Introduction

As cars rushed along Los Angeles’ famous Century Boulevard in December of 2006, traffic came to a dangerous halt as drivers stopped and stared at what has recently become a somewhat common sight in the city: over 500 hotel workers camped out in the pouring rain along the boulevard in front of the Westin LAX Hotel. Hoping to secure a better future for themselves and their co-workers, protestors spent an entire week performing a water-only fast while living on the dirty and traffic-ridden Century Boulevard. Their demands were simple: that Century Boulevard hotels, their employers, provide them with wages equal to their fellow hotel workers working in downtown Los Angeles’ tourism industry. Sparked by their employers’ appeal of a living wage ordinance that guaranteed “3,500 Century Boulevard hotel workers with a wage of $10.64 an hour for those without employer-provided health insurance, or $9.39 an hour for those with health insurance” (Living Wage Fast 2007) that had been put in place by Los Angeles’ City Council and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in November, the protest spanned 7 days and garnered the attention of several well known politicians, including Senator John Edwards and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, who joined workers in protest throughout the week. The strike concluded with uncertainty; politicians promised to put pressure on hotels wanting to repeal the addendum.

This story underlines the significance in studying the historical contexts that have made hotel workers “invisible” and undervalued in the past and in the present. Today’s tourism laborers have brought themselves out of the shadows of their employers’ kitchens, hotel rooms, and gardens in order to make themselves visible to consumers. In the past 5 years, discontent among hotel workers nationwide has caused them to take to the streets in a show of visible and uniform solidarity. Just a few months before the LAX fast, 2,000 protestors marched in support of Los Angeles’ immigrant hotel workers, including Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello, musician Ben Harper, California State Senators Gil Cedillo and Richard Alarcon, and Assemblywoman Judy Chu. More recently, over 2,000 Disneyland bellmen, dishwashers, room attendants, and cooks staged a fast in front of the tourist attraction’s hotels to demand safer working conditions. These campaigns are in reaction to nearly 100 years of efforts by travel and tourism industries to keep certain types of workers invisible from the people who rely on them the most: tourists.

Many scholars (Hodder 1986; Johnson 1996; Leone 1981, 1995; Leone et al. 1987; Mullins 1999, 2003; Orser 1998, 2004; Potter 1999; Scott 1994; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Wylie 1999) have argued that exploring the roots of modern day politics and transnational economic systems should be central to archaeological research. Consequently, it is surprising to find that very few archaeologists have examined the foundations of tourism since it is presently the “largest industry on earth, employing somewhere between 100 and 230 million people, handling over 600 million arrivals a year, and having an estimated value between $476 billion and $3.4 trillion dollars” (Adler and Adler 2004, p. 4). To address this issue, I highlight some of the possible contributions historical archaeologists can make by considering the archaeology of tourism workers. I use my research at Mount Lowe Resort and Railway, one of the most popular tourist sites in the United States between 1893 and 1936 and the first mega resort of its kind in the West, as a case study (Camp 2009).

Located only fifteen minutes away from the site of the 2006 demonstration, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway was visited by over three million tourists from all across the globe (Seims 1976). Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of employees worked at the site between 1893 and 1936, cleaning hotel rooms, cooking elaborate meals, guiding tourists through forest trails on horseback, building and repairing the resort’s railway that took tourists up to one of the resort’s four hotels from downtown Los Angeles, photographing tourists during their stay, and constructing the hotels’ numerous attractions, including a zoo, miniature golf course, and tennis courts. Yet these individuals are absent from literature, local historians’ accounts, and signage relating to the site. This absence is an outgrowth of a long historical trajectory that began in Los Angeles prior to the site’s construction and, until the more recent hotel worker protests, has continued in contemporary Los Angeles.

In this article, then, I consider some of the racialization processes by which tourism workers became both visible and invisible on the landscape of Mount Lowe Resort and Railway and in current commemorations of the site. I begin with a discussion of the historical realities that made such presences and absences allowable, such as social ideologies regarding tourism, citizenship, and ethnicity in turn-of-the-century America and Los Angeles. I conclude with a call for further archaeologies of tourism by emphasizing the unique perspective that only archival and historical archaeological methodologies permit.

