate the city of St Augustine’s 450th commemoration two years later Marketers and historians play key roles in creating the “tourism imaginary” (Salazar 2012) of the city, one that is deeply imbricated with racial histories in the South. Explorers, anthropologists, judges, entrepreneurs, and historians are sources of authoritative knowledge that construct the state and city narratives, but they are also main characters in the dramatic telling of these stories, blurring the lines between History and storytelling. By reviewing two different performances of heritage for the
Viva Florida 500! celebration, I show how Florida and St Augustine narrate self-proclaimed diverse and inclusive official histories that upon closer inspection remain within the white racial frame, silencing narratives from the margins that would complicate the positive story of place constructed for tourists. Intentionally or not, the simultaneously diverse yet colorblind narratives produced in and about Florida recreate history from the perspective of the dominant group, constructing a white hegemonic heritage that has implications for national identity. To conclude,
I review how authoritative knowledge functions in the story and the promise of postcolonial sociology for investigating how historical storytelling in heritage tourism constructs race today.
The Historical Story: Marketing and Educational Outreach for the 500th Anniversary
The landscape of the 500th commemoration activities is official knowledge. Whereas the
450th was staged outdoors in St Augustine’s tourist downtown, the present-day setting of the
500th is the museum, NASA, and the courtroom. In the short film Viva Florida, produced to tell the story of Florida from the “encounter” to the present, history and science form the various settings of the storytelling. When the film is not a voiceover of a painting, artifact, or reenactment, Ileana Varela narrates from what appears to be the inside of a living history museum or a NASA lab command center. The reproduction of the interior of a ship is staged
109 behind her and swashbuckling music leads her in. As an award-winning broadcast journalist with a history in Miami reporting, Varela’s nightly-news tone gives the film an air of contemporary authority as well as nostalgia and pride.
The Viva Florida 500! promotional film presents a familiar series of events: Native peoples lived here in complex societies until Ponce de Leon landed, European settlement began, and the introduction of diseases devastated the native population. Conquistadors and missionaries shape European settlement. Florida is the third state to secede from the union, but graciously gives up human trafficking and welcomes northern visitors after the war, when freedom and opportunity is granted to formerly enslaved people. Statehood and Henry Flagler revitalize the city for tourism and development. Civil rights battles take place right here in St
Augustine, the original birthplace of the diverse America we know today. And so the story goes.
Varela sums up the state’s history in a nutshell, voiced over familiar images of St
Augustine, including a living history reenactment, Flagler’s Alcazar hotel, and tourists on a bustling St George street:
“Many changes have transpired since 1513 and we can only imagine what the next 500 years will bring. The commemoration of Florida’s unique history allows us to find common ground and unity regardless of our personal family heritage…we share life as Floridians as well as a proud heritage of our state’s role in American and global contributions. As we remember how far we have come, and what we have in common, may we be better prepared to continue our national leadership role as a state of firsts, as we collectively step into the future.” Here, the scene cuts from Varela in a NASA lab to a shot of a spaceship launch that fills the screen with sky, a rocket tearing up into space in all its phallic, fiery grace. This shot fades into the painted image of a conquistador holding an American flag who raises his glass towards the viewer. Next to him is an Indian woman holding a flower with what appears to be a British flag behind her. As the video ends and the rocket launch fades into the painting, we are left with the
110 image of these two characters with a rocket ship ascending behind them, “Viva Florida 500” emblazoned below them. Before a short list of credits roll, a deep, radio-announcer voice declares the sponsors of the commemoration and their slogans— “Florida League of Cities: The
United Voice of Florida Cities,” “The Florida Lottery: Just Imagine,” and “Florida Blue: In the
Pursuit of Health.” Indians and conquistadors form the backdrop of techno-scientific progress, and Florida heritage is crafted through the alchemy of heritage.
It is made very clear that this is a state effort to commemorate and canonize a “historical past.” The description below the video on YouTube describes the short film:
“Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and before there was a Jamestown, Virginia, Juan Ponce de León landed on Florida's shores. The "Viva Florida 500" television program chronicles some of the most unique and significant milestones in Florida's 500-years of history. The use of archived renderings, images and video together with modern footage come to life on the screen to tell a story of a rich, cultural and historical past. The special was produced on behalf of the Friends of the Museums of Florida History, Inc., as a project administered by the Florida Department of State.” The video series is published on YouTube by Sachs Media Group, a Florida marketing and PR firm recognized as the top firm of their size nationally, “Delivering bold, game-changing solutions that help you conquer your toughest challenges and shift momentum in your favor.”
The Florida company boasts 20 years in business and takes credit for “The Florida Brand” through user experience (UX) research and analysis conducted for Florida Chamber of
Commerce. Their website for The Florida Brand project gives brief descriptions of the study’s survey methods, findings, and analysis, which “focused on identifying areas of opportunity for telling Florida's story and raising awareness about the state's business and cultural resources.”
According to Sachs Media Group website, “The Florida Chamber of Commerce engaged our
Breakthrough Research Division to uncover the truth about how people perceive the Sunshine
State in order to better tell Florida’s positive story.” The Florida image being presented is
111 intentional, positively spinned, and state sponsored, made possible through the various sciences of marketing, archaeology, history, and city government. Furthermore, by understanding the nature of user experience research (human subject research without IRBs) like this we know that the Florida Brand is not so much a novel and autonomous marketing campaign as it is a feedback loop, a reflection of the imaginary and desires of Florida visitors refined and consolidated for marketing purposes.
How the website of the marketing and PR firm that takes credit for “The Florida Brand,” created through UX research is proof that historical storytelling in Florida is neither a wholehearted try at diversity and inclusion nor is it the result of sober scholarly inquiries into the archives. The presumed objectivity of History is complicated by political-economic interests.
States compete for tourist money, but they also more explicitly compete for using the power of a populated territory to influence the nation through congress (not to mention competing for favors in an environment of explicit clientelism). The Florida brand promulgated since the 2013 has been the result of the Viva Florida 500 and Florida Brand marketing campaigns, dedicated to promoting a “positive” story of Florida history. On a slideshow with the seal of Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, available at myflorida.com, Viva Florida 500 is billed as “a “teachable moment” and marketing opportunity to highlight 500 years of history and cultural diversity – a claim no other state can make” with more than 200 events in all 67 Florida counties6. In contrast to other states, Florida is making an obvious effort not only to capitalize from heritage but to teach it as a lesson. The Florida archives’ digital outreach campaign is branded “Florida
Memory” and the FHS website is entitled www.myfloridahistory.org. Compared to most other
6 http://www.myflorida.com/myflorida/cabinet/agenda13/0123/VivaFloridaPres012313.pdf
112 state archives and history websites across the nation, the branding of Florida historical archives is highly nostalgic. Web searches for “Georgia memory” and “Massachusetts memory” yielded resources on dementia and Alzheimer’s. Despite the obvious cultural heritage attractions of both states, the language of memory and collective memory are conspicuously absent from the language of these state archives, perhaps because most library and museum professionals justly acknowledge that the nature of archives is just as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. The stories told in heritage tourism, stories developed and given authority through academia and science, are elements of a state-sponsored brand bent on increasing growth and commerce within the state. Furthermore, in the context of the stated intention to bring in the most dollars through research-based marketing, the Florida Brand and Viva Florida 500 marketers know their audiences—any ‘brand’ is therefore a reflection of the target audience’s preferences and desires. These narratives are interested, and they are instructive, refracting the past through the broken lens of the present to tell us more accurate stories about ‘now’ than they do about
‘back then.’
In addition to the marketing campaign produced by Sachs media group, the Florida
Historical Society’s executive director Benjamin Brotemarkle published “an original courtroom drama” and the script was performed, in costume, on two Saturdays in January. The January 12th performance in front of a full (court) house in historic Deland was telecast to an audience in
Tallahassee and remains on myfloridahistory.org and YouTube, where it has almost 2,000 views.
The stated purpose of the performances and publication of the script, “The Florida Historical
Society Presents an Original Courtroom Drama: Ponce de Leon Landed HERE!!” is public history outreach:
113 “With the approach of the milestone 500th anniversary year, residents of several areas along Florida’s east coast voiced enthusiastic claims that their own town was where Ponce de Leon first made landfall in 1513. Each claimant could point to various interpretations of the available facts to support their position. In an effort to help the general public understand all of the available facts and interpretations, the Florida Historical Society staged this original courtroom drama to present the information in an entertaining way.” (107) The “original courtroom drama” is structured as a script and meant to be accessible in that way for anyone who wants to stage a performance. Staging directions are included in italics, and the setting is detailed from “takes place in an historic Florida courtroom” to where each character is seated. Importantly, the setting directions specify that a Florida map should be displayed prominently in the front of the courtroom next to the witness stand where each advocate will present their case. The advocate parts are acted out by a Florida state attorney, two judges, and the president of a law firm. The names of the characters in the script are the names of those same present-day Florida legal professionals, forever emblazoned in the scripted performance of historical storytelling. Each advocate presents their case to the jury that Ponce de Leon landed in their city, complete with evidence and objections. Importantly, the “Foreman of the Jury…is a direct descendent of Ponce de Leon,” and when the Judge asks the jury to introduce themselves, he is the only one whose introduction is included in the script. Three “very special witnesses” then follow. The props are important symbols of the connections made between history and the law, on the one hand, and race and biology, on the other hand. The map represents the colonial desire for land broadly and is even more significant in the context of settlers claiming the land not only for exploitation but as their own mythological homeland. Drawing the map of America is an original possessive act (discovery doctrine) that remains enshrined in the law today. The legal setting and characters signal the importance of the law in American origins but superficially and without explanation. The choice of courtroom and judges has more significance for the social construction of race in America than history, though undoubtedly the connection exists
114 between law and history as well. But the significance of the map and the genre, plus the “direct descendent” Foreman of the Jury character together elaborate a theory of race. Descent and ancestry continue to rule the day, promoting a “blood” concept of race. Though concepts of ancestry and descent do not on the surface make arguments about racial hierarchy, throughout history they are inseparable from ideas about degeneration, purity of blood, and property ownership. Being the “direct descendent” also confers an air of authenticity on the speaker which cannot be approximated through any other claim—the “Indians” are denied this authoritative authenticity, represented by a ghost who is a witness, not an agent to change the outcome of the
“case.”
