Tabula Raza: A New Table for People-Centered Conservation

Trudi Sandmeier 00:00
Today on Save As: Buckle up. The future is now.

Cindy Olnick 00:12
Welcome to Save As, a podcast that glimpses the future of heritage conservation through the work of graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Cindy Olnick.

Trudi Sandmeier 00:22
And I’m Trudi Sandmeier.

Cindy Olnick 00:24
So, Trudi.

Trudi Sandmeier 00:25
Yes, Cindy.

Cindy Olnick 00:26
I had a delightful conversation with our old pal Laura Dominguez recently.

Trudi Sandmeier 00:31
I do enjoy a conversation with Laura Dominguez.

Cindy Olnick 00:34
She is a ray of sunshine, isn’t she? And it was so good to catch up with her because she got her Master of Heritage Conservation degree at USC a few years ago. And so we will be talking about her thesis as a backdrop for a larger conversation. And because her whole career is basically about expanding the field to include underrepresented stories and bring people from the margins to the center of the field. And she is really one of the leaders nationwide doing that right now.

Trudi Sandmeier 01:08
And she’s a student again. She’s come back to USC, and she’s earning her PhD now. And I’m really excited to work with her on that project going forward.

Cindy Olnick 01:17
Yeah. So she’s both a student and a Where Are They Now? So listeners, you get double your value in this episode, and we may have to start a new podcast actually, for doctoral students. A spin-off.

Trudi Sandmeier 01:31
Absolutely. We’ve got a lot of them now.

Cindy Olnick 01:33
The doctor is in.

Trudi Sandmeier 01:35
We’ll have a contest for how do we name the next podcast.

Cindy Olnick 01:38
Yes, yes.

Trudi Sandmeier 01:40
Enough from us. Now, let’s hear from you and Laura Dominguez.

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Cindy Olnick 01:48
Laura, welcome to Save As.

Laura Dominguez 01:51
Thanks, Cindy. It’s wonderful to see you and hear your voice.

Cindy Olnick 01:55
Would you please take a moment to briefly introduce yourself?

Laura Dominguez 01:58
I’m Laura Dominguez. I’m a fifth year PhD candidate in history at USC and an active historic preservationist/heritage conservationist and new mom.

Cindy Olnick 02:09
Yes. And all that’s before lunch. And active is an understatement, I might add. So Laura, you know, in a nutshell, what’s your story? What brought you to this wacky field?

Laura Dominguez 02:22
I was born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley, born in Whittier and my family moved to Pasadena. I lived in Monrovia. I think like a lot of people, was born into a family of storytellers, grandfather in particular, he was a musician and he loved Los Angeles, emigrated to the US from Mexico in the 50s. And sort of fell in with the music scene on the Eastside and was a traveling musician by night. And by day was a janitor handyman and just loved to tell his story and tell his story through place. Time spent with my grandfather going back to Whittier, and going places like downtown to Dodger Stadium, he would insist on taking certain routes through the city because he wanted to sort of narrate the story of the places that we were going. And so, I think, between that, and you know, growing up in a place like Pasadena for a good part of my childhood, just surrounded by historic buildings and going to schools that I think had a lot of opportunities to immerse students in the built environment or in the natural environment, I just sort of had a natural proclivity for place.

As an undergraduate, I moved to the East Coast, moved to New York City for my bachelor’s and studied architectural history. But had sort of a completely different orientation to this field, to this concept of the built environment and architectural history. Very Eurocentric, very white, very kind of elite. And I sort of struggled to find my footing and my interests in that environment. I think I learned how to read place, learn how to read landscape and to ask historical questions, but wasn’t really connecting with the material in any kind of meaningful way. I had been exposed to historic preservation as an undergrad, I knew I wanted to do something applied. And I kind of at the last minute made the choice to go to USC and it’s kind of one of those amazing, very unlike me to make a sort of split second decision about but it was one of the best decisions I could have made because I think everything that I’ve done since then is a result of being able to be part of the heritage conservation program and larger preservation community in Southern California.

Cindy Olnick 04:46
Absolutely. And boy, are we glad you found it. So, then you go to USC you get your master’s and you do your thesis on East Los Angeles.