Creating (In)Visibility: Tourism in Turn-of-the-Century America

Scholars (Benedict 1983; DeLyser 2003; Deverell 2004; Dilworth 2001; Parezo and Troutman 2001; Rodriguez 2001; Rothman 1998; Rydell 1984; Shaffer 2001; Wrobel 2002) have argued that the development of tourism in the United States helped to create a notion of racial otherness; that is, touring and seeing visual, spatial, and physical representations of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983) of “ethnographic others” at World’s Fairs, theme parks, and resorts was central to the creation of a white American identity. Given that the social construction of whiteness is dependent on categories of “otherness” or “nonwhites” to exist linguistically (Epperson 2001; Lipsitz 1998; Roediger 2002), tourist sites offered up a lesson in “racial hierarchy” (Bederman 1995, p. 35) that placed whiteness on the top of the evolutionary scale. For example, at the 1893 Columbian Exposition World’s Fair, anthropologist Franz Boas organized “Native” peoples imported from all over the world for white American tourists to see using Lewis Henry Morgan’s famous evolutionary scheme (Thomas 2000). Here, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, visitors were given the opportunity to see “humanity in its highest phases down almost to its animalistic origins” (Bederman 1995, p. 35), with Native Americans being placed on the lowest rung of Morgan’s evolutionary ladder.

In the following section, I take a closer look at how the development of tourism in California produced and confirmed racial assumptions regarding non-white groups living and working in the United States. Understanding this process is critical to unraveling how nationality, race, and class have continued to shape who does the “dirty work” in yesterday and today’s tourism economy.

California Dreaming: Boosterism, Racism, and the Development of Tourism in Los Angeles

The racialized and gendered organization of Mount Lowe’s tourism laborers reflects broader regional themes made popular by the tourism industry in historic Southern California. Beginning with the opening of the transcontinental railway in 1883, Anglo-American boosters, wishing to draw commerce to the region, created a suite of standardized and racialized symbols and images that were circulated in the form of travelogues, brochures, and newspaper advertisements to Midwesterners and Easterners (Wrobel 2002). Boosters came from all walks of life, but all shared the desire to increase the settlement of the Western states and profit from it; these individuals, who included real estate agents, state, county, and city officials, railroad and hotel public relations managers, produced and sent between 10,000 to 30,000 brochures and advertisements (Wrobel 2002, p. 3). Wishing to cut ties with the region’s Spanish-colonial and Mexican pasts, tourism rhetoric essentially re-wrote California’s past by systematically erasing and/or romanticizing its “ethnic” or non-white heritage. Boosters did so by continually discussing California’s temperate climate, fruitful vegetation, and its bountiful selection of natural wonders, such as Southern California’s infamous beaches and Northern California’s Yosemite National Park. This strategy highlighted essentially everything but the state’s very real racial and social tensions that had been simmering since the United States occupied California in 1848.

Only a year after the cessation of the Mexican-American War of 1848, United States officials began debating how to deal with California’s ethnic populations. As a solution, government officials exploited a three-tiered ethnically structured social hierarchy that was already in place during California’s Spanish-colonial period. In this system, Native Americans, some of whom had been of the mission system, were at the bottom of the tier; individuals of ‘mixed’ heritage (Mestizos) were in the middle; and Californios (those of Spanish heritage) and Mexican ranchers, soldiers, and ex-government officials were at the top (Camarillo 1979, p. 107). This structure was cemented into law at California’s Constitutional Convention when a heated debate took place regarding the racial status of Native Americans and Mexican Americans in 1849; the debate concluded with the designation of “Mexicans as ‘white’ and thus eligible for citizenship, while California Indians – like other Indians throughout the United States – received the status of ‘nonwhite’” (Nevins 2002, p. 100). A year later, the California Supreme Court passed a law preventing Native Americans, African Americans, and Chinese Americans from testifying in court cases (Haas 1995, p. 171). These laws created a racially tense environment in mid nineteenth-century Los Angeles and the city became known as a dangerous place to live (Almaguer 1994; Camarillo 1979, p. 108; Rios-Bustamante and Castillo 1986) due to racial uprisings.

