ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4

Intangible Heritage Contents NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION VOL. 32, NO. 4

PAUL EDMONDSON President & CEO Historic Preservation Without Place TABITHA ALMQUIST DENNIS HOCKMAN ...... 3 Chief Administrative Officer LYNN ENGLISH Away From Place: Expanding Intangible Interim Chief Development Officer GEOFF HANDY Cultural Resource Protections Under U.S. Chief Marketing Officer and International Law KATHERINE MALONE-FRANCE EMILY BERGERON...... 4 Chief Preservation Officer THOMPSON M. MAYES Is There Such a Thing as Tangible Heritage? Chief Legal Officer & General Counsel JEREMY C. WELLS...... 15 PATRICIA WOODWORTH Interim Chief Financial Officer Shared Spaces, Invisible Imprints: Intersections of Latinx and African American PRESERVATION LEADERSHIP FORUM Intangible Heritage SEHILA MOTA CASPER AND LAWANA HOLLAND-MOORE...... 25 SUSAN WEST MONTGOMERY Vice President, Preservation Resources Vestiges of Vietnam: Uncovering the RHONDA SINCAVAGE Hidden Heritage of Virginia’s Little Saigon Director, Publications and KIM O’CONNELL ...... 34 Programs SANDI BURTSEVA Content Manager Engaging Communities to Identify KERRI RUBMAN Intangible Heritage in Minneapolis Assistant Editor MICHAEL TOLAN ...... 44 PRIYA CHHAYA Associate Director, Working-class Intangible Heritage from Publications and Programs the Pennsylvania Coal Fields DENNIS HOCKMAN Senior Director, Editorial CAMILLE WESTMONT...... 54 and Creative MARY BUTLER Count the Outside Children! Kinkeeping as Creative Director Preservation Practice Among Descendants of Texas’ Freedom Colonies ANDREA R. ROBERTS...... 64

Cover: Parade in Minneapolis, Minnesota. PHOTO BY MICHAEL TOLAN

Forum Journal, a publication of the National Trust for Historic Preservation (ISSN 1536-1012), is published by the Preservation Resources Department at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2600 Virginia Avenue, NW, Suite 1100, Washington, DC 20037 as a benefit of National Trust Forum The National Trust for Historic Preservation works to save America’s historic places for membership. Forum members also receive four issues of Preservation magazine. Annual dues start the next generation. We take direct, on- at $195. Send email address changes to [email protected]. Copyright ©2020 National the-ground action when historic buildings Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States. Of the total amount of base dues, $6.00 is for and sites are threatened. Our work helps a subscription for Preservation magazine for one year. Support for the National Trust is provided build vibrant, sustainable communities. We by membership dues; endowment funds; individual, corporate and foundation contributions; and advocate with governments to save Amer- grants from state and federal agencies. The National Trust Forum Journal is a channel for express- ica’s heritage. We strive to create a cultural legacy that is as diverse as the nation itself ing opinions, encouraging debate, and conveying information of importance and of general inter- so that all of us can take pride in our part est to Forum members of the National Trust. Inclusion of material or product references does not of the American story. constitute an endorsement by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Historic Preservation Without Place

DENNIS HOCKMAN

hen the general public thinks about historic preservation, they envision house museums, historic neighborhoods, Wand battlefields. But we know that many important histories cannot be attached to place, because the buildings were demolished, landscapes paved over, communities redeveloped, leaving little evidence of the tangible places that once existed. Often, these erased places relate to the histories of marginalized communities—minorities, people of color, immigrants, the working poor. These histories we now recognize are equally foundational to who we are as a nation as the histories of political leaders, captains of industry, and war heroes. To preserve the history of marginalized communities, it is often necessary to focus on intangible heritage— elements of culture such as community traditions, dialect, music, art, craft, and cuisine. In the following pages, you will find wide ranging explorations of this theme. While most of the articles in this issue focus on specific communities and the efforts to preserve intangible heritage, others take a broader view of the topic. We explore the work to preserve intangible heritage in African American, Latinx, Vietnamese American, immigrant, and coal mining communities throughout America in places as disparate as San Diego; Pennsylvania Coal Country; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Arlington, Virginia. But first we position intangible heritage within the context of historic preservation. In the preservation of places, for example, there is a legal framework guiding the protection of historic sites. With intangible heritage, such legal protections are also starting to take shape. Another article evaluates validity of intangible heritage, asking “If heritage is itself intangible, how can there be an intangible version of it?” I’ll leave that for you to decide.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 3 Away From Place: Expanding Intangible Cultural Resource Protections Under U.S. and International Law

EMILY BERGERON

hether due to war and political unrest, economic hardship, natural disasters, or other forces, communities around the Wworld, throughout history, have been displaced from their homelands or other places of cultural connection. Climatic activities, including global warming, pose growing threats. From the obvious effects of catastrophes like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico or the wildfires in Paradise, California, to the slower, less-publicized impacts of sea level rise on the Alaska Native village of Newtok or the residents of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana—environmental events have caused people to be increasingly separated from place. One estimate puts the number of Americans migrating in 2017 alone due to disasters at 1.6 million (IDMC, 2019). By 2050 climate change could force more than 140 million people to migrate within their own countries, including the United States (Rigaud, et al, 2018). Community-wide relocation is best approached through managed retreat, which will require some focus on protecting heritage after its dislocation from place, as well as protecting the cultural rights of refugees (Kim, 2011). Deliberate migrations force individuals to abandon built structures, land, and natural features. But they should provide people who are migrating with opportunities to plan for the protection of their heritage even though it will be untethered from a specific location. This will make legal protections of intangible resources an important next step. Seeking to protect what remains of natural resources also warrants the protection of traditional knowledge about those resources. As researchers and policy-makers are increasingly realizing, traditional knowledge, on everything from architecture to land management, has been integral to indigenous survival for

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 4 thousands of years—often providing more effective envi- ronmental approaches than those of mainstream science— and have great potential to stop (or at least slow) the tide of environmental destruction (Hermann, 2016). But the poten- tial for commercial exploitation of this information at the expense of indigenous people is also great. Protecting what UNESCO refers to as living culture could help maintain diversity amid increasing globalization, promote international exchange despite increasing nationalism, encourage the transmission of knowledge and skills from generation to

The artisanal process of harvesting and generation, and ensure that the drying the materials used to make pintao social and economic value of hats in Panama is an example of intangible heritage. both natural and cultural PHOTO BY ©MICI, 2014, WITH THE PERMISSION OF UNESCO resources remains in the community of origin. International conventions set forth by UNESCO, as well as laws ranging from statutory protections to policy-level initiatives in countries around the world, have demon- strated that laws can successfully be enacted and enforced to protect intangible cultural heritage. But the U.S. response, both in adopting international conventions and in establishing its own, has been regrettably slow. Changing the U.S. regulatory framework to address resources that are not completely reliant on their connection to place would encourage more equitable preservation and avoid the constraints of physical integrity, which has been criticized for limiting the protection of resources of traditionally under- represented communities.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 5 INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS The most widely recognized international convention concerned with Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) was established in 2003: the UN Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Convention on ICH), representing a conceptual shift in what heritage, and therefore historic preservation, actually are. Before that, there were other international laws and conventions to address heritage,1 but these were often faulted for being Eurocentric to the exclusion of indigenous culture in determining how heritage is assessed and managed, and for favoring the interests of research communities over the culture bearers (Smith and Akagawa, 2019). The Convention on ICH seeks to protect traditions and living expressions, including assets like oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe, and the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts (2003). It asserts that it is not the product but the knowledge and skills represented by the product and the process of creating it that must be recognized for preservation. The convention also authorizes the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage to compile a Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This list moves away from documenting the monuments, sites, objects, and Western values associated with the World Heritage List and is not restricted by the same notions of “pastness” that other registers are constrained by (Smith and Akagawa, 2019: 20). Nonetheless, it has been criticized as yet another exclusive and excluding list. The connection between intangible heritage and indigenous communities is also acknowledged in international law, recognizing the importance of preventing the exploitation of traditional knowl- edge and the misappropriation of traditional practices. In 2007 the General Assembly of the United Nations recognized the need for indigenous people to have agency over their intangible cultural heritage in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIPS). The Declaration states that: Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 6 traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures... They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions. Such provisions also exist outside the bounds of the United Nations. For example, a similar recognition of the need to protect indigenous people is evident in the Andean Community of Nations’, Elementos para la protección sui generis de los conocimientos tradicionales colectivos e integrales desde la perspectiva indígena (2005).2 This collective from the northwestern part of South America, including Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, formally recognizes the need to protect intangible heritage, including traditional knowl- edge associated with uses of biodiversity, to maintain the social and economic benefits of ICH for indigenous people (Elementos 11). It also addresses the need to protect traditional knowledge for reasons of human rights and intrinsic values such as cultural identity, equity, and as a defense against misappropriation of intellectual property (Elementos 14).

INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS Protecting ownership and preventing commercial exploitation of ICHs are central principles of many of the existing regulatory frameworks and were key reasons for creating the international conventions. In fact, the term “cultural heritage” is often used interchangeably with the term “cultural property.” Intellectual property is essentially a 19th-century concept, fostered by the desire to protect innovations in technology. Only relatively recently has cultural resource protection been considered in this arena. Specialized organizations such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have started examining intangible cultural heritage and traditional knowledge as part of a broader concept of heritage protection. To that end, it established an Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore in 2000 to address the

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 7 misappropriation of folklore, traditional knowledge, and indigenous practices (Antons and Logan, 2018). Further, existing laws can and have been used to protect these resources. Intangible cultural heritage can be divided into public and non-public knowledge, and this distinction limits what can be protected under intellectual property law. The U.S. has a legal framework for protecting intellectual property that may also be suitable for protecting intangible cultural heritage and the products derived from it. The current system offers design patents, trademarks, copyrights, protection for trade secrets, utility patents, and even plant patents. Special case protections also exist that may provide unique protection of resources not specifically covered under other laws. If something is known or is obvious, then legal protection will likely not be available. Internationally, protection is similar, relying on concepts such as novelty. Some of these laws allow lessening enforcement of rights against some communities or more stringently protecting the rights of others.3 The protection of ICH through the concept of intellectual property poses a number of challenges. For example, since something must be novel (35 U.S.C. §102) and nonobvious (35 U.S.C. §103) to be patentable, those terms must be defined and interpreted. Something known by “others” for more than one year prior to the date of “invention” is not novel. In the case of ICH, one must also determine who “others” may be for the purposes of defining public disclosure, particularly when a practice is known to an entire community. And in that case, should the entire community, or just some or its members, be entitled to own and benefit financially from the patent?

The artisans who make pintao hats in Panama also plant and process the raw materials needed to make the braids used to create the hats. PHOTO BY ©MICI, 2014, WITH THE PERMISSION OF UNESCO

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 8 INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE UNITED STATES Protecting culture has not been high on the domestic or foreign policy agenda of the U.S., or subject to much regulation. Laws that do exist are closely attached to monuments, sites, and objects. The National Historic Preservation Act, for example, as well as other federal laws relying on the National Register of Historic Places to prioritize resources worthy of preservation, protects buildings, sites, objects, districts, and structures. To be eligible for listing, a resource’s significance must be linked to a place, and that place must meet a standard for “integrity” of location, setting, design, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. This privileges places that remain intact thanks to the owners’ status and financial means, or to political will. This arguably limits the types of resources included on the register associated with minority cultural groups, thus reinforcing a Eurocentric history of the U.S. as opposed to an actual diverse one (Brookstein, 2001). Laws protecting archaeological resources—likely the strongest protections for heritage in the U.S.—are also strongly linked to the physical place or object, considering those separately from any living traditions associated with them. Such was the case in the 1974 Ninth Circuit opinion in United States v. Diaz,4 in which the court declined to interpret “object of antiquity” to include long- standing religious or social traditions for failure to meet the commonly held understanding of the meaning of the term antiquity (1974). This requirement for something to be understood as old to warrant protection not only left a portion of the Antiquities Act void for vagueness, it also demonstrated a disconnect between protecting culture versus artifact. Within the existing U.S. regulatory framework, the best protection for intangible aspects of heritage is the provision that a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) may be eligible for inclusion on the National Register because of its association with cultural practices and beliefs that are (1) rooted in the history of a community, and (2) important to maintaining the continuity of that community’s traditional beliefs and practices (National Register Bulletin 38). This does reflect a growing recognition that culture is a living thing, but still requires that for intangible heritage to be recognized, it must

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 9 be rooted to place rather than to individuals or communities. For example, National Register Bulletin 38 lists the sedge fields along the Russian River in California as a potential TCP. Although the bulletin acknowledges that the site lacks individual distinction, it is considered significant as the source of the roots needed to make Pomo’s famous basketry, an ongoing cultural practice linked to a place (14). Compare this to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List which recognizes the artisanal process of planting, gathering, preparing, and weaving plant fibers to makepintao hats in Panama. It is the process, not the place where it is done, that is identified as representative of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (UNESCO, 2017). In addition to having weak federal laws addressing heritage, the U.S. also resists adopting international conventions. Its failure to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict until 2008, despite the role of the now well-known Monuments Men and the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, demonstrates a reluctance to formally adopt restrictions on actions. So does the fact that the U.S. was one of only four countries that voted against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, and the last of those four to have reversed its opposition; and that the U.S. joined only a handful of nations in abstaining on the vote for the 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage. The U.S.’s 2017 withdrawal from UNESCO, although not the first such withdrawal, indicates that its lack of international involvement is not likely to change soon.

