"This Land Was Mexican Once": Histories of Resistance from Northern California 0292716338, 9780292716339

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations and Tables
Figure 2.1. Racial Categorization of Married Couples, San Francisco, 1790
Photograph 4.1. María Higuera Juárez
Photograph 5.1. Miss Washburn’s Room, Central School.
Photograph 6.1. Chinese family in front of temple
Photograph 6.2. St. Helena, Chinatown
Table 2.1. Racial Categorization for San Francisco Presidio, 1790
Table 2.2. Racial Categorization for San Francisco Region, 1786
Table 6.1. California Population 1850 to 1870
Preface
INTRODUCTION. Uses of Stories and of History
CHAPTER 1. Precolonial Stories/ Precolonial Histories: Events and Nonevents in Wappo History
CHAPTER 2. Stories of Settler-Colonizers, and of the Colonized
Source Break: Bear Flag Narratives
CHAPTER 3. The Bear Flag Incident
CHAPTER 4. Stories and Histories of Women and Violence in the Colonial North
Source Break: The White Mind
CHAPTER 5. Mobilizing Linear Narratives
Source Break: Civilized Man
CHAPTER 6. Raced Bodies in White Spaces
CHAPTER 7. Conclusion
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Source Break: Bear Flag Narratives
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Source Break: The White Mind
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

“this land was mexican once”

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chicana matters series, deena j. gonzález and antonia castañeda, editors

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Histories of

“T h is L a n d Wa s M e x ic a n Onc e”

Resistance from Northern California

by linda heidenreich

u ni v ersit y of tex as pr ess Austin

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Copyright © 2007 by Linda Heidenreich All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2007 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heidenreich, Linda, 1964– This land was Mexican once : histories of resistance from Northern California / by Linda Heidenreich.—1st ed. p. cm. — (Chicana matters series) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-292-71633-9 (cl. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-292-71634-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Napa County (Calif.)—Historiography. 2. Napa County (Calif.)— History—Anecdotes. 3. Mexican Americans—California—Napa County—History—Anecdotes. 4. Wappo Indians—California—Napa County—History—Anecdotes. 5. Women—California—Napa County—History—Anecdotes. 6. Immigrants—California—Napa County—History—Anecdotes. 7. Government, Resistance to—Cal ifor nia—Napa County—History—Anecdotes. 8. Napa County (Calif.) —Social conditions—Anecdotes. 9. Napa County (Calif.)—Race relations—Anecdotes. I. Title. f868.n2h45 2007 979.4⬘19—dc22 2007006355

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In gratitude To my mother, Dolores D. Heidenreich And to the B.V.M.

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Con t e n t s

preface

xi

introduction

1

Chapter 1

precolonial stories/precolonial histories

15

Chapter 2

stories of settler-colonizers, and of the colonized source break: bear flag narr atives

40 72

Chapter 3

the bear flag incident

75

Chapter 4

stories and histories of women and violence in the colonial north source break: the white mind

93 112

Chapter 5

mobilizing linear narr atives source break: civilized man

116 140

Chapter 6

r aced bodies in white spaces

142

Chapter 7

conclusion

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contents

173

notes

223

bibliogr aphy

243

index

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I l lus t r at ions a n d Ta bl e s

Illustrations r acial categorization, married couples, san fr ancisco, 1790 Photograph 4.1 maría higuer a juárez Photograph 5.1 miss washburn’s room, centr al school Photograph 6.1 chinese family in front of temple Photograph 6.2 st. helena, chinatown Figure 2.1

50 98 121 160 161

Tables r acial categorization, san fr ancisco presidio, 1790 Table 2.2 r acial categorization, san fr ancisco region, 1786 Table 6.1 california population 1850 to 1870 Table 2.1

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Pr e fac e

Among the students of Beatrice Pita, there is a saying that all history is really me story, and so it goes. This me story is very much about the contradictions of a small American town in the mid-twentieth century. The text itself traces the histories of a much earlier time, but the questions it addresses originated in the twentieth century, in the gut of a young mixed Euro-Latina girl in “Down-Valley Napa.” The questions that we encounter in our childhoods resonate throughout this nation-state, and so we re-encounter them in our graduate studies, in our jobs, and, for those of us from bi-national families, in other countries having strong ties to the United States. As will be discussed in detail in the Introduction to this book, Napa has a very complicated past. Its Indigenous history can be traced back for thousands of years; Mexican culture dominated the region for a large portion of the nineteenth century. By the time that the United States invaded in 1846, Napa held a richly layered history, and that history had to be subjugated in order for the white supremacist order of the twentieth century to be established and normalized. As young people, growing up in Napa, we seldom questioned the order of things. As an adult, I question why it was that we could not fi nd the tools to do so. And so this book is very much about asking uncomfortable questions about the histories of small-town America, but also about the ways that social systems are established and normalized throughout the nation-state and through the use of history. The text attempts to de-stabilize white supremacist narratives; and so it is also about recentering Wappo histories, Chicana and Chicano histories, and immigrant histories. In the course of writing the text, my partner often teased that I would become “the dirty girl” of the Napa Valley. Perhaps so. But as this country becomes increasingly diverse, there are more and more people who are raising similar questions, and more and more people attempting to write decolonial histories. If we are ever to successfully dismantle white supremacy and its cousin, imperialist militarism,

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we have to address awkward questions. And when we encounter “dirty” answers, we really do need to speak them. In this text you will find many rich histories along with quite a few dirty answers—this is the stuff of nation building, and it is also the stuff of resistance—layer upon layer of subjugated history, waiting to be excavated, breathe life into people’s movements, and inspire new generations to imagine different futures. This text builds upon the work of another generation of interdisciplinary, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist scholars. Throughout the text you will hear the voices and influence of Alexander Saxton, Antonia Castañeda, Emma Pérez, Quintard Taylor, Prasenjit Duara, and other scholar/activists who shifted paradigms and made it possible for my generation of historians to do the work that we are doing today. I would like to send out a very loud thank you to friends, mentors, and institutions who helped me survive while researching, drafting, and revising this manuscript. But first, I thank the institution that made it possible for me to imagine myself as a historian: San Francisco State University. Year after year, our state schools provide opportunities for upward mobility to young people from working families. At San Francisco State, Barbara Loomis mentored us, taught us the basics of applying to graduate school, critiqued our work, supported our projects, and had an unabashed faith in our potential. I am indebted to my dissertation committee, David Gutiérrez, Ramón Gutiérrez, Takashi Fujitani, Jorge Huerta, and Rosaura Sánchez, for their help in completing this project and, equally important, because their pedagogy and commitment to social change taught me that academics can make a difference beyond the classroom. I extend a special thanks to my co-chairs, to Ramón Gutiérrez and David Gutiérrez, who continued to critique proposals and articles long after I flew the coop. Thanks to Delfino Rangel and Gregory Rodriguez for their brothering and for teaching me basic survival skills for academe. Thank you to Natalie Ring, Démian Pritchard, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz, and Bárbara Reyes for their friendship and collegiality while I was researching and developing this text; they continue to be an important support in all my work. At Washington State University, José Alamillo, friend and colleague, was an incredible support; graduate students Jody Pepion, Jennifer Mata, Luzviminda Carpenter, and Petra Guerra kept me honest in my writing and in my activism (two great tastes that go great together). The National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies provided critical support throughout my academic career—I am particularly grateful to

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Julia Curry Rodriguez and Kathy Blackmere Reyes for their ongoing support not only of myself but of young Chicana/o scholars in general. NACCS provided spaces for me to introduce my work and develop new ideas, as well as important emotional support for me as a junior scholar. Two writing workshops were also essential to developing many of the basic concepts you will encounter in this text: the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council sponsored a workshop for Migration fellows in 2001, and that same year, the History Department at the University of Texas, Houston, held a workshop for junior historians gendering Chicana/o histories. Donna Gabaccia, from that first workshop, patiently mentored material on citizenship and education into publishable work. In Sacramento, Lorena Marquez and Francisco Martinez extended their hospitality to me and created a wonderful home-away-from-home while I labored at the California State Archives. In Napa, León García took time out of his busy schedule to discuss the project with me and to point me in the direction of local resources. Earl Couey, Wappo tribal consultant and historian, took time out of his schedule to help with chapters on Napa’s Indigenous histories and to review an earlier version of Chapter One. The people at the Napa County Records Office made me feel at home while reading over decades of death and marriage records. The Bancroft Library provided critical resources. The Napa County Historical Society was a critical aid to completing this project. Their volunteers, especially Floyd Stone, who graciously shared his own research with me, were generous with their time and welcoming with their hospitality. Deena González and Antonia Castañeda have been an incredible support throughout the project. From the time that I was a graduate student learning to produce conference papers, they patiently looked at bits and pieces of the project. When the pieces eventually became a manuscript, Antonia mustered the patience of Job and critiqued the text once again. Both historians have helped pave the way for future generations of scholars, not only by their scholarship, but by their untiring commitment to mentoring and to community. Finally, the editors at the University of Texas Press provided critical input and guidance through the editing and production process. The research for “This Land Was Mexican Once” was assisted by a grant from the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council and with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as a generous grant from the UC MEXUS Foundation. A writing grant from the University of California at San Diego allowed me

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to complete the early draft. A completion grant from Washington State University allowed me to return to Napa to locate sources for the later iteration of the work. While money may be the root of all evil, it is also a critical part of successful research projects. Portions of Chapters Three and Five build on an earlier article published in the Journal of American Ethnic History. An earlier version of Chapter Four appeared in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. Thanks to Transaction Publishers and to Aztlán for permission to use this material. Finally, I could not have done this without my family. To the dead, my grandmother “Chicki,” Mariana Alcazar, and my Uncle Armando, who taught me to be proud of my family and our histories, I am forever indebted. As well, I remain indebted to the living: to my brother George and his family; to my mother, Dolores Heidenreich, for her faith in me; and to Karen Gallaghar, compañera de mi vida, for her patience in reading the drafts, for her patience with me, and for the joy she takes in playing “stump the Ph.D.” Linda Heidenreich Pullman, Washington 2005

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i n t roduc t ion: use s of s t or i e s a n d of h is t ory

During the summer of 2004, I went home to Napa to spend time with my family. One morning, while my mother was at work, I went out front to water the yard and noticed our neighbor also watering her yard. Like so many neighbors in Napa, we hollered a hello to each other and then moved in closer to visit, all the while watering our respective yards—perhaps a bit too much and a bit too unevenly, but the visiting was as important as the watering. We caught up on family stories, and then she asked, “So what are you doing? ” I paused, bridged the gap in my own mind between home and academe, growing up in the socioeconomic margins of Napa and writing about Napa from the middleclass comforts of a research institution, and then replied, “I’m writing a book about Napa.” Our conversation pulled me back to my early years in graduate school: my rage at the white educational system, which, I felt, was suffocating me; my rage at the inequalities that were normalized in my formative years and in academe; the questions that drove my early research. “What kind of book? ” she asked. My response was not eloquent: “I guess, well what I really wanted to figure out . . . was how things got to be so messed up . . . I mean, when we were growing up, things were just really messed up in Napa.” She laughed and then said, “They still are.” This text is an analysis of “how things got to be so messed up” at both a local and a national level, and about how the inequalities constructed and experienced at a national level are in dialogic relation with the local. Small-town America is central to understanding the U.S. nation-state. Over the past eight years that it took me to research and write this book, I learned that some people use history, like culture, to garner power for themselves. Others use history to disrupt exploitative power structures in the modern nation-state and to challenge those people who have used history as part of a politics of domination. To ignore this very basic power dynamic is to ignore the important role that stories and histories play in creating the social structures within which we all live. Every

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week, in school classrooms in small towns across America, children listen to stories about who they are, who their “founding fathers” are, and what it means to be “American.” Many of their parents read similar stories in newspapers or listen to them on the television. These basic stories, told at both a national and a local level, are the stuff that nation building is made of. And so “This Land Was Mexican Once” is about these local and national stories and how national identities are created, not only by politicians and national literary figures, but in the local press of small-town America and in public school classrooms. It is a story about the county of Napa, California, its histories, and the ways that dominant groups used stories and histories to garner power for themselves as residents of Napa and citizens of the United States. It is a story about the “Colonial North.” Today, it is possible to write a raced and gendered history of the Colonial North because of the many historiographic tools that earlier generations of historians, especially Chicana historians, provide us. The term colonial itself took on new political meanings in the 1970s, when Rodolfo Acuña, heavily influenced by third world writers such as Alfred Memmi and Frantz Fanon, argued that Chicanas/os are also colonized people. Building on the work of such revolutionary writers, he reinscribed the word colonial so that, for Chicana/o scholars, it no longer merely signified the relationship of colonial settlements to the metropol, but instead was a term laden with power politics describing a necessarily exploitative relationship between colonizer and colonized.1 Emma Pérez breathed new life into the term when she called on Chicana/o historians to recognize that we are not writing in a postcolonial world, and that the very frames with which we write are rooted in our colonial past. This project is about the colonial past, then, not because it is restricted to histories prior to 1821—it is not—but because the arrival of the Spanish in Alta California opened a period of colonization against the Indigenous peoples of the area that continues, in the form of U.S. federal practices, today.2 In claiming Northern California as a colonial space, this work explicitly builds upon the field of Chicana/o history and places itself in this larger body of work, which acknowledges that California “was Mexican once, was Indian always . . . And will be again.” 3 Such histories reject the origin histories of “the West”—tales and scholarly work that tell stories of rugged individuals marching from the east coast and into Greater Mexico/the U.S. West, bringing civilization with them.4 Instead, it maps the violence Euro-Americans mobilized in taking the space from the Indigenous and mestizo people who preceded them to

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the area, and excavates the histories the colonizers attempted to erase.5 When Acuña, writing in the 1970s, excavated the colonizing histories of the United States in the Southwest and declared it “occupied,” he was part of a larger Chicano movement, and part of a larger movement of Chicana/o scholars who were reclaiming space and disrupting a racist historiography that effectively erased and distorted three hundred years of mestizo history. Mario T. García, Albert Camarillo, and Adelaida del Castillo were among those leading this reclamation, as were the graduate students and faculty who founded organizations such as the National Association of Chicano Studies.6 “This Land Was Mexican Once” also enters into dialogue with a new school of thought represented by the work of historians and interdisciplinary scholars who attempt to create a “fundamental reassessment of the old order of things,” who map out the power relations that produce social inequalities, and who interrogate the role of academic disciplines within larger social systems.7 These new interpretations of the past interrogate the field and function of history and problematize the very tools and training historians bring to their sources. In doing so, they imagine and create new ways of using history. Thus historian Chris Wilson, in his landmark study of Santa Fe, interrogated the ways in which both history and what he called “historical amnesia” were tools that local politicians and many white residents of Santa Fe used to create a fantasy past that disguised the racial and ethnic tensions at the very base of Santa Fe society.8 He explicitly addressed the function of historical narrative in his own project and argued, history is not something neutral or ever completely objective, but rather is a subjective re-telling based on a selection and ordering of a small portion of the facts. . . . It follows that this book is a selective interpretation of history, shaped by my sense of what questions are important, and, to the extent that it may be found interesting or useful to others, by the issues and concerns of this era.9

He produced a history containing textual disruptions, where chapters were followed by and interrupted with “interludes,” or non-chapters, laden with artifacts of Santa Fe, which both contributed to and disrupted his narrative. The text itself and its form became part of the larger narrative and argument. Similarly, historian Prasenjit Duara argued that Western linear narratives played a critical role in creating modern social structures and social inequalities, and developed the idea of bifurcated histories to

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demonstrate how historians can recover “counter-memories” and thus challenge linear histories and mythologies of a stable nation-state. Building on the work of Paul Ricoeur, he argued that “historical time is a series of infi nite nows.” The contestedness of history, and the infi nite number of “nows” present in any one time, have traditionally been masked by linear narratives.10 Such narratives, rooted in Enlightenment teachings of progress, give the dominant order a façade of stability.11 For Duara, to write a bifurcated history is to write a history that recovers countermemories while demonstrating ways in which the past was transmitted to the present.12 Finally, this book directly builds upon the work of those scholars who mapped connections between the local and the national. This includes historians such as John Bodnar, who demonstrated that, because local traditions are not built in a vacuum, it is important to study them in relation to the nation.13 And it includes the work of historians such as Albert Camarillo, Ricardo Romo, Antonia Castañeda, and Deena González, who studied displacement and resistance in the specific spaces of Santa Bárbara, Los Angeles, Alta California, and Santa Fe, thus demonstrating the importance of the local to the national within the historical phenomenon of displacement and community resistance. It was the more recent work of Castañeda and González, as will be discussed below, which demonstrated that such resistance is not only local and national, but also gendered.14 “This Land Was Mexican Once,” then, enters into dialogue with a new generation of writers that is rethinking the ways in which we look at the past. It attempts to problematize linear narratives and experiment with new models of writing. Building on the work of all these scholars, it asks, “What does it mean to write history? ” and “How do we use histories and stories to construct the present? ” and “What might happen to the next generation of young people growing up in Napa and growing up in Greater Mexico/the U.S. West, if we were to learn how, really learn how, to tell a different kind of story? ”

napa as a significant location in the history of greater mexico/the u.s. west Napa County lies just forty miles northeast of San Francisco and seventy miles southwest of Sacramento. Due to its rich soil, its ample flora and fauna, and its proximity to the San Francisco Bay, over the last two hundred years, Napa has attracted large numbers of migrants and

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immigrants—migrants who moved back and forth from one home place to another, often within the space of Napa itself, and immigrants who came to Napa to create homes and/or profit in a new place.15 Because of this, immigration and other historical trends found throughout the U.S. West are writ large in the area now called Napa County. Such a pattern can be seen from the earliest histories of Wappo- and Patwinspeaking people in the region, well into the twentieth century, when various groups of immigrants struggled for political and social power. As with the rest of what is now California, a number of Indigenous communities populated the region before the arrival of Spanish colonizers. An extensive trade network tied the people living in the area to other communities throughout what is now called California, and also tied Napa to the histories of people beyond its valleys. With the arrival of Spanish colonizers and, later, Mexican settlers in the region, Napa’s history did not deviate from the history of what is now Greater Mexico/the U.S. West, but rather was reflective of it. In 1824 a mission was built in the Sonoma Valley, to the immediate west of Napa County. Both Wappo- and Patwin-speaking people from Napa came to the Sonoma mission. Those who refused to cooperate with the colonizers were attacked and subdued by soldiers from Sonoma’s presidio. Consequently, the California Indians of the area now called Napa County entered into a series of uneven exchanges of power and culture with Napa’s and Sonoma’s Californios. Later, at the close of the Mexican era, with the U.S. invasion, Napa was once again a site of confl ict, with Mariano Guadalupe and Salvador Vallejo taken as prisoners from the Sonoma presidio, while the Osos, men who rallied around John Frémont in the war against Mexico, rode through Napa robbing ranchos and threatening women, at times assaulting them. As will be discussed in Chapter Four, some women met these threats with like threats of violence; others did not have the means with which to protect themselves. Following the annexation of Napa and California to the United States, immigration patterns to Napa continued to reflect larger immigration patterns throughout the state. As Robert R. Alvarez argued in Familia, Mexican miners continued to migrate and to immigrate north to work following the U.S. invasion.16 In Napa this pattern was repeated throughout the late nineteenth century with the rise of quicksilver mines in the area. From the 1860s through the 1880s, Chinese immigrants also came to the area to work in the mines, in agriculture, and in other industries. By the twentieth century, Napa had established patterns of migration and immigration similar to those throughout the West.

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Napa, then, is a location where larger trends throughout Greater Mexico can be studied in detail, not only in the ways in which different waves of immigration changed the region, but also in the ways in which the different histories that people construct continue to influence a particular place. In Napa, Indigenous histories, Californiana/o histories, Euro-American histories, and Chinese and Mexican immigrant histories co-exist. At times they overlap and/or conflict with each other. But they always co-exist. Looking at a small but centrally located place such as Napa allows me to begin to study how such histories are constructed, and how people often make use of histories. In addition, the study of Napa in relation to the nation raises questions regarding the relation of the local to the national in constructing national identities. Napa, then, is an ideal site to study uses of history in the U.S. West and the larger nation-state.

ethnic identities and the importance of specificity in writing the past The complexity of ethnic identities and labels in the United States continues to pose a challenge to scholars who believe that the power to name and to name oneself is an important part of constructing the social relations within which we function. These challenges come in part because identity itself often changes with changing historical circumstances.17 Throughout this study, I use specific labels to identify both ethnic and racialized minorities, and the dominant majority. My goal is to be as specific as possible when discussing the various players whose histories constructed Napa County and the greater U.S. West. The earliest histories of Napa pose the greatest challenge for this kind of naming. Often, for these communities, it was late nineteenthand early twentieth-century anthropologists, trained in ethnocentric centers of learning, who first wrote down their stories and histories; and it is the inadequate language developed by them that continues to frame much scholarship on early California history. When attempting to discuss early communities as a group, I often use the term Indigenous, to acknowledge them as “the first peoples of this hemisphere.” 18 When referring to Indigenous peoples in California I often use the broad umbrella term California Indian because their similar histories, as people who lived in a region first colonized by the Spanish and then by Euro-Americans, meant that their histories ultimately had much in common. Likewise, because they lived in a region rich with flora and

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fauna, California Indians, more so than people living further south or east on the continent, tended to form hunting and gathering societies. Thus, while California Indian remains a vague and amorphous term, it functions, in this project, to describe people who shared some common cultural traits in precolonization California, and whose histories often intersected during and after colonization due to their physicalgeographic locations. The use of language groups as ethnic labels for California Indians is both useful and problematic. As argued by anthropologist Randall Milliken, sometimes communities from different language groups held more in common with each other than with people who spoke the same language.19 Yet language played an important role in the organization of California Indian societies.20 For example, the baskets of Pomospeaking people, Wappo-speaking people, and the Coast Miwok all had similar traits. Yet among each of these different language groups, there are marked differences in weaving techniques, so that scholars of California Indian crafts and artwork can identify whether an artist is from a Wappo, Pomo, or Coast Miwok community by studying the artist’s basketry. This is because, throughout the Central California culture area, peoples within the same language group held aspects of material culture, such as basket weaving techniques and design, in common.21 In addition, throughout the Napa region, from precolonial times and into the early years of U.S. occupation, language divisions played a significant role in trade.22 For these reasons and because such labels are often used by California Indian groups themselves, I sometimes use these language categories.23 In Chapter Two, after colonizers from New Spain arrive in California, similar naming problems arise. There are a variety of identity labels that academics and other writers have used when writing about these immigrants.24 In addition, in this study, who such people are in relation to California Indians, in relation to each other, and in relation to EuroAmerican immigrants is different. Mexico became independent in 1821, which further complicates ethnic and national maps of nineteenthcentury California.25 Throughout this work, I have settled on the following rules for naming Spanish colonizers and their descendents in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century California. Those immigrants who arrived under Spanish rule, I call simply “Spanish,” or “Spanish colonizers.” Following the lead of historian Deena González, I call those arriving or living in California after 1821 “settler-colonizers,” thus acknowledging their very complicated socio-economic and political

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roles as both colonizers and colonized.26 For those colonizers and settlers who were raised in California, I also use the term by which they identified themselves, Californianas/os. Finally, in discussing the time after the U.S. invasion, when Mexican citizens continued to come to the area, now as immigrants, I refer to Californios and Mexican immigrants collectively as “Chicanas/os.” By this time, most Californios were socially and economically displaced; their social location, like that of the Mexican immigrants alongside of whom so many Californios lived and labored, was pushed to the margins of the U.S. nation-state. Following the rise of U.S. dominance in the region, Chinese immigrants came to Napa. I call these individuals immigrants for reasons articulated by historian Sucheng Chan.27 While some scholars who write of nineteenth-century Chinese immigration call such immigrants “sojourners,” such a label negates the experience of the Chinese as part of a larger story of U.S. immigration. In addition, it draws attention away from the fact that many Chinese immigrants left California, specifically Northern California and Napa County, not because they came as sojourners, but because Euro-Americans, through violence and threats of violence, forced them to leave.28 During the same time that Chinese immigrants established work communities in Napa, African Americans established successful networks within Napa and beyond. For African Americans in Napa and California, I sometimes use the label “African American,” as is most common in the early twenty-first century. At other times, especially when today’s labels are clearly anachronistic or inappropriate, I follow the lead of John W. Ravage and use the label Black.29 When I use the label Black, it is with an uppercase “B,” in the tradition of Critical Race Theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, who have demonstrated that Blacks, like Asians, share a common cultural history in the United States. Their commonalities derive, in part, from a shared history of exploitation; hence they also share a history of community liberation movements.30 Finally, what should I call the dominant population? While EuroAmericans were a diverse population throughout the nineteenth century, often they chose to downplay those differences, as when Thomas Hart Benton referred to white Americans as the “Celtic-Anglo-Saxon division” of the “Caucasian race.” 31 At times when they ignored their differences they referred to themselves as “pioneers” or “Americans,” thus benefiting from their white status without necessarily acknowledging that such a status existed.32 At other times, in the U.S. West in particular, white Americans overtly claimed racial superiority but did so by

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making loose use of terms such as Anglo-Saxon and Caucasian, and by using such terms interchangeably with the label American.33 Throughout this work I use the term Euro-American when writing of white nonHispanics. This is not a new term; both Rodolfo Acuña and Vicki Ruiz successfully deployed it to acknowledge the shared histories that such communities have in the United States and the ways in which those communities have often ignored their own differences for the common goal of white supremacy. In using the term instead of the more common Anglo-American, I am also acknowledging the way Irish immigrants, throughout Greater Mexico and in Napa in particular, often defi ned themselves as white in opposition to Mexican immigrants and Chinese immigrants. An example of this occurred in Napa in 1882 when Euro-American workers burned President Arthur in effigy for vetoing the Miller bill, which would have limited Chinese immigration. The workers who protested the veto included Irish immigrants and the descendents of Irish immigrants as well as other white non-Hispanics.34 In the fi nal chapters of this work, when Euro-Americans mobilized their constructed white identities to exclude racialized minorities from local and national resources, I sometimes label them as white, to acknowledge the power and resilience of their constructed racial identity. These then are the actors, the subjects who lived their lives and histories in the county of Napa. While finding the words to tell such histories is challenging and often problematic, the task of doing so remains important. As recently argued by postcolonial scholars, the ethnic and national maps within which we function are becoming increasingly complex. Care and specificity in studies of the past can aid us in understanding social systems in the present.35

mediated sources Among the primary sources I use to reconstruct the histories of Californios in the Napa area are testimonios, census records, and birth, death, and marriage records. And all of these sources are problematic. Census materials from the Spanish, Mexican, and American periods were used to create and control social categories as well as to map a population and/or document resources. Birth, death, and marriage records served a similar purpose. Yet government documents are also useful for these same reasons. Through them we can begin to discern the class and racial “common sense” of an era.36 They can tell us about social hierarchies by documenting where people lived, who they married, and how

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introduction

much property they owned. For the Spanish era, they can tell us who had access to literacy. Both Genaro Padilla and Rosaura Sánchez have discussed the problems of working with testimonios. In the 1870s, when Hubert Bancroft began collecting documents to write his voluminous History of California, he sent his assistants to interview the Californios so that he could include their information in his narrative and produce what he considered an objective history. Using the argument that their stories were an important part of California history, Enrique Cerruti, one of Bancroft’s assistants, was able to convince Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo to speak with him.37 While Cerruti’s appeal to Vallejo was not the hyperbolic plea that Bancroft later claimed, his respectful request and comportment won him the trust and friendship of the retired general.38 Vallejo later convinced other Californios to give their testimonios to Bancroft.39 Yet the Californios’ stories were not given directly to the public. The Californios dictated their stories, but it was Bancroft’s staff that wrote them down, filtering their words through a lens of Manifest Destiny and sometimes translating them from Spanish to English before any ink was put to paper.40 While Bancroft claimed to write as an objective historian, he believed that the United States was destined to own California, and referred to the Californio lifestyle as one where “to eat, to drink, to make love, to smoke, to dance, to ride, to sleep seemed the whole duty of man.” 41 For Bancroft, the California of the nineteenth century was a land in need of Yankee industriousness. Testimonios written down by Enrique Cerruti are among the primary documents available for studying nineteenth-century Napa. This includes those documents dictated to Cerruti by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Salvador Vallejo, and Rosalía Vallejo de Leese, as well as a collection of interviews with working-class Mexicanos that Cerruti collected under the title “Ramblings in California.” Whereas for Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s testimonio, the text is in Spanish, Cerruti translated Salvador Vallejo’s testimonio to English before writing it down. Likewise, Cerruti’s own subject position, as an employee of “the great historian,” is clearly presented in his opening to “Ramblings.” For Cerruti, Bancroft is “the great historian,” while he himself is a “literary gentleman” who makes a living writing for Bancroft and, through him, “the public.” 42 Yet these are sources available to us. In those few instances, such as with the Juárez family, when family papers are available with which to cross-check information from census materials and from testimonios, I

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11

have done so. But oftentimes the counter-narratives found within this volume are the product of the author’s building on the work of critical scholars before her, as she attempts to identify, interpret, and negotiate the dominant discourses embedded within her sources.

mapping the histories of napa county “This Land Was Mexican Once” maps a number of interwoven histories. It begins by mapping subordinated histories, specifically precolonial histories of Wappo-speaking people and other California Indian groups whose histories intersected with and influenced the inhabitants of the region now called Napa County. In Chapter One I argue that both the menstrual rooms and the sweat houses of Napa’s California Indians served as sites that were constitutive of and reflective of the larger social systems structuring Wappo societies. These were the sites that organized the gender-stratified communities of Wappo-speaking peoples as well as many of their neighbors. I examine the roles of economic and cultural exchange between Wappo-speaking communities and their neighbors to argue that from precolonial times Napa was tied to other histories beyond its valleys. Such histories not only influenced events in Napa, but also tied it to its future histories as part of the nation of first Mexico, and then the United States. Chapter Two focuses on the histories of Californios in what are today Napa and Sonoma counties. Here, because throughout the nineteenth century the histories of these two counties were intimately tied to one another, the chapter includes both histories in relation to each other. Under Mexican rule, the two counties were part of the same district—the district of Sonoma. Children from Napa and Sonoma attended school together, and their fathers fought side by side in antiIndian campaigns. The chapter begins with histories of the families who moved to the Napa-Sonoma area, and of their socio-cultural structures, including their constructions of race and gender roles. It then moves to Wappo and Patwin histories to show how the opportunities won by the Californios came at the explicit expense of the Indigenous peoples of the region. Chapter Two is also about violence. Recently, Chicana and Chicano scholars have begun to map social stratification, especially the function of violence in establishing and maintaining stratification in colonial societies.43 The historical landscape they are excavating demonstrates that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century California, colonizers viewed

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introduction

women from their own social class as needing protection against sexual violence at the same time that they used sexual violence to subdue Indigenous populations.44 In the history of Alta California, most sexual violence was directed against Indigenous women. Californio soldiers and priests raped native women, enslaved entire families, and exiled them to missions far from their native lands.45 In Napa, many of the Wappo, the people who resisted Spanish colonization most fiercely, were forcibly removed across the bay to Mission San Francisco Dolores.46 Chapter Three is my telling of the Bear Flag incident in the NapaSonoma region. Drawing heavily on the testimonios of Californios and Californianas, I look at the multi-layered conflicts that took place between these communities, California Indians, and Euro-American immigrants during the Bear Flag incident, and the shifts in power relations that took place following the invasion and the rise of EuroAmerican dominance. Central to these stories are acts of resistance, such as when a California Indian by the name of Sinao was able to take revenge on one of the invaders, and then flee the pueblo of Sonoma, never again to be seen by a white man. In Chapter Four I address the stories and histories of three nineteenth-century women whose lives and material circumstances were interdependent upon each other. The first story is about María Higuera Juárez, a landed Californiana; the second about the wife of Enrique Licaldo, a soldier serving under Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo; and the last about Isidora Filomena Solano, an Indigenous woman who became the wife of Sem Yeto, favored Suisun ally of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo.47 All three women lived and labored in the NapaSonoma area.48 And all three of these women, as well as their families, lived in what Cynthia Enloe has termed a “militarized society,” where their daily lives were shaped and influenced by the presence of presidios and soldiers, and where women provided the necessary labor to enable their spouses to engage in ongoing campaigns against the Indigenous peoples of the region.49 In this chapter I map the social relations that existed between women by examining three narratives by and/or about them from the time of the Bear Flag incident. I analyze the manner by which the status of some women was gained at the explicit expense of others. Following the example of historian Deena J. González, I utilize detail from a range of historical sources to interpret and envision the past and to bring Chicana and Indigenous women to the forefront of this history.50 The move to engender history, to “question and reevaluate extant sources,” and to “expand the sources [I] use to study nonwritten

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13

texts and other constructs of history” is, in part, a response to the call of historians, such as Antonia Castañeda, who are engaged in the task of engendering the past.51 Chapter Five examines the myths that some Euro-American immigrants created and used to present themselves as the legitimate possessors of Napa. Primary among these myths was the story of the Bear Flag incident, the time when Euro-American immigrants came into the Napa Valley and claimed the region for themselves. In the context of these white mythologies, I discuss how the victors used discourses of race and gender to belittle the claims that Napa’s other residents might make to the region. Many Euro-Americans who came to dominate the region used the English-language press to portray Californianas/os, California Indians, African Americans, Mexican immigrants, and Chinese immigrants as unworthy of participation in the governments of both Napa and the larger U.S. republic. In the process of doing so, they used a racist and sexist language that erased differences between these groups. At the same time, the public school textbooks in Napa, specifically McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, portrayed white schoolchildren as “American” schoolchildren, attributed American liberties to Puritan “forefathers,” and promulgated an ideology of Manifest Destiny among a generation of young Euro-Americans in the county and the larger U.S. West. Thus, by the close of Chapter Five, a linear history has emerged in Napa, one which erased the earlier interwoven stories of the county, at the same time that it paralleled national stories of Manifest Destiny and white supremacy. Raced Bodies in White Spaces, Chapter Six, examines immigration and life among racialized minorities in post-1848 Napa. Despite the white violence of the time, peoples of various racialized minorities continued to live in Napa. And Chinese immigrants in search of work opportunities joined the diverse populations that were already there. African American, Chinese immigrant, and Chicana/o communities were pushed and pulled into segregated areas of Napa. Yet these communities remained diverse in terms of class stratification. They also challenged racist narratives and racist social institutions in Napa. And so this chapter closes by examining the history and legacy of the Sam Kee laundry case and argues that, even in times of overwhelming racism and racial violence, subaltern communities often fi nd ways to fight back and challenge the systems within which they are compelled to live and work. Chapters are interspersed with source-breaks or “non-chapters,” comprised of primary source materials I believe are critical to understanding

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introduction

the socio-political climate of the times. The first non-chapter follows Chapter Two. It is in this narrative breach that I introduce EuroAmerican and Californiana/o narratives of the Bear Flag incident. The sources, like the sources throughout the other non-chapters of this work, are presented in the raw, with little framing and no interpretation, to provoke challenges to and alternative readings of my own interpretations located in the main body of the text. The second non-chapter follows Chapter Four and is a collection of Napa’s nineteenth-century newspaper articles and filler, intended to demonstrate the obstacles that racialized minorities faced in post-1848 California. The source-break thus sets the stage for Chapters Five and Six, which address the racism against which these communities struggled. The last non-chapter follows Chapter Five and contains the text from the Sam Kee decision—the not yet famous Chinese laundry case that struck down Napa’s anti-laundry ordinance. Such non-chapters may be disruptive, or even jolting. But then, so is history. “This Land Was Mexican Once” is a story about the very processes in which we engage when we write. Whether or not we engage in traditional, linear histories, or struggle to find alternatives that excavate subordinated histories, is not incidental but critical to the future of the field. This project, then, is part of a larger scholarly movement, initiated by historians, Chicana/o Studies, and postcolonial scholars, which challenges the very historical traditions in which so many of us were and are trained, and creates new alternatives to envisioning our pasts and futures.

