Southern California Architecture and Maya Ruins in the U.S. Imagination 1840 – 1950

Elizabeth Miller
Visual Arts
UC San Diego

This project examines how historical treatments of Maya ruins crystallized into unique examples of Southern Californian architecture of the early to mid-20th century. More specifically, the project investigates the U.S. imagination of Maya ruins vis-à-vis key examples between the 1840s and 1950s in travel writing, architectural drawing and architecture. Beyond a strictly historiographical address of canonical figures such as explorer John Lloyd Stephens, draftsman Frederick Catherwood, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, my investigation researches the critical role of Mexican cultural heritage in the regional imagination of Southern California, and more broadly, in the national imagination of hemispheric American antiquity. By reappraising several works by the aforementioned figures, the project uses the vantage point of Mayan architecture and its representation and repurposing in the United States in order to problematize the politics of culture across two seemingly disparate constructions—the ancient Maya and  modern American.