To divert potential tourists’ attention away from these issues, encyclopedic lists of mundane facts about California were placed in brochures, handbooks, and travelogues. These details included the average precipitation per year, endless inventories of the flora and fauna potential travelers might see, and elevation figures for various peaks in the region. When mentioned in tourism literature, California’s Mexican American and Native American populations were depicted as manageable, isolated, and dying cultures. To further persuade travelers to visit or settle in the West, postcards, photographs, and travelogues of this genre emphasized the “typicality” of Mexican American and Native American cultures as if these cultures were predictable and static, or, in historian William Deverell’s (1997, p. 239) words, cryogenically frozen in time. For example, boosters took thousands of photographs and circulated them to Easterners and Midwesterners to illustrate what they called “typical” Mexican American homes, yards, babies, and food (Deverell 1999). Postcard images similarly feature Los Angeles’ Native American populations surrounded by trees and animals in Angeles National Forest, implying that they existed outside of the city, part of the frontier’s disappearing wilderness. As Kropp argues, this imagery exhibits White Californians’ unwillingness to imagine Mexican Americans and Native Americans as playing a role in Los Angeles’ future. In her own words, “Mexicans strolled the streets of yesterday, while Anglos inhabited a city of today” (Kropp 2006, p. 5).

Additional steps were taken to anesthetize Los Angeles’ ethnic past. Parades and plays were developed as symbolic tools to disseminate Los Angeles’ “new past” to its residents. One of these programs was “La Fiesta de Los Angeles,” “a strain of boosterism akin to carnivalized Manifest Destiny” (Deverell and Flamming 1999, p. 120). The parade organizers zeroed in on 6,500 schoolchildren, who, perceived as the future residents of the city, would uphold and pass down the history they witnessed at the Fiesta. During the parade, the city’s ethnic heritage was presented in an evolutionary sequence; it began with “a float of ‘angels’ accompanied by Spanish cavaliers, and moved through ‘Aztec Indians’ (actually Pueblo Indians shipped in via boxcar from Yuma), the mission period, the mining days,” and concluded with a float dedicated to Anglo-American products and mercantilism (Deverell and Flamming 1999, p. 121). This event sought to reinforce and naturalize Anglo-American presence in and rights to Los Angeles to parade-goers.

San Gabriel playwright John Steven McGroarty’s infamous “The Mission Play,” attended by millions of tourists and residents of Southern California, also re-appropriated the region’s Spanish heritage in order to convince Anglo-Americans of their rightful position in Los Angeles’ history. The play focused on California’s “pastoral past—quaint, romantic, and fleeting” (Sánchez 1993, p. 71). It wove a narrative that argued that the disappearance of Native Californios, the Spaniards, and Mexican Americans was the result of natural selection, an idea substantiated by anthropologists of the time. This performance played into what Sánchez (1993, p. 71) calls the “mission myth,” an ideology created to dismiss the “Mexican heritage and influence in the region, and the clash of cultures between Mexicans and Americans in the state.”

Hotel Workers in Context: Los Angeles’ Mount Lowe Resort and Railway

Because of the resort’s somewhat remote location and the sheer amount of tourists it attracted, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway’s workers were required to live on site. This created what Denis Byrne (2003) calls a “nervous landscape,” a place where bodies inscribed as racially, sexually, or morally “separate” from one another could easily come in contact. To prevent “inappropriate” interactions from occurring, the resort’s worker housing was designed to facilitate and direct human behavior in a controlled, productive, and orderly fashion, with the goal of creating efficient laborers and a nationalist citizenry indifferent to the politics and inequality embedded in the Anglo-American way of life. The resort owners designed the landscape of Mount Lowe Resort and Railway to put forth a homogenous, shared set of racially charged ideologies that naturalized the exclusion of some individuals from touring activities, occupying certain professions, and engaging with workers of different genders, classes, nationalities, and age groups.

Below, I summarize a few of the strategies the resort’s owners enacted in an effort to segregate, discipline, and control the workers who inhabited and moved through its spaces. I focus, in particular, on the many individuals who labored at Mount Lowe and how their living and work environment was structured by prevailing racial and disciplinary ideologies of the time.

Research History

Located in Angeles National Forest just above Altadena, California, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway featured four large hotels, a zoo, bowling alley, post office, miniature golf course, fox farm, an observatory, a World’s Fair searchlight, and an extensive railway system that extended from Long Beach and included one of the world’s steepest inclines at the time (Hoehling 1958; Manning 2005; Robinson 1977; Seims 1976; Zack 2004). In the 43 years the resort was in operation, over three million visitors were recorded as having toured the site. Today, the site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is protected and maintained by local historians from the Scenic Mount Lowe Railway Historical Committee and Forest Service archaeologists. Until 2005, no substantial archaeological work (other than routine trail maintenance and surface surveys) had been conducted at the site.

