If you see or hear an actual citizens band (CB) radio, via mass media or in real life depending on your age (mostly), you may not know what it is or your mind may jump to an association with the United States in the 1970s, the movie or song âConvoyâ and the question âI wonder what happened to âŚ.â CB radio holds a place in some of our minds as a sort of one-hit wonder of communications technology or an awkward phase between the omnipresence of old terrestrial media and the emergence of new digital media . But in this book I argue that CB radio is worthy of more lasting attention from scholars and students of media and communications history. In fact, as I will show, CB radio, as deployed in the United States, was both representative of, and a player in, urban race relations, gendered and racialized uses of technology, a changing image and national role for the American South, the dwindling power of major post-1945 social movements, and American citizensâ responses to forms of mobility and immobility in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
Big claims for a simple mobile communications technology! But as other scholars in the history of technology and media have shown us, the cultural work performed by devices (from many eras but particularly those in the electronic age) goes far beyond their intended function.1 Scholars can frame urban history and the history of popular culture around histories of technology and invention just as much as they can frame such research around histories of migration, race, economics or gender. As a cultural historian I am interested in the resonances among time-place-people-things; in how a building or a pervasive idea or a change in perspective can reshape other stories far beyond that original starting point. For example, I have written about how the development of New York Cityâs skyscraper âlandscapeâ at the turn of the twentieth century helped âAmericanizeâ the city in the eyes of Americans who had thought the city too âforeignâ both by sensibility and due to its large population of immigrants. So, similarly, I dug into the history of CB radio as part of a larger research project on sound in cities. What I learned from archival research in films, television shows, advertisements, and magazine and newspaper articles led me to understand CB radio as a catalyst for my own questions about histories of listening, aural perceptions of different voices and the role of nonmusical sound in shaping senses of belonging or marginalization especially in urban settings undergoing demographic change.
When, why and to whom might the audibility of race and other forms of difference matter? As scholars of visual culture have argued, questions of the visual legibility of âidentityâ have mattered most at times of social-political change when the previously stable visual markers of, say, gender, class, sexuality or race became blurred; so too with questions of audible identification and its uncertainties. Mark Smith extensively documents in his book How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses the significance of all senses in the construction of race and the practice of racism in the southern United States from the antebellum period through the immediate postsegregation years after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandating the desegregation of public schools. Smith argues that examining the history of the southern racial sensorium shows that âit was no accident that the most vicious sensory stereotypes whites applied to blacks occurred when certainty in the identification of race was evaporating.â Smithâs skillful examination of the interplay of the histories of the senses and of race and racism buttresses my own arguments here that the racialization of CB radio technology requires us to consider the history of the audibility of race.2
The audibility of race, and other forms of difference rendered in relation to white Anglo supremacy and heteronormativity, resonated with particular sharpness in the post-1945 social movement efforts to reorder Americaâs racial and other hierarchies. The voices of women, Latinx, queer and trans people in addition to those of African Americans began to reverberate through both reformist and liberation movements, in mainstream media attuned to stories of political and social disruption, through residential urban neighborhoods, and in street protests and marches. Post-World War II America sounded quite different than the preceding pre-war version.
As this book will demonstrate, mobilityâgeographic, physical, social, economic, intellectual, culturalâproduced audible difference by moving bodies, voices and ideas with a rapidity as well as a reach not seen (or heard) before the war, moving them into spaces, territories and ears not previously entered. The uses of citizens band radio provide stark examples of the interaction among mobility, audibility and difference, in particular with reference to the racial construction of âwhiteâ and âblackâ in mid- to late twentieth-century America. But that interaction exemplified through CB radio is better understood, and also complicated, by considering a larger context for audible difference and an expanded idea of âtechnology.â In this chapter I provide a first example of that larger context of the operation of audible difference preceding the era of CB radioâs mass popularity by listening to the Puerto Rican migration in the late 1940s and the 1950s; in the last chapter of the book my example again extends the audibility of difference to include queer Americans and expands the idea of âtechnologyâ to encompass the queer sensory intuition known colloquially as âgaydar.â
The first major postwar migration from outside the mainland United States began in 1948, when many thousands of Puerto Ricans left home for New York City, in search of economic mobility and better opportunities than their island territory could offer. New York had not experienced a mass migration of this sort since the turn of the twentieth century. Immigration restriction legislation passed against Chinese immigrants in 1882, and subsequent laws targeting southern and eastern Europeans in the 1910s, and culminating in the 1924 National Origins Act had closed Americaâs doors to most sources of immigration other than western and northern Europe. So when Puerto Ricans came to New York in large numbers from 1948 to 1958, their presence represented certainly an audible, if not always a visible, sea change in many working-class neighborhoodsâplaces already under increasing pressure in that same decade from urban planning initiatives to rid the city of âblightâ by demolishing vital, if poor, tenement neighborhoods.
In one of those neighborhoods, on Manhattanâs west side, beginning in 1948, commercial sound recordist Tony Schwartz undertook a series of personal recording projects. One of these local sound portraits ultimately resulted in a 1955 record album Schwartz entitled âNueva York,â a project that emerged from Schwartzâs listening to his own changing neighborhood. Around 1948â1949, Schwartz had noticed a particular change in the cadences of his neighborhoodâSpanish-language conversations on the street, merengue tunes and Puerto Rican folk ballads on the candy-store juke boxes, and the shrill complaints from his Euro-American neighbors about âthose Puerto Ricans.â Recalling his fatherâs stories of his grandparentsâ immigrations from Europe to New York at the turn of the century, especially the hardships they faced from discrimination, the confusion of a new language and the hostility of so-called native New Yorkers, Schwartz realized, he said, that he âhad a chance to document a migration of a people to New York.â Recorded in a mixture of Spanish and English, Schwartzâs âNueva Yorkâ album, distilling eight years of recording into a set of distinct tracks, was released on the Folkways Records label during the peak years of the Puerto Rican migration and New Yorkersâ varied responses to it.3
Listening to âNueva York,â it becomes clear that the public spaces of the neighborhood cafes and candy stores offered some of Schwartzâs rich...