As the central figure in the unfolding historical drama, de Leon is revered for the deplorable acts of colonial violence but the question the “court” pursues pertains more to a formality, where he landed, that is superficial in comparison to who he met, how he treated them, and what plans he devised for occupation. In the passage introducing the question to the court, we learn about Ponce de Leon and his would-be accomplishments (the hierarchy of race he would install and enforce), all to finally settle on asking where he landed:
“JUDGE We know that Juan Ponce de Leon was born in Spain in 1474 to a noble family, where he became an experienced soldier. He joined Christopher Columbus on his expedition to the New World in 1493. In 1504, Ponce successfully enslaved the native population of Hispaniola, and was named Governor. A few years later, Ponce was named Governor of the neighboring island of Puerto Rico. It was from there that Ponce set sail for Florida…The contract included instructions for how Ponce was to distribute any gold and slaves that he acquired, and declared that he would be Governor for Life of any lands that he discovered. Ponce assembled a crew of two hundred people that included women and free people of African descent…The next day, on April 3, 1513, Ponce came ashore to claim his and for Spain. But where was he? Where, exactly, did he come ashore? That is the question we are exploring today. Mr. Bustamante, please present your case.” (110) Howard Zinn identifies this type of distortion as ideology, citing how historians mention the atrocities committed by Columbus and then quickly move on to more important things, thereby
115 teaching us to mimic the narrative in our thinking: he did bad things but where would we be without him? The ideological move consists in setting up an image of the world as an equal playing field with Columbus or de Leon as innocent “products of their time” who must be honored for their sins. The set-up of the play alone, the courtroom setting and the chosen actors as well as the importance of being a descendent of Ponce de Leon all speak to the US racial context, of course without explicitly seeming to have anything at all to do with race. Whiteness is functioning as the invisible norm, but not necessarily through white faces (the original play casts a black woman and a Latino as advocates).
Space makes the whiteness of it all so apparent—throughout American history, the courtroom has been a place where racial categories were consolidated, and where whites defined bodies and land as their property through constant legal maneuvering. The courtroom drama is also a fallacy of the American imagination. Beloved television shows like Law & Order portray a criminal justice system in which legal decisions and punishments play out in front of judges and juries, when in fact most cases are settled before they even reach a courtroom. Add to this the fact that Ponce de Leon’s landing site would not be a legal matter today and we have a perfect storm of false consciousness and ignorance. Seeing the factual fallacies of the setting, it becomes easier to see the ideological work that the courtroom does. As an issue of land, it is important to note that the question is not framed as a radical critique of white possession of native lands.
Whereas one could ask a legal question about the discovery doctrine and legitimate ownership, the question of where he landed shifts the focus to the man, the mythical character that is Ponce de Leon, and in the process advertises the cities who claim he set foot there. In true settler colonial fashion, the question of whose land it is assumed from the beginning—it is his land, we are just curious where he originally “landed,” a meaningful word in itself. The
116 reconceptualization of the problem as “where was his landing site” assumes that the land was his and that landing means something. After all, to give up the discovery doctrine would mean that maybe this land isn’t “ours” to begin with.
Indians enter the scene to verify White land claims. The only Indian character in the play is brought back through time and performed by a white woman in brown-face, despite thousands of Indians alive in Florida today. She is the “Ais Queen,” her name a riff on the Indian princess trope (Deloria 1969), characterized as the leader of what the text calls a “savage tribe” (116) inhabiting Florida at the time, here to make her contribution to the cause of verifying where, in fact, Ponce de Leon landed.
“JUDGE Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, our next witness was among the first native Floridians to have contact with Ponce de León during his first voyage here in 1513. Perhaps she can shed light upon where he first landed. Bailiff, please call the next witness. This hearing of the Florida Historical Society calls the Ais Queen to the stand! (The Ais Queen enters stage right, with a purposeful, regal air and takes the stand. She is wearing a deer skin dress and a pelt robe with a shell necklace and feather earrings.) JUDGE Welcome your majesty. Thank you for being here. Please tell us about your encounter with Juan Ponce de León and its impact on your people.” (120) While she starts out with some counter-storytelling—Indian life described as a complex, heterogenous, materially abundant, and culturally diverse society—the script slips into naturalizing discourses characteristic of “ethnographic entrapment” very quickly with descriptions of food, farming, and family practices; “chiefdoms;” “religious ceremonies;” and
“unique works of art” (121). After three paragraphs of this and one paragraph ending with the
Queen letting the audience know “we gave those men a greeting that let them know they were not welcome here” (121), she launches into a familiar narrative of inevitable Indian disappearance through biological disease to conclude her monologue:
117 “That did not stop the Spanish, though. Over the next century and beyond they worked to change our culture by making us abandon our ancient religion and adopt theirs. They enslaved and killed us by the thousands. Finally, the unfamiliar diseases they brought to us proved to be too much for our Medicine Men to fight. The great native societies of Florida collapsed and the people disappeared. Those last remaining were absorbed into other Native American groups such as the Seminoles, who arrived in Florida from the north in the 1700s. When Ponce de León came here in 1513, it was the end of my people's existence. [emphasis mine]” (121) To which the Judge replies, rather insensitively, “We are very sorry for your loss. Can you tell us anything about where Ponce de Leon first landed, before he encountered your people?” The “Ais
Queen” responds that she knows it was north of her where he landed, but that the landscape has changed to such an extent that she could never identify the spot today, even if she did know, remarking that “If you continue down this path, you will no longer be able to call this the “land of flowers”” (122). After this, the judge calls the next special witness, and an important interaction takes place in that is unprecedented in the script until this point:
“JUDGE Thank you for your testimony today. (The Ais Queen slowly gets up and begins her slow, regal walk toward the exit stage right.) Bailiff, please call our final witness. BAILIFF This hearing of the Florida Historical Society calls Juan Ponce de León to the stand! (The Ais Queen has slowly progressed to center stage. Juan Ponce de León strides quickly in from stage right, with purpose. He is looking down, though, and almost runs right into the Ais Queen at center stage. They both stop abruptly and stand up straight, in a surprised, defensive stance. They both stand rigid, starring at each other for a long, uncomfortable moment. The audience should feel the tension between them. Finally, Ponce slowly moves aside, extending his right arm out, inviting the Ais Queen to exit. She slowly does so. Ponce then proceeds to the witness stand and sits down.) JUDGE Welcome Governor. Thank you for joining us. If anyone can tell us where you came ashore and named our state in 1513, we are hoping it is you.” (122) This interaction between the “Ais Queen” and “Ponce” is representative of the white racial frame that is embodied throughout the script. This “tense” but civil scene is a microcosm for what supposedly happened in the process of US settler colonial conquest—the Spanish arrived,
118 purposefully, and ushered the Indians out who may have been resentful but slowly disappeared when told to do so by Europeans. It is a parable, a stock story in the ideological toolkit of power- blind American “race relations.” This scene, though meant to be tense, is also meant to be non- violent. The Indian character exits slowly but she does not protest, she does not fight, she does not expose de Leon. The fact that Ponce de Leon is “looking down” as he approaches the Indian woman and almost runs into her is an allegory as well—it is noted throughout historical storytelling that de Leon stumbled upon Florida by mistake, and that he didn’t know there were already vast civilizations present when he took the land for himself.
Florida Heroes of the Past and Present: A Conquistador, a Capitalist, an Anthropologist, and a
Historian
Archaeology and History are important academic disciplines in the production of heritage tourism sites and stories. Through the tales of Ponce de Leon and Henry Flagler, Florida history is presented through a succession of hegemonically masculine heroes of the past. An anthropologist from the past draws the connections between exploration and science, and a historian from the present questions the importance of Ponce de Leon in Florida history only to reinforce the popular mythology. This collection of characters from the past and the present and the extent of their centering in the historical and contemporary narratives about Florida history is another way in which we can see the white racial framing not only of the past, but of historical storytelling in the present.
The focus on Ponce de Leon probably has more to do with portraying Florida history in a positive light and maintaining the many Florida tourist attractions which mythologize him, than it has to do with telling a true or authentic history. In fact, as popular Florida historian J. Michael
119 Francis pointed out, Ponce de Leon probably never set foot in St Augustine and there is no record that he was looking for a ‘fountain of youth.’ In interviews and the commemorative book published for the 450th, Francis thoroughly debunks the idea that de Leon came to Florida searching for a fountain of youth. Yet, the Florida story continues to highlight Ponce de Leon.
According to Francis, the site of the famous tourist attraction now called The Fountain of Youth
Archaeological Park shows up in early colonial maps as an Indian mission village less than a mile north of the Castillo de San Marcos Fort. After Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain in
1763, residents of the village fled to Cuba, and the new Florida governor James Grant converted the village into farmland “which he used for the cultivation of exotic plants” (27). Grant owned rice and indigo plantations worked by enslaved people throughout East Florida at the time, though Francis does not specify who and what on the Fountain of Youth property — “a succession of farmers, some of them Minorcans, farmed the property” (27). After the civil war, a florist bought the land and in 1874 opened the “Paradise Grove and Rose Gardens” which attracted tourists who found their way to St Augustine on Henry Flagler’s railroad. In 1885 the city inaugurated the annual Ponce de Leon celebration and by 1888 Henry Flagler’s famous hotel was named the Ponce de Leon. But it was not until the early 1900s that the property was associated with Ponce de Leon and his mythical search for the equally-as-mythical fountain of youth. After participating in the Alaska gold rush and many stays at Flagler’s Ponce de Leon
Hotel, the new owner, Chicago physician Dr. Louella Day McConnell, claimed to have discovered artifacts proving Ponce de Leon’s presence on her property. She named the well the fountain of youth and began charging for sips of the water, then for admission to the grounds.
