A San Diego Cultural Narrative

By its very nature, the art of traveling removes tourists from their home culture and places them temporarily in a different cultural milieu, whether in an adjacent city or in a village halfway across the world.

-McKercher and du Cros, Cultural Tourism: 

The Partnership between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management 2002

Over the course of my lifetime, I have been interested in travel and tourist activities. With our modern ability to span the globe in a matter of hours, the astounding rates of tourism and its importance to understanding both local and global processes have seemingly become intertwined with our pursuit of daily existence. For the city of San Diego, California, the Visitor Industry is the third largest revenue generator, following manufacturing and the military. Because of the tourism industry’s influence and significance to San Diego’s continuing urban development, it is essential to assess its impact on the spaces and people that serve to attract all of these visitors. Moreover, linkages between tourism, space, history, and commoditization are investigated across locations, but it is within a city setting that anthropologists have a unique opportunity to study the varied activities that shape a dense, multifaceted and peopled environment.

For this discussion, I would like to focus on a place in San Diego where I conducted my thesis research: Old Town San Diego State Historic Park (referred to as Old Town, OTSDSHP, and the Park). Old Town is a historic urban public park that has developed over the years as a popular tourist destination in San Diego. It is a 12-acre California State Park situated in the heart of San Diego and averages over 5 million visitors annually. Old Town is advertised as the “birthplace of California” and is described as a living history site that uses human interpreters, as well as symbolic representations, to bring to life and teach about the past in our current present. The Park is dedicated to public education, but business operations - with pragmatic concerns of visitor attendance rates, stretching limited budgets, and upholding concessionaire guidelines - continue to muddle the effectiveness of education through history and entertainment. The Park’s “historical significance”, its Interpretive Period, encompasses three unique stages that include major, permanent transformations to Southern California’s landscape: the Mexican Period (1821 - 1846), the Transition Period (1846 - 1856), and the American Period (1856 - 1872), as well as displaying a tad bit of American Indian presence throughout the years. Old Town hinges its continuing evolution as a contemporary tourist location, complete with “authentic” buildings, material culture, employee attire, performances, and cuisine, on this 50 year Interpretive Period.

Old Town can be described as a dreamscape produced for visual consumption and is a place in which Park operators inscribe cultural narratives into Old Town’s built environment. These cultural narratives are played out through the Park’s structural layout, period attire clad employees, multiple commercial operations, as well as Park tours and themed special events held throughout the year. What makes Old Town intriguing is that visitors continue to swarm through Old Town’s buildings, engaging with historical interpreters who tell stories about ourselves by talking about what we imagine the past to have been. San Diego history continues to breathe through present tourist activities, and is constructed by our present ideologies and beliefs about who we are today and who we were (or ideally should have been) in the past. This complex array of placed and misplaced histories, narratives, and personalities all coming together in a distinct location is really quite captivating.

Although Old Town is a distinct location, the park is representative of the city of San Diego, other living history sites across the nation, and urban public spaces abroad, as well as being tied to larger global processes of theming, commoditization, and tourism. This is because physical spaces, structures, and cultural constructions serve as metaphors for larger populations and environment. I also believe that the displayed themes at Old Town symbolize even more because of Old Town’s setting within the large urban area of San Diego. The exotic, fetishized elements are additionally highlighted because Old Town takes visitors away from surrounding busy city life and transports them not only in place, but also through time. Scholars write that many tourists traveling to living history sites are symbolically transported into actually believing that they are a part of an unspoiled and authentic community. Although spaces are obviously updated with functioning toilets, ATM machines, and electronic cash registers, Old Town makes the stage look authentic through buildings and activities of employees in period attire specific to the Old Town Interpretive Period.

As cultural consumers, visitors are attracted to places that portray particular themes and depictions of life. These places are influenced by cultural norms and trends, putting on display to the public modified and favorable versions of reality. The theming of Old Town’s space is not simply to make the place look respectable, but also to display a particular image that embodies something more than itself. It functions in a fluctuating consumer environment, playing off visitor desires and their willingness to accept the stories told through theming as real, meaningful, and authentic. In Old Town San Diego, important connections are made through the commoditization of San Diego history and by unifying ideas and symbols to create a joyful location to visit. Although the actual history can be important, it is not as significant as how history is reshaped and subsequently interpreted by the ephemeral visitors. Even though tourists have not experienced the 1800s westward expansion and settlement themselves, their participation at Old Town provides a sense of place and identity.

