The year 2012 joins the old with the new as Rancho Los Alamitos eagerly hails the opening of its Rancho Center in late spring, in the newly restored barns area of the historic site. Today we look from the past into the future of this unforgettable landscape, a one-of-a-kind place that speaks to all time.

With that in mind, the Rancho is delighted to present the exciting new calendar for Conversations in Place 2012. Season one of this challenging annual series selects from among the best minds in the country to reflect on topics of conversation occurring “back then” at the Rancho, which still relate to the news today as well as to tomorrow’s issues.

The series’ remarkable launch on May 20th brings together the West and East Coast perspectives of two nationally preeminent cultural luminaries, Dr. Kevin Starr, university professor at USC and the renowned historian and author of the California Dream series of books, along with Marc Pachter, the interim director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution and retired director of the National Portrait Gallery. On this not-to-be missed occasion, the audience will also enjoy a special preview of the peerless Rancho Center and exhibition, which will not open to the public at large until June 10th.

Now is the time to make your reservation for one or more—or all—of the series’ four programs. Admission is free, but seating is limited to 150 people per program on a first-come, first-served basis. Reservations are a must and will need to be reconfirmed before each program. Please don’t wait; simply call, fax, respond online, or mail your RSVP now to reserve your seat for the ongoing conversations at Rancho Los Alamitos— truly a place for all time. Please click here to make reservations online.

- Claudia Jurmain, Director of Special Projects & Publications

To view detailed information about each session, please click the links below

Sunday, May 20, 2012, 1:30 to 4:00 p.m.
Session #1 -Rancho Los Alamitos: A View of America from California

Sunday, June 24, 2012, 1:30 to 4:00 p.m.
Session #2 - Reconciling Perspectives: Anthropology, History and the Native Community
with Peter Nabokov and Steven Karr.

Sunday, August 26, 2012, 1:30 to 4:00 p.m.
Session #3 - A View of California from Rancho Los Alamitos: Migration and Immigration with William Deverell and  Phoebe S.K. Young.

Sunday, October 7, 2012, 1:30 to 4:00 p.m.
Session #4 - "Rancho Los Alamitos in Idea, Space and Form: A Designerly Perspective" with Wayne Donaldson, FAIA and Stephen Farneth, FAIA.

PLEASE NOTE:
Free parking for each of these events is at CSULB Lot 11 on Palo Verde Ave., with continuous shuttle service to the Rancho. Shuttle buses are handicapped accessible.

I am so burnt up over the apparent inability of the Federal Government to do anything about anything that has to do with the part of the United States west of the Mississippi. You have heard about the forgotten man, or the man without a country. Well, we in California are certainly in the same fix he was in. – Fred H. Bixby, owner of Rancho Los Alamitos in a letter to Governor Earl Warren, March 22, 1943

California is “west of the West,” and Southern California is a region that most naturally looks south of the border and across the Pacific Rim, not east to the Atlantic, to see the diverse legacy of this storied place over time. But is it a place apart fromthe national experience or at home somewhere within? In this opening conversation, two of the country’s premier cultural historians explore how Rancho Los Alamitos (ranch of the Little Cottonwoods) is amicrocosmof the unique regional story over time and a reflection of the national experience.

Speakers: Marc Pachter and Kevin Starr

Marc Pachter has been called an “invaluable cultural asset of the Smithsonian Institution” and its “master interviewer” of such luminaries as Agnes de Mille,Walter Cronkite, and Steve Martin. In 2007, he retired from the Smithsonian after a 33-year career, most recently as the director of the National Portrait Gallery, where he oversaw the six-year renovation and reopening of the National Historic Landmark building and museum. In 2011, the Smithsonian Institution called Pachter back to serve as the interim director of the National Museum of American History.

A cultural historian, Pachter graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a five-year prize fellow in American history at Harvard University. He joined the Portrait Gallery in 1974, and from 1990–94 served as the Smithsonian’s deputy assistant secretary for external affairs, overseeing Smithsonian magazine, Smithsonian Institution Press, and membership and development programs. He was appointed counselor to the Secretary of the Smithsonian and chair of the Institution’s 150th anniversary in 1996 and awarded the Secretary’s Gold Medal for Distinguished Service in 1999.

Born in New York, Pachter grew up in Los Angeles. He has written and edited numerous books, including Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation, Champions of American Sport, Documentary History of the Supreme Court, Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art, and A Gallery of Presidents.

Kevin Starr, preeminent California historian and nationally renowned scholar and author, has been called “California’s Living Archive.” He graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1962, received his MA (1965) and PhD (1969) from Harvard, and a master of library science degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Starr has served as city librarian of San Francisco, state librarian of California, and is currently university professor and associate dean of libraries
at the University of Southern California.With the 2009 publication of Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, Starr completed his monumental eight-book California Dream series.The following year, his 15th book, Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge, was released. Starr has written the foreword to two Rancho Los Alamitos/ Heyday publications: O,My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal for the Gabrielino-Tongva People of the Los Angeles Area (2009) and Rancho Los Alamitos—Ever Changing,Always the Same (2011).