When she passed away in 1927, Florida senator and mayor of St Augustine Walter B. Fraser purchased the property. Years later in 1934 human remains were discovered in an orange grove,
120 and since then archaeologists have been conducting excavations on the property, though no formal claims to artifacts directly relating to Ponce de Leon have been made.
Thus, the claim to Ponce de Leon in St Augustine was articulated in a specific period after the civil war by multiple actors, centuries after he was said to have landed on the city’s shores. This parallels the historical documents that detail de Leon’s voyage—his original log has yet to be found, but narratives created after his death provide the basis for the fountain of youth myth and corresponding myth of his landing in St Augustine. Two accounts published after the death of Ponce de Leon tell the story of him searching for the fountain of youth. The first is published in 1535 by Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, a sworn enemy of de Leon, and in it he paints a portrait of a silly explorer tricked by Indians into wandering aimlessly for a fountain of youth. A later account of Ponce de Leon’s voyage published in 1601 by another Spanish travel writer Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas describes de Leon’s encounters with natives and search for the fountain of youth, but historians question whether or not de Herrera y Tordesillas had the original log like he said or, more likely, wrote the story as a claim to fame (Francis 2015). All of this serves the larger point that whatever story Florida attractions tell about Ponce de Leon, there is still no historical record to prove it, outside of the untrustworthy travel narratives written after his death.
In the Viva Florida 500! Play “Ponce de Leon Landed Here!,” the judge stresses the historical importance of archaeology in the production of historical knowledge, and the role of the
Florida Historical Society as an introduction to the next witness:
So far today we have been relying on primary source documents and various historians' interpretations of those records. Archaeology can also be a valuable tool when discussing Florida's Spanish Colonial era, and the Florida Historical Society has a long history of supporting archaeology in the state. The Florida Historical Society has been preserving prehistory for more than a century. We were the first
121 organization to collect Native American relics in Florida. We were the first to promote and publish archaeological research. We helped to create the position of Florida State Archaeologist. The Florida Anthropological Society began as a committee of the Florida Historical Society. At our statewide headquarters in Cocoa, we host the Florida Public Archaeology Network East Central Region. To help us here today, we call to the stand one of Florida's first archaeologists, Clarence B. Moore. This next witness is a key character in the Florida drama of archaeology; summoned from the past and brought to the scene in living history is Mr. Clarence B. Moore:
“BAILIFF This hearing of the Florida Historical Society calls Clarence B. Moore to the stand! (Clarence B. Moore enters stage right dressed in late-nineteenth century clothing and proceeds to the witness stand.)” Clarence B. Moore is a perfect example of the colonial explorer scientist, and his character helps to construct an idea of history based on a belief in the power of archaeology to tell historical truths. The heir to his family’s paper business, Moore made enough money in the family business to follow his passion in archaeology. He travelled by boat completing “expeditions” and excavations throughout the Southeastern United States as an amateur archaeologist, collecting artifacts and specimens for museums and publishing his findings. Many of the artifacts Moore collected are today subject to the Native American Graves Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)7—it is written into the script for Moore to openly admit that he “sometimes accidentally did significant damage to the Native American Shell Middens and other sites” he excavated. In this script,
Moore represents the confluence of archaeology and history. He, like the others, is unable to provide a clear answer to the question of where Ponce de Leon landed, but he asserts that
“perhaps that will change as archaeological excavations continue” (119), forwarding the idea that archaeology can indeed provide information about the past that speaks to questions which, in
7 Some of the woefully inadequate provisions lauded by NAGPRA allow officially sanctioned tribes to rent their own artifacts and returns desecrated human remains to families and communities who don’t want them. Though it has provided some relief the ownership of the artifacts still remains in White hands
122 reality, can never be answered. What archaeological evidence would tell us where de Leon landed? Though “archaeologists have uncovered early buildings and artifacts from the oldest
European city in America,” it is unclear what type of evidence could serve as proof of de Leon’s landing, and if this is even the right question to ask.
A similar settler hero is celebrated in the St Augustine narrative landscape—builder of the Ponce de Leon hotel, railroad and hotel magnate Henry Flagler made his presence known in
Florida history through architecture. In 2007, The Whitehall Society of the Flagler Museum published what they call a “newspapers-in-education tabloid” to tell the story of Henry Flagler and America’s Gilded Age of 1865-1929, “the most amazing period in America’s history.” The introduction letter from the co-chairs of the society credits Henry Flagler with the invention of the modern corporation and “the invention of modern Florida;” he planned a railway system that brought people to his luxury hotels, he established Florida agriculture and Florida’s first museum. The authors end their introductory letter with the “hope that Flagler’s Florida will not only educate you about Henry Flagler and America’s Gilded Age, but will inspire you to continue the American tradition of thinking big and working hard to accomplish your dreams, and then sharing your success by creating opportunities for others,” articulating clearly that the
Flagler story is meant as a story of the American Dream. Besides telling a story of capitalism and individual bootstraps success, the story of Henry Flagler tells a story of America where race and racism do not exist. The claim that the gilded age was the best and most exciting period of US history makes it clear that this story is written from the white perspective. During this period,
Indians from various cultures and locations were transported west on the trail of tears, Mexicans and Chinese immigrant workers were imported and deported at the will of labor demands, and
Black people were lynched, imprisoned, and controlled through a system of legalized
123 discrimination known as Jim Crow. Widely known racist entertainments like minstrelsy shows
(black face) and movies like The Birth of a Nation proliferated during this period.
During his time and ours, the purpose of the buildings Flagler built was a re-writing of history. Reiko Hillyer (2005) argues in The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts that the focus on Flagler in Florida history and the preservation of Flagler’s St. Augustine landscape promotes a version of the Florida story in which slavery and confederate backwardness did not exist. Instead, Florida was promoted through Flagler’s landscaping and marketing as an exotic paradise for Northern tourists, untainted by politics and civil-war era “sectional strife” between whites. An intentional rewriting of history when Flagler built up and marketed St Augustine in the late 19th century, the story of a Spanish colonial city is made possible today through the same
Gilded Age architecture meant to create an “American Riviera” using Spanish Renaissance and
Moorish revival design elements. Henry Flagler is figured in Florida history as an explorer just like Ponce de Leon, and Florida is literally thought of as having “slept through” the controversial southern past until this “one man” came along and developed the city, connecting it to the modern US through railroads and hotels (Hillyer 2005). The same trend is evident in Florida historical storytelling. The commemorations themselves center the moments of “discovery,” naming, and “encounter” as especially historically important. But why? For whom are these moments important? In a settler colonial and modern state, historical storytelling can convey explanations for the present through characters and perfected scenes of the past. The colonial period is the most important today, towering over the later Flagler period in which much of the actual ‘oldest’ architecture around the city today was built. Because Flagler appropriated a
Spanish Renaissance revival style, it works, and the historical eras blend together into a Spanish destination image which supports the focus on the colonial era in which the city actually looked
124 completely different. This is important because the overall feeling of the place as Spanish and colonial is part of what creates the romance that draws visitors and allows the settler city to be seen in a positive light.
J. Michael Francis is the author of the commemorative book for the 450th and the subject of conversation surrounding the 500th as well. He is a Florida transplant, a Canadian white man educated in Europe who writes about Spanish colonial Florida, including articles on the African
American experience, through his career as an academic historian. In an interview for a Spanish- speaking radio audience, Francis says St Augustine is “enchanting” and that he still feels like a tourist when he is in the city for research. Images and phrases from J. Michael Francis’ work are used verbatim in other media—videos on PBS and the local radio as well as in talks, interviews, and articles about the man himself. Published in March 2013 during the year-long Viva Florida
500 celebration, an article about J Michael Francis gives us his biography and explains some of the central questions of his career centering around Ponce de Leon. Described by Times Staff
Writer as a “blond-haired, blue-eyed, baby-faced historian” who “knows a lot” and is “perhaps our states most prominent Spanish-Florida historian,” J Michael Francis “has been handed the public microphone…he’s the man” (Klinkenberg 2013). The article likens Francis to the Spanish conquistadors— “Ponce explored for gold; Francis digs for the gem of historical significance, something he might bring home to set the record straight” … in a visit to Spain, “the USF professor walked in the footsteps of Ponce de Leon.” Francis’ wife is quoted in the article saying,
“Michael is a real adventurer…When he’s researching, he begins to feel he is living in the past.”
Francis is a modern-day explorer writing St Augustine history. Francis is biased, his judgment is obviously clouded by emotion. Authoritative knowledge has an embodied subjectivity too—
Francis sits in the Plaza and feels the salty breeze on his skin as he bathes in the beauty of
125 Flagler’s architecture, he eats and drinks and is merry in the bars and restaurants that lines the historic streets he is enchanted in. Knowledge has a sentiment no matter how authoritative.
Authoritative Knowledge and Historical Storytelling in the White Racial Frame
Authorship matters in historical storytelling and commemoration because worldview influences what narrators see and what they are blind to. Questions about who has the authority to create authoritative historical knowledge pervade this analysis. Feminist scholars have been at the forefront of theorizing power and how authority is produced and maintained as exclusive.
