Blast from the past
Our latest trip to California’s San Gabriel Valley is a bit of a homecoming. About 4 and a half years ago, we spent two days in the SGV shooting this little TV item about the Vietnam War Living History Group.
The Vietnam War LHG claim to be the only historically (and ethnically) accurate re-enactment club devoted to bringing America’s tragic history in Southeast Asia to life. Enjoy!
Microwave
Part of being North American is being from somewhere else. Since the 16th century, the continent has been shaped by wave after wave of immigration, both voluntary (from Ireland, Eastern Europe, and China) and involuntary (from Western and Central Africa). If you squint your brain enough, you can even think of North America’s indigenous population as the first wave of proto-immigrants, a driven bunch who disembarked Asia via the Bering Strait while on the hunt for megafauna.
Southern California’s Dutch-Indonesians—known as Indos or Amerindos, or more generally as Eurasians—floated into the US on the back of a tiny immigration wave that started in the late 1940s and peaked a decade later. The details of their displacement are simultaneously as unique and as familiar as any immigrant story: first there’s conflict in the home country, brought on during the death throes of European colonialism. Next come the ships, to Europe and later to the New World, and the difficult journeys during which dear material possessions are discarded or lost. Once on US soil, there’s a period of intolerance and persecution, which somehow recedes as work starts to pay better and education levels rise. The story ends, as many do, with the next generation, who either forget or never learn their parents’ language and customs, preferring to selectively employ their ethnic identity at holidays, street festivals, and other food-centric events.
Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley now hold three generations of Indos. Switching rapidly between the Dutch, English and Indonesian languages, members of the first generation have created their own version of the American Dream in Southern California. The blended quality of their language is also reflected in their features: sometimes they are taken for Mexicans, sometimes for Southern Europeans, and sometimes for Filipinos.
Réné Creutzburg is the voice of the first generation. He has turned the second floor of his house into a library and museum dedicated to the Netherlands and Indonesia, and to the Dutch East Indies, a colonial construction that existed for centuries but now only exists in the memories and conversations of the Dutch-Indonesian diaspora. Réné also publishes a magazine, appropriately titled De Indo, that revels in the specificity of his community’s identity. Copies of De Indo ship to all points in the US, as well as to Australia, the Netherlands, and more than 20 other countries. Each month, the new issues are labelled and stamped by other first generation immigrants like Kees Kunstt, whose stories of growing up rough during wartime ring with all the sorrow and humor of JG Ballard’s memoirs.
Norman DeBuck is also first generation, but is a bit younger than Kees and Réné. This may explain why he doesn’t read De Indo and has never visited Réné’s second floor museum. Norman jokingly refers to himself “the last of the Indohicans,” and recalls a childhood in Indonesia shaped by the iconography of American movies. He would parade through the streets of Jakarta wearing a cowboy hat shaped out of a banana leaf, dreaming of the day when he would have a horse and a pair of six guns to call his own. To hear him explain it, Norman was always an American. He was just born in the wrong place.
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Meet the Dutch-Indonesian Charles Bronson
Norman De Buck was born in Indonesia in the 1950’s. Even as a child, he was fascinated with cowboy and Indian lore. He came to Southern California via The Netherlands as a teenager, and settled in El Monte, a town rich in frontier history. He’s now living the dream in the San Gabriel Valley, where he makes a career for himself playing Mexicans in Hollywood westerns and commercials.
The hat is his own.
Empire is coming to America
And guess what? We won’t be making anything about the Henry Hudson-led VOC mission that brought New York City into existence. Instead, we’re headed to the West Coast to learn about Southern California’s twice-displaced “Indo” community.
In the 1940’s, 50’s, and even 60’s, some 300,000 people of mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent left behind the conflicts of their newly independent tropical homeland and relocated to The Netherlands. Not all of these new immigrants felt comfortable with the cold winds of Northern Europe, and so a small number immigrated to the States and settled in warm climates like Florida and California.
Despite encountering some early setbacks—including various straight up racist, quota-driven immigration policies—the US’s Indo population integrated and assimilated rather seamlessly into American culture. In the US, as in The Netherlands, they were considered to be a “model” immigrant population, with all of the baggage that that label implies.
For the new Empire story in California we’ll be investigating how multi-generational families in the Indo community resolve the friction between the congruent Dutch, Indonesian and American parts of their identity. With any luck, we may even meet the most American of Indos, Mr. Zack Morris himself, Mark-Paul Gosselaar (pictured above after a blond dye job).