A collaborative partnership between Angeles National Forest and Stanford University was formed in 2004 to investigate the archaeological remains of worker housing associated with the resort and later became known as “The Mount Lowe Archaeology Project.” Between 2004 and 2005, the first two phases of the project focused on locating historic structures, examining archival documents, and assessing the integrity of archaeological deposits relating to the resort’s working population. Building upon this data, a team of approximately 20 students and professional archaeologists systematically surveyed, mapped, and conducted test excavations at the site in August 2005. With the help of local historians and Forest Service employee Mike McIntyre, we located the remains of a railway workers’ house on Echo Mountain, one of the resort’s two mountaintops. Due to its regional and historical significance, the 2006 field season of the Mount Lowe Archaeology Project focused on excavating the railway workers’ homestead and recovered thousands of artifacts directly associated with the laborers (Camp 2009).

Landscape History

Though Mount Lowe Resort and Railway encompassed hundreds of miles of forested land (Fig. 1), tourist activity was contained and managed on two ecologically and culturally distinct landscapes: Mount Lowe (Fig. 2) and Echo Mountain (Fig. 3). Echo Mountain was the first stop along the resort’s railway, which in its earlier years (1893–1905) housed two hotels, an observatory, a zoo, tennis courts, and hiking trails. Mount Lowe became a point of interest in 1895, when noted architect Kwiat Kowski designed and constructed the C-shaped Craftsman-style Ye Alpine Tavern for the resort. Ye Alpine Tavern immediately became the hub of tourist activity from the moment it opened its doors. A miniature golf course and children’s playground were constructed a few years after the Tavern was constructed in an attempt to add even more appeal to the resort.

Fig. 1
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Bird’s eye view of Mount Lowe Resort and Railway, 1913 (Image courtesy of Brian Marcroft)

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Fig. 2
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Mount Lowe and Ye Alpine Tavern, date unknown. (Image courtesy of Brian Marcroft)

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Fig. 3
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A photograph of Echo Mountain in 1906 depicting the section house’s landscape. (Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library, Security Pacific Collection)

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Changing styles of tourism determined the fate and popularity of these two landscapes. When the resort first opened for business, technology was heralded and praised as evidence of America’s progress as a nation. But as the West urbanized and “natural” landscapes and wildlife diminished or were purposefully destroyed to make way for technological progress (such as the railroad), Americans began to lament that which they had eradicated. These narrative changes are visible in the resort’s promotional materials and in the types of attractions they did or did not offer to their tourists. For instance, whereas the resort’s incredibly steep Incline railway (in the title of the resort: “Mount Lowe Resort and Railway”) was the focus of promotional brochures in the 1890s and early 1900s, it later became the bane of the resort’s existence. By the 1920s, hiking trails, green and lush foliage, and frolicking deer canvassed the covers of brochures and were focal points in newspaper advertisements for the resort. This visual and narrative shift in marketing reflects Western Americans’ growing unease and frustration with technology (Camp 2009). In what is best described as a turn back toward an imagined conception of “nature,” Americans during this period of time started to lament the disappearance of forested areas and wildlife, both of which were removed (in some cases, forcibly and violently) to make way for technological developments like the railway at Mount Lowe. When the resort opened for business, however, new technologies like the Lowe Observatory and Incline railway were perceived as evidence of the nation’s progress and control over nature, which had posed a threat to the settlement and development of the Western frontier.

Ye Alpine Tavern, which was tucked far back into the forest and provided no lines of sight to the urban areas surrounding it, became the center of tourist activity during these later years. Playing into the “nature” conservation efforts and concerns of the time, hiking and animal observation activities were promoted and offered. Echo Mountain, on the other hand, lost all of its appeal. With two fires devastating its hotels and a wind storm leaving its observatory roofless, Echo Mountain became a transition point where tourists would depart from the Incline railway and board another train heading further back into the forest toward Ye Alpine Tavern. Barren of nearly all tourist activity by 1905, Echo Mountain’s landscape became the perfect place to situate and house workers who were perceived as marginal based on their line of work, nationality, sex, language skills, and race. Examining the historic materialization of inequality on this landscape, which reflects a “microcosm of social relations” (Zukin 1991, p. 18) in America during the resort’s years of operation, and the social stratification of tourism workers along these different vectors of identity, not only adds to our understanding of the tourism industry in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, but also to our comprehension of how such historic formations dictated the contemporary marginalization of tourism workers in the United States.

