UC San Diego professor shares broader history of Black Americans along the Pacific coast in public exhibition – San Diego Union-Tribune

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A question posed by another researcher really struck Caroline Collins in her work on the way the public thinks about and remembers the American West: “Where else can blackness imagine itself besides the Atlantic?”
“I was interested in not just how we imagine our relationship to the Pacific in the future, but in order to do that, helping folks realize that we do have this really long history of interacting with the Pacific. Since I’m really a scholar of the American West, I kind of limited my scope to what’s now the U.S. Pacific — California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. I’m also looking at a real long period of time from the 16th century to the mid-20th century; that’s an area of time that really aligns with a lot of the mystique and the invention that people associate with the Pacific,” she said. “I wanted to help broaden that story and include Black people, who’ve been part of that story for a long time, and felt that you couldn’t really talk about the significance of the Pacific as this important site, commercially and economically and socially, and all it’s done and continues to do in the development of the U.S. (unless you) also understand how part and parcel Black folks were in that region.”
The result is “The Black Pacific Project,” which looks at the history of Black people and their relationship to the Pacific Ocean — as mariners, explorers, whalers, shipbuilders, dockworkers, sailors — between the 16th and 20th centuries. “Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific” is a public traveling and gallery exhibition she curated that is now on display through May 18 at the Central Library in downtown San Diego. Collins, an assistant professor of social and spatial justice in the department of urban studies and planning at UC San Diego, took some time to talk about this history and this reimagining of the origin story of Black people in what is now the United States. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: “Take Me to the Water” features the work and impact of Black whalers, commercial mariners, fishers, soldiers, and explorers and their role in shaping the identity of what we understand as the American West. What made you interested in exploring this history of Black people and their ties to the American West, particularly the Pacific?
A: You know, I’m a San Diego native who’s really had a long relationship with the water myself. I grew up being on the water with my family and that’s something that my parents did in Southern California, as well, when they were young folks. So, I’ve always had this natural affinity and relationship with the water and just knew from my own upbringing that there were all of these wonderful ways that Black folks have been connected to water. At the same time, professionally, I’m really interested in origin stories and how we understand the history of the American West, and a lot of that history is often really land based and looking at things like the myth of the American West. At the same time, I’ve been working with groups like Native Like Water and Black Like Water, and in all of that work, I started thinking of the origin story of Black folks in America. Generally, when people think about Black folks and ships, one type of ship comes to mind—the slave ship. When they think about our relationship to big, large bodies of water, it’s generally the Atlantic that comes to mind, for really important and valid reasons. The transatlantic slave trade is this huge historical moment that has all of these implications that follow us to this day, but I just knew, from my own lived experience and from things that I’ve read and seen, that that wasn’t the only story of Blackness in the Americas, especially in our relationships to water and watercraft. So, I just got really excited and thinking about how could we tell a larger story about Blackness and our relationship to water?
Q: In your article, “Water Berth: Charting My Journey to the Black Pacific,” you mention a question posed by Black studies scholar Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley: “Where else can blackness imagine itself besides the Atlantic?” What did you find in this imagining along the Pacific?
A: I found that I was really thinking about, how could we rethink notions of migration and how we understand how race has been made? I found all of the various ways that people pursued new futures and remade their lives on the Pacific, both through forced migration-because there were definitely enslaved people who traveled by sea on the Pacific-but also all of these stories of people who voluntarily took to the sea in order to start a new life, in order to make a living, in order to study something new, or be part of something larger than themselves. Or, for all of the other mundane reasons that people go to the water-for pleasure, to play, to boat, to fish, to surf, and swim. I saw that people imagine themselves in all of these various capacities upon the water, which isn’t really surprising because the water is this place where we’re often reminded of how small we are and how connected we are through water, which is just such a huge force in our world. Then, naturally and also metaphorically, in the way that we think about the natural world and our in our roles in it.