Among his many awards, Starr has received a Guggenheim fellowship, five honorary doctorates, the Gold and Silver Medals of the Commonwealth Club, the Centennial Medal from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and the Humanities Medal from the National Endowment of the Humanities. A fourth-generation Californian and lifelong San Francisco resident, he has also acquired a Southern California state of mind. “I love it there,” he says. “I love Los Angeles.”

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I don’t see Cal State Long Beach, Rancho Los Alamitos (maybe a little), I see Povuu’ngna.
–Cindi Alvitre, Gabrielino-Tongva

According to one Native American story, when the world was created, the precious meaning of its being was given to the rocks, the trees, and water since no human could be fully trusted to retain or tell the truth of the place and its people. Yet for 25 years, “News from Native California” published by Heyday, has devoted itself to the story of the indigenous people of the state. On this occasion we honor the publication with a gathering of notables fromthe academic and museum communities, publishing, and the native Tongva community, who reconcile cultural and professional perspectives in the effort to tell the story of native people and Povuu’ngna as well as the rocks, the trees, and water.

Speakers: Peter Nabokov and Steven Karr

Peter Nabokov, professor of American Indian studies and world arts and cultures at UCLA, is a nationally acclaimed anthropologist and writer who has walked in the ways of the people he writes about. He is the author of innumerable published articles and reports and nine books that combine exceptional scholarship with popular appeal, including the highly praised works A Forest in Time: American Indian Ways of History; Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations fromProphecy to the Present, 1442–1992; Native American Architecture; and Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior. His most recent book, Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places (2006) considers the enduring connection of sacred places across this land in view of contemporary times.

Nabokov earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He has received awards from the American Institute of Architects, Bay Area Book Reviewers, and the American Library Association, among many honors. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008–09 and was a Stewart Fellow in anthropology and visiting professor in humanities at Princeton University. Prior to his tenure at UCLA, Nabokov served on the anthropology faculty at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

Steven Karr is director and Ahmanson Curator of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian at the Autry National Center, home to the second largest dedicated American Indian collection in the nation. He received his PhD in history from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, with an emphasis on American Indian history, ethnology, and 19th and 20th century Mexican history. He previously worked at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Phoenix, Arizona. Karr’s scholarly and professional work examines native cultures of North America and the history of American Indian anthropology and museums, including how we recognize and reconcile alternative views of American history. He has been a lecturer in the Department of History and the Department of American Indian Studies at UCLA and lecturer in the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. An eminent museum professional and scholar, he is the author of numerous articles and book reviews appearing in scholarly and popular publications and has curated and facilitated exhibitions at the Southwest Museum at the Autry National Center. He is also a distinguished lecturer in the Organization of American Historians.

Additional Panelists:
• Malcolm Margolin, Publisher of Heyday and “News from Native California,” Berkeley, CA
• Wendy Teeter, Curator of Archaeology,The Fowler Museum, UCLA
• Cindi Alvitre, Gabrielino-Tongva
• Desirée Martinez, Gabrielino-Tongva

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The Mexican families lived north, down over that hill on Palo Verde. The Belgians were tenants scattered on the acreage most to the east. South was across Seventh Street. That’s where the Japanese tenants had beautiful peat land, kinda moist and black and very rich and they raised celery and vegetables.

-Sister (Florence Elizabeth) Bixby Janeway, daughter of Alamitos owner Fred Bixby. Her 1984 oral history describes the workers, tenant and lease famers at the Rancho in the early twentieth-century.

I think Governor Warren has the right idea about this farm labor problem…Mexican farm labor from farming communities in Mexico are more than anxious to come up here and to work in the United State. They are, however, so handicapped and so frightened by what they have to go through at the border that they are afraid to even try to come into the country…I don’t know of any better source of supply as far as farm labor than Mexico although we certainly could use some Chinamen. This idea, however, would be again the law according to the Chinese Exclusion Act.

-Letter from Fred Bixby, owner of Rancho Los Alamitos to Frank P. Doherty, president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, March 22, 1943

The story of owners and workers at Rancho Los Alamitos over time is a riveting chapter in the larger epic of the state. During the Mexican and early American era, unsung California Indians worked at Rancho Los Alamitos. By the 1880s, more laborers would come from across the country, Europe, and China, until the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese immigration. Japanese workers followed, as didmen and families south from Mexico, but by WWII, California ranchers, including Alamitos owner Fred Bixby, scrambled for help. Join the distinguished scholars and writers of this program as they consider how land and labor, migration and immigration yielded the diversity and memory embedded in the value of the Rancho, the region, and state.