Distribution of Workforce on Echo Mountain and Mount Lowe

The layout and placement of worker housing can only be understood when considered alongside the politics of race, class, sex, and nationality in early twentieth-century Los Angeles. Around 1910, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway began to hire Mexican immigrants to work along and repair their aging Incline railway. This was perhaps in direct response to immigration restrictions placed on other marginalized immigrant groups who had previously performed railway maintenance. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1907–08 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan, and the Immigration Acts of 1917, 1921, and 1924 substantially limited European and Asian immigration into the United States (Sánchez 1993, p. 19; Ngai 2004, p. 18) and led to a reliance upon Mexican laborers. Companies like Pacific Electric Railway Corporation, who owned Mount Lowe Resort and Railway, actively recruited Mexican nationals across the border to replace these laborers, an act that both violated the Alien Contract Labor Law and encouraged an unrestricted border policy that would remain unquestioned up until the late 1920s and early 1930s.

This hiring practice starts to be reflected in United States Census Schedules and historic maps related to the resort in 1910. During that year, approximately half of the resort’s employees and family members lived on Mount Lowe (26 individuals) while the other half lived on Echo Mountain (24 individuals). The resort’s railway workers were placed on what had become an incredibly undesirable and arguably uninhabitable landscape of Echo Mountain in two separate structures. Fifty-four year-old section foreman, James J. Goggins, whose parents emigrated from Ireland, lived in a “cottage” on Echo Mountain with his employee and fellow railway laborer, Thomas J. Walsh. Walsh shared Goggins’ Irish ancestry, though it appears as though Goggins was of a higher class as he is listed as the “head” of the household in census records. This is likely due to Goggins’ status as the foreman in charge of the railway crew.

The rest of the railway laborers were non-naturalized Mexican immigrants and placed into what was described on historic maps as a “section house.” Section houses were built by railway companies to house workers temporarily repairing “sections” of a railway line. A total of eight railway workers and their family members lived in this cramped, small two-room section house (Fig. 4). Pacific Electric Railway Corporation constructed these houses in a relatively uniform design as part of their Americanization program, which aimed to create a stable, non-striking workforce by giving Mexican immigrant families homes and by instructing them in lower-class, trade-oriented work (such as gardening, car repair, and domestic services). The resort’s owners specifically recruited married Mexican immigrants for the program as they believed that Mexican employees were most efficient (and dependent on the company) when they were in what they perceived as monogamous, heterosexual relationships. This recruitment strategy was only applied to Mexican immigrants, reflecting the liminal, racialized position they occupied in Anglo-American society.

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Pacific Electric Railway article depicting section houses (Elliot 1918). (Image courtesy of Paul Ayers)

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The section house sat on the Western slope of Echo Mountain, which was far removed from Goggins and Walsh’s “cottage” on the Eastern slope. The Western slope of Echo Mountain is particularly treacherous; as our archaeological crew discovered, one misstep could land a person 153-762 m (500–2,500 ft) below the mountain. Through archaeological work, we also observed and came to despise the Western slope’s lack of foliage. Today, the Eastern slope of Echo Mountain is a picnic area due to the expansive pine trees that historically shaded the slope. The Western slope, however, lacks any shade and reaches temperatures up to 46°C (115°F) by as early as nine in the morning.

Though a cesspool was installed on the section house’s landscape late in the 1920s and well after other worker housing where Anglo-American employees occupying higher positions at the resort lived, it was placed literally 3 m (10 ft) away from the section house. With temperatures reaching in the high 43 s C (110 s F), one can only imagine how bad the smell emanating from the cesspool would become in the summer. The two sole incinerators that burnt all of the resort’s waste and trash also sat only a few feet away from the house along with a pigpen. The section house was the only landscape to feature this deadly and bacteria-ridden combination of sewage (both human and animal) and hotel and construction-related trash.

Not surprisingly, marketing materials written and circulated by the resort owners’ monthly magazine, Pacific Electric Magazine, described and photographically depicted clean, sanitary landscapes with no cesspools, incinerators, railway car pits, or pigpens in sight. The same magazines complained about Mexican immigrants’ “innate” penchant for dirtiness and bad hygiene practices; by placing them in a landscape that made any attempt at a sanitary lifestyle impossible, Pacific Electric Railway Corporation only helped reaffirm, rather than remedy, such stereotypes. Though Mexican immigrants’ racial designation was “white” by law in 1910 (this would change in 1930 census schedules), it appears as though their legal whiteness offered little benefit.

