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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 politics inherent to the enduring quest for aquatic pleasure.

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While surfing was a pastime enjoyed for centuries in ancient Hawai‘i, it was nearly extinguished following Hawaiians’ contact with the West. Empire in Waves begins, as does modern surfing, with an examination of this decline—as well as the early years of surfing’s revival and globalization—in the context of American empire-building. In the nineteenth century, Congregationalist missionaries endeavored to remake much of Hawaiian society and culture as part of a general Western effort to “civilize” the barbarous residents of the island chain while, at the same time, dispossessing them of their native lands. Such was the missionaries’ success in uplifting the “infant race” that, one contemporaneous observer noted, by the early 1890s it had become exceedingly difficult to “find a surf-board outside of our museums and private collections.” The imperial project would shift , however, following Washington’s annexation of the Hawaiian Islands just several years later. As chapter 1 demonstrates, surfing, in the first decades of the twentieth century, underwent a surge of popularity as boosters such as Alexander Hume Ford sought to transform Hawai‘i into a “white man’s state,” turn Waikiki into a beckoning paradise for the growing number of Pacific tourists, and establish the islands more broadly as a crucial outpost of American global power. No longer a disreputable pastime of licentious natives, surfing was used to sell Hawaiian tourism—and white settlement—in popular magazines and promotional literature, in the process strengthening the grip of the haole class over the native population with whom the sport originated.

If surfing had become thoroughly Americanized by the first few decades of the twentieth century—though always, as Isaiah Helekunihi Walker has shown, in the context of ongoing resistance from the Hawaiian people—Americans increasingly sought to make it global.⁹ Ironically enough, it was two Hawaiian men, the legendary lifeguard George Freeth and the five-time Olympic medalist Duke Kahanamoku, who perhaps most famously helped plant the roots of global surf culture. But they were not alone. By the 1950s and 1960s, thriving communities of surfers could be found not only in the United States but in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, France, and Great Britain. Surfing, moreover, entered the commercial and political mainstream. Hollywood developed a fascination with Southern California beach culture, churning out such motion pictures as the Gidget series and the popular comedies of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, while those charged with crafting U.S. foreign policy gave the surfing lifestyle a bit part in official Cold War cultural diplomacy.

One of the hallmarks of surf culture in the post–World War II era has been its close relationship to Third World tourism. In this respect, surfing has mirrored U.S. foreign policy, as both were deeply concerned with the so-called peripheral states of the Cold War, and both placed primacy in the exploitation of those nations’ resources. For the U.S. government, it was the oil, copper, rubber, and other minerals and commodities desired by American corporations; for surfers, it was the waves. Yet where Washington was concerned that revolutionary nationalism might interfere with America’s grand strategy of global capitalism, surfers’ concerns generally began and ended at the water’s edge. For them, what happened on land—the national liberation movements of Africa, the counterinsurgency warfare of Central America, the state-sponsored repression of Southeast Asia—was of little serious concern. The waves were all that mattered.

If the Hollywood beach films of the 1950s and 1960s hinted at surfing’s commercial ambitions, the growing surf exploration of the postwar era, such as that portrayed in Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer (1966), was at the heart of surf culture’s more organic foundations. The advent of commercial jet travel in the 1950s, in particular, afforded surfers an opportunity to seek out new wave frontiers. A growing number of haoles brought to Hawai‘i by their military service began to call the islands home, while Mexico and other Latin American countries became favored stomping grounds for American surf travelers. Chapter 2 focuses on the growth of global surf tourism from the 1940s through the 1970s, viewing such tourism as an unofficial form of cultural diplomacy. Accompanying these jaunts, I argue, was the construction of an exceedingly simplistic surfing imagination. For the surf travelers of the post–World War II period, the political universe of the Cold War was banished from surfing’s popular grand narrative. Surfers preferred to see themselves as pioneers navigating a world of bountiful waves and always-smiling locals who lived in lands uncomplicated by imperial concerns.

Whether they liked it or not, however, surfers—mostly young Westerners who routinely traveled where few other foreign tourists bothered to visit—inevitably found themselves enmeshed in the practical realities of U.S. foreign policy. This is perhaps truer of no place more than Indonesia, the vast archipelago north of Australia considered the premier surfing destination on the planet. What had, in the 1950s, been a leading Third World proponent of nonalignment in the broader Cold War struggle became, by the late 1960s, a staunch American ally in Washington’s ideological competition with China and the Soviet Union. It was in 1965 and 1966 that Indonesia’s neutralist Sukarno government was essentially overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup that culminated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. In the decades that followed, Indonesia stood out as a leading recipient of U.S. military aid and diplomatic support, whether in Jakarta’s brutal and consistent repression of internal dissent or in its 1975 invasion and genocidal occupation of East Timor. As chapter 3 examines, it was shortly after the massacres of the mid-1960s that Indonesia began to capture the attention of American and Australian surfers, who discovered on its thousands of islands some of the finest waves in the world. With the cooperation of the Suharto regime, which boosted international surfing contests and even sponsored an outer-island junket for visiting foreigners, surfers helped promote tourism across the island chain. Surfing magazines regularly published features on Indonesian “surfaris,” while filmmakers captured the nation’s waves and people in a host of productions. In such features, whether print or filmic, the nation was represented not as a site of dictatorship and state repression—which was how too many Indonesians experienced life in their country—but as an exotic paradise with primitive locals who welcomed the West’s interest in their homeland. Empire in Waves examines both this discursive erasure and surfers’ collaboration with the Indonesian authorities, illustrating how the touristic impulse that is virtually intrinsic to the sport of surfing has inevitably been imbued with political meaning.

