Shaping the Shoreline

Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast

Connie Y. Chiang

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780295989778
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

The Monterey coast, home to an acclaimed aquarium and the setting for John Steinbeck's classic novel Cannery Row, was also the stage for a historical junction of industry and tourism. Shaping the Shoreline looks at the ways in which Monterey has formed, and been formed by, the tension between labor and leisure. Connie Y. Chiang examines Monterey's development from a seaside resort into a working-class fishing town and, finally, into a tourist attraction again. Through the subjects of work, recreation, and environment -- the intersections of which are applicable to communities across the United States and abroad -- she documents the struggles and contests over this magnificent coastal region. By tracing Monterey's shift from what was once the literal Cannery Row to an iconic hub that now houses an aquarium in which nature is replicated to attract tourists, the interactions of people with nature continues to change. Drawing on histories of immigration, unionization, and the impact of national and international events, Chiang explores the reciprocal relationship between social and environmental change. By integrating topics such as race, ethnicity, and class into environmental history, Chiang illustrates the idea that work and play are not mutually exclusive endeavors.

1 CONTESTED SHORES

On May 16, 1906, a fire of unknown origin engulfed the Chinese fishing village at Point Alones, a rocky headland northwest of Monterey. Once a thriving settlement, the village was left with dozens of homeless residents and only sixteen standing buildings.

The fire was devastating for the Chinese, but it was more than just an unfortunate accident. It also marked the climax of over two decades of tension between the tourism and fishing industries. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, immigrant fishermen and seaside developers gravitated to the Monterey coastline because of its valuable natural resources. Abundant fisheries and stunning scenery could both be harnessed and commodified for sale. However, these newcomers had very different ideas about what in nature had material value, how it should be developed, and who should have the power to do so. The fecund shoreline that provided fish and shellfish for East Asians and southern Europeans was the same picturesque shoreline that delighted tourists. Thus, the coastline came to reflect contending visions for nature and society—divergent views about the types of people and activities that should occupy Monterey's shores. While these visions, on occasion, complemented one another, social conflicts grew more common as tourists, real estate developers, and competing groups of fishermen laid claim to the same or adjacent spaces and struggled to gain control and access.¹

Ideas of how to structure the natural world, then, intersected with ideas of how to structure society. At the same time, one's social status helped to shape one's relationship to nature. This reciprocal relationship between social and environmental change first developed within both the tourism and the fishing industries. Later, it revolved around a tug-of-war between these often opposing coastal enterprises—and the people who pursued them. Both seaside developers and immigrant fishermen refused to relinquish control of the coastline to their competitors. Their heated contests over nature came to define the shores of Monterey and culminated in the smoldering ruins at Point Alones.

RACE AND THE MAKING OF MONTEREY 'S FISHERIES

While Rumsen Indians long capitalized on the fecundity of Monterey Bay, their efforts were focused largely on subsistence and trade. For the southern European and East Asian immigrants who came to Monterey in the second half of the nineteenth century, fishing was a commercial endeavor. A point of convergence for many migratory species of marine life, local waters offered these immigrant fishermen a wealth of resources that they could turn into commodities for sale.² But as their respective populations increased, competition intensified. Italian and Portuguese fishers tried to push aside their Chinese counterparts, while many local residents and outside observers discredited the Chinese and Japanese by accusing them of being destructive fishermen. Racial difference and fishermen's divergent methods of harvesting Monterey Bay's riches intertwined to structure and reinforce the social divisions within the fisheries.³

The Chinese were one of the first groups of immigrant fishermen to settle on the Monterey Peninsula. After a small group set up camp near Monterey to harvest abalone in 1853, many Chinese in San Francisco followed suit. Located about one and one-half miles northwest of Monterey in the town of Pacific Grove, Point Alones emerged as the main Chinese fishing camp on the peninsula. In 1870 the village was home to forty-seven residents, including twenty women and fifteen children under the age of eighteen. Unlike other places where Chinese immigrants settled, Point Alones was a family community. The absence of a heavily skewed gender ratio also suggested that the Monterey Chinese did not see themselves as sojourners who would make their fortune and then return to China. Instead, they established an extensive fishing operation that included kelp, rockfish, cod, halibut, squid, and shark.⁴ While they shipped some fresh fish to San Francisco, Gilroy, San Jose, and other inland towns, they dried the bulk of their catch on nearby fields and loaded these products on steamers or junks bound for San Francisco.⁵