Another issue that arises while examining the distribution of workers on Echo Mountain’s landscape in 1910 is that if Walsh was also a “railway laborer” like the section house residents, why wasn’t he living in the section house with the rest of the railway laborers? One possible explanation for this is that Walsh made what Lipsitz (1998) terms a “possessive investment in whiteness” by asserting his rights as an individual with “white”-colored skin to climb up on the ladder of railway employment. It is also important to note that according to the 1910 census schedule, there were no Mexican or Irish trainmen living or working at Mount Lowe or inside Ye Alpine Tavern or living on Mount Lowe. While both nationalities were considered “white” by law, the spatial distribution of workers in 1910 at Mount Lowe Resort and Railway and placement of railway workers on the hot, miserable Echo Mountain demonstrates that both groups were still deemed “different” by their Anglo-American employers. The crowded living conditions that Mount Lowe’s Mexican immigrant railway workers experienced further suggests that Irish railway workers were considered “whiter” or less marginal than Mexican railway laborers. This hierarchal structure—segregating Irish and Mexican employees not only from each other but from naturalized and/or native born white American employees living on Mount Lowe—and continued into the 1920s and 1930s. During this span of time, Mexican and Irish Americans became the only employees to be housed on the isolated and desolate Echo Mountain. In 1936, for instance, a total of 26 workers lived on Mount Lowe, while only 9 individuals resided on Echo Mountain.

In addition, the management of sanitation standards inside Echo Mountain and Ye Alpine Tavern’s worker housing was not regulated in an equal manner. Over the course of 8 years, two work orders were placed to install sanitary plumbing and toilets for the section house occupants. In October 12, 1920, a work order requested that sanitary plumbing and a septic tank be installed at the section house as well as at the Irish section foreman’s house due to a complaint made by county health officers. The request for the section foreman’s house was filled on August 21, 1921. It was not until the Los Angeles County Health Department filed another complaint against the company in the summer of 1928 that Pacific Electric Railway Corporation complied with updating the section house, however. And in July 1928, the section house finally had sanitary plumbing, which included a combination toilet, shower, and heater. As the work order details, the request was filed to “provide improvement necessary for the general sanitary conditions of track laborers quarters at Echo Mountain, as the present facilities are inadequate in this respect. Los Angeles County health department, after an inspection, has requested that this improvement be accomplished promptly.” Workers living on Mount Lowe and working at Ye Alpine Tavern received hot and cold water and showers as early as June 29, 1912, nearly 16 years before the section house occupants could enjoy such amenities.

Furthermore, the section house’s landscape and the daily life of its inhabitants were rendered visible to Mount Lowe’s touring public as the railway cars passed directly above the section house on the way to Ye Alpine Tavern. At the same time, the section house inhabitants were rendered invisible to tourists when their presence was required by them for housekeeping services; the resort’s housekeeping staff were purposefully transported in railway cars during the daytime to clean the tourists’ hotel rooms, when tourists were out and about (Brian Marcroft, pers. comm.). Seeing these workers up close and personal (rather than at a comfortable distance on the railway cars) would force tourists to acknowledge that the cost of their trip was kept at a minimum due to the employment of immigrants at the resort and other tourist sites. This sentiment is echoed in America’s contemporary tourism industry, where First World tourism costs are kept at a minimum by employing Third World immigrants on temporary work visas (Chang 2000; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Enloe 1990, p. 34).

This is not to say that the Anglo-American workers employed at Ye Alpine Tavern and living on Mount Lowe were not micro-managed or subjected to corporate disciplinary techniques. Pacific Electric Railway Corporation made a number of attempts to police sexual practices and naturalize gender relations through their hiring practices and the architectural design of Mount Lowe’s worker housing. The layout of what was termed the “Helps’ Dormitory” for Mount Lowe’s employees suggests that there was some interest in preventing sexual co-mingling between Ye Alpine Tavern’s workers. The Helps’ Dormitory was divided into two sections; the right half of the dormitory housed female workers, while the left side was for male workers. Gender-specific closets and restrooms separated the space; one for males on the left and another for females on the right. On the opposite ends of both left and right sides of the building were two gender-specific sitting rooms and porches. These architecture features can be read as an attempt to limit and control the interactions between the two genders. This architectural strategy, however, could not curtail all employee-employee interactions. A small outdoor porch, for example, was located where workers would both exit and enter the dormitory and interact on a regular basis.