Feminism have been concerned with voice, charting the connections between language, representation, and power. Feminists have been particularly worried, in the twenty-first century, not only about the power of men’s voices but of the power of the authoritative voice of science.
Expert authority has also been acknowledged more widely by sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman as a key aspect of modernity, with professionalized expertise available on anything from public policy to sexuality to interior design. As a modern invention, then, the authority of expert knowledge arose alongside liberal enlightenment colonialism and the disciplines it spawned—natural history, anthropology, economics, psychiatry, and philosophy to name a few which form the canon through which the Social Sciences and Humanities are disciplined. These disciplines value particular forms of knowledge which fit into a masculine,
Eurocentric value system.
The dichotomies are evident in the privileging of archaeology over oral history that native peoples around the world have uncovered (Deloria 1997; Gilio-Whitaker 2016), or the historical and present denigration of women’s knowledge of their own bodies and minds as opposed to the highly valued authoritative knowledge of doctors and psychoanalysts (Jordan
126 1992; Boston Women’s Health Collective 2003). Because Western thought privileges the written word, texts and documents become extremely important especially inside the sciences themselves as written scholarly production amongst colleagues (designated ‘research’) is valued more highly than the oral dissemination of knowledge through teaching and community involvement (designated ‘teaching’). Because systems of authority are so entrenched, today even certain forms of writing are more privileged than others (prestigious disciplinary jargon, an editorial versus an academic journal publication, long and repetitious versus short and concise, etc.). Critical theorists from Derrida to Spivak have discussed this relationship between writing and power that they theorize as fascist or colonial, and Foucault’s genealogical approach helps to connect the dots between institutions, the discourses they use to represent themselves and the
Other, and the power institutions thus have to create subjects and objects of power. In modern society, people are treated as objects and evacuated of their complex personhood (Gordon 2008) through hate speech and controlling images (Collins 1990). We are also turned into loyal subjects, for example through the neoliberal self-projects of consumerism, psychology, and job markets which call for us to express ourselves, improve ourselves, and sell ourselves.
Outside of academia, where these debates are rarely even had, the public receives authoritative knowledge as authoritative without knowing all of the options. In St Augustine tourism, archaeology and colonial archives are taken without question as the authority on the past—it is coming from the ground beneath our feet, where the conquerors and Indians once stood, after all! With all of this said, it becomes even more important to investigate authorship, whether it be individual or institutional. In fact, across genres and sites in St Augustine tourism, the same voices reappear again and again. Historians and archaeologists are presented as the authoritative knowers of the past. The film cites J. Michael Francis, the historian who served as
127 advisor to the 2015 St Augustine 450th anniversary and wrote the commemorative book. This privileging of academic or ‘scientific’ knowledge over the oral (and written) histories of native peoples still living in Florida is evidence of the Eurocentric white racial framing of the entire historical narrative.
Finally, Archaeology is a main character in the courtroom drama, like DNA in true crime stories, and promises are made for a future of historical knowledge through archaeological exploration. Archaeology in fact used some of the same forensic methods that the American public sees ad nauseum in television crime solving—bones, DNA, and items buried in the earth provide the conclusion to the stories. Archaeology can even be a hobby. Most projects carried out today in St Augustine draw more volunteers than the archaeologists know what to do with and people can practice the exploration of the past in the land in their own backyards imagining how pottery shards and chicken bones might be their own performative act of discovery.
The colorblindness of the Florida narratives serves to reinforce the idea of objective and neutral science. Bonilla-Silva (2017) writes about colorblindness as an ideology; ideologies work as justifications for an unequal status quo. Whereas the US continues to be structured by inequalities that are the direct result of racism, many white Americans do not believe racism to be a central problem affecting the lives of people of color. The colorblind worldview relies on the idea of race as a social construction, using it outside its original context to argue that if we just stop talking about race, racism will cease to exist. This works together with the ideology of a meritocracy and land of equal opportunity to blame poor people and people of color for their position in society—if racism is no longer a significant problem then people of color have no one to blame but themselves for their failure to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This works in the Florida narrative by portraying heritage as disinterested and value-neutral, when in fact the
128 historical storytelling leaves out huge swaths of information that, if included in context, would make today’s protests against racism and extrajudicial killings easily intelligible. The use of the gilded age rather than Jim Crow to refer to the birth of modern Florida by Henry Flagler, the invisibility of the prison labor that actually built his hotels and railroads, and the city’s claim to
Spanish heritage today all deflect from the histories of race in St Augustine and Florida in general which not only subordinated people of color but aided in the construction of whiteness as a superior category.
Laurajane Smith (2006) writes that, in fact, “there is no such thing as heritage” (11).
Instead, there is “authorized heritage discourse,” or the hegemonic set of stories which rely on knowledge claims of institutions and experts combined with the grand narratives of the nation.
The consequences of this hegemonic discourse are to stem debate and contestation to established social and cultural values and meanings, prescribing heritage practices of organizations and individuals who find their identities through them (Smith 2006). Race is made in the practice of heritage; cultural performance and the landscape work together to construct a coherent group identity and hegemonic place narrative through highly selective remembering, when in fact history, the landscape, and group identity are highly contested and constantly changing (Hale
1998; Hoelscher 2003).
For a Postcolonial Sociology? Race and Historical Storytelling
The first wave of postcolonial theory launched a critique of enlightenment values of objectivity in the discipline of history; scholars across the colonized world questioned the dominant progress narratives of civilization and modernity that either excluded the colonized world or included them as the primitive ‘Other’ of Anglo modernity. Knowledge and power were
129 inextricably connected; imperial powers used knowledge of the Other to ideologically justify expansion and occupation as much as they used their new authority to exert political domination through knowledge of the population’s desires and movements. Postcolonial thought in this vein also launched a critique of the social sciences as producers of imperial knowledge. Later in the second wave of postcolonial thought Edward Said highlighted the importance of the power to narrate, and how the West’s narratives of world history allowed for the construction of self and other in mutual but opposing relation of superior and inferior. The later critique of historicism that came out of the subaltern studies school of postcolonial theory continued the critique of historical narratives by specifically investigating the role of the discipline of history in
Eurocentrism and neo-colonial domination. For instance, Chakrabarty thought of the
Enlightenment not as parallel to imperialism but as one of its key tools to differentiate whose knowledge matters; ‘epistemic violence’ determines whose ways of thinking are authoritative and whose are marginalized. White men were considered to be the fullest incarnation of objectivity and reason whereas women and people of color were considered too emotional, too self-interested, and still too primitive. Sociology today has fully engaged this critique of positivism but has been less engaged in bringing postcolonial intellectual developments to center stage in the discipline (Go 2016).
Julian Go (2018) argues further that one of the most important points sociologists can take from postcolonial theory is the critique of the culture of empire with the goal of decolonizing consciousness. A postcolonial theory of race begins by recognizing the historical development of race as a tool of colonial domination. Out of these dynamics of colonialism, racialized identities emerge continuously based on national myths, in this case nostalgic for a colonial past. However, we must also take into account the fallacies of “post” colonial thought
130 and deploy a more historically specific understand of race in the USA in our analyses. In fact, we are not “post,” as most scholars of postcolonialism admit. And the culture of empire is not limited to consciousness. Understanding race in the context of the settler colonial goals helps us understand how the ideology of the American nation directly reinforces Eurocentric theft of land and White supremacist theft of labor from “diverse” people “included” in the USA. Perhaps understanding this connection between ideas and actions, and the essentially propaganda nature of historical storytelling is a way out of the nightmare. Settler colonialism forces us to acknowledge the present-ness of the project of colonization, without getting into semantic arguments about whether or not something constitutes neocolonialism or neoimperialism in a world that is “post.”
Historical storytelling is the narrativizing of history for a present-day audience—it conveys US history to vast audiences through heritage tourism and national parks, museums and monuments, and branded consumer cities. Thus, the storytelling in heritage tourism sites is limited by both the settler colonial archive as well as the current ideology and discourse. While the nature of archives being limited by inadvertent and intentional bias is obvious, the idea that history is told through the present lens is less often acknowledged. The messages sent through storytelling are important because they are messages about American history and identity that are presented as authoritative knowledge. These narratives tell the story of a place through the lens of the nation, promoting identity archetypes through public and private institutions like museums and universities which in turn serve the interests of the local and state governments.
While sociologists have begun to pay attention to the racial dynamics of travel and tourism, we have yet to fully investigate the ways in which race functions in through historical storytelling within the United States. Through these critical lenses, we can begin to understand
131 just how deeply entrenched are the settler colonial dynamics of the knowledge economy that makes race and white supremacy through the heritage tourism industry. The increased violence of white nationalists makes it even more critical that we explore the platforms where these ideologies are already present. While few if any tourist attractions promote an explicitly racist and white supremacist vision to viewers, many of them, especially state-sponsored national parks and heritage industries, promote an idea of the US where white supremacy and settler colonial violence is glorified, fetishized, and unchallenged.
