Reviews for Seeking El Dorado

The average rating for Seeking El Dorado based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-13 00:00:00 Tim Howard I recommend this book for anybody interested in either African-American history or Californian history. The essays can sometimes be a little dry or matter-of-fact, but they are never overly academic or obscure. They cover very basic subjects such as black people in Spanish/Mexican California (including Pio Pico, our last Mexican governor before the U.S. took over, descended from a black sailor), migration to the Bay Area of freed men around the time of the gold rush and Civil War (that there was a greater number of black women to white women shows that black migration was more of a family affair, and hence a true migration), and ultimately, migration to the suburbs (the first wave of black suburban migration was often to older suburbs that whites were already moving up and out of). The two essays where I learned the most were the ones covering the founding of the black township of Allensworth in the Central Valley (I know someone who family reunites there every Juneteenth), and the essay about Jefferson Edmonds, the publisher of The Liberator, a boosterist magazine extolling the potential of southern California for providing opportunities for advancement for African-Americans. Edmonds was a prime example of how former slaves were able to access education and build middle-class lives during the Reconstruction era, and in several of these essays there is a clear demarcation between those who we able to build upwardly mobile lives provided they got out of the South before Jim Crow strangled African-Americans for three generations. In this view California history, there is a painful divide between those African-Americans who arrived first, better equipped and better timed to rise up with the rest of the state, and those who arrived later, from the 1920s onward: more working class, more ‘country’, and less desirable to whites or the established blacks. The topics of integration in the schools and workforces, as well as battling housing covenants, are always hovering around any subject. African-American entrepreneurs and artists are occasionally mentioned in this book, covering Los Angeles’ Central Avenue jazz scene, 1930s black Hollywood actresses going to court to live in West Adams, and the Golden State Life Insurance Company, the most successful black-owned business in Los Angeles, whose success was partly due to segregation, and whose Art Deco building now sits empty on Western & Adams, with two fantastic murals inside. There are also essays about the colored women’s reform organizations which occurred around the turn of the 20th century at the same time as the temperance and other reform movements of white women. And like their white counterparts, these often consisted of scolds telling lower classes how to behave – I mean, ‘uplift’. True uplift, the unionization of labor, is also examined, particularly in Oakland. Several essays also touch on how difficult it was for black people to access all of the New Deal programs, although that negative experience also helped mobilize advocates for labor integration during early WWII. Also of note, in the postwar years when women were sent back to the home from their jobs, black women often eventually returned to similar types of employment, while white women did not. Yes, financial strain may have often necessitated this, but we can also appreciate how black women were way ahead of white feminism of the 1960s. I was not aware of her before, but Charlotta Bass is mentioned in a few of the essays. She was the first African American woman to run for VPOTUS in 1952 on the Progressive Party ticket, and prior to that, she was a contributor for and later ran the California Eagle, a Los Angeles-based newspaper dedicated to examining injustice in society’s treatment of all minorities, not just African-Americans, which helped to build the pan-racial coalition that eventually transformed the city’s politics. The book frequently cites how racist Los Angeles could be from the 1920s to the 1960s, not just towards black and brown, but also that 33% of SoCal residents wanted to see the Japanese put in internment camps, versus 14% in the rest of the state. I would say that approximately 50% of the book centers on the greater Los Angeles area, with 40% in Oakland/East Bay, and 10% elsewhere in California. I cannot believe that there are no written reviews for this book here on Goodreads, and only two others who have rated it. This does not seem like an obscure book to me, though I can’t recall how I came to know of it. Probably Amazon recommended it to me. This is not available on Kindle, but it should be. If you have read this far in my review, you should go to amazon.com and request that it be made available on Kindle. My best couple/friends gave me this book ten years ago, but because of the book’s weight (in mass and in subject) it gathered dust on my shelf. Finally a couple of years ago I started reading it during jury duty and managed to read approximately one essay a month after that. By breaking it up into digestible pieces, I was able to finally get it all read.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-31 00:00:00 Jared Canon This book is a very valuable book of essays written on the history of African Americans and also other people of color and even the Jewish Community as well in California. the last essay in particular highlights possible action items, especially coalition building among minority groups as crucial. Highly recommended reading. #publicdomaininfrastructure ShiraDest