Just as Indonesian repression was written out of surfing’s popular grand narrative, so, too, was South African apartheid. For over two decades after The Endless Summer featured what it called the “perfect waves” of South Africa’s Cape St. Francis as the film’s apotheosis of surf travel (with, it must be noted, nary a word about the country’s notorious system of racial segregation), young Americans and Australians ventured to the apartheid state to enjoy its rich coastal bounty. Nearly all of these young tourists were white; surfers of color who traveled to South Africa, such as the Hawaiian professionals Dane Kealoha and Eddie Aikau, were denied entry into restaurants or hotels and were technically prohibited from surfing on many of the country’s finest beaches, which were reserved exclusively for those with fairer complexions. In the 1980s, a number of professional surfers decided to adhere to the sporting boycott called for by the global antiapartheid movement by forgoing international surfing contests in South Africa. The boycott movement generated considerable debate in the surfing community. Among South Africa’s white minority were some of the most accomplished surfers in the world, and the nation’s beaches had become globally famous for the superior quality of their waves. Nevertheless, to the boycott’s proponents, forgoing participation in the South African leg of the surfing world tour was a morally necessary step in opposing racial oppression. The boycott’s opponents, however, viewed such actions as an ill-advised politicization of what they considered an apolitical sport. Chapter 4 examines this historical epoch—a three-decade saga that culminated in surfing’s discovery that it was not in fact above international politics—situating the debate over apartheid in the surfing community within the broader context of modern sport and global affairs.

Recognizing the confluence of politics and economic policy, Empire in Waves likewise explores the development of commercial surf culture and its relationship to global neoliberalism. What began as small outfits founded by surfers looking for ways to subsidize their wave-riding lifestyle had become, by the 1980s and 1990s, billion-dollar corporations with a retail presence throughout the industrialized world. Clothing brands such as Quiksilver, Billabong, and Rip Curl were increasingly found not only in traditional surf communities but also in inland malls from Topeka to Kuala Lumpur. By the close of the twentieth century, surf culture had indeed gone global. With billions of dollars at stake, it is little surprise that “non-endemic” corporations would seek to tap the surf market, and, by the early twenty-first century, the “organics” faced growing competition from Nike, Target, and—perhaps most bizarrely of all—the Abercrombie & Fitch subsidiary Hollister. Yet unexplored by scholars has been the extent to which the manufacture and assembly of surfwear products has been enabled by the neoliberal trade policies pursued by the United States and its industrial allies. In particular, the so-called “race to the bottom” that has mixed a minimal standard of environmental regulation with an abundant supply of low-wage workers has been at the heart of American efforts to promote “free trade.” Clothing and apparel manufacturers have benefited enormously from this situation.

There has thus emerged a paradox in modern surf culture. On the one hand, surfing valorizes exploration not only for the potential discovery of waves in unspoiled paradises but also for the fostering of cross-cultural contact between surfers from the industrialized West and the millions of villagers throughout the littoral Third World. Inherent in these encounters has been a romanticization of the poor as living simple and happy lives, free of any desire for modernity. On the other hand, the corporations that have become associated with global surf culture both rely on and perpetuate that impoverished condition, fueling the “race to the bottom” by exploiting the surplus of laborers or the owners’ capital mobility when those same Third World villagers seek higher wages and better working conditions. Chapter 5 explores these unresolved tensions.

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Empire in Waves is by no means exhaustive. It is not intended to be the history of surfing. Rather, the book employs a number of important developments in modern surf culture to explore a series of premises: Surfing is not a mindless entertainment but a cultural force born of empire (at least in its modern phase), reliant on Western power, and invested in neoliberal capitalism. Acceptance of even that first premise is hardly a given. Mentions of surfing far more often elicit amused chortles involving “cool dudes” and “gnarly waves” than they do serious contemplation. But, I argue, surfing—however rooted it may be in the individual pursuit of pleasure—has been a pastime impossible to divorce from the political universe in which it originated, spread, and took root. If modern surfing was born of conquest—a reasonable argument, I suggest, in light of America’s unlawful annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898—its global diffusion certainly owed a great debt to the imperial management necessitated by twentieth-century American power. It was not long before surfing’s pleasurable beach culture emerged as a staple in the globalization of American life, whether through early tourism in Hawai‘i and Latin America, the military diffusion of the sport to Japan and other oceanic locales, the Third World “surfaris” of young American travelers, or the global export of Hollywood beach films in the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, surfing’s relationship to American power has been detached from its popular association with discovery and plea sure. Yet it was the colonization of Hawai‘i by the United States that rendered surfing American. It was American foreign policy, which favored elite-led capitalism over revolutionary socialism, that made the world safe for discovery by generations of surfers. And it was the global economic system exemplified by the “Washington consensus” that enabled the low-wage manufacture of surf culture’s sartorial accoutrements. Empire in Waves sets out to trace this international history.