Q: You also wrote about this history in a piece for the Washington Post in 2023, where you traced some of this history back to the 16th century. Can you tell us a bit about some of the Black people who’ve comprised this history over the years? Who were Lope Martin, Allen Light, and Nick Gabaldon?
A: Lope Martin was the first navigator to successfully cross the Pacific in the 1500s, going from Asia to the Americas and back. He was an Afro-Portuguese mariner. (Historian) Andrés Reséndez has done quite a bit of work on him, and even though he was a navigator who, in many ways, opened up the world through his oceanic exploration in the way that we might think about Magellan or Columbus, in all kinds of complicated ways and he was part of this larger colonial project, he’s a name that we don’t know. There were other navigators like him, as well.
There were the Kru people out of Western Africa, who also were highly trained in navigational skills and used the different types of parts of navigation, so they were often on board different British-led ships, as well as Allen Light, as you mentioned. He was a Black mariner who was born in Philadelphia around 1805 and he was a seaman. At the time, about 20% or so of the maritime workforce was made up of people of African descent and there were quite a few Black sailors in Philadelphia at that time. It was one of the ways that people could make a living for themselves-they could travel, they could be exposed to all kinds of different cultures, they could have a precarious connection to things like economy and independence, kind of like railroad porters would be in the 20th century. So, he came to California around the 1830s, reportedly on this clipper ship, The Pilgrim, out of Boston. He left in 1834 and came around Cape Horn up the Pacific coast and disembarked in Santa Barbara, which was still under Mexican rule at the time. We know about that ship because it’s really important in maritime history; there was a writer on it, Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Dana Point is named after him), and he had been on leave from Harvard as a young man, and took to the sea to kind of do something new and explore. He closely journaled his experience and it turned into this memoir. That book also inspired books like “Moby Dick,” and Allen Light was reportedly on that ship. He got off in Mexican Santa Barbara, and never got back on, which a lot of mariners did at the time. They would just desert or make new lives for themselves. He was an otter hunter, he into Mexican San Diego. The reason why we know about him is because, in the 1940s, these construction workers were repairing a heating unit in one of the historic Machado Adobes in Old Town San Diego, which was owned by a church, at the time. They found two of Light’s 19th century documents in it, and one was his 1827 seamen’s protection papers. The other was this letter he had gotten from the Alta California governor at the time, (Juan Bautista) Alvarado, where he was kind of tasked with guarding the coastline against otter poachers, so he had a really successful otter hunting outfit here in San Diego. He lived with another Black immigrant, Richard Freeman, and Freeman owned property. He lived with him in the Old Town Plaza and they ran a grog shop out of that building. With U.S. rule, he kind of disappeared from the record.
There were also folks who came out to the West like to find new futures on the Pacific, even in the late 19th and into the 20th century. There were whalers. You had a lot of women who came out to work in the shipyard during World War II, and they were building liberty and victory ships. If you read that piece, you saw one named Annie Small who came from Shreveport, La., and she was really determined to find a job in Marin, kind of outside of San Francisco. The train that she was riding on didn’t have any seats available to her. There might have been seats in the White car, but in the colored car, there were none, so she sat on her suitcase the entire time because she was just so determined to get out here. There’s a community historian, Felecia Gaston, up in Marin City, who has been collecting a lot of those items and oral histories of these women and the ways that they were part of the Great Migration and found themselves in these Pacific cities, like Marin City, and were really part of remaking that area, both demographically and culturally, and also part of helping win the war.
These ships were integral parts to the war effort. During the war, there were servicemen who were serving all across the Pacific. There were Black nurses who were serving across the Pacific. The exhibition kind of moves through a lot of that history in terms of folks that it highlights, and also thinks about the forms of play that Black people engaged in on the Pacific. There were places like Bruce’s Beach in Los Angeles, this Black beach enclave where people could feel comfortable coming and being on the beach. Even though beaches weren’t technically segregated at the time, Black beach goers were often harassed at beaches. Or, if they were fishing, they could be harassed on the piers, so Bruce’s Beach was this place where Charles and Willa Bruce had a structure where they would rent out bathing suits to people, they had food, they would have get-togethers. People were buying homes in the area, both first and second homes, so it was also becoming a more permanent Black beach enclave. In response to that, a lot of White neighbors really were incensed about this and the City of Manhattan Beach ended up seizing the property through eminent domain. They said it was to build a park on it, but it sat vacant for decades.
