Paul Ganster On His Epic Journeys With Harry Crosby

Slow Baja

In this archive edition of Slow Baja, we return to my 2020 conversation with professor Paul Ganster. I wanted to share this show again as I recently watched Isaac Artensteins's magnificent Journeys of Harry Crosby documentary. The Crosby film is available to stream on PBS here.

Ganster began traveling to Mexico with his friend and former high school teacher, Harry Crosby, in the early 1960s. When Crosby landed his 1967 commission to photograph the El Camino Real, he asked Ganster, then a graduate student at UCLA, to make the trip with him. In retracing the original Portolá missionary expedition of 1769, Crosby and Ganster covered 600 grueling miles, mostly by mule.

Ganster took trail notes, made detailed drawings and maps, and shot scores of photographs. However, no job was more important than feeding the mules. Each evening, he would climb the palo verde trees and use a machete to hack off branches that the mules would crunch on loudly. The trip was a life-changing trip for both men. Crosby's photographs from the journey were published in The Call to California in 1969. He often returned to Baja to photograph cave paintings and study early life in Alta, California, and published several books on the subject. Baja figured prominently in Ganster's life as well. In his long academic career, he is an acknowledged expert on the U.S.-Mexico border region.

Currently, he directs the Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias at San Diego State University. He's recently edited Loreto, Mexico: Challenges for a Sustainable Future (2020, SDSU Press) with Oscar Arizpe and Vinod Sasidharan. He and Arizpe, a professor at the Universidad A. de Baja California Sur, collaborated on two earlier projects examining Loreto's sustainability.

Check out Paul Ganster's extensive writings here.