The Chinese faced competition primarily from southern European fishers. Portuguese whalers settled in the area in 1855 and organized the Monterey Whaling Company. By 1880 the company employed twenty-three men, mostly Azorean Islanders, who joined other Portuguese fishermen to catch fish for local and San Francisco markets during the offseason.⁶ Italians entered the Monterey fishing community in 1873, when a company of fishermen, originally from Genoa, left San Francisco and headed south. A second Italian group came to Monterey two years later, making camp close to the railroad depot east of Point Alones to focus on catching mackerel, halibut, sardines, and salmon.⁷

Even though the ocean and its resources were, in theory, common property in which many users enjoyed equal access, the ocean was not an open field in practice.⁸ Hoping to dominate the waters directly off Monterey, Italian fishermen shoved the Chinese west toward Point Pinos, Point Lobos, and Carmel Bay. This arrangement worked only when groups remained within their boundaries. When they did not, conflicts flared. In 1880 Chinese fishermen sued the Monterey Whaling Company, accusing whalers of chasing them down and cutting their nets and lines. The whalers' exact motives were unclear, but they likely sabotaged the Chinese because they were invading their territory or simply getting in the way. While the court dismissed the complaint, the Monterey Californian defended the Chinese, lambasting the whalers for “tormenting their brother fisherman” and describing their actions as “no less than piracy.”⁹

Emergent racial divisions reflected the unequal power relations typical of other western industries. While Monterey did not experience the virulent anti-Chinese activities that erupted elsewhere during the late nineteenth century, observers routinely expressed conventional anti-Chinese sentiments. They described Chinese fishermen as filthy and inferior, the same adjectives used to describe Chinese laborers who laid railroad tracks and toiled in mining camps.¹⁰ When J. W. Collins, writing in an 1888 United States Fish Commission report, noted that the Chinese lived in “miserable squalor .. . conditions that would be unbearable to white men, particularly those of American birth,” he made Chinese living conditions a corollary of their race. When he commented that a considerable percentage of Italian and Portuguese fishermen became naturalized, while the Chinese “appear[ed] to have no desire for citizenship,” he implied that applying for citizenship made Italians and Portuguese superior. However, Collins did not mention that Chinese immigrants were ineligible for citizenship because the Naturalization Law of 1790 limited this privilege to “free white persons.”¹¹

The federal government considered all Europeans, including Italians and Portuguese, to be white in terms of their eligibility for citizenship, but there was no monolithic white race at this time. Nativist fears that certain immigrants threatened the republic led to the development of a hierarchy of multiple, scientifically distinct white races. Italians and other southern Europeans occupied the lower rungs of this social order, as northern Europeans believed that they were primitive and lacked civilization. Nonetheless, as Matthew Frye Jacobson argues, Italians and other degraded white races were still “rendered indelibly white by the presence of populations even more problematic than themselves,” such as Asians. Thomas Guglielmo describes this system by distinguishing between race and color. During the late nineteenth century, Italians may have been an undesirable race, but they benefited from and embraced their color status as whites.¹² In the context of the Monterey fisheries, it was not surprising that federal officials classified Italian and Portuguese fishers as superior whites, in contrast to the nonwhite Chinese.

Individuals who reported on the fisheries also ostracized the Chinese by casting them as destructive fishers. In particular, the Chinese use of trawl lines to take bottom fish became a source of criticism. While “white fishermen” used gill nets and hooks and lines to make their catch, the Chinese rigged trawls with two hundred hooks each, uniting eight or nine sections to form one continuous line. They baited the hooks, left them at the ocean bottom, and checked them once or twice a day. According to an 1888 United States Fish Commission report, trawls were prohibited, and this infraction on the part of the Chinese created “a very bitter feeling between the two classes” of fishermen.¹³ While the California Penal Code from this period did not include any explicit laws against trawls, the taking of young fish by any method was prohibited in state waters.¹⁴ Perhaps observers believed that trawls—and the Chinese—were harmful because they took immature fish. However, most Pacific Coast fisheries experienced hard times from the mid1870s to the mid1890s, and it is difficult to sort out the various forces—human-induced and natural—that accounted for any species' decline.¹⁵

Attacks against Monterey's Chinese fishermen were not isolated events. Criticizing Chinese gear and methods reflected a statewide attempt to regulate them out of the fishing industry and reduce white fishermen's competition. In 1880 the California legislature prohibited aliens incapable of voting from fishing in the state's public waters. The United States Circuit Court, however, struck down this act because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection. Other legislation tried to expel the Chinese from the shrimp industry by banning their favored net, the Chinese bag net, and instituting a closed season during the summer, the only time when they could air-dry their catch and then ship it to China.¹⁶

