Michael A. Messner

Salinas, California is my hometown, and Salinas High School is my alma mater. When I was a little kid from around 1960 to 1966, I felt like the luckiest boy in town that I got to be the towel boy for my father Russ Messner’s SHS basketball teams. I played on my dad’s varsity basketball team from 1968 to 1970, and my sisters Terry and Melinda graduated from SHS in 1965 and 1968, respectively. It’s not an exaggeration to say that through my high school years, my life and my identity orbited around sports, and Salinas High School was the center of that universe.

My research as a sociologist has revolved around a handful of themes, including gender-based violence prevention, men’s engagements with feminism, and military veterans’ efforts to wage peace. But my largest body of work has focused on the ways that sport shapes gender relations. After my father passed away in 1977, I inherited about twenty-five of his El Gabilan Salinas High yearbooks. These books remained in a box until around 2001, when it occurred to me that looking systematically at high school yearbooks over a long stretch of time might open a fascinating window into the shifting meanings and organization of high school sports, coaching, cheerleading, and other student activities. I began to collect copies of the El Gabilan, and two decades later I owned about 100 of them. At that point, I started systematically to analyze the books, zeroing in on questions about the change and continuity in the ways that sports, cheering, and student life shaped citizens.

Our high school yearbooks can be a rich source of personal memory. But these books are also a fascinating repository of cultural memory, largely untapped by scholars who study youth, schools, sports, or student organizations. The High School is in some ways a nostalgic love letter to my alma mater. But I tried to deploy what I came to think of as a standpoint of critical nostalgia, the aim of which is to sharpen, rather than obscure, our understandings of the ways that schools throughout history have been sites of contestation over inequalities based in social class, race, and gender. What I chose to focus on in The High School, as well as my interpretations of their meanings, was shaped both by my scholarly foundations in sociology and gender studies, and by my personal background and experiences. I hope readers will find my interpretations compelling. But I expect too that each reader will also sift the stories and images in The High School through their own memories, interpreting meanings and drawing conclusions in light of their own beliefs and values.

I retired in 2023, but for most of my career I worked as a professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. I invite readers who would like to know more about my larger body of work to explore my web site, michaelmessner.org.