For last week’s post, I wrote about how Garrett Broad’s book is helping me to think through the work that I’m doing. But I’ve also been thinking a lot about the role an ethnographer plays in the city, and the ways in which we see and map the city. My view of New York is complex and layered because I’ve spent my life there so I know the different neighborhoods by feeling and association and memory, but I don’t have that for San Francisco, Oakland or Berkeley yet. I’ve been intrigued by a book that I found used in a bookstore on Valencia the other day: Rebecca Solnit’s map-story collection Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas and I wanted to write a second post on a guiding book to highlight my thoughts around this book and the way it’s influencing how I think about my research. Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Shapiro recently published a counterpart book about New York that is a beautiful and fascinating portrait of the neighborhoods and connections in New York. Infinite City is focused on San Francisco specifically, although some of the maps are widened to include other parts of the Bay Area.
Infinite City is fascinating because it reveals the side of the city that can only be learned through experiences, anecdotes, memories and a view of the smaller pieces that form the fabric of the city. The atlas that Solnit has constructed is filled with memories, writings and essays about different aspects of the city, accompanied by maps that show the visual geographies. As Solnit says in the introduction, “An atlas is a collection of versions of a place, a compendium of perspectives, a snatching out of the infinite ether of potential versions a few that will be made concrete and visible.” This atlas has allowed me a window into San Francisco, Oakland and the rest of the Bay Area during my limited time here, and a way of understanding the various threads of memory, meaning, and history that are intertwined with each other. In reading so far, two maps have particularly stood out to me.
“The Names Before the Names: The Indigenous Bay Area, 1769”. From Infinite City, pg. 12. Cartography by Ben Pease, Online Image from Business Insider
The first is the first map and section in the book entitled “The Names before the Names”. This is a map and essay dedicated to the Indigenous Bay Area in 1769. As you can see in the map, there are a vast number of different local tribes that inhabited this land prior to colonization. Specifically, the land I’m living on was the home of the Yelamu and Oakland, where I work, is Huichin land. This map and these names resonate especially with me because in my studies, I’m drawn to and interested in Indigenous rights, culture, and environmental connections. But also as researchers, we tend to start histories and ethnographies after colonization and do not often recognize Indigenous claims to the land as well as histories and memories, and the extreme violence of colonization that occurred on the places where we are conducting research. It feels very important to acknowledge the full and real histories of these places, and in my environmental justice work, I have come across many organizational alliances and partnerships between communities of color and Indigenous communities, which often face similar environmental and economic challenges. In my work, I feel that it is right to bring this to the surface and emphasize a history which has often not been told and actually suppressed.
“Palate/Poison: The Bay Area in Your Body” From Infinite City, pg. 52-53. Cartography by Ben Pease, Artwork by Sunaura Taylor, Online Image from National Geographic
The second is the map entitled “Poison/Palate: The Bay Area in Your Body” which outlines both “palate” sites such as famous restaurants, farmers markets, and farms, and “poison” sites and EPA Superfund sites, which include the Port of Oakland and the Alameda Naval Air Station. This map and accompanying essay are fascinating and extremely important. As Solnit says in the essay, “The culinary Bay Area never tires of trumpeting its gourmet treasures, while the toxic face of the region is rarely mentioned, from the barrels of radioactive waste rusting off the coast of the Farallones to the twenty-nine Super-fund sites Silicon Valley created to the tons of pesticides and herbicides that go into winemaking to the mercury from leaking mines and former gold-mining operations that has washing onto the floor of the bay” (51). Environmental justice is very focused on both of these issues: the importance of safe and healthy locally-grown food, and the dangers of toxic sites that are imposed on low-income communities and forgotten about by mostly everyone else. Specifically, those coastal sites are especially dangerous in the face of rising sea-levels and other effects of climate change. This map brings together food and poison in the same place, forcing us to think about these two elements together, rather than keeping them comfortably separate. In this way, maps can bring together two or more elements that often don’t inhabit the same mental space, but show the importance of seeing them together in the same physical and visual space.
Solnit says in the introduction that “a city is many worlds in the same place…or many maps of the same place” (5), and it seems that as an ethnographer and temporary researcher in a place, we attempt to map out our vision of the city through our research, but I think it’s always important to note and acknowledge that this represents only one view of the city. That view is shaped by our status as researchers, as coming from an academic perspective from within a specific field, by our own personal feelings, experiences, and backgrounds, and by the experiences that we choose to show in our maps. What I love so much about Solnit’s book is the way that she compiles and uses these individual experiences to create a more complex and layered view of the city. My experience is only another layer on the city, another layer on the maps that people have been creating for centuries, and with that, comes all the flaws and incomplete elements of any map, especially ones that only have three months of memories and experiences present in them. But Solnit’s book has made me aware that it will be a unique map, one that matters in its difference and one that is worth making.
Source: Solnit, Rebecca. (2010). Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Solnit’s book is available through the NYU Library here and through University of California Press here.
I LOVE this post and am so glad you looked at Infinite City. In fact, I was just thinking about her work while reading Jonathan’s post this week (check it out), which incorporates a map he created for his current research. Too often, as you say, maps are invented by outsiders and are intended to orient outsiders. They share the information the intended reader might find most pertinent, but they never quite capture the essence of a place or, indeed, the “placeness” of a place. By putting data sets in conversation and tension, Solnit reveals, perhaps ironically, how much maps can lie by withholding information. I’m not surprised you are drawn in by those two maps! I wonder whether knowing the information within them can help you brainstorm creative ways to help the communities with which you work connect more with the land. For example, are there still native plants growing in Oakland that would have been there when it was Huichin? I’m still thinking about what to do with the gastronomy/toxic waste map…that one calls out for radical political interventions!