NEXT STEPS IN THE UNITED STATES Opportunities exist to strengthen and broaden existing U.S. laws to protect intangible cultural heritage as the permanence of place changes. One possible approach, being adopted in other countries, is to better integrate tangible and intangible heritage, diminishing the distinctions between the two. That could be done by expanding what is included on the National Register, taking a lesson, for example, from Japan’s revision of its Law for Protection of Cultural Properties (LPCP),5 enacted in 1950 and amended in 2007. Japan’s law includes “intangible cultural property” in its overall definition of

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 10 A Panamanian artisan slitting Carludovica palmata fibers, an early step in the process of making pintao hats. PHOTO BY ©MICI, 2014, WITH THE PERMISSION OF UNESCO

cultural prop- erty as well as Intangible Folk Properties, which include manners and customs, folk performing arts, and folk techniques concerning food, clothing, housing, occupation, religious faith, and events. The national government designates especially significant practices, recognizes individuals or groups of individuals who are masters of the techniques concerned, and offers subsidies for individuals who are training successors and for public performances and exhibitions. Allowing the U.S. National Register to include not just the sedge fields in California but the basket weaving process itself would be similar to Japan’s LPCP. This would further allow the recognition and protection of cultural practices that are being lost to economic forces like urban renewal and gentrification, or to environmental ones like climate change. Something similar already exists at the local level: San Francisco’s Legacy Business Registry (Ordinance No. 29-15). The program seeks to save long-standing community-serving businesses that are considered valuable cultural assets. To qualify, a business must have operated in San Francisco for at least 30 years with no more than a two-year break, although the business may have been in more than one location. Further, the business must contribute to the neighborhood’s history and identity, and it must be committed to maintaining the physical features or traditions that define it,

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 11 such as craft, culinary, or art forms. In 2015 city voters approved the creation of a Legacy Business Historic Preservation Fund to help retain businesses at risk of displacement. In the protection of ICH, there must also be standards for addressing issues of disrespect, exploitation, and misrepresentation for non-community members carrying out research or data collection. The law currently requires that any institution that engages in federally funded research involving human subjects must have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) (42 U.S.C. § 289; 45 CFR § 46.101 et. seq.; 21 CFR 50; 21 CFR 56). The IRB, an administrative body established to protect the rights and welfare of human research subjects, must review and approve proposals before any principal investigator (PI) engages in research. Before applying, PIs must submit to training on the ethics and implications of working with human subjects. The federal regulations do consider some popula- tions, such as minorities or the economically disadvantaged, as “vulnerable” and therefore in need of additional consideration or protection. Additionally, some Native American Nations have Tribal IRBs that researchers must gain approval from before conducting their work. For example, the Navajo Nation Human Research Review Board addresses issues of consent, ownership of data, and review of manuscripts prior to publication (NNHRRB, 2019). In concert with these regulations, many institutions suggest working collaboratively with members of the study population to ensure the production of culturally appropriate materials, the additional consideration of benefits and harms accrued to the community, and the long-term implications of work. Expanding IRB requirements or creating new ones at the federal level, as well as mandating additional education prior to approval of research protocols addressing the harvesting of traditional knowledge and intangible cultural heritage, would create much-needed protections for communities whose resources have traditionally been exploited. When U.S. laws addressing intellectual property were created, it was quickly understood that the concept of property rights needed to be stringent enough to foster further innovation but flexible enough to allow for wide use (Goldstein and Reese,

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 12 2008:18). A similar balance is needed in the regulation of intangible cultural heritage. It is significant that UNESCO has recognized and promoted the universal value of these resources, but in the wake of the interest and publicity this can bring, bearer communities may also need to be protected from outside exploitation of their cultural products and practices. Changes to the existing regulatory frame- work in the U.S. for the protection of something other than the tangible will require expanded definitions of cultural significance, changes in preservation law, and a willingness by those in preser- vation and related fields to take on new challenges.FJ

EMILY BERGERON, J.D., PH.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Historic Preservation at the University of Kentucky. She can be reached at [email protected].

TAKEAWAY Eroding Edges Series (climate and native peoples)

TAKEAWAY Forum articles on Legacy Business

Bibliography 35 U.S. Code § 102. Conditions for patentability; novelty. “Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.” World Trade Organization. WTO, 1994. https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/trips_e.htm. Akagawa, Natsuko, and Laurajane Smith. Safeguarding Intangible Heritage: Practices and Policies. London: Routledge, 2019. Antons, Christoph, and William Logan, eds. Intellectual Property, Cultural Property and Intangible Cultural Heritage. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018. Brookstein, Mark D. “When History Is History: Maxwell Street, “Integrity,” and the Failure of Historic Preservation Law,” 76 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 1847 (2001). City and County of San Francisco. “Legacy Business Registry.” Legacy Business Registry | Office of Small Business, 2019. https://sfosb.org/legacy-business/registry. de la Cruz, Rodrigo, MarÌa Teresa Szauer, Roberto Lopez, and Luisa Elena Guinand, eds. Elementos Para La ProtecciÛn Sui Generis Elementos Para La ProtecciÛn Sui Generis De Los Conocimientos Tradicionales De Los Conocimientos Tradicionales Colectivoseintegrales Desde La Perspectiva IndÌgena Desde La Perspectiva IndÌgena. Caracas, Venezuela: Comunidad Andina, Corporacion Andina de Fomento, 2005. Establishing Legacy Business Registry, San Francisco Administrative Code, Ordinance No. 29-15 (2015). Goldstein, Paul, and R. Anthony Reese. Copyright, Patent, Trademark, and Related State Doctrines: Cases and Materials on the Law of Intellectual Property. 6th ed. St. Paul, MN: Foundation Press, 2008. Herrmann, Victoria. “U.S. Cities Need to Plan for an Influx of Internal Climate Migrants.” Scientific American Blog Network. Scientific American, June 6, 2018.https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ observations/u-s-cities-need-to-plan-for-an-influx-of-internal-climate-migrants/.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 13 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, and Norwegian Refugee Council. “IDMC: Global Report on Internal Displacement 2019.” IDMC | GRID 2019. IDMC, May 2019. https://www.internal-displacement. org/global-report/grid2019/. Kim, Hee-Eun. “Changing Climate, Changing Culture: Adding the Climate Change Dimension to the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage.” International Journal of Cultural Property 18, no. 3 (2011): 259–90. https://doi.org/10.1017/s094073911100021x. Law for the Protection of Cultural Property, Japan, Law No. 214, https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/ files/japan_law_protectionproperty_entno.pdf, May 30, 1950. “Navajo Nation Human Research Review Board.” Navajo Nation Human Research Review Board Conference 2013, 2019. http://www.nnhrrb.navajo-nsn.gov/. Parker, Patricia L., and Thomas F. King. National Register Bulletin 38: Guidelines for Evaluating and Documenting Traditional Cultural Properties. Washington, D.C., U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register, History and Education, National Register of Historic Places, 1998. Rigaud, Kumari, Alex de Sherbinin Kanta, Bryan Jones, Jonas Bergmann, Viviane Clement, Kayly Ober, Jacob Schewe, Susana Adamo, Brent McCusker, Silke Heuser, and Amelia Midgley (2018), Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration. Washington, DC: The World Bank. “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.” UNESCO, 2003. https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention. UNESCO. “Twelfth Session of the Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage.” UNESCO, 2017. https://ich.unesco.org/en/12com. United States v. Diaz, 499 F.2d 113 (United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. 1974).

1 For example, there was a Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property in 1970 and the 1973 World Heritage Convention. Some conventions came closer to protecting intangible resources, particularly folklore and oral history. These included the 1989 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, the 1993 Living Human Treasures system, and the 1998 Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity (Smith and Akagawa, 2019:13), and the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage. 2 http://www.comunidadandina.org/StaticFiles/OtrosTemas/MedioAmbiente/libro_perspectiva_ indigena.pdf. 3 The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPs), for example, sets international minimum standards for protecting IP, while focusing on reducing and preventing impediments to international trade (WTO, Preamble 1994). TRIPs further recognizes, however, “the special needs of the least-developed country Members in respect of maximum flexibility in the domestic implementation of laws and regulations in order to enable them to create a sound and viable technological base.” Alternatively, the rights of Indigenous people is called out specifically in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which states that member countries “subject to its national legislation, respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and promote their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge, innovations and practices and encourage the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of such knowledge, innovations and practices” (1992: Article 8(j)). 4 US v. Diaz, https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9016663950726667490&hl=en &as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr. 5 Japan’s Law for the Protection of Cultural Property, https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/ japan_law_protectionproperty_entno.pdf.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 14 Is There Such a Thing as Tangible Heritage?

JEREMY C. WELLS

estern culture over the past century has shown a remarkable interest in dystopian themes, especially Wthose that contemplate the end of human existence. Fictional accounts in movies and books—such as AI, War of the Worlds, and The Day the Earth Stood Still—paint a predictably apocalyptic future, while more scientifically grounded works—such as The World Without Us, written by Alan Weisman, a professor and journalist—objectively help us understand how life on the planet will likely continue, regardless of our presence on it.1 I provide this important context because I want to build on Weisman’s book title and ask what would “heritage” be in a “world without us”? Framing heritage in this way is a useful device to understand not only what this word means, but to also expose the haphazard and confused ways in which “heritage” is combined with “tangible” and “intangible” by educated people in the field of historic preservation. If we want to effectively communicate the value of “heritage” to the broader swath of humanity, surely we must first agree, among ourselves, what this concept is supposed to represent. But back to my question. Let’s assume that tomorrow humanity ceases to exist. What remains? Certainly the tangible aspects of our environment will still be here, such as buildings and landscapes. The basic characteristics of these objects—such as color, length, height, design, and materials—would not disappear. The records of who designed these places and of past human events would also still exist, preserved and recorded in documents until those crumble into dust. It is therefore quite obvious that human-modified objects and records do not need human beings to continue to exist, at least for a time. An alien could visit an Earth without people and find examples of all of the characteristics that are traditionally associated with criteria A, B, C, and D of a National Register nomination. Or in another sense, the way in which we professionally

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 15 Heritage, as a concept, is inherently intangible. ILLUSTRATION BY JEREMY C. WELLS define historical significance within a regulatory framework doesn’t actually need people to be operationalized. Given sufficient artificial intelligence, computers could be just as (or more) efficient in algorithmically defining historical significance—no people needed at all. Or maybe an alien race would be so inclined to populate our post-apocalyptic world and continue to nominate buildings to the National Register because this kind of activity doesn’t actually need people.

EXPERTS DEFINING “HERITAGE” Now let’s bring the disputed word “heritage” into this dystopian future. Can heritage exist independently of people? Before we can answer this question, we need to clearly define heritage, and move beyond its taken-for-granted, uncritical definitions. In orthodox historic preservation practice, the term essentially has become a synonym for history or historical significance and lost much of its

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 16 original meaning. The interchangeable way in which “historic” and “heritage” have been used in our field is not my observation alone; it has been documented by a number of academics and professionals as well, including internationally.2 Functionally, in orthodox preser- vation practice, especially in relation to the regulatory environment, whether one uses history or heritage to describe something, it inevitably is synonymous with (tangible) objects and factual history, and not (intangible) sociocultural meanings, such as a folklorist would employ. If our reference is UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICHC), however, heritage has a very specific definition based in the cultural “practices, representa- tions, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.” Moreover, the convention recognizes that heritage is constantly created and defined by everyday people in response to their environment. This definition of heritage has long been found in the academic literature on the topic from such noteworthy experts as the prominent University College London geographer David Lowenthal, as well as researchers from the critical heritage studies field, such as Laurajane Smith and Rodney Harrison, and many others.3 Folklorists, who have been researching the interactions between people and place for more than 50 years, most certainly perceive heritage in this manner.4 In sum, based on the ICHC definition and academic studies in the field, heritage is as much about the present as the past and is defined by the people to whom it has meaning, regardless of their conventional expertise.

EXPERTS DEFINING “HISTORY” IN PRESERVATION PRACTICE Unlike heritage, history—as used within historic preservation practice—is always about the past, is always about facts that can be documented objectively, and its meanings are controlled by conventional experts.5 To be sure, this definition is manifest in the many rules and regulations that direct preservation practice, such as the National Register of Historic Places (NR) criteria.6 In the United States, the NR is the official foundation of preservation

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 17 activity at the federal level and also has been adopted by most local municipalities (in some fashion) in their preservation ordinances. A key concept of the NR, “historical significance,” is a narrow way of describing “history” through a positivistic lens. Robert Morstein- Marx describes history through this perspective as “focus[ing] upon independently verifiable fact, stripped of all (or as much as possible) subjective ‘taint,’ and typically attended by the conviction, based on this reverence for facticity, that historical interpretation is something that somehow ‘emerges’ from the facts themselves after they have been thus properly verified.”7 Positivistic history is also associated with other concepts in the NR, including “broad patterns of history”, or the idea that somehow historical events can be predicted through a kind of scientific method. But, most importantly, the NR (and, by extension, broader preservation practice) erroneously assumes that significance is an innate quality of buildings and places. Or, in a more simplistic sense, what makes properties significant has nothing to do with how contemporary people perceive, conceptualize, or interpret these objects.8

LAYPEOPLE DEFINING “HERITAGE” INDEPENDENTLY OF “HISTORY” But how do laypeople define heritage? What does this word mean to them? The research is consistently pointing to a concept of heritage that rejects the historical positivism inherent in the NR. For instance, Laurajane Smith, an anthropologist at the Australian National University, has been trying to answer this question with almost 3,000 interviews of laypeople conducted in the United States, Canada, and Australia. In her interviews, people overwhelmingly define “heritage” in relation to someone’s or their own “background/ identity” and also associate the word with a sense of well-being, emotional security, or sense of place. Her interviewees describe heritage not as some innate quality of objects, but as meanings intimately intertwined with their own identity and experiences. For Smith’s interviewees, heritage is inexorably about what people think and do in the present and not what historical objects are (or how they exist).9 To be sure, the way in which Smith’s interviewees define heritage is quite compatible with the ICHC’s definition and