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pr e col on i a l s t or i e s / pr e col on i a l h is t or i e s: e v e n t s a n d non e v e n t s i n wa ppo h is t ory

Chapter One

Wappo peoples, on whom this chapter focuses, may have moved to the Napa area as long as eight thousand years ago. Throughout the Spanish and later Mexican era they stood in direct confrontation with Spanish colonizers and Mexican settlers as they struggled to survive within a violent world of confl ict and accelerated change. During the U.S. invasion and its aftermath they developed new strategies to survive under Euro-American dominance.1 While skyrocketing property values made it impractical for anybody on the Wappo tribal roll to live in Napa in the late twentieth century, some families continued to live in neighboring counties such as Santa Rosa. To date, when anthropologists from neighboring universities follow their profession’s protocol, they ask a descendent of Napa’s Wappo inhabitants, now living in Santa Rosa, to come observe their excavations.2 The excavation of Napa’s Wappo histories poses challenges to historians—challenges that are rooted in Napa’s colonial past. In Napa, the colonial begins with Spanish colonization, but does not end with Mexican independence from the empire. Instead it changes form and continues into the Mexican era, the U.S. invasion, and Napa’s history as part of the United States. Layer upon layer of colonization obscure the past, until all that is possible is a problematized sketch, educated deductions of what histories might have preceded the first waves of colonizers to the region. The first wave of colonization in the region demonstrates the relationship between colonization and history, the failure of colonizers to see the people they encounter and the destruction/subordination of precolonial histories. The socio-economic and political domination Spanish colonizers practiced throughout California is an example of this. Trained in the Roman Catholic belief that Catholicism was the one true faith, Franciscan friars came to Alta California and built missions where they baptized California Indians: the Indigenous peoples then received mandatory religious instruction and performed forced

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labor at the dictates of the padres. Through the mission system the friars denigrated the religious practices of California Indians, disrupted family structures and support systems, and destroyed trade networks. This is not to say that all Spaniards were blind to the people and culture they encountered. As Eduardo Galeano argued in “El descubrimiento que todavía no fue,” there were Spaniards, even in the sixteenth century, who saw that Indigenous peoples had their own valued culture and history.3 Instead, it is to say that the Spanish colonizers who came to Central California came to the area with a belief system that divided the world into good and evil, God and Satan, civilized and uncivilized. Such a conception of the world did not allow them to respect California Indian lifeways or history as equal to their own.4 The blindness of the friars to the culture and history of the California Indians was essential to their colonization. For as earlier postcolonial scholars have argued, the history of the colonized performs the critical task of changing their imagined future. With access to precolonial histories, people can imagine other futures for themselves in which the colonizers have no place.5 The erasure of subaltern histories, then, is not incidental but a fundamental part of colonizing processes. For the historian, the role of history in colonization processes is critical because we work within a colonial legacy: these processes do not stop in colonial history but continue to influence the future; the “work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance.” 6 In United States history, this process is evident in the very writing of history, where previous attempts at subordination and colonization produced a paucity of materials from which a historian might study subordinated pasts, at the same time that this paucity pushed (and pushes) historians toward replicating processes of erasure practiced by colonizers and historians before them. As argued by historian Emma Pérez, we do not live in a postcolonial world. The violence of the colonial past and present continues to affect our work, influencing our lives, texts, and families. The solution to writing decolonial histories lies not in denying the colonial past, but in finding our own voices and the voices of other subaltern peoples in those texts that survived and continue to survive colonial violence. Chicana historians Emma Pérez and Deena Gonzalez have already created maps to aid scholars in accomplishing this task. As argued by Pérez, as scholars we need to shift our own gaze to that space from which the subaltern speaks.7 To write the early histories of Wappo peoples, then, the texts to which we turn are early twentieth-century interviews with

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anthropologists, stories, and physical artifacts—maps and drawings of the places where people lived and worked and worshiped. Critical works by Indigenous scholars such as Devon Abbot Mihesuah and Greg Sarris further problematize any works by non-native scholars. Mihesuah points out that non-native scholars continue to make a living off native histories and stories even when their work misrepresents native peoples. With the abundance of anthropological and history works that use but do not represent Indigenous peoples, she argues, there is no reason to write more of the same. In the twenty-first century, any works produced about Indigenous people need to be of use to Indigenous communities.8 Similarly, Greg Sarris has criticized the ways that universitytrained anthropologists use the stories of Indigenous peoples, at times out of context, like exotic museum pieces, or without respect, asking inappropriate questions because they have not yet learned to listen.9 In order to address these problems in the context of the Napas, I have engaged in a dialogue with Earl Couey, the Wappo Tribal Consultant, in an attempt to ensure that the stories I see and hear when I look to the Napa region “do no harm.” Professor Couey is also a linguist and a local historian, and I deeply benefited from my conversations with him. This is reflected in the notes throughout this chapter. Much of my methodology remains either white or Chicana, in part because this is my background, and so these tools make sense to me when I try to understand the past. Thus the work of Raymond Fogelson, Rosaura Sánchez, Emma Pérez, Michel Foucault, and Deena González also influences this text. Writing in 1989, Raymond Fogelson argued that what many historians might see as non-events were in fact critical to understanding Indigenous histories. Just as historians of the Annales school stressed the importance of understanding social structures and economic systems—what Fernand Braudel called the “structure” or “long-term realities” of history—so historians and ethnohistorians could write better history by learning and writing more about Indigenous ritual and ceremony, philosophies, and narratives. This includes oral histories and stories passed down over the centuries—acknowledging that stories and events in the present remain connected to the past.10 Such an approach to Indigenous history is critical to changing the way that American history is understood, because most history is uneventful. People eat, labor, rest, and so on. While their lives are punctuated by the deaths of political and religious leaders, and sometimes wars or natural disasters, most of their lives are structured by slow changes and by continuity. Writing Chicana histories, it is Deena González who excavated specific women’s texts from

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colonial and precolonial pasts. Excavating the social histories of SpanishMexican women before and after the U.S. invasion of Santa Fé, she demonstrated how women produced and lived resistance in their everyday lives. González engaged in a paper chase through birth, death, and marriage records, to excavate the stories and histories of precolonial lives.11 In relation to the work of Fogelson and González, Michel Foucault proposed some very basic ways to study social structures. Recently, Rosaura Sánchez utilized his theory of heterotopias as sites of crisis to map out power relations and the political economy of nineteenthcentury Californio society. Here, I appropriate this model and use it to study menstrual huts and sweat houses in precolonial California.12 In this chapter I sketch the events and non-events, spaces and language of early Wappo history because I believe it is impossible to understand the social and economic systems that now dominate the region without understanding Napa’s early past. I do this by first placing Napa in the larger context of precolonial California Indian cultures and mapping out some of the relations between Wappo-speaking communities in Napa and their neighbors. I then map out specific spaces and socioeconomic institutions among the Wappo. Finally, I look at the history of a cross-cultural event in Central California—Sir Francis Drake’s arrival at the bay later named after him—as an example of early exchanges that took place between Central California Indians and non-Indigenous peoples prior to the arrival of Spanish missionaries. Drake’s visit further demonstrates the location of Napa’s Wappo communities as part of a larger network of Central California Indians whose histories continued to intersect long after the arrival of European colonizers in the region.

california lifeways Precolonial California was a place of varied cultures. While most communities were hunting and gathering societies, technology, culture, and social structure varied from region to region, with each community or group of communities strongly influenced by environmental factors. Within this milieu of cultures is the area anthropologists call Central California, and within Central California, the place now called Napa County. In the early twentieth century, in an attempt to impose order on the diversity that he saw throughout California, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber divided California into six geographic-cultural areas: Northwest, Northeast, Central, Great Basin, Southern, and Colorado River.

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In particular, Kroeber studied how cultural attributes such as architecture, canoes, and dress varied greatly from region to region. For example, Northwestern peoples developed a culture adapted to a rain forest environment. They settled along riverbanks and the ocean coast and built canoes and houses from the trees they felled. Their canoes were swift and capable of navigating large bodies of water—most probably the best-built canoes in precolonial California. While sharing similar cultural traits with peoples to their west, people who settled in the Northeast tended to cover their sweat houses with hides, and their canoes were not capable of navigating larger bodies of water like those of the Northwestern peoples. In marked contrast to these, and to most California Indians, communities in the Great Basin area were nomadic, living in desert areas where food sources were scarcer than in other regions; thus, they were compelled to move from food source to food source as they became available.13 While Kroeber’s categorization is problematic, imposing an order from outside of the given social system, it remains useful, demonstrating many of the differences that characterized California’s Indigenous peoples. It is also useful because the basic elements of which Kroeber writes—oak trees and willows, for example—played critical roles in the pre- and postcolonial histories of Indigenous peoples throughout the Central California area. Thus, the Wappo-speaking communities of Napa developed a culture unique to their region. An abundance of oak and willow trees gave rise to a society where acorns were the dietary staple, and residences were made from bent willow poles and brush. The abundance and importance of acorns throughout the region would contribute to women’s status within an economy where gathering was an essential community resource.14 While different ecological factors strongly influenced diversity among the precolonial peoples of California, generations of migration and cultural exchange among different villages and home sites gave rise to similarities among communities throughout Central California. California peoples were territorial, but at the same time, the necessity and desire for trade goods such as obsidian, flint, beads, and magnesite encouraged trade with villages outside of their own territories.15 Such trade, along with shared environmental factors, meant that California Indians not only shared a similar hunting and gathering culture, but also many other socio-cultural traits. The size of California Indian villages was small. Many had as few as thirty inhabitants, perhaps contributing to the tendency of California

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peoples to practice exogamous marriage and to the lack of a rigid political hierarchy among their communities. Even when food sources were abundant, rather than permanently expanding a village, the numbers of people who had gathered in any one area would break into small communities of equal size, each with a claim to a portion of the territory. This tendency would be reversed with the arrival of Spanish missionaries in California.16 A lack of political hierarchy was reflected both in landownership and in community leadership. While the position of chief was often hereditary, Indigenous chiefs throughout California ruled by consent; their authority was rooted in their reputation for making good decisions, and those decisions were usually made through consultation with other adults.17 In addition, while most of the political leaders of whom early anthropologists wrote were male, recent scholarly work, taking advantage of Indigenous oral histories and traditions, indicates that leadership was shared by women who held positions as community prophets and dance leaders.18 Finally, while individuals owned personal property such as tools and jewelry, land, a powerful resource, was owned in common.19 Throughout Central California, peoples owned land communally, with each community claiming an area marked by watershed ridges and stream drainages. Migration to locate seasonal food sources, or for health and sanitation reasons, occurred within a community’s territory. Unless a community was willing to risk war, its members traveled into other territories only for purposes of trade, or to celebrate dances and holidays when invited by neighboring peoples. When wars did occur, they were usually territorial disputes, or retribution for specific injuries against a member of a community. When a member of one community was injured by an outsider, “arms were resorted to and an elaborate ritual followed. The actual fighting was negligible, with perhaps half a dozen causalities, or even none at all.” 20 At stake was the reputation of the community, and therefore the fighting ceased once the offending community had been shamed or the person responsible for the injury was himself injured or killed.21

the mishewal, meyahkmah, and mutistul peoples of napa and sonoma counties In Napa, peoples that became known as Wappo dominated the area until the arrival of the Spanish in Central California. The earliest histories that we have for Napa are those of the Meyahkmah and Mutistul

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peoples. Further north and west, in what are now called Lake and Sonoma counties, there was a related community called the Mishewal.22 These peoples came to be called Wappo through a series of specific historical processes. When the Spanish came to the Napa area, they were impressed by both the beauty and the valor of the local Indigenous peoples, and so called them “Guapo.” 23 When Euro-Americans immigrated to the region, they heard the Spanish speakers referring to local peoples as guapo, thought they were saying “Wappo,” and so called them Wappo.24 Finally, when at the turn of the century linguists and anthropologists began to study the history of California Indians, they placed these same communities in a single language sub-group and employed the Euro-American name for them: Wappo.25 The history of Wappo-speaking people in Napa County probably goes back at least 8,000 years. It was at that time that Yukian speakers controlled most of the north coast ranges of the Central California culture area. Most modern linguists and anthropologists hold that the Wappo language belongs to the Yukian language family. Wappo speakers, according to this version of history, were cut off from other Yukian speakers anywhere from 1,500 to 3,300 years ago, when the Pomo expanded southward into the present-day Sonoma and Napa counties. The Wappo later regained control of some of their territories, but remained separated from other Yukian speakers by the Pomo.26 By the time of Spanish colonization in Napa, then, Wappo-speaking peoples were the dominant group in the area. They lived in the northern part of Napa and remained in contact with the Pomo and the Coast Miwok, their immediate neighbors. The Pomo lived to the immediate north and west of Napa, where the Wappo went to fish on an annual basis. The Coast Miwok, located to the southwest of Napa, often traveled to the same place to harvest clams and other food sources. As Central California Indians, these communities shared many traits, due not only to environmental factors, but also to travel, trade, and shared resources. A brief discussion of Wappo trade will further illustrate this point. The location of the Wappo between the Coast Miwok and Pomo, in whose territories they could obtain clamshells, and peoples who did not have immediate access to such sources, placed them in an economically advantageous position. Once they harvested the shells from Bodega Bay, or purchased them from the neighboring Pomo, Wappo people worked them into flat round beads and drilled their centers. Clamshell beads were a currency among Central California peoples, and the value of the beads, like the value of other currencies, increased with scarcity; hence

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the Wappo could charge inland peoples a higher price for clamshells and clamshell products than they themselves had to pay. Disks could be used to buy most things—for example, awls, carrying baskets, split-stick dice, and arrows.27 The shells traded by the Wappo were also used for ornamentation on baskets, clothing, and jewelry. Wappo peoples traded for tule mats from the Pomo in the Lake County area and magnesite cylinders from the Pomo of Sulpher Bank. From Indigenous peoples as far north as Colusa, they traded for yellowhammer headbands and sinew-backed bows.28 Wappo control of an obsidian quarry located at Glass Mountain, on what is now the Silverado Trail in Napa County, also contributed to material trade and cultural exchange between the Wappo and other peoples. Obsidian was a valued commodity not only among Wappospeaking people, but among their neighbors who lacked obsidian sources within their own territories. And so, as with clamshells, the Wappo developed a trade network for obsidian. Like clamshells as well, obsidian was worth much more when sold as a finished product than as a raw material. And so the Wappo organized a basic industry at Glass Mountain, where obsidian was broken into specific sizes and forms at work sites before bringing it back to the village. Once at the home site a more highly skilled knapper finished the pieces into arrowheads and tools. Like so many other activities in Wappo life, arrow making was tied to ritual, and the knapper rubbed the arrow point with angelica before it was ready for use or sale.29 Due to their proximity to raw materials such as clamshells and obsidian, then, Wappo-speaking peoples developed local industries where skilled craftsmen worked obsidian, and skilled craftspeople, most probably women and men, worked clamshells into currency.30 Trade networks were facilitated by shared cultural traits among Central California communities; at the same time, ongoing trade between people from various language groups encouraged continuing cultural exchange, thus contributing to further commonalities in culture, gender roles, and economic systems throughout the Central California region. While trade for magnesite and other goods sometimes brought the Wappo into contact with peoples from other communities and language groups, the quest for seafood and freshwater food also took them on long excursions beyond their immediate territories. Each year the Wappo traveled through Pomo and Miwok territory to fish and gather food at the coast. Men, women, and children traveled together, packing pinole, a dry meal of roasted seeds, to eat on the two-day journey. Once there, they gathered abalone, clams, crabs, mussels, and seaweed. They

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made similar trips to Clear Lake in the spring and the summer, where a variety of fresh water fish were caught, preserved, and carried back to the village/town.31 Long before the arrival of Spanish colonizers in the Napa area, then, Wappo-speaking peoples were part of a regional trade network. The basic economic and production unit was both family- and community-based, where the labor of the entire community was critical to the success of gathering expeditions. The destruction of both these units—first through the Spanish mission system, and later through Euro-American colonization—would prove devastating to California lifeways, family, and community health.32

gender divisions of labor in wappo communities While hunting and gathering societies need all adults to labor in order to maintain an ample food supply, among Wappo peoples the tasks performed by members of a community were determined by gender. Gender determined whether a person hunted large game, leeched acorns, or wove baskets. With these daily tasks, as well, ritual and restrictions surrounding women’s bodies played a central role in organizing how such tasks were accomplished. For the most part, gathering was the responsibility of women and children, and hunting and fishing were the responsibility of men. Yet while most societies are structured by gender, not all of any one task is necessarily accomplished by one gender.33 Among the Wappo, at times men gathered food and women hunted small game. In addition, while part of the gender division in hunting and gathering included rituals, gendered proscriptions, and activities that were sex segregated, such proscriptions and rituals sometimes complicated genderspecific behaviors. Baskets were central to community, family living, and economy. They were given as gifts and used to cook in, for storage, and for carrying stones into battle.34 In basket construction, a gendered division of labor existed. While men made some baskets, for the most part, it was the responsibility of women to supply the baskets used by their families. Like the neighboring Pomo, Wappo women often used a very tight weave, which allowed them to make waterproof baskets for cooking. Wappo baskets were rivaled only by those of the Pomo, and like the Pomo they often used designs, shells, and feathers to decorate their work. When men wove baskets they did what is now called rough work, a plain twined weave that is useful for making fish traps and quail traps. In this Wappo men shared a common craft with other communities in

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their immediate area. Outside of Central California men did not weave baskets at all.35 Acorns were so important to Wappo diet and community organization that they need to be discussed separately from other food sources. The Wappo used at least six specific names for different kinds of acorns. Both men and women gathered acorns and carried them home in burden baskets; men and women usually worked together in a harvest.36 Once home, it was the responsibility of women to make acorns into mush, soup, or bread. This was a long and laborious process. Acorns had to be dried, shelled, ground, and leached before they could be cooked. Grinding acorns was done through the slow process of pounding the kernels with a pestle in a mortar basket, or on rocky outcroppings along streams. Women often worked together at this task, as evidenced by the number of mortar holes that have been found together in stone outcroppings throughout Central California.37 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Indigenous scholars would demonstrate how these communal and gendered tasks created spaces for women to share information and tell stories. At the same time, they point out that almost all of those stories were lost through time and through waves of colonization.38 And so the stories, told by Wappo-speaking women as they sat and ground acorns, are among those that are missing from this telling of Wappo history. The central role of acorns in Wappo culture may have also contributed to women’s status within their communities. Late twentiethcentury scholarship on peoples of the Marin peninsula, another Central California culture group for whom acorns were an important staple, has demonstrated that the critical role that women played in gathering and food preparation spilled over into dances and other community rituals. Those communities held Acorn Dances, and the women who led the Acorn Dances were held in high esteem by the entire community.39 Did the Wappo hold Acorn Dances? Did they have women leaders who were respected by the community for leading such dances? We may never know. Yet the central role of gathering and acorn preparation to Wappo-speaking peoples, in conjunction with women’s roles in relation to these tasks, indicates that women, as important providers, most probably held important roles in Wappo social structures. In addition to acorns, there were a variety of insects, seeds, and plants that people gathered and ate. Grasshoppers and caterpillars were gathered and eaten. When roasted, grasshoppers were considered a delicacy.

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Roots, sweet clover, hazelnuts, and milkweed also were part of Wappo diets. Using a seedbeater and a basket, women gathered seeds and roasted them and pounded them to a dry powder, which then could be eaten by hand. Grapes and a variety of berries, including blackberries, manzanita berries, and elderberries, were a common food source, often consumed as juice.40 Before men hunted or fished they performed rituals such as rubbing pepperwood and angelica on their bodies. This was, in part, to disguise their body odors. In addition, the ritual itself was necessary to bring men luck. While hunting, they refrained from sex and did not eat meat, fish, or fat. Hunting deer required a communal effort. The Wappo built both stone and brush fences that forced deer into the path of the hunters. Then a man disguised as a deer, wearing a stuffed deer head and making deer sounds and movements, lured the deer into target distance, where it was shot. Normally, the deer was cut up and divided equally among the hunters before returning home; if a newly married man killed the deer, he brought it home to his mother-in-law, who divided the meat.41 As with deer hunting, only men fished. On days that they fished, they did not eat meat. If a man wanted good luck, he would throw beads into a stream four times. Men sometimes speared fish or caught them in wicker traps. Other times they worked in teams with two men holding a net and the rest of the men driving the fish into it. Women were not allowed near the places where the men fished because they might bring the fishermen bad luck.42 While hunting large game was the responsibility of men, the Wappo diet also included a large number of small game that women sometimes caught in wicker traps made by men, such as rabbits, pigeons, and quail. Some birds were shot down with slings and stones. When male quail were caught, the feathers from their crowns were used to make beaded neck bands worn by women when they danced. At other times people used burn methods to drive squirrels, rats, mice, and gophers from fields. Small game was prepared by roasting it on sticks or laying it on coals.43 To say that Wappo-speaking communities were hunting and gathering societies only scratches the surface. Precolonial Wappo-speaking communities were hunting and gathering societies where gender played a critical role in the division of labor. The importance of gathering to their communities contributed to the status of Wappo-speaking women. A certain reciprocity was exhibited in the division of labor, indicative of precolonial power relations among men and women in Napa’s

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precolonial communities. Wappo peoples took full advantage of their geographic location to trade with neighbors outside of their language groups, acquiring raw shell and obsidian resources from neighboring communities to sell as fi nished products.

wappo mythologies and religious practices The people would gather in a permanent building, built by the men in the community. First the people entered the building from a back door. They were seated grouped in families and sitting in rows. After all the people in the community were seated, their leader, dressed in a dark outfit, with his hair cut short, would enter the front of the building, through a side entrance. He would exhort the people, then they would stand and sing. At regular gatherings, people sang common songs selected by another religious leader chosen for his or her skill and training in songs. The music leader might be male or female, but only the men could serve as head religious leaders. After the people sang, the head religious leader would tell the people a story, usually with a strong moral ending, exhorting community members who had broken taboos to confess. If they did not confess their god would be angry and they would be punished in the afterlife; their families could be shamed in the present. The music leader would then lead the community in another song, one that was written for this specific part of the ritual, and anyone who had broken taboos since the last meeting would come to the front of the building and kneel on the floor and confess their transgressions to the deity, to the religious leader and to their community. If it was a successful meeting, their deity would smile down on them with prosperity.

What happens when historians and anthropologists tell stories about other people’s religion? The above story is from a childhood memory of sitting in a white Protestant church on a Sunday evening. If I were an anthropologist from another culture or another planet, this is how, I believe, I might describe it. Without faith, all religion appears bizarre and primitive, including Western twenty-first century religions.44 And so looking at anyone’s religion outside of your own faith group is problematic. Yet it is in these beliefs that our basic gender and other social systems are articulated—at times constructed, and at other times challenged. Religion is one means through which a society makes its world understandable; as such, it is an integral part of cultural systems and a critical tool for understanding culture and society.45

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Wappo peoples practiced the Kuksu religion. In this, they shared common religious cosmologies and rituals with other peoples throughout Central California and perhaps the Southwest. In Wappo religious practices, a Kuksu celebration was held once a year to bring health and prosperity to the community. Throughout the rituals and dances, as throughout Wappo mythology, men and women had specific roles. These roles, in turn, were reflective of Wappo social structures beyond the dance house. Humor also played an important role in Wappo religion and spirituality, and was sometimes incorporated into community rituals. An examination of Wappo mythologies and religion, rituals, and beliefs can then help us understand Wappo social structures, specifically gender as a structuring force in Wappo society. The name that Central California peoples used for the primary deity of the Kuksu religion varied: the Yuki called him Taikomol, the Pomo called him Kuksu, and the Maidu called him Yohyo.46 Yet despite the diversity within Central California belief systems, the way they celebrated their beliefs demonstrated common roots; all could be classified as belonging to the same religious group or sect. According to Kroeber, Kuksu was a religious “system based on a secret society and characterized by the Kuksu or ‘big-head’ dances.” He identified three distinguishing elements to determine whether or not a community engaged in Kuksu practices: (1) The community had to have a male secret society where there were specific rites that only members could participate in; (2) as part of their rituals, members used masks and/or disguises; and (3) the community built a specific kind of dance house, normally a large, round, earth-covered building where annual dances were held.47 The religious ceremonies of the Wappo, like those of their neighbors the Pomo and the Patwin, shared these elements. In Wappo practices, as with Yukian speakers to their north, the main ceremonial character was most probably Taikomol, or “he who goes alone.” 48 In Kuksu mythologies and rituals throughout Central California, both creator characters and the dead played significant roles, much as they did in the Pueblo Kachina religion. Because of the similarities between Central California Kuksu and Pueblo Kachina religions, anthropologists such as Alfred Kroeber argued that the religions had a common origin.49 Once a year Wappo-speaking villages held a four- or sometimes sevenday ceremony to bring health to the community. In large settlements, communities had a permanent dance house. In smaller settlements, men and women built two brush houses, or at times a subterranean dance house, for the occasion. If they built two brush houses, one was used

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as a dressing room for the performers. As with all important aspects of Wappo life—hunting, fishing, birthing—the dance involved ritual fasting. Performers were not allowed to eat meat or fish during the four to seven days of the ceremony.50 The first day of the ceremony, men, women, and children gathered in the dance house, and a group of four to five male singers began to sing. Performers disguised with “big-head” costumes and blowing elderberry whistles then came into the brush house with two to three boys who were to be initiated into the sect. The boys were made to lie in the dirt, while the women and children in the room hid their faces from the Kuksu dancers. After the initiation, the Kuksus danced around the fire and blew their elderberry whistles. They then left and went back to their dressing room. The rest of the people held common dances for the rest of the day and the following days. These were dances in which both men and women participated and that were danced on other occasions in addition to the annual Kuksu celebration—hence the label “common.” There were a variety of common dances, among them one danced exclusively by women where two to four women acted “as if they were intoxicated”; another called the “loli olol,” a round dance where men and women danced together with flowers in their hair; and the “Gilak dance,” considered a dangerous dance during which the dancers refrained from eating meat and fish for the duration of the ceremony. While the central dance was primarily participated in by men, then, the four- to seven-day ceremony required participation by the whole community.51 It was at the close of the ceremony that humor entered the ritual in the form of a trickster. Yet in looking at descriptions of the closing, it is clear that this was also an important, serious, and critical part of the ceremony; it included a visit from the dead. On the last day of the ceremony, a ghost came down from the hills and into the dance house. His face was painted and he wore abalone shells across his forehead; fire blazed from a torch that he held in his hand, as well as from his hair. He came into the dance house singing songs, and danced and jumped in and out of the fire, throwing coals around and asking people for tobacco. Sometimes people gave him tobacco, and when they did he ate it and then fined anybody who laughed. When he finished his dance and performance, he returned to the hills.52 While this closing ceremony included a dance by a trickster character, this did not detract from the importance of the ceremony.53 Among the Wappo, the Kuksu ceremonies were considered an integral part of the ordered world within which the Wappo and other Central California Indians lived. Like the World Renewal ceremony of

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Northwestern California, the ritual ensured health and food supplies for the coming year. Likewise, if the ceremonial rituals were performed incorrectly, the community might face bad health and natural disasters in the coming year.54 The gendered divisions within the dances and the roles of men as Kuksu dancers, then, were not incidental but reflective of the larger gendered world and social structures within which Wappospeaking people lived.

wappo social structure: the sweat house and menstrual room as heterotopias Turning to the social structure of Wappo societies, Michel Foucault’s model of the heterotopia, a site that is reflective and constitutive of a given society, is a useful tool for mapping central institutions that structured Wappo society, gender relations, the economy, events, and nonevents. Building on Foucault’s studies of power and society, both Lisbeth Haas and Rosaura Sánchez have demonstrated the utility of space as a tool of historical analysis. For these scholars, spatial organization was an integral part of how power functioned in California’s past. In addition, specific sites and institutions functioned as forces that structured life beyond their immediate spaces. Within this context, it was Sánchez who brought Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to the fore of understanding how specific institutions, such as the California missions, structured the past.55 I now extend this analytical tool to California’s precolonial history, and I complicate that model by introducing the role of spirituality in constructing the Wappo institutions of the sweat house and menstruation room. All societies contain heterotopias, or places “that are formed in the very founding of a society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” 56 Such places are paradoxes; they are both isolated and penetrable, only certain people can enter them, and there are certain rites a person undergoes in order to gain access to them. Many of these are sites of crisis, “privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.” In the past, according to Foucault, sites of crisis included boarding schools, honeymoon suites, and menstrual rooms.57

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In Wappo society, and among many precolonial Central California peoples, there were two heterotopias that together reflected and structured society. One of these was the sweat house in which men went to purify themselves, to smoke and tell stories. The other, and perhaps more powerful, heterotopia was the menstrual room. This was the place where young women went to mark their entrance into womanhood, where they stayed while menstruating throughout their adult lives, and where they gave birth to the next generation. As Mary Rojas Muños has recently suggested, these two sites were part of a larger spiritual reciprocity within precolonial communities, reflecting and constructing other important relationships within the larger community.58 The central role that sweat houses and menstrual rooms served in Wappo communities is demonstrated not only in the larger socioeconomic functions of their communities, but in their mythologies as well. Here, Central California and Wappo stories are helpful for understanding Wappo social structures. As with Kuksu rituals, gender is essential to stories told by Central California Indians. Anthropologist Victoria Patterson has argued that “Pomo myths take place in a world fully formed. Gender roles are not created there: they are taken for granted . . . they are not learned but fundamental. It is the transgression of this fundamental essence that causes upheaval and confl ict.” 59 Yet it is not just Pomo myths that take place in a “world fully formed”; most religious myths take place in a world fully formed, or are themselves creation myths reflecting the values of which Patterson writes.60 So it is in the creation story and story of the sweat-house construction, recounted below. In one Wappo myth, human beings were created in a sweat house. According to Joe McCloud, a Wappo man who told stories and myths to anthropologist Paul Radin in the early twentieth century, Wappo creation stories contained the story of a great flood: The place they were living at was flooded. There coyote locked himself up in a hollow of the rock together with his grandson. After twenty days had elapsed the water disappeared and coyote looked around but there was no-one there. “Well,” said chicken-hawk, “what are we going to do, grandfather?” “Tseia’o, tseia’o,” said coyote, “we’ll create people.” Then he picked up some feathers and built a sweat-house. In the sweat-house he placed these feathers one by one. “Well, may these [feathers] become people!” and the feathers became alive.61

Another Wappo story stresses the importance of the sweat house to the community, men and women alike. Here, specific gender divisions

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in labor make it possible for a community to build a sweat house. In the story, Chicken-hawk needs to build a sweat house in the land of the dead, and so he asks his grandfather for advice: “Who’s going to dig the sweat-house for me?” “Down south your grandmother is living . . . she will dig it with the palms of her hands.” Then there taking his beads he went and gave them to his aunts. “What are you doing here, grandchild?” “I have come after you because I want you to dig a sweat-house.” “When?” “Well, I’ll be at your place tomorrow.” Then chicken-hawk went home to his grandfather . . . “Well, grandfather, who’s going to get me the small willow?” “There to the north, on the other side of the hill your grandfathers, the birds . . . live.” There he went.

