Representational conquest: Tourism, display, and public memory in 'America's Finest City'

Representational Conquest: Tourism, Display, and Public Memory in "America's Finest City" examines the centrality of representation in the formation of Southern California during the twentieth century. Popularly defined, conquest refers to the defeat, mastery or subjugation of peoples and territory through war, violence, and military force. While multiple historians signal the end of U.S. conquest with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, I argue that conquest has not ended---it has merely changed shape. Twentieth-century tourism in San Diego features a new form of conquest that extends the legacy of military conquest. This dissertation develops an alternative way of understanding conquest that not only considers the terror of psychic and physical violence, but also charts how visual and material symbols and images in San Diego's tourist economy operate as ongoing, continual processes of representational conquest. These discursive formations both continue and are mutually constitutive of earlier projects of domination and control---i.e., military invasion and the mission system.;As the first contemporary investigation of representational conquest in Southern California, my project is driven by the following questions: What is the relationship between tourism and conquest in a particular region? How do processes of conquest change over time? How do these processes influence the racial and political landscape of Southern California and more particularly the global city in the twentieth century? I investigate these crucial inquiries by focusing on a geopolitical area where conquest is arguably most concentrated: the bordered space between nations. Specifically, I look to the San Diego, California border region as a case study. Self-proclaimed as "America's Finest City," San Diego has established global economic prominence through its large military complex, free-trade manufacturing, and international tourism industries. As a global city, San Diego provides compelling examples of military, territorial, racial, and discursive conflicts, which continually work to define U.S. national identity in a turbulent, bordered space.;The abundant array of tourist representations mythologizing the Western U.S. borderland region have functioned as conquest. I have chosen four different examples that provide productive lenses through which to understand representational conquest---namely: "Ramonamania" in early twentieth-century Old Town State Historic Park, which established public memory and a patriotic Anglo version of San Diego's past; post-War architecture in the city's Shelter Island, where physical structures do the work of conquest; the city's 200th birthday flop, which became a financial disaster in 1969's tense political and racial climate; and the installation of giant pandas at the San Diego Zoo following U.S.-China rapprochement, where East meets West by way of internationally sanctioned biopower in the 1980s and 1990s.