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 18 antithetical to the way in which “heritage” is contextualized within orthodox preservation practice as simply a synonym of history or historical significance. In other words, whether using a rigorous and culturally sensitive academic definition of heritage, the ICHC’s definition, or laypeople’s definition,heritage cannot exist independently of people. In a “world without us,” heritage simply disappears because people would not be around to create it, sustain it, and use it. An alien race could not populate our post-apocalyptic world and keep heritage alive—although they certainly would be creating their own version of heritage in the process. The reason why our heritage disappears without us is inherently related to its intangible qualities, and, more importantly, the assertion that nothing intangible can exist without us.10 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, intangible means “not constituting or represented by a physical object and of a value not precisely measurable” and “difficult or impossible to define or understand; vague and abstract.” I challenge the reader to come up with a single instance of how something intangible can exist independently of the human mind. Returning to the concept of heritage, if it can’t exist without people, how can any form of heritage be tangible? Sure, the building, object, or landscape is real and exists, but these things are not heritage, they are simply objects. People create the meanings associated with heritage once these objects are inter- preted, used, and changed by direct human influence. Using the phrase “intangible heritage” is equivalent, therefore, to saying “intangible intangible”; or conversely the phrase, “tangible heritage” is equivalent to saying “tangible intangible”—which is pure nonsense. Because heritage is inherently intangible, we technically do not need this adjective before it. Our lack of agreement on what heritage is, however, requires the presence of the word “intangible” to remind us that while heritage relates to the tangible world, it should not be a proxy for the physical environment of objects. Again, all heritage is intangible; it cannot be otherwise. To be sure, I am not the originator of this fact nor the first one to reinforce it. I give full credit to Laurajane Smith, who introduced this idea in her groundbreaking book Uses of Heritage (Routledge,

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 19 2006). In justifying her claim, Smith explains that “While places, sites, objects and localities may exist as identifiable sites of heritage— we may, for instance, be able to point to such things as Stone- henge, the Sydney Opera House, Colonial Williamsburg, the Roman Coliseum, Angkor Watt, Robben Island, and so forth—these places are not inherently valuable, nor do they carry a freight of innate meaning.” What exactly is Smith saying? When we claim that a tangible object is heritage it is tantamount to stating that the meaning of the object is in the object itself and not in our minds or in a group of minds (otherwise known as culture). In other words, we give meaning to objects; the objects do not give meaning to us (at least not without venturing into the paranormal, which is outside the scope of this article). The critical question to ask is, do meanings have tangible form? The obvious answer is no, they do not. Claiming that tangible heritage exists is therefore patently absurd. As far as I know, I cannot see meanings or touch them. This is the essence of Smith’s argument. Even critical heritage studies, which is arguably the wellspring from which many of these ideas arise, is mired in a confused bog of terms—not only “intangible heritage” and “tangible heritage,” but the equally absurd “intangible values” and “tangible values.” Values- based preservation/conservation became popular in the early 2000s, simultaneous with the Getty Conservation Institute’s publications on the subject, although its origins go back at least as far as William Lipe’s work on the subject in the mid 1980s.11 Ostensibly, it recognizes that there are more values associated with heritage than just art/historical ones, such as cultural, social, and economic values. It is, however, a reductive approach that requires condensing the full richness of cultural meanings into a discrete set of values that lack depth in their required simplicity. In this sense, it is semi-positivistic in assuming that reality can be reduced to these discrete values rather than understood, naturally, though a full breadth of meaning.12 When we conflate heritage and history, values and meanings suffer from the same abuse: These latter concepts are most certainly not the same, yet they are treated as such. Crucially, the philosopher Saussure reminds us that values are understood in relationship to other values, in relative order of

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 20 desirability, while meanings are not.13 In this sense, values are often (but not always) quantitative or semi-quantitative and are opera- tionalized through clarity and certainty, which are characteristics that impair depth of meaning. Yet, when one looks at English- language, Western preservation/conservation literature (academic and professional), meanings and values are used interchangeably in an uncritical and naive way. A useful example of this naive approach to values is in the phrases “intangible values” and “tangible values.” Returning to the earlier definition of “intangible,” we are reminded that this word means “vague and abstract” as well as impairing the measurability of something, which are antithetical to the required process of valuing. Thus “intangible values” is akin to asking for undefinable and unmeasurable values, which is an absurd proposition. Similarly, values, as a human concept, devoid of tangible form, make no sense in the context of “tangible values”; values, by their very nature are not part of objective reality.14 I would find it rather difficult, for instance, to physically touch a value, but I could certainly understand what it is. Or to bring us back to where we started, in a “world without us,” there can be no values. Leaving this pedantic critique behind, it is important to realize that while the words people use may not be precise, there is a definite and often consistent meaning behind their seemingly haphazard deployment. Functionally, when intangible heritage and tangible heritage are written in a document, they typically serve as a proxy for another dichotomy: cultural meanings or material objects. Unfortunately, what this dichotomy fails to encap- sulate is the possibility that cultural meanings can be derived from and associated with tangible objects. Too often, so-called intangible heritage is assumed to only apply to things like foodways, music, or performance arts when it applies equally to how buildings and places contribute to overall well-being and identity, among other possibilities. Conversely, tangible heritage is assumed to be a proxy for what Smith calls a “Eurocentric common sense definition of heritage as material.”15 In other words, it’s just a stand-in for the tangible characteristics of objects from the past. One might sound more inclusive by claiming to have a concern for built heritage, but

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 21 if it doesn’t involve a sociocultural investigation of people’s meanings associated with place, then heritage isn’t really being addressed. Moreover, failure to systematically look at these mean- ings is a functional ignorance of the broader public or what Smith calls a process of “sidelining” people’s values and meanings that is required by orthodox historic preservation practice.16 Whether intentional or not, the required language we use as professionals has the effect of alienating the very public we wish to serve.17 Yet, I am often as imprecise as anyone in using this stilted language because our field simply lacks better, more precise and easily understood words for concepts. Heritage is a messy, vague, ill-defined thing and if we proceed as if it’s easy to identify, under- stand, and treat, we are deluding ourselves. My own use of the phrase “built heritage conservation” may appear to suffer from this deficiency, but I indeed mean it very much as it should be inter- preted: the conservation of meanings that people associate with the built environment. Let me unpack this idea for a moment; conventional historic preservation practice assumes that we should focus on preserving (or conserving) fabric. I offer the more human- and people-centered approach of focusing on conserving the meanings (that is, heritage) that people have for places that are important to them, which is a concept explored by the conservation theorists Silvio Zancheti and Rosane Loretto in their idea of relating “dynamic integrity” to urban continuity.18 The former approach is of great interest to architects, architectural historians, archaeologists, and art conser- vators; the latter approach should be of great interest to laypeople.

AN INEVITABLE CHANGE Still, the majority of practitioners in the field of historic preservation are not ready to embrace the idea that all heritage is intangible, even if we had a logical path for doing so (hint: it doesn’t yet exist). This change would completely upend the regulatory and educational frameworks traditionally used in historic preservation in the United States. Yet we must embrace the inevitability of this future in an increasingly pluralistic society; for failure to fully appreciate the sociocultural dimension of heritage can be too easily read as elitist,

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 22 lacking in empathy, and myopic of social justice and equity issues that will increasingly define historic preservation practice. The reason for this is relatively simple: more than half a century ago, architects, historians, and archaeologists created the orthodox practice of historic preservation using the values of their time and not the much wider values held by the public either then or now.19 While, alone, there is nothing inherently wrong with either set of these values in certain contexts, the problem is when the values of conventional experts dominate over the broader values of the public in contexts that are uncertain and dynamic. To be sure, this describes 75% of practice today in the United States where accept- able values are dictated by rules and regulations and not common sense.20 Instead, by design, the majority of historic preservation practice “sidelines” the values of the public.21 In our conclusion to Human-Centered Built Environment Heritage Preservation, Barry Stiefel and I ask if “heritage conservation could be reconceptualized as an activity that does not impose value systems, but rather is a framework for understanding and negotiating meanings and values.”22 Such a change would require the systematic gathering of evidence using methods from the social sciences along with community-participatory–based techniques. But it would also demand replacing the nonsensical tangible/intangible dichotomy with the assumption that heritage is always intangible. In doing so, we would accept ambiguity as central to our work rather than creating our own, separate reality through the imposition of narrow systems of professional value. The meaning to be found in cultural heritage is wide-ranging and profound; we just need to figure out how to understand and manage it much better than we can do today. It’s time we embrace this challenge for the benefit of humanity—for at least as long as we exist on this planet. FJ

Jeremy C. Wells, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland, College Park. He can be reached at [email protected]. 1 Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: St. Martin’s Thomas Dunne Books, 2007). 2 Lynne Armitage and Janine Irons, “The values of built heritage,” Property Management, 31, no. 3 (2013): 246-259; Emma Waterton, Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 159; ECORYS & Fitzpatrick Associates, “Economic Value of Ireland’s Historic Environment,” 7. https://www.heritagecouncil.ie/content/files/ecorys_economic_ evaluation_historic_environment_final_report_1mb.pdf.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 23 3 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006); Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches (New York: Routledge, 2013); David C. Harvey, “Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 7, no. 4 (2001), 319-338; Regina Bendix, “Heritage between Economy and Politics: An Assessment from the Perspective of Cultural Anthropology,” in Intangible Heritage, edited by Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa (London: Routledge, 2009). 4 Folklorists were particularly active in the 1970s and 1980s in working with the National Park Service in integrating their ethnographic perspectives into historic preservation practice, culminating in 1983 with the report, Cultural Conservation: The Protection of Cultural Heritage (Washington D.C.: Library of Congress), prepared by Ormond Loomis of the Florida State Folklife Center. The Folklore and Historic Preservation Policy Working Group of the American Folklore Society, led by co-chairs Laurie Sommers and Michael Ann Williams, is continuing this work today (see https://www.afsnet.org/page/ histprespolicy). 5 For more on the concept of conventional experts’ control of the meanings of history, see the “authorized heritage discourse” in Smith, Uses of History. 6 See 36 CFR § 60.4. 7 Robert, Morstein-Marx, “Political History,” in A Companion to Ancient History. Edited by Andrew Erskine. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 8 Jeremy C. Wells, “The Plurality of Truth in Culture, Context, and Heritage: A (mostly) Post-structuralist Analysis of Urban Conservation Charters,” City and Time 3, no. 2:1 (2007): 1-13. 9 Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell, “The Tautology of ‘Intangible Values’ and the Misrecognition of Intangible Cultural Heritage,” Heritage & Society, 10, no. 1 (2017): 26-44. 10 The idea that nothing intangible can exist without human beings does, of course, ignore the possibility that if aliens do exist, they would likely have intangible concepts as well. It’s also possible that non-human species on this planet may also have cognitive qualities that could support intangible concepts. For purposes of simplicity, however, this article will not address these possibilities and only assume that intangible concepts apply to human beings. 11 Erica Avrami, Randall Mason, and Marta de la Torre, Values and Heritage Conservation (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2000); Marta de la Torre (ed.), Assessing the Values of Heritage Conservation (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2002); William D. Lipe, “Value and Meaning in Cultural Resources,” in Approaches to the Archaeological Heritage, edited by Henry Cleere, pp. 1-11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 12 Nigel Walter, “From Values to Narrative: A New Foundation for the Conservation of Historic Buildings,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 6 (2014): 634–650. 13 Stephen R Yarbrough, After Rhetoric: The Study of Discourse Beyond Language and Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), 130. 14 See Smith, “The Tautology of ‘Intangible Values’” for a much deeper exploration of these ideas. 15 Smith, “The Tautology of ‘Intangible Values,’” 29. 16 Smith, Uses of Heritage. 17 Thomas F. King, Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Resources (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2009). 18 Silvio Mendes Zancheti, Rosane Piccolo Loretto, “Dynamic integrity: a concept to historic urban landscape,” Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, 5 Issue 1 (2015): 82-94. 19 See John H. Sprinkle, Crafting Preservation Criteria: The National Register of Historic Places and American Historic Preservation (New York: Routledge, 2014). 20 For more about how various areas of practice define the preservation field, see Jeremy C. Wells, “Challenging the Assumption about a Direct Relationship between Historic Preservation and Architecture in the United States,” Frontiers of Architectural Research, 7, no.4 (2018): 455–464; for an exploration of how historic preservation practice lacks common sense, see Jeremy C. Wells, “Are We ‘Ensnared in the System of Heritage’ Because We Do Not Want to Escape?”, Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, 13, no. 1 (2017): 26–47. 21 For more about how the public’s values are unintentionally “sidelined” by preservation professionals, see Smith, Uses of Heritage. 22 Jeremy C. Wells and Barry L. Stiefel, “Conclusion: A Human-Centered Way Forward,” in Human- Centered Built Environment Heritage Preservation: Theory and Evidence-Based Practice, edited by Jeremy C. Wells and Barry L. Stiefel, 317–332 (New York & London: Routledge, 2019), 327.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 24 Shared Spaces, Invisible Imprints: Intersections of Latinx and African American Intangible Heritage

SEHILA MOTA CASPER AND LAWANA HOLLAND-MOORE

hen we talk about “intangible heritage,” we are talking about those qualities of place, culture, and the nuances Wof the daily lives of a cultural group that are not easily quantifiable, but generally appreciated and valued by the community in ways that outsiders and traditional historic preservation practi- tioners might not even perceive. Shared culture is embodied by physical places—notable buildings, unassuming vernacular structures, even alleyways and empty lots—and also by the myriad activities and cultural traditions associated with those places. We gather on brownstone stoops and in yardas (yards), reaching across them to share stories, news, or food with family and neighbors. We wave or call out to one another down streets and around neighborhoods that have become our shared spaces. Music fills our ears. Backyards and front and side lawns become places of celebration of the milestones of life. These are the places where culture and traditions continue to be transmitted across generations, and where deep connections are formed. These spaces and the structures within them hold the identity—both past and present— of that community. Even when physical places are altered or lost, the activities and bonds associated with them remain. Communities of color connect within their spaces through their traditions of communal life and heritage identity, with the two often blending. The intangible cultural heritage and imprint of communities of color continue to transform our urban landscape. As cities across the nation lose buildings and sites due to the forces of densification, displacement, and gentrification, African American and Latinx communities are challenged to protect the places that reflect their cultural identity and landscape. Both

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 25 Chicano Park, San Diego, California. COPYRIGHT © NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION historically and in contemporary society, these spaces are often shared by both communities and represent intersections and commonalities of experience.