Laura Dominguez 04:58
Yeah, it was a kind of return to roots. Everything that I had been craving while I was in New York was what I found when I got back home. And I was just fortunate, I think, to be in the right place at the right time. And I bring it back around to my family, my family sort of followed the same route that a lot of Mexican American families did in the postwar period, from Boyle Heights to East LA to Whittier. And so for me, my ancestral stories, my ancestral roots were in the Eastside. Even though I didn’t live there, I thought of that as part of my story. And so when I was able to connect with people like Karina Muñiz, who was at the LA Conservancy, and Manuel Huerta on the Eastside, as a graduate student to connect with advocates who are on the ground, trying to figure out how do we talk about preservation in a place where people are told you don’t have any history, there’s nothing to see in your neighborhood, your neighborhood is ugly, it’s dangerous. How do you value the environment, the built environment in those places? And how do you amplify the stories that people are inheriting and telling? And know they are important and know that they matter, but how do you make them matter to more people?

Cindy Olnick 05:59
Absolutely. And, you know, you did that and Karina and Manuel and so many others, the Eastside Heritage Consortium, there’s a lot of people who have been working a really long time on these and the residents themselves, of course, because the whole point is it’s coming from the community.

Laura Dominguez 06:16
This was something that I learned in doing my thesis research, and I think has rung even truer to me as I’ve deepened my engagement with these questions over the last decade, is that this work is tied to civil rights, social justice organizing that the Chicano movement, which was born in many ways on the Eastside, advocates in the 60s and 70s, were saying the same thing. We’re trying to reclaim roots, trying to reclaim story, and trying to kind of leverage their heritage as a way of saying we are deserving of rights, we have always been here. And we ought to have self-determination, we ought to have power over our own futures power over what happens in our environment. And so, in many of the people that I work with today, even in doing Latinx heritage conservation are people who started out as advocates for civil rights and have sort of evolved into preservationists. And so, I was really exposed to that for the first time while doing my master’s thesis, that trajectory.

Cindy Olnick 07:14
And fact, a recent episode of Save As featured Rosalind Sagara, who came from community organizing and labor organizing, and got into heritage conservation. The traditional movement is really trying hard, or we’re talking a lot, at least about connecting our work to social issues. And preservation is about people, not buildings. But all we have to do is look to historically underrepresented communities to see how it should be done, because you’ve been doing it all along, right, every day.

Laura Dominguez 07:45
Yeah. And I think that was one of the things that really struck me when I was doing that research was the people who were doing what we would call heritage conservation didn’t think of themselves as preservationists, but they were doing that work. And it was all about this kind of paradigm shift to think about how do we center the people who’ve been at the margins, and think about what preservation or conservation means to them, and shift our entire movement to center their actions, their values, their practices, and sort of loosen our attachment to material integrity, and all of these other things that have kept so many people out for so long.

Cindy Olnick 08:23
I see wider and wider gaps between architectural preservation, which is important. I mean, we do need City Hall and we do need, you know, the modern masterpieces and Art Deco, we need that that’s part of it. But it’s only part of it. I see a big gap between how you do that, and how you do this.

Laura Dominguez 08:46
And I think 10 years ago, it was an either-or conversation and more and more, we’re acknowledging that it’s both. We need to think about these things in different ways. And I think my colleague, Ray Rast, is really, I think at the forefront of thinking about how do we move beyond this kind of exceptionalist language that has guided how we thought about great works of architecture, and say that language is elitist and sort of colonial and it doesn’t serve these other kinds of stories that we think are important and not to be sort of passed on in some fashion.

Cindy Olnick 09:18
And you have mentioned a couple times the past decade, and that is because you actually wrote this thesis 10 years ago. I know it’s super hard to believe. And it was both very prescient at the time and very relevant still, because essentially, you were talking about how traditional historic preservation doesn’t meet the needs of underrepresented communities, especially in the 21st century.

