grants in any case. Kevin Starrn— journalist, professor of communications,nand former librarian of the Citynof San Francisco—offers a fiistory ofnCalifornia that may lend clues to understandingnwhat needs to be America’snresponse to the new immigration.nHis Inventing the Dream: CalifornianThrough the Progressive Era followsnAmericans and the California Dream,n1850-1915 (1973) as the next installmentnof an ambitious cultural historynof the state. Whereas the first volumenemphasizes Northern California andnthe state’s history before 1900, the newnvolume takes Southern California asnthe embodiment of the Progressive Eran”dream,” and herein lies the relevancenof Starr’s book to the new immigrationnthese 70 years later.nStarr’s subject is the dialectic emergingn”as the California of fact and thenCalifornia of imagination shape andnreshape each other” during this periodnof the emergence of a regional societynand the invention of a “Californiandream” that would explain and justifynthat society. Starr deals some with thenovertly imaginative materials—thennovels of Mary Austin and HelennHunt Jackson and Jack London, say,nor the paintings of James Bond Francisconor the buildings by architectsnCharles Sumner Greene and HenrynMather Greene—but Starr is cannynenough to know that “imaginative materials”nin a business civilization include,nalso, the booster literature ofnCalifornia politics, business, banking,nand agriculture. So Starr offers us portraitsnof such key characters as LosnAngeles Times publisher and real estatenspeculator Harrison Gray Otis,nTimes city editor Charles FletchernLummis, agriculture journalist EdwardnJames Wickson, and Bank ofnItaly (later Bank of America) foundernAmadeo Peter Giannini, all of whomncontributed significantly to a story, an”mythology,” about California in generalnand Southern California in particular.nThe stories were sometimes contradictorynand usually departednsignificantly from the facts. But allnunderstood that a people must have anset of stories and images to guide theirnactions, even if one function of thosenstories and images is to cloak economicnmotives in grander ethical garb.nCalifornia’s first self-image was thatnof a frontier, which translated into then101 CHRONICLES OF CULTUREn”Americanization” of the MexicannCalifornios, Through the three decadesnfollowing the American CivilnWar, Mexican-held land fell into thenhands of Anglo-Americans, who subdividednthe ranchos into residentialnareas that eventually became SouthernnCalifornia towns and cities. Very fewnof the Californios learned how to donbusiness “Yankee-style,” and thenAmericanization process includednsome dramatic displays of racism andnviolence chronicled by Starr.nAs the frontier self-image waned,nCalifornia’s dream-makers created annew mythology, what Starr calls thenmyth of “the American farm perfected.”nFlirting briefly with the semitropicalnimage, California boosters settlednon the more civilized Mediterraneannmetaphor. Image-makers as diverse asnarchitects and designers of orange cratenlabels assisted in the myth, but it wasnLA Times city editor Lummis whonworked the hardest to create a Spanishn”mission myth” at the center of SouthernnCalifornia’s booster ideology in then1880’s and 90’s, even to the point ofnbuilding a Spanish mansion. El Alisul,nat Arroyo Seco. Lummis andnothers created a pastoral, feudal mythnthat justified its opposite—an industrialized,nmass society. Frank Miller’snMission Inn in Riverside, the immenselynsuccessful Mission Play (annoutdoor drama-spectacle), the aestheticnmovement known as “Arroyo Culture,”nand the adverhsing campaignsnaimed at making raisins and orangesnstaple foods all participated in thenstory.nStarr’s most important point almostngets lost in his telling the stories ofnthese colorful characters and places,nbut it is worth making here. Underlyingnthe Mission Myth and related selfimagesnwas a racial myth quite innkeeping with the cultural context ofnthe period, a myth that said thatn”Southern California was the Anglo-nSaxons’ destined place.” The dilemmaninherent in Lummis’ myth was itsndelicate and unresolved bringing togethernof Western frontier vigor andnEastern refinement.nAlso departing from this booster.nMission Myth was an equally vigorousnCalifornia movement toward experimentingnwith collectives, cooperatives,nand socialist ideas. A colonynsystem emerged in Southern Califor­nnnnia agriculture, each colony created bynan ethnic group (e.g., the French innSan Jose, the Germans in Anaheim,nthe Danes in Solvang) pursuing anquasi-utopian impulse. The agriculturencooperative movement was strongnin California, with over half of thenstate’s agriculture done by co-ops byn1920; and there were explicitly socialistnfarming experiments, such as thenLlano del Rio colony and the DurhamnSettlement. The Populist and progressivenmovements in California also hadntheir share of theorists, most notablynFresno journalist Chester Harvey Rowell,nwho urged Californians to thinknof themselves as a community holdingna life in common and working towardnits perfection.nStarr’s story would be one merely ofnan interesting regional society were itnnot for the emergence of the Americannfilm industry during this period. For itnis through its films that this regionalnsociety “would set national standardsnof American identity, as the attitudesnand styles of Southern California werenexported via the film industry to thenrest of the nation.” It fell to SouthernnCalifornia, in short, to create whatnStarr calls “the collective daydream ofnAmerica.” Constrained by the timenlimits he defines for this book, Starrndeals only with the earliest pioneers innthe industry, such as directors D.W.nGriffith, Mack Sennett, and C.B. DenMille, producers Jesse Lasky and AdolphnZukor, and movie stars CharlienChaplin, Mary Pickford, and DouglasnFairbanks. But all these stories revealnthe surprising fact of the minority immigrantnorigins of the industry responsiblenfor America’s collective “daydream.”nStarr need not have stopped in then1920’s. My earlier reference to FranknCapra was partly to acknowledge that,nas film critic Richard Corliss put it innhis essay on the cinema for the specialn”immigrants” issue of Time, “Americanncinema is truly an immigrant artnform, made by immigrants for immigrants.”nSome of our most powerful,nmythic stories about the meanings ofnAmerican experience are gifts fromngrateful immigrants, films like FranknCapra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946),nFred Zimmerman’s High Noon (1953),nand Mike Nichols’ The Graduaten(1967). Perhaps it is not surprising,nthen, that the few current films takingn