132 “America Begins Here”: History as Ideology at a St Augustine Landmark
“A monument not only of stone and mortar but of human determination and endurance, the Castillo de San Marcos symbolizes the clash between cultures which ultimately resulted in our uniquely unified nation. Still Resonant with the struggles of an earlier time, these original walls provide tangible evidence of America’s grim but remarkable history.” -National Park Service Castillo de San Marcos website
“Every tourist attraction is symbolic. Every attraction represents a belief, or set of beliefs, held in common within a human community. Not necessarily all of humanity, but some small or large group. By placing themselves in the presence of an attraction, tourists stand in mute witness to their membership in a group that shares subjective grasp of the attraction’s symbolism.” -Dean MacCannell The Ethics of Sightseeing
In this chapter, I examine the discursive and visual role of the Castillo de San Marcos
National Monument or, the fort, in the white racial framing of the St Augustine tourism narrative. The fort was built in the 1600s during the city’s first Spanish period to defend the strategically placed city from attacks by pirates and other European colonizers. As a US possession, the fort was renamed Fort Marion and served as a prison for indigenous Americans detained during the Indian Wars. The prison also functioned as a laboratory for scientific racism and General Richard Pratt’s ‘kill the Indian save the man’ theory of assimilation. The prisoners were subjected to ethnological study, taught military discipline, and opened to a touring public curious to see ‘civilized’ Indians in real life. Today, plaster life casts of the prisoners at Fort
Marion remain held in storage at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at
Harvard University, no one knows exactly what to do with them. However, the focus of the fort museum reflects the renaming that took place in 1942 when the fort was declared a National
Monument—at the Castillo de San Marcos, all but a few displays center colonial history before the nineteenth century, and visitors are continuously invited to imagine themselves as European colonists during the 16th-18th century Spanish and British colonial periods, before the fort was
133 officially ‘American.’ The Spanish translations present on every display further signal the viewer to the period they should be imagining, the Spanish colonial days of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Furthermore, I argue that this myopia in the historical storytelling is a function of settler colonialism, visible representationally and discursively in the St Augustine landscape and in the fort National Monument narrative of history. By making a claim to European origins through narratives of hard work and continuous occupation in power, the fort monumentalizes the settler colonial fantasy that land, time, and nature can be owned known as the doctrine of discovery. Furthermore, the fort as an important part of the St Augustine tourist landscape furthers ideologies of the white spatial imaginary and functions semiotically as a charming ‘sign’ of colonial world history.
The concept of colorblind racism helps to elucidate the kinds of puzzles that force us to ask ‘how’ rather than ‘why,’ and asks researchers to shift the analysis from individual actors to institutions. Colorblind racism refers to the adaptations of racial ideology to postmodern social values which tell us to embrace identity and difference, and neoliberal logic which commodifies diversity. While ‘overt’ racism still certainly does exist, ‘covert’ racism is said to have taken over as the prominent form of racism and discrimination. Scholars refer to subconscious racism, implicit bias, and white savior complexes among those who claim they are not racist. In reality, both types of racism have been around since the beginning of transatlantic capitalism.
Postcolonial theorists point to enlightenment liberalism as the beginning of a Western thought grounded in both inclusion and exclusion, which function together for a complete colonization of mind and body, bourgeois and proletarian (Go 2016; Mehta 1997).
What Bonilla-Silva offers is much more than a theory of ‘being colorblind’ or and assessment of colorblindness as an antiracist ethic. He offers a critique of western liberalism and
134 the attendant obsession with the individual. Bonilla-Silva is part of a movement in the sociology of race and ethnicity to decentralize the subject and turn our attention to institutions, to social constructions, and to ideologies. Thus, the proposal that race theorists should investigate racial thinking itself, as a colonial imperial category—whiteness studies, Critical Race Theory, and the rediscovery of DuBois as a classical sociologist.
The concept of “mindset” defined as “the bundle of presuppositions, received wisdoms, and shared understandings against a background of which legal and political discourse takes place” (Delgado 1989: 2413), similar to worldview in that it functions as an overarching subjectivity which individuals can draw upon to make sense of current events and inequalities.
As a mindset and worldview, whiteness structures not only what is portrayed as science, history, and truth, but what is believed to be authoritative as such. This analytical move takes the attention away from ‘white people’ per se and recenters the institutions that teach white ideology. Historical storytelling functions ideologically, helping to construct a nationalized
“received wisdom [that] makes current social arrangements seem fair and natural” (Delgado
1989: 2413) and thus justifies existing social arrangements. Therefore, understanding the linguistic and representational features of the narrative becomes important to understanding how a happy white national origins story is reproduced in the face of mountains of contradictory evidence.
As a backdrop to social life, history is ubiquitous, and yet not everyone shares the same narrative. The fact that mindset is “like eyeglasses we have worn a long time…we use them to scan and interpret the world and only rarely examine them for themselves” (Delgado 1989: 2413) also means that “several observers never see the same fact in an identical way unless they see it as given by a shared ideology.” (MacCannell 2011:20); whites do not have to see their conduct
135 or heritage as inherently oppressive or even exclusionary. It is entirely possible and highly probable that the museum curators think their inclusion of Indian Incarceration in the fort museum is a laudable attempt at diversity and cultural inclusion. As one reviewer of the exhibition writes in a 2004 issue of the Journal of American History, “although the display would benefit from a more critical discussion of Pratt’s ethnocentrism, it ultimately succeeds in using the Castillo to highlight America’s multicultural past” (Lee 2004). This is the puzzle of
American multiculturalism, and the reason to be skeptical of multicultural (read: neoliberal) promises of inclusion and diversity.
The park museum is not and never has been overtly racist in the sense of ‘hatred’ or
‘exclusion.’ The mission of the first national parks rested on a modern liberal drive to save the past that was being rapidly destroyed to make way for white settlement, much in the same way that gentrification today preserves desirable pieces of the culture it displaces. If the intention was to avoid making white people feel bad about history, they probably could have done an even better job. That the incarceration is included in the exhibition represents the 21st century,
“postmodern” museum drive for multiculturalism and inclusion, inadequate as it is. The purpose statement defines the purpose of the park: “preserves the oldest masonry fortification in the continental United States and interprets more than 450 years of cultural intersections,” thus pointing to cultural diversity as one of the offerings of the monument and reasons to preserve it.
The foundation document prepared by the NPS again identifies diversity as a value in two of the
“core themes” identified at the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument—"America’s First
Great Melting Pot and “American Indian Incarcerations.” Since the beginning of national parks and monuments, there has been a symbiotic relationship between preservation and extermination that is characteristic of settler colonialism throughout history and today.
136 One of the puzzles of this project, encountered repeatedly in the storytelling data, is the relationship between diversity as a purported value and the lack of a diversity of voices in the storytelling. Parallel to this phenomenon, the inclusion of ‘diverse’ (read: non-white) characters in the narratives but only at the expense of their multidimensionality and resistance to white power. In previous chapters, I have shown how the white racial framing of state and city commemorations shape a national white origins story though historical storytelling. Storytelling at the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, administered by the National Park Service, shows how the racialized national narrative is constructed through historical storytelling in the park museum and through the landscape. National parks have always been about history, culture, and the landscape that can be made to tell the right story. Take, for example, the logo of the
National Park Service, which has not changed substantially since its 1952 adoption:
In the logo, which was solicited through a contest because the former sequoia logo was not seen as fully encompassing national park values, emphasizes the incorporation of indigenous culture into the historical narrative of the American nation. The idea that the arrowhead “represents historical and archaeological values” only alludes to the fact that the creation of national parks was to preserve and control nature as well as people. The landscape of the logo is pure and
137 pristine, free of Indian people who would pollute both the wilderness and the new national origins story of an unconquered west there for the taking by innocent white settlers. The first national parks were created in the 1870s, the 1906 antiquities act allowed presidents to unilaterally declare national monuments on any federal land, and in 1916 the NPS was established as a bureau of the Department of the Interior. In addition to conserving nature, national parks discourse and laws focused on preserving “vanishing” native cultures and establishing a strict definition of “wilderness” and “nature” that excludes human inhabitants. The
Antiquities Act of 1906, which designates Fort Marion (later renamed Castillo de San Marcos) as a national monument among the first five of its kind, offers a window into the social context in which national parks and monument enter into debates about human development, culture, and archeology. At the turn of the twentieth century, settler colonialism was consolidating domestically and giving way to American imperialism overseas and in Latin America. Theodore
Roosevelt, whose ‘big stick’ diplomacy saw through the construction of the Panama Canal, also supported scientific research to simultaneously extinguish and preserve indigenous culture at home, integrating native cultures into the national origins story. During his term congress passed
The Antiquities Act which played a fundamental role in institutionalizing archaeology as an arm of the state for the construction and maintenance of a coherent national narrative of history; throughout the 20th century following the Act, archeology was increasingly funded by the government and practiced by amateurs whereas anthropology grew as an academic discipline in universities. Whereas academic anthropology supported a view of culture as pluralistic and comparative, archeology and government that funded it supported a concept of culture as linear and evolutionary. What this means for archeology is not only that most research was funded and thus purposed for the grand national narrative, but that the official view of North American
138 history was one in which native peoples were seen as savages at a prior stage of human development, naturally and inevitably supplanted by white settlers through evolution (Colwell-
Chanthaphonh 2005; McLaughlin 1998). Thus, we arrive at the idea that native history is “ours,” that indigenous artifacts and material culture is to be studied as a part of “national” (white settler) heritage.
The social-cultural context surrounding the choice to incorporate Fort Marion as a national monument is instructive for understanding some of the curatorial choices made today, which through a review of historical literature on the fort reveal striking similarities to the earliest research, including travel narratives published during the time when indigenous people were incarcerated there. Whereas the diversity and inclusion discourse of the Castillo de San
Marcos most recent foundation document (2016) purports to tell stories of native American cultures, Indian characters are featured in the story as starting points for the fort’s US history. As one-dimensional, passive prisoners, the historical storytelling replicates the national narrative that figures native Americans at the savage level of human development, a starting point for human civilization on the American continent. This move is predicated on and allows for the reproduction of an idea of culture as linear, where natives are incorporated into the colonizing
European narrative of the nation as the first ‘savage’ stage in human development of the continent. This is the national version of what Deloria (1969) calls the “native American grandmother complex,” predicated on White settler concepts of time and space.
