Editor’s note: This article is part of a special edition of this year Craft Archive Scholarship Cohortorganized in conjunction with the Center for Craft to support new work by emerging and established scholars in the field, with a focus on underrepresented and non-mainstream stories.
In a garage somewhere northeast of San Diego sits a handful of Rubbermaid boxes full of suits: dark corduroy vests fringed with gold tassels and painted, multiple times, with a silver sun emblem; long rolls of brown and pink fabric filled with printed butterflies; rich black silk scarves studded with tiny metallic flowers; and gold wreaths, cut from cardboard, stapled together and dripping with glitter and craft paint. The crowns are small, designed to fit a teenage girl or girl. The names of the girls who performed in these crowns between 1960 and 1975 are inscribed on the inner lip of each helmet – an archive recording traces of Indo history, Indo craftsmanship and Indo care.
In 1959, hundreds of Indo families began arriving in the United States from the Netherlands. It was the last leg of a long journey. Gripping guitars and suitcases, the Indos or Dutch Indonesians – a mixed-race community whose members are from Indische Nederlander heritage in the colonial Dutch East Indies – had been adrift for almost a decade. Displaced by the violence of World War II and the subsequent Indonesian revolution, several thousand mixed families had first fled the islands of Southeast Asia to the Netherlands.
There, in a country recovering from years of Nazi occupation and intense aerial bombardment, Indos encountered intense ethnic discrimination, a lack of quality housing and an anemic labor market. While the majority of Indos remained in the Netherlands, a fraction of this community, including my own family, decided to bet on a second migration, to the United States and Canada.
Upon arriving in California, Indos began forming mutual support organizations in communities with large population groups, such as Los Angeles and San Diego counties. These organizations provided Indos with a chance to socialize, play music, and preserve their unique hybrid culture in the United States. In the fall of 2022, I lived with Andrea Matthies, a photographer, musician, and Indo community organizer in San Diego County. Andrea showed me photo albums from the Dutch Refugee Fellowship, or DURF, an Indo community organization founded by a handful of migrants in the early 1960s. Andrea’s family were active members of the DURF in its heyday and her mother , Brenda, danced at fundraisers and community parties throughout her teenage years. I also had the opportunity to interview several Indo Californian elders at get-togethers, buffets and a kumpulan community party.
I learned that in the saloons and garages of 1960s San Diego, adults like Renee de Long taught teenage girls Javanese courtship dancing to perform at DURF events. Community members also cut, sewed and decorated elaborate dance costumes for these performances, performing designs from patterns generated by Fred Attinger and other collaborators.
Many DURF cultural practices resembled contemporary activities in Europe. As part of my thesis fieldwork in the Netherlands, I interviewed several artists from the Indo artistic community in the 1960s and 1970s before the normalization of political relations between the Netherlands and Indonesia. In this context, Indo practitioners of classical Indonesian dance forms were relatively isolated from dance networks in Indonesia – for example, teaching and artistic patronage centered around the royal courts of Central Java – as well as material networks that support the practice of dance in the archipelago. : the legions of artisans who craft and fabricate costumes, props, wigs and makeup for specific dance traditions.
One of my interlocutors described how his master teacher in Tilburg drew on his training experience in India before migrating to the Netherlands to choreograph classical Javanese dance, looking at still images of dancers from souvenir postcards and his own inventions when his memory failed.
This same dynamic – coping with material scarcity and cultural disconnection – is evidenced by the dance costumes of San Diego. Members of the DURF community could not order a golden leather dance crown from a craftsman in Central Java. Instead, they had to craft their costumes with materials and expertise at hand. While some might be tempted to read the plastic pom poms and stapled construction of San Diego crowns as makeshift imitations of proper dance ornaments, I see them as archival evidence of a people deeply engaged in their context. cultural and political, using the materials it can access to try to preserve their cultural practices.
These practices emerged at a time when Indos in the United States were struggling with how to present themselves. Unlike our cousins in the Netherlands, the California Indos had the luxury of being ethnically unintelligible to their neighbors. Being Dutch, white, and Indonesian were not mutually exclusive in San Diego. Yet ambivalence abounded. Eventually this would change – by the mid-1980s many of the Indo community organizations that had flourished in Southern California had closed and with them these dance and craft practices. It was almost at the exact moment that certain Indo artists, like Alex and Eddie Van Halen or Mark-Paul Gosselaar, began to achieve widespread success in the American media – as tanned Californians, not as Brown or Asian Others. .
But there are still traces of Indo Californian dancing – in the photos scrapbooked by community members, in the bodies and memories of the girls who danced serimpi at the South Claremont Community Center over a period of 15 years, and in the costumes that community members have handcrafted for these performances. Although Indo dance performances were short-lived, the craft materials they generated suggest what they may have meant; they evoke the act of evoking a pattern for a wreath of memory – memories pulled across the world and a decade away from life. These 60-year-old cardboard wreaths record mixed and communal responses to the limits of diasporic life. They testify to the tenacity of Indo migrants to preserve and transmit their culture. And they testify to the changing strategies Indos have deployed to thrive in the United States.
Digging through the boxes of costumes in Andrea’s garage, I wondered about the future of all these materials and, by extension, our culture here in California. American Indos have often sought invisibility; I interpret this as a defensive squat against the forces of discrimination and harassment that pushed us across three continents before arriving here, on the crumbling edge of the West. But this invisibility comes at a high cost. We renounced many of the cultural practices that set us apart.
In backyards, buffets and barbecues across California, Indo artists and organizers like Andrea attempt to record, preserve and advance Indo Californian culture as best they can. This project has incredible urgency; our seniors are dying at an alarming rate, exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. The fires that have threatened Indo homes in Southern California have increased in intensity and show little indication of abating. The California Indos need resources to record and preserve our stories, and there is little time to waste.
Holding a crown in my hand, I run my fingers over a dark stain left by a sweaty forehead, a strip of duct tape strategically placed to shield the dancer’s scalp from the sharp edge of a staple. So much care and love is wrapped in these ornaments, echoing the care and love that my aunts pass to me, and that I pass to my niece. By gently pressing my fingertips to the cardboard, I imagine I can feel the radiant warmth of the dancer who wore it and the benevolent touch of the person who made it. The dances may be over, but the tenacity, artistry and care of the dancers and their community endures.
