Empire in Waves - Scott Laderman Sport in World History

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up north, that of the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley. At the National Archives II in College Park, Mary land, I was aided by Edward O. Barnes and David A. Pfeiffer. Cory Czajkowski helped me navigate the Pan Am papers at the University of Miami. Sue Hodson of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and Clint Pumphrey at Utah State University helped me from a long distance with their institutions’ Jack London materials. Kristi Rudelius-Palmer and Mary Rumsey made possible my research in the Human Rights Library of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. And Kay Westergren, the interlibrary loan specialist at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, ably and amiably fielded my many requests.

      Numerous scholars read or heard pieces of this book as conference or seminar papers or draft chapters. I thank Chris Endy, Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu, Andy Johns, Paul Kramer, Dennis Merrill, Mark Rice, Brad Simpson, Mike Sunnafrank, and Glen Thompson for their insightful comments. Dion Georgiou and the participants in the Sport and Leisure History Seminar at the Institute for Historical Research in London provided excellent feedback and questions. So, too, did Diane Negra, Stephen Boyd, Jack Thompson, and several others at University College Dublin; Scott Lucas and Michele Aaron at the University of Birmingham; Kimberly Marsh and the participants in the Travel Cultures Seminar at the University of Oxford; and Tony Collins, Matthew Taylor, and their colleagues at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. In 2012, I had the good fortune to spend three weeks in Japan as a representative of the Organization of American Historians. Danielle McGuire, Priscilla Wald, and Sachiyo Shindo provided helpful criticism of my work. Rumi Yasutake provided me with a rich exchange on Alexander Hume Ford. And Yuka Tsuchiya, Yujin Yaguchi, Nao Nomura, and Hiroaki Matsusaka—among too many others to name here—were gracious hosts and the source of hours of stimulating conversation.

      I thank the surfers who allowed me to formally interview them: Tom Carroll, Tom Curren, Mike Hynson, Dick Metz, Martin Potter, and Shaun Tomson. Like the others mentioned in these acknowledgments, they may not agree with everything (or anything) in this book, but their willingness to meet and speak with me attests to their commitment to a fuller understanding of the pastime to which they have devoted their lives. The same goes for those many people who have patiently responded to my queries and humored and assisted me during my research. I thank, among others (including some already named), Doug Booth, Greg Borne, Brittany Bounds, Clift on Evers, David Theo Goldberg, Alex Leonard, Jess Ponting, and Isaiah Helekunihi Walker.

      I worked with a dream team at the University of California Press. Niels Hooper and Kim Hogeland could not have been better editors. Kate Warne, Pamela Polk, Jamie Thaman, and Michael Bohrer-Clancy expertly guided the manuscript through production. In addition to an anonymous referee, I thank Mark Bradley, Susan Brownell, Chris Endy, and Chris Young for their wonderful feedback as readers. The same goes for the representative of the press’s faculty board. I am grateful to Chris Axelson for generously allowing me the gratis use of his photograph for the book’s cover. And Carol Roberts once more created my index. There is a reason I keep asking her.

      Finally, my family. My siblings-in-law, Robert and Paul Torres and Molly Carter-Torres, were always quick to lend me a car, put me up, and give me equipment and head out for a surf during my stays in California. My parents-in-law, Ernie and Karen Torres and Bernadette Torhan, showed me innumerable kindnesses as I was conducting research and writing. My mother, Jackie Laderman; brothers, Mark and Greg Laderman; and sister, Mary Ann Corbett, continue to be a deep wellspring of love and support. John Hatcher and I may not be related, but we might as well be. His friendship and humor, both in and out of the water, have brought me immense joy when it is needed most. He is also an incisive critic. And what can I say about Jill Torres, my partner for over twenty years. Words cannot begin to express how much she means to me. For always being there, and for bringing me my greatest work—Izzy and Sam, whom I love more than anything and to whom I dedicate this book—I remain eternally grateful.