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“Ultimately, the Dutch will have to let go of the blackface, whether they like it or not.”
In this interview by Grolsch Filmworks we talk Dutch Christmas traditions and much more.
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COLONIAL COCKTAILS! (part 2)
Discussions about colonialism can get tense—especially in the Netherlands, where certain aspects of the country’s colonial past remain very touchy. Since liquor loosens tongues, we’re starting an every-now-and-again series called “Colonial Cocktails,” where we sit down with historians, journalists and filmmakers, make them drinks of our own devising, and ask them for their take on colonialism.
This week’s expert is Tristan Mostert. A junior curator of the Rijksmuseum’s history department who wrote his master’s thesis on 17th century VOC warfare, Tristan has all kinds of insights into why the Dutch transformed from fearsome warriors into bike-riding peaceniks. His conclusion: they gave up.
Tristan is drinking a Jodensavvane, our slave-revolt themed cocktail that is a variation on a Bourbon Old Fashioned.
Kel O’Neill: So how do you like the cocktail?
Tristan Mostert: Well, after what you told me about it I’m not sure I really can like it, of course. But it’s good.
KO: We were wondering if you could draw any continuity between private armies as they exist now, and as they did during the initial VOC military experiment.
TM: Yeah, it’s a different thing. Nowadays we think of armies as being national armies, usually with conscripts and you have to have your passport and there’s all sorts of links to nationalism and the like. This simply didn’t exist in the days of the Dutch East India Company. Conscription, well it happened, but it was rare, and it always met with great opposition. Nationalism, like it developed later, wasn’t there yet, and all armies, even the Staatse legers, which were like the state armies of the Dutch republic, were much more like private armies, and the Dutch East India Company simply had been allowed to have an army of its own. But also, if you ran a small trading company you brought cannon. There wasn’t much of a violence monopoly at the time. It was a lot more open. So if you tried to compare the Dutch East India Company to Blackwater, you’d run into problems.
KO: When you look at VOC sea battles, do you think that most of the time the conflicts that came up were conflicts of self-protection, or conflicts of aggression by the VOC?
TM: The first bit of warfare that the Dutch East India Company waged, I suppose you could say, was mostly defensive.
It was an extension of European conflict. The Netherlands were at war with Spain, which automatically meant they were at war with Portugal. It was the same king at the time. They wanted into the Asian trade and tried all kinds of things to make that work, but in the end they were going to end up getting shot at by the Portuguese. And then, at a certain point, they started shooting back.
Later, they start winning. They beat the Portuguese up quite a bit, then they discover, specifically in the Moluccas, that violence can be very practical if you want to enforce certain trade conditions. And they start doing that with relish. They’re very practical about it—they’re not out to conquer the world. It’s not the second half of the 19th century. They use it when they think it’s profitable.
So if they think, “hey, we can beat up these people in the Moluccas and it will help us with our spices,” they do that. If they see a big Japanese shogun or Indian Moghul who is more powerful than them, they say, “no, wait, we’ll just build a little settlement there and we’ll be very nice to you.”
Often, when people talk about early colonialism, this whole 19th century notion comes with it. So in the 19th century, European countries swarm across the world and really divvy it up. And they bring steam engines, and they bring antibiotics, and they bring rifled artillery, and they’re willing and able to conquer the world.
At the height of its power, the Dutch East India Company had 10,000 soldiers spread out across pretty much half the planet. And you could discuss, yeah, that the ships were a litte better and they had firearms, but the technological differences weren’t that great. There were cases, particularly in Taiwan, where the Dutch East India Company was just smashed by a largely Chinese army.
Eline Jongsma: The Dutch aren’t known these days to be fierce warriors or anything. How were they doing in the 17th century? How did they compare to the others?
TM: To the English and the Portuguese? They did exceedingly well, but they also had the time with them. The Portuguese empire was kind of falling apart and the Portuguese were very cocky, like most colonial empires are, and felt that they could win it all. But in reality their organization wasn’t too good, and was a little outdated. As soon as they came to blows with the Dutch, the Dutch won and won and won until the 1660s, when the Portuguese had a few specks left and the rest was taken.
EJ: Why do you think that changed? What happened to us?
TM: In the 18th and 19th century we were passed left and right by other European powers, and were no longer a serious party in battles, or in wars at all. So I guess we kind of stopped trying at some point. I guess that’s the short answer.