Soon Chicken-hawk, on the advice of his elders, has involved his entire family and community in building the new sweat house. On the following day the water teals, his grandfathers, and the wateranimals brought the poles. Then the spider-woman came and scratched away the dirt, scratching it away in four directions. Then the willow twigs were brought . . . The women, the mountain-rats, came there and brought the grass, packing big loads of it. Now the sweat-house was built . . . Then that woman threw the dirt on it. First she threw it once from the east, then again once she threw it from the north; then once she threw it from the west, and then once she threw the dirt from the south; then again she threw the dirt. Then it was fi nished; she had thrown the dirt on four times. Now the sweat-house was fi nished, it was built.62

Sweat houses were both central to the construction of Wappo villages and to Wappo mythology. The physical site of a Wappo sweat house was always in the center of the village, by the stream, with its door opening to the south. The location of other buildings did not matter, as long as the sweat house remained in the center of the community.63 The construction of sweat houses was a communal activity, with women gathering most of the construction materials, men building the frame, and both men and women digging out the base of the building. Once complete, the village chief would host a large celebration of feasting and dancing. While sweat houses were built through a united effort by men and women, once constructed, they were used as men’s space. As part of their daily routine, men went to their village sweat house to steam themselves twice a day; afterward they plunged into an adjacent

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stream. Men also went to the sweat house to tell stories, to smoke, and, at times, to sleep.64 Sweat houses as a central site, then, functioned at a dual level. On the one hand, they were central to Wappo spirituality, the place where people were created and where men went to purify themselves. In addition, the site of the sweat house, as a masculine space, reflected the larger gender divisions in Wappo socio-economic relations, where hunting and gathering tasks were often gender specific. Like sweat houses, menstrual rooms were critical sites that organized Wappo society. Like sweat houses, menstrual rooms also had a spiritual dimension; they were places where California women went to renew themselves.65 Among Wappo peoples, every residential dwelling had a separate menstrual room. Regulations surrounding the room and menstruation determined not only when a woman could labor, but when her spouse could labor and when a community could go to war. As with sweat houses, the importance of menstrual rooms was evident both at a cosmological level and at a physical level among Central California Indians and among the Wappo in particular. A brief survey of American Indigenous myths and rituals related to menstruation demonstrates its centrality to a variety of precolonial cultures. On most of the North American continent, Indigenous peoples often had rituals for young women coming of age. Among the Illinois, for example, young women went on vision quests. The Menominees of Wisconsin had a myth they told to explain the origins of menstruation.66 In both the Midwest and West Coast of North America, girls underwent initiation rites that indicated they were now women; such rites all involved some kind of seclusion. In addition, all women during menstruation lived apart from men and performed rituals specific to their sex. Menstrual rooms and the rituals surrounding menstruation provided a women’s space within many Indigenous cultures.67 For many California Indian communities, the critical role of menstrual regulations was articulated in the story of Loon Woman. Communities to the north of the Wappo, including the Maidu, Wintu, and Modoc, all told a version of this story about a young woman who violated the regulations surrounding ritual seclusion. In Theodore Kroeber’s retelling, once, when a girl went to stay in her house of the moons, she sat alone as the sun set down and the woods grew dusky, dreaming her strange and lonely young girl dreams . . . She heard her father and her older brothers praying and singing in the sweat-house. They would, she knew, be

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going to the pool soon. And as she listened to them, she thought of a way to learn what she so much wanted to know. The night was clear with only the dark illumination of the stars, and [she] slipped out of her house and hid close to the pool.68

In the tale, the girl’s community and cultural transgressions become more and more severe and chaos ensues. While many of the details in Kroeber’s story seem influenced by an anthropological gaze, the moral of the story is consistent with other information we have about women’s rituals: how a woman treated her body in relation to the larger community, in regard to menstruation, was reflective and constitutive of how she respected her body and family in other relationships. Menstruation regulations structured gendered, familial, and community relations.69 Among the Wappo, a family participated in a ritual at the time of a daughter’s first menses. At that time, she went to a menstrual room, where she was alone for four days. Only female members of her family were able to see her, and if she had to leave the room for any reason a female adult from the family would accompany her; the girl would also keep her head covered. Rather than join the family for meals, she was brought food by the women of her family. At the end of four days, she was bathed by a woman in her family, while a community doctor, most probably a “singing doctor,” sang in the main room of the family dwelling.70 Recent scholarship examining precolonial women’s rites has suggested that women’s time away in menstrual rooms was a spiritual time, with parallels found in men’s time at sweat houses. The amount of ritual surrounding a young woman’s initiation rite suggests that Wappo women’s initial time away, as well as their regular observance of menstrual rituals, was an important part of women’s and community spirituality.71 The Wappos’ private, woman-centered ritual marks it off as different in terms of degree from communities such as the Wintu, who lived to the north of what is now Napa County. Among the Wintu, and other California communities, a similar time of isolation was set aside at a young women’s first menses, but instead of a private ceremony where one person sang in the home, the family closed the ritual by inviting friends to feast and dance in honor of their daughter.72 Like the Wintu, who told the story of Loon Woman, however, women and entire communities could suffer serious consequences if a menstruating woman left a menstrual room: if she bathed, she could get rheumatism or have bad luck; if any men accidentally touched her, or she crossed their path, they would also have bad luck.73

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With childbirth, once again the menstrual room became the center of a family’s attention. When a Wappo child was brought into this world, it was by its mother, grandmother, and father. Both the mother and the grandmother went to the menstrual room of the family dwelling, where the grandmother or another woman helped the mother deliver the baby. If there were complications in the delivery, a village doctor who worked with menstruating women and childbirth complications came and assisted.74 After the delivery, the baby was washed twice with warm water and rubbed with angelica, and its mother stayed in her home for ten days. The father of the child sometimes assisted with the delivery of the baby, and observed the couvade, a four-day fast where he was confined to his bed. Both parents abstained from meat, fat, and fish for several days following the birth of a child.75 Once a man married, his work patterns adjusted to the monthly cycles of his wife. Each month, while their wives menstruated, husbands were not allowed to hunt, fish, gamble, dance, eat meat or fat, make hunting traps, or perform a variety of other tasks. And so each month, for a few days, married men gathered acorns and vegetable foods, rested and smoked, and waited for their wives to return to their daily routines.76

the history of an event: the visit of sir francis drake to central california, 1579 The story of Sir Francis Drake’s visit to Central California remains important to histories of Napa because it is an event that most probably affected Wappo communities and because it stands as an example of the authorial limits historians face when writing precolonial histories. The communities that most probably interacted with Drake and his crew while they were in Central California were the Coast Miwok and the Southern Pomo, two peoples with whom the Wappo had ongoing interactions due to trade networks and travel through their territories to collect clams and other resources. In addition, because Drake was in the area long enough for various communities to make it to the bay to see him and his crew, most anthropologists speculate that more than one language group would have been present during the events recorded by Drake’s crew.77 As well, early historians of Napa have argued that Wappo and Pomo communities may have traveled to the coast to see Drake as soon as news of the event reached them.78 Drake’s visit, the first account we have of Central California Indians meeting with non-Indigenous peoples, demonstrates some of the

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authorial limits of historians writing the precolonial past because the documents we have of the event were not produced by the Coast Miwok or Pomo or Wappo peoples, but by Drake’s crew and other English men who spoke with his crew. The sources bring to mind the work of Renato Rosaldo, where he argued that all historical and anthropological texts are produced in specific contexts. Often, historians do not have access to the words of the people they study; they have only translations of those words, perhaps translations that have been filtered through the perspectives of representatives of different, perhaps dominant, cultures.79 The following story is about English men meeting California Indians: it is not a California Indian history. In this the sources for recounting Drake’s visit are similar to those used throughout this chapter. That is to say, those sources were not of Wappo or Central California origin. They were Euro-American narratives about Wappo and Central California histories. At best, they were stories told by Wappo and California Indians to anthropologists who then wrote down what they heard when California Indians spoke with them. And so the story that follows is an important story for understanding Napa’s history, both as a story of first contact in the larger Central California area, and as an example of the limitations historians face in writing the past. The narrative of Drake’s visit is familiar to most California historians. Sir Francis Drake and his crew were cruising the west coast of North America, pillaging Spanish ships for precious metals, money, and other valuables. As they prepared to return to England, Drake decided to look for a northern passage around the continent, one that would take them home. When stormy weather delayed their voyage and forced them to head in toward the west coast, they anchored at what was later named Cape Blanco (in Oregon). From there Drake and his crew headed south and in June of 1579 anchored in the San Francisco bay area, most probably at what is now called Drake’s Bay just south of Point Reyes.80 The day after they anchored, a group of Central California Indians gathered together gifts, boarded their canoes, and went to greet the ship. From English accounts it appears that they were most probably Pomo and/or Coast Miwok peoples because of the words the English recorded from their interactions with them and because of the gifts the peoples gave the English. Specifically, the Indigenous peoples brought the English gifts of waterproof baskets, and baskets covered with red feathers. Because Pomo-speaking groups were and are known for their red feather–covered baskets, it may have been a Pomo-speaking community that went to greet the English.81 On the other hand, we also

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know from English accounts that some of the California Indians with whom the English spoke kept repeating the words Nocharo mu, translated by some as “don’t touch me” in Coast Miwok.82 According to their own accounts, the English accepted the gifts, and interpreted the respect and gifts that they received from the Indigenous peoples as an indication that they thought the English sailors were gods. This misunderstanding gave rise to the English trying to demonstrate their own mortality by eating and doing other things to prove they were human. In addition to attempts at gift exchanges and demonstrations of mortality, the English did something very similar to what the Spanish would do when they later came to colonize the region: they tried to get the Indigenous peoples to put on European clothing to “cover their nakedness.” 83 According to Francis Fletcher, chaplain and diarist of the Drake expedition: when the people of the country, perceiued vs . . . they came downe vnto vs, and yet with no hostile meaning or intent to hurt vs: standing, when they drew neere, as men rauished in their mindes, with the sight of such things as they neuer had seene or heard of before that time: their errand being rather with submission and feare to worship vs as Gods, then to haue any warre with vs as with mortall men . . . . . . our Generall, with all his company, vsed all meanes possible gently to intreate them, bestowing vpon each of them liberally good and necessary things to couer their nakednesse; withal signifying vnto them we were no Gods, but men, and had neede of such things to couer our owne shame; teaching them to vse them to the same ends, for which cause also wee did eate and drinke in their presence, giuing them to vnderstand that without that wee could not liue, and therefore were but men as well as they.84

Drake and his crew remained in Central California for over a month. By that time, several peaceful exchanges had occurred between the crew and local peoples of the area. The English had received gifts from the local inhabitants and had watched them perform some of their rituals. The English, in turn, performed Christian rituals for the Indigenous peoples and attempted to give them gifts. Before their departure, the Coast Miwok, and/or the Pomo and other peoples of Central California, held a ceremony for Drake and his crew. English accounts of the ceremony illustrate the cultural miscommunications that transpired during the visit.

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Dressed in regalia, which anthropologist Robert Heizer argues were Kuksu outfits, and carrying a four-foot black stick as was used in annual Kuksu ceremonies, a person Fletcher understood to be the community leader, along with over a hundred men and women, approached the English men. After performing rituals for the dead, the Indigenous peoples indicated that Drake should sit down, and then, according to Fletcher, they made signes to our Generall to haue him sit down; unto whom both the king and diuers others made seuerall orations, or rather, indeed, if wee had vnderstood them, supplications, that hee would take the prouince and kingdome into his hand, and become their king and patron: making signes that they would resigne vnto him their right and title in the whole land, and become his vassals in themselues and their posterities: which that they might make vs indeed beleeue that it was their true meaning and intent, the king himselfe, with all the rest, with one consent and with great reuernce, ioyfully singing a song, set the crowne vpon his head, inriched his necke with all their chaines, and offering vnto him many other things, honoured him with the name of Hyóh. Adding therevnto (as it might seeme) a song and dance of triumph; because they were not onely visited of the gods (for so they iudged vs to be), but the great and chiefe God was now become their God, their king and patron, and themselues were become the onely happie and blessed people in the world.85

Upon their departure, the English claimed the region for England, erecting a monument with the Queen’s name on it and a statement that the people of the country had freely given it to the Queen of England.86 The cultural exchanges and misunderstandings that transpired in 1579 foreshadow, in a limited but powerful way, similar historical events that would occur in Central California two hundred years later when, in 1776, Spanish missionaries arrived in the San Francisco bay area. Among their goals would also be the immortal salvation of Indigenous peoples, and the acquisition of Indigenous land in the name of their sovereign. In addition, the English accounts of Drake’s visit clearly demonstrate dramatic miscommunications that foreshadow later Indigenous-colonizer relations in the region. While the peoples who interacted with Drake and his crew may have seen them as deities, they did not see them as deities in any sense of the word that the English implied. Instead, the rituals the Indigenous peoples performed, and their insistence that the English not touch them, indicates that they believed the English were ghosts, returned from the land of the dead to visit the living. Likewise,

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while the rituals the Indigenous peoples performed indicate that they respected Drake and his crew, the idea that they willingly offered their lands to Drake is improbable.87

summary and conclusion The brief and necessarily incomplete precolonial histories analyzed in this chapter demonstrate some of the cultural and economic exchanges that were common to the Napa area prior to the arrival of Spanish colonizers. They also demonstrate some of the ways that precolonial communities organized their societies and the ways that religion, socioeconomic activities, and uses of space were interrelated. These basic long-term structural events, or non-events, are critical aspects of Napa’s history. The social and economic networks that the Wappo developed through obsidian and clamshell trade as well as expeditions to Bodega Bay and Clear Lake for food supplies placed them in a central position in early California Indian trade networks. Such networks may have been responsible for many of the cultural traits that the Wappo shared with their neighbors, such as the Kuksu religion and regulations related to menstruation. By the time Spanish colonizers arrived in Central California, California Indians had a well-established trade network, a common religion, and similar gendered social structures. Among the Wappo, as among some of their neighbors such as the Pomo, the two central sites that structured their communities were the sweat house and the menstrual room. Together these two sex-segregated sites both reflected and structured gender relations within the community. The gender order of these heterotopias was produced and reproduced in activities such as basket making, hunting, cooking acorns, and other activities necessary for the well-being of the community. The abundance of acorns and their central role in the diet and culture of the society appear to have contributed to a strong social status for Wappospeaking women. From the time of Drake’s departure in 1579 to the arrival of Spanish colonizers in 1776, Central California’s history continued, structured by events and non-events alike. During this time, communities of peoples known as the Patwin moved into the southern portions of Napa. Like the Wappo and other Central California Indians, the Patwin practiced the Kuksu religion; sweat houses and menstrual rooms also played significant roles in structuring their social order. Whether the Patwins’

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incursion into the Napa area preceded the arrival of the Spanish in California, or was made possible because of their arrival, is still not clear. What is certain is that when the Spanish arrived in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys the Patwin were among the first to ally themselves with the newcomers. Alliances with the Spanish against other Indigenous communities would disrupt an earlier balance of power, intra-California trade, and Central California Indigenous social structures.

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Chapter Two

S t or i e s of Se t t l e r- Col on i z e r s, a n d of t h e Col on i z e d

On the morning of June 25, 1823, Alférez José Antonio Sánchez, Fray José Altimira, and a company of soldiers and indigenous converts left Mission Dolores in San Francisco to locate a site for a new mission further north.1 The expedition’s first stop was at Mission San Rafael, for one last night of rest in a familiar locale before heading further north into land that was still dominated by Indigenous peoples. The next morning they left at 5:30, covering about three leagues by 9 a.m. They rested until early afternoon and traveled further north until they reached some streams in the area owned by the Petalumas. That evening, according to Sánchez, they “camped by the shore of a stream named Lima along with 8 to 10 Petaluma Indians who came there to hide from the wrath of some Indians from [a] ranchería . . . about 15 miles away.” 2 The rest of the expedition followed a similar pattern. At times the company encountered Indigenous peoples, but as with their interactions with the Petaluma, these were not violent encounters. The expedition traveled by day and noted local water supplies, quality of soil for agriculture and cattle grazing, and other resources in the area. That they considered the area their own is demonstrated by their propensity for naming things as they went along, as when they passed a bay as yet unnamed by the Spanish and called it San Pedro.3 When the expedition arrived at Sonoma they noticed that it was one of the most fertile regions they had encountered. Sánchez noted: No one could doubt the mildness of Sonoma’s weather, taking notice of the plants, tall and leafy trees and delicate plants; . . . we surveyed the banks of the estuary and saw large pieces of land that would be perfect for sowing corn. . . . We found out from the Indians that the estuary had fish, they assured us that it had plenty of fish, especially salmon; Because of these and other reasons, we saw that Sonoma was a very suitable site for a mission.

After further exploring the area around what became the town of

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Sonoma, the expedition erected a cross at the site and celebrated mass.4 As with the altar erected fifty-four years earlier at Mission San Diego, it was the Christian converts who built the altar: The Willow boughs were stripped of their larger twigs. Stakes of tree limbs were driven into the ground to form an oblong frame directly in front of the tall cross. The smoothest poles were formed into a skeleton for the frame. Taking the willow canes, the men wove, in and out, green walls till the stake frame was quite hidden, excepting the front. The top was woven with the most care as to evenness of surface and niceness of material.5

As in the founding of earlier missions, the party, though now under Mexican rule, reflected earlier Spanish colonization practices in California. Alférez José Sánchez was the son of another military man, José Tadeo Sánchez, a literate soldier who had served at four different presidios in his time.6 He would eventually become Vallejo’s right-hand man, left to command the presidio in his absence.7 As the once Spanish colonizers, now Mexican colonizer-settlers, traveled through the area, they claimed it for their own, naming land and streams after Catholic saints. The California Indians who accompanied the expedition may have been from the Napa-Sonoma region. As part of their military/religious ex peditions, Californios often brought mission converts with them from the area to work as scouts, interpreters, and laborers. Such peoples would have been baptized and would have proven their loyalty to SpanishMexican socio-political institutions by subjecting themselves to the rule of the missionaries, and by proselytizing other peoples from their own and neighboring communities, or engaging in expeditions against unchristianized peoples.8 The impact of the 1823 expedition on the Indigenous peoples of the Napa and Sonoma areas was disruptive at several levels. First, in their journey to found the mission, the expedition offered sanctuary to a group of Petalumas who were fleeing their enemy. Like previous alliances the Spanish made with local Indians, this disturbed the regional balance of power. Next, and perhaps most important, the expedition sought out the best, most fertile land for the mission site, complete with an ample water supply to support a transplanted population and grazing grounds in the adjacent (Napa) valley. Finally, the expedition reflected the racial order. Fray Altimira claimed a Spanish racial status. He was accompanied by soldiers who were most probably español, mestizo, and

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color quebrado. A group of Christianized Indigenous peoples accompanied them, who served as scouts, interpreters, and laborers. As with Mission San Diego and Mission San Francisco Asís, the early years of Mission San Francisco Solano were met with armed resistance from local Indigenous communities. Wappo-speaking people were at the fore of this resistance.9 These communities objected to the presence of Mexican colonizers on their land. For years after the official founding of the mission it remained, for the most part, uninhabited while the Mexican settler-colonizers subjugated the area.10

The Colonizers Colonization was the primary factor structuring Californio histories throughout Alta California during the Spanish era (1769–1821) and the Mexican era (1821–1846). Before the flag of the Mexican Republic flew over the Plaza at Monterey and at San Francisco, the future residents of Napa were colonizers for the Spanish empire. Afterward they were settler-colonizers for the Mexican Republic, subjugating and displacing the Indigenous peoples of the region. It was a militarized society. As will be discussed below, in this society, men earned their wealth and status through military efforts that served the state. While their colonial efforts placed their lives at risk, as in any colonial society, their service to the state benefited themselves.11 Within this society, economic growth, access to mission lands, and an influx of new immigrants brought about rapid change in the Napa area, but daily life remained structured around relations of domination and colonization. The Californios were in the region to settle the area for Spain; after Mexican independence, in 1821, they were there to settle the area for Mexico. Beginning in the early 1840s, the region as well as colonial processes were also influenced by relations with Northern Europeans and Euro-Americans who immigrated to the area. In 1823, when the expedition led by Fray José Altimira and Alférez José Sánchez selected the Sonoma Valley as the site for Mission San Francisco Solano, Napa became part of the history of Mexico not as a mission site or presidio in its own standing, but as an appendage to the mission: a place where Christian converts ran mission cattle and where Californios and Mexican soldiers met to organize campaigns against local Indigenous communities. Spanish colonists and colonizers had been in Alta California since 1769, building missions and presidios and attempting to integrate California Indians into the lowest levels of their

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social order. Mexico’s declaration of independence from Spain further escalated change in the region so that by 1823, the entire district of Alta California was plunged into what one historian has called an era of “turbulence and change.” 12 This chapter is a history of Napa during this time of rapid change, between 1823 and 1846. Throughout this time, the Californio population of Napa remained small; approximately one hundred Californio settlers lived in Napa at the time of the U.S. invasion, with the families Berryessa, Vallejo, Juárez, and Yount owning the largest and most productive properties. Yet this population, when combined with the forces of settlers in Sonoma, transformed Napa from a grazing area for mission cattle to a valley of ranchos.13 Napa’s Californiana/o histories were tied to those of other settlers throughout Alta California. Throughout the mission and rancho eras in Napa, which lasted from 1823 to 1846, the history of Napa was intimately tied to that of the Sonoma Valley. Even after Californios established several ranchos in Napa, men from landowning families continued to spend their time at the Sonoma presidio while their wives stayed in Napa to manage the family ranchos.14 The children of families in Napa and Sonoma attended school together, and the men from both areas went to war together against local Indigenous communities. Finally, at the time of the Bear Flag incident, when Euro-Americans tried to declare California an independent state, it was squatters from Napa who went with Fremont’s men to arrest Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Victor Prudón, and Salvador Vallejo at the Sonoma Presidio. And so from the time of the founding of Mission San Francisco Solano in 1823, when Napa served as little more than a cattle run for the mission, to the end of the Mexican era, when Californio ranchos filled the area, the histories of Napa and Sonoma were tied. Because of these reasons, this chapter addresses both Sonoma and Napa, and their relationships to each other under Spanish and then Mexican rule. The Californiana/o population of Napa and Sonoma was a complex network of individuals and families from varied backgrounds. Gender, race, and family history functioned as variables in the lives of Spanish and then Mexican colonizers to determine their status and access to socioeconomic mobility in Alta California. By focusing on Californiana/o histories (as distinct from California Indian histories) in Napa, I examine differences among Californios themselves, particularly the differences between powerful and landed families such as the Vallejos, and working-class, landless soldiers who often remain nameless in extant nineteenth-century narratives of the region. By examining changes the

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culture of the settler-colonizers brought to the Wappo- and Patwinspeaking peoples of the region, I am able to demonstrate how in Napa, the dictum “difference is always relational and value laden” held true.15

Ignacio Vallejo, María Lugo, and the Spanish Race of Alta California Both the Vallejo family, the most powerful family in northern Alta California during the Mexican era, and the Juárez family, one of the wealthiest families in Napa during this same time, trace their histories in Alta California to the time of Spanish conquest and colonization. As such, these two families serve as models for exploring the social and political status of landed Californianas/os during these times. The best-known and most powerful family in the Napa-Sonoma region was the Vallejo family. They traced their history in Alta California to the migration of Ignacio Vicente Ferrer Vallejo, who was born in Jalisco on July 29, 1748. The family was educated and owned property, and on both the maternal and paternal sides of his family, his ancestors included clergy, military officers, and statesmen. His parents had moved to Jalisco when the Spanish government appointed his father to a government office in the province.16 The Vallejo family planned for their youngest son, Ignacio, to become a priest, and so sent him to seminary. While there he studied not only theology but also horticulture and irrigation. Before he fi nished his training, he ran away and enlisted in the army, joining a company of soldados de cuera, led by Captain Fernando Xavier de Rivera y Moncada, which was leaving for Alta California. It was in his role as a soldier for the Spanish army that Ignacio Vallejo’s training in horticulture and irrigation proved useful.17 Rivera y Moncada’s expedition arrived in San Diego, Alta California, in 1774, just five years after Junípero Serra founded the first Franciscan mission there. Ignacio Vallejo served as a soldier and then officer at Mission San Diego de Alcalá, where he was cited for bravery during the Indigenous uprising of November 1775. In addition he was appointed to oversee the development of agriculture and irrigation in the missions. Within ten years of his arrival in Alta California, Vallejo had established himself as a respected military officer.18 In the late 1770s, Ignacio Vallejo turned to the business of finding a suitable mate, one with whom he could maintain and pass on a Spanish

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racial status to his progeny. And so Vallejo rode up and down the coast searching for a Spanish woman to marry. Having failed, he happened upon the happy news that Francisco Lugo and his wife were about to have a baby, María Antonia Ysabel de Lugo. The Lugos, like the Vallejos, claimed “pure” Spanish ancestry, and so Ignacio asked Francisco Lugo for the hand of his infant daughter in marriage. Fifteen years later, February 18, 1791, María Antonia de Lugo, age fourteen, was married to Ignacio Vallejo, then age forty-three. It was at this time, perhaps, as part of solidifying his social standing, that Vallejo applied for a certificate of legitimidad y limpieza de sangre issued by the Inquisition, to certify that he was of pure Spanish descent, free of the blood of “Indian, Negro, Mulatto, or other mixed race group, or persons recently converted to the Roman Catholic faith.” 19 By the late eighteenth century, a Spanish colonial racial system was firmly established in Alta California. The system was stable and porous. It provided structure to the larger society; people at the top of the racial order had access to the best jobs, while those at the bottom labored in a state of peonage. It was porous in that one might work and/or purchase one’s way up the racial ladder. It had developed through seven hundred years of Spanish colonization and conquest, beginning in the early years of the Reconquest of Spain from the Moors and culminating in the conquest of the Americas.20 At the top of the racial system, was the category of español, which could be “a person having the ‘status’ of a Spaniard, although not necessarily being of pure European descent.” Español was a racial category to which one could be promoted: in Alta California, all persons of one-quarter or less Indigenous ancestry were eventually regarded as español. One level down from español was the rank of “mestizo, or person of half-Indian, half-European ancestry,” and at the bottom of the Spanish racial taxonomy was the indio, or person of “pure Indian descent.” 21 Vallejo’s certificate tells us an important story about race history in Alta California. On the one hand, it is ironic that he would hold such a certificate. Racial class, even during the middle colonial period (1660– 1720), a period historian Douglass Cope calls the most racially stable of Spain’s past, was porous. Because of New Spain’s gender imbalance, many mixed-race children were born, some of them absorbed into the “Spanish” ruling class. And in some places, as many as one out of six people changed racial status in their lifetime.22 Certification of racial standing was based on Church records, baptismal records, and marriage

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records, yet even these could be contested. For example, in 1699, when Domingo Velásquez applied to the priesthood, he found that his baptismal record listed him as casta (mixed race). He was able to find three neighbors to testify that the certificate was in error, that his family was truly Spanish, and so was accepted into the racially restricted profession.23 While racial categories were porous, as the petition of Domingo Velásquez illustrates, Spanish racial standing meant access to the professions.24 Even on the frontier, a claim to such racial standing, as demonstrated in the career of Ignacio Vallejo and that of his son Mariano, meant upward mobility. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was the eighth of thirteen born to Ignacio Vallejo and María Antonia Ysabel de Lugo—he was a middle child.25 He grew up at the Monterey Presidio. There, in January of 1824, at the age of sixteen, he began his military career under Governor Arguello. Once enlisted, he quickly rose through the ranks. In December of 1827, Mariano Guadalupe received a commission as Second Lieutenant of the San Francisco Presidio Company, and on August 10, 1834, he was commissioned as a Full Lieutenant.26 Vallejo’s rise to power was due to more than just his position as a favored son. Soon after enlisting as a soldier, he proved himself adept at subduing local Indigenous communities, attacking before they were able to take offensive actions, often on the basis of rumor, and making treaties with Indigenous communities who were willing to aid him in maintaining Californio and Mexican rule throughout the region.27 Vallejo’s wars against and treaties with the Indigenous peoples of Napa made him the ideal candidate to permanently settle the NapaSonoma area. When in 1835 the government decided to found a presidio to the north of San Francisco, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, by that time a colonel in the army, was selected. The appointment led to Vallejo’s most famous battle in Napa—the battle of Suscol. In 1835, in response to missionary incursions into the adjacent Sonoma Valley and to news that a presidio was soon to be built, Sem Yeto, also called Solano, of the Suisun, a Patwin-speaking community, planned an uprising to drive the Californios out of the Napa-Sonoma area. Sem Yeto had been baptized as a youth and may have already known Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. Some believe that the two men were friends by this time, and that Sem Yeto warned Vallejo that if the Mexican government attempted to settle the area, the Indigenous peoples would rise up to protect their land. So warned, in 1835, Mariano Guadalupe set out for the southernmost end of the Napa Valley prepared for battle.28

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By 1835, Sem Yeto and his men had realized the destruction the Mexican presence brought to Indigenous resources and lifeways.29 The threat of more intruders was so critical that Sem Yeto was able to rally men from a number of communities, not only among Patwin-speaking peoples, but from peoples outside of his immediate trade and social network. At the initial battle his men successfully surrounded Vallejo’s troops, and it was only because of reinforcements sent by Governor Figueroa that the Mexican army was ultimately victorious. In an effort to win a treaty with Sem Yeto and his allies, Vallejo promised aid in defeating the Satiyomi, a longtime enemy of the Suisun. Both parties agreed to the treaty, and from 1835 on, Sem Yeto and the men of communities allied with him served under Vallejo and aided in maintaining Californio dominance in the region.30 Together with many of the same troops who had previously served under him in the north, Vallejo moved into the Sonoma Valley in 1835. There he carved out a small empire for himself where the troops who served under him relied on him not only to maintain order, but to pay their salaries and support their families. Because the government of Mexico was unable to provide a counter-balance to his power in the north, Vallejo soon became a powerful patriarch, allotting land grants to favored soldiers and friends as well as intervening in the family lives of the men who served under him.31

Colonizing Families Most of the colonizer-settlers who eventually came to the Napa and Sonoma areas were soldiers and their families.32 Soldiers accompanied Spanish friars to establish missions in Alta California from their beginnings in 1769. It was not until 1775, however, when Fray Junípero Serra recruited a small number of families from Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Tepic, that expeditions of families arrived in Alta California.33 Two larger expeditions followed. The first, led by Fernando Rivera y Moncada, recruited settlers from Sinaloa. A slightly later expedition with colonizers from Sinaloa and Sonora, led by Juan Bautista de Anza, arrived in Alta California in 1776.34 Most of the laboring families that settled in Napa and Sonoma trace their origins to the latter two expeditions.35 We know quite a bit about the women and families recruited to colonize Alta California because of the pioneering work of historian Antonia Castañeda. Viceroy Bucareli instructed Fernando Rivera y Moncada, the commandant of Alta California, to recruit families from the laboring

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classes, “sturdy Spanish families” to colonize the region. It was because of this that both Rivera and Anza recruited families from Sonora, where there was a regional depression. These families had survived on meager resources and would be likely to survive the harsh environment of Alta California. Likewise, while some of these families came from areas where Spanish colonial social structures were well established, many came from Sonora’s frontier regions, where conflicts with Indigenous peoples were still common and material commodities from Spain and Mexico City were not.36 Apparently the viceroy’s strategy was effective. During the 1775 journey, while traveling through Horcasitas, Sonora, the colonists were raided by Apaches. They continued their journey with a reduced number of horses and mules, arriving in San Diego in January of 1776. Eight women gave birth during the journey; of those births, three infants survived. The mothers rested one to two days following childbirth, and then continued on foot. Five to six days later they were back in the saddle, when a horse was available. Only one person died en route to Alta California: Manuela Ygnacia Pinuelas died in childbirth.37 The families on the expeditions were racially diverse. According to historian Jack Forbes: Two-thirds were Indian or were mixed bloods probably of part-Indian descent. Six to nine of the men were also part-African (perhaps 25 percent). Of the twenty-five women whose race can be ascertained, only six were “española” (24 percent), while the rest were generally Indian or part-Indian and three to six were also part-African. Of the twenty-nine marriages, only four involved an “español” man marrying an “española” woman, thus indicating that the next generation would be even more mixed.38

The majority of the soldier-settlers and their families who came with de Anza’s expedition were “Mexican mixed-bloods.” 39 Soldiers and settlers who labored in the Napa-Sonoma area came from families such as these. In 1835, when Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo founded the Sonoma Presidio, he brought soldiers and families from the San Francisco Presidio with him.40 Census records from the 1780s and from 1790, listing the families of San Francisco, reflect the racial diversity and continued racial mixing that characterized the settlers of Napa and Sonoma. As Tables 2.1 and 2.2 demonstrate, many people were listed as español, but others were categorized as mestiza/o. Still

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table 2.1. r acial categorization for san fr ancisco presidio, 1790 Español/a Mestizo/a Mulato/a Indio/a

24 16 4 8

Source: “1790 Padrón de los Vecinos del Presidio de San Francisco,” MSS CA 50, 1: 85–90, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.