A worker’s biological sex (male or female) and immigration history similarly influenced the jobs tourism workers could occupy at the resort. As a survey of the resort’s employees from 1910 through 1930 demonstrates, females only found employment in the following positions: waitresses (17), clerk (1), housekeepers (3), hostesses (2), and cooks (2). Men, however, occupied a variety of positions of power, including dispatcher, cook, conductor, laborer, carpenter, astronomer, engineer, section foreman, photographer, motorman, hotel proprietor, chief clerk, bartender, waiter, pantryman, baker, dishwasher, trail guide, watchman, hotel manager, silverman, bell boy, yardman, mule train driver, janitor, houseman, store-keeper, and bus boy. The titles of many of these occupations, such as bus boy, pantryman, watchman, or silverman, convey the naturalization of particular job categories with the male gender. Women tourism workers at Mount Lowe, “perceived as possessing innate skills that render them more adept at subservient roles or jobs,” were assigned occupations such as housekeepers and waitresses, which simply replicated their “traditional domestic and care duties” typically performed in their own homes (Cabezas 2006, p. 514).

Lingering Boosterism in Los Angeles: Contemporary Commemorations of Mount Lowe Resort and Railway

“Los Angeles is marketed as a place for consumers to enjoy, but only in preselected places. Other parts of L.A. are never visited by tourists. The communities where the tourism industry workers live and raise their families are not on the tourists’ map”

(Geron 1997).

As the above quote demonstrates, the ideas behind the design of contemporary Los Angeles tourism routes are not far removed from earlier booster attempts at segregating and stratifying the city’s diverse ethnic heritage and worker housing. Since the arrival of these boosters in the 1880s, Los Angeles has been promoted as the city of the future, a city that never looks back at its past. To be this futuristic metropolis, promoters and officials had to explain away what they perceived as the “Mexican problem” by constructing alternative histories of Southern California and publicizing these histories to the city’s residents. This boosterism still lingers, haunting current attempts at commemorating Mount Lowe’s working populations.

The tale of how Mount Lowe Resort and Railway ended up on the National Register of Historic Places reflects how the site continues to be treated. On January 6, 1993, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a task completed not by the United States Forest Service who oversees the property, but rather by Charles Seims, a local author and historian. Despite being successfully placed on the National Register of Historic Places, Mount Lowe Resort and Railway still lacks any government-sponsored signage relating to its history and social significance. Local historians from the Scenic Mount Lowe Railway Historical Committee have responded to this absence by making and installing their own signage. The signs are historic photos placed along the hike to Echo Mountain and Mount Lowe taken in the exact same spot a century earlier. Some members of the public spend every weekend up at the site maintaining the signage (since vandals enjoy putting graffiti on the placards throughout the year), picking up trash (since there are no trash cans or regular trash pick up services at the site), and watching over the archaeological remnants of the resort and its many still standing structures.

The signage commemorates nearly all of the resort’s amenities—its fancy hotels, dance halls, observatory, and, of course, its famous railway and incline. When I first began conducting my research in 2004, many local historians had not even considered the labor history of the site. Instead, they would tell me fascinating in-depth stories about the resort’s founder, Thaddeus Lowe, a Civil-War hero who went bankrupt building the tourist site. Or, instead, they would praise the intellectual merits of David Macpherson, a Cornell trained engineer who mastered the art of building Mount Lowe’s world-famous incline. A quick survey of the local publications regarding Mount Lowe Resort and Railway exhibit the fairly narrow interest in preserving the Horatio Alger myth that upholds the notoriety of Lowe and Macpherson. When I questioned local historians and Mount Lowe enthusiasts about the workers who made the site function smoothly on a day-to-day basis, I usually received puzzled and questionable looks in response. Many interviewees freely admitted that this aspect of Mount Lowe’s history had not come up, although a few mentioned that they had collected documents and news clippings related to the resort’s employees.

This is not to discount the work that local historians and Forest Service employees have done to preserve Mount Lowe Resort and Railway thus far. If it were not for their efforts, the site would most likely lack any signage whatsoever and may have been closed off to the public. Instead, their lack of interest in Mount Lowe’s tourism workers reflects how booster rhetoric continues to constrain the production of history in Los Angeles and keep its present and past working populations invisible. In fact, I have personally encountered public challenges regarding my own research. A few unidentified members of the public, wishing to keep the history of labor relations at Mount Lowe invisible, have gone as far as to deface Forest Service signage and destroy archaeological equipment at the site. These contestations make archaeological research on similar sites all the more important; researching the trajectories of inequality and tracing them to modern practices, such as studying the history of the tourism industry, will not always be met with welcome arms by community constituencies, the public, or even some academics. This type of research, work that evokes unease and distress among some audiences and forces them to confront naturalized assumptions about the social stratification of labor across the world, should define the discipline and practice of historical archaeology.