There were black surfers. In California, we talk about Nick Gabaldón, who was one of the first documented Black surfers; in my archival research, I’ve also seen folks like Carlotta (Stewart) Lai. She was a teacher in Hawaii in the early and late 19th century and early 1900s, and there are letters that she wrote to her family, to her brother, talking about some of the things she would do on the weekend, and she talked about surfing. One of my favorite archival photos in the show is this image of these young folks in, like, 1917. I want to say it is in San Diego and they were part of the Acme Social Club, and one of them was having their 17th birthday. Either the club or the parents have chartered out this yacht that all the kids are sitting on top of and are standing on. They’re having this moment of play with one another, and it’s happening right on the San Diego Harbor in the same way that so many of us enjoy the San Diego Harbor now. So, the show kind of covers folks like that, people from soldiers and sailors, to oceanographers, people who were whaling or hunting, building ships, working along docks. So many of the social gains and labor gains that were made with the longshoremen and unions that have helped people of all races, a lot of those pushes for social justice first started with a lot of these African American laborers.
Q: What are some of the African roots of traveling the seas? Are there links between African nautical activities and skills and what early Black mariners practiced?
A: A lot of that work has been done by a scholar named Kevin Dawson at UC Merced. He wrote this really wonderful book, “Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Cultures in the African Diaspora,” that looks at Black aquatic traditions coming out of Western Africa. He talks about how one of the earliest ones is a 1000-year tradition in Africa, and some of the earliest, written documentation of Black folks surfing in West Africa took place in the 1600s in what’s now Ghana. Another scholar, Jeffrey Bolster, he looks at a lot of Black seamen during the Age of Sail, but generally on the Atlantic. In a lot of his research, both he and Dawson talk about some of those practices that folks gained along the African coast and brought into the Americas. A lot of people in West Africa were really accomplished swimmers. They started swimming really young, as toddlers and even around 15 months old. Often, being in the water and being able to navigate high velocity waves was really important to them socially and economically because even though Africa has all of these miles of coastline, there aren’t many protected bays. So, there were times where they would build these kind of surf vessels that could handle high turning surf. Also, there weren’t as many cultural taboos to swimming, to just rolling and getting in the water, and having water bodies that might be partially closed; whereas in Europe, around the same time during the Age of Sail, there had been a change, culturally. Where years and years before, people were much more open about getting into the water because of different social and cultural norms in Europe, people had often started to associate that with particular types of sin, or it was even considered unhealthy to be in the water in that way. So, because of that, they often weren’t accomplished swimmers. Even the sailors who spent their lives at sea, if they fell overboard, European sailors were much more likely to drown than sailors of African descent, just because of some of the cultural differences, not because of any type of natural ability. Also, because of these skills on the eastern seaboard, many Black folks who were enslaved in places like the Carolinas, were often used for diving, or in other areas where there was commerce around being in the water.
Q: How have Black people historically interacted with nature along the Pacific? What are ways in which they’ve uniquely seen, understood, and taken care of the ocean environment?
A: Sometimes it wasn’t always taking care of it. There are times where Black people were really just part and parcel of a lot of over hunting and overfishing. Black people were really heavily involved in whaling. They were up to 20% to 30% of whalers of at the height of the industry, so that meant that they were part of a lot of overfishing of whales, part of Indigenous land and water dispossession, but there were also Black people who took part in studying the ocean or studying ocean environments. The Buffalo Soldiers went to all kinds of Pacific locations, especially in locations that would become national parks, so they were in Yosemite and they were up in the Pacific Northwest. They were also in Hawaii and what would later become Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island. While they were there, they did things like labor, they helped build major roads, but they also helped the scientific teams do some of their scientific inquiry. There is a great archival photo of some of them helping measure one of the big lava lakes using a pipe. There were also other Black people who were oceanographers. Even at Scripps, Anita Smith Hall was the first Black person to pursue their Ph.D. at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. She had a history of being part of these folks who were studying the water.
