Allison Wang: From 91.9 KVCR News, it's Allison Wang. I interviewed Professor Catherine Gudis from the UC Riverside's History Department to discuss the Annual Citrus Festival and the California Citrus State Historic Park's 30th anniversary, and the historical importance of citrus to the city of Riverside and the significance of inclusive public history interpretation. The Annual Citrus Festival runs on April 6th from 11am to 4pm, a midday event to celebrate the height of citrus season with citrus tasting, cultural and educational booths, craft vendors, cooking demonstrations, live music, hands-on activities, and more. This event is free and parking is $7 per vehicle. Events like this highlight Riverside citrus history. But the California Citrus State Historic Park wouldn't be opened without initial efforts of key community groups advocating to preserve our literal and figurative roots as Riverside transitioned from citrus to logistics.
Professor Gudis: An advocacy group, which was called Riversiders for Responsible Growth. Now, they started agitating after the groves were replaced by industry, we start to see large amounts of sprawl, downtown had lost his businesses. Main Street is paved over, it was a pedestrian mall. People are scurrying to figure out how to correct this problem. Other groups were going to the Chamber of Commerce and saying our city's identity is around citrus. What are we going to do when we're replaced? What's our identity? And they really are talking back and forth about that a lot. The Riversiders for Responsible Growth are really lucky to pass Proposition R. The idea was that the park would come out of that proposition.
Allison Wang: The effort to further discover and emphasize Riverside's citrus history continues in present day. Since 2016, Professor Gudis has been piloting the Relevancy and History Project, a movement to use community engaged research to create more inclusive historical interpretation at the park.
Professor Gudis: We started by having community meetings and we have partners with about a dozen different groups in the area. And, people to a one said that they wanted to see new exhibitions, and they wanted to see themselves represented. And so we have done oral histories and had community collection days to scan people's family photos, especially when they were laborers in the fields or in the packing houses. And we've been using that material to create exhibits in the groves and in the museum space. So for instance, we met the great grandchildren of an African American man named John Adams, who had come to this area and helped Eliza Tibbets, who's famous as you know, The Mother of Citrus, so to speak, because she got the famous Bahia oranges here, the navel oranges. So, John Adams actually helped to graft all of those because he knew a whole lot of different agricultural notions for plants. We also were able to document and also include images, actually, in the groves of the various groups who represented some of both the early laborers like Chinese Americans who were reported to have cleared land along with working citrus because they came from the Guangdong Province where they had experience with citrus cultivation. So without that Chinese labor and know-how they really wouldn't have been successful. You know, when you look at a ViewMaster, okay, well, we put a life size one, it's big, and you click it, it's in the shape of stereo card, so you see a 3D image, and that's where we've also put like women in packing houses. We've sort of done stuff about Brasero labor, you know, different elements of social history to sort of bring directly into the fields.
Allison Wang: The Relevancy and History Project will represent at the Annual Citrus Festival, hosting a number of fun games for all to participate in.
Professor Gudis: My students and I will be hosting a couple of different competitions. So one of them is a smudge pot toss, and that is essentially a distance throwing game, where you throw a hula hoop over a smudge pot. And the reason we have this game is to let people know what a smudge pot is and how it affected the environment. Essentially, people would burn the worst of petroleum in this metal pot, and it has a spout so that it would emit smoke, but it would create clouds of smog that would help to keep orchards warmer if a freeze was coming. Another event that we're going to have at our booth with A People's History of the Inland Empire is a quiz game that's called "From Citrus to Logistics." And what we're doing is quizzing people on what the historical impacts have been on our landscape, from the time of citrus agriculture to logistics. So stop by our booth to play a couple of these games, win a few prizes, get some SWAG, and learn about both the history of citrus in our region and the history of logistics.
Allison Wang: To reiterate, the Annual Citrus Festival is on Saturday, April 6th, from 11am to 4pm. From KVCR News, it's Allison Wang.
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This is the first part of a two-part story. Part 2 will feature interviews from staff and event-goers live at the festival. See related content.
More information can be found about this event here.