Laura Dominguez 09:42
I think I was really, again, in the right place at the right time as a researcher but also as somebody who had everything to learn from organizers. I think East LA was such a great case study as a graduate student because it was unincorporated territory that was overseen by the county. So, this was at a time when SurveyLA was still very much in progress. And there were residents in East LA just over the border from Boyle Heights, wondering, well, why are we being left out? Because we’re two communities that are very much linked. But there’s this sort of artificial boundary that’s drawn for jurisdictional reasons. Our resources aren’t being included in the survey, even though our histories are linked. And so, there was this opportunity, I think, for residents to say, okay, we have very few registered properties. There was one building on the National Register. The LA Conservancy had been working to list two properties on the California Register, there was no countywide ordinance at the time, so there was no local process for residents to get involved in. And there were already these questions about encroaching development and gentrification, what’s going to happen to us over here. And East LA is a community that has already been split up by freeways and has suffered from environmental racism, the list of injustice is goes on and on and on. So, residents were at the same time trying to once again a create a city in East Los Angeles as opposed to being kind of overseen by the county.

So, it was this perfect link in terms of, as residents, if we were to invent our own preservation program that centers our needs, what would that look like? If we were to design our own survey, who would we talk to what places would be important? What stories would rise to the top? And how could those stories then influence policy? Unfortunately, the cityhood movement, the measure failed, so East LA is still an unincorporated territory. But those ideas about what does it look like if we’re the ones steering the ship, I think they had an impact. So, the effort that the LA Conservancy helped lead with support from the county too and local residents very much at the fore of this, to list the Chicano Moratorium sites on the National Register came out of the work that the Eastside Heritage Consortium was doing at the time, which I was both actively involved in and documenting as a researcher. And there are other properties that have been listed as well as a result of that documentation work and the story gathering. So, it was a really wonderful moment, I think. As I sort of got deeper into the field as a professional, I was connecting with other Latinx professionals and other parts of the country who were looking to do the same thing. And we realized that we had so much to learn from each other because we were all trying to imagine what would it be like if we were the ones documenting, we were the ones writing the nominations, we’re the ones coming up with the criteria that determine what’s important or not. And drawing all of those connections among one another, which kind of leads I think, into a lot of what I’ve been doing since graduate school.

Cindy Olnick 13:12
Yeah. Including co-founding Latinos in Heritage Conservation.

Laura Dominguez 13:16
Yes, that was in 2014. April is our eighth anniversary.

Cindy Olnick 13:21
And you’ve done so much. You are already hiring your first executive director, which is fantastic. I’m so inspired by groups like LHC and Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation, APIA-HiP.

Laura Dominguez 13:36
It’s been a labor of love for many of us, but it’s such a collaborative initiative, undertaking, movement. I owe my career to working with like-minded, inspiring, imaginative, just breathtaking people.

Cindy Olnick 13:53
You had a minor stint at San Francisco Heritage, where are you, I don’t know, like started their legacy business program, which is now an international model of success, and did all this great work. And then you came to Los Angeles and worked at the Los Angeles Conservancy where we work together and made a fair amount of progress in neighborhood outreach and neighborhood work there and advocacy.

Laura Dominguez 14:17
And I was fortunate enough when I was working at San Francisco Heritage, where the same questions that we were asking here in Los Angeles, were being asked at times a thousand, I think. San Francisco had done such a good job of preserving its architecture that there was just opportunity to really think intentionally about centering different racial and ethnic communities, because that’s really where the pressure was. And so I was fortunate to be at San Francisco Heritage with Mike Buhler and Desiree Aranda, where Mike gave us a lot of creative freedom to sort of test new ideas and think about intangible heritage alongside the built environment and I think, you know, Desiree and I sharing an office together, two young people, looking for mentors, sort of understanding what it was we needed, having a vision for the kind of work we wanted to do. But knowing that we needed to connect with other people in order to really do it.

That’s how LHC was born, was through our conversations with one another and with the other people we were meeting in Texas and Arizona, other parts of California, other USC students, and being really inspired by APIAHiP to be completely honest. I mean, LHC would not exist without Michelle Magalong and her guidance. So yeah, so we just we started with phone calls and just thought maybe we’ll be a network of advocates and professionals and scholars, and we’ll just share information, here’s a project that we’re working on over here. Have you experienced anything like this? Or how can we create more pipelines for professionals. I don’t think we set out to create a nonprofit organization when we first started, but that’s certainly the direction that it’s gone. And we couldn’t be more thrilled.