Settler Time and Space
That time is a social construction is at once the most obvious and hardest to notice. Time periods, then, and historical timelines, are even more so constructions than the hours and the
139 days. Settler time is exemplified in narratives of American racial progress packaged as history.
The Black-White binary situates racial progress in a narrow frame of vision, and the civil war to civil rights timeline occludes what happened in between not only to Black people but to other non-White racialized populations. The narrative that portrays slavery and the civil war as nothing but a brief break from progressive movement forward, reconciled by the emancipation of the slaves, normalizes settler subjectivity as a way of experiencing historical time. Only with the presumption of settle sovereignty can the Civil War be made into a watershed event in US history, ignoring the Indian Wars and US Indian policies of genocide and extermination taking place before, during, and after the war. Furthermore, and more broadly, the question of land that exists for native peoples across the Americas is left unaddressed by settler conceptions of history which are built on assumptions of rightful White claims to land ownership and private property.
The US history timeline proceeds without a second thought according to settler time, whereas native conceptions of time and space are left unintelligible.
Lipsitz (2007) relates the connection between place and race in American society to an earlier American spatial imaginary that formed the heart of settler colonial expansion. Pure and ideal American space was timeless and romantic, the frontier space imagined in the painting of the American frontier as Edenic and free from inhabitants. This ideology of natural space paved the way for guiltless American expansion; as an ideology, the idea of free space allowed settlers to disavow the genocide and violence necessary to free up these places for settlement. The fort museum replays a similar version of American expansionist history. Placed in the American frontier and at the moment of encounter between indigenous people and European colonizers, the fort neglects to mention any of the history of the people that were here. The white spatial imaginary is evident in the timeline, starting at 1672, which highlights the European colonist’s
140 relationship to the land—the first display the visitor sees upon entering the fort is entitled
“Enduring Monument,” and highlights 1672 with a document describing the governor “with spade in hand” digging the first trench of the fort, and the present with a phot of a National Park
Service ranger speaking to a group of tourists. This connection between past and present is a constant theme throughout the fort museum, accomplished through the use of archival photos and documents alongside present-day photos, reenactments, and reproductions. The innovations of the past in the present serve to invite the visitor into the story and to sympathize with the colonial settler heroes.
Anne McClintock uses the terms anachronistic space and panoptical time to discuss how objects facilitate the Western subject imagining himself as the center of world history. In the colonial bathroom for example, Victorian soap advertisements offer a view of the history of world conquest through their use of racialized images imposed on timelines of progress through white cleanliness. In the fort, world history is also offered from a privileged point of invisibility—not the Victorian bathroom, but the top of the fort in St Augustine peering out over the inlet to the Atlantic Ocean. Envisioning soldiers, ships with canons, prisoners of war. All to end up here and now, on top. World history wrapped up into a neat tale of competing powers and nations battling for unclaimed land. The fort’s linguistic use of terms like “powers,” “nations,” and “possessions” takes the hierarchy of colonialism as a given and portrays world history as an unproblematic battle for control over the world’s wealth. Furthermore, the fort functions as anachronistic space to transport the visitor back in time, part of the larger claim to St Augustine as transporting tourists to a timeless and romantic past, and the anachronistic space of the fort also functions to silence the voices of indigenous people imprisoned there by placing them only in the distant past.
141 The fort narrative collapses indigenous existence into a period of less than one hundred years of ‘Indian Wars’ referred to as one time period, with Osceola (1804-1838) presented in the same display space as the Apache incarceration that began in 1886. Furthermore, out of forty-six displays total, only six displays tell indigenous stories, all of which from the perspective of the colonizers. Two of these stories are about Captain Richard Pratt, the mastermind behind the
Indian Boarding Schools concept, two describe tribal rituals, one tells the general history of
Indian incarceration under the heading “The United States Takes Over,” and the last is a portrait and a short biography of Osceola, a leader of Indian resistance in the early 19th century first
Seminole War, distinct from Indian Wars in the West and the Second Seminole War later in the century. The reality is, that for the most recent two centuries of existence, the fort was a prison.
As a piece of the wider puzzle of US Indian policy, and with connection to forts across the country, the fort is part of a network of US white supremacist expansion. The National Park
Service does not use the historic structure to tell this story, and instead choosing to use it as a symbol of US imperial power and settler sovereignty.
Settler time is also settler subjectivity. By marking the narrative turn with a settler hero and squashed resistance (Osceola) the timeline is thoroughly ensconced in the white racial framing. Additionally, though Osceola was known for his fierce resistance to settler expansion into Florida and federal Indian policy, he did not resist once imprisoned. A story not even mentioned but alive and well within Florida and Seminole folklore is the tale of twenty imprisoned Seminoles who escaped the fort one night in 1837. Part of what makes this a settler narrative is the conspicuous absence of Seminole stories. The Seminoles are ‘the unconquered tribe’ whose communities flourished in the interior and southern regions of the state during the colonial period until they were pushed onto the reservations where they live today in Southern
142 Florida and the Everglades. By highlighting the imprisoned rather than the free and neglecting to mention that Indian people live in Florida today, the fort reinforces the narrative that Indians have vanished. Furthermore, the narrative that the fort does provide tells a story of benevolent saviors and eager assimilation rather than white supremacist genocide and persistent resistance.
In fact, Seminole people were imprisoned at the fort during the First Seminole War. In 1837, twenty Seminole people escaped the fort prison, however, it is one prisoner who remained whom the fort museum chooses to highlight.
The Vanishing Indian
The trope of the ‘vanishing Indian’ plays out in US popular culture and history with implications for (lack of) reparative justice and for White subjectivity when the disappeared
Indians are transmogrified into national “heritage” or “common ancestry” (Deloria 1998;
Dunbar-Ortiz 2016; Merskin 2001). In the fort museum, the trope is played out through two displays of the fort wall encased in glass. These comprise two of the total six displays that refer to indigenous people. One asks the viewer to “look closely behind the glass” to discern the outline of a carving of what is referred to both as the Sun Dance and the Victory Dance. The carving is attributed to Kiowa Indians imprisoned in the 1870s, and the text goes on to tell the reader about ledger art— “Plains Indians recorded their history through pictures. The prisoners at
Fort Marion continued this tradition. Using colored pencils and sketchbooks purchased by
Captain Pratt, they created a unique art form. These drawing form a visual history of their experience.” The other display, below the wall encased in glass for preservation, tells the viewer to “use the drawing to help you identify the carving” of “the apache fire spirit,” attributed to the
Apache prisoners of war. The text then goes on to mention that Geronimo himself was imprisoned here, with his three wives. In both these displays, we see photos of the people
143 imprisoned, an example of ledger art, and a picture of a “fire dance ceremony” we are told was
“performed as a blessing, used to ward off or cure disease, or to protect people.”
To the casual viewer, this may seem like a good inclusion of diverse American Indian culture. You have the archival photos of a ‘dark history’ the National Park Service is courageous enough to represent, you have the representations of cultural ceremony, you have the art they created about their experience. However, the picture is more complex. What you do not see are the stories of the descendants of the prisoners, whose grandchildren and certainly great- grandchildren would be alive today. You do not have stories of how many of the prisoners were transported around the country, separated from loved ones, to Indian boarding schools. You do not have the stories of prisoners petitioning the federal government to be reunited with their loved ones, promising any condition and amount of labor in exchange for their families. You do not even have the stories of tourists visiting the prison to be entertained by the prisoners, an important piece of the tourist history of the fort and the city of St Augustine. With all this silencing, what we are left with is culture.
Andrea Smith uses the term ‘ethnographic entrapment’ to refer to the ways in which indigenous people all over the world and especially in the racial framing of the United States are trapped in a relationship to culture determined by the West. There are many examples of how this plays out. In this case, the indigenous people imprisoned at the fort are represented as ritualistic and overtly ‘cultural,’ in the ethnological sense of the word. All they have to do, the story goes, is give up this ritualistic culture and assimilate to the Western lifestyle. All they lose are their ceremonies and styles, and we have western medicine, book knowledge, and hard work to replace that. But portrayed as an inferior culture, they are also portrayed as an inferior people for not abandoning that culture long ago and assimilating by choice rather than by force. One of
144 the white settler moves that traps Indians in a distant and inferior past is to tie them essentially to culture. They are ceremonial peoples, tribal peoples, ritualistic peoples. This serves to display their apparently inherent inferiority to Western ways of life and thinking. Culture, here, becomes biological; Indian blood, mind, and spirit. Culture becomes biological in similar ways in all too familiar ‘culture of poverty’ arguments that blame so-called ‘urban’ families for reproducing a
‘cycle of poverty’ through bad money management, lack of birth control, and failure to understand the importance of education. All of these accusations equate to an argument about the inherent essence of a people unable to govern themselves, in need of savior by white western ways of thinking and being. Another side effect of ethnographic entrapment is to trap indigenous people in a romanticized past time and place, similar to the ways in which American culture romanticizes the ‘inner city’ in tv, music, and movies and then proceeds to think every black person they meet is from the romanticized time and place they saw on The Wire. If Indians are only in the past, and we can only barely discern their presence from a fading carving in the wall, it becomes a lot easier and more comfortable to believe they slowly faded out of history.
Research on Plains Indian ledger art suggests that the dominant interpretations of these drawings by anthropologists and art historians should be taken with a grain of salt, and that indigenous perspectives often differ based on cultural or even specific family knowledge brought to the interpretation (Greene 2013; Schmittou and Hogan 2002).However, by beginning history at
1672, the fort successfully evades the ‘moment of contact’ which museums for the city’s 450th and state’s 500th celebrations highlight. Thus, the fort National Monument does not have to deal with the fact of indigenous presence on the land and their original confrontations with settlers.
