Winner of the 2021 Richard J. Orsi Prize

Abstract

It is with great pleasure that I announce the winner of our Richard J. Orsi Prize for the best article published in California History in the past year. Among the nineteen research articles we published in 2021, our prize committee chose Amanda Marie Martinez’s “Suburban Cowboy: Country Music, Punk, and the Struggle over Space in Orange County, 1978–1981” (California History vol. 98, no. 1: 83–97).The committee members were deeply impressed by “Suburban Cowboy.” Barbara Berglund Sokolov explains that the article “innovatively brings together analyses of two antipodal musical genres, country and punk,” elegantly combining a “cultural history approach with insights from urban and political history to reveal how music was a battleground” in Orange County, across which Martinez tracked “differing responses to suburban living and to the conservatism of the Reagan era in Orange County.” Glen Gendzel praises Martinez’s study for exploring the nexus of “music, culture, and politics in Orange County” to draw profound observations about “not just a simple clash” over musical preferences but “a conflict over the merits of suburban life,” with country music fans embracing “suburbanism” while punk rockers rejected the “mundane orderliness” of suburbs (84). Plumbing the significance of an exploding punk rock scene in the heart of Reagan country, Martinez argues persuasively that, “at a time when conservatism appeared to dominate social, cultural, and political life, hardcore punk rock offered one of the first cultural waves of resistance to the conservatism” of that era (93). Calling on Lisa McGirr, Eric Avila, Becky Nicolaides, and other scholars, Gendzel found Martinez’s essay well situated in the secondary literature of California politics and music history, in addition to its wide-ranging primary-source research.Congratulations, Amanda Marie!