There Goes the Transnational Neighborhood: Calypso Buys a Bungalow

Abstract

I live in a place where, in the early 1900s, the Craftsman ideal took hold as it did in few other places in North America. Today, a good seventy years after its heyday and its eventual eclipse by postwar ticky-tacky, the California Bungalow is still the state's pre-eminent style of domestic architecture. From one end of California to the other, craftsman cottages blanket the urban and rural landscapes; in Pasadena and the Berkeley Hills, Greene and Greene's showpieces—apotheoses of the genre—have become holy shrines for Arts and Crafts pilgrims; and in my small college town, way up north behind the Redwood Curtain, well-preserved bungalows are so prized by a certain breed of middle-class refugee from the south that they fetch sums well above their already-inflated asking prices. From its inception in William Morris's industrialized England, of course, the Arts and Crafts movement was about nostalgia for a lost organic past; and so the bunga- low, avatar of this Arcadian never-neverland, has for several generations symbolized an escape, albeit a rather compromised and disingenuous one, from the depredations of the modern world. Its calculatedly homey appeal may be largely what my new neighbors (not to mention those legions who were so recently snapping up Mission Oak repros everywhere from upmarket Restoration Hardware to downscale K-Mart) are buying into, then. Still, the northerly flight of these migrants of means—from something they euphemize vaguely as congestion, or if pressed, crime—points indirectly to another, less homespun, of California's late distinctions: its much- ballyhooed ballot measures of the 1990s restricting immigration, rolling back affirma- tive action, and (briefly) ending bilingual education. Thus, with the Golden State in the vanguard, did the American nation begin working through another in a series of demographically-inspired identity crises. 1 The nature of the work being carried out here, and the sometimes hysterical tone of its execution, invite us to be careful readers of similar moments in the past. Since the underlying anxieties of this latest crisis are often expressed publicly as worries over broadening (and, it's implied, divisive) cultural differences, for instance, it