      INTRODUCTION

      A Political History of Surfing

      RAFAEL LIMA CAME FOR THE WORK but returned for the waves. A thirty-year-old Cuban American journalist and screenwriter, Lima found El Salvador much to his liking. The surf at La Libertad, the coastal town roughly twenty miles from the capital, was “clean, fast, [and] uncrowded,” he wrote in a photograph-studded piece for Surfer magazine. El Salvador provided “some of the best waves in Central America,” including a “long, howling, rock-strewn, hollow point break” that, with a six-foot swell that “held up all morning,” left him and his companions “[s]urfed out.”1 Accounts touting the discovery of waves at such and such a place are hardly unusual in the surfing literature. They are, in fact, the bread and butter of the genre. What distinguished Lima’s travelogue from others, however, was both its timing and the nature of its author’s employment. The year was 1982—deep into the Salvadoran regime’s violent crackdown on peasants, union organizers, human rights activists, and other civil society elements—and Lima was returning to the country after a stint training some of the paramilitary forces carrying out much of the regime’s repression.

      The former martial arts editor of Soldier of Fortune magazine, Lima had, by the time of his excursion, already developed quite a résumé. He had spent time in Guatemala in the employ of an American company instructing that country’s right-wing militias in “anti-insurgency and light weapons.” He had then worked for “one of the largest landowners in El Salvador, training a small army to combat guerrillas on the huge cotton plantations.”2 Now he was “back to go surfing.” True, he had surfed in Central America during his previous visits to the region, using “my Indians”—a term Lima repeatedly deploys—to maintain security while he sought temporary solace in the waves.3 But this trip was different. This one was for plea sure.

      

      The politics of Lima’s account were predictable. El Salvador was “a country gone mad with bloodletting,” he wrote, leaving little doubt as to who was responsible. The left-wing insurgents were the “hostile attackers,” while those he trained to “defend and protect themselves” possessed “[f]aces lined with years of torment and hunger,” “[f]aces that would rather farm and raise children than fight.”4 But Lima was no angel. There was a young “whore” he berated for her gold-toothed ugliness, telling her in English that “[t]his revolution is prettier than you are.”5 And his story dripped with the hypermasculine sensibilities of the Reagan era, employing militaristic language to describe the act of wave riding: “guiding a high-tech projectile at maximum cruising speed,” “honing in on a long-distance target,” “stringing staccato explosions of power with long-range speed bursts,” “blasting his moving target with pinpoint accuracy.”6 Given the contentiousness of U.S. foreign policy during the Reagan era, it is not surprising that Lima’s account evoked outraged responses. “[P]lease do not publish any more articles by soldiers of fortune who deal in death for the highest bidder and who happen to surf,” a Californian wrote in one of several critical letters to Surfer.7 Others found nothing to criticize. “There might be a lot of political unrest and foreign influence in the internal affairs here,” conceded a surfer serving in the U.S. Army in Honduras, “but we are trying to modernize and stabilize the situation at hand.”8

      The case of Rafael Lima is certainly unusual. Most surfers were not involved in training the paramilitaries or death squads of Latin America. Most, in fact, paid them little heed. The Lima account does, however, starkly reveal the ways that surfers, as people and as tourists, inevitably maneuvered through an inherently political world. Surfing is of course ultimately about plea sure. People ride waves because it is fun. Gliding across the face of a moving mass of water, turning offthe top of a folding lip, tucking into a barrel: these feel good, so much so that surfers oft en speak of the wave-riding experience as something akin to a spiritual quest. Yet plea sure, like “the personal” once highlighted by the women’s movement, is political. We must thus come to appreciate surfing in political terms. Although surfing may involve a specific person riding a specific wave at a specific beach, those waves travel vast distances, just like the surfers who set out across the planet to ride them. Surfing, in other words, is a natural global phenomenon, and it enjoys a rich and complex global history. It is the goal of Empire in Waves to tease from this history some of the

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