CONNECTIONS LINKED TO, AND TRANSCENDING, PLACE History—and the built environment that is a part of that history— may be used to help reclaim a community’s identity and acknowl- edge its cultural presence. African Americans, displaced from their ancestral homelands and memory due to enslavement, created a connection with their African heritage through intangible traditions, as seen in the retention of vestiges of African dialects, foodways, crafts, and music. One of the best examples of this cultural retention can be found along the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which extends down the East Coast from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. Development pressures in locations such as Hilton Head Island (just outside of Charleston) have caused displacement of the Gullah community, creating a loss of their homes and a threat to a distinct, unique culture with a direct link to the past. Little Mexico, a once-thriving community in downtown Dallas, was a refuge for thousands of Mexicans fleeing the violence of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. In the following decades, Mexicans and

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 26 Mexican Americans created a built and culturally meaningful environment. Spanish conversations, outdoor socialization, and traditional architecture transformed downtown. Locally owned tienditas (stores) and businesses popped up throughout the barrio selling traditional food such as pan dulce (sweet bread) and Mexican spices; throughout the barrio women made fresh tortillas and sold them daily. Their connectedness to culture and landscape were expressed through the celebrations of their motherland, with the most meaningful holiday being el Diez y Seis de Septiembre, or September 16th, Mexico’s Independence Day. Urban renewal has all but erased Little Mexico, and only a handful of the historic buildings survive, but the connection and social ties continue through public celebrations and the expression of foodways and with the still- prospering restaurants that began in the barrio such as El Fenix Restaurant and El Chico Café. Places of community interaction and activism—such as barber- shops and beauty parlors, restaurants, community centers, and fraternal organizations—are valued in the African American commu- nity. Plazas and open communal space are significant to the Latinx community; places like Chicano Park in San Diego and Casita Rincón Criollo in the Bronx. Spiritual sites are very important to both communities. Ones such as Clayborn Temple in Memphis, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and Church of the Epiphany in Los Angeles not only served as places of communal religious worship and community centers, but also acted as meeting locations for civil rights and labor activists.

Clayborn Temple PHOTO COURTESY STEVE JONES

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 27 No matter how humble or unassuming the historic structure or site, it is nonetheless the location of intertwining lifeways and traditions. Recognizing these hidden or intangible elements figures greatly in determining what is important—what is historically significant and valued—to that community. It affects how the historic significance of places of meaning to communities of color should be evaluated, as communities’ needs and concerns might be very different than what is evident to “outsiders.” The challenge, then, is how to think about and evaluate those intangibles into what is considered the formal historic significance evaluation and designation process.

THE IMPACTS OF DISCRIMINATION AND DISPLACEMENT Shared multilayered histories of marginalization and discrimination have created opportunities for the Latinx and African American communities to live, interact, and react both side-by-side and together. Systemic discriminatory policies that perpetuated racism through segregation forced communities of color to create their own enclaves—barrios and neighborhoods where they found comfort in familiarity, and support while functioning in a country often hostile to people of color. Policies that enforced housing segregation, such as redlining and restrictive covenants, limited not only where black and Latinx residents could live but even the money they could receive to purchase their homes in the first place. Following World War II, developers rushed to create housing for returning GIs and their young families, but former soldiers of color were not able to take equal advantage of the opportunities. Whole suburban communities, such as the Levittowns created in New York, Pennsylvania, and Bowie, Maryland, barred them from owning homes there. Mexican American veterans faced the same discriminatory housing practices on their return that they had before leaving. Organizations like the American G.I. Forum were established to secure earned G.I. benefits and protect the civil rights of Latino GIs. In order to make way for urban renewal policies and the expansion America’s highway system, urban neighborhoods across the country were deemed “blighted.” From Atlanta to Detroit to

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 28 Left: In Little Havana, Cuban elders gather to play dominoes in the public park. Right: Little Havana’s traditional building stock faces a range of threats, including development pressure, demolition of historic buildings, and displacement of existing residents. PHOTOS COURTESY STEVEN BROOKE STUDIOS

Tucson, neighborhoods such as Little Mexico, Dallas’ first Mexican barrio, were cut through and decimated. Similarly. the destruction of an African American neighborhood in Southwest Washington, D.C., was the basis for the landmark Supreme Court decision Berman v. Parker, which upheld these policies in the name of eliminating “blighted” areas. These urban renewal policies that created blighted neighborhoods, coupled with federally subsidized suburban developments tailored to white families, spurred white flight into the suburbs and urban cores became predominately black and brown. Urban spaces are dynamic. Urban cores change and the neighborhoods within them evolve over time. You can see this in neighborhoods such as Little Havana in Miami. Little Havana transitioned from a thriving 1930s Jewish community, housed other ethnic groups, and in the 1960s became a Cuban safe haven, transforming into the Little Havana that exists today and is home to residents from the Caribbean, South and Central America, and elsewhere. Little Havana residents have created a vibrant Latinx corridor and bustling neighborhood on and off ofCalle Ocho (8th Street). There, Cuban elders continue their traditional pastime of playing dominoes in the park; artistry is expressed through murals and music; ventanitas offer a walk-up window for strong, sweetcafecitos .

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 29 In New York City, black and Latinx communities have long shared histories and interaction. The worldwide cultural phenom- enon that is hip hop, with its associated music, dance, and graffiti art styles, was created by black and Latino youth in the early 1970s. Its birthplace is recognized as 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, an unassuming apartment building in the Bronx, where DJ Kool Herc’s now- legendary party started a movement. New York City’s East Harlem began as an African American, Irish, and German neighborhood, followed by Italians and Eastern European Jews, and then Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Dominican residents. It derived its nickname “El Barrio” from its predominately Latinx residents. At the intersection of both black and Latinx cultures is the concept of “Afro-Latinidad,” which recognizes shared African and Latinx heritage in the Caribbean and Central and South America. Being Afro-Latinx is not mutually exclusive, as one is both black and Latino, and Afro-Latinx individuals and communities celebrate both cultures and their traditions. El Barrio is the location of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI), whose founder, Afro-Latina activist and artist Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, created “El Querido Barrio” (“My Beloved Neighborhood”) to tell the stories of more than a dozen sites through the use of an augmented-reality virtual tour. However, the pressures of development and gentrification have disproportionately affected black and Latinx neighborhoods nationwide. In Little Havana, for example, residents increasingly worry about escalating rents and longterm affordability. Mom-and- pop restaurants and locally owned grocery and clothing stores also fear being priced-out or otherwise displaced by new development or commercial gentrification. Communities of color, such as Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, are being gentrified not only by white incomers but also bygente (“people”) from the community, especially younger, more affluent ones who are returning to it to buy homes and invest in businesses. Called “gente-fication,” a term that is attributed to Boyle Heights wine-bar owner Guillermo Uribe in Los Angeles magazine, the process can be equated to what is normally perceived as hipster gentrification and takeover.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 30 Places can serve as anchors, rooting culture and identity to them, but they also do the same for that community’s memory. When a neighborhood’s original residents are displaced and the area begins to reflect its newer residents more, more than just structures are lost. There can also be the erasure of a community’s legacy and living memory, which makes the preservation and acknowledgement of who was once there that much more important.

MAKING THE INTANGIBLE TANGIBLE So how do we as preservationists make the intangible tangible? Since the National Register’s criteria for listing does not include intangible resources, these must be tied to a tangible resource. National Register Bulletin 38: Guidelines for Evaluating and Documenting Traditional Cultural Properties was developed to address this by considering the cultural significance and social values of a site. Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs) are usually associated with Native American spiritual or sacred sites, but a TCP can also be located anywhere of cultural, social or historic significance and mean- ing to a living community of any cultural or ethnic minority group. What makes sites such as Manhattan’s African Burial Ground or Shockoe Bottom in Richmond also qualify as a TCP? They serve as places of meaning, with both historical and spiritual significance to a living community. Bulletin 38 took displacement into account by stating that if a property has gone unused for a lengthy period of time, with use beginning again only recently, that does not make the property ineligible for the Register, citing the example of Native American tribes who were forced onto reservations or converted to Christianity.1 A site’s use does not have to be continued. What matters is the community’s continuing cultural identity and the site’s relation to that community’s history. The Bulletin also recognizes that in an urban landscape, all ethnic groups could have places that hold cultural value to a particular community, this includes sites like Casita Rincón Criollo in the South Bronx. These places of meaning help cultural communities to reclaim intangible connections to a place and to ancestors for whom those connections were lost. This opens possibilities for how we can view

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 31 black and Latinx cultural spaces. By consulting with and under- standing the values of the local community and looking at how intangible aspects of heritage and culture manifest and intersect in the built and social environment, historic preservationists can incorporate those qualities into resource identification and evaluation. As practitioners, we are trained to look for traditional primary sources, but sometimes, no matter how hard and how long we look, the information just isn’t there. Such is the case with the Rio Vista Farm in Socorro, Texas (outside of El Paso). As the processing center for the nation’s largest bracero (guest worker) program, with nearly 5 million work contracts granted to Mexican nationals during 1951–1964, it is a site critical to much family, community, and national history—yet relatively little is known about it. There is scant documentation about the bracero experience, or about the buildings within the facility. The City of Socorro and the National Trust will be nominating this site as a National Historic Landmark. We are relying primarily on oral history research to unearth personal accounts, which will help us better understand the shared experience and the historical use of the buildings. While this approach is not revolutionary, it has been seen by some as radical. But for those of us who come from communities of color and value generational learning in family and community settings, these oral narratives are very much a part of our cultural traditions and feel authentic. As the nation changes demographically and transitions to majority non-white, it is imperative that heritage practitioners embrace the audience of the future by learning how to empower communities of color to preserve both the tangible and non-tangible aspects of their heritage and identity. One of the most effective ways to transform our work is by connecting with community leaders in black and brown neighborhoods to learn from them and their cultural values and practices—both shared and unique—that contribute to the positive shaping of their cultural, social, and physical heritage. By using more inclusive ethnographic approaches such as oral histories and cultural mapping, encouraging the teaching of traditional expressions, and engaging and empowering

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 32 community knowledge-holders, preservation practitioners can look outside of their traditional preservation toolbox and incorporate these methods to not only tell a fuller story, but discover new ones that have not been considered before. FJ

SEHILA MOTA CASPER is the senior field officer at the National Trust’s Houston Field Office. LAWANA HOLLAND-MOORE is the program assistant for the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. They are also, respectively, the 2013 and 2014 National Trust Mildred Colodny Scholars.

TAKEAWAY AfroLatino Forum

TAKEAWAY Preserving African American Historic Places

RESOURCE Latino and Hispanic Heritage Stories

TAKEAWAY Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage.

1 Thomas F. King and Patricia L. Parker, National Register Bulletin 38: Guidelines for Evaluating and Documenting Traditional Cultural Properties, National Park Service, 18.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 33 Vestiges of Vietnam: Uncovering the Hidden Heritage of Virginia’s Little Saigon

KIM O’CONNELL

hroughout most of the 20th century, Arlington, Virginia, experienced what seemed like unstoppable growth. A small Tself-governing county of only 26 square miles, Arlington has been a bustling bedroom community of Washington, D.C., ever since around the time of the Second World War, when the construction of the Pentagon drew thousands of federal workers to the nation’s capital and the county began to rapidly urbanize. For most of the 20th century, Arlington’s central commercial district—its “down- town”—centered in its Clarendon neighborhood, which once boasted major department stores such as Sears and J.C. Penney. By the 1970s, however, the Clarendon commercial district was in a period of decline caused largely by growing competition from regional malls and ongoing construction of the D.C. Metro subway system, which tore up Arlington streets and kept away shoppers. This coincided with a wave of Vietnamese immigration to Arlington, precipitated by the availability of sponsor families that helped immigrants get settled and the affordability of abandoned storefront

My-An (left) started as fabrics store and then expanded as a cafe. It, as with Vietnam Alterations, was established by Vietnamese entrepreneurs in Arlington, Virginia’s Little Saigon. PHOTOS COURTESY MICHAEL HORSLEY

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 34 retail spaces in Clarendon. There, Vietnamese entrepreneurs estab- lished a thriving commercial enclave that included grocery stores, gift shops, and restaurants—an area that became known informally as Little Saigon. But it didn’t last. About a decade after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnamese community in Arlington largely moved on to establish a commercial center in Falls Church, Virginia, in neighboring Fairfax County, leaving almost no trace in Arlington. This has posed a challenge to historic resource managers and preservationists who want to commemorate the important imprint that the Vietnamese community made in Arlington in the immediate years after the Vietnam War.

ARRIVAL IN ARLINGTON After a protracted military conflict that would see more than 3.4 million U.S. soldiers deployed to Southeast Asia, the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon capitulated to the North Vietnamese army on April 30, 1975. This event led to the first major exodus from Vietnam, in which hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees sought safe havens in the United States and elsewhere. This first group of refugees tended to be better educated than the later arrivals, and had connections to government and military personnel. About 125,000 refugees came to the United States in this first wave of Vietnamese immigration. The U.S. military quickly set up refugee relocation centers in Guam, the Philippines, Thailand, Wake Island, and Hawaii. Once processed through those ports, refugees were sent to one of four resettlement centers in the United States: Camp Pendleton in California, Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, or Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania. From there, unless they were financially independent, refugees were matched with sponsors— often families, church groups, or social-services organizations— which helped the new arrivals to get settled, enroll children in school, and find work. The second wave of Vietnamese immigration included thou- sands more refugees, who came via camps all over Southeast Asia. They often arrived by boat, thus earning the common description

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 35 of refugees from Vietnam and neighboring countries as “boat people.” More than 800,000 people left Vietnam by boat between 1975 and 1997.1 Large Vietnamese populations settled in southern California (primarily in Orange County, which is still home to the largest concen- tration of Vietnamese in the United States), as well as in and around other cities such as Houston; Portland, Oregon; and New Orleans. In the Washington, D.C., area, most Vietnamese refugees settled in Northern Virginia, predominantly in Arlington, Alexandria, and Falls Church, because of their proximity to the nation’s capital and the availability of U.S. sponsor services, financial aid, and other assistance.

CREATING A COMMUNITY The first Vietnamese immigrants to arrive in Arlington quickly realized that Clarendon’s vacant and low-rent buildings offered business opportunities. By early 1975, two Vietnamese grocery stores had been established in Clarendon: Saigon Market, operated by a secretary from the Vietnamese embassy, and Vietnam Center, managed by the Vietnamese wife of a CIA employee. “Many of us wanted to stay together—to form something like a Chinatown,” Dung Luong, who helped to develop Saigon Market, told the Washington Post in 1981.2 Several of these businesses were established in local buildings that date to the 1920s and 1930s, adding another layer of significance to these historic structures.