Table 2.2. r acial categorization for san fr ancisco region, 1786 Español/a Mestizo/a Color Quebrado Indio/a

106 61 25 844

Source: “Padrón, Jurisdicción del San Francisco Presidio, 1786,” MSS CA79, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.

others were listed as color quebrado, mulata/o, or India/o. As Figure 2.1 demonstrates, marriage among people from different racial categories was common. When numbers are totaled, 50 percent of all marriages listed took place between people of different racial categories. The Mexican War for Independence had very little effect on social structures in Alta California. Soldiers continued to serve under the same officers, and because all news from Mexico City had to travel by land and sea to Alta California, it was not until months after the event that the province even heard the news. With the government at Monterey swearing loyalty to the new republic in April of 1822, Alta California became the last of Mexico’s provinces to swear loyalty to the new government.41 While political independence did not bring radical social change, it did bring economic benefits to some settler-colonizers, in part because independence brought with it an immediate opening of international trade. While the republic struggled with trade regulations and tariffs throughout the nineteenth century, California was never again subjected to the trade restrictions previously imposed by Spain. Under these circumstances, a fur and hide trade flourished.42 In addition,

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figure 2.1. Source: “1790 Padrón de los Vecinos del Presidio de San Francisco,” MSS CA 50, 1: 85–91.

throughout Alta California, Californios such as Juan Bautista Alvarado and Salvador Vallejo benefited from a burgeoning trade in sea otters, exploiting the labor of local Indigenous peoples to accomplish their task, and selling the pelts to New England maritime merchants.43 A small number of Californios benefited from increased trade with New England and European merchants, but it was the missions that dominated the hide and tallow trade well into the 1830s, when the Californios fi nally secularized the missions. From 1769, when Junípero Serra and Gaspar de Portola came to Alta California, the missions dominated the lives of the Indigenous peoples who lived in them as well as the Californios who lived outside of them. The missions controlled not only the market for the hide and tallow trade, but all of the prime coastal land as well. Thus the secularization of the missions also had a significant economic effect on many Californios. Dissolution of the missions freed large tracts of land for soldiers and provided increased trade opportunities for settlers.44

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Ironically, Mission San Francisco de Solano, located in the Sonoma Valley, was founded after Mexico declared its independence from Spain. Both its founding and its early administration are reflective of the economic shifts of the era, when the missions were in decline, and certain Californios were able to benefit both from the decline of the missions and from the opening up of international trade.45 Shortly after his arrival in Alta California, Fray José Altimira, a cousin of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, set his eyes on founding a new mission. Initially he was assigned to Mission San Francisco Asís, one of many Alta California missions already in decline. Altimira, however, soon became restless working under Fr. Amoros, the head of the mission, and was convinced that a new mission, located across the bay, would both win new converts to the Church and provide him with some much-craved autonomy.46 Fortunately for Altimira, his plan for a new mission matured at the same time that the governments of Alta California and of Mexico were beginning to worry about the encroachment of foreign powers in the north. The Russians established Fort Ross in 1812, and rumors continued that the English were sailing up and down the coast of upper California. A mission north of San Francisco could discourage further encroachment on land claimed by Mexico. And so the new mission was founded.47 In June of 1823, an expedition was sent to select a place. Led by Fr. José Altimira and Alférez José Sánchez, the expedition chose Sonoma as the site for the mission and the adjacent Napa Valley as the place to graze the mission’s cattle.48 Just as the first Spanish presence in so many other regions of California was through the mission, so in the Napa-Sonoma area, the first sustained Mexican institution and settlement was Mission San Francisco de Solano. As in these other areas, the first settlers were representative of the larger colonial social structures. In August of 1823, when Fr. Altimira founded the mission, he was accompanied by a small band of soldiers as well as Indigenous converts from Mission San Francisco Asís.49 Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and his brother Salvador, two of the sons of Ignacio Vallejo, would be primary actors in establishing a Californio militarymission presence in the region.50

Class Stratification under Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 1835–1846 Under Spanish rule, the residents of northern Alta California had lived in a class-stratified society, where status was tied to the ethnic origins of

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their ancestors, military service, and access to land. Religion and state were inextricably linked. It was the Inquisition that issued certificates of “clean blood,” certifying that a person was racially and culturally clean, “not mixed with Indios, Negros, Mulatos, and other mixed peoples, or people recently converted to Our Holy Faith.” 51 Spanish Friars assigned racial labels to infants at their baptisms. Equally important was the mission system, which not only drove much of Spain’s colonizing efforts in the Americas, but which provided officers, soldiers, and other colonizers with food, clothing, and other basic supplies.52 Under Mexican rule, much of this remained the same. In the newly established Sonoma district, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and his family stood at the top of the social order, a family whose name was given legitimacy through service to church and state. Within the larger patriarchal structures of northern Alta California, Vallejo served as the patriarch. Under the Vallejos stood families of officers such as the Juárezes, Rodríguezes, Higueras, and Berryessas; after the officers stood the regular soldiers, and beneath them, California Indians. Some people crossed over from one social status to another, through the accumulation of wealth, through military service, or through marriage. The first land grant that Vallejo sponsored was not to a Mexican Californio soldier, but to a naturalized citizen who served under him in the 1830s. That man was George C. Yount, who came to the Napa-Sonoma area from Missouri in 1833. Yount first won the favor of local priests by working as a carpenter in the missions; once accepted as a member of the larger Californio community, he began serving in the Army. When Vallejo founded the Sonoma Presidio in 1835, Yount followed him there and participated in anti-Indian campaigns. In 1836 Vallejo rewarded him with a land grant in the Napa Valley. Until the U.S. invasion of 1846, Yount remained loyal to Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, joining him in battle against local Indigenous peoples whenever summoned.53 The extent of Vallejo’s control over the landholding classes in the region is demonstrated in his relations with the Juárez family. For the socio-economic and political system of Alta California was necessarily patriarchal. Church, state, and family worked together to reconstruct the social apparatus of the state on the frontier. In the Napa-Sonoma area, Vallejo served as both caudillo and padrón, providing jobs and land to those who were loyal to him, and exerting social control over both his own family and the indigenous and settler-colonizer families of the region.54 Cayetano Juárez served under Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo as early as 1827, while still stationed at the San Francisco Presidio. By the

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time Vallejo founded the Sonoma Presidio, Juárez was a sergeant, and followed Vallejo north. Juárez held a position as a trusted officer at the Sonoma Presidio, yet in 1837 an event occurred which demonstrated both the volatility of the local army and the power Vallejo held over the lives of his soldiers.55 Like so many times in the past, Mexico had failed to send the troops’ salaries, and while often Vallejo clothed and paid his troops from his own funds, for some reason, on this occasion he chose not to. In response, Sergeant Juárez organized a mass desertion to ride to Monterey and demand payment. Sem Yeto overhead the soldiers discussing the plan, and out of loyalty to the General, reported the incident. Rather than immediately arrest the men, Vallejo attempted to persuade them to stay. Confronting the soldiers while they were still mounting their horses, he reminded them that desertion was a capitol offense. He convinced all but Juárez to remain.56 Juárez fled the scene alone and sped toward Monterey; at the Carquinez straits, he dismounted and managed to swim the straits with his horse. Once on land, he again rode at full force toward the department’s capitol. Just short of arrival, Juárez was captured, court-martialed, and sentenced to be shot. It is at this point in the story that Mariano Guadalupe’s hold over the lives of his men becomes clear, for rather than carry out the sentence, he ordered Juárez to marry and gave him a grant in the Napa Valley so that he could help him “civilize this fi ne country.” 57 Throughout the course of Juárez’s desertion and eventual pardon, there were a number of actions that Vallejo could have taken in regard to the sergeant. Because the soldier was running to the capital and not necessarily away from his duty, he could have opted against a court-martial, or he could have intervened on his behalf before he was sentenced to be shot. Instead, Vallejo chose a path that demonstrated his power and authority. In a militarized society, order is maintained through violence and threats of violence. Because he was the caudillo of the region, Vallejo’s public and private displays of authority cemented his position at the same time that they maintained and reproduced the larger patriarchal order. And so Vallejo waited until Juárez was condemned to death, and only after the women of the presidio came and begged him for mercy did he pardon the sergeant. As part of his end of the bargain, Juárez allowed the General to direct his personal life.58 While the story of Juárez’s land grant is more dramatic than that of other soldiers who received grants through their military service, the control that Vallejo exercised over all of their lives was very similar.

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D. A. Rodríguez received his grant for the Yajome Rancho from the Mexican government in 1841, and José Jesús and Sisto Berryessa received a grant for Las Puntas in 1843.59 Like George Yount, further up the Valley, all these men continued to serve under Vallejo even after they officially retired from the military. Any time that the General needed their assistance in wars against Indigenous peoples, he summoned them to meet at Las Trancas, a rancho at the southern end of Napa.60 Other events, such as rodeos, served to reinforce the bonds between the General and the lesser landowners throughout the region. For example, the Juárez family held an annual rodeo where the General always made an appearance and rode with the men.61 The everyday lives of such men and their spouses required a great deal of labor, yet it was labor that was richly rewarded and strongly aided by yet another group of Californios who labored beneath them. Such landholders, then, can be seen as living on a middle ground; not as wealthy as the Vallejos who held haciendas in the area, these rancho families held enough land to raise crops and cattle. There were two groups of Californios under the authority of landholding classes in the Napa-Sonoma area: common soldiers and their families, and landless workers. Presidio records, along with the narratives of officers and landed families, make it possible to roughly sketch the lives of common soldiers. During the Spanish era, the average literacy rate among soldiers at the San Francisco and Monterey Presidios had been 25 percent.62 Because throughout the Mexican era the number of teachers increased in the north, the literacy rate among soldiers and their families most probably increased during this time.63 Yet their life was one of subsistence and dependence. The salaries of such soldiers seldom arrived on time, nor did their uniforms and other basic supplies. At the Sonoma Presidio, this made the soldiers dependent on Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, who maintained the basic stores at the presidio out of his personal funds and at times paid salaries out of his own pocket. Most landless laborers lived on the ranches of the wealthier families in the district. According to one worker, Juan Antonio Sánchez, when he arrived in Napa, there were already about 70 men working for Salvador Vallejo on his Napa hacienda. Some of the men planted and harvested his fields, others maintained his livestock. All the men working for Vallejo lived on his land and socialized primarily with each other and with Vallejo, who was known to be “a very good man, open hearted and always ready to make free with his peones.” 64 Landless men also

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worked matanzas, or cattle slaughters, for landholding families. Their families lived on ranchos throughout northern Alta California and often kept vegetable gardens on the lots allotted them by the landowners.65 In Napa, when a rancho owner died, their entire workforce sometimes moved together to work for another landowner.66

Edward Turner Bale: A Different Ethnic Conflict on the Mexican Frontier The lives of Californianas and Californios, throughout the 1830s and 1840s, were rooted in “settling” the region through first the establishment of a mission and then that of a presidio, and finally the development of a ranch economy. In part, the settlement of the Napa-Sonoma region was accomplished through marriage to immigrants, particularly European and Euro-American immigrants.67 Many of these marriages contributed to a growing Californio population in the region. Immigrant men and women married into Californio families, received land grants through the aid of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, and maintained fealty to him.68 On the surface, such intermarriage did very little to disrupt Californio socio-cultural norms in the region. In 1840, John Bidwell, in his travels through California, noted that Euro-Americans who had intermarried assimilated into the dominant Californio culture and lived “in every respect like the Spaniards.” 69 Yet when one looks beyond the clothes they wore, the unequal relations embedded in these early intermarriages between Euro-Americans and Californios becomes more apparent. Such relationships cemented Anglo-Californio relations among the landowning classes of Alta California. As noted by Rosaura Sánchez, these were unequal relationships, rooted in patriarchal systems where women were commodities. European and Euro-American men converted to Catholicism, became naturalized citizens, and were given wives and land in return. Yet recent scholarship demonstrates that these same men brought racist conceptions of Californianas to their relationships, and that the age differentials between the men and the women created grossly unequal relationships within these same families. Thus, while intermarriage provided the appearance of Euro-American assimilation into Californio culture, it also represented the sexual and material conquest of California by a new wave of invaders. This is not to argue that Californianas did not find room for resistance within this exchange.70 Stories of women’s resistance, as will be discussed in later chapters, demonstrate that women do resist, even when living in

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patriarchal and militarized societies. Nonetheless, the power dynamic established through these marriages, in many instances, was not one of reciprocity, but a foreshadowing of future conquest. The marriage of Edward Turner Bale to María Antonia Juana Ygnacia Guadalupe Soberanes, a niece of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, provides an example of these complicated relationships. Bale was British, and began his immigrant life in Alta California much like other northern European and Euro-American immigrants. He found work with the Mexican army in Monterey, became a Mexican citizen, married a Californiana, and through the intercession of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, received a grant in Alta California.71 Bale’s grant was for 17,000 acres and included the area that is now Calistoga and St. Helena, in the heart of the Napa Valley. Then, in 1841, the same year Governor Alvarado awarded him the grant, Bale was sued for non-payment of a debt by a French immigrant named Ricardo.72 The Bale-Ricardo incident marks the time at which relations between Bale and the Vallejo family began to deteriorate. Ricardo won the suit, yet Bale refused to pay his dept. This prompted the military commander at Monterey to ask Vallejo to attach Bale’s wages until the debt was paid. Vallejo did so, and Bale blamed him for withholding the wages.73 In the years that followed, confl icts between Bale and the Vallejos continued. In 1844 there were at least two incidents that demonstrated growing tensions between Bale and the Vallejos. For the first of these incidents, there are significantly different stories. According to one account, Bale was offended by Salvador Vallejo showing what he felt was undue affection toward María Soberanes (Vallejo’s niece). Bale challenged Vallejo to swords and was duly defeated.74 According to yet another story, Bale spread rumors throughout the Sonoma-Napa area questioning Salvador Vallejo’s honesty, and so Vallejo had him publicly whipped.75 The significant differences in the stories remind us of the constructedness of history. From a reader’s perspective, either story might be true. Ultimately, though, whether the former, the latter, or both incidents occurred, by 1844, Edward Turner Bale, who was married to a Vallejo, had aligned himself against the Vallejo family, and hence against the Californio social order of northern Alta California. Several weeks after the alleged public whipping, while Salvador Vallejo walked through the town of Sonoma with Cayetano Juárez, Bale rode by with fourteen Euro-American immigrant men and fired on him, grazing his cheek and wounding Juárez.76 Sem Yeto was in the area with a group of Suisun soldiers and responded by capturing Bale and his accomplices

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and attempting to lynch them. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, however, arrived in time to stop the lynching and placed Bale in the custody of Sergeant José Berryessa. Bale was then taken to the Sonoma jail, where he attempted to bribe his guard into allowing him to escape.77 Bale is symbolic of the growing tensions between Californios and foreign immigrants during the 1840s. In later years both Salvador and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo regretted the hospitality they had extended to European and Euro-American immigrants. Not only had Mariano Guadalupe allowed them to remain in Alta California, he and Salvador had provided many of the immigrants with food and shelter and had lent some of them money. In exchange for their hospitality, their land was taken and their culture subordinated by people for whom “no other law existed than their will or whim, and who did not recognize any rights but those of force.” 78 In June of 1846, roughly five years after his marriage to María Soberanes, Bale was host to agitators for the Bear Flag incident, en route to Sonoma to place the General and his brother under arrest.79 A majority of those immigrant men who had married Californianas would ultimately side with the invaders.80

The Colonized By the late eighteenth century, Wappo-speaking peoples of what is now called Napa County had developed a society whose ritual life was organized largely around menstrual rooms and sweat houses. Trade and cultural exchanges between communities, even among different language groups, meant that by the late eighteenth century, communities throughout California were economically and culturally linked to each other.81 When in 1769 Spanish colonizers established missions and presidios in the areas they called San Diego and Monterey, the changes they brought could not be contained in these areas. Instead, as Indigenous peoples fled the missions to neighboring communities, they brought stories of the missionaries and the diseases they had contracted there. Disease, dislocation, and disruption spread throughout California. The influence of the missions on California Indians living outside of their immediate area repeated itself in the Napa-Sonoma region. In the early nineteenth century, a typhoid epidemic swept through Mission San Francisco de Asís, killing thousands of Indigenous converts. Some people fled the mission to what is now Napa County, where they took refuge with Wappo-speaking people. The end result was the that Wappoand Patwin-speaking people of the Napa area heard of the missions

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long before a mission was founded in the neighboring Sonoma Valley.82 Many California Indians continued to flee the missions for a variety of reasons, including disease, abuse, and desire to return to previous lifeways. At the same time, other people continued to join the missions. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, peoples from both Wappo and Patwin-speaking communities, having heard of the missions from ex-neophytes, traveled more than forty miles to join the missions of San Francisco de Asís and San José. This happened prior to the arrival of the Franciscans in the Napa-Sonoma area.83 The California missions served as critical sites of colonizing processes; it was here that colonial processes were produced and reproduced, and where the discourses established within the mission walls spread their influence well beyond into presidios and the villages where non-mission peoples lived.84 During times of colonization it often appears that challenges to dominant power structures would be futile, yet histories of California Indians in the eras of Spanish and then Mexican rule demonstrate that within an expanding system of social control, there was resistance. The periods of 1769 to 1821, and then 1821 to 1846, were periods of upheaval and rapid social change among California Indians. As disease, cultural disruption, and violence tore away at their communities, California Indians developed a variety of survival strategies, including making treaties with the Spanish, voluntarily joining missions, and laboring on newly organized ranchos. But they also fought against Spanish soldiers and their allies, attacking missions and moving as far away from the colonizers as possible. Some of these attempts provide opportunities to study resistance to systems of domination, especially in social systems where power mechanisms are dispersed.

The Persistence of Race For the Spanish colonizers of both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century California, their sense of self and other was largely shaped by the racial ideologies they brought with them from the Peninsula and forged through centuries of interaction with colonial subjects in the Americas.85 Yet race is also important for understanding California Indians as well as the Californianas/os. Whereas, for Californianas/os, the racial ideologies they inherited from Spain allowed for upward mobility, for California Indians, these same ideologies facilitated their social and economic subordination. The racial consciousness that the Spanish brought with them to the Americas had its roots in nation building.86 From 711 to 1492, Spanish

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Christians fought to drive the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula. Such prolonged warfare reinforced their identities as Christians, that is, persons who were religiously and ethnically different from Muslims and Jews. In the process of constructing their new identity as Christians, the Spanish racialized the Muslims and the Jews, whom they expelled from the continent.87 When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they immediately encountered people with cultures dramatically different from their own and from those of the Muslims and Jews they had recently expelled from the Peninsula. Fueled by a desire to acquire wealth for themselves and for the crown, they began a debate concerning whether or not American Indigenous peoples were beasts, or humans with souls.88 Racism in colonial Spanish America drew heavily on discourses elaborated in Spain during the Reconquista. From the sixteenth and into the nineteenth century, Spanish soldiers called on Santiago Matamoros (St. James, Killer of the Moors) for divine assistance when they went into battle against American Indigenous peoples.89 At times they referred to the Indigenous peoples as Moors and Jews.90 This connection between the racial categories of Reconquest Spain and of Spanish and Mexican territories also replayed itself in Napa.91 Between 1831 and 1841, Vallejo often called upon the settlers of the area, including George Yount, to meet at Las Trancas, to organize expeditions against local Indigenous communities. When Yount described Vallejo’s expeditions he borrowed terms from the Reconquista. Of Vallejo’s excursion against the Indigenous peoples of the Russian River area Yount remarked: “The plan was well and skillfully arranged and admirably was it executed—the General in person with a bravery worthy of any hidalgo, who ever charged upon the Moors in Spain, led on the attack.” 92 In Alta California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was the Spanish hidalgo, and the Indigenous peoples, Moors. Clearly, such categories were not an uncomplicated transplant from the past and had considerably evolved in the colonies. As with most social systems, the meaning and significance of terms in one era can radically change in the next. Whereas the initial division between Christian Spaniards and heathen Moors was used to explain the expulsion of Moors from Spain, an ethnic and racial othering of Indigenous peoples was employed to justify their subjugation in Alta California. The initial division between Christian and non-Christian, therefore, was complicated through the addition of American Indigenous peoples to Spain’s ethnoracial composition.93 While racial categories were more fluid on the frontier, the distinction between gente de razón, or Christian and Christianized people, and

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gente sin razón, or non-Christian people, remained intact.94 Moving from a position of sin razón to de razón was very rare. Yet, because cultural racism, rather than biological racism, was the dominant ideology, a very small minority of baptized Blacks and Indigenous peoples who practiced trades and lived in non-Indigenous towns were able to become gente de razón. The number of such people in Alta California remained small.95 In the Napa-Sonoma area, Sem Yeto was among the few people who were able to cross the racial line from gente sin razón to gente de razón.96 Settler-colonizers also brought new understandings of gender to Alta California. These, like the racial taxonomies, were developed largely through centuries of warfare and conquest. The ways in which men and women maintained, promoted, or lost their social status were dramatically different. Men, for the most part, could improve their status through military and/or government service. This was because, among Spanish colonizers, a man’s status was determined by his honor and was tied to the exercise of force. Due to the need for support from privately fi nanced soldiers during the Reconquista, Catholic monarchs rewarded soldiers with titles to land and nobility. This gave rise to a tradition where men’s honor was inextricably tied to military service and to fighting non-Christians.97 Throughout the colonization of Alta California, non-Christian Indigenous peoples were the targets of colonial violence by which Christian Spaniards earned and maintained their honor. While men’s status was tied to military service and the ability to use force, women’s status was tied to their honor-virtue. A woman’s status was based on her virginity before marriage and fidelity to her spouse after marriage.98 In Alta California, honor-virtue existed on a binary. At one end of the binary stood colonizing women who, by maintaining their virtue, won the protection of colonizing men. On the other end of the binary stood colonized women. Feminist historians have discussed the impact of war and colonization on colonized, subjugated women.99 According to Gerda Lerner, The impact on the conquered of the rape of conquered women was twofold: it dishonored the women and by implication served as a symbolic castration of their men. Men in patriarchal societies who cannot protect the sexual purity of their wives, sisters, and children are truly impotent and dishonored.100

While maintenance of their honor-virtue earns women in colonizing societies the protection of honorable men, the same honor system that

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buys their protection directs sexual violence and exploitation at colonized women. Colonial honor systems produced systematic violence against Indigenous women throughout the Napa and Sonoma valleys. As argued by historian Antonia Castañeda, throughout California the women of the colonizers were viewed as needing protection against sexual violence, while Indigenous women were sexually exploited. In 1774, this ideology had disastrous effects for some little girls living near the presidio in Monterey. A group of Spanish soldiers raped them, and murdered one of them.101 The men were arrested and tried in court, but in the end their actions went unpunished: two of them were sentenced to become citizens of California; they were discharged and settled in the pueblo of San José. The third soldier deserted the army before sentence was passed.102 Colonizing practices of rape and violence against women were so common in Alta California that Junípero Serra wrote to the Viceroy claiming that such violence was interfering with the spiritual and military conquest of the region.103 The racial and gender ideologies that the Spanish brought with them to Alta California, then, were not only dramatically different from those of California Indians, they also placed California Indians at the bottom of the Spanish colonial social order. Spaniards coming to the area achieved upward mobility for themselves through the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. Under the gender ideologies of the Spanish colonizers, the exploitation of colonized women contributed to their honor-status.

The Mission The first Wappo contact with the Spanish may have occurred as early as 1795, when, following a typhoid epidemic at Mission Dolores in what is today San Francisco, a group of Saclan peoples fled the mission hoping to escape the disease. The Saclans escaped to Napa, where they were captured and brought back to San Francisco to be tried in a military court.104 This contact with mission converts would have provided Wappo-speaking people with accounts of mission life and demonstrations of Spanish military power. The incident also suggests the possibility of other SpanishWappo contact prior to the founding of Mission San Francisco Solano in the Sonoma Valley. By 1810 Spanish colonial influence was having a profound demographic impact on the Napa area. It is at this time that Patwin-speaking peoples most probably entered what is now Napa County, displacing

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Wappo-speaking peoples from their settlements in the southern end of the valley.105 Prior to the arrival of the Spanish in Alta California, Patwinspeaking peoples populated the areas now called Sacramento, Fairfield, and Suisun. Like the Wappo and their neighbors, they practiced the Kuksu religion. Women were secluded during menstruation, and men segregated themselves in the community sweat house. In hunting and gathering societies such as precolonial Wappo- and Patwin-speaking communities, maintenance of hunting and gathering grounds was critical to survival. With the incursion of the Suisun, a Patwin-speaking group, into Napa, confl ict between the two groups intensified.106 The relocation of the Suisun people was forced. Initially, they avoided contact with Spanish colonizers, and they were among the last of the Indigenous communities in the greater San Francisco bay area to succumb to Spanish colonization. From the time Spanish colonizers arrived in the area now called San Francisco, the Patwin-speaking peoples of the Suisun area resisted their presence. While some neighboring communities visited the missions and were baptized, the Suisun chose to remain in their own territory and at times aided peoples from neighboring villages who fled the mission system.107 From the 1770s and into the early 1800s, Suisun peoples guarded their territories against other peoples displaced by Spanish colonizers. Then in 1810, after the conversion of the Carquin people, the last non-Christian peoples residing between the Suisun and Mission San Francisco, the Suisun capitulated. Three Carquin women were home visiting from the mission when a group of Suisun people overtook and killed them. When word got back to the mission, the friars sent out a retaliatory expedition under the command of José Darío Argüello to raze the Suisun village. Most of the Suisun men and women at the village fought to the death. Of the survivors, six boys and six girls were taken to Mission San Francisco de Asís and baptized.108 After this battle many of the Suisun, a Patwin-speaking people, are said to have moved into the Napa area.109 Other stories of displacement have been told by California Indians from the area just north of Napa. According to one story, Wappospeaking people living in the area of the Russian river and Pluton Geysers were originally from the Napa Valley. They did not emigrate north until after Spanish colonizers began grazing their cattle in Napa. The cattle grazing depleted the flora and fauna on which they based their livelihood, and so they were pushed north.110 Depletion of food resources pushed Wappo- and Patwin-speaking peoples to relocate their communities. It also pushed many people to enter the mission system.

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California Indians entered the missions for a variety of reasons. In the early years after the founding of Mission San Francisco, California Indians came to the mission for relatively positive reasons. Some families sent members to become allies of the new settlers. Others went to the missions simply out of curiosity. In later years, social and economic disruption played a greater role in attracting Indigenous peoples to the missions. By the late eighteenth century, disease spread by soldiers and runaway mission converts had attacked communities miles beyond the immediate mission grounds. Cattle grazing had destroyed gathering grounds, and the conversion of entire villages had destroyed trade networks.111 When the Spanish brought cattle into the San Francisco and Napa areas, they set them to graze in areas rich in foliage—precisely those that were best for gathering. Wappo- and Patwin-speaking peoples claimed such territory for gathering seeds and roots and for hunting small game. With their food sources depleted by the grazing cattle, some communities resorted to slaughtering cattle for food. Spanish colonizers and later the Californios arrested and punished Indigenous people for doing so.112 From 1794 into the nineteenth century, with their food sources depleted, trade routes interrupted, and populations decimated by disease, large numbers of California Indians entered the missions of Northern Alta California. While the priests saw the movement as a work of God, in retrospect it can be seen as the end product of years of material and cultural destruction.113 For many people who went to missions San Francisco de Asís, San José, and San Francisco Solano from the Napa area, forced admission to the mission system was also common. The military expeditions led by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and his brother Salvador Vallejo often led to such forced admissions.114 George Yount, who participated in many Californio expeditions against California Indians, remembered how, several times when Indigenous people were captured, they were brought to the missions to be baptized. Living in up-valley Napa, Yount was in an ideal place to observe such ex peditions. The rallying place for Napa and Sonoma Californios, for Solano’s allied Indigenous troops, and for Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s presidio soldiers, Las Trancas, was just ten miles from Yount’s rancho, where he lived surrounded by a group of Caymus Indians, a Wappospeaking group whose labor he exploited. According to Yount, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo preferred offensive maneuvers against the surrounding Indigenous villages. When news of Indigenous unrest reached him at Sonoma he would call for the district’s Californios to rally at Las Trancas and set out against the Indigenous

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peoples before they could attack. In most instances the Californios won and the general took prisoners back to the mission, “there to be taught Christianity, agriculture and the arts . . . to be ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ for the establishment.” If the prisoners were taken from a particularly resilient community, Vallejo would send them across the bay to Mission San Francisco de Asís.115 Between 1809 and 1818 both Wappo- and Patwin-speaking peoples from Napa entered the records of Mission Dolores and Mission San José. Fifty-seven people from Napa were baptized at Mission Dolores and another 164 were baptized at Mission San José. Wappo-speaking people throughout the Napa region traveled to Mission Dolores sometime during, or before, 1821, when another 240 people were baptized.116 By the time of the founding of Mission San Francisco Solano in the Sonoma Valley, many Wappo- and Patwin-speaking peoples had had extensive contact with the settlers. The founding of Mission San Francisco Solano in the Sonoma Valley initiated a period of intense contact and confl ict, for the peoples of the Napa-Sonoma area could no longer avoid the destructive forces of colonization while remaining on their own land.