EJ: So you sort of automatically retreat if you’re not one of the big players?
TM: Well, they tried. I mean during the Napoleonic age, when you had this whole mess with the colonies, they tried to defend the Cape. They failed miserably. They tried to defend Java. It worked for a bit, then the English took it all the same. They’d already lost most of India. They fought. They just weren’t too good at it anymore.
And that’s all folks! See you next time.
Dispatches from the wrong side of history
My parents met in Cu Chi, Vietnam in October of 1969. They were both officers in the US Army. My mom was a nurse, and my dad was a hospital administrator. They fell in love over a period of months while my mom was stitching up bodies and my dad was counting them. The circumstances of their courtship make me and my siblings, quite literally, the products of US imperialism. If it weren’t for the Vietnam War—or The American War, as it is called in Vietnam—we would not exist.
War and colonialism are the twin forces, often aligned, that smash together populations and societies, leaving a jumbled mass of destruction and creation in their wake. The creation part can be tricky to talk about. I am not egotistical enough to believe that my life or the lives of my brother and sister in any way balance out the deaths of 2,000,000 Vietnamese citizens. I am also not so shortsighted to believe that the joy I get from a Dutch-Indonesian rijsttafel in any way justifies the brutal Banda nutmeg massacre of 1621 (look it up). The good stuff that comes from war and colonialism, presuming that my life can be called good, can look pretty paltry beside all the slaughter, exploitation and pillage. In the grim arithmetic of foreign intervention, I am a remainder. So too are many of the people who we have filmed for Empire, from the Dutch-descended Jews of Sulawesi to Sri Lanka’s Burgher ladies. Some might call them villains, but I think they deserve some measure of our understanding. I share a place beside them, as many of us do, on the wrong side of history.
—Kel O’Neill, Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, October 2012
Picture gallery: scenes from my mom and dad’s late adolescence in Southeast Asia
Portraits of Ghanaian Freemasons
For the past 3 weeks, we’ve been hot on the trail of Ghana’s elderly elite, and these gentlemen are it. They come from the highest ranks of academia and civil service. Some are of Dutch extraction, some of British. What they all share is membership in a global fraternal order led by the Duke of Kent, which explains the clothes.
European Masters
Winneba, a small city on Ghana’s central coast, was a European hotspot during the 19th century. While the African locals earned their living as fishermen, Dutch and British traders grew fat on earnings from the gold and slave trades.
The Europeans may be long gone, but their spirit lives on at the Winneba Fancy Dress Festival, a yearly event dedicated to the mocking/lauding of the long-departed colonists. Participants wear light-skinned masks and flouncy clothes, and dance like there’s no tomorrow. Dancers choose their costumes from a variety of strictly-defined categories: there are Robin Hoods, Devils and, of course, European Masters.
Click through the selection of our video stills on the right to see some of the old guard brought to life.
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The Craft
1859 marked the consecration of the first Masonic lodge on the Gold Coast of Africa.
Of the lodge’s seven founders, six had British or Irish names, while one man, Brother Charles Bartels, did not. Bartels’ name placed him just slightly apart from his colleagues, and marked him as a descendant of C.L. Bartels, former Governor-General of the Dutch Gold Coast.
The late 19th century saw the end of the Dutch empire’s influence over the Gold Coast (current-day Ghana), and the beginning of British rule over the region. The mixed-race traders who controlled the colony’s commerce under the Dutch went with the flow and became anglicized. As time wore on, they mingled with the British and their British-African offspring, and joined their secret clubs. They found positions in the higher ranks of civil service, attended Oxford and Cambridge, and spoke in sparkling Received Pronunciation of the English aristocracy.
Jimmy Phillips, whose portrait you can see in the photo on the right, is one of the last representatives of that era. Jimmy is of Dutch, British and African descent, and is connected to the Bartels family line. He is also the Freemason’s former District Grandmaster For Ghana. We love Jimmy, and are currently spending a lot of time with him and his wife Rachel while shooting Empire: Migrants.
The people of Holanda
Behold! The second teaser for Empire: Migrants.
This time we take you to the village of Holanda, Brazil, where cousins married cousins for generations.
The ecstasy of gold
Or is that “agony”?
In this trailer, we take you into the illegal gold mines of Suriname, where half of the country seems to be seeking their fortune.
We’ve never worked harder to get images. Hope you enjoy them.