In the mid 1970s, two Vietnamese businesses, the Saigon Market and the Pacific department store, helped anchor and establish Little Saigon. PHOTOS COURTESY MICHAEL HORSLEY

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 36 In 1977 the Pacific department store opened in Clarendon in a two-story building, selling imported food, antiques, fabric, and wedding items. The upper floor featured a billiard hall. Other shops soon opened, places with names like Lotus Imports, Dat Hung Jewelry, Saigon Souvenir, My-An Fabrics, and Mekong Center. Family sponsors, refugee assistance groups, and the Catholic Charities regularly organized trips that brought immigrants to Clarendon to shop, and word quickly spread about the area’s offerings. Once Little Saigon was established, more Vietnamese restaurants opened in Clarendon, lasting into the 1990s, including popular establishments called Queen Bee, Little Viet Garden, Café Saigon, and Nam Viet. There, customers—both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese—could sample Vietnam’s signature dishes, including cha gio (spring rolls ), pho (soup ), and banh mi (sandwiches). Former refugee Toa Do talked about Arlington’s Little Saigon in an oral history interview: “There’s a coffee shop that is selling [traditional Vietnamese] coffee with the condensed milk, and then if you sit there and you listen to the Vietnamese music and bring your coffee, you feel like you’re back in Saigon again if you close your eyes. So I think that was the magnet, because my family, my wife and the two boys, they were in Vietnam at the time….You could still see the display of the yellow flag of the former South Vietnam, and then you could also hear all the music, and from time to time you would see people in the long traditional dress…so you could feel very much at home.”3 In 1986, after opening one of the first restaurants in Little Saigon, My-An, Richard Nguyen’s parents then established Nam-Viet restaurant, now the only restaurant from the Little Saigon era that remains in Arlington. Nguyen is now the general manager. “Growing up, some of the [business] owners had kids my age, and… you would literally sit at a table or a corner spot in where the restaurant was or your business was, and you would just do your homework,” Nguyen recalled in an oral history interview. “It was very close knit. You knew everybody down the street. You knew everybody across the street. You knew their family. You knew their extended family.”4

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 37 In addition to providing Vietnamese immigrants with self-suffi- ciency and comfort in their new land, the presence of the growing Vietnamese community paved the way for changes in government programs that have created a generally immigrant-friendly envi- ronment in Arlington ever since. One significant early program was the Vietnamese Community Center established at Arlington’s Page Elementary School. Vietnamese resources were also included in the public schools’ English as a Second Language program. (Now, the current iteration of that program serves students representing about 90 background languages.) After the Vietnamese community became established, Arlington County also set up the Indochinese Refugee Cooperative Education Program in the Arlington Career Center, which was designed to help refugees find jobs as well as deal with depression and other problems associated with the trauma of leaving home. This program then became the Refugee Education and Employment Program (REEP) and is now called the Arlington Education and Employment Program (although it still goes by acronym REEP), which teaches life and workplace skills to immigrant communities.

FINDING EDEN After years of planning and construction, the first section of the D.C. Metro rail system opened in 1976, with new stations added in succession and radiating outward from the urban core over the following years (a process that continues with below- and above- ground rail lines to this day). On December 1, 1979, the long-awaited Clarendon Metro Station opened, ending the construction-related upheaval that facilitated the Vietnamese shops locating there in the first place. Once the Metro opened in Arlington, county government and local developers quickly During construction of the Clarendon Metro Station, the upheaval resulted in low-rent opportunities worked to revitalize the neighbor- for Vietnamese immigrants and entrepreneurs. PHOTO COURTESY ARLINGTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 38 hood, which they viewed as an essential hub in a long-term plan for transit-oriented development. Landlords, in due course, began raising the rents on Vietnamese shopkeepers. In 1975, for example, a Clarendon storefront could be rented for as little as $5 a square foot. By 1989 that same retail space would go for $25 per square foot.5 Eventually, like a house of cards, the Vietnamese establishments bowed to this pressure and folded. By 1995, two decades after the fall of Saigon, only a few restaurants remained. By 2015 only one holdout from the Little Saigon era still stood—Nam Viet restaurant. All around it, Clarendon had transformed from a low-rise, mid-cen- tury shopping district to today’s high-rise mecca of apartment and commercial buildings, upscale restaurants, and chic stores, all centered on the Metro station. The transformation was keenly felt by the Vietnamese community. “They felt sad,” said former refugee Kim Cook in an oral history interview. “The ones who helped set it up felt like we were losing the country the second time. The first location that we had as a community in America [was] gone.”6 Around 1982 several Vietnamese investors pooled their resources and purchased a fading supermarket in Falls Church, about five miles west of Clarendon, to open a new “Little Saigon”— which they would call Eden Center. The center was named after the Eden Arcade, a once-prominent retail area in Saigon (which has now been demolished). The location was convenient to many Vietnamese in the area, who had generally moved deeper into the western suburbs of Washington. By 1984, 60 percent of local Vietnamese lived within three miles of Eden Center, according to geography professor Dr. Joseph Wood.7 Since then Eden Center has become the primary community gathering place for Vietnamese in Northern Virginia and the mid- Atlantic region, now including more than 120 Vietnamese shops and restaurants (and a few related to Korean or Chinese goods) in a strip mall that is still growing. In addition to an elaborate lion’s gate at its entryway, two flagpoles stand in the parking lot—one with the American flag, the other with the yellow-and-red banner of the pre-Communist Republic of Vietnam.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 39 Eden Center has become the primary community gathering place for Vietnamese in Northern Virginia. PHOTO BY KIM O’CONNELL This is, by most accounts, a happy ending to the story of Vietnamese immigration to Arlington in the tumultuous years after the fall of Saigon. But a growing effort has sought to recognize the importance of Arlington’s role in this success story.

REVIVING LITTLE SAIGON Over the last five years, there have been a variety of efforts, some tied to the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War in 2015, to commemorate the intangible heritage of Arlington’s Vietnamese com- munity. These have including storytelling, exhibits, and events, taking place, whenever possible, in Little Saigon’s original location and places. In 2014 Dr. Elizabeth Morton, director of Virginia Tech’s Urban Planning program, led her graduate students in collecting more than a dozen oral history interviews with members of the Vietnamese community. Interviewees talked about leaving Vietnam, settling in northern Virginia, and their memories of Little Saigon, either as a business owner, patron, or employee. The collection of oral history interviews is now housed (in both audio and transcript form) at the Arlington Public Library’s Center for Local History. It has also been widely used in outreach efforts, as described below. Most of the Clarendon buildings that housed the Vietnamese shops pre-dated the Little Saigon era and remain in use today by other businesses. Although they are mostly not protected by local preservation designations, there is abundant local and government

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 40 interest in preserving and adaptively reusing them. But there has been little recognition of their historic significance to the Vietnamese community. In 2015 Virginia Tech student Judd Ullom, who had participated in the oral history project, created a “living museum” in which he edited the oral histories into video and audio stories. Furthermore, to connect this history to the buildings where events took place, Ullom created a series of colorful stickers with QR codes that were placed in the front windows of current Clarendon businesses that once housed Vietnamese establishments (for which owners and managers were generally supportive). Patrons and passersby could scan the codes with their mobile phones and be taken to the Little Saigon Clarendon site to hear oral history snippets and view more about the Vietnamese experience. In 2015, to recognize the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Arlington County staff worked with a local Vietnamese artist, Khanh Le, to create a temporary public art installation in the Clarendon Metro Station plaza, which was unveiled in a public program. Le used historic photographs of Little Saigon to create three-dimensional miniature buildings that recreated what Clarendon looked like after the Vietnam War. He also incorporated audio files from the oral histories into the artwork, allowing visitors to walk around a version of Little Saigon and be transported back to that time and place. That same year, Arlington County’s Historic Preservation Program and Cultural Affairs Program jointly won a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to produce a 28-page illustrated booklet, Echoes of Little Saigon, based on the oral histories collected by the Virginia Tech students, additional interviews, and archival research.

In 2015, local Vietnamese artist, Khanh Le created a temporary public art installation in the Clarendon Metro Station plaza, using historic photographs of Little Saigon to build three- dimensional miniature buildings recreating what Clarendon looked like after the Vietnam War. PHOTO COURTESY ALIZA SCHIFF

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 41 Drawing on my training in historic preservation and back- ground as the daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant, I have been involved in many of these efforts, including serving as an advisor to the oral history project and author of the booklet. I have participated in several public programs about Little Saigon in general and the booklet in particular, including a lecture at Arlington Central Library, a panel discussion called “We Are All Arlington,” a table at Arlington’s annual Mid-Autumn Festival (a traditional Vietnamese children’s festival), an interview with a local public radio food program called “Melting Pot,” and a panel discussion and video produced by WETA, the D.C.-area PBS station. Although decentralized and often temporary, these efforts are nevertheless building a coalition of shared understanding and interest among Arlington County government, members of the Vietnamese community, and the general public that will likely support future preservation efforts that are more lasting. Future projects that have been discussed in the county include the creation and installation of a permanent public artwork or historical marker acknowledging the Little Saigon period in Arlington, as well as the possible nomination of Nam Viet restaurant to the National Register of Historic Places. If these projects are successful, it would largely be due to the extensive groundwork that a determined group of preservationists and scholars has done already to preserve the intangible heritage of this indelible community. FJ

The daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant, KIM O’CONNELL is a journalist based in Arlington, Virginia, who is writing a book about Vietnamese heritage. In spring 2019, she was a Virginia Humanities fellow researching Vietnamese immigration history at the Library of Virginia in Richmond. She holds a master’s degree in historic preservation from Goucher College. She can be reached at [email protected]. Selected Bibliography “Arlington’s Little Saigon.” WETA (PBS) Boundary Stones Blog: https://blogs.weta.org/boundary- stones/2014/05/08/arlingtons-little-saigon Do, Hien Duc. The Vietnamese Americans. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999. The Fall of Saigon. PBS Documentary, WGBH Boston, 1983. Freeman, James A. Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese American Lives. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1989. Historic Affairs and Landmark Review Board. Historic Resources in the Clarendon Commercial District. Arlington County, Virginia, May 1985. Little Saigon Clarendon web site: www.littlesaigonclarendon.com. O’Connell, Kim. Echoes of Little Saigon: Vietnamese Immigration and the Changing Face of Arlington, Virginia. Arlington County, Virginia, in partnership with the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 2016. Vietnamese Immigration Collection and Oral History Transcripts, Center for Local History, Arlington Public Library.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 42 1 W. Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refuge (London: Zed Books, 1998), 193. 2 Charles Dervarics, “Orient Meets East Coast in Clarendon,” Washington Post, June 1, 1981: WB19. 3 Toa Do, transcript of an oral history interview conducted by Aaron Frank, November 8, 2014, Arlington Public Library Center for Local History. 4 Richard Nguyen, transcript of an oral history interview conducted by Judd Ullom, October 27, 2014, Arlington Public Library Center for Local History. 5 B. Drummond Ayres Jr.,“Prosperity Threatens Refugees of Vietnam,” New York Times, October 26, 1989: A18. 6 Kim Cook, transcript of an oral history interview conducted by Aaron Frank, November 8, 2014, Arlington County Library Center for Local History. 7 Joseph Wood, “Vietnamese American Place Making in North Virginia,” The Geographical Review, 87 no.1, (January 1997).

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 43 Engaging Communities to Identify Intangible Heritage in Minneapolis

MICHAEL TOLAN

few months ago, at a neighborhood meeting in Northeast Minneapolis, a prospective business owner came to pitch Ahis idea for a nightclub. Neighborhood meetings here are typically an orderly gathering of the usual suspects—some home- owners, a few business owners—but this meeting drew a standing- room-only crowd. The entrepreneur didn’t make it very far into his presentation before the barrage of questions came. The meeting swiftly descended into pandemonium, with the flustered presenter standing by, as community members turned their barbs upon each other, some thrilled by the prospect of a new business, others distressed about traffic, parking shortages, and noise. To him, his idea must have seemed like a natural fit—a sensible next step in Northeast Minneapolis’ evolution from quiet working- class industrial neighborhood to artistic haven to premiere hipster locale. To the community, it struck a nerve. The proposal epitomized the struggle between so-called growth and so-called preservation;

Intangible heritage, like a legacy of diversity and immigration, rarely has a fixed address but defines a community’s identity. PHOTO BY MICHAEL TOLAN

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 44 between gentrifiers and gentrified; long-time homeowners and new renters; artists and developers. Beneath the brouhaha lay a fierce tug-of-war over community character. At Rethos (formerly the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota), we’ve tried to position ourselves not as participants in this debate, but as facilitators of it. In Minneapolis, like many major cities across the country, change is happening—fast. The question is no longer about how to spur growth, but how to manage it. While conversa- tions about community character spark fierce debate, a lack of consensus about the definition of community character often immobilizes these discussions from the onset. Our role has been to render the intangible tangible—not necessarily to generate policy, but to promote the conversations that precede it. And in doing so, we hope to reframe crucial discussions about intangible heritage and how communities can safeguard their future.

WHY ENGAGEMENT MATTERS In 2016 the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota received a grant from the McKnight Foundation to engage with communities in four Minneapolis neighborhoods to examine and determine their cul- tural assets.1 It was an exciting opportunity to do innovative work— to perform the ever-elusive “proactive preservation.” We would have time and resources to build relationships with community members, investigate the importance of intangible heritage, and experiment with solutions to protect it based on local priorities. This was a new initiative for the organization, and it felt crucially relevant. Communities in Minneapolis and across the country are currently facing rapid change and the prospect of physical and cultural displacement. This moment demands both novel strategies to address these challenges and space for communities to tell their stories in authentic ways. With a focus on the power of place, preservationists are uniquely equipped to lead this effort. We approached the project with a loose conception of what intangible heritage or cultural assets might include. It could be physical places—historic or otherwise. But it could also be the businesses and critical community nonprofits that inhabit those

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 45 spaces. It might involve the experiences, memories, stories, tradi- tions old and new, and other characteristics which define a place. But the essence of the project was to provide a forum for communities to provide clarity and substance to our initial vision. While we could brainstorm in our offices what cultural heritage might mean to people or ways to protect it, we had no way of understanding of its depth and extent without their input. For this reason, we felt—and feel now, more than ever—that community engagement must be at the center of the movement to protect intangible heritage. A grassroots approach enables us to learn about what truly matters to communities and reveals opportunities for solutions grounded in how people connect to places. Further- more, engaging communities in discussions about intangible heritage empowers them to advocate for these tools. Unfortunately, there is a widespread sentiment among communities that they don’t have the authority or agency to advocate for cultural heritage. We believe engagement can address that assumption. And so while we had bold visions of the power of community engagement and recognized it as integral to the future success of the preservation movement, we—like many preservation organizations, I suspect—had absolutely no idea how to do it.