In Monterey, the Chinese did find a few allies among scientists at Stanford University's Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, the first marine station on the Pacific Coast. Founded in 1892 at the behest of Stanford's first president, David Starr Jordan, a former student of noted Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz, the laboratory was located at Lover's Point in Pacific Grove, a short distance from Point Alones.¹⁷ Here, Stanford biology professor Oliver Peebles Jenkins explained, “the forms of plants and animals are wonderfully rich in variety, in the numbers of individuals, in interest, in novelty, and in accessibility. It proves a perfect paradise for the marine biologist.” To study this environment, the facility provided collecting apparatus, two boats, and several laboratories equipped with glassware, chemicals, microscopes, and aquaria that were pumped full of fresh, running seawater.¹⁸ In its focus on laboratory-based research and specialization, Hopkins joined a larger shift in American biology from a “museum-oriented natural history” that entailed collecting, identifying, and preserving flora and fauna to a focus on research within academic and research institutions.¹⁹

Hopkins's scientists took advantage of their proximity to the Point Alones fishing village and enlisted the Chinese to provide specimens. As biologist Bashford Dean remarked, “The station has never found difficulty in securing an abundant supply of fish material, thanks to the Chinese fishermen of the neighbouring village.” Scientists soon came to respect their skill as collectors and their knowledge of marine organisms. Unlike other descriptions of the Chinese at Point Alones, derogatory statements were coupled with praise. Dean and F. M. McFarland, a Hopkins instructor, referred to the fishermen as “the lowest type of Cantonese” and a “peculiar poor grade of Chinamen” but then lauded them as “excellent fishermen,” “intelligent collectors,” hardworking, honest, and “kindly.” Dean also commended “the skill with which they separate the fertile or unfertile eggs of sharks .. . and recognize what they refer to as the ‘hen’ or ‘rooster’ sharks or ratfish.”²⁰ Through their labor in nature, the Chinese had acquired expertise valued by scientists.²¹

Collecting specimens was only part-time work for the Chinese; they continued to pursue the fisheries and soon focused their energies on squid. Squid fishing occurred at night, when the species could be attracted to the surface of the water with a lighted torch placed at the boat's bow. Two skiffs carrying the purse seine net followed. Once the squid appeared, Chinese fishermen threw the net into the water. They rowed their boats in opposite directions to encircle the squid, pulled on a rope to close or “purse” the two ends of the net together, and dragged the full net to shore. Onshore, men and women split the squid open and laid them on flakes (racks) to dry for two or three days. They then gathered and bundled the squid to be sent to San Francisco, where Chinese merchants distributed it to dealers in China and the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawai'i). In 1892 the Chinese of Monterey County shipped 357,622 pounds of dried squid.²² The squid fishery proved to be profitable, and it allowed the Chinese to escape their losing conflict over the fishing grounds with Europeans who worked during the day. Under the protective cover of darkness, the nocturnal harvesting of squid created physical, ecological, and temporal separation from potentially hostile fishermen.²³

Still, observers maintained that the Chinese fisheries and their related odors reinforced the intrinsic inferiority and wastefulness of these nonwhite fishers. Writing in an 1888 booster publication entitled Picturesque California, J. R. Fitch argued that the Chinese caught squid only because they had exhausted other species, such as flounder and halibut. While federal data indicated that these fisheries were not, in fact, depleted, he maintained that the squid fishery was a sign of destructiveness, not resourcefulness. A U.S. Fish Commission report also pointed out the distasteful nature of the Chinese fishing operations, declaring that dried seafood possessed a “repulsive odor [and] their appearance [was] anything but attractive.” Fitch added that the Chinese fishing village was “unspeakably dirty and redolent with the odor of decaying fish.”²⁴ Squid and other fish odors were revolting, and the Chinese production of such an unpleasant stench became a way to characterize them as inherently repugnant. In other words, environmental activities deemed distasteful were markers of lower social status.²⁵

Witnesses also objected to how the squid fishery transformed Chinese women, as working in nature imparted certain unfeminine characteristics to their bodies. According to travel writer M. H. Field, “There is truly nothing more hideous in shape than an old Chinese woman, bareheaded and scantily clad, wading into the surf to haul in a boat and unloading fish with masculine energy.” Fitch added, “Swarthy women and little children who are tanned as black as negroes by sun and wind, swarm in the squalid cabins, and tumble about in the dust of the single street.”²⁶ Hauling and unloading fish created sweat, muscles, and tan skin—attributes that marked these women as unlike their white counterparts. By working alongside men, they also contradicted Victorian gender roles in which women were segregated in the domestic sphere and did not assume public lives.²⁷ The physical manifestations of their labor provided further evidence of the lack of civility in the Chinese fishing village.

Japanese fishermen also became the object of white disdain and scorn. In the 189...