Cindy Olnick 15:50
And just so happens that you’ve got quite a big event coming up.

Laura Dominguez 15:54
We do. We’re having our fourth convening, Congreso, in Denver, Colorado at the end of April, and it’s going to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the Latino American Heritage Initiative. But COVID, of course, kind of pushed us back a little bit, but recognizing everything that’s happened nationally, and at the local levels since Secretary Salazar launched the American Latino theme study. All of the work that inspired at state and local levels.

Cindy Olnick 16:25
Terrific. So, friends, if you haven’t gotten your tickets, get them now. And you can get them at…

Laura Dominguez 16:31
Latinoheritage.us is our website.

Cindy Olnick 16:35
And of course, we will link to that in the notes on our episode page. Okay, so you didn’t get enough school with your master’s program. You needed more. So, you went back and now you’re getting your doctorate.

Laura Dominguez 16:49
Yes.

Cindy Olnick 16:50
So, what are you studying? And how’s it going?

Laura Dominguez 16:53
Well, this is where I would say having great mentors who can see farther down the line than you can really comes in handy. I went back to school because I stayed in conversation with Trudi, and also Bill Deverell, who’s a wonderfully generous and brilliant historian at USC, who runs the Institute on California and the West out of the Huntington at USC. I was fortunate enough to take classes with him while I was getting my master’s at USC. And we just stayed in touch. And I realized that the questions I was asking then were still relevant to me now, even more relevant to me once I was out in the field doing the work. And I really wanted to get to the root of why and how we do heritage work in Los Angeles.

And so I went back to school, after having worked in the field, worked at the nonprofit level, and tried to kind of keep my foot in the field through my work with LHC. But I continued to deepen my understanding of Chicanx history, ethnic studies, because I realized I only just scratched the surface of that when I was writing my master’s thesis. So, I have had the luxury of being able to set aside five, six years of my life to read a lot of really brilliant thinkers on space and plays and the history of Los Angeles, the history of the American West, and really deepen my understanding of the theoretical basis of heritage work, which I don’t think I fully appreciated. Within the two-year span of a master’s degree. We try to cram so much information into two-year master’s program, I feel really grateful that I’ve been able to set aside this time to really think about these questions.

And so, my dissertation is sort of a sprawling history of heritage conservation memory, ancestral practice in Los Angeles, and looking at the ways that groups at the margins have sort of resisted what I think is the kind of settler colonial underpinnings of the preservation field in Los Angeles. Essentially, it’s a racial project that seeks land and the elimination of indigenous peoples. And in places like Los Angeles, it’s not just the elimination of Indigenous peoples through violence, through schooling, through relocation. But it’s a reorganization of a society, a white supremacist society on indigenous lands, that then comes up with rules for who else can belong in that land. So, in a place like Los Angeles, it’s not just the Indigenous peoples, it’s the Mexican, Mexican American peoples. It’s immigrants from Asia. It’s African Americans who are coming here in the 20th century as part of the Great Migration, or the descendants of the enslaved who were brought here in the 19th century.

All these groups of people being sort of sorted into hierarchies and deprived their right to be on the land through various means. And as I’m kind of arguing in my work, settlers are notorious storytellers. They invent their own histories to sort of justify why the land belongs to them exclusively. And as I’m getting into the research, memory work, historical thinking, historic preservation, these were tools of settler colonialism. The way that settler societies maintain their rights to that land over time by inventing their own histories, building their own buildings on these lands and saying, because we have buildings and because we preserve them, that’s evidence of our civility, that’s evidence of our narrative of progress. And so, I’m thinking about those origins, and how they pull into the 20th and 21st century, but also the ways that, again, we’re talking about re-centering people at the margins now, well, how were people who were at the margins of that society, centering themselves, how were they taking on their own kind of ancestral practice embedding them in the land. How are they engaging with this apparatus of settler memory, and particularly after moments of kind of violence or trauma, how were people leaning on their heritage as a way of resisting that eliminatory impulse and saying, we have a right to be. And it’s not just our physical presence, but it’s everything that we inherit and bring with us and embed in the land. So, I’m only about halfway through it and there’s so much more still to discover. But it’s been a really rewarding process to know that the work that we’re trying to do now has this really deep past, and we have our own heroes in this movement to look up to.