BUILDING COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT FROM THE GROUND UP Our community engagement initiative emerged out of ongoing conversations with neighborhood leaders from the four Minneapolis neighborhoods. They all expressed interest in preserving their historical and cultural legacies, but traditional preservation tactics could not fully support their goals of protecting intangible heritage. The need for new tools was readily apparent. Our initial funding stemmed from the need to address this gap, and we selected the four neighborhoods as locations to conduct our work. We had audacious aspirations of facilitating community meetings and convening conversations to build consensus about the value of cultural heritage assets. That work, apparently, does not happen overnight. Beyond a loose network of relationships, we lacked the connections that could support our efforts.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 46 The Cedar-Riverside Multicultural Dinner highlights the diversity of the neighborhood. PHOTO BY MICHAEL TOLAN

We remain deeply thankful to the McKnight Foundation for providing the opportunity for us to develop relationships and to experiment with a truly organic approach. Recognizing that not every organization will have the same flexibility, I want to outline four major strategies we relied on to build a new community engagement initiative and discuss the lessons we’ve learned about preserving intangible heritage: Establishing a Presence, Engaging Communities on Creative Terms, Meeting People Where They Are, and Building Authentic Relationships.

ESTABLISHING A PRESENCE First and foremost, we made ourselves consistently available. It sounds obvious, but we understood that no one knew who we were, and no one would ever find out if we worked from our offices eight miles away in downtown St. Paul. During the days, we worked in local coffee shops. During the evenings, we attended neighborhood association meetings. Especially in the beginning, we didn’t discriminate about what types of meetings we attended—the simple presence of community members was enough to draw us there. If we weren’t immediately relevant to locals, we would make ourselves relevant by our regular presence. Over time, as our network of relationships grew, we found this to be particularly effective. New relationships grew out of serendipitous encounters. Once, we made plans to speak with a longtime regular at Palmer’s Bar, an iconic dive bar that’s been a Cedar-Riverside neighborhood landmark for over a century. Before he arrived, another Palmer’s regular decided he wanted to chat too. Over time, more regular patrons approached us wanting to tell

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 47 their stories. We gathered much richer information than expected, all because we showed up (it probably didn’t hurt that we bought them a few drinks for their time).

ENGAGING COMMUNITIES ON CREATIVE TERMS We all know that preservation jargon can fail to resonate with others. Asking people about their favorite cultural assets or intan- gible heritage will likely elicit confused stares. But we found that a simpler question, like “what are your favorite places in the neigh- borhood?” isn’t a whole lot better. These direct questions overwhelm and force people to think in unfamiliar ways. Preservationists are passionate about places and actively think about how they shape their lives. Others have that passion too, but it’s not as top-of-mind. Questions about experiences—rather than preferences—proved much more inviting. We held unstructured conversations, as opposed to formal interviews, and asked questions that anyone might be accustomed to answering, like “What was your first experience coming to the neighborhood?” We always wanted to know how a place facilitates an experience, but it was never the role of community members to say that explicitly. Instead, we created a setting in which someone might be comfortable sharing that information indirectly. We used some creative techniques to get people talking. We relied heavily on an adaptation of “Place It!”, an activity developed by James Rojas. We asked participants to abstractly represent their favorite places, stories, and memories from the neighborhood using a collection of found objects we provided. Talking about these ideas can be difficult; building them out of toys and other assorted objects breaks down those mental barriers and stimulates a free-flowing conversation about culture.

Place It! helps communities think creatively about place. Here, a Cedar-Riverside youth builds the Riverside Plaza building where she lives. PHOTO BY MICHAEL TOLAN

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 48 MEETING PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE We were also intentional about the places where we engaged people. Neighborhood meetings provided a good venue for building relationships. We wanted to reach non-participating, disenfranchised groups too, though. To do so, we abided by the principle of meeting people where they are, rather than expecting them to come to pre-arranged, potentially intimidating meetings. We talked to people at block parties, businesses, and even on the street. In Logan Park, the center of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District, we felt comfortable wandering into artist studios and other businesses to speak with owners and customers. If they were busy, we set up times to come back and have more in-depth conversations. In Cedar-Riverside, a heavily East African neighborhood, we learned this spontaneous approach might be considered intrusive. So we built trust and relationships with community leaders who then provided access to a broader network. They invited us to attend existing events, like the Cedar-Riverside Multicultural Dinner which celebrates the neighborhood’s diversity and draws a broad cross-section of the community. We could never have indepen- dently organized anything of its scale and reach, and we engaged people there—especially youth—whom we never would have been able to speak to otherwise.

BUILDING AUTHENTIC RELATIONSHIPS Establishing trust with the community often meant working on projects only tangentially related to documenting heritage. That’s because meaningful engagement requires a commitment to the community’s needs—not just to your vision of what the community needs. Authentic engagement isn’t about marketing your group, drawing more people to your events, or increasing awareness about your work. It’s about developing a better understanding of how to orient your expertise to meet the priorities of the community. In Cedar-Riverside, we collaborated with local leaders to develop a program called Building Power. The inspiration behind the initiative was to equip youth with training to combat racial injustice and become vocal community advocates. Each weekly

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 49 session featured leadership development training and an outside speaker who spoke on topics such as criminal justice reform and white supremacy. Initially, we became involved with Building Power to lead discussion on topics like gentrification. Even though that never happened, we view our participation as immensely important. We played a role in preparing youth to become better civic leaders. We also built stronger relationships with neighborhood activists. These connections allowed us to access a broader network of people and better serve the neighborhood. Building Power helped us understand the community’s priorities, needs, and issues, independent of our own project. Our involvement allowed us to recast our work to be more meaningful to the community.

DOCUMENTING INTANGIBLE HERITAGE Our experience engaging communities revealed the fascinating depth and breadth of intangible heritage. Sometimes intangible heritage is obvious. But sometimes, it’s found in the quotidian, the overlooked, the mundane—the features that blend so seamlessly into a place that it becomes hard to untangle them from the place itself. People mentioned familiar elements that corresponded with our expectations of intangible heritage: restaurants and other local businesses; parks and public squares; murals; festivals and other traditions. But on the ground, we found surprises and new insights. People talked about the value of physical places because of the memories they evoke and the opportunity they provide for intangible heritage to flourish. For example, a culture and history of accepting immigrants is important in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Residents recognized the importance of certain buildings not because of any particular business that exists there currently, but because their affordability and location allow new immigrants to start their own businesses and thrive. We also found that people cited less-obvious elements of intangible heritage: railroads that bisect the neighborhood, a vacant lot that once held a historic performing arts center before it burned down, the basketball gym at the community center.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 50 The GIS maps articulate what the community values, and why. PHOTO BY MICHAEL TOLAN

Eighteen months of community engagement taught us that our greatest contribution didn’t have to be compiling new research or offering up revelations about intangible heritage. Though we would’ve liked to, we also didn’t have to solve gentrification or displacement. Rather, we came to see the importance of articulating a community’s perspectives on intangible heritage in a communal, tangible way that enables productive discussion about neighborhood character. Partnering with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), we created GIS maps for theLogan Park, Cedar-Riverside, and Elliot Park neighborhoods that depict the information we gathered. The maps include entries on notable cultural assets and contain stories, quotations, and photos. Each map considers assets that have fixed addresses, like mosques, businesses, and artist studios, as well as abstract neighborhood characteristics, like a “gritty” vibe or a history of immigration. The program we used, StoryMaps, is a free, simple tool any organization can utilize. None of this information is new. But the presentation is. The maps translate perspectives previously scattered across individual memories into a single, easily accessible location, allowing people to see how others experience culture. They give the sense that personal feelings are actually shared and collective while also offering new insights. They affirm the notion that intangible heritage exists, that it’s worth fighting for, and that communities possess the power to advocate for it.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 51 PRESERVATIONISTS AS AMBASSADORS OF PLACE It is difficult to consider the prospect of developing a new system to preserve intangible heritage that parallels the one we’ve created for tangible, architectural heritage. This would necessitate some- how creating a unified theory of preserving sandwiches, festivals, and intersections. Such a system would presage many of the same criticisms of traditional historic preservation: its heavy-handedness and lack of applicability to what matters most about a place. These concerns elevate the need for community engagement— for understanding intangible heritage through the lens of commu- nities. Creating a tangible record of that cultural heritage establishes a common language. It allows communities and policymakers to discuss the present and future of local heritage. In Logan Park, for example, community members are referring to their GIS maps as they lobby developers and property owners to create public art, bulletin boards, and other amenities that respect and contribute to the longstanding blue-collar and artistic culture. Some community members have learned about the neighborhood’s past reputation as a home for underground music through the maps and are now exploring ways to revive that legacy and make it more visible. GIS maps are just one method, but a staid, academic report is emphatically not an option. The presentation of this information should be living, public, accessible, and wholly owned by the community so it can be used by the community. SmaPl, a graphic novel that functions as a planning document created by the Frog- town neighborhood in St. Paul, provides another example of how to convey community priorities in an engaging, interactive way. The collaborative, interdisciplinary approach of the GIS maps and SmaPl offers a valuable lesson about protecting intangible heritage: safeguarding cultural legacies cannot be the preservation field’s responsibility alone. Preservationists should increasingly see themselves not as stewards of a to-be-determined policy appara- tus, but as ambassadors of a community’s sense of place. This field can provide a critical understanding of how culture, history, and heritage directly impact our lives. Now we should examine how to connect that understanding to broader community development

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 52 efforts—and into other fields and disciplines, to establish a multi- sectoral movement. In Cedar-Riverside, for instance, the community cited the presence of diverse immigrant businesses as an important piece of their intangible heritage. Now, we see our task as connecting our insights to planners and economic development specialists to create better translation services for business owners, increase facade grants, and ease permitting processes. The Logan Park community said the density of artist studios is a critical element of their cultural identity. Now we see our task as informing City Hall and real estate specialists about our insights in order to envision sustainable ownership models that preserve the use of the large warehouse buildings which are home to the arts. We must continue to develop new policies to strengthen preservation efforts. Perhaps more importantly, we must find new uses for the ones we already have by strengthening interdisciplinary connections with our peers and expanding our notion of what preservation can look like. Engaging communities about intangible heritage will always be daunting because the results are far from clear. This is, of course, a feature, not a bug: the lack of obvious proscriptive measures forces us to engage, understand, design policies specifically tailored to a community. We’re all better off when we participate in this messy process. We certainly have a long way towards doing this consistently in Minneapolis. But our work has taught us valuable lessons about how we could be most useful to communities—how preservation can be most useful to communities: We can provide people a platform to articulate who they are so they can better advocate for who they want to be. FJ

MICHAEL TOLAN is a Master in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and former Community Engagement Coordinator for the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota. He can be reached at [email protected].

1 Throughout this piece, I use the phrases “intangible heritage” and “cultural assets” interchangeably.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 53 Working-class Intangible Heritage from the Pennsylvania Coal Fields

CAMILLE WESTMONT

oday many of the mid-19th century workers’ houses in the former company towns of the Northeastern Pennsylvanian Tanthracite coal fields are undistinguishable from mid-century suburban homes, down to the manicured lawns and two-car drive- ways. But even just 60 years ago when these houses and the shaft mines they served were still integral to the coal industry, these landscapes were radically different. The landscape was optimized for production not beauty. Simple, ad-hoc plank fences encircled house lots that were covered with subsistence gardens, fruit trees, storage sheds, and little else. Life was difficult and dirty. Grey culm (waste) banks of mining refuse stretched out from the edges of towns like a lunar landscape, releasing a constant cloud of dirt and dust into the air. The sounds of processing coal at nearby coal breakers and washeries created a consistent, deafening rumble. In maps and depictions of the built environments of these towns, it becomes clear that in these landscapes of production, there was no space for enhancing people’s lives, only spaces for labor. It is only through intangible heritage that the tactics working families used to survive and thrive within these highly controlled environments become clear. This article provides a glimpse into the intangible cultural heritage of working- class families in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania,

Andrew and Loretta Berish working in a garden in Pardeesville, Pennsylvania, circa 1940s. PHOTO COURTESY GINA ROMANCHECK

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 54 thereby highlighting the parts of the historical lived experience that are lost when a purely tangible approach is taken to defining heritage. The vulnerable social and economic positions that migrant laborers found themselves in meant that they were often forced to resort to informal and ephemeral ways of ensuring their needs were met. Intangible forms of knowledge enabled these populations to persist for generations under adverse conditions. Therefore, preserving the intangible heritage of the working classes not only captures a perspective on history that would otherwise be lost, it is a form of social justice that helps to restore power to marginalized communities by ensuring that their stories receive as much repre- sentation as the people who constructed and controlled the built environment.