One hundred years after the initial colonization began in Florida, many of the Indians living in
145 the area were already evangelized or enslaved in the coquina quarries where coquina to build the fort was mined. By beginning in this time, the fort solidifies its narrative stance in settler time.
White Supremacy is embedded in mainstream institutions and worldviews so that it remains invisible to most whites who can live life without seeing the underlying structure because they are spared from its negative effects, and in denial of the benefits. Racism does not need to be intentional to be racist. ‘Why’ is such a sticky question that some scholars have given up looking for intentions; as Robyn Wiegman puts it, “[taking refuge] in the contingencies of how is to register broader anxieties about knowledge, truth, and politics” (1), identifying the structural conditions of possibility for these claims to be made. This is part of studying whiteness rather than whites, discourse rather than subjects, and systemic institutional racism. This attention to the discourse and culture of racism in institutions highlights that today, one does not need to be an ‘overt racist’ to accomplish white supremacy. What is more revealing is how the inclusion or exclusion is done, in often contradictory ways. Since the curators of the fort museum, whom the NPS tellingly calls “interpreters,” do talk about indigenous history, they obviously had the intention to include. Thus, the question revolves around assessing their efforts-
-how do they do it? How do their efforts relate to native memory? How does the story they tell compare to existing white stock stories? ‘Why’ is a different research entirely that would center white subjects in the research and exposition. Focusing on the ‘how’ reveals the limitations of multiculturalism and diversity and inclusion paradigms, regardless of ‘why,’ and is part of an effort to decenter whiteness in research and disciplinary culture.
This contributes to understanding the broader cultural context of the narratives’ production. That these narratives are this way tells us something about how race works in
American culture, and the contours of today’s racial thinking. Through my data we have a
146 window into the collective representations, the end product of racist institutions. Interviews with the curators would give insight into their psychologies and intentions but would tell us little about the society at large without my close examination of how the stories function as ideology to reproduce the white settler racial frame. We need not know anything about the creators of racist messages, but if we deconstruct the messages, we know something about how racism takes place, how it functions, and what is circulating today.
The Fort as Frontier
From the time that the Spanish forced enslaved native and African people to build the fort, Florida has been a literal and figurative frontier. Slotkin identifies the frontier as the basis of
American mythology, an outgrowth of the American settler psyche defined by conflict with
Indians (Slotkin 1973). Barthes describes myth as a part of speech, a system of communication with a message that presupposes a “signifying consciousness,” (108) or a web of existing discourse in which the message of the myth makes sense. Saussure defines semiotics in language as the investigation of relationships between sign and signified where culture fills in the gap to attach meaning to a formerly arbitrary object or image. Barthes gives the example of how the red rose is a potent symbol, a sign filled with meanings of love and passion (Barthes 1972; Merskin
2001). The average American city if full of signs—broken windows, cathedrals, strip malls, all signs of different aspects of the American present that represent narratives about groups of people, political economy, neighborhoods, even world history. As a visual icon the likeness of which is reproduced throughout St Augustine tourism narratives and marketing, the fort is a symbol and a sign of history, preservation, and settler triumph. That the fort is a potent sign is exemplified in the fact that the commemorative book published in 2015 for the city’s 450th celebration used the fort’s photographic image on the front cover to promote the message of
147 settler continuity and endurance and used the fort image on every page throughout as a logo for the city’s celebration of 450 years of permanent European settlement. The location of the fort is convenient not only for tourist maps and finding one’s way around the city, but because it is so easily recognizable as part of the landscape and from above.
Ferguson and Turnbull (1999) describe the presence of the military in Hawaii as ‘hidden in plain sight.’. Similarly, in St Augustine, the fort represents just a piece of the town’s military orientation. With a visible invisible quality, the fort at first glance does not openly represent the military per se; a second look provides more information, that the national Monument is meant to represent the enduring perseverance of settlers, the defense of the city from foreign attackers, and the incarceration of prisoners of war. This is only the tip of the iceberg in a city where two of the five major employers are Northrop Grumman, one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, and the national guard, with two armory locations in the city in addition to a Customs and Border
Protection port of entry. Just to the north is the naval station Mayport and the Camp Blanding army training center. The military presence in Florida is staggering, reflecting and reproducing
Florida as a frontier space. The fort in St Augustine references US militarism without seeming to be about the military at all. Once inside, the majority of the museum’s storytelling is about soldiers of the colonial period—there are reproductions of their bunks, food pantry, and bathrooms, there are photos of reenactors placed underneath the appropriate European flag, there are historic weapons demonstrations on the hour that can be heard reverberating for miles. Settler subjects are produced and reproduced through this performative play; the settler psyche is militarized.
The idea of the frontier is also relevant for understanding the militarization of American society. The development of the fort into a national monument and museum through the
148 antiquities act, and the military memory the fort projects as the protector of the US border.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reminds us that the American revolution was waged over taxation is not the full story. The taxation British rulers proposed was to pay for more and more soldiers to police American settlers stealing Indian lands in the West. Americans revolted not just to be free from taxation, but to be free to violently conquer and settle the lands of other nations unimpeded by British oversight and alliances. After the revolution, the government set forth creating ordinances and legal procedure for the colonization of Western lands (the Ohio country known as the Northwest at the time). These new legal processes for possessing land were based on the illegal actions of the founding fathers, notably George Washington, who made their wealth as land speculators conquering and selling territory owned by Indian nations (prohibited under
British rule). As early as 1632, settlers in the New England colonies were required to possess a firearm and two pounds of gunpowder, and other orders in the thirteen colonies forbade travel to work, church, or public meetings without a firearm. The second amendment enters as the requirement that male settlers arm themselves and form militias for the purpose of protecting seized land and moving conquest in every direction. Building on the Discovery Doctrine,
Manifest Destiny and the Monroe doctrine centered good citizenship around expansive settlement and violent conquest using guns. “Freedom” as enshrined in the constitution reveals settler-colonial roots. Settler-militias used to destroy and control native peoples were repurposed and put to work as slave patrols as plantation culture consolidated. Thus, guns and gun ownership became a part of the white-masculine definition of citizenship in the United States
(Dunbar-Ortiz 2018; Light 2017).
In addition to serving as a prison, the fort was a laboratory for Pratt to experiment with theories and practices he would later deploy in Indian Boarding Schools like The Carlisle
149 School. In his letters, he identifies his experience leading the all-black ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ of the
Tenth Cavalry as formative in his assimilation mindset, that African Americans and Indians could be valuable second-class citizens. Pratt claimed that Black soldiers and imprisoned Indians proved that savages could become citizens through European style, labor, and education (Hayes
2018). The focus on the soldiers makes the fort a military attraction, but also shows the general public where their sympathies should lie. Throughout the museum, the public is urged explicitly through commands and implicitly through historical reproductions to imagine themselves in the colonial era. The one time they are told to imagine themselves in the shoes of the Indian prisoners, they are subjects of a white savior narrative where assimilation is the only path to existence. The display entitled “The US Takes Over” places the following text next to a full body portrait of Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt’s story as portrayed by the National Park Service in the fort museum exemplifies the white savior narrative:
“In 1875 Captain Richard Pratt was assigned to Fort Marion. He had to guard 75 American Indian prisoners. Imagine being taken away from your home and brought to a strange place. People speak a different language and act differently. How do you survive? Pratt began a program of assimilation. He believed that the adoption of white culture, language, and religion were the Indians only chance. An advocate for American Indian education and civil rights, he sought to find a way to accomplish his goals, and his actions led to the beginning of the American Indian schools’ concept.”
In this revisionist history that aligns with the colonial stock story of benevolent white rulers and happily assimilated natives, Pratt is figured as a hero whose methods, while they may be criticized today, came from a heart in the right place. The invocation for visitors to the exhibit to imagine themselves in the prisoners’ shoes does little to empathize with the indigenous viewpoint that sees imprisonment and boarding schools as part of the broad efforts of the United
States to exterminate indigenous peoples and life ways. Instead, the viewer is invited to feel
150 saved by General Pratt, who is credited with teaching the supposedly culturally impoverished natives what it takes to survive in Western culture.
The 19th century period of indigenous interment at the fort is also representative of the cultural racist variety of punishment wielded at Indians and can be related to liberal assimilationist arguments leveled at people of color today that blame ‘those people’ and their culture for their marginal position in US society. Part of the policies of ‘total war’ against Indian culture and souls deployed at boarding schools that first appeared at Fort Marion was to cut their hair, change their clothes, and forbid their languages. Another part of the punishment of indigenous prisoners at the fort was the directive to make and sell art, traditional crafts, and entertain tourist visitors. Since the beginning of touring publics, people were put on display in human zoos most famously at the World’s Fairs but also at museums and local attractions around the world.
“Race relations”
The race relations paradigm as an ahistorical and power blind way to study race is inherently White and the same epistemological orientation is evident in the storytelling and iconography of the fort. Anibal Quijano (2016) argues that the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas is the foundational moment not only of colonialism, but of race as an axis of domination and subordination. Furthermore, racial thinking was not based just on the colonial relationships of domination but on ideologies of physical, biological inferiority of every aspect of the colonized people that justified their subjugation to Europeans. This contributed to the formation of a Western subject predicated on the notion of exercising power over others and being unaffected by others’ power. This prophecy of unaffectedness was fulfilled partially in the segregation of space which allowed whites to both exert control over people of
151 color and to live completely unphased by the systems of violent domination they produced (da
Silva 2007; Smith 2014). Thus, the fact that the fort is now a tourist attraction is a further consolidation of the spatial and affective imaginary of whiteness. Tourists of any color can experience unaffectedness by imagining themselves living in the less controversial periods of colonial history and by empathizing with the soldiers and colonists, or in one case as an Indian prisoner about to be saved by them. The repeated use of the term “control” to describe changes in colonial regimes points to this fantasy of the self-determined subject, and the symbolic power of the flag is repeated throughout the museum to refer to these changes in “control.”