Cindy Olnick 21:15
And also, you know, illuminating why things are the way they are now. It’s not arbitrary. It didn’t just happen. And so, when we talk about connecting this field with social justice and social issues, I think it goes a lot deeper than what a lot of us may think Can you give me like one example of what you’re seeing, of how people are doing this themselves.

Laura Dominguez 21:40
So, the example that’s kind of at the fore of my mind, because I’m writing about this right now, it’s not an example within the Latinx community. But it has to do with the legacy of the Chinese massacre of 1871, which is a watershed event in LA history that most of us who grew up here don’t learn about until we’re adults, if then. And the 150th anniversary of the massacre, which in a nutshell was a mass lynching of Chinese immigrants in, close to the Pueblo, within the Pueblo where the original Chinatown was. An episode of mass violence brought on by a mob of Mexican and mostly white vigilantes, but a sort of interesting case of interethnic violence. Interesting, meaning horrific. One of the big questions, I think, on many people’s minds at the moment, is how do we recognize this event? There are plaques in the ground, the Chinese American Museum, Chinese Historical Society have commemorative events every year. There was a lot that happened in the last year for the anniversary. But there’s this question of how do we create some kind of permanent memorial to that event, given that the buildings where it took place have largely been erased, the Civic Center is built atop a lot of the landscape of the massacre.

As part of my work, I’m thinking a lot about the word repair. And we think about repair in the field. Our mantra often is repair, don’t replace, repair don’t replace. Well, I want to kind of broaden the way that we think about repair and think about how our heritage practices are reparative among people, and so I’m looking at the ways in which the residents of Chinatown, after the massacre, remembered the event and commemorated it and memorialized it and finding that what they did was quite place-based. And so in terms of the festivals that they held, the ways that they used the LA River and rituals, the processions that they held through the city, the ways that they marked burial sites. And so, as we are thinking about, how do we mark this event now, I think there’s a lot that we have to learn from the ways that people did then. It’s not to say that we replicate what they did, but how are we kind of pulling those commemorative threads through across centuries? For me, that’s the kind of example of how do we do this work is to listen to the ancestors to listen to the ways that people marked the past, as they were sort of grappling with it in the immediate aftermath, that I think is really powerful. Other ways that people are doing it now in practice that I see through LHC, we’re in the midst of developing a digital humanities project called the Abuelas Project that we named because so many of us inherited our stories from our grandparents at the kitchen table. For me, it’s sitting under the kitchen table during tamale-making season and listening to everybody swap gossip and stories and being handed the corn husks to play with under the table. I mean, we all have those kinds of stories where the heritage is passed along. It’s maintained in those spaces. So how do we center the abuelas’ kitchen table as a kind of way of thinking about story and preservation, but also how do we take all of the data that we’ve created through formal means in the last decade and marry it with the informal storytelling practices that we know our communities treasure.

Cindy Olnick 25:09
And how do you do that? Have you figured it out?

Laura Dominguez 25:13
We’re working on it!

Cindy Olnick 25:14
We’ll take, taking your calls listeners.

Laura Dominguez 25:18
I mean, I think the goal of this project, which we’re still just in the nascent phase, but you know, really, truly think how do we do this? And how do we do it in a way that’s accessible? And how do you do it at a national level, it has to be digital, in some ways, that’s the most accessible means that we have right now, to tell stories across such vast distances. But I think one of the things we’re doing is reimagining the Registry. It’s coming back to that same question that I started with in East LA, what does a people’s registry look like that is story-based and democratic and has room for all of us?

Cindy Olnick 25:51
Do you think it’s possible to change the existing system enough? Can we change what we have? Or is it just sort of another movement growing up alongside it,

Laura Dominguez 26:04
I think we have lots of really brilliant thinkers who have ideas for how we can change the existing system. I don’t think any of us want to eradicate the national park system, you know, or eradicate the National Register. We want to be represented, but representation is just one piece of the larger puzzle. I think many of us, as we’ve said, are seeking justice, and equity and those are really big buzzwords that get thrown around a lot. But we want to be recognized in the ways that we recognize ourselves and to recognize the reparative power that this work has within our communities within a larger framework.

