The San Diego World’s Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940

In the American Southwest, no two events shaped modern Spanish heritage more profoundly than the San Diego Expositions of 1915-1916 and 1935-1936. Both San Diego fairs displayed a portrait of the Southwest and its peoples for the American public.

By examining architecture and landscape, American Indian shows, civic pageants, tourist imagery, and the production of history for celebration and exhibition at each fair, Matthew F. Bokovoy peels back the rhetoric of romance and reveals the legacies of the San Diego World's Fairs to reimagine the Indian and Hispanic Southwest. In tracing how the two fairs reflected civic conflict over an invented San Diego culture, Bokovoy explains the emergence of a myth in which the city embraced and incorporated native peoples, Hispanics, and Anglo settlers to benefit its modern development.