In the museum exhibited for the city’s 450th anniversary, the only violence that was mentioned in the storytelling was between European powers at Matanzas Inlet. Similarly, in this story the violence only occurs between Europeans in what the fort museum refers to as “the contest of nations.” The ledger drawings chosen to be exhibited in the fort museum space also point to how the museum silences histories of violence between groups that would portray whites in charge as violent oppressors. Ledger drawings not selected for display portray train and steamboat transports to the fort and military drills once inside conjure up images of more reminiscent of the holocaust than white saviors—forced transport in cattle cars, military spectacle, and outright imprisonment and labor (Glancy 2014). It must be noted that the curators at the national monument did not choose these ledger drawings, nor did they choose to display the letters from prisoners petitioning the government for return to families and communities, promising to abandon traditions and live a white way of life. In fact, what the viewer receives is so contradictory as to defy logic: images and stories of ritualistic dances and ceremonies, alongside the story of top-down assimilation and civilizing schooling, leaving out an important piece of information that would paint the indigenous prisoners as “good” and “obedient” and
152 thus perhaps deserving of better treatment. Not including these drawings and letters also deprives the prisoners a level of agency in the present that they did exert in the past—they documented the conditions of their forced migration, they knew how to read and write in English, they played the white man’s game promising assimilation and petitioning the US government for release in
“civilized” and “respectable” ways.
Discussion: Implications for Studying Race through Historical Storytelling
The Southeastern US is one of the seven places in the world where agriculture first developed—Perhaps the claim to White (Euro)American heritage is so strong in the South, and the narrative of White progress so blatant, for this reason precisely. The land was not undeveloped and thus allowed for whites to say that it was not owned by natives. Agriculture proved they owned the land and that made settlement efforts so much more vicious and violent.
Same thing with assimilation, trail of tears…the ‘civilized tribes’ punished not because they didn’t assimilate and conform, but punished even more severely for doing so, for assimilating and adapting to a white way of life—inferiority not the only racialized narrative. In the case of native peoples in the Americas, the narrative has to be that they are “part of us,” and because that is so, extermination has to happen to avert the viewers eyes to the fact that the land was stolen.
In the US, the foundations of the country were built on the contradictions of freedom and slavery (with poor many whites enslaved in the very beginning). Part of how colorblindness functions is by erasing the inequalities of the history, written off as the distant past, and placing disadvantaged groups into the meritocracy game as if nothing has happened. Thus, colorblindness is about ignoring peoples (‘I don’t see color’) and political economic history
(‘what’s done is done, that was so long ago’). This is paired with a voracious establishment of
153 ‘heritage’ (White history) as the dominant and authoritative national narrative. Colorblindness is power-blindness and as long as we are blind to power, we are also ignorant of a whole series of historical events in which people fought for a world without oppression. Colorblindness is a function of the White settler narrative required to sustain White possessive claims to “American” heritage.
Photos
“Close Quarters” 1763-1883 Replica of the sleeping quarters of British army soldiers
Photo taken by the author.
154
View from the top deck of the fort, out across the intercoastal with the inlet in the distance (inlet dates to a 1940s marine corps of engineers project—Spanish and British ships entered a different inlet about 14 miles South of St Augustine to arrive in the city from the South, this view is facing northeast looking directly at the inlet with the Vilano Beach bridge in the distance). Photo taken by the author.
155
View of the rooms of the fort/museum from the courtyard on an overcast day. Photo taken by the author.
156 View of canon replicas on the top deck of the fort, facing the city of St Augustine. The tops of
Henry Flagler’s buildings seen above the tree line. Photo taken by the author.
157 Conclusion
In this project, I analyzed how the story of St Augustine told in two commemorations and a monument at three levels of the nation. In chapter one, I used the Castillo de San Marcos to investigate not only storytelling but visual symbolism in the white racial frame. At the national level, the fort is a symbol of historic preservation efforts and racialized incarceration. As a national monument, the fort curators are particularly interested in historical storytelling which frames St Augustine’s story as an essential chapter of in the history of the (settler) nation.
Furthermore, visitors are encouraged to imagine themselves back in time, inculcating a settler subjectivity through physical engagement in space. The story told at the fort highlights the enduring importance of monuments for nation building. In chapter two, I traced the connections between tourism, heritage, and the city knowledge economy through the year-long commemoration of Florida’s 500 years since European conquest. Multimedia materials and the performance of a “courtroom drama” frame the state’s history for local families and tourists as a story of the nation. Central questions of authenticity—who landed where, and what archaeological evidence can be found illuminate the settler subjectivity of the commemoration, which characterizations of whiteness and otherness haunt the plotline. In chapter three, I focused on the storytelling surrounding the city of St Augustine’s 450th to show how characters are constructed in a white settler frame, and how historical storytelling that explicitly claims to be diverse and inclusive falls short of opposing white supremacy and settler consciousness. During this commemoration, the connections made to nation and nationalism were explicit. Celebrated in 2015, the 450th capitalized on the notion of St Augustine as the nation’s oldest city, declaring itself the birthplace of the multicultural American nation. They did so particularly through the
158 bodies of three racialized wax figurines, who appear in various forms throughout the historical storytelling.
In each chapter, the nationalist claims coming from state-sponsored collective memory sites shows how places and spaces produce regimes of knowledge and subjectivity centering whiteness and settler colonial history. Resistance to the unbridled Western progress narrative is hard to locate in the historical storytelling, though a quick google search reveals there is a treasure trove of information that could have been presented to the public. In places I hint at the places where storytellers could have included histories of resistance, but this work is for another, more archive-oriented project in the future. This project highlighted the white supremacist and settler narratives of the nation, and future research might delve into the archives to bring out narratives of resistance to racialized domination and further illuminate how white supremacy and settler colonialism haunt the present, distorting our view of the past.
From DuBois to postcolonialism and the coloniality of power to native studies of settler colonialism, all roads lead to understanding the US in its colonial context. Whereas it seems that
US scholars are late to the game in this, there is and always have been scholarship, albeit marginalized, that pokes holes in US exceptionalism to reveal the continuities of colonial power arrangements. An essential part of this work is understanding not only colonial dynamics but also the dynamics of a global race system that was co-constitutive of colonialisms across the globe. This global theory of race was first fully elaborated by DuBois, who observed the inner working of whiteness as well as the global anti-communist machine that threatened to silence him and built a theory of race and whiteness around two themes: an arrogant superiority complex grounded in ownership and the white man’s burden of insidious benevolence. Sociologists should understand that so-called race, while enacted differently around the globe and even within
159 each country, is a system for the ownership and control of the labor power of black and brown people. Paul Ortiz in his African American and Latinx History of the United States uses the concept of racial capitalism to explain how the US deployed the race concept against various groups throughout history to stem human collaboration and steer all energies towards corporate profits.
For sociologists, history is important in a variety of ways. Many students complain that sociology has too much history—I get the feeling they are looking for more a pop-psychology spin to their sociology 101. However, history is essential not only as information but as data, as sociologists join in the effort to untangle how historical storytelling impacts the present. History is instrumental in shaping the present because it creates subjectivities, historically grounded templates for this or that type of person to aspire to, promote, or abhor. History also has a variety of sites that beg for sociological analysis—from heritage tourism to museums of all sorts to city landscapes and national monuments, to TV programming and written and performed historical fiction. Historical storytelling, even pre-historical storytelling as in narratives of evolution, is a potent site for the formulation of worldviews and ideologies. Historical narratives are ‘things,’ highly constructed fragments of the national imaginary that are accessible to sociologists as social facts, evidence of the social forces shaping the present.
Whiteness studies has emerged to the public eye recently but continues to focus on white people. Including white ‘things’ in the conversation broadens the view and opens up new sites for data and analysis. However, whiteness studies and the sociology of race and ethnicity have neglected to integrate insights from or collaborate with native studies scholars, who point to the fundamental structuring effect of settler colonialism and Native Americans on the American
Imagination. Thinking of settler colonialism and white supremacy together gives a more
160 complete picture of American history, showing how racial categories are social constructions deployed for the benefit of a few elite white men against anyone who can even vaguely be considered non-white. Settler colonialism offers a move beyond the black-white binary that escapes from the apolitical marketing-style multicultural smorgasbord of food, traditions, and other ethnic display, while allowing for the historical understanding of racial categories articulated together and managed through colorism, wages, and deceit. While the current historical storytelling falls into the multicultural trap, I have hope for a historical storytelling which centers the resistances to colonialism and domination that can inform our struggles today.
A quick read of the Seminole’s history section of their website provides some insight into how the stories told about American ‘Others’ could be different. They highlight community leaders throughout history, providing a complex portrait of their heroes and heroines. They provide clear indictment of colonialism while remaining focused on how they have persevered to become known as the unconquered tribe, and they highlight the diversity of their community throughout history and today. The southern escape route that St Augustine historians treasure so highly is not because Spanish colonialism and slavery was kinder than British, the British controlled St Augustine for many years and slavery is not benevolent. However, this is not to say that the underground railroad didn’t go South—The Seminole took in people who had escaped from slavery and taught them to live in Southern Florida and fight off the colonizers with guerilla tactics. In fact, a primary impetus for the Seminole wars, for developing the Florida frontier, and for Florida statehood was to preserve slavery and cut off the escape route South. Imagine if this was told to tourists in St Augustine! Imagine a world where we cherished resistance to domination rather than domination itself. Despite relativist questions about how to judge
161 diversity and inclusion efforts, it is safe to say that without these narratives, historical storytelling is not even complete, let alone diverse and inclusive.
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