But I think that there are ways that we can change the language so that it is more inclusive. Often we rely on change to kind of filter from the top down. But I think really, we’re seeing, especially under the last administration, when so much of the progress that had been made under the Obama Administration to really create a more democratic park system, kind of ground to a halt and all kinds of horrible things happened. But I think we’re seeing now that there’s a possibility to come back. And we’ve done a lot of really good thinking and work at the local level. In the meantime, I think people who are working for federal and state agencies are listening and are showing up at the tables that we’re setting. And I think that that’s a really big shift that it used to be about trying to get a seat at their tables. And now, we’re the ones with the table inviting people in power to come and listen to us. And that’s what events like Congreso are all about.

Cindy Olnick 27:34
Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, by the way, one of LHC’s board members, Sara Bronin, hopefully soon will be leading the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which is one of those federal organizations. So, you know, that’s something.

Laura Dominguez 27:52
Absolutely.

Cindy Olnick 27:54
Cautiously optimistic. No pressure Sara. Okay. So where do we go from here? How can people like me, old white people, how can we help?

Laura Dominguez 28:07
I think using platforms like this one, I mean, this is such a great way of getting the ideas of young people out there and giving them an opportunity to test drive, what they’re thinking. So this is a small way, right, that we share space and give younger voices a chance to sort of speak up. I think it is about giving up a little bit of power, and torn about the idea, do we dismantle all of our institutions and start from scratch, but at the very least, power needs to be ceded. And I think, mentoring where we can, but you know, again, acknowledging the different ways that our communities mentor ourselves and bring up people. I mean, I think we’re thinking about pipelines constantly through LHC, paying young people for their labor. And these issues like pay equity, this is how we build a more diverse and expansive field is by giving people who otherwise would not be able to take the luxury of being able to do work in this field. I think many of us come from families that see this kind of work as a luxury, that you have your other basic needs that come before preserving your history. So, I think supporting young people to come up through the field, just in material ways is really important.

Cindy Olnick 29:17
So, I think a lot of people, including myself, we’re not sure how to involve people in the right ways that are respectful.

Laura Dominguez 29:27
And I think that goes back, again, to the question of whose table is being set. And I think, I heard people saying this over and over again, stop inviting us to a table that’s already been set. You know, we’ve had our own platforms, our own spaces. And if we’re opening the doors and inviting you in, sometimes we may not, but if we are, then your responsibility is to show up and listen and learn from us. And there are so many ways to support you know, LHC isn’t the only organization that’s doing this. I think it’s showing up when a call to action is issued by an organization, showing up, supporting financially, all of these other things.

Cindy Olnick 30:07
So, thank you, Laura, for being here today, while raising a human, and doing all this amazing work Thanks for taking a few minutes to share your work and your views with us. And we cannot wait to see where you go next.

Laura Dominguez 30:21
Thank you, Cindy. It was such a joy.

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Trudi Sandmeier 30:27
So, Cindy, that was really a fun conversation to listen in on. And it’s exciting to see what Laura is up to. And as I said, I really am looking forward to working with her as she finishes her PhD and kind of moves forward and to see where in the world she ends up. All I just know is that we’re all going eventually going to be working for Laura Dominguez.

Cindy Olnick 30:49
There you go. I mean, there’s a few people we’re going to be working for. And I for one look forward to the job security. Also, Laura mentioned Bill Deverell, she’s been working with, and he also does a great podcast called Western Addition. So, we will put a link to that in the notes on the episode page.

Trudi Sandmeier 31:10
Yeah, Bill does this really great partnership with the Huntington Library called the Institute for California and the West, which is a link between the library and USC and, you know, they do some really great interviews and seminars, and this podcast is a natural outgrowth of that. So it’s fun to have this sort of connection in podcast land with them as well.

Cindy Olnick 31:35
Absolutely. And we will link to that podcast on the episode page of our website at saveas.place as well as the registration for the Latinos in Heritage Conservation’s Congreso, which is next week, April 28 to the 30th. It’s happening in Denver, but there is a virtual option. So there really is no excuse not to do that. Come on, you can go to latinoheritage.us or saveas.place for that info.