Speakers: William Deverell and Phoebe S.K.Young

William Deverell is an American historian with a focus on the 19th and 20th-century AmericanWest. His books and publications examine political, social, ethnic, and environmental history, including his groundbreaking work, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles (2005). Chronicling the rise of Los Angeles through shifting views of race and ethnicity, his work offers a unique perspective on how the city that was once part of Mexico itself came of age through appropriating—and eradicating—the region’s connections to Mexican people and places. He is coeditor of the recent book A Companion to California History and the Encyclopedia of California.

Deverell is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, an intellectual partnership between the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the Huntington Library. Prior to joining USC, Deverell taught at the California Institute of Technology, where he was honored with the Associated Students of Caltech Teaching Prize. He is a graduate of Stanford University and received his doctorate from Princeton. In 2009–10, Deverell was the Beinecke Senior Fellow in Western Americana atYale University.

Phoebe S.K.Young teaches and writes about the cultural and environmental history of the modern United States and the American West. Her first book, California Vieja: Culture andMemory in a Modern American Place (2006), examined public memories of the Spanish past, the built environment, regional development, and race relations in Southern California between the 1880s and the 1930s. She is currently working on a book for Oxford University Press on the history of camping and sleeping outside that explores the meanings and politics of nature in American culture. Young received her PhD from the University of Southern California and has received fellowships from the Huntington Library, Smithsonian Institution, and American Council of Learned Societies, which awarded her the Oscar Handlin Fellowship for 2010.

Additional Panelists:
• Ray Rodriguez, Columnist
• Stephanie Pincetl, PhD, Director, Urban Center for People and the Environment, UCLA

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Dear Mrs. Bixby, I understand that you would like to build the path connecting the Rose Garden with the lower end of the long Terrace. I would be inclined to make the entire walk either of grass or brick. I think we all sort of hesitate in California about building the walks of grass on account of the amount of watering that will be required.
-Letter from J. Frederick Dawes, Olmsted Brothers, to Florence Bixby, August 11, 1927

11-30-1928 Improvement to house–old adobe $1,044.80
– Fred H. Bixby Ledger, Jan 1, 1927–Dec. 31, 1929

Can the past or can Rancho Los Alamitos be a model for making a better future in neighborhoods, communities, and the region? Join two of the country’s finest historic preservation architects, as Wayne Donaldson, FAIA, and Stephen Farneth, FAIA, bring their creative expertise to matters of idea, space, and form to explore how the Rancho’s landscape reveals the local DNA and vernacular with just enough design to reflect the diversity running through the years. Discover how this extraordinary place has stood the test of time, still offering possibilities for tomorrow.

Speakers: Milford Wayne Donaldson, FAIA, LEED AP and Stephen J. Farneth, FAIA, LEED AP

Milford Wayne Donaldson, has served as the governor-appointed state historic preservation officer (SHPO) of California since 2004, and in May 2010 he was appointed chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation by President Barack Obama. Prior to his SHPO appointment, Donaldson had served as president of the prominent award-winning firm Architect Milford Wayne Donaldson, FAIA, specializing in historic preservation services.

A former instructor at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Donaldson continues to lecture at California community colleges and universities. He holds bachelor of architecture and bachelor of science in engineering degrees from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He engaged in postgraduate studies at Uppsala University, Sweden, and received a master of science degree in architecture from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland as well as a master of arts degree in public history and teaching from University of San Diego. In June 2007, Donaldson was awarded an honorary master of architecture degree from the New School of Architecture & Design.

Stephen Farneth is a founding partner of the prestigious award winning preservation firmArchitectural Resources Group. Founded in 1980, the 60-person firm is based in San Francisco, with additional offices in Pasadena, California, and Portland,Oregon.The firm’s integrated services include architecture, historic architecture,
sustainable design, conservation, planning, historical research, and materials conservation.

A recognized presence in the national and international preservation community, Farneth is the former vice chairman of the U.S. Committee of the International Council of Monuments and Sites and a former member of the Getty Institute’s Seismic Adobe Project steering committee. He has served on the executive committee of the California State Historical Safety Board for over ten years and guided the design and rehabilitation of some of the nation’s most prominent architectural sites and buildings, including the Ahwahnee Hotel inYosemite National Park, the Huntington Art Gallery in San Marino, Cavallo Point, the Golden Gate Lodge in Sausalito, and Garret Hall at the University of Virginia. Architectural Resources Group, with Stephen Farneth in the lead, developed the architectural component of the original master plan for Rancho Los Alamitos in 1986 and has served as the ongoing preservation architectural firm for the restoration of the Ranch House and gardens and, most recently, for the construction of the new Rancho Center and restoration of the historic barns area.

Additional Panelists:
• Ken Breisch, PhD; Assistant Professor, USC School of Architecture; Founder and Former Director, USC Graduate program in Historic Preservation and published scholar of architectural history
• Pamela Seager, Executive Director, Rancho Los Alamitos
• Claudia Jurmain, Director, Special Projects and Publications, Rancho Los Alamitos

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