Resistance During the mission era, which in the Napa/Sonoma area lasted until the late 1830s, Franciscan friars struggled to convert the surrounding Indigenous communities to Christianity. This process included not only replacing California Indian mythology and rituals with a Christian equivalent, but also replacing a hunting and gathering society with an agricultural one. Among the primary aspects of California Indian life that the friars attempted to change were their religious beliefs. While the Indigenous peoples who came to Mission San Francisco Solano represented a variety of cultures, in precolonial times their religious practices appear to have been similar. The primary religion of the area was the Kuksu, practiced by Wappo-speaking peoples, the Maidu, the Patwin, and the Pomo.117 California Indian mythologies had been passed down from generation to generation through stories and dances, yet once the Indigenous peoples entered the mission, the Franciscans insisted that they interpret their lives through new stories. These stories were told in sermons at mass and in the sometimes macabre religious art that decorated mission chapels.118 The mission chapel was also a place where Christian stories and the ritual of the mass were connected to other aspects of mission life. It is

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here that both the mission as a place of refuge and the mission as a site of discipline and punishment came together.119 Mass served as a central reminder of the order under which Indigenous people lived and of the consequences that would befall them if they strayed from the ways of the padres. Mission converts were called to mass by the same bells that called them to labor. As they filled the church and sat or knelt on the floor, soldiers, or sometimes Indigenous alcaldes selected by the mission fathers, stood guard to make sure that no one left the building before mass was over. At some missions, such as San Carlos, these were the same alcaldes who administered punishments to their fellow converts for refusing to labor.120 During the ritual of the mass, the order of the mission was reenacted not only by the actions of the priest at the head of the church and the alcaldes policing their brethren, but by the acculturation of children to mission life. Throughout the service, children trained by the priest played musical instruments to accompany the mass and sat between the priest and adult neophytes instead of with their families.121 This pattern of conditioning children to identify with their colonizers, instead of their parents, was repeated in catechism lessons, where children were trained away from their families and given gifts for reciting their lessons correctly.122 Despite the aggressive colonizing practices of the Mission fathers, mission converts throughout Northern California were able to maintain some of their earlier traditions, in part because the friars allowed mission converts to practice some of their traditional rituals within the mission walls, and in part because they found small spaces, beyond the gaze of the mission fathers, where they could maintain cultural autonomy. The friars also allowed some Indigenous peoples to go on visits to their villages. Albert von Chamisso, a Russian explorer, reported on Indigenous practices at the missions during his visit to San Francisco in 1816. According to von Chamisso: The Indian, in the mission, dances his national dances, on Sunday, in the presence of the fathers, and plays, always for gain, his usual game of chance; he is only forbidden to stake his coat, a piece of coarse woolen cloth, manufactured in the mission: he can also enjoy the hotbath, to which he has been accustomed. The dances are boisterous, different in each tribe . . . The game is played between two antagonists, at “odd or even,” with short sticks; an umpire keeps the account with other sticks. The usual bath of the Indians . . . is the following: at the entrance of a cave on the sea-shore, in which the bathers are, a

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great fire is made; they suffer to go out, when they have perspired sufficiently, and then leap over it and plunge into the sea.123

Similar practices were observed by François La Pérouse at Monterey where, in 1786, he noted that the Franciscans had stopped trying to prohibit body painting as part of funeral rites and common dances.124 At Mission San Francisco Solano, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and the resident friars encouraged traditional dances for the amusement of visitors.125 While such activities were performed under the watchful eyes of the Franciscans and other colonizers, they also served to maintain a critical link between California Indians inside and outside of the mission. When mission converts went to visit their former homes outside the missions, the culture they encountered was not foreign; instead it was one with which they struggled to maintain ongoing ties. The central role that paseos, or authorized visits, played in the lives of mission converts was commented on by all three diarists of the Rurik expedition. Rather than incidental events that punctuated the routines of baptized Indians, such excursions appear to have been events they looked forward to throughout the year. Again, according to Adelbert von Chamisso: The fathers allow their Indians, for the most part, twice a year, a leave of absence for some weeks to visit their friends, and their native place. On occasion of these journeys, which are undertaken in companies, apostates fall off and new converts come in.126

On one occasion, continued von Chamisso, [t]wo sick people, a man and his wife, whose end seemed fast approaching, being unable to undertake the journey, had remained behind the throng of departing Indians. They did not return to the mission; they laid themselves naked as they were on the damp ground, on the shore near our tents, without a covering from the stormy rainy nights. Their looks were fi xed on their blue mountains; they saw their native home; and thus consoled themselves for not being able to reach it.127

The Epidemic of 1832 Mission converts who survived forced labor routines, cultural disruption, and physical violence faced yet another threat, European diseases. The susceptibility of Indigenous peoples to these diseases was tied to colonizing processes. Chronic depression due to captivity, unsanitary

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living conditions at the missions, malnutrition, and the failure of priests to inoculate Indigenous peoples against smallpox all contributed to the decimation of California Indian communities.128 By 1832, the California Indian population had suffered severe losses from disease. In 1806 a measles epidemic swept through Mission San Francisco de Asís, killing 880 people. Of the young people at the mission, almost none under the age of ten survived. In 1827 another epidemic broke out. This time, the disease spread to other missions.129 Then in the early 1830s, groups of trappers traveling south from the Pacific Northwest came to the California missions to trade, bringing what was most probably smallpox with them. The epidemic that resulted was one of the most severe in California history. Lasting from 1832–1833, it fanned out over the Central Valley and beyond.130 The results were devastating. Up to 75 percent of the California Indian population died as a result of the epidemic.131 Salvador Vallejo estimated that sixty thousand Indigenous peoples died in the district of Sonoma alone.132 Decades later, George Yount commented, After burning the bodies of their friends in heaps of hundreds, in despair the living fled to the mountains and wandered desolate and forlorn, they die alone—The bones of untold thousands lay whitening the vallies—Travelers ascending the rivers found the stench almost intolerable and the following year heaps of whitened bones might be seen everywhere in those fertile vallies—deserted and desolate Rancherias were frequent and numerous.133

By 1834, the year when most missions in Alta California began the secularization process, only a small remnant of the Wappo- and Patwinspeaking peoples who once dominated the Napa-Sonoma region survived.

The Secularization of Mission San Francisco Solano Following the Suscol battle of 1835, Sem Yeto and his troops aided Vallejo’s army whenever they went to war against local peoples. They were critical in defeating a community known as the Satiyomi, who continued to resist the Californio settlers even after their numbers were greatly reduced from smallpox.134 Who the Satiyomi were is not certain. Julio Carillo, in reflecting on his youth in Sonoma, commented that the Satiyomi were also called “Guapo.” 135 Because Guapo was the Spanish name for peoples modern anthropologists call Wappo, it is possible that

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the Satiyomi were a Wappo-speaking community.136 If this is so, then Sem Yeto’s treaty with Vallejo meant that a coalition of Patwin-speaking peoples now had the aid of the Mexican army to defeat their rivals in the Napa-Sonoma area. In the same year that Sem Yeto and Vallejo signed their treaty, they united forces to defeat some local communities led by Peregrino, Sampay, and Tuerto. The Satiyomi were among them. Determined to “drive out the invader,” they began to move toward Mission Solano. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, with his new Suisun allies, was able to defeat them.137 The two armies worked well together; both leaders were successful warriors, in part because of their skillful strategic maneuvers. The organization of their army camps was also similar, with both Patwin and Californio troops employing camp followers to cook and care for their soldiers.138 Thus both armies shared a heritage, which in both Patwin and Mexican histories could be traced to precolonial times. Women were employed not only to cook, clean, set up camp, and offer first aid, but at times to forage, gathering foods to feed an army that had no formal commissary.139 The defeat of the forces of Sampay, Peregrino, and Tuerto won Sem Yeto the gratefulness of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. As with smaller battles, Vallejo and Sem Yeto exchanged gifts to celebrate their victory. Sem Yeto and the Suisun held a celebration that lasted for several days where Vallejo was invited to feast with the Patwin warriors. It was at this celebration that Vallejo gave Sem Yeto his infamous honor guard. Dressed in full military uniforms and mounted on horses, they would accompany Sem Yeto until the smallpox epidemic of 1838, when most of them died.140 It was in 1837, however, the year before the next smallpox epidemic, that Vallejo and Sem Yeto defeated the Satiyomi. This time, the victory of the Californio-Patwin allies was clearly due to the military strategies and advice of Sem Yeto, and Vallejo acknowledged it. To express his gratitude for the defeat of their long-time foes, Vallejo gave Sem Yeto the title “Chief of the Unconverted Indians,” a title which, historian Marcus Peterson argued, signaled a special status for Sem Yeto’s people. According to Peterson, “Chief of the Unconverted Indians” necessarily meant that Sem Yeto’s people would never be expected to convert to Catholicism.141 While by this time a mere remnant of what was once Mission Solano remained, Vallejo had yet to fully secularize the institution, and its presence had remained a threat to the Indigenous peoples of the area.142

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That the relationship between Sem Yeto and Vallejo was unique is demonstrated by the popular reaction of Monterey settlers when Vallejo brought Sem Yeto and his troops with him to the Capitol. Disturbed by the sight of armed and mounted Indigenous warriors, the governor ordered Vallejo to take his troops and immediately leave the area. Watching from a distance, Dorotea Valdez, a servant in Monterey, later recalled: I took particular notice of the tall figure of that dark colored savage, who was dressed like the people of my race; his many followers however were dressed like Indians, and wore feathers round their heads, many of them were tattooed round their wrists, arms and legs—their presence we disliked very much because their conduct was really overbearing—Solano and his Indians were all mounted on fi ne horses, all had achimas but a few of them had saddles. They wore long hair, carried their bows and arrows, and their appearance was such as to inspire fear—I really believed them to be devils let loose from hell . . . I heard my mistress say, that the arrival of these savages in Monterey was a plague sent by God, for the purpose of punishing us for our sins.143

Under the leadership of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a number of Patwin-speaking communities were able to escape some of the violence of settlement. The price of doing so was service to the settlers. Select warriors, like Sem Yeto and his honor guard, were able to achieve special status through military service. Yet even this status did not carry over into other Californio communities. The population of Sonoma’s presidio and pueblo were familiar with the sight of Sem Yeto and his troops, who came and went as they pleased. The population of Monterey, including the governor, had very different reactions to the Patwin troops. The close of the 1830s brought with it the last great epidemic of the Mexican era. In 1837, a group of men set out from Sonoma to purchase supplies from Fort Ross. Unknowingly, they came back infected with smallpox. Vallejo quickly moved the remaining Christian converts away from the mission and set up a quarantine, but to no avail.144 Not only did most of the Indigenous peoples who survived the epidemic of 1832 succumb, but the majority of Sem Yeto’s troops also died. Before the epidemic Sem Yeto’s troops numbered in the thousands. At the close of the epidemic only two hundred survived. Those two hundred continued to ride into battle with Vallejo in the few instances when rival communities were able to offer resistance to the Californios.145 Sem Yeto continued to serve at Vallejo’s side until the U.S. invasion of 1846.

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Summary and Conclusion When, in 1769, Spanish colonizers arrived in Alta California, they set in motion a series of events that permanently changed both their own histories and the histories of California Indian peoples. The Californios who settled in the Napa-Sonoma area during the early nineteenth century came from a class-stratified society, where many of their social structures were directly carried over from the era of Spanish colonial rule. Most of these people spent their days engaged in labor, either serving as soldiers or camp followers, or working on ranchos. For both Napa and Sonoma, it was Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo who stood at the top of the social structure. As a general stationed at Mexico’s most distant presidio, Vallejo had remarkable autonomy in the administration of his presidio. As part of their colonizing mission, the soldiers and priests brought with them racial and gender ideologies that they imposed on Indigenous communities. The racial ideology necessarily placed California Indians at the bottom of the colonial social order. The same ideologies that created social mobility for the colonizers who came to Alta California proved devastating to the Indigenous peoples of the region. By the time that Fray José Altimira and a small band of soldiers and converts from Mission San Francisco de Asís arrived in the Sonoma Valley, communities throughout the Napa-Sonoma region had already suffered significant disruption. Some Patwin-speaking peoples had been pushed out of their traditional homes and moved into the Napa area. Peoples from both Napa and Sonoma traveled more than forty miles to join the missions at San Francisco and San José. The new mission at Sonoma only meant that colonizing processes were accelerated. Yet Indigenous people from both Wappo- and Patwin-speaking communities survived both the era of Spanish colonization and the era of Mexican settlement. For them, the future continued to hold reduced options. By the close of the 1830s, Vallejo had dismantled most of Mission San Francisco Solano, yet throughout the Napa-Sonoma region, the lands that once served the Indigenous peoples as hunting and gathering grounds were used to graze cattle or were farmed by retired soldiers. Ultimately, some mission converts sought out their old communities. For those whose communities were destroyed, they sought out allied communities, or labored on the ranchos of Californios who settled in the area. Still others went to labor on Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s Petaluma hacienda.146 The peoples who worked on the Petaluma hacienda found themselves subjected to a labor routine similar to that of the missions.

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They were awake by 5:00 a.m. for roll call and morning prayer. They had a breakfast of atole and labored in the fields, candle factory, and leather shops until noon, when they broke for another meal and a rest. They would then labor to the end of the day. Unhappy with their work and living conditions, in 1843, the workers at the hacienda revolted.147 For some of the Wappo- and Patwin-speaking people who remained in the area, including those who did not enter the missions, the 1840s were years of continued negotiation with Californio rancheros. In the years following secularization, when George C. Yount and Cayetano Juárez expanded their cultivated lands and grazing areas, they employed the communities living on the property in exchange for food.148 In the mid-1840s as well, the California Indian communities residing in Napa continued to practice many traditions from precolonial times. The Ulucas, a community of Patwin-speaking people living on the Juárez Rancho, and the Caymus, a Wappo-speaking people living on what had become Yount’s rancho, continued to practice Kuksu rites and sweats even while serving as an exploitable labor pool for the Californios. Indigenous people who lived on the ranchería near the Juárez rancho sweated in a structure overlooking a stream, and the women gave birth in a separate room set aside for that purpose.149 In 1846, when Euro-American filibusters from throughout northern Alta California descended on the pueblo of Sonoma to take Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Salvador Vallejo as prisoners of war, this is an important part of the world they encountered. California Indians were providing manual labor for Californio colonizers, some communities continued to live apart from the settlers, and Sem Yeto, along with a small contingent of Patwin-speaking soldiers, continued to serve at the side of the then-retired General Vallejo.

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sou rc e br e a k : be a r f l ag na r r at i v e s

There are many Bear Flag narratives. The stories below provide a sampling of the different perspectives nineteenth-century subjects brought to the event. For most of the twentieth century, it would be the narrative of Thomas Jefferson Gregory and similar iterations that dominated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century northern California discourse. As becomes apparent when compared with the narratives of Californio survivors of the incident, such narratives erased the violence of the event.

“the ‘bear flag war’ ” Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo As quiet as a New England village, the people were ending a night’s repose on Sunday night, June 18, 1846, when my father was roused by a tumult in front of his house, just as the day was beginning to dawn. He looked out and saw that it was surrounded by a band of armed men. He could see that they were Americans, but all of them were unknown . . . My father quieted my mother’s fears, dressed himself, opened the front door and inquired of the men what they wanted—what was their purpose. No one answered at first. The party was without a leader, purely a go-as-you-please concern. Finally a huge Kentuckian, Dr. Robert Semple, found a voice and told General Vallejo that they were acting under orders from Captain Fremont to seize and hold the village of Sonoma. My father, of course, believed this to mean that war had broken out between the United States and Mexico. He also was gratified to be assured that the men were acting under military orders and not a mere band of outlaws. He agreed at once to meet a committee and draw up terms of capitulation . . . But soon as [William] Ide was clothed with authority, he at once proceeded to upset the apple-cart of Dr. Semple and the committee. Entering the house, he claims to have

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found the America contingent comfortably drunk, victims of the potency of the General’s “vine.” This charge, my father always violently denied. The fact remains, however, that Ide cancelled all agreements, refused to accept my father’s parole, and while he disclaimed Fremont and proclaimed an independent republic, nevertheless decided to send father, my uncle Salvador, and Victor Prudón to the American Captain as Prisoners of war . . . I remember well seeing my father ride away with a number of men. He seemed quite content as he waved his adieu to his family and the villagers. He told everyone he would return in four days. But as it happened, those days were lengthened into nearly two months . . . My father returned to a home partly plundered, with cattle and horses driven away—almost with life to begin anew.1

“the fierce americanos stay to breakfast” Thomas Jefferson Gregory and Other Well Known Writers Early that morning after General Vallejo had been notified by his captors that he, his sword, the old brass guns on the wall, the rusty muskets in the castillo, and everything else possessed by Mexico in Sonoma, were prisoners of war, the old don batted his eyes once or twice, said, “Bueno,” and invited the fierce Americanos to stay for breakfast. Señora Vallejo stirred up her Indian cooks, and soon the General’s dining hall—that was never closed to a stranger, especially to an American—was thrown open, and on the tables were loads of chile-con-carne, frijoles, tortillas and wine from the mission grapes growing out by the old church of San Francisco Solano. Needless to say, that banquet given by the premier Native Sons of the Golden West was a notable one. It has been reported that during the latter part of the feasting some of the invaders were swearing “Viva la Mexico,” and General Vallejo was offered the presidency of the new republic. William Lincoln Todd, nephew of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, was the artist of the Bear Flag.2

“history of the bear party” Rosalía Vallejo de Leese About half past five in the morning of June 14th 1846 an old gentleman called don Pepe de la Rosa, came to my house and notified me that a band of 72 rough looking desperados, many of them run away sailors from whale ships had surrounded the house of General Vallejo and had

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arrested him, Captain Salvador Vallejo and Victor Prudón . . . On the 20th of June news reached Sonoma that Captain Padilla at the head of 100 men was coming to the rescue of Sonoma, no sooner Fremont heard this than he sent for me and ordered me to address Padilla a letter requesting him to return to San José, and not to approach Sonoma; I flatly refused, but Fremont, who was bent on having his way, told me that he would burn our houses with us inside of them if I refused to address Padilla in the manner he wished me to do . . . During the whole time Fremont and his gang were in Sonoma, robberies were very common; ladies dared not go out for a walk unless escorted by their husbands and brothers—Among my maid servants I had a young Indian girl of about 17 years of age: and I assure you that many a time John C. Fremont sent me orders to deliver her to the officers at the barracks, but by resorting to artifices I managed to save the unhappy girl from the fate decreed to her by the lawless band who had imprisoned my husband . . . I could relate many a misdeed of the bear flag crowd, but not wishing to detain you any longer I will close with the remark that those hated men inspired me with such a large dose of hate against their race, that though 28 years have elapsed since that time, I have not yet forgotten the insults they heaped upon me, and not being desirous of coming in contact with them I have abstained from learning their language.3

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t h e be a r f l ag i nc i de n t

Chapter Three

All impartial writers and students unite in pronouncing the Bear Flag revolt as the most unpleasant spot in the history of California. So far from aiding in the acquisition of California, it was a grave obstacle in the way . . . and cost many lives and a heavy financial burden on the Government. The indirect consequences are too numerous to even mention. California has many noble incidents in its history. It is strange that one has been selected for canonization that will never bear a close analysis of facts. —platón vallejo, Memoirs of the Vallejos, 1914

Every year, as June approaches, retrospectives and “histories” of the Bear Flag incident begin to appear in newspapers throughout the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. And every year, on June 16th, Euro-Americans run a Bear Flag up the flagpole in Sonoma. At major anniversaries of the event, they give speeches and proclaim themselves “Bear Flag descendents,” and retell the tales their ancestors have passed down through the generations. Then they have a party.1 The Bear Flag incident remains central to the identities of both the Napa and Sonoma valleys. It is a central part of the history and the forgetfulness of the region. The local celebration of the Bear Flag incident fi nds its roots in the larger mythology of “the West”—a mythology that, until recently, dominated both histories produced in academe and histories produced in community centers in towns across America. In that earlier history, the Euro-Americans who came to California were part of the westward movement, a people chosen by God to populate the West, and bring civilization and democratic institutions to a wilderness. The first Englishlanguage histories of California were often written by Euro-American men who came west during or following the Gold Rush. Much of their work, including that of Hubert Bancroft, was based on travel literature— a product of the racial and racist ideology of Manifest Destiny. The later work of historians who followed the Turner school of thought did

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not dramatically shift this paradigm. While Frederick Jackson Turner shifted the focus of national history to the West, the West remained a wild and untamed place; Euro-Americans remained the bringers of civilization; and Indigenous peoples, mestizos, and Californios remained absent or one-dimensional in the new texts.2 Not until the 1970s, with the publications of texts such as Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America and Albert Camarillo’s Chicanos in a Changing Society, would this be successfully disrupted.3 While Chicana/o historians began to challenge national narratives of Manifest Destiny, the Bear Flag incident remained a central yet largely uncontested event in the annals of Napa Valley history. Californios had contested dominant narratives of the event throughout the nineteenth century, but most of their stories and histories remained hidden away in archives at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, California, far from the reach of the people whose subordination was justified by white narratives of the event. Then, in the 1990s, something wonderful happened: a new generation of Chicana/o scholars turned their gaze to the nineteenth century, to reexamine the myths that white America used to build the West and to build the modern nation-state as we know it. At the same time, the Indigenous peoples of the Napa and Sonoma valleys began to rebuild in strength, numbers, and voice. In the Napa Valley, an organization calling itself the “Bear Flag Resistance Committee” emerged and began protesting at commemorative events. Its goal: to counter the narratives of Manifest Destiny that continued to dominate the region’s historical narratives.4 Most of the people who came to protest the commemorations were Indigenous or ethnic-Mexican, in part, reflecting the fact that the Napa-Sonoma region remains a region divided by racial tensions and racist histories. In the 1990s, a second wave of Chicana/o scholarship was emerging, and explicit critiques of early Euro-American narratives were part of its larger counter-hegemonic agenda. To a large extent, it was Antonia Castañeda, with her dissertation “Presidarias y Pobladoras,” who led the way. She excavated documents long hidden in the Bancroft Library and produced one that forever changed the way that California history can be written. Californios and Californianas came to life on the pages of her text—real people, with real goals, dreams, weaknesses, successes, and failures. Her text provided a counter-narrative to romanticized stories of the mission era and to the still dominant narratives of Manifest Destiny that plagued so much of Western history.5 Other texts soon followed: Genaro Padilla’s My History, Not Yours and Rosaura Sánchez’s

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Telling Identities among the most textured, nuanced, and disruptive of the genre.6 By successfully challenging larger narratives of Manifest Destiny and both reclaiming and complicating histories of nineteenthcentury Alta California, these scholars made it possible for us to now return to that past, to a specific event, the Bear Flag incident of 1846, to disrupt it.

the osos The early 1840s had been a time of upheaval in Alta California. Acknowledging the inability of Mexico to protect the distant department from foreign invaders, some of its political leaders began to debate the possibility of annexation to a foreign power—England, France, or even the United States.7 Many leaders saw annexation to the United States as an unnecessary risk to their liberty, citing Texas as an example of the treatment Californios might expect if annexed to such a racist country. Others, including General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, preferred republican government. Contrary to the advice of his peers, Vallejo espoused an alliance with the United States.8 While the political leaders of Alta California continued to debate its future, the centralist government in Mexico City sent a new governor to the department. Its intent was to assert control over an increasingly independent territory.9 Accompanied by three hundred semi-skilled exconvicts and their families, Manuel Micheltorena arrived in 1842. While the Californios were insistent on increasing the numbers of settlercolonizers in the area, the arrival of Micheltorena and his troops angered them. The ex-convicts were working-class mestizos, and they arrived poorly supplied.10 According to Antonio Osio, a landed Californio of the time, the soldiers robbed private residences as well as public stores and citizens who went out at night.11 How much a role the Californios’ race and class prejudice played in their complaints, and how much a desire to oust a governor representing a centralist government influenced their actions, we may never know. What we do know is that two years after his arrival the Californios united to drive Micheltorena and his soldiers from the region. In February of 1845 he signed a treaty with the insurrectionists and departed Alta California. Pío Pico then became governor of the department, with José Castro, at Monterey, appointed its military commander.12 A significant influx of Euro-American immigrants to the region proved even more disruptive to the political and social stability of the department than the actions of the government in Mexico City. Prior

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to 1840 there were almost no Euro-American immigrants in Alta California. Then, in the early 1840s, immigrants began traveling overland from Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky into northern Mexico. Many of these men, such as Andrew and Benjamin Kelsey, William Hargrave, and Granville Swift, were among the first generation of Euro-American settler-colonizers in Napa. They shared similar geographic origins: 26 percent were from Missouri, 11 percent from Illinois, and 7 percent from Tennessee. In addition, many immigrants from further east lived for a number of years in Missouri before crossing the Sierra Nevada. Nancy Kelsey, the first Euro-American woman to immigrate to Napa, was also part of this new wave of immigrants. Eighteen years of age, she had accompanied Benjamin, her husband, barefoot and pregnant.13 The new immigrants were able to successfully settle in the area, in part because wealthier immigrants, with a firm belief in Manifest Destiny, aided them in their endeavors. John Sutter was one of the first immigrants to establish himself in opposition to the local government, and one of the first immigrants to encourage Euro-Americans to settle and consider taking the land for themselves. Originally a Swiss émigré, Sutter had deserted his wife and five children and headed for North America in 1834. After a brief sojourn in Oregon, he arrived in Northern Alta California and became a citizen of Mexico. Initially the government of Alta California supported him, granting him a large tract of land in the Sacramento Valley. The then Governor Alvarado hoped that the presence of the foreigner so far north would help check the power of Vallejo. Not long after his arrival, it became clear that Sutter would be more of a problem than an aid; he aggravated local Indigenous peoples, alienated the Californios, and brought unruly immigrants into the region. Sutter built a fort and named it Nueva Helvetia, or New Switzerland. He hired local Indigenous people to work at the fort, but at times did not pay them and only provided them with mush, from a trough, to eat. When he did pay them it was with coins redeemable only at his company store. At times he kidnapped their children and gave them to EuroAmerican immigrants as gifts. Yet the Euro-Americans, he treated with open arms. He gave them jobs and land and forced the local peoples to work for them. They, in turn, called him “General.” They saw the region as virgin territory, and that territory included Indigenous land and labor, and Californio land and cattle.14 In 1841 a caravan of at least forty-eight wagons arrived in Alta California. Whereas earlier European and Euro-American immigrants had come prepared to work in agriculture or skilled trades such as carpentry,

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these immigrants did not have a specific plan. They had heard there was abundant land in California, and so they gathered their earthly possessions and traveled west. They arrived in Alta California without passports and with no established plan to obtain them.15 The arrival of the 1841 caravan marked a shift in Californio relations with Euro-American immigrants. In small numbers European and Euro-American immigrants were content to obey the laws of the land; they acknowledged the authority of local officials. Less invested in discourses of Manifest Destiny, some, such as Jacob Leese, shared a strong regional identity with the Californios who preceded them to the area; they married into their families and participated in their community events.16 Yet there were others who married to gain access to land and had no allegiance to their adopted country, its culture, or the community in which they lived.17 Finally, there was just a sprinkling of immigrants who did not attempt to acculturate to the larger Californio society at all, men such as John Marsh of Missouri, who would soon find allies in the recently arrived immigrants. Originally from the east coast, John Marsh had earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard. He traveled to Missouri, and eventually made the trek further west into northern Mexico. Legend has it that he hung his Harvard diploma on the wall of his residence and his newly acquired neighbors mistook it for a medical degree. He accepted the title and immediately set to work as a doctor. Fortunately, he was a quick learner and the local population did not have to pay the price of his arrogance. It was due to his work as a physician in California that the Mexican government eventually awarded him a hefty land grant in the San Joaquin Valley.18 Marsh settled in Alta California with the explicit goal of populating it with Americans who could later claim the region for the United States. He wrote open letters to the press in Missouri and the Mississippi Valley area, urging North Americans to immigrate as quickly as possible.19 The story of the 1841 caravan is a twisted tale that provides critical insight into the Bear Flag incident. The 1841 caravan traveled partly in response to one of Marsh’s letters. In fact, their difficult journey was due in part to faulty directions in his published correspondence.20 They arrived after Mexico’s federal government had become worried about immigration trends in Alta California and had begun to enforce passport regulations. And they were befriended by both Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and “Dr.” John Marsh. Marsh fed them and housed them and offered to help them secure passports. But the immigrants were still

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hungry, and they were accustomed to taking and eating whatever they happened upon. So while Marsh slept, they slaughtered one of his work oxen— apparently his favorite and most reliable work ox—and ate it. Marsh was incensed, but also relied on a similar set of values in his daily decisions.21 The next day, Marsh walked the immigrants through the requirements of obtaining passports and informed them that the documents would cost them five dollars a head. Discovering that the travelers had almost nothing of value left at the end of their journey, he accepted whatever possessions they had left as payment. He then directed them to Vallejo and the Mexican government. The group begged Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo to let them stay in the country. Arguing that they were out of supplies and would most probably die if sent back over the Sierra Nevada, they convinced him to bend the rules. George C. Yount, Timothy Murphy, and Guillermo Richardson, Euro-American immigrants who had never met the recent arrivals, vouched for their character. Vallejo, not wanting to send the families to their deaths, allowed them to stay.22 Only after they received their passports did they discover that Marsh had swindled them of their last possessions; there was no five-dollar fee for the documents.23 It was these immigrants who would form the core of the insurrectionists who took Sonoma in 1846.24 And it was these same immigrants who would one day claim the title of “Napa Valley Pioneers.” 25 Some, such as Granville Swift and John Grigsby, first settled in the Sacramento area and moved to Napa following the insurrection. Others, such as the Kelseys, Thomas Knight, and Elias Barnett, were already living in the valley when they joined the filibusters.26 If the early church histories of the Napa Valley are accurate, they were a diverse group in terms of religion, with Presbyterians, Methodists, and Catholics comprising a large portion of their numbers.27 What this diverse community of immigrants held in common was a desire for a new start, and a belief that the United States should possess Alta California. They had immigrated to the region in response to letters by men such as John Marsh.28 While both Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and his brother Salvador worried about the number of immigrants settling in northern Alta California, new immigrants continued to arrive, out of supplies and ill equipped to make a return trip over the Sierra Nevada. Both men helped the newcomers fi nd food and shelter, and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo continued to bend immigration rules.29 His reasons for doing so were complex; on the one hand, he had a genuine concern for travelers

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arriving in the area with no means to return home. On the other hand, the number of immigrants alarmed him. While he continued to welcome the immigrants, he also sent correspondence to the federal government voicing concern about their increasing numbers, explaining that he lacked the military resources to force such groups to leave the territory.30 In 1845, for one bright shining moment, there seemed to be something that could be done about the growing presence of Euro-American immigrants. Andrés Castillero, a commissioner from Mexico City, came to inspect the area. He met with the Californios and with immigrants such as John Sutter. At the time, Sutter was grossly in debt. He suggested that the Mexican government purchase Nueva Helvetia for the sum of $100,000. Despite the high asking price, Vallejo, Castillero, and others felt this would be a prudent move. Vallejo wrote to the federal government, “this is a high price to pay for a few pieces of cannon, a not very scientifically constructed bastion, some fosses or moats, ten or twelve adobe houses, and corrals of the same material; but the security of the country is what is to be paid for, and that is priceless.” 31 The government hesitated, and then said no. Sutter eventually improved his financial lot; he would never again offer to sell the fort. By 1845 there were 250 immigrants from the United States. One year later that number had doubled.32 Like the immigrants of 1841, many of the newer immigrants did not want to assimilate into California society. Instead, they arrived in the area well immersed in ideologies of white supremacy and Manifest Destiny. They saw the Californios as racially and ethnically inferior to themselves, and believed that God had appointed them to populate and “civilize” the continent.33 As increasing numbers of Euro-American immigrants arrived in Alta California, tensions between the immigrants and Californios increased. Eventually the Mexican government happened upon letters John Marsh had been sending to Missouri newspapers—letters urging North Americans to travel to Mexico and take the land for themselves. He was briefly jailed. Upon his release his letter-writing campaign increased. So did the number of Missourians coming to the area.34 Amid increasingly tense relations between Californios and Euro-American immigrants, John Frémont arrived in Alta California in January of 1846 and claimed that he was in the area for the U.S. Topographical Corps, surveying the area for a possible route to the Pacific. Using this story, he gained permission to stay in Alta California and rest his men before moving on to Oregon. The condition for doing so was that he stay in the area around the San Joaquin River, away from Californio ranchos and settlements. Frémont

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and his men promptly ignored this condition and traveled throughout California with a howitzer, offending Californios and telling EuroAmericans that the Mexican government was going to expel them.35 By May 29th Frémont had set up camp just north of Sutter’s Fort. He continued to agitate Euro-American immigrants in the area. According to Bancroft: “The old rumors of Castro’s hostile preparations were revived and new ones invented; new appeals to American patriotism were made; men were urged from love of life, of family, of liberty, from ambition, from greed of gain, from whatever motive was likely to be most potent with each, to shake off the tyrant’s yoke.” 36 One month later, the fears of the Mexican government and of the Vallejos were realized when Euro-American immigrants, along with a sprinkling of European immigrants, rose up to take northern Alta California from Mexico and from the Californios who had welcomed them into the area. Recently arrived Euro-American immigrants—squatters and trappers—first stole horses en route to General Castro, the military commander of California. Then they proceeded to Sonoma and placed Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo under arrest. The Euro-American squatters and trappers of northern Alta California called themselves “Bears.” The Californios called them by the Spanish-language equivalent, “Osos.” 37 On June 6, 1846, the Osos arrived at the Vallejo residence in Sonoma. Vallejo was just waking up when he heard loud voices outside his house. He looked out his window and saw a group of half-dressed, armed men shouting to be let inside. Robert Semple, one of the appointed leaders of the crowd, would later write, “Almost the whole party was dressed in leather hung-shirts, many of them were greasy; taking the whole party together, they were about as rough a looking set as one could well imagine. It is not to be wondered at that anyone would feel some dread falling into their hands.” 38 Yet the Vallejos did fall into their hands. When Vallejo’s wife, Francisca Benicia Carillo, saw the men outside their home she feared for her husband’s life and tried to convince him to flee out the back door, but he refused. If the men were as angry and unrestrained as they appeared to be, it was not safe to leave his family alone. He dressed and invited the men inside, then attempted to fi nd out why they were there.39 Soon, his brother Salvador arrived at the residence along with Pepe de la Rosa, Jacob Leese, and Victor Prudón. Leese, an immigrant from Ohio, was one of those earlier Euro-American immigrants who had married and assimilated into Californio society. Prudón, from France, had arrived with the Hijar Padres expedition and

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become the trusted secretary of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo.40 Leese and Prudón worked as translators between Vallejo and the filibusters, and the situation began to calm. Then Oliverio Bolieu, a recent immigrant from Canada, decided to show his hospitality to the filibusters by offering them a barrel of aguardiente. The incident devolved into chaos.41 Benjamin Kelsey, one of the filibusters, tried to kill Salvador Vallejo, but was restrained by Victor Prudón.42 The men outside began shouting to “sack the town.” 43 Dr. Robert Semple, a recent immigrant to Napa, tried to establish order and negotiated a treaty with Vallejo. According to the proposed treaty, the men of the Vallejo family would not take up arms during the insurrection and the Bear Flag group would leave them under house arrest. By the time the treaty was signed by Vallejo and Semple, the men outside were drunk and insisted that the Californios were their prisoners and should be taken to Frémont’s camp. While the Osos robbed local residences of food stores and horses, Pepe de la Rosa escaped out a back door. The Osos then made Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Salvador Vallejo, and Victor Prudón mount horses, gathered their stolen goods, and headed toward Sacramento. The Osos who remained behind painted a “bear” on a piece of white cloth and proclaimed themselves citizens of the California Republic.44 Euro-American–generated local histories of Napa and Sonoma have romanticized the characters who imprisoned the Vallejo men and took the town of Sonoma as heroes and founders of the state of California. Thus the filibusters became “Frémont’s men” and the “Bear Flag men [who] aided in the conquest of the rest of California.” They also became a “militia” dedicated to “the struggle to liberate California from Mexican rule.” 45 And the Bear Flag took on a life of its own to become a “knightly diction of heraldry.” 46 Yet others, including Bancroft and John Frémont himself, acknowledged that such men were violent and lawless and primarily motivated by self-interest. A closer examination of the filibusters demonstrates this. For example, the Kelsey brothers were among the more well-known men from the Napa Valley who participated in the Bear Flag incident. Arriving from Missouri in 1841, the Kelsey brothers soon gained a reputation for killing Indigenous people and raping Indigenous women. Even among Euro-American immigrants, they were known as people who did not abide by any laws.47 Ultimately, just a little over a decade after the Bear Flag incident, Andrew Kelsey pushed a community of Pomo-speaking people to retaliate. Kelsey as well as his friend, Mr. Stone, had recently moved into the Clear Lake area and