Summary: Making Tourism Workers Visible in the Past and in the Present

It is up to archaeologists to counteract and contest booster rhetoric that continues to deny the vital role tourism workers played and still play in maintaining the tourist’s paradise that is Los Angeles. Archaeologists are not strangers to this kind of political work; archaeologists working on relatively recent sites have challenged stereotypes about “slum” life in ethnically bound neighborhoods (Karskens 2001; Solari 2001) and have unearthed hidden and suppressed histories (Camp and Williams 2007; Jopling 1998; LaRoche and Blakey 1997; Legendre 2001; Ludlow Collective 2001; McDavid 1997; Mullins 2003; Praetzellis et al. 2004; Wood 2002) in order to help marginalized groups reclaim their place in history and, sometimes, their rights to a landscape. The data uncovered through archaeological research has the potential to empower residents who are still being affected by Anglo-American claims to the city, including the tourism workers detailed at the beginning of this article. It is our responsibility to take part in this political process—to make our knowledge and the historicity of tourism workers available to people such as the tourism workers protesting on Century Boulevard.

In addition to the landscape, artifacts recovered from Mount Lowe speak to issues of race and inequality in a way that landscapes, no longer visible at the site, do not (Camp in press). Faunal evidence associated with the section house residents, in particular, document both the hardships the section house residents faced and ways they dealt with their lower-class social position. Of the identifiable bones, a total of 697 mammals, 142 birds, and 8 fish were found on the section house’s landscapes. Some individual species were identified within these categories, which included 17 cows, 18 sheep, 12 pig, 2 cottontail rabbits, 1 turkey, 18 chicken, 5 large ducks, and 1 trout. Based on the geographical location of the site, it would have taken at least half of an entire day to reach a river or stream and an hour or so to locate undomesticated mammals. Nonetheless, all of the named species were served at the resort, with the exception of cottontail rabbits. Unidentified small mammals and rodents were also recovered, which the section house residents may have procured to supplement their diet. This was not an unusual practice among section house laborers. The remains of a ground squirrel, jackrabbits, and cottontail rabbits recovered from a section house occupied in the same region (Santa Barbara, California) and time period (1898–1933) display evidence of human processing and/or cooking (Nettles and Hamilton 2005). Diagnostic ammunition found at the site also implies that these food sources may not have necessarily been leftovers or handouts given to the section house workers from the hotels, but rather secured by their own means.

The abundance of glass canning jars and containers (which made up 17% of the minimum number of individual vessels count), the lack of tin cans (5), the presence of ammunition manufactured to hunt small game, and the diversity of animals, birds, and fish discovered at the site paint a picture of a family seeking out all possible food sources in the typically barren, chaparral-laden mountains surrounding them. Placing these objects and remains in site visitors’ hands along with bringing members of the public up to the site during the summer months for public archaeology days (when it is well over 38°C [100°F]!) has given them a visceral and tangible sense of the hardships railway laborers faced. While members of the public are up at the site, I have tried to make the link between the inequalities Mexican immigrants and tourism workers experienced in the past to their continued marginalization in the contemporary global economy explicit. I have discussed the parallels between the conditions under which the section house residents and today’s migrant and tourism workers have to live and labor: some of the shared set of conditions between past and contemporary laborers include living in cramped housing, coming from a Second or Third World country to do domestic or trade-oriented work in a First World country, living far away from their family, and being kept under close watch by their employers (c.f., Adler and Adler 2004; Cabezas 2006; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994).

As the case of Mount Lowe exhibits, one of the unique things archaeologists have the ability to do is to trace the situatedness of racial identities through historical trajectories. In considering Mount Lowe’s laboring population, we gather a better and clearer understanding of the significance of these contexts. We see how the racial designations and countries of origin structured where Mexican and Irish immigrants could work and live and what jobs they could occupy as well as how naturalized notions of femininity and masculinity governed what jobs women and men could and could not do.

Making the history of the Mount Lowe Resort and Railway’s reliance on non-naturalized immigrant workers from Mexico to keep the tourist experience at a minimal cost through public outreach programs and the installation of signage can shed light on how the United States has always relied on cheap, non-naturalized labor. Recalling and remembering histories that undermine booster language—through archaeological work and public outreach—may help today’s tourism workers gain the public and economic recognition they so direly deserve.