Blind Date: The Creation of an Arabian Fantasy in the Deserts of Southern California

Sarah Seekatz
History
UC Riverside

Southern California’s Coachella Valley remains one of the few places where dates can be commercially grown outside of the Middle East. Ever since the date industry was established there around the turn of the 20th century, local boosters have tapped into the date’s Arabian heritage to market their crop and the agricultural communities they established. This dissertation follows the establishment of the date industry and its celebrations to explore the ways in which local boosters sold their dates, their desert, and their dreams through Middle Eastern fantasies embodied in festivals, parades, pageants, costumes, architecture, exhibits, and marketing campaigns. In doing so locals entangled their reality with American (mis)perceptions of the Middle East, crossing borders through popular culture and agricultural ventures. This work explores how interethnic and gendered relationships of the area were filtered through the celebration of an imagined Arabia.