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immediately began exploiting the Pomo inhabitants of the region. They randomly shot men, forced the people to work for them without wages, exhausted the community’s local food resources, and raped Indigenous women and girls. Realizing that the violence would not end as long as Kelsey and Stone were alive, a group of Pomo-speaking people organized and killed them both.48 With the fall of Sonoma into the hands of such people, a history of increased violence ensued. This history, however, played itself out differently depending on the social position of those who lived in the Napa-Sonoma area. While one contingent of the Bear Flag group rode toward Sacramento with Salvador Vallejo, Victor Prudón, and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, most of the filibusters stayed behind in the town of Sonoma. Californios organized to rescue Vallejo and joined men from other districts in the state to retake the area. Californianas were left behind at the Sonoma Pueblo, or at their family ranchos in the Napa and Sonoma valleys. California Indians in the area, seeing men such as the Kelseys rise to power, must have known that yet another new age of violence was dawning.

californios, californianas, and the patwin people Salvador Vallejo, Victor Prudón, and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo were taken to Frémont’s camp, where the filibusters debated their fate. While the popular mythology of Napa and Sonoma holds that the imprisonment of the Vallejos was a mere formality, historical records contradict this claim.49 The prisoners were ultimately sent to Sutter’s Fort, where testimonios of the Californios attest that they were abused and treated harshly by the Osos who imprisoned them. Even Bancroft’s writers, who sometimes accused the Californios of overstating their grievances, acknowledged that the Californio prisoners were fed coarse food, were allowed no communication with friends or family, and were insulted by their guards.50 When Julio Carrillo, a brother-in-law to Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, attempted to visit him, the Osos imprisoned him as well.51 Correspondence between the prisoners and American Consul Larkin from the time of the incident also attests to maltreatment. Victor Prudón wrote that their situation was “deplorable,” and while he refrained from listing offenses of the Osos, he commented that the refusal of their captors to allow any outside communication made their situation unbearable.52

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While the Californios of the Napa–Sonoma area organized to fight the Osos, many Californianas were left alone to defend themselves. Throughout the incident, they succeeded in doing so because of their family status prior to the incident, their ties to respected American citizens, and the training they received in arms as young women educated in a military society. The stories of Francisca Benicia Carillo, Rosalía Leese de Vallejo, and María Higuera Juárez demonstrate this point. During the invasion of Sonoma, when Pepe de la Rosa fled Vallejo’s house, he went directly to Sausalito, where John Montgomery, a friend of Vallejo’s and an officer in the U.S. Navy, docked his ship. The relationship between Vallejo and Montgomery illuminates the complex relationship between the Vallejo family and Euro-Americans in Alta California. For while it was clear that many of the newcomers were not to be trusted, men like Montgomery left the family with a very different impression of Euro-Americans. When de la Rosa told Montgomery of Vallejo’s imprisonment, the officer immediately offered to send his men to Sonoma to protect the women of the Vallejo family. De la Rosa returned to Sonoma with Montgomery’s Lieutenant Mifron and twenty men. They informed Benicia Carillo that if she desired, they would escort her and her family to Montgomery’s ship, the Portsmouth, to stay until the incident was over. If she chose to stay in Sonoma, they would also stay and ensure her safety. According to Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, she chose to stay, believing that her presence in the pueblo would help to keep order.53 Vallejo’s sister, Rosalía Vallejo de Leese, was also living in Sonoma during the incident. According to her narrative, the Osos continued to rob Californio residences throughout the occupation, and the Californianas, fearing for their physical safety, did not leave their homes unless escorted by men in their families.54 No physical violence against Californianas had been reported in the Napa-Sonoma region, but just one month prior to their arrival at the Sonoma Presidio three of Frémont’s men had attempted to rape the daughter of Don Ángel Castro at his rancho near San Juan Bautista.55 It is probable that news of the incident had reached the Sonoma Pueblo, thus fueling a general lack of trust toward the filibusters.56 While many of the Osos remained in the Pueblo of Sonoma, others rode through the Napa and Sonoma Valleys stealing supplies. At times they left notes stating that the U.S. government would reimburse the owners for their goods; at other times they stole the goods without pretense.57 In August, over a hundred men rode through the Napa Valley,

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taking horses and supplies from Californio ranchos. According to a family history passed down in the Juárez family, “Sixty of them came to the Juárez rancho and while Don Cayetano was away, stole cattle and horses and saddles. They approached the house and attempted to take a very handsome saddle belonging to Señora María Juárez. She threatened to attack them with a heavy spear with which she was armed and which she could adeptly use and they rode off without her saddle.” 58 The Bear Flag incident was a time of violence for both Californios and Californianas. Yet, as demonstrated in the above stories, many landed Californianas were able to exercise a significant amount of agency throughout the incident. This was in part because of their family class status. Thus, María Benicia Carillo had the option of leaving Sonoma to stay with Captain Montgomery in Sausalito, but declined because she felt her presence would help to maintain order in Sonoma. This option was made possible in part because of her husband’s friendship with Montgomery, which in turn was made possible because of his own political, social, and economic status. While Rosalía Vallejo de Leese clearly feared for her physical safety, she also knew that she could leave her house, if accompanied by men in her family. Yet not all landed Californios were able to mobilize the resources wielded by the Vallejo and the Juárez families. Narratives from the lives and deaths of the Berryessa family provide insight into the very uneven treatment of Californios during and immediately following the Bear Flag incident. For while Salvador and Mariano were imprisoned at Sutter’s Fort, three men of the Berryessa family were murdered by the Osos. According to Salvador Vallejo, Frémont and his men left Sonoma for San Rafael on horses they stole from his rancho in Napa. Upon arrival in San Rafael, they found the town deserted and took possession of it. Then, however, Frémont looked out toward Mission Dolores and saw three men canoeing across the embarcadero. He promptly ordered them killed. The three men were Don José Reyes Berryessa and the de Haro brothers, ages sixteen and eighteen. The men were unarmed.59 Controversy surrounds the murder of the elder Berryessa and the de Haro brothers. Some argue that Frémont and his men were taking revenge on the death of two Osos killed in a skirmish with the Californios; others tie the murders to the racism of the Osos; still others argue that Frémont’s men mistook the boys for soldiers.60 While the story of the Berryessa murders remains shrouded in controversy, another variable of the story needs to be explored—the race of the Berryessas as read by the Osos. For while extant paintings and photos of the Vallejo and

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Juárez families portray a European phenotype for their members, the historical record indicates that Euro-Americans may have categorized the Berryessas as “Indian.” The Napa County Census of 1880 listed at least 356 people of Mexican origin or Mexican descent; the census takers listed all but 44 of those people as white. The remaining 44 were listed as “Indian.” Thirteen of the 44 residents originally categorized as Indian were Berryessas.61 The possibility remains that it was the class of the Juárez and Vallejo families, as well as their physical appearance, that protected them from much of the violence during the incident. Other Californios/ianas were not so fortunate. In the words of Leonard Pitt, “While the gringos canonized Frémont as a hero of the conquest, the lordly Berryessas were dogged by one Yankee injustice after another until they were completely decimated.” 62 By the close of the nineteenth century, throughout California five more members of the Berryessa family died violently at the hands of EuroAmericans: Nemesio, Juan, Encarnación, José Suñol, and José Galindo.63 In Napa in 1863, four members of the Berryessa family were arrested for “resisting an officer in the lawful discharge of his duty”; they were tried and found innocent.64 In 1880, a remnant of the family continued to hold onto a small piece of property at the northern end of Napa. By the close of the century they were landless.65 For California Indigenous peoples, the Bear Flag incident had devastating effects. The two Indigenous peoples in the region at the time of the incident were the Wappo and the Patwin. While little information is available concerning the actions of Wappo-speaking peoples during the event, there are several stories about Patwin-speaking people who were at Sonoma.66 In addition, the testimonios of both María Vallejo de Leese and Salvador Vallejo contain references to California Indian women in Napa and Sonoma during the insurrection. Most of these stories indicate that throughout the Bear Flag incident, the Osos engaged in acts of violence associated with conquest, and that much of this violence was directed at California Indian men and women.67 According to testimonios from the Vallejo family, when the filibusters surrounded Vallejo’s house, he feared that the Patwin leader, Sem Yeto, would attack the Osos and so ordered him to stay away from the area. Sem Yeto had been Vallejo’s first and foremost Indigenous ally in the region; he brought troops with him to serve in the General’s army and helped him subdue and enslave his rivals, the Wappo. Upon the General’s request, Sem Yeto left and wandered north, trying to get as far away from white men as he could.68 According to the story he later told

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Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, he eventually arrived in a land where it was “sometimes light, sometimes dark all day.” 69 While he left the area disillusioned, Sem Yeto also escaped the violence that fell on the Patwin and Wappo peoples who remained in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. In Sonoma, according to Salvador Vallejo, some of the Osos began shooting Indigenous peoples at random.70 While violence against California Indians throughout the Bear Flag incident appears overwhelming, there is at least one account of a man in Sonoma taking revenge on the Osos. According to Salvador Vallejo, a number of the Osos were harassing Indigenous men they encountered at the Pueblo. At one point a group of Euro-American men, led by Benjamin Kelsey, captured an Indigenous man named Sinao and began to taunt him. Sinao hurled insults back at Kelsey, so Kelsey had him whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails. As soon as he was able Sinao washed his wounds, mounted his horse, and rode into town to find the man who had whipped him. He lassoed the man and dragged him out of town. The body of the man was not found until one week later. Sinao was successful in winning his revenge and the Osos failed in hunting him down. Most California Indians, however, were not so fortunate.71 Accounts of Salvador Vallejo and of Rosalía Vallejo de Leese tell of sexual violence against California Indian women during the insurrection. According to Vallejo de Leese, Frémont and his men demanded that she turn over her servant to them so that they could use her as a prostitute. The servant was saved from such a fate through the skillful maneuvering of Vallejo de Leese. In Napa, according to Salvador Vallejo, many women had no one to protect them; as a consequence, Frémont’s men rode through the Napa Valley raping Indigenous women. They violated California Indian women on his own rancho while he was at Sutter’s Fort and were never tried for their actions.72 Violence and agency, then, played very different roles in the lives of Indigenous women and landed Californianas during the Bear Flag incident. While women such as Rosalía Leese could not leave their homes without male escorts, they were not shot at random. Their position as landed Californianas, with class status, ties to U.S. citizens, and training in arms, appears to have protected many of them from the sexual violence of marauding Osos. The Bear Flag incident was even more violent for the California Indians who had preceded them to the area. Even those people who had earlier allied themselves with Spanish and Mexican colonizers found their homes once again invaded by violent outsiders. This time, there was no one among the newcomers interested in forming alliances.

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the land act of 1851 and its aftermath The rise to dominance of the Osos and the Euro-Americans who followed them brought about changes in the socio-economic structures of Northern California where the ethnicity of the Californios no longer qualified as European. While Californio families such as the Vallejos and Juárezes, who shared the phenotypic whiteness of Euro-American immigrants, lived on long after the Bear Flag incident, their culture was subordinated. Euro-Americans removed their language from political and education institutions, and the rancho society they imposed upon the Wappo- and Patwin-speaking peoples of California was replaced by the towns and homesteads of Euro-American immigrants.73 Mariano and Salvador Vallejo left Sutter’s fort only to find that the Osos had destroyed $150,000 worth of their crops, buildings, and livestock. Yet this was only the beginning of their end. In the same year that the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the U.S. war against Mexico, gold was discovered in California. Thousands of immigrants poured into Alta California, many of whom never returned to their place of origin. The problem of squatters moving onto the land of Californios was exacerbated by growing numbers of Euro-Americans who did not recognize the Californio’s claim to the land.74 In 1851 Congress passed Senator William Gwin’s Land Act in an effort to free land up for Euro-American homesteaders, land that was held by the Californios. The Land Act established a Board of Land Commissioners to sit in San Francisco for two years and evaluate land claims. After three years, all rejected claims and unclaimed land was to be opened up to Yankee settlers.75 At the time that the act was debated in the Senate, Senator Thomas Hart Benton argued that it was “abominable” and would force the Californios to divide and sell their land to cover legal fees. When questioned about his intentions for promoting the Land Act, Gwin admitted that it was to free up land for Yankee homesteaders.76 In the Napa area, the Land Act served the function intended by Senator Gwin. Salvador Vallejo, in an effort to hold onto his land, sold some of his cattle to pay lawyers to defend his Napa grant. While he won the claim, it was appealed and squatters moved onto the property. They then burned the remainder of his crops in an effort to drive him and his workers off the land. Salvador Vallejo held onto 3,000 acres until the time of the Civil War, when he led Californio troops in defense of the Union. While he was away, squatters moved onto what was left of his land.77 By the close of the century, the Vallejos owned no acreage in the Napa Valley.

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Of the Californios in Napa, only the Juárez family was able to keep a portion of its property. They donated a large tract of land to the town and county of Napa for use as a cemetery.78 By 1860, the majority of Napa’s ethnic Mexicans, including Californios, lived in a barrio called Spanishtown. More than 90 percent of the Mexicano and Californio men living in this barrio appeared as laborers in the census. Women living in the barrio, both married and single, were often listed as “keeping borders.” 79 In addition to enduring economic subordination, Californios and ethnic Mexicans lost equal protection of the law. In March of 1863, an interracial confl ict erupted that ended with a group of Euro-American men lynching Manuel Vera. According to the Napa Reporter, a man by the name of Preston shot and wounded Vera in March of 1863. The paper did not record a reason for the shooting, but noted that on Tuesday, May 5, of the same year, Vera retaliated. Preston and a friend named Shafely were returning from a trip to the town of Vallejo when Vera spotted them and opened fire, missing Preston and wounding Shafely. Shafely recovered from his wounds. Vera was arrested. A group of Euro-American men gathered, blackened their faces, took Vera from the jail, and killed him.80 The aftermath of the Bear Flag incident was more devastating for the California Indians of the Napa-Sonoma area. In March of 1847, while Sonoma was still under military rule, George Harrison wrote a letter to Captain Dupont asking for the government to help him because white settlers were raiding Indigenous villages to enslave the inhabitants, shooting those who resisted.81 Then gold was discovered in California and yet another wave of immigrants joined the numbers of violent newcomers to the area. According to George C. Yount, This state of things, for several years after the discovery of gold, was accumulating upon the old settlers of California, the worst of evils, in greatest abundance—Impunity rendered multiplying, more bold and audacious, and they roamed from Rancho to Rancho, from Rancheria to Rancheria, and left behind only traces of tears and blood—They would shoot down the Indian and even the Spaniard, for mere sport, or as some have confessed upon the gallows, “only to see them jump and struggle, and to hear them yell and groan.”—They stole cattle by the hundreds from the Ranchos and drove them to market in the cities—They often entered houses on remote farms and isolated, and robbed in open daylight, prepared for murder indiscriminately if resisted, or in any danger of being exposed—Sometimes they have been known, in organized bands, of from 20–50, to embark in an indiscriminate slaughter of all the Indians they could fi nd . . . On one

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occasion they even skinned their wretched victim alive from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head—and exultingly to mock and exult over his expiring agonies.82

At the close of the 1840s a number of armed men rode into the Napa Valley claiming that General Smith had sent them “to destroy and drive off into the mountains all the Indians of the Napa Valley.” The men rode from rancho to rancho killing California Indian men, women, and children. A group of rancheros from the Napa and Sonoma Valleys finally succeeded in stopping them and after a brief skirmish placed them under arrest. Due to the absence of an established justice system, they were never tried.83 When a juridico-legal system was finally established in California, it too worked against California Indians. One of the first acts of the legislature was “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,” which legalized the indenture of Indigenous children and forced labor of adults. Indigenous boys could be held in servitude until the age of eighteen, and Indigenous girls until they were fifteen. Indigenous adults charged with vagrancy could be auctioned to the highest bidder for up to four months of labor; any Indigenous person arrested for other offenses could be auctioned off in a similar manner.84 In 1860 the law was amended to allow the indenture of boys and men until the age of twenty-five and girls and women until the age of twenty-one.85 This legislation encouraged the continued kidnapping of Indigenous children in Napa and the surrounding area.86 Under the new laws white settlers only had to claim the children were not taken by force. Indigenous peoples were barred from testifying against white men in court and so could not challenge their claims.87 During this time, according to Yolande Beard, Indigenous women living in Napa County increasingly resorted to infanticide.88

summary and conclusion How do you tell a story that has been told more than a hundred times, with few iterations holding anything in common? Euro-Americans moved into Northern Mexico. They believed God had destined them to possess the land and so they took it. They took it from the people who preceded them to the area—both earlier settler-colonizers and Indigenous peoples who had lived in the region for thousands of years. Then they made up a tale to celebrate the land grab. Yet people continued to tell the tale, from different perspectives. What you have just read is another of those perspectives. The Bear Flag incident is a story about a

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place, but it is also a story about race and gender, bigotry, violence, and the power of storytelling. While greed was clearly a motivating factor in the Bear Flag incident, racial and ethnic confl ict were also central to the event. During the eras of Spanish and then Mexican rule, both the Vallejo family and the Juárez family lay claim to the privileges of a white Spanish heritage. Both Salvador and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo kept papers certifying that their father was of pure Spanish descent.89 At the Bear Flag incident, a new racial order was articulated by the Osos—one that was rooted in Euro-American racism and “Hispanophobia.” 90 The Osos did not see the Californios as their equals, but as “greasers,” people ethnically and racially inferior to themselves.91 The roots of the Osos’ ethnocentrism ran deep. Many Euro-Americans were exposed to hispanophobic literature and ideology long before immigrating to Mexico. Seventeenth-century Puritans carried a long tradition of anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish sentiment with them to New England. This sentiment made its way into American textbooks such as the New England Primer, which sold over three million copies in a period of 150 years. Even before the time of Henry Dana, the few histories of Mexico available in English referred to both Mexicans and the Spanish colonists who came to Mexico as depraved and inferior to Northern Europeans.92 John Marsh himself, in encouraging immigrants to move West, claimed that the Californios were lacking in industry.93 Immigrants to Alta California during the mid-eighteen forties were raised in an environment of hispanophobic and anti-Californio literature. Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast, which portrayed the Californios as lazy and lacking in industry, was just one example of the popular literature available to the immigrants.94 According to Dana, Californios were “an idle thriftless people, and [could] make nothing for themselves.” 95 When the Osos insisted on calling the Californios “greasers,” they were drawing on a long tradition of Euro-American anti-Spanish and antiCalifornio sentiment. Hence the assertion of the Euro-Americans who descended on Sonoma in 1846 that “a Spaniard has no right to liberty and but very little right to the enjoyment of life.” 96 The Bear Flag incident brought a new era of violence to the Napa Valley. This is not to claim that the preceding era was peaceful; it was not. But the new era, with its new social order and new racial system, is the one that we continue to live in today. This is where the racial bigotry against which the people of California continue to struggle today fi nds its origins. It is an important story—one worth the retelling.

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S t or i e s a n d H is t or i e s of Wom e n a n d V iol e nc e i n t h e C ol on i a l Nor t h

Chapter Four

In the spring of 1846, María Higuera Juárez stood at the door of her rancho in Napa, California. She held a spear in her hand; it was the same spear she had kept by her side as soon as the rumors started, the same spear she kept by her side when there were rumors of Indian insurrections. This time, it was American immigrants who threatened violence. Squatters, rallied by a man named Frémont, were on the rampage; they had been marauding through the valley, stealing livestock and stores and raping Indigenous women. Further south, they had attempted to assault the daughter of María Ygnacia Vicenta Buitron and Don Ángel Castro.1 When Frémont and his men arrived at the rancho, they realized that Higuera Juárez was alone protecting the ranch and children, and so they attempted to steal her saddle, at which point she “threatened to attack them with a heavy spear with which she was armed and which she could adeptly use.” The men rode off leaving that saddle behind, but took as many other saddles, cattle, and horses as they could before Cayetano Juárez was able to return.2 The story of María Higuera Juárez, who came of age in the midnineteenth century, provides readers with important insights into her history. It tells us that Juárez, like other Californianas, knew how to defend herself, her children, and the family property. During her husband’s long absences assisting Vallejo in his anti-Indian campaigns, it was she who was responsible for protecting the rancho. It also tells us that while many Californios, such as the Juárezes, held friendships with Euro-American immigrants prior to the invasion, that friendship did not always protect them from U.S. soldiers seeking supplies. And what of her saddle? Does this story imply that she was protecting more than her “saddle”? Other accounts of the invasion document that American invaders raped Indigenous women throughout the Napa area.3 And they document the attempted rape of María Buitron’s and Don Ángel Castro’s daughter.4 In this larger historical context, the Higuera Juárez story, passed down through generations, raises a number of important

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and unanswerable questions. What we do know, is that María Higuera Juárez went to the door of her home with a spear in her hand, warning Frémont’s men that she could meet violence with violence. Her story of resistance does not stand alone; instead it calls to mind the testimonio of Rosalía Vallejo de Leese, the sister of landed elite Mariano Guadalupe and Salvador Vallejo, who, like Higuera Juárez, met Frémont with resistance, refusing to aid him in his efforts to hold the area. Only after he threatened to burn down her house, with her and her household in it, did she comply. Yet even after Vallejo de Leese agreed to aid Frémont by providing him with information, she resisted him in other ways; when he and his men attempted to rape an Indigenous woman who worked for her, Vallejo de Leese lied about the woman’s whereabouts and hid her until the men left. She, like Higuera Juárez, also resisted by telling her story to her children, whom she forbade to speak the colonizers’ language in her presence, and briefly recounted the story to Bancroft’s assistant, Enrique Cerruti, using the opportunity to speak back to the people who brought so much violence into her life.5 This chapter takes the story and history of María Higuera Juárez as a starting point from which to examine women’s lives in nineteenthcentury California. Writing in the early twenty-fi rst century, it is possible to write a gendered history of “the Colonial North” because of the many historiographic tools that earlier generations of Chicano, but especially Chicana, historians provide us. Thus oral histories, written down years after their initial tellings, can be strategically used, as can marriage records, and gendered interpretations of census records.6 This chapter also addresses class stratification among Californianas and Indigenous women in the colonial north and analyzes the manner in which the status of some women was gained at the explicit expense of others. I address the stories and histories of three women whose lives and material circumstances were interdependent. First I excavate and map a history about María Higuera Juárez, a landed Californiana; next, I retell and analyze a story about the wife of Enrique Licaldo, soldier under Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo; and finally, I look at a history and testimonio of Isidora Filomena Solano, an Indigenous woman who became the wife of Sem Yeto, favored Suisun ally of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. María Higuera Juárez and Isidora Filomena Solano lived and labored in the Napa-Sonoma region. The wife of Licaldo, if she did in fact live outside of the imagination of the Californios, also lived and labored there. This area, now known for its wine, was known in their time for its distance from Mexico City. The geographical distance from the

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federal government provided local politicians with greater control over local affairs than they would have had elsewhere in the country. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, whose figure, in many circles, has now assumed mythic proportions, was the pivotal patriarchal figure in the region.7 In 1835, with many of the same troops that previously served under him at the San Francisco Presidio, Vallejo moved into the Sonoma Valley. There he carved out a small empire for himself, where his troops relied on him not only to maintain order, but to pay their salaries and support their families. Because the government of Mexico was unable to provide a counter-balance to his power in the north, Vallejo soon became a powerful caudillo, allotting land grants to favored soldiers and friends as well as intervening in the family lives of the men who served under him.8 The social stratification at Mexico’s far northern frontier was shaped by forces rooted in Spanish colonial history, where the Indigenous people of the region provided the “other” against which the settler-colonizers defi ned themselves, and where myths of racial purity contributed to the elite’s social status.9 Following 1821, Mexico’s independence from Spain did not significantly alter the social order. Instead, mestizo and español settler-colonizers continued to define themselves in opposition to the Indigenous peoples of the area. While it was now illegal to use racial categories in legal documents, those at the top of the old racial caste system continued to use them. In areas where secularization freed up land for more settler-colonizers to own ranchos, there was increased economic mobility, primarily for soldiers and military families with ties to local presidios. In the Napa-Sonoma region, the Vallejo family stood at the top of this social order. They owned most of the land and cattle in the Napa-Sonoma area, several residences, and a self-sustaining hacienda. The family was able to support numerous servants both at the hacienda in Petaluma and at its residence in Sonoma. Francisca Felipa Benicia Carrillo Vallejo had several servants who cooked, cleaned, and helped care for their children.10 Below the Vallejos were families such as the Juárezes, Rodríguezes, Higueras, and Younts, families who owned land thanks to the intervention of Vallejo and who owed their loyalty to him. Most of the men in these families were officers in the army, and spent time away from their property on military campaigns. They also had servants, normally Indigenous people who lived on their property. Their children went to school in Sonoma. Under these families were artisans and professionals, many of whom came to the area with the Híjar-Padrés expedition of 1834.11 Landless soldiers and laborers held even less status than artisans. Such individuals and families lived on the

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property of ranch owners and labored for them.12 All of these families lived in what Cynthia Enloe has termed a “militarized society,” where their daily lives were shaped and influenced by the presence of presidios and soldiers, and where women’s labor enabled their spouses to engage in ongoing campaigns against the Indigenous peoples of the region.13 Finally, the Indigenous populations of the region were exploited for their labor. They cultivated crops for ranch owners and received food in payment for their services. Indigenous women worked as servants for landowning families, as did many of their children. Indigenous people who refused to enter the labor system either as workers on ranches or neophytes at the mission risked attack by settler-colonizers.14 This was the social order in which María Juárez, the spouse of Enrique Licaldo, and Isidora Filomena Solano lived their lives.

With a Lanza in Her Hand In August, 1846, General Frémont passed by the Rancharia with onehundred and fifty men. Sixty of them came to the Juárez rancho and while Don Cayetano was away, stole cattle and horses and saddles. They approached the house and attempted to take a very handsome saddle belonging to Señora María Juárez. She threatened to attack them with a heavy spear with which she was armed and which she could adeptly use and they rode off without her saddle. When the Don returned, he rode after the party and told Frémont what they had done and the saddles stolen, were returned to him.15

The story of María Juárez meeting Frémont’s men with “a heavy spear” is typical of many women’s stories because it was tucked away in a larger male-centered narrative of the U.S. invasion, and because it was a story told and retold in a number of formats. The larger narrative in which the above iteration was located focused on Cayetano Juárez and the strategies he used to survive during the war. Euro-Americans had accused him of mutilating and killing two Bear Flaggers; Juárez escaped the wrath of the invaders because he found another Euro-American, Dr. Semple, who vouched for his character. The same Dr. Semple drafted a “passport” for Juárez to carry for the remainder of the hostilities; thus his relationship to Semple provided him with a semblance of physical safety during the war. The narrative then shifts back to the rancho to María Juárez and her children. It is this portion of the narrative that was retold not only in the recuerdo of Vivien Juárez Rose, but also in a northern California newspaper. That account, rendered by her father, Roy Juárez, is also brief

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and is located in a slightly different, yet equally male-dominant narrative of the U.S. invasion. According to Roy Juárez, Cayetano was away from the rancho, attempting to aid Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. When Frémont’s men arrived at the house, María Juárez met them at the door with a spear. They stole horses and stores from the barn and then fled the scene.16 While the Juárez story is brief, it tells us about the resources that a particular woman, María Juárez, was able to muster to defend herself once trappers, squatters, and other Euro-American men moved to take the land from the Californios and Indigenous peoples of the area. She was armed, she knew how to use a spear, she was accustomed to protecting the rancho and family while her husband was away on military business. By coupling this brief account with a gendered reading of census records and family trees, a more complete history of this nineteenth-century woman emerges. We know from census records and family documents that María Higuera Juárez was a landed Californiana of the racial cast española. She was born into a military family at the San Francisco Presidio on December 4, 1815. Her father was an officer at the San Francisco Presidio, as was his father before him.17 Thus she grew up in an environment that had some economic stability, and more access to basic resources than was available to most colonists living in the far North.18 When she reached the age of twenty she married Sergeant Cayetano Juárez in the chapel at Mission Dolores. Two years later, she and Sergeant Juárez moved to Napa, then part of the district of Sonoma, where, with the aid of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Juárez received a land grant of 8,856 acres.19 By the time of the Bear Flag incident and the North American invasion, the Juárez family was one of the largest landholders in the Napa area—second only to the Vallejos.20 Looking at her life, we can begin to understand how landed Californianas were critical to the project of colonizing nineteenth-century California.21 By examining the histories of María Juárez and her family in relation to those of other Californianas, we can begin to understand the diverse ways that class, race, sex, and gender intersected in the lives of nineteenth-century Californianas who lived and labored in the North. Before the U.S. invasion, women such as María Higuera Juárez, whose families owned ranchos, lived a lifestyle distinct from those of women whose families owned haciendas, and from those of women who labored on them. On the Juárez Rancho, the family raised stock and exploited the Indigenous population for construction and agricultural labor, yet there were no artisan shops. Thus, dependence on outsiders provided both the Juárez family and the Indigenous peoples, the Ulucas, who lived

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photograph 4.1. Society.