PRESERVING WORKING-CLASS INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE Understanding the relationships between working-class families and their industrial environments is important because identity and place are inextricably intertwined. In industrial contexts, the often- ephemeral nature of the architecture combined with its purpose- built function and aesthetic has meant that these communities have had to fight for preservation and recognition as heritage on both national and international levels. Although industrial, and increasingly post-industrial, sites are receiving recognition as heritage that is worthy of preservation, the human stories that give these places meaning have historically been overlooked or diminished in favor of interpretations that explore the mechanical processes that took place in there.1 Documenting and preserving intangible heritage is an approach that has gained substantial recognition at an international level only in the last two decades, but is rapidly gaining traction within heritage management, including for the preservation of mining heritage. Despite this increased interest, industrial sites in the age of deindustrialization are particularly at risk for demolition as the process of economic transition “threatens to eradicate not only regional and national economic sectors but also their tangible and intangible remnants”.2

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 55 Left: Former company town resident Joe Michel talks to Dr. Paul Shackel and University of Maryland students about growing up in a company town. PHOTO COURTESY CAMILLE WESTMONT

Right: A row of identical company houses on Main Street in Eckley, circa 1915. PHOTO COURTESY ECKLEY MINERS’ VILLAGE MUSEUM

COMPANY TOWNS OF NORTHEASTERN PENNSYLVANIA Anthracite coal was documented by European settlers on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the 1760s in the area today known as Wilkes-Barre, in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley. However, due to the isolated and rugged terrain, it was not feasible to ship the coal to market until river and canal navigation in the early 19th century provided an economical means of trans- portation. The introduction of railroads to the area in the 1840s, which further reduced the time and cost of transportation, brought new waves of investment and new mines to the Wyoming Valley. In 1854 the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed a law granting companies the right to construct and manage towns on mineral lands. This act led to a rapid expansion in company towns through- out the region but also to greater control by mining companies. Mine owners could now legally act as sole employer and landlord for laborers and their families. Some chose to pay their employees in script that could only be spent at the company’s store, where prices were inflated to trap workers in debt peonage. Because the towns were private property, owners could block labor organizers from entering or evict workers who objected to dangerous working conditions and low pay. Company towns were designed to be hierarchical and anonymous. Worker housing had a uniform

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 56 outward design with no options for individual expression, reinforcing the sense of corporate order and control over an interchangeable, undifferentiated workforce. Despite these circumstances, the anthracite region became home to thousands of migrants from Wales, Ireland, Eastern Europe, and Southern Europe throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Workers and their families successfully tolerated these conditions in a variety of ways, including through undermining corporate appearances of control and finding places within the landscape to exert autonomy and increase self-sufficiency.

THE ANTHRACITE HERITAGE PROGRAM As the number of those who remember life in the anthracite region when mining was still a major industry continues to decrease, opportunities to understand how the industrial landscape was defined and used by workers slip away. In 2009 the University of Maryland’s Department of Anthropology established what would become the Anthracite Heritage Program to record, honor, and share this heritage. The program has run an archaeological field school since 2012 and a historic preservation field school since 2017 in coal company towns outside of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Most recently, the Anthra- cite Heritage Program has partnered with Eckley Miners’ Village, an open-air museum that interprets life in anthracite company towns. Graduate students associated with the program have worked with community members to record oral histories about life in these “patch towns.” Through the hosting of the field schools and a parallel community

A coal breaker at Eckley, circa 1915. PHOTO COURTESY ECKLEY MINERS’ VILLAGE MUSEUM

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 57 archaeology project, researchers with the Anthracite Heritage Project have been able to document the architectural landscapes of these company towns as well as the material and social realities of the people who lived and worked within them. This has brought a deeper understanding of working-class life in the Pennsylvania anthra- cite fields and provided a new perspective on working-class history. Incorporating oral history interview data and public collaborative outreach into the Anthracite Heritage Project’s

Woman hauling coal in Pardeesville, research design has not only Pennsylvania. fundamentally shifted our PHOTO COURTESY THE DELORENZO FAMILY relationships with the communi- ties in which we work but has also dramatically reshaped our understandings of the landscape and the embedded processes of power, inequality, and resistance. Oral histories and local lore have revealed that families undertook a variety of strategies to circumvent the oppression of the coal companies and redefine the industrial landscape according to their needs. This article will focus on two themes specifically related to socioeconomic strategies for survival: the informal resource economy and efforts towards self-sufficiency.

INFORMAL RESOURCE ECONOMY Working-class families in the Pennsylvania anthracite region relied heavily on the informal resource economy to meet their needs throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Oral histories and printed newspaper accounts reiterate the importance of “found”

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 58 resources. Wild berries and building materials represent two forms of discarded or found materials that working-class families became experts at exploiting. Knowledge of where to find these items and how to procure them without company awareness was a class- derived cultural practice. Although some of these informal resources are visible in the archaeological and architectural record, most of the working-class strategies associated with the exploitation of found goods only come to light during conversations and inter- views with long-time residents of the coal fields. The churned, acidic soils created through coal mining damaged existing ecosystems but created opportunities for other types of vegetation. The mined soils of the anthracite region proved to be especially welcoming for species of the Vaccinium family, including blueberries and huckleberries. Women and children from working- class families turned culm-bank berry-picking into a secondary source of income. Joe Falatko of Eckley recounted in 1970 that as a child in the 1930s and 1940s, he had daily summer huckleberry picking chores with the berries selling for upwards of 4 cents per quart. To increase his berry haul, Falatko learned to hitch rides by jumping onto coal train cars.3 Interviews with working-class families in other towns recount similar experiences, with one woman relating that during the summer, a man with a truck would pick up a group of women from her town, drive them to the berry-bush stands, drop them off, and return at dusk to pick up the women and pay for the berries they had picked. Working-class families successfully exploited the landscapes created by industry, thereby acquiring a source of income independent from the coal companies. Another resource that working-class families took advantage of was the coal company’s junk or trash piles. Families pilfered and reused an astounding array of items, many of which are still visible in the tenant-built outbuildings behind the company houses. Hinges, doors, iron coal size sorting screens, sheet iron, dynamite boxes, and scrap lumber were acquired and reused to build out- buildings and fences, to enclose the ceilings of attics and basements, and for insulation, amongst other purposes. Many of these reused and adapted pieces are still visible in the houses and backyards of

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 59 company towns today. However, an architectural review of the presence of these materials misses the role of working-class families in acquiring and reusing discarded or second-hand materials as part of a way of life. Being able to access these supplies allowed workers to cheaply and quickly erect or modify structures for their own purposes. This ability to shape their environments for their own purposes is a departure from company town architecture that was built and maintained according to the interests of the company.

EFFORTS TOWARDS SELF-SUFFICIENCY Families also developed ways to establish self-sufficiency through the modification of their environments, such as the region-wide practice of soil improvement. The majority of the anthracite region is covered in poorly formed, unfertile soils, hampering mining families who relied on subsistence farming to supplement poor wages. Families adapted to this reality by creating informal, long- term soil improvement projects. Families incorporated organic household refuse directly into garden topsoil and encouraged their children to collect manure from cow pastures outside of town for fertilizer.4 Improving garden soils was a constant, ongoing project that represented both self-sufficiency and worker rebellion: The more productive a garden was, the less a family had to rely on the company store and traveling vendors for groceries, enabling families to break free from corporate control to some degree. Improved garden soils held both social and economic worth. Oral histories about former company towns reveal the importance of these soils: One family dug up their garden topsoil and took it with them when they moved, while another family reported that a man stole the topsoil of their neighbor’s garden. Families also gained self-sufficiency by picking coal fragments from company waste piles or digging their own “bootleg” coal mines in the yards behind their company houses. Some families had their children collect coal at the same time that they collected wild berries.5 In other families, women used large metal buckets to haul coal from company waste piles back to their houses. Because this activity was technically theft from the company, families in the

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 60 Dynamite box end and scrap wood being used to enclose exposed roof beams in a house in Eckley Miners’ Village Museum. PHOTO COURTESY CAMILLE WESTMONT

19th century had to dodge the Coal and Iron Police, private company- hired police forces with a reputation for brutality. For those who dug mines in their own property, the risks were as great as the rewards. It is estimated that 5 to 10 percent of all coal sold in the United States between 1932 and 1934 originated from the bootleg mines of out-of-work miners during the Great Depression. Bootleg miners could sell coal they didn’t need for less than market price, driving up demand for bootlegged coal during the 1920s and 1930s. Yet because bootleg mines received no safety oversight, miners would have been at greater risk for ceiling collapses, explosions, suffocation, and other causes of injury and death than miners working in official mines. These practices, which had been in effect for decades before the Great Depression, provided families with additional income and additional resources in an otherwise tightly controlled industrial environment.

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF EVERYDAY PRACTICES Grassroots knowledge about the location of potential resources, including wild berry patches and scrap building materials, helped

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 61 families reframe their environment from an economic perspective. Intergenerational knowledge about soil improvement helped families reshape their physical environments to support success, while strategies to illicitly obtain coal provided working-class families with a means of becoming more self-sufficient. These systems and others were practiced and exchanged between community and family members for generations. They were adapted into different forms but ultimately became a way of life for families in the region. These traditions were unique to the working-class communities in the area and served as a major factor in enabling working-class livelihoods. Reliance on the informal resource economy as well as on methods of self-sufficiency developed into community and regional practices that are still carried out in parts of the anthracite region today. These methods demonstrate examples of adaptive behavior that enabled families to undermine corporate control and develop greater autonomy over their situations. While berry picking, scrap reuse, soil improvements, and coal collecting may seem like ordinary, unremarkable activities, they represent lifeways that enabled families within the anthracite region to successfully cope with the deprivations of industrial working class life for over a century. Without these and other forms of class-based intangible heritage, our understandings of life in the anthracite region and of the anthracite industry as a whole are incomplete.

THE PLACE OF INTANGIBLE HERITAGE IN LABOR HISTORY Exploring the intangible heritage of the local community has provided a richer and more nuanced understanding of the lives of workers and the cultural role of the built environment in coal company towns. Without considering these instances of intangible heritage set within and defined by their proximity to industrial landscapes, the lessons of survival, adaptation, ambition, and creativity remain hidden, and the real meaning of buildings— the spaces where peoples’ lives are lived—are lost. The capitalist factors that created the mines and the mining towns in the

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 62 anthracite region also shaped the social relationships of the people that lived and worked within them. Preserving the mining towns without capturing the methods working-class families used to alleviate the social and economic pressures of their circumstances presents a one-sided perspective on labor history. Intangible heritage can be the key to re-integrating human experiences into discussions of industry and labor. Acknowledging these class-based tactics of survival as important and worthy of preservation also provides new opportunities for uplifting a historically marginalized population and presenting a fuller version of history. FJ

V. CAMILLE WESTMONT is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park where she researches the experiences of working families in coal company towns. She can be reached at: [email protected].

TAKEAWAY For additional information about the lives of miners in the Anthracite Region of Pennsylvania, visit Eckley Miners’ Village Museum, a restored 19th century coal company town.

1 http://whc.unesco.org/document/102409 2 http://tph.ucpress.edu/content/22/3/49 3 https://www.standardspeaker.com/news/my-town-and-now-it-belongs-to-everyone-1.2352305 4 https://books.google.com/books?id=-qZKAQAAMAAJ&dq 5 https://www.standardspeaker.com/news/my-town-and-now-it-belongs-to-everyone-1.2352305

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 63 Count the Outside Children! Kinkeeping as Preservation Practice Among Descendants of Texas’ Freedom Colonies

ANDREA R. ROBERTS wen Bluiett, a former Houston resident, retired mail carrier, and self-taught genealogist, could recite, in some instances, Gthe date and time someone was born without referring to any written list or computer database. I watched her do this several times as she and her cousin Herman Wright led me on tours down the back roads of Deep East Texas and through cemeteries, including the graveyard adjacent to where hate-crime victim James Byrd’s body was found in 1998.1 Though the death is associated with the city of Jasper (where the murderers were sentenced), the site of this hate crime was actually Huff Creek settlement, a historic black community where Bluiett’s ancestors settled shortly after

The Texas Freedom Colony Atlas and Study is a map of freedom colonies on a StoryMap platform. The Atlas maps known settlements and allows for storage of kinkeepers’ stories, archival materials, and tours which are often the only way to spatialize previously unmapped freedom colonies.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 64 emancipation. During my visit to Huff Creek, I learned about the remaining structures, landmarks, and buildings associated with other settlements in the area. As we walked down the dirt road between a former school and a graveyard, I asked her why gathering genealogical data from cemeteries was so important. She explained that she wanted to ensure that descendants of commu- nity founders “know who their people are.” Bluiett describes these revelatory moments as feeling “just like you coming back home, even though I was not reared here, this is a part of my heritage... I think there is a connection that takes you waaaaay back.” While interviewing nearly 50 descendants (during 2014–16) in several black settlements in Deep East Texas, I encountered women like Gwen Bluiett, who each took me waaaaay back. They shared family histories that were actually community histories, which enabled me to map nearly imperceptible cultural landscapes and settlement patterns. Their collection and organization of different forms of ephemeral knowledge associated with kinship and place is called “kinkeeping.” Kinkeepers remember, define, and enumerate people and places that for years have ceased to count among preservationists and planners. Huff Creek settlement is one of those places, and it is challenging to find without the aid of a kinkeeper. The settlement, whose heritage is overshadowed by the gruesome 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, is one of 557 Texas freedom colonies,2 once independent, self-sustaining historic black communities unrecognizable as official places to most Americans. Founded by formerly enslaved Texans between 1865 and 1920,3 many of these freedom colonies are missing from official maps and have lost population since the Great Migration. Because most never had legally recognized boundaries, freedom colonies are best understood through the features that remain— churches, schools, clusters of buildings belonging to long-time landowners, and cemeteries. Sprawl, gentrification, natural disasters, heir property (communally owned land by heirs of someone who didn’t leave a will), outmigration of residents to higher opportunity areas, and urban renewal have destroyed many freedom colonies. However, some descendants of community founders remain committed to making sure these places are not forgotten.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 65 Gwen Bluiett is a Jasper County resident who lives in a freedom colony called Magnolia Springs. Here, she leads a tour of a freedom colony known as Clear Creek Community. She is pointing to and recalling her time attending the church when it was active and the settlement was populated. PHOTOS BY ANDREA R. ROBERTS

During an ethnographic study of Newton and Jasper County freedom colonies, I identified kinkeeping as a local preservation practice. I followed kinkeepers on walking tours, and recorded their memories and oral histories at the kitchen table, during overnight stays, at reunions, and at homecomings. Interviewing kinkeepers reveals the specific meanings and attachments that matter in a particular context, belying the appearances of places hidden behind the Pine Curtain4 in the Deep East Texas woods. Kinkeepers enable planners and preservationists to avoid treating African Americans and their communities like abstractions5 or conversely emphasizing specific elements of buildings to the exclusion of local conceptualizations of historical significance rooted in a whole community.6 Instead, kinkeepers like Bluiett, through their knowledge and understanding of belonging7 rooted in complex social networks, add both emotional and historical visibility and dimensions of significance8 to what remains of freedom colonies assumed historically insignificant and placeless by the untrained observer.9