There were also people who just were nature enthusiasts. So, I was talking about whaling and most of the whaling captains were White, but there were whaling captains of color, most of them on the eastern seaboard, but there was one, William Thomas Shorey, who was located on the west coast. He was out of the Bay Area, out of Oakland, and his wife, Julia, came from this prominent Black family in San Francisco. Her father had come out during the gold rush, and she and her husband honeymooned on one of his whaling vessels after he had just become a captain, and they went to Mexico and to Hawaii. She wrote later, in a newspaper, about seeing a volcano erupt and she was recognizing the natural wonder of it. She also talked about one of her young daughters and how, once they were old enough, they would go out to sea with them. She talked about one of her young daughters being quite the accomplished sailor who knew all the ropes and had perfect command of her father, which is always one of my favorite archival quotes from the show.
There were folks who traveled for things like missionary work. There was a missionary, Betsey Stockton, who went to Hawaii in the 19th century. We still have her journal today and she went on a whaling vessel. She left out of the east coast and was going to Hawaii, and she would later become the first African American woman missionary there. On that trip, which had been a harrowing trip, she talked about not feeling well at times, and about the cramped quarters; but she also talked about really being interested in watching the way it all worked, about tasting new fish and how wonderful it tasted. There’s this one quote where, at one point, she’s just kind of marveling at the beauty of the night. They’d had a lot of bad weather and trouble at sea, and during this moment of calm, she knows where she is in space. She has her coordinates within the diary and she talked about, in that moment, how all was calm. Even in that moment where she’s facing things like having to keep a letter on her that shows that she’s traveling on a missionary outings, in case enslavers were to board the ship, even while she’s facing all this uncertainty, even while she hasn’t been feeling well, in the midst of all of that, she’s able to just recognize the beauty in the natural world and what it meant to kind of just be in the middle of the Pacific at that moment.
Q: Many people often think of Black American history beginning along the East Coast, into the South, with slavery, and that any connection we have to the American West is a result of a migration that began from the other side of the country. What kind of difference does this understanding make, of a history in which Black people were traversing the Pacific coastline even before the founding of the United States?
A: I think it’s important because, one, it’s history and we want to have accurate understandings of history. I think it also helps us kind of rethink racial relations in the U.S., generally. When we think about how we understand race, how race gets designated, it’s very much based in the Anglo-American project that did begin on the eastern seaboard. It’s kind of a White-Black construct, very much steeped in things like White supremacy and the one-drop rule. There might have been miscegenation, but generally, people of mixed race were still bound to all kinds of caste systems of what it meant to be Black in America. If you’re looking at these other areas, in addition to having a more accurate understanding of history, you’re also confronted with other colonial projects, like Spanish California and Mexican California. When you’re studying the way that Black folks navigated those areas, you’re also able to see a different way that different societies understood the making of race. In Hispanic California, for instance, there still were racial casts, and there still were times that folks were discriminated against, so there might have been certain types of employment for people of African descent; but you also see these Black conquistadors, like Juan Garrido, or some of the early Black colonists who came to the area, and the way that there was room for social mobility, the way that folks intermingled, the way that there was all of this intermarrying between European, African, and Indigenous folks. It helps you kind of realize that the way that we understand race in the U.S. isn’t necessarily set. It isn’t concrete and it isn’t even all that old. It’s kind of new, and it’s one way of understanding race and humanity, so I think that’s really important for us to understand.
More than anything, I think it’s just important for us to just have nuance, to understand how big and broad and wide the world is. There have been all of these wonderful ways that people have found themselves here in the U.S. Pacific, and there’s been really complicated and hurtful ways, too, that folks have ended up here, but we’re all here now together. So, how can we have a better, broader understanding of what brought different types of people here?
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