Tourism in Southern California has always had a dual nature. It has been part of the development of a physical infrastructure, while also combining goods, settlers, businessmen, and tourists with the exploration of land. Furthermore, close ties between place building and image building endure, creating a close link between the development and continual reinvention of Southern California’s physical landscapes and social environments. It is important to remember that Old Town is not necessarily creating an artificial fantasy (because the area does indeed have an actual history), but rather staging a version of it in the real past, as documented by experts and historians, with modern amenities to ensure visitor comfort and positive visitor experience. The Park plays off visitor desires in order to continue operations and produce an imagined, historical California landscape and social environment considered to be a multi-faceted form of education and recreation to all who visit.

Conor Muirhead

Wish You Were Here

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

I was lucky enough to live and work in Siem Reap, Cambodia for about a year in 2009-2010. During my tenure at the non-profit organization, I carried out program research in underdeveloped rural communities, including pilot research, implementation, and follow-up activities. I had many opportunities to explore the countryside while also enjoying the multifaceted and continually transforming cities. Although I was familiar with the events in Cambodia during the 1970s, and had additionally heard many sorrowful stories from individuals that I worked with, I was unprepared for this experience. I tried to objectively look at the situation, as an ex-pat and tourist, but because by that point in my job I personally knew ex-Khmer Rouge soldiers, as well as countless individuals whose lives were forever changed, S-21 hit me like a rock. I used my camera as a type of defense mechanism on my first visit in order to separate myself from the despondence, but returned again in order to experience the museum fully.

The photos below include Tuol Sleng’s four main buildings, one of which was encased with barbed wire in order to prevent prisoners from jumping to their deaths. The rest of the buildings were converted into both group and individual prison cells, complete with bars and torture tools that are now on display for visitors. Additionally, I included a few shots that have visitor writing on the walls and/or in books.

While living in Siem Reap, Cambodia last year I had the opportunity to visit Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (also known as Security Prison 21, or simply S-21). The site was originally built as Chao Ponhea Yat High School years before it was converted in 1975 to a makeshift prison. During Khmer Rouge occupation, rooms were transformed into tiny brick and concrete cells, barbed wire was laced throughout the encampment, and various types of torture chambers were scattered throughout the complex. For the next four years, Khmer Rouge officers imprisoned and tortured an estimated 17 thousand individuals, of which only 7 survived.

If visiting Cambodia, I urge you to travel down to Phnom Penh (which is routinely skipped over) and visit S-21. Although it may be difficult to complete the tour of the four large buildings, it is truly one of the most remarkable locations I have ever seen. To imagine people actually living out their days imprisoned and tortured in these small spaces is almost unfathomable. While visiting S-21 a second time, my sister broke down and cried outside the thousands of anonymous prisoners pictured in one of the group holding cells. It truly is a sobering experience. 

As a tourist location, S-21 offers a piece of Cambodia’s recent history put on display for travelers. The space is re-imagined through current visitors that swarm (yes, it is a very popular site) in and out of prison cells and barbed wire, seeking answers to questions from tour guides that you can pay for at the entrance. And even though each visitor’s experience at S-21 is unique, each visit is also framed by cultural perceptions and a visitor’s sense of identity. What the visitor takes away from Tuol Sleng is highly dependent on what they knew before they visited, their identity-related needs that are tied to reasons for visiting, as well as types of conversations they have while in the museum, by what they do and see in the museum, and by what they think about, see and do after they leave. As captivating as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is, it unfortunately is a very recent tragedy and one that still haunts many of Cambodia’s current population.

Notes: I do not intend to strictly parallel Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge through these photos. As you may know, it was a terrible time in the country, but in no way do current Khmer define themselves by these events. They are remembered as a part of a history, but not their entire history. Additionally, many Khmer Rouge soldiers held out in villages up until the mid 1990s. Although the "official" Khmer Rouge time frame is 1975-1979, in reality it was from the 1950s through the mid-1990s. Two of the villages that I worked with during my tenure in Siem Reap Province were sporadically invaded by Khmer Rouge holdouts for years after 1979. Many perished, but the ones that survived are anxious to find stability after years of continued economic and social unrest. It is a pretty amazing situation. And, from what I heard while living in Cambodia, the country has come a long way since the 1980s and 1990s and continues to re-build everyday.

If interested in some further reading, I recommend Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide by Alexander Laban Hinton. It is one of the first anthropological attempts to investigate origins of genocide. For a more intimate reflection on an individual’s experience growing up during the Khmer Rouge, I suggest First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung.

Lastly, in July 2010 Kang Kek lew (also known as Comrade Duch), director of Tuol Sleng prison during the late 1970s, was the first Khmer Rouge member found guilty of crimes against humanity, torture, and murder in his role as the former commandant of the S-21 extermination camp. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Conor Muirhead