THE ROLE OF THE KINKEEPERS To validate that a place exists or is worthy of listing as a significant cultural resource, it is the fundamental practice of planning and preservation professionals to establish measureable, documented facts: determining population levels, boundaries, building types, and recorded historic activities and events.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 66 White accounts of African American history are steeped in such enumerations. Whether it is the counting of African Americans by age, cotton production, spatial concentration, or slave auction block value, black use value has been incorporated into land-use practice and the country’s political economy.10 Before and after emancipation, racialization of landscapes11 has overshadowed culturally relevant kinship types and forms of land ownership.12 Hortense Spillers describes the ambiguity in the accounting of Africans as cargo on the way to the new world disconnected from their groups of origin, gender roles, naming conventions, or the manner in which they constructed kinship ties. Captive, enumerated black people would be bundled and stacked in ship hulls, bred in plantation cabins, then cordoned off and penned into redlined zoning districts with racial covenants.13 Enumeration, accounting and categorization of people and places, are agents of abstraction.14 Because these forms of data and associated analysis are thought to be objective, questioning their underlying assumptions is discouraged. Kinkeepers disrupt this accounting approach by articulating connections between people and place as they maintain family relationships via various activities, such as planning family rituals or reunions,15 coordinating family caregiving,16 or serving as a repository of family kinship and medical information.17 Characterized as a female hobby, kinkeeping is a practice of collecting and managing information about belonging—who belongs to whom and who belongs where. Kinkeepers’ womanist18 knowledge and understanding of belonging, emerges from the everyday lives of black women. I characterize the kinkeeping I witnessed—recollecting, reviewing archival materials, and reciting family tree information—among freedom colony descendants as alternating processes of “conjuring and quilting.”19 They conjure the names and offspring through careful prodding at community events and then quilt together their relationships with each other and the land (as they did for me in follow-up interviews and cognitive mapping). Like other practices associated with black women, quilting and conjuring place and familial relations have been considered a resource for researchers but not as evidence of legitimate preservation

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 67 expertise. However, preservation is not the only sphere in which the legitimacy of black women’s voices, family structures, and leadership capabilities have been perpetually questioned and dismissed. During the 1960s, a federal report claimed that matriarchal family structures hinder the progress of African Americans “as a whole.”20 Black family formations were deemed “destructive.”21 The report and the census also sliced and diced relationships into categories such as “household, single-mother”; associated births were called “illegitimate.” Women I interacted with while conducting research often spoke of those who fell outside the scope of the Western construction of family and respectability as “outside children,” or the “outside child.” However, kinkeepers allocated space in their place and family narratives for unkempt notions of family and land ownership that include multiple marriages, prodigal children, and lapsed church membership. The kinkeepers embrace and integrate seemingly errant people or places back into the stories of communities, church foundings, and land acquisition—thereby reconstituting disassembled remnants into place. Men’s “second” families, single-mother households, or otherwise non-nuclear households are integrated into the family and place narrative with ease. Through an inclusive definition of family, the kinkeeper is concurrently exposing and legitimizing family structures and relationships dismissed and shamed elsewhere. Kinkeepers seize the opportunity to unpack kinship at events such as homecomings and within spaces like cemeteries, where they can operate outside authorized relationships or familial structures. Homecomings are annual community celebrations held at churches within freedom colonies. During these two-day events, kinship and church networks meld. Those who grew up in the settlement attend, as well as many of their progeny no matter where they may live now. Nearby settlements also attend, and the offering collected pays for cemetery maintenance for the community as well as next year’s celebration. In cemeteries they may simulta- neously tell the history of a place and their kinship to grand-aunts and -uncles visiting from California during reunions and home- coming celebrations.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 68 Left: Huff Creek Chapel, located in a freedom colony of the same name. Huff Creek was one of several freedom colonies through which Gwen Bluiett led informal tours in Jasper County. The Chapel faces Huff Creek Road where hate crime victim James Byrd’s body was found after his dragging death in 1998. Right: Herman Wright and Gwen Bluiett, area freedom colony descendants, at Huff Creek Chapel. PHOTOS BY ANDREA R. ROBERTS

During our visit to cemeteries, Wright and Bluiett walked the grounds and pieced together kinship and place while talking with the grave-keepers and homecoming presidents who plan annual events commemorating community founders for Huff Creek. Wright and Bluiett walked through the minefield of explaining kinship disrupted or complicated by enslavement. While recounting this genealogy and list of area freedom colonies, I heard Bluiett bear witness to the black female body as the site of involuntary community creation. She recalled the lack of control her enslaved female ancestors had over their own bodies but chose to emphasize their humanity as the matriarchs of area families—honoring their labor, sacrifice, and role in founding the freedom colonies. Other kinkeepers maintain timelines and calendars. Gwen Bryant Carter, who has roots in Magnolia Springs and Rock Hill settlements, maintains, in her head, the locations of freedom colony cemeteries, the Newton and Jasper freedom colony homecoming network calendar, and the list of names of settlements in the region. During our conversations, Carter connected family names with anchor sites like schools and the churches where homecomings are held. I was also able to attend some of the homecomings, having learned from Carter the weekends and months in which they had been held since the Great Migration.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 69 AN EXPANSIVE UNDERSTANDING OF “BELONGING” In their recollections and stories, kinkeepers use expansive, inclusive definitions of belonging and place. This inclusiveness is exemplified through their ease and nonjudgmental approach to explaining the relationship between women crossing amorphous settlement, familial, and social boundaries. These relationships subvert current maps. For example, women who grew up in the Shankleville settle- ment of Newton County remember keeping kin (biologically related or not) by assisting neighbors living in secluded, wooded areas. Lillie White of Shankleville recalls, “We’d walk, the women, if somebody gets sick they take the old lamps, oh I mean the lights, like a splinter, pine splinters. And they go to people’s house and put on those high-top shoes and walk the people out, and sit up all night with them. That’s the way we had to travel. And all of those were old ladies, but they went to see about them.” There’s no physical evidence of these long-lost circulation patterns and corridors between freedom colonies, of course, but the memories of the late-night walks tell us much about sense of place and expansive belonging among freedom colony women. Jasper and Newton County’s official and unofficial boundaries challenge formal planning constructions of communities and places. Interestingly, the border issue was a real one, as census takers mistook the Huff Creek settlement as being located in Newton County in two decennial censuses. Gwen Bluiett clarified that Huff Creek was a porous border town, serving as a social way station for Newton and Jasper County freedom colonies. Huff Creek settlement was central to regional freedom colony life. Within this in-between place, marriage, school and church atten- dance, cemetery burial, and homecomings celebrations connected residents. Youth from both counties attended the settlement’s Rosenwald School or nearby Jamestown School in Newton County or walked through Huff Creek on the way to their own schools or activities. Here place and kinship came together, she explained, as the families in Jamestown in Newton County married or attended church with the families of Magnolia Springs in Jasper County.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 70 Marian Shankle (left) and Gwen Bluiett at the Shankleville Community Homecoming in Newton County, Texas. PHOTO BY ANDREA R. ROBERTS

CO-CREATING NEW MAPS After my field research was completed, my next task was to translate these graveyard recollections, quiltings, conjurings, and calendars into a map. Freedom colony place names, often associated with remaining cemeteries, churches, or natural features, were affixed to audio file names and geotagged photos from the field research. Kinkeepers were also invited to verify or dispute names and boundaries from historical county and Texas Department of Transportation maps. Those points were combined with overlays of information gathered from state historical marker files and historical census data. I demarcated places into two black geographic identities: Black Pockets (a term that emerged from discussions with Carter) and freedom colonies (from the 2005 book of the same name).22 The resulting map shows a tremendous gap between profes- sionally trained archivists and kinkeepers’ embodied knowledge of place. Cumulatively, there are at least 38 freedom colonies and Black Pockets in Newton and Jasper Counties. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project has continued this database and mapping process, relying primarily on publicly available information as well as crowd- sourced and archival data. Using an ArcGIS and StoryMap platform, 357 of the 557 known place names have been mapped with another 16 locations and origin stories crowdsourced. To map the 200+ known and unknown settlements, more co-research with descendants is needed.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 71 HOW BELONGING DEFINES PLACE Drawing cognitive maps, divining social networks from event programs, and reviewing old historical marker applications revealed the way even objective measures (such as the National Historic Preservation Act and National Register of Historic Places criteria)23 obscure traces of African American landscapes. Criteria for listing places on historic registers, for example, emphasize the physicality and integrity of buildings, structures, and tangible features, rather than considering the meanings and group attach- ments embodied in places, which leave out many African American landscapes. These criteria are often the reason we see, map, and plan for some communities and not others. Kinkeepers’ womanist24 knowledge and understanding of belonging, emerging from the everyday lives of black women, is essential to making freedom colonies visible to preservationists and planners. Preservationists might characterize the kinkeepers’ remembering and telling of place and kinship histories as “family” but not community history. Yet the very survival of freedom colonies requires that planners, researchers, and cultural resource managers tap into the kinkeepers’ distinctive store of information.25 Kinkeepers allow for unkempt notions of family and land ownership that include broken marriages, prodigal children, and lapsed church membership. Women I interacted with while con- ducting research often spoke of those who fell outside the scope of the Western construction of family and respectability26 as “outside children,” or the “outside child.” Being able to identify many of Texas’ historic black communities and settlements often require a willingness to recognize and record the “outside children,” a name I ascribe to legally undefined places and spaces. Mapping and conserving these communities will require bringing the outside children into planning and preservation through collaboration with kinkeepers. Kinkeepers’ collecting, recollecting, reconstituting, and quilting together place meaning, locations, and significance help overcome the perceived placelessness of freedom colonies.27 Like the kinkeepers, the architects, planners, and cultural resource managers committed

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 72 to social inclusion in preservation must join in counting the outside children—places established under circumstances for which we were meant to feel shame, places we ignore because they require that we acknowledge the disquieting conditions under which these freedom colonies were founded and why they were necessary. FJ

ANDREA ROBERTS, PH.D., is assistant professor of urban planning and Faculty Fellow with the Center for Heritage Conservation at Texas A&M University. She is founder of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, a research and social justice initiative documenting African Americans’ place- making history and contemporary challenges to historic communities’ survival. She can be reached at: [email protected].

1 Dina Temple-Raston, A Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder, and a Small Town’s Struggle for Redemption (New York: H. Holt, 2002). 2 Andrea Roberts, “The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas & Study,” 2018. 3 Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad, Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2005). 4 Temple-Raston. “Behind the pine curtain” is a phrase used to characterize a section of East Texas surrounded by densely forested areas. It is also connotes a separate Texas culture filled with people resistant to urban living. p. 36. 5 Hilda E. Kurtz, “Acknowledging the Racial State: An Agenda for Environmental Justice Research,” Antipode 41, no. 4 (2009): 684–704. 6 Shaylih Muehlmann, “Rhizomes and Other Uncountables: The Malaise of Enumeration in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (May 2012): 339–53. 7 bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009). 8 Jeff Joeckel, “Section VII: How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation, National Register of Historic Places Bulletin (NRB 15),” July 11, 2001. 9 Andrea R. Roberts, “Performance as Place Preservation: The Role of Storytelling in the Formation of Shankleville Community’s Black Counterpublics,” Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage, 2018, 1–20; E. C. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976). 10 Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Civitas Books, 2014). 11 Richard H. Schein, “Normative Dimensions of Landscape,” Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after JB Jackson, 2003, 199–218. 12 Thomas W. Mitchell, “From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common,” Nw. UL Rev. 95 (2000): 505. 13 Christopher Silver, “The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities,” Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows 38 (1997). 14 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81. p. 77. 15 Margaret S. Leach and Dawn O. Braithwaite, “A Binding Tie: Supportive Communication of Family Kinkeepers.” Carolyn J. Rosenthal, “Kinkeeping in the Familial Division of Labor.” 16 Lillian E. Troll, “Gender Differences in Cross-Generation Networks,”Sex Roles 17, no. 11–12 (December 1, 1987): 751–66. 17 Alicia M. Giordimaina, MS; Jane P. Sheldon, PhD; Lesli A. Kiedrowski, MS, CGC; and Toby Epstein Jayaratne, PhD; (2015). Searching for the kinkeepers: Historian gender, age, and Type 2 Diabetes family history. Health Education & Behavior, 42(6), 736-741. 18 Walker, A. (2004). In search of our mothers’ gardens: Womanist prose. (p.7-8) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kinkeeping exemplifies most aspects of Walker’s four-part definition of womanism and womanist thought, because its practitioners: 1) express ideas with maturity and audacity 2) are black women and/or women of color 3) maintain a celebratory attitude toward and love of the complexity and messiness of life, and 4) are proponents of a culturally-situated form of feminism that may be described without using the word feminist. Gillman, L. (2010). See also Storytelling as Embodied Knowledge: Womanist Praxis in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. In Unassimilable Feminisms (pp. 95-131). Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Izgarjan, A., & Markov, S. (2012). Alice Walker’s womanism: Perspectives past and present. Gender Studies, 11(1), 304-315.

ForumJournal VOL. 32, NO. 4 73 19 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Duke University Press, 2005). 20 Daniel P. Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965),” African American Male Research, 1997. 21 Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–65. 22 See note 3, above. 23 National Park Service, “National Register of Historic Places Federal Program Regulations” (2016). 24 Walker, A. (2004). In search of our mothers’ gardens: Womanist prose. (p.7-8) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kinkeeping exemplifies most aspects of Walker’s four-part definition of womanism and womanist thought, because its practitioners: 1) express ideas with maturity and audacity 2) are black women and/or women of color 3) maintain a celebratory attitude toward and love of the complexity and messiness of life, and 4) are proponents of a culturally-situated form of feminism that may be described without using the word feminist. Gillman, L. (2010). See also Storytelling as Embodied Knowledge: Womanist Praxis in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. In Unassimilable Feminisms (pp. 95-131). Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Izgarjan, A., & Markov, S. (2012). Alice Walker’s womanism: Perspectives past and present. Gender Studies, 11(1), 304-315. 25 Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). 26 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–74. 27 Roberts, “Performance as Place Preservation: The Role of Storytelling in the Formation of Shankleville Community’s Black Counterpublics.”

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