María Higuera Juárez. Courtesy of Napa County Historical

and labored on the rancho, more flexibility in their lives than women from either class on larger haciendas. Juárez interacted with outside artisans out of necessity, since the rancho could not produce any of the leather goods, pottery, or furniture that the household required. Unlike the Indigenous peoples who lived at the larger haciendas of northern Alta California, the Ulucas maintained most of their lifeways in order to support themselves and supplement the beans and meat they received for their labor. They built the house and the stone fences on the rancho, and harvested crops for the Juárezes; they also labored hunting and gathering to supply many of their daily needs. They constructed their own housing, maintaining a dance house and a sweat house. Native

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peoples from Suisun, Sonoma, and Sacramento came to their community to trade and celebrate.22 The manual labor María Juárez performed was similar to that of landowning women throughout Alta California, where the maintenance of her household required her to labor both inside and outside of the boundaries of her home. Inside the house, she worked alongside one or two servants, cooking and cleaning for the family and other laborers. Outside of the house, trips with servants to the Napa River would have been part of her weekly routine. Cattails, sometimes utilized as a foodstuff by some of the local Patwin- and Wappo-speaking communities, lined the river in many areas, and the women would have had to find a place away from the mud and reeds to wash the clothes of the growing family. Flooding in the winter, the river also provided fertile land for the family garden. Long stretches of melons and squash lined its west bank, and the women of the Juárez family harvested fruits and vegetables to supplement the family’s protein-rich diet. Often, María Higuera Juárez would pickle the melon and use the fruits to serve dishes from back home.23 According to her grandchildren, María Higuera Juárez was also known to spend long hours searching the hills of Napa for cleaning and healing herbs. Like the Wappo and Patwin people who preceded her to the area, she gathered local herbs such as angelica and nettle for both of these tasks; she also continued to use rosemary, an herb that Spanish colonizer-settlers brought with them to the region. In fact, rosemary remained the primary cleaning aid for the Juárez women throughout the mid-nineteenth century. All of the herbs had to be cut and dried. Thus the kinds of labor she performed intersected with the lifeways both of the wives of hacendados and of Indigenous women. Like the wives of hacendados, she sometimes supervised servants. But she also labored with them, and like the Indigenous women of the area, she was a gatherer who utilized local herbs for healing, cooking, and cleaning.24 Juárez’s presence in Alta California, however, came at the direct expense of Indigenous women. She was a militarized wife, living in a society where military violence was normalized.25 Her husband was wounded in an 1829 campaign against native peoples, just forty miles from their home. His body still bore the scar from the arrow that lodged in his leg.26 He stayed at the presidio for weeks at a time, and so she had to know how to defend herself, their children, and their property.27 This was a situation that was common to Californianas whose labor and dominance over the Indigenous peoples of the area was critical to colonizing efforts. Just as women such as Apolinaria Lorenzana in the South knew

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how to make their own cartridges from paper and gunpowder, so María Juárez, in the north, learned how to use a spear as a young woman at the San Francisco Presidio. While it is unclear if this was part of her formal or informal education, we know she was confident enough to go out gathering, as well as travel to visit sick neighbors throughout the Napa and Sonoma valleys.28 Both Juárez and Lorenzana rode well. Indeed, in the Juárez family, the women as well as the men were known to ride well, with the family hosting rodeos where men and women came together and competed in riding and ranching skill competitions—public displays of Californio cultural dominance in the region.29 Juárez’s relationship with the Indigenous women who labored for her was complicated and exploitative. These were women who once held the land she now called her own. That is, while in precolonial times, most California peoples did not practice personal property ownership, they did own land communally. In fact, villages were known to go to war to defend their land.30 The livelihood of the people was tied to specific regions, and so were their stories. For the Wappo, their creation story was tied to the land; their people were created on Mount Kanamota, at the northern end of the Napa Valley.31 When Californios moved north from San Francisco and Monterey, they built ranches on the land that once served as hunting and gathering areas for Wappo- and Patwin-speaking peoples. When the Juárez family settled in the southernmost end of the Napa Valley, the Ulucas, a Patwin-speaking people, stayed. The ranching culture of the Juárezes disrupted the traditional hunting and gathering lifeways of the Ulucas, and so they went to work for the family, receiving meat and beans in return for their labor. They, like many Indigenous peoples throughout California, developed a hybrid economy of working for the Californio settler-colonizers who took their land, and hunting and gathering on their dwindling holdings to supplement the inadequate diet the Juárezes provided to them.32 Some of the women went to work for María Juárez as domestic servants; they also made sewing and kitchen baskets and gave them to her as gifts. The Juárez children grew up speaking Spanish and Uluca.33 Given that the Patwinspeaking children of the area were, at this time, multi-lingual, they most probably learned Spanish as well. And at least one of the Juárez daughters spent long hours visiting with Uluca women, comparing her body with theirs and exchanging information regarding menstruation and childbirth.34 Yet even the relationships between the children reinforced their unequal social status; rather than learn the names of the Uluca children, the Juárez family assigned them Spanish names.35

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The state used the body and labor of María Juárez, as well as those of other landed women, to extend its landholdings. Without their bodies, the white population could not produce new citizens for the state; and without their labor, the reproduction of “civilized” family structures and households would be impossible. In exchange for land and the opportunity of upward mobility, Californiana women labored under harsh conditions without the aid of basic manufactured goods. They also raised their children in an environment where resources were scarce and violence was a constant threat. In bearing and raising their children they reproduced and expanded the Californio population. Her husband, Cayetano Juárez, was one of fourteen children who lived to adulthood in his family. María Higuera Juárez bore and raised eleven children.36 It may not be a coincidence that the Vallejos and the Juárezes, the two wealthiest families of the area, also had two of the largest families. The average size of a family in Alta California was significantly smaller than this. Even among the earliest colonizers in the area, the average family had only four children.37 The few families who did have many children viewed them as a sign of status.38 In a colonizing and patriarchal society, such as Alta California, a large family demonstrated access to wealth and the ability to support it. Such families were micro-patriarchal units with the ability and virility to fulfill the desire of the larger nation to re-create Alta California in its own image.39 Thus Californio families in early nineteenth-century California had something in common with Euro-American families who arrived later in the century. Both cultures utilized family units as places of production and institutions through which to acquire and maintain wealth.40 In the early- to mid-nineteenth century, landed Californianas who did not biologically reproduce also contributed to the reproduction of another generation of Californios. For example, Marta Higuera was born at the Presidio of San Francisco and moved to Napa as a little girl when her father received a grant there. Higuera married into the Frias family, yet she and her spouse did not— perhaps could not—have children. Instead, Marta Higuera Frias raised Enos Valencia, who called her “grandmother” and took care of her in her old age, thus maintaining a reproductive role in the larger Californio society.41 Like the Vallejo family, the Higuera-Juárez family identified with the socio-racial caste of español. But there were also differences between the families. The Vallejos claimed to have a “pure” Spanish ancestry, with Salvador Vallejo including a copy of his father’s certificate of legitimidad y limpieza de sangre at the opening of his testimonio.42 The Higuera

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and Juárez families never applied for such certification. Perhaps it mattered less to them; perhaps they understood their racial status in different terms than the Vallejos. Extant census records do indicate that the racial status of María Juárez was reflective of the fluid racial order that had shaped Spain’s northern colonies. While limited racial mobility was a possibility throughout colonial Mexico, frontier colonies provided more opportunities for upward mobility; her family had moved up the racial order.43 We know little about the paternal side of the Juárez family, other than that they arrived in Alta California sometime in the 1780s, and by the early nineteenth century were living in Monterey.44 Census records reveal more information about the maternal side of the family, the Higueras. Ramón and Francisca Borjorques, grandparents of María Higuera Juárez, came with Juan Bautista de Anza to Alta California in 1776 and were among the first colonizers of San Francisco. Unlike Ignacio Vallejo, Ramón Borjorques did not rise quickly through the military’s ranks. Instead, he arrived in Alta California as a soldier in 1776 and, at age fifty-eight, was still classified as a regular soldier in the 1790 census.45 Also unlike the Vallejo family, the Higueras were not initially categorized as españoles by census takers, but as mestizos. In the San Francisco Presidio census of 1782, Ramón was listed as a mestizo; eight years later, he and his spouse were still listed in the San Francisco census as mestizo. By 1790, their daughter María Micaela Borjorques, the mother of María Higuera, could also be found in the census records as a mestiza. She married Ignacio Higuera, a soldier in the Spanish colonial army who was first categorized as mestizo, but was later listed as español. María Higuera, who later married Cayetano Juárez, was the descendent of explicitly mestizo ancestors. Thus the white population of which the Vallejos later spoke in their testimonios was reflective of the very mestizaje of which Jack D. Forbes wrote in the 1980s: in California, eventually everyone half of whose lineage could be claimed as español claimed the racial caste status of español.46 In this region as well, the status of españoles and mestizos as colonizers placed both groups in a position defined in opposition to the California Indian population.47 When Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo encouraged Californio families to come to the Napa and Sonoma Valleys to “civilize” the area, it was people from families such as these that he was recruiting—people who sometimes called themselves “español” and at other times “blanco.” 48 The men from most of these families rode with or for Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo in campaigns against the California Indians of the area. In Napa,

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men from prominent families such as the Berryessas and the Juárezes served under General Vallejo. Cayetano Juárez participated in campaigns against Wappo- and Patwin-speaking peoples in the Napa Valley as early as 1827.49 “With a Lanza in her Hand,” then, stands in dialogical relationship with our knowledges of Californiana histories—the story is more understandable because of other Californiana histories; at the same time, it contributes to our understanding of those histories. María Higuera Juárez met Frémont’s men at the door to her house because she had access to arms. As a member of a society at constant war with the Indigenous peoples of the area, she knew how to use violence to protect herself and her family—she was trained to do so as a young girl at the San Francisco Presidio. Her husband was away from the rancho because of the unique circumstances of the U.S. war, yet he had often been away from the rancho on campaigns against Native peoples. In the militarized world in which she lived, it was expected that she could protect her body as well as her children, and the land once owned by the Indigenous peoples of Napa.

La Llorona del Norte Most Californianas who lived in the North did not have as many resources as María Higuera Juárez. And so it is important to excavate as much information as possible about these other women, women whose names do not always appear in historical records, who had fewer servants, whose husbands had less impressive military careers. In Napa, the absence of a history about soldier’s wives and soldiering women was filled by a fiction—a story told by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo that has scant evidence to support it. The story Vallejo told was retold by his family and by other Californios, and was fi nally reproduced in a local newspaper in the early twentieth century. It was about an unnamed soldier’s wife, the “wife of Enrique Licaldo,” who died of a fever after hearing of her husband’s death in battle.50 The story resonates with themes of Llorona tales, told throughout Mexico’s northern frontier, and provides a window into the very complicated and labor-intensive lives of soldiers’ wives. Llorona stories have been told, by women and men, from the time of the conquest. Often, the context of the stories is conquest, colonization, and violence against subaltern peoples. And so it should not be surprising that we would fi nd a Llorona tale in the North. Such tales

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have common themes: a woman, either Indigenous or mestiza, suffers abandonment, violence, and/or betrayal. She kills her children out of madness, out of revenge, or out of a desire to save them from colonization—or someone else kills her children. She, or at times her ghost, cries out, wailing in the night and searching for her children. Finally, water is associated with the stories. Oftentimes, the children are drowned in water, a precolonial symbol of rebirth. Llorona stories are often reflective of the social structures and realities in which Chicanas and Mexicanas live and have a long rich history as Chicana/o stories.51 Some scholars, such as Tey Diana Rebolledo, point out that La Llorona, in most of her iterations, “approximates . . . all those ancient Nahuatl deities who had life-giving and -destroying abilities.” 52 Others will point out that when the Spaniards arrived in Tenochtitlán, the people reported hearing a wailing woman. According to Sahagún, a post-conquest missionary, a woman was heard crying, “My children, we must flee far from this city!” or “My children, where shall I take you?” 53 One of the earliest recorded iterations, then, was a foretelling, a warning of violence to come, and an attempt of a mythic mother to protect her Indigenous children.54 Feminist readings and feminist narrations of Llorona tales have sought to make direct connections between the lived realities of Mexicanas and Chicanas and the events in the tales. La Llorona, betrayed by a patriarchal, racist, and exploitative society, kills her children. Her unending cries serve as reminders of the injustice she suffered and of her drive for revenge.55 For the Napa-Sonoma area, their Llorona tale was about a soldier’s wife, a woman who followed her husband to battle, who gave birth to their child in the midst of that battle, and who, learning of her husband’s death, threw the child into a nearby river. Given that the story contains many elements of Mexicana and Chicana Llorona stories, in all probability the story was told in many communities, by men and by women, before it was written down. It is the story of a woman driven to despair, and as such it tells us much about the material circumstances within which women of her time lived. The year was 1841, and Enrique Licaldo’s wife had arrived in the North just three months prior to the event, having made the trip from San Diego six months into her pregnancy. Shortly after her arrival there was an uprising of Indigenous peoples in Lake County, just north of presentday Napa; soldiers from the San Francisco and the Sonoma Presidio pooled forces to defeat them. She, along with other women, many of them soldiers’ wives, traveled with the men to where they would camp.

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The women, perhaps with the help of the soldiers, perhaps without, established the campsite; while the men went to battle, they stayed at the camp, cooked, cleaned, and administered first aid to wounded soldiers. Just as it was women who guarded ranchos, it was likely these women who guarded the camp while the soldiers engaged in battle.56 This military excursion was especially fierce, and several Californios were killed in battle. Amid the chaos, and news of death, the soldier’s wife gave birth and waited to hear news of her husband. Eventually someone came to her tent and told her that her husband had been killed. She responded in a manner that colonial myths are made of: “Leaping from her couch, she seized the still naked child and before anyone could interfere rushed to the bank of the creek, threw the infant into the rapid stream, and was about to precipitate herself after it, when overtaken and with difficulty subdued.” 57 The labor of soldier’s wives was critical to the perpetuation of the colonial North. They not only gave birth to new generations of citizens and soldiers, they supported and maintained the troops during military excursions. Yet there is very little surviving information about their lives. Sparse accounts narrated by the women themselves, remembrances of landholding women, and references by and about working-class men in Napa provide glimpses of the lives of laboring women. Here, the paucity of information about laboring Californianas and soldiers’ wives in the accounts of landed Californios seems to indicate a social structure where people of many classes came together for events such as fandangos and rodeos, but otherwise socialized with people of their own class. It may also indicate that people from the landowning classes placed little value on the people who labored for them. Newspaper articles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries support such hypotheses. For example, when Charles Topping, a third generation Californio in the Napa Valley, wrote about how the workers who once labored on the ranchos of Salvador Vallejo and other landed Californios came to live in the segregated area of Napa called Spanish-town, he referred to them simply as “workers.” 58 While the names of the Juárezes and the Vallejos are prominent in such remembrances, the names of laboring Californios, like those of California Indians, are not mentioned. The absence of these names, in Topping’s account, signals that these workers, like the Indigenous peoples of the area, were exploited as interchangeable producers. Because of this paucity of sources regarding the lives of working women, stories such as that of La Llorona del Norte become important to understanding the material realities of nineteenth-century women’s lives.

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So what of the material circumstances of the woman in the Llorona story, the wife of Enrique Licaldo? She would not have been from a wealthy, landed family. Would she be mestiza? Indigenous? While they were a small minority, between 1 and 15 percent of soldiers in Alta California married Indigenous women.59 Whether Indigenous or mestiza, she was the spouse of a soldier in the Mexican army. According to Spanish presidio records, 64 percent of soldiers at the San Francisco Presidio were married in 1790.60 Because the ratio of women to men increased during the Mexican era, the marriage rate most probably remained the same or increased during this time. Thus, the role of soldier’s wife would have been fairly common among women in Northern Alta California. For these women, as for women throughout militarized societies, their lifeways would have been largely determined by the military values and regimen under which their husbands served and the larger militarized society in which they lived. In such a society, violence would be normalized both outside and inside their homes. In most militarized societies, domestic violence is an integral part of familial relations.61 In the Napa-Sonoma area, military wives lived near the Sonoma Presidio, supporting a family with the unsteady income of a Californio soldier. At least once in the Presidio’s history, soldiers became so desperate for food and funds that they deserted and attempted to ride to Monterey to demand payment.62 Most soldiers’ wives did not have servants, and so when they followed their husbands to battle they took their children with them.63 They cooked for their spouses and for other men in the army, nursed the sick, sewed, cleaned, and provided sexual services for their spouses.64 While their service was a critical part of the colonization process, they did not reap the same benefits as landed women and/ or officers’ wives for their efforts. The story of Licaldo’s spouse, as a Llorona story, gives us additional information about the life of a soldier’s wife. In this tale, as in so many Llorona stories, there is an interesting twist to the end of the tale, because in this narrative the child does not die. Instead, a soldier rescues the baby from the cold waters of the creek while it is still alive. He then gives the baby over to General Vallejo, who gives the child to Benicia Carillo, his wife, to raise as her own.65 Thus the story becomes an allegory of patriarchal social relations on Mexico’s northern frontier, where the militarized state was represented by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the wealthiest and highest-ranking officer of the region. At times, when the government could not afford to pay the salaries of the soldiers, Vallejo paid their salaries out of his own pocket. Just as the state promised and

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awarded soldiers with land for service on the far North frontier, so Vallejo awarded men who served in campaigns against local Indigenous peoples with land.66 Just as Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo controlled the lives of his soldiers, so he and landed Californios controlled the lives of laboring women. Whereas in most Llorona stories the death of the child results in a colonized woman roaming the region in search of her child and of revenge, especially against men, in this Llorona story, such an open and disruptive ending is precluded by the General’s taking the child into his family and raising it as his own. Patriarchy is maintained and order is restored. The child grew up with his father’s name of Enrique and took the name of Vallejo as his surname. He grew to be a “respectable man” in the eyes of the Vallejo family.67 The story of La Llorona del Norte, then, places laboring Californianas in a contradictory position on the nineteenth-century Mexican frontier. While their presence was critical to the exploitation and subordination of the Indigenous peoples of the area, their position below landed Californianas/os left them vulnerable to, and dependent upon, the state and the landed families of the region. It also bears witness to the violence women endured as bodies employed in state colonizing processes.

“In Return, They Gave Us Nothing” At the close of her life, Isidora Filomena Solano, the spouse of Sem Yeto—the Patwin-speaking leader and ally of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo—sat down with Salvador Vallejo and Enrique Cerruti and told them some of her life’s stories.68 Isidora Filomena Solano told her story to Cerruti in Spanish, her second or perhaps third language, and Cerruti wrote down what he heard, or chose to hear. At the time of her interview, Isidora Filomena still possessed the wedding dress and headpiece from her marriage to Solano. She planned to be buried in it. Enrique Cerruti and Salvador Vallejo gave her whiskey during the interview and convinced her to give the dress and headpiece to them.69 We will never know how much Cerruti chose to edit as he wrote. Yet Isidora Solano’s story was an act of resistance. Like the Californios of whom Rosaura Sánchez and Genaro Padilla write, Isidora Filomena Solano used her testimonio to talk back.70 Her testimonio contained stories about events, mixed with everyday information about people, and basic information on where to find herbs and how people made soap before the changes that the “gente de razón” and then the “blancos” brought with them.71 Her narrative challenges discourses of progress;

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it names both the Californios and the Euro-Americans as thieves, and speaks of the subjugation of Indigenous women. According to Solano, there was plenty of food before the arrival of the two groups, not only game, but wild onions and herbs to use for soap and medicines. Then the gente de razón arrived, followed by the blancos. Men like Sutter took everything from the Indians, including cows they traded from the Californios. “In return they gave [them] nothing.” 72 As the spouse of an Indigenous man who allied himself with the invaders, Isidora Filomena lived a life that was relatively privileged among the Indigenous peoples of the Napa-Sonoma area, but her life also had much in common with the lives of other Indigenous women who struggled to survive under Spanish and then Mexican rule. That is, like so many other women, she was subjected to the mission system and lost her family. Within her recuerdo, Isidora Solano provided a brief narrative of the events that led to her Christian marriage: Before I was baptized I was not of the Suysona people, I belonged to the Chiuructos. But one day Solano came and stole me from my people. My father and many of the Satiyomi pursued him, but failed to overcome him . . . Father Lorenzo baptized me and gave me the name Isidora Filomena. He taught me to be charitable to the poor, submissive to my husband, and compassionate to prisoners.73

For the Indigenous women of the Napa-Sonoma region, the arrival of the Californios marked a decline in the natural resources of the area, a loss of their land, the disruption of their families, and the beginning of an era of violence and threats of violence against their bodies. Recent histories of Northern California have just begun to chart the violence.74 In an attempt to maintain specific neighboring Indigenous communities as allies, Californio soldiers and mission priests allowed allied men to take women from non-allied tribes as trophies. Sem Yeto apparently stole Isidora from her family in 1835 while on an expedition against his rivals, the Satiyomi, with Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo.75 At some point in his relationship with the presidio and the padres at Sonoma’s mission, San Francisco Solano, he brought Isidora there “to be baptized, to be taught submission, and to marry him.” 76 Yet the training that Fray Lorenzo gave to Indian women was not consistent with the behavior of other priests who worked at Mission San Francisco Solano. Catholic priests were part of a social system that rewarded their military allies with women from other Indigenous communities. In addition, there were priests who sometimes had affairs with Indigenous women, and yet

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others who assaulted them and/or sold them into slavery. Thus, this is one of those places where the story of Isidora is clearly part of the larger story and history of other California Indian women. Historians such as Antonia Castañeda and Albert Hurtado have documented the extreme violence infl icted upon Indigenous women through the mission-presidio colonization and occupation system.77 This violence was manifest in the inconsistency between what some priests taught Isidora and violent soldiers and priests who violated and exploited Indigenous women. According to Salvador Vallejo, while Fray Lorenzo taught California Indians like Isidora to be submissive to their husbands, Fr. Jesús Mercado, who ran Mission San Francisco Solano before him, won the disdain of local Californios for “seducing Indian girls as often as possible.” 78 Another example of the exploitative practices of Fr. Mercado occurred in 1838. That autumn Sem Yeto, Fr. Mercado, and a group of Californios and Euro-American immigrants conspired to kidnap women and girls from a local Cainamero community for sale to the soldiers at Fort Ross and people living on the other side of the San Pablo and San Francisco bays. The Californios behind the plan apparently hoped that the sale of the women and girls would hurt the reputation of General Vallejo and had convinced Solano to claim that the General supported their actions. The end result was that Solano and other men associated with the mission went to the Cainamero village and kidnapped women and girls, whom they promptly sold for “a few dollars or traded for horses and cattle.” 79 Clearly the position of California Indian women at Mission San Francisco Solano and its surrounding area, and the violence against which they struggled, was part of larger colonial systems of sexual violence and sexual slavery. While mission priests isolated young women from their families in sex-segregated dormitories, such isolation did not protect them from violent soldiers and priests. Instead, such isolation removed them from the familial-cultural networks that protected them in precolonial times. Ultimately, the founding of a Franciscan mission in the Sonoma area created an environment where Indian women were continually threatened by soldiers, priests, and Christianized Indians. Indigenous women who survived forced labor routines, cultural disruption, and physical violence faced yet another threat: European diseases.80 In 1806 a measles epidemic swept through Mission San Francisco de Asís, killing 880 people. Of the children at the mission, almost none under the age of ten survived. In 1827 another epidemic broke out. This time, the disease spread to other missions.81 Then in the early 1830s two waves of smallpox destroyed entire communities.

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When the lives of nineteenth-century women, living in the colonial North, are examined in relation to each other, it becomes very clear that there were dramatic differences in the lives of landed Californianas, the wives of common soldiers who owned little land, and Indigenous women who were relegated to the bottom of the social order. All women who lived on the frontier labored. Yet it was the soldier’s wife, the woman who followed her husband to battle, carrying their children with her, who most clearly embodied both colonizer and colonized. And it was the Indigenous peoples of the Napa-Sonoma area who were exploited by both social groups of Californianas and who bore the bulk of the violence of colonization. When Euro-American men in the Napa-Sonoma area rose up to join in what is now called the U.S. invasion, this was the social order within which Californiana and Indigenous women lived and labored. Their respective positions in Mexican society would play a significant role in their lives after the invasion.

Conclusion: The Continuing Importance of Women’s Stories María Higuera Juárez, the wife of Enrique Licaldo, and Isidora Filomena Solano lived in a militarized society where women’s safety and access to basic resources was determined by their position in the larger colonized social order. María Higuera Juárez had more access to basic resources and physical safety than the soldiers’ wives or Isidora Filomena Solano. She was trained in arms and allowed to carry them. Her life was one of labor, where she maintained the Juárez rancho while her husband stayed at the presidio or participated in anti-Indian campaigns. Unlike common soldiers’ wives, she did not follow her husband when he went into battle. She gathered her own herbs for cooking and cleaning, yet she also exploited the labor of Indigenous women who once owned the land. The wife of Enrique Licaldo did follow her husband when he went to battle. Her body, as much as that of María Higuera Juárez, was critical to maintaining and extending the California social system. Yet within that system, she did not merit the protections awarded Juárez. The only story we have of a soldier’s wife may very well be a fiction, handed down by the Vallejo family, by the child of the man who once ruled the region. Ultimately, both Higuera Juárez and soldiers’ wives were in Alta California to settle the area for Mexico, and they did this by taking land from Indigenous peoples—by supporting their spouses so that they could go out and make wars against them. Women such as

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Isidora Filomena Solano paid the highest price in this colonizing system. The Californios took her people’s lands, and while they were at war with them, allowed a Patwin ally to kidnap her, bring her to the local mission, and have her “trained” for Christian marriage. All of her children died. All she ever owned was lost to the Californios and EuroAmericans. While these histories suggest more similarities than differences between North and South, they also add to our understanding of the structural relationships between women, Californianas, and Indigenous women living in nineteenth-century California. The excavation and exploration of histories from three different communities from the same region and the same time have allowed me to make rich comparisons that I might not otherwise have been able to make. Their stories help us better understand our colonial past. As argued by Tey Diana Rebolledo, “numerous women have told or written of their lives and experiences when they could. As more and more previously unrecognized texts are recovered, we will be able to better understand the impact of women on the social and cultural structure of their times and our own.” 82 While the Adelitas of the Mexican revolution are our foremothers, so are María Higuera Juárez, the wife of Enrique Licaldo, and Isidora Filomena Solano. Their stories are disturbing, and yet it is these disturbing stories that may one day help us reconstruct a “usable past.” María Higuera Juárez passed her story on to her children and to her grandchildren, who grew up with stories of how their abuelita met Frémont’s men with a lanza in her hand. The other women of this history were not so fortunate. Isidora Filomena had only one child who survived to hear her stories. He died before giving her any grandchildren. In 1874, at the close of a long and tumultuous life, Isidora Filomena Solano sat down with Enrique Cerruti and told him her story. Did she trust him? Probably not. But she cut a bargain with this man who, to her, most probably represented yet another wave of colonizers. Thus the small pockets of agency nineteenth-century California women were able to utilize left stories and a history on which future colonized women could build.

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sou rc e br e a k : the white mind

Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the white editors of Napa’s press worked aggressively to establish white supremacy throughout the region. Their texts dehumanized non-whites, especially African Americans and Chinese immigrants. To the average twenty-first century reader, their rhetoric is disturbing. Yet this is the rhetoric that contributed to white American identity at a local level. Below are excerpts from Napa’s nineteenth-century press. “to the white men of america” Americans! Who proudly trace Lineage from a noble race; Who fill a high and honored place ’Mong the nations of the earth: Where is all your freedom grand? See! A wretched negro band Ruling o’er your southern land, Where white men now are slaves. Tho’ the South at battle’s call Madly staked and lost their all, Shall we drive them to the wall, And crush their manhood out? Shall a base, ignoble horde, Over white men play the lord— Lay in waste with fire and sword Our Eden of the South? Is our Charter now repealed? Which our Fathers’ blood has sealed?— Shall we, Freemen, basely yield The birthright of our race?

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Shall we stand where Judas stood— Break the bond of brotherhood— Force the men of our own blood To bow to negro rule? Lo! The land of sunny skies, In the “gloom of Egypt” lies; Soul of Washington arise! And save us from our shame. By the blood of our fathers shed, By the souls of heroes dead, God forbid it should be said; “We’ve made our brethren slaves!” 1

“john chinam a n’s jubilee” Blackee man he hab jubilee Wen Limkim makee him free; Me, too sall hab de votee, An’ be Mandarin in fi ne coatee. So, kickee me who can, Wen me Melican man. (Sings, with Chinese fiddle.) Chee-chee-cha-see Dese days o’ jubilee! ’Menment 15 velly nicee— Like ’em much as pork and licee. John he cut a velly big swell, An tell ’em Democrat to h—l. Kickee me who can, Wen me Melican man. Chee-chee-cha-see. Dese days o’ jubilee! Me votee, yes, evely time, An’ sell ’em too, for one dime. No likee Melican or Melican Josh, And tinkee all a heap o’ bosh.

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But Kickee me who can, Wen me Melican Man. Chee-chee-cha-see Dese days o’jubilee. Wen me heap o’ money makes, Den de dust from shoosee shakee; To China Sam Sing fly away Into de arms o’ sweet Sing Say. Den kickee me who can, Wen me China Man. Chee-chee-cha-see Dese days o’ jubilee.2

“the negroes in our schools” For a long time, the lovers of a purely “mixed” government and “mixed” schools have been contending that our state laws, regulating the admission of negroes into our public schools, are unconstitutional; that the Civil Rights bill, and the late amendments to the Constitution give the negroes all the privileges of our institutions, just the same as the whites; that our State regulations, as regards schools, are a nullity when discriminating between classes of citizens. Instigated by these humanitarians, the colored “brethren,” of San Francisco, have demanded that their children be admitted to all the public schools equally with the whites. Of course, according to our State laws, their demand has been refused. Judge Dwinelle has been consulted, and he encourages the friends of the negro to believe that the courts will grant what they demand . . . The test in San Francisco, if it takes place, will decide the matter throughout the State. We do not know what would be the decision of the courts in this matter, but believe if the Federal courts will decide that this State has no constitutional right to pass a law levying a tax on Chinese miners, they will decide we have no right to discriminate in matters of color between different classes of our citizens. Many people now look upon our public school system as a wrong to the State, and we believe if the courts decide against the right of the State to regulate this matter of classes, an opposition will be likely to be raised against our schools strong enough to overthrow the system.3

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Remember.—The German picnic comes off on Sunday, at Wm. Imrei’s ranch. Plenty of Lager and a good time may be expected. A brass band from San Francisco, will be in attendance.4

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Chapter Five

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mobi l i z i ng l i n e a r na r r at i v e s

Following the North American invasion, a number of Napa’s EuroAmericans created myths to justify the subjugation of peoples who preceded them to the area, as well as racialized peoples who arrived after them. Until the Bear Flag incident these Euro-Americans held little in common other than their immigrant status. Thus their rise to power necessarily entailed creating a united white identity—one that disfranchised whites, even while they did not share in the material success of the ruling classes, would support.1 As part of this process, editors of Napa’s English-language newspapers, as well as the local “pioneer” society, mobilized a linear history, one that began with their own arrival in the region and ended with their rise to power. Because this history was both raced and linear, focusing on the triumph of one group, it obscured, and at times even erased, the histories of other communities that were interwoven with it. The narrative was then mobilized to legitimize the dominance of one community, the white community, in the area. This local narrative is important because it intersected with, and was part of the construction of, a larger national narrative where the descendents of “Anglo-Saxon” men planted the seeds of liberty on American soil, and then moved west bringing their republican institutions with them. EuroAmerican women followed their men, bringing with them “civilization” and family values. The mythology was not benign; it intersected with and contributed to narratives that constructed African Americans, ethnic Mexicans, and Chinese immigrants as threats to republican institutions.2 Scholars who study nationalism and colonialism have long argued that when dominant groups achieve power, they construct a fictive past where the violence of their rise to dominance is masked by mythologies of heroic deeds and progress.3 There are several means for accomplishing this task. Colonizers can make myths where they are heroes, they can create symbols and holidays to celebrate their mythic acts, and they can dehumanize the colonized by subordinating their histories and

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cultures. Often, the act of inventing heroic identities for themselves is part of the same process by which they demonize the colonized.4 In Napa, the process through which a small group of recently arrived Euro-Americans constructed themselves as the true “pioneers” of the county, and consequently as the true builders and inheritors of the American Republic, was multi-layered. As I will demonstrate below, political parties, school curriculum, the local press, and historical societies constructed and promulgated similar narratives that together naturalized Euro-American dominance in the region. Other communities in Napa, particularly racially oppressed communities, were actively excluded from or demonized in the new narratives. The new narratives were also tied to larger discourses of the nation through a rhetoric of republicanism. In the mid-nineteenth century, both Democrats and Republicans used racist rhetoric to garner political power. Yet the move to construct the United States as a white republic was not exclusively a topdown affair. Instead, workers actively participated in and benefited from the racist agendas of mainstream political parties.5 In what follows I begin by examining the role of the public school system in normalizing white supremacy among Napa’s schoolchildren. I then examine the development and promulgation of myths, such as the Bear Flag incident, which a number of Euro-American adults created and used to present themselves as the legitimate possessors of Napa. In the context of these white mythologies, I then discuss how the victors used discourses of race and gender to belittle the claims that Napa’s other residents might make to the region. In the process of doing so, they used a racist and sexist language that erased differences among these groups. Stories of the Bear Flag incident, then, were central to a larger story of American identity where Euro-Americans were normalized as citizens and “pioneers,” Californio and Indigenous stories were eliminated from narratives, and African Americans and Chinese immigrants were constructed as threats to the U.S. republic. While analysis of the use of narratives and history to establish dominance in an area and the relationship between the local and the national in accomplishing this task are important topics for discussion themselves, resistance to this kind of domination is also important to understanding not only local and national social structures, but social change as well. For this reason, I close this chapter by examining resistance: the ways that Napa’s subaltern communities challenged linear and demonizing narratives and racist and discriminatory practices.

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constructing young citizens: stories, histories, and the public school system In 1848, with the success of the United States in its war against Mexico, 80,000 mixed-race people were brought into the Union, many of whom were eligible for citizenship.6 And so as Euro-Americans moved into what was formerly Mexico, they worked to redefine the territories as legitimately “American,” and to solidify and promulgate a defi nition of American that was rooted in their own histories and mythologies.7 Then just two decades after the North American invasion, while that very definition remained contested, the attempted extension of basic citizenship rights to freedmen caused yet another crisis among Euro-Americans in the U.S. East and West.8 At the national level, Euro-Americans strove to maintain a separate place for themselves, above the other residents of the nation, controlling national trends and policies. They accomplished this through legislation, through myth-making, and through the popular press. Thus, the late nineteenth century was the time when the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted, and when a journalist by the name of David Croly coined the word miscegenation, a term heavy with the sexual and racial politics of the time, constructing white women as the vessels of the white race and of white culture.9 It was also the time when, in response to the nation’s changing demographics, the descendents of British colonists dedicated the National Monument to the Forefathers at Plymouth.10 Given this widespread attempt of many Euro-Americans to influence national sentiment, it is not surprising that their actions were accompanied by efforts to create a uniform school system, reflecting their own “Anglo-Saxon” values. The dominant majority in the United States moved to quickly contain the winds of change by placing young people into categories of assimilable and unassimilable. Southern and Eastern European immigrant children, while portrayed as inferior to their northern European and Puritan counterparts, were deemed assimilable. Consequently, the dominant majority on the East Coast quickly developed a curriculum to transform these newcomers into young citizens. By the turn of the century, many of them felt that they were successful. For example, in 1906, when reviewing the public schools of New York, the president of Johns Hopkins University wrote of the success of the public schools in making young immigrants into American citizens: First in interest in this citizenship training is the work in civics and the history of the United States. In addition to the regular class work

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in these subjects this training includes the recitation of patriotic pieces at the morning assemblies, the singing of patriotic songs, and the daily salute to the flag. As one of the best means of rousing the patriotic sentiment, the principal of one school endeavors to make the special exercises in honor of national holidays.11

The writer ended his letter by concluding that, while a number of foreign languages and traditions dominated the streets outside the school, English and “American” traditions were successfully taught at school and brought home to parents by immigrant schoolchildren.12 Public schools in the West also stressed the importance of patriotism. At a time when public schools were attempting to standardize pedagogy and curriculum, Teacher’s Institutes were one means through which counties sought to improve and homogenize the pedagogy in their classrooms. One week each year, teachers from throughout a county came together to listen to common speeches on curriculum, pedagogy, and patriotism. In Napa, the topic of patriotism dominated annual Teacher’s Institutes from the 1890s throughout the early twentieth century. Topics such as “Civil Education” and “Lowell’s Conception of the Duties of Citizenship” filled the annual programs.13 Also reflective of national trends, when African American schoolchildren were discussed, they were placed outside of the general school population. In 1903, for example, when Napa’s Teacher Institute addressed the issue of Black education, they featured speeches on industrial education and “The Social Condition and Tendencies of the Negro.” 14 Thus, while the Teacher’s Institute did not explicitly exclude Black students from citizenship, speeches and discussions on Black education as separate from discussions of citizenship suggest that the education system had come to reflect the values of the American South, where civic education was the stuff of white education, and manual labor was the stuff of Black education. Public schools as well as privately funded institutions would produce a nation of white civic leaders and laboring Blacks to work for them.15 The successful construction of a white citizen within the public schools of Napa was part of a larger move, on the part of the state, to defi ne citizen as white. In 1849, one year after the treaty ending the U.S. invasion, the Treaty of Guadalupe, was signed, delegates from throughout California met in Monterey to draft a state constitution. Primary among the issues they addressed was the vote. Who, in this new state, would be allowed to vote? All men? White men? Were Mexicans white men? The demographics of the delegates are telling and strongly influenced the convention’s outcome. Of the forty delegates, sixteen were

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originally from slave states—and their average residence in California was two years. Nine of the delegates had been in California for less than a year. There were also eight Californios among their numbers. Initially, the convention decided, “Every white male citizen of the United States, of the age of 21 years . . . shall be entitled to vote.” After much debate about the rights of the Californios under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the language was modified to include former male citizens of Mexico who became U.S. citizens. The modifier white was not removed.16 In 1865, when the state of California passed its first laws to govern the public schools, they explicitly established them for the exclusive use of “white children between five and twenty-one years of age.” 17 Likewise, in clear violation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, they stipulated that “all schools shall be taught in the English language.” 18 When, after challenges by Black citizens for access to public schools, the state legislature amended the laws to provide for their children’s education, it mandated segregated schools, unless there were not enough students to open a separate school and the local school board agreed to allow local children of color to attend the “schools for white children.” 19 Schoolchildren in nineteenth-century Napa, then, came of age in an era of inequalities. Some immigrants were welcomed as citizens, while others were labeled as inassimilable and ineligible for citizenship. To further narrow the definition of American, legislators and textbook writers throughout the later nineteenth century strove to promulgate a defi nition of citizenship that would contain and stabilize the recent extension of full citizenship rights to all white males.20 Thus, the contradiction that lay at the base of so many nineteenth-century inequalities, where the extension of rights and property to white men came at the explicit expense of racialized minorities, also influenced nineteenth-century education politics. In the case of the public schools, not only were racialized children barred from full access to education, the curriculum utilized in the public schools of the West also reinforced a narrow and exclusive defi nition of American and citizen. In Napa, as throughout the U.S. West, McGuffey’s Readers played important roles in this process. McGuffey’s Readers were used throughout the greater American West, including not only what is now called the Southwest, but as far east as Ohio and Kentucky from the early nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. First published in 1836, they sold seven million copies between 1836 and 1850. Between 1850 and 1870, following the North American invasion and then the U.S. Civil War, they sold forty million copies, making McGuffey the dominant eclectic reader in the U.S.

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photograph 5.1. November 9, 1920, Miss Washburn’s Room, Central School. Courtesy of Napa County Historical Society.

West.21 Written explicitly for a Western audience, the volumes reflected William H. McGuffey’s Presbyterian values as well as the national anxiety that came with a rapid expansion of territory and voting rights.22 Born on September 23, 1800, William H. McGuffey was a respected and successful clergyman, teacher, and administrator. He preached and taught school for thirty-eight years, yet he never taught girls, which may account for the fact that many of the Readers largely ignore their existence.23 In addition to this gender bias, and critical to this discussion, was his ethnic and racial bias, which can be easily attributable to his family and the values with which he grew up as a Scotch “Covenanter,” or Presbyterian, in the U.S. West. His grandparents had been homesteaders in Pennsylvania at a time when Euro-Americans were engaged in anti-Indian campaigns; when he was just an infant, his parents moved to Ohio and began again the work of establishing a homestead in a region inhabited by Indigenous peoples.24 While his father was of Scotch descent and his mother of English and of Irish descent, they settled with a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian community, where the church doubled as a school and was the center of the community.25 The family, as a whole, was strongly influenced by a Presbyterian culture which taught that an individual’s good behavior and socio-economic

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success were signs of sanctification. Thus, men and women were to be industrious and disciplined; their behavior would testify to whether they were among the saved or the damned. Covenanters were also to “bring God’s discipline to this world,” and God’s discipline looked a lot like Euro-American Protestant culture.26 By the time McGuffey began preaching, he had rejected Presbyterian teachings of predestination; yet the severity with which he ruled the classroom stands as testimony to the importance that he continued to place on discipline and salvation.27 McGuffey’s formative years, in a space where whiteness was defined in opposition to Indianness, was also influenced by his understanding of republican and Christian values. In fact, among the Covenanters of the West, part of the task of taking the land for God’s chosen people often required “killing the heathen.” 28 McGuffey’s father fought in antiIndian campaigns in the Ohio River area. And the young McGuffey and his brother, Hamilton, most probably grew up listening to their father tell of his successful campaigns, along with racialized morality tales that accompanied nineteenth-century white Protestant expansion into Indigenous people’s territories. Such stories included captivity narratives that had their origins in colonial America, and which continued in popularity as Euro-Americans moved west. In such tales, white women were taken captive by Indigenous peoples; upon their return to their original communities, they told stories of life among people they termed “savages.” Protestant ministers used such tales to drive home the Christian morals found in “civilization.” 29 These Euro-American morality tales reinforced white supremacist beliefs that Euro-Americans had a mission to fill the continent with their people and to spread their civilization from shore to shore.30 Like the Beecher family of New England, who strongly influenced his work, McGuffey also believed that education was the key to protecting the status quo from the upheavals of Jacksonian democracy.31 It was in the late nineteenth century that Jacksonian democracy was contained. If all white male citizens were to participate in the republic, then citizenship needed to be defined narrowly, and all citizens needed to share a reverence for property. The McGuffey Readers were part of a larger Republican counter-reformation which wedded property, religion, and the judicial system, in part by rationalizing the poverty of the disfranchised.32 Thus, in the McGuffey Readers, these two constructions, of Euro-Americans as peculiarly American and of a reverence for property ownership, together justified the socio-economic inequalities of the nineteenth century for young Euro-American schoolchildren.

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The acceptance of social inequality and the dogma that EuroAmericans were peculiarly and especially “American” were iterated and reiterated throughout the series. At a basic level, the message of EuroAmericans as real Americans was reinforced through pictures. Every American depicted in the Readers, from level one through level six, is white and wears standard Euro-American clothing. In fact, when people of color or people wearing different clothing do finally appear, in Reader Four, they are placed safely in foreign countries, with stories of faraway places. Thus, ironically, the only broad-brimmed hat that California schoolchildren ever see in the Readers is on the head of a rider in South America, even though broad-brimmed hats remained popular in California long after the fall of Mexican rule.33 The theme of American patriotism appears as early as the First Reader, with a little white boy carrying an American flag. His older sister tells their mother, “I went with Tom to the pond, I had my doll, and Tom had his flag.” 34 Later in the same reader, five boys are depicted carrying a flag. They ask their father to use the flag “to play Fourth of July.” He gives them permission to do so and then closes by saying, “Hurrah for the flag, boys.” 35 American flags and “hurrahs” disappear for a brief while in the Second Reader. At the same time, stories about grateful poor children begin to appear, all of whom are clean and happy to work. The first of these stories is a layered tale that simultaneously normalizes child labor and white women’s domesticity. In the story, Henry is “a kind good boy” whose father is dead and whose mother is very poor. One day he fi nds a man’s pocketbook and returns it to the owner without removing any of its contents. The man is so happy that he gives little Henry a one-dollar reward. Henry promptly uses the dollar to buy materials to black boots and begins spending his days blacking boots to raise money for his family. He goes to school in the evenings, and earns “almost enough to support his mother and his little sister.” While the depiction of the child laborer, to many modern readers, is disconcerting, it tells only part of the tale. For the story also normalizes a problematic women’s sphere, where real women are white, passive, and domestic. In the tale Henry, with his bootblack kit, labors in the public world of the masculine, and the mother, while surely she must have labored, is depicted at home with her daughter, grateful for the son’s ability to provide.36 Stories of honest, laboring children appear throughout the Readers. While it can be argued that the main point of these stories is to teach young children honesty and industry, it is also apparent that such stories

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normalize child labor and social inequalities. The poor children in these stories are never angry, and, if they are honest, they find plenty for themselves and their families to eat. The story where this is most clear is that of “The Little Loaf,” found in the Third Reader. In the story, there is a famine in an unnamed country. And so a rich baker sends for twenty of the poorest children and gives them a basket of bread, one piece for each child. While most of the children fight for the biggest piece, one polite little girl waits until the rest are fi nished and then takes the smallest remaining loaf. The next day, the same thing happens, only when the little girl gets home, she fi nds silver coins in the small loaf. Immediately she returns to the baker to tell him of the mistake and he replies, “No, no, my child, it was no mistake. I had the silver pieces put into the smallest loaf to reward you. Always be contented, peaceable, and grateful as you are now.” 37 The message here is at least twofold: you should always be contented with what you have, and if someone does not have what they need, they must be doing something wrong. Messages normalizing social inequalities were coupled not only with pictures that equated American identity with Euro-American identity and civilization with separate spheres, but also with patriotic lessons that over-valued the English heritage of a particular community of Americans. Thus, in their Fifth Readers, students sat and read of how the people of the United States, descendants of the English stock, grateful for the treasures of knowledge derived from their English ancestors, acknowledge, also, with thanks and filial regard, that, among those ancestors, under the culture of Hampden and Sidney, and other assiduous friends, that seed of popular liberty first germinated, which on our soil, has shot up to its full height, until its branches overshadow the land.38

Also in the Fifth Readers, which were not written by William McGuffey, but by his brother, Hamilton, students read not only of their “English ancestors,” but of virtues of their Puritan “forefathers.” 39 This construction of Englishmen and Puritans as the mythic forefathers of the schoolchildren of the U.S. West co-existed with the reactionary Monument to the Forefathers and the Mayflower Society. In the Readers, such constructions also existed side by side with an overtly antiSemitic rhetoric that blamed Jews for the death of Christ and claimed that they were strangers to “the morality found in the gospel”; there was also language that often referred to American Indigenous peoples as “savages” even when discussing their virtues.40 What we have in the

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Readers, then, is a normalizing of Euro-Americans as true Americans. In conjunction with the overtly racist language of the local press, such texts normalized the disfranchisement of the “others” with whom Napa’s white schoolchildren shared resources in their far Western town. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, Napa’s schools and schools throughout the U.S. West continued to use McGuffey as their central, at times their only, text. In retrospect, scholars criticize these texts for the ways in which they inculcated doctrines of Manifest Destiny into a generation of young white Californians by praising American’s mission to spread liberty “among other nations and backward peoples.” 41 At the time, however, the press criticized them only for their price tag—and so the rhetoric of white supremacy at the state and national levels, of which Reginald Horsman, Ronald Takaki, Tomás Almaguer, and others have written, was reproduced at the local level in the press and public schools of Napa.42 Perhaps the role of eclectic readers is best understood in the context of discourses of nation—specifically in the context of the work of Benedict Anderson, where, in Imagined Communities, he made the nowclassic argument that what constitutes modern nation-states is not common race, religion, or language, but instead their status as a specific kind of “imagined community.” “The people” conceive of themselves as a fraternity and imagine themselves to be part of the community. This imagined community is made possible not only by governmental mechanisms, but by mechanisms of culture and education—particularly newspapers.43 Here I would add that the role of the popular press extends to the texts used in the public schools. And for the nineteenth century, what young people were taught in the public schools dovetailed with what was printed in the popular press to create an understanding of “American” that placed young white Protestant Americans in opposition to other citizens and residents of Napa and of the nation.44

white supremacy and the popular press In Napa the mobilization of the Bear Flag incident was both reflective of and constitutive of ways in which the national press and the federal government used the U.S.-Mexico war at a national level. Both larger national influences and the local press functioned together to provide Euro-Americans with a superiority complex while providing their dominance with a façade of legitimacy. Within two decades of the war, events surrounding the Bear Flag incident and the war were memorialized in Napa’s English-language press. For example, in the Napa Reporter,

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June 8, 1861, an announcement appeared calling on the “early settlers” and “Pioneers” of California to meet for an ox roasting. It read: meeting of pioneers It having been suggested by many of the Pioneers of California that a meeting of the early settlers of this State is desirable, and being myself one of the parties constituting the Bear Flag party in ’46, I venture to take the responsibility of calling a meeting to be held at Sonoma City, on the 5th day of July next . . . All who were in the service of the United States, are especially invited; and all who were residents of the State in the “high old times,” are requested to be on hand. A part of the programme of the day will be to demolish an Ox roasted whole—in the good old style—to be provided by Capt. Grenville P. Swift, of Fremont’s Battalion. The original “Bear Flag” will be hoisted on the occasion.45

Lest there be any confusion, the “Pioneers” did not include the Californios in their numbers. Lists of membership, printed in the Napa paper, included the names of many of the filibusters who took Sonoma. Listed as “members of the Bear Flag party,” they were constructed as the true founders—“pioneers”—of Napa.46 Likewise, these “pioneers” were sometimes asked to write or publish their memoirs or reminiscences for the Napa Register. In such accounts, the onetime filibusters wrote of the Californios as “Mexicans [who did] not labor themselves.” Of the Indigenous peoples of the area, another pioneer wrote of “their laziness and negligence.” 47 Thus, through the press, one community of Euro-Americans, that associated with the Bear Flag incident, was able to construct itself as the founder of Napa in opposition to “lazy” Indigenous peoples and “Mexicans” who did “not labor themselves.” The work of the Vallejos, Juárezes, Rodríguezes, Berryessas, and Higueras as earlier settler-colonizers in the area was absent from these accounts. This early, dominant process of community building and mythmaking can best be understood within the context of colonization and nation building. Because colonizers construct and mobilize mythologies to justify their dominance, and because invented traditions are central to constructing modern nation-states, usurpers in any region are compelled to create new traditions to justify their position and that of their descendents. Thus, Napa’s Euro-Americans mobilized the Bear Flag incident as a heroic myth to be celebrated annually.48 All white participants in the Bear Flag incident, from Semple, who attempted to keep order at Sonoma, to the Kelseys, who shot California Indians for sport, were

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invited to join in rituals such as ox roasting and raising the Bear Flag.49 These events were symbols through which the onetime fi libusters could claim membership in a community and at the same time, as “pioneers,” claim legitimacy for that community. In later years, as the original filibusters died, the Napa Recorder printed obituaries that constructed their earlier deeds as heroic.50 It was within local newspapers, then, this organ which Anderson considers so critical to constructing imagined communities, that the Bear Flag incident was mobilized to create a sense of belonging and entitlement for Euro-Americans in Napa—both as the rightful members of the community of Napa and as upright citizens of the United States.51 The same year the Napa Recorder ran the announcement for the first annual “Meeting of Pioneers,” it published a series of articles titled “Reminiscences of ‘Old Times,’” written by someone who signed off as “Bear Flag.” 52 Like the pioneer announcement, the articles portrayed the incident as the genesis behind republicanism in the U.S. West. In relation to this, Bear Flag’s narrative demonized the Californios who preceded them to the area. According to Bear Flag, rugged Euro-American men made Bear Flags out of their worn shirts, declared California independent of Mexico, and waged battles against Californios and Mexicans throughout Alta California. When writing about the Californios and Mexicanos who fought in the war, Bear Flag sometimes called them “Mexicans.” At other times he called them “Greasers.” 53 In addition to narrating a racialized account of the Bear Flag incident, where Euro-Americans stood as heroes and Californios as “Greasers,” Bear Flag’s account contained racialized stereotypes from larger nineteenth-century white mythologies. These stereotypes functioned to negate the violence of the Bear Flag incident and the U.S. invasion in the manner Ernest Renan argued is critical to successful nation building. That is, according to Renan, successful nation building is partially dependent on the ability of dominant classes to erase the violence of the nation’s founding and their consequent rise to power. This erasure allows linear narratives to flourish, and these narratives legitimize the status of both the conquerors and their progeny.54 In Napa, following the U.S. invasion, stereotypes of welcoming señoritas were mobilized to negate the violence used to establish EuroAmerican rule in California.55 Specifically, Bear Flag wrote of Californianas as “señoritas” who desired Euro-American men, especially men with “rosy cheeks and light hair.” 56 Thus Bear Flag, and others who wrote in his genre, constructed a “Spanish” womanhood in opposition

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to the white womanhood of the nineteenth century. While white women were domestic and chaste, to be protected from miscegenation, Spanish women, even the “Señoritas,” were lusty, desiring white men, part of nature.57 In his narrative, Bear Flag told of a time when he and some other Osos were watching a number of Californianas washing clothes. According to Bear Flag, the Californianas were watching them back and discussing which one of them they thought most attractive.58 Bear Flag’s narrative is consistent with nineteenth-century EuroAmerican mythologies surrounding Californianas, which scholars such as Leonard Pitt and Rosaura Sánchez have analyzed at the state and national level. Pitt wrote of Euro-American aggressors singing Already the señoritas Speak English with fi nesse. “Kiss me!” say the Yankees, The girls all answer “Yes!” 59

And Sánchez argued that in nineteenth-century Euro-American literature, “the construction of Californio women . . . is underwritten by romantic tropes. Women are like the earth, healthy, wholesome, and desirable, a fertile site for reproduction and like California itself, eagerly awaiting the arrival of equally strong foreigners.” 60 Yet Bear Flag’s narrative stands in contrast to the information we have about Californianas from Californio and Californiana accounts of the war. In their own narratives, Californianas resisted the invasion of their land, homes, and lives. At times, they were successful in their resistance. María Higuera Juárez, for example, told her grandchildren stories of confronting Frémont’s men with a spear, and Rosalía Vallejo de Leese wrote of protecting her servant from Frémont’s men in Sonoma.61 In the writings of Bear Flag, then, what we have is another example of how, at the local level, specific narratives were used to construct an imagined white community. By portraying Californianas as desiring Euro-American men, Bear Flag constructed a gendered and raced narrative that naturalized the dominance of Euro-American men in the region, state, and nation, and normalized sexual violence against women of color. The constructed desire of Californianas was part of a linear narrative, wherein Euro-American men, destined to rule California, were welcomed by people preceding them to the area. Bear Flag’s argument that “they wanted it” would later become a common motif throughout EuroAmerican literature, not only when they wrote about Californianas, but also when they wrote about General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo.

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For example, in Thomas Gregory’s History of Napa County he claimed that when the filibusters arrived in Sonoma, General Vallejo invited them all in for breakfast, and that the trappers shouted “Viva la México” and offered Vallejo the presidency of the new republic.62 Like Bear Flag, Gregory neglected to mention that the General, his brother, and his translator were imprisoned after signing a treaty promising not to take up arms, that their ranchos were raided during their confinement, and that members of the Bear Flag party raped California Indigenous women they encountered both at the Sonoma Presidio and at ranchos throughout the Napa Valley. In addition, Gregory’s work, published in 1912, neglected to mention any resistance to the Osos either by troops of Californios or by Californianas. The book was sold by subscription and was serialized in journals throughout California.63 This construction of Euro-Americans as heroic American pioneers and ethnic Mexicans as “other” was one central piece in the construction of Napa as a white American county, and, to borrow a phrase from Alexander Saxton, as part of a “White Republic.” For the mobilization of Bear Flag mythologies and corresponding commemorative institutions not only constructed Euro-Americans as the rightful dominant group in Napa, but also constructed Napa and its white citizens as part of a larger white population within the nation. In this respect, Bear Flag’s narratives were part of a larger republican dialogic in Napa, whereby the incident fueled discourses of white supremacy, while other discourses of republicanism both supported it and were supported by it.

napa county and the white republic A rhetoric of republicanism dominated Napa and the larger U.S. nationstate throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. The function of this rhetoric was to center white men as the foundation of an American republic, and white women as the vessels of white citizens and of white culture. Thus, Napa’s linear narrative worked in conjunction with other related discourses of republicanism to make Napa a white space where African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and ethnic Mexicans were constructed as threats to the republic, where women from these communities were constructed as lusty non-women, and where California Indians were portrayed as fading away. In Napa, Wappo- and Patwin-speaking peoples did not disappear from the landscape following the U.S.-Mexico war. Instead, some lived in Napa on ranchos owned by Euro-Americans and Californios; others, the U.S.

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Cavalry forcibly removed to reservations north of Napa in 1851.64 Often these former residents of Napa returned to the area to work the harvest.65 Yet, despite a continued Wappo and Patwin presence in Napa, white residents promulgated a myth that they were “fading away” from the area. Thus, once again, Napa’s local histories reflected and contributed to larger state and national histories. Nineteenth-century Euro-Americans throughout California used a language of inevitability to justify violence against California Indians, and that motif of inevitability justified antiIndian campaigns at the national level.66 In Napa’s English-language press, death notices were also framed with a motif of inevitability. When an Indigenous man was found dead by the steamship landing, the Napa Reporter opened the announcement with, “March of Civilization.” 67 When another Indigenous man was found dead by a roadside in one of Napa’s minor valleys, the death notice ended with the refrain, “Alas! Poor Lo, the evening star of thy destiny is fast waning in the west.” 68 The idea that California Indians were dying out due to the “march of civilization” also made it into Napa’s subscription books. In 1878, a firm in Oakland published Illustrations of Napa County California, with Historical Sketches. In it, C. A. Menefee wrote of a massacre at the Bale rancho in up-Valley Napa. It is stated that a party of settlers having met with such [cattle] losses surrounded a party of Indians, several hundred in number, on the Bale ranch, near Oakville. They were assembled unarmed in the “sweat house,” and the whole number were slaughtered as they passed out, man by man, killing the entire tribe. . . . Such wholesale slaughter soon decimated their ranks, and it is no wonder that the Indians soon disappeared before the march of such civilization.69

Illustrations of Napa County demonstrates the strength of Napa’s larger historical narrative, where Indigenous peoples fade away with the march of white civilization. Even Euro-Americans, such as Menefee, who decried the violence of their neighbors against Indigenous peoples, believed that California Indians were doomed to disappear. And for Menefee, who by no means condoned the “slaughter” of Indigenous people, “the march of civilization” appears to have been common knowledge. In his text, and perhaps in his mind, “civilization” and Indigenous people could not co-exist in the same space.70 While survivors of once thriving Patwin- and Wappo-speaking communities were portrayed as fading with the march of civilization, ethnic Mexicans, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants were portrayed

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very differently. Within Napa’s narratives of republicanism, members of these communities were portrayed as threats to republican institutions. Through the press, local holidays, and black minstrelsy, Napa’s white citizens lumped together Chinese immigrants, African Americans, and ethnic Mexicans in a manner reflecting white discourses at the national level, where in the late nineteenth century, throughout the United States, the press and state politicians portrayed all three groups as threats to white liberty. James Buchanan labeled Mexicans a “mongrel race” unfit for republicanism, and Thomas Hart Benton wrote that the “Celtic-AngloSaxon race” was superior to Chinese, Mexican, and Indian “races.” 71 It is here, in lumping together these groups as unfit for participation in the American republic, that nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy enters the picture and the narrative. Nineteenth-century minstrelsy created a new sense of whiteness by creating a new sense of blackness.72 Throughout the nineteenth century the images of African Americans that Euro-Americans constructed became increasingly demeaning; with the rise of abolitionism, a key point to many skits was that Blacks would be better off under the slave system, where whites could look after them. After the Civil War, “black” minstrels lampooned civil rights.73 Thus, in many skits performed by Burnt Cork troupes, a familiar story line was reiterated. In lampooning civil rights, the writers of the minstrels’ material made it clear that Black men could never be heroes of the republic. At the local level, Napa had its own Burnt Cork minstrels throughout the 1850s.74 In addition, a number of out-of-town troops, including the renowned “Christy Minstrels,” toured Napa. Such traditions continued through the Civil War and into the early twentieth century, when Napa’s high school maintained its own Burnt Cork minstrel troupe.75 Napa’s Euro-American population, then, participated in a larger “blackface” culture that flourished in the United States throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century whereby Euro-Americans projected their anxieties onto African Americans, at the same time that they constructed themselves as superior to them. Throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century, white humor was not restricted to the stage; instead, it bled over into other media outlets.76 Napa’s English-language press was replete with filler jokes where fictive African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and ethnic Mexicans said and did stupid things. Most white jokes, as in black minstrelsy, made fun of Blacks, yet the immediate ties between minstrelsy and republicanism can be seen as well in white humor that was directed against Chinese immigrants and ethnic Mexicans. Such white humor did not detract

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from white labor’s accusations that Chinese immigration posed an economic and political threat; rather, like anti-Black humor, it served to dehumanize Chinese immigrants and ethnic Mexicans while arguing that they remained a threat to the U.S. Republic. The function of white humor is clear when it is read in the context of anti-suffrage rhetoric published in Napa’s papers during the Civil War. In April of 1863, for example, Napa’s Copperhead paper, the Pacifi c Echo, ran an article titled “More Nigger,” in which the writer accused Unionists of repudiating the Constitution. Like Napa’s school textbooks, the article was layered, weaving the defense of the Constitution and the defense of white womanhood into the same space. The article read: Perkins of San Francisco has introduced a bill into the State Senate, to give negroes the right to hold a homestead. So we go: negroes to hold homesteads, negroes to testify against white women, negroes to be invited to come to the State, negroes to vote, and the next thing, no doubt, to hold office . . . we are sick of hearing men prate of their Democracy and love of Country and regard for the Union, made for white men, not negroes, by both slave-holders and non-slave-holders, who go to the polls, and contradict their own words, by voting for the overthrow of all these things, and the election of the negro. If you are honest in your votes and motives, go boldly in the face of day, like Perkins and his compeers, and say you spit upon Democracy, you repudiate the Constitution, you laugh to scorn the precepts and practices of the men of ’76 who gave you a County, and a National name. If “nigger” is the god you adore, for mercy sake, do not blacken the name of Democracy, and sing hosanna to the Fourth of July, to cover up your iniquity.” 77

The author was quick to raise the image of white womanhood, and to do so in the context of Black civil rights, implying threats of violation if “negroes” were to “testify against white women.” Thus, with the specter of rape and miscegenation raised, he was able to tie Black rights, simultaneously, to the fall of the Republic and to the fall of white womanhood. While the Unionist papers used white humor as filler, they avoided political diatribes until after the Union Victory of 1865. At that time, the Pacifi c Echo folded and the Napa Recorder shifted its stance away from the Republican Party. In an editorial of August 1867 it announced We shall be Democratic at all times and under all circumstances. In the battle for the re-inauguration of the grand old party we shall combat with vitality and vigor the enemies of White Supremacy,

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Equal Taxation and Union . . . we shall zealously labor for and herald with joy, the speedy coming of the time when designing demagogues shall be rebuked, and the return of the pure principles of the past announce the triumph of Democracy over the foes of the Union and Constitutional freedom.78

One month later, when the Democrats swept local and state elections, the paper ran a political headline proclaiming, “Glorious News! . . . California Democratic . . . Napa County Repudiates the Corruptionists! . . . A White Man a ‘Leetle’ Better than a Nigger or a Chinaman. WHOOPEE-E-E-E!” 79 The triumph of the Democratic party and self-proclaimed white supremacists in Napa did not mute their rhetoric; instead, it gave rise to more anti– African American rhetoric, once again constructing white democratic and “American” rights in opposition to African American rights. Throughout 1868 and 1869, while congress debated “universal” manhood suffrage, Napa’s English-language press railed against “Monkey Suffrage,” and waxed poetic about the valor of white men.80 In July of 1868 it printed a poem, very similar to the prose of heroism found in nineteenth-century school primers, where the narrative told is that of the founding of liberty by the white forefathers of America.81 The poem was titled “To the White Men of America” and appeared on the front page of the Napa Reporter. It read: Americans! Who proudly trace Lineage from a noble race; Who fill a high and honored place ’Mong the nations of the earth: Where is all your freedom grand? See! A wretched Negro band Ruling o’er your southern land, Where white men now are slaves . . . Is our CHARTER now repealed, Which our father’s blood has sealed ?— Shall we, Freemen, basely yield The birthright of our race? Shall we stand where Judas stood— Break the bond of brotherhood— Force the men of our own blood To bow to Negro rule?

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Lo! The land of sunny skies, In the “Gloom of Egypt” lies: Soul of Washington, arise! And save us from our shame. By the blood of our fathers shed By the souls of heroes dead, God forbid it should be said: “We’ve made our brethren slaves!” 82

Like the minstrel shows that visited Napa’s Opera House, the poem both drew from and built upon a specific narrative. White men, chosen by God “ ’mong the nations of the earth,” founded a republic for themselves. “Heroes dead” shed their blood for this republic and included such slaveholding revolutionaries as George Washington. Finally, this republic was created by and for white men, all white men in both north and south. According to this narrative, Black men were a threat to their “birthright.” Napa’s exclusion of Black men from the republic was directly related to its exclusion of ethnic Mexicans. Where Euro-Americans mobilized stories of the Bear Flag incident that excluded ethnic Mexicans from American republicanism, they mobilized stories of “heroes dead,” such as Washington, to exclude Black men from the same republic. In both instances, Euro-Americans were able to construct themselves as the rightful masters of a white republic in opposition to ethnic Mexicans and African Americans, whom they labeled “greasers” and “niggers.” When Chinese immigrants eventually came to Napa, they too were incorporated into a mythology of dark threats to the republic. As historian Ronald Takaki has demonstrated, this mythology was mobilized at a national level, where it served to bolster white supremacy because it reaffirmed the narrative of the “errand in the wilderness”: white men and women settled a savage wilderness in the east and then swept west, bringing industry and republican institutions with them. The mythology was already well established by the time the Chinese arrived on Western shores.83 In Napa, in June of 1869 the Napa County Reporter printed a poem on its front page that demonstrated how easily Napa’s white population projected previously established myths and ideologies onto Chinese immigrants.84 The poem was titled “John Chinaman’s Jubilee” and read: Blackee man he hab jubilee Wen Limkim makee him free:

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Me, too, sall hab de votee, An’ be Mandarin in fi ne coatee. So, kickee me who can, Wen me Melican man. Chee-chee-cha-see Dese days o jubilee! ’Mendment 15 velly nicee— Like ’em much as pork and licee John he cut a velly big swell, An’ tell em Democrat go to h—l . . . Me votee, yes, evely time, An’ sell ’em, too, for one dime. No likes Melican or Melican Josh, And tinkee all a heap o’bosh . . .85

The very title of “jubilee” tied the piece to African American celebrations, and reference to the jubilee of emancipation demonstrated a link that the author saw between the threat freedmen had posed to his white republic and the threat enfranchised Chinese immigrants now posed. That the fifteenth amendment would enfranchise Chinese immigrants was, of course, a fiction. In 1869 Chinese immigrants remained excluded from citizenship and hence ineligible to vote.86 Yet by portraying Chinese immigrants as well as African Americans as a threat to the political system and hence the republic, the writer was able to construct Euro-Americans as fighting heroes struggling against alien others. Thus the white humor that filled the pages of Napa’s English-language press served to both generally demean and demonize people of color in Napa as well as to construct Euro-Americans in opposition to them. While images of ethnic Mexicans were often absent from white humor, they did make occasional appearances. Such humor also placed ethnic Mexicans outside of Napa’s imagined white republic. In September of 1873, for example, the Napa Reporter ran a piece of filler that read: “Our County Judge has been unjustly accused of being verbose: we say unjustly because of the following colloquy which took place in the Court House on Monday last: Judge to Mexican candidate for naturalization —‘Are you in favor of the promotion of a republican form of government? ’ Mexican—‘Si señor, me vote the Republican ticket.’” 87 While the English-language reading public had its laugh at the expense

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of the fictive “Mexican,” the press contributed to an image of ethnic Mexicans as outside the republic; in fact, the press claimed, they did not even know what a republican form of government was.

resistance As powerful as these strains of hegemonic racial ideologies were, they met resistance in Napa even in the nineteenth century. Among Californios and California Indians, this resistance was present at the Bear Flag incident, where armed Californianas confronted Frémont’s men, and where a California Indian by the name of Sinao took a lasso to a EuroAmerican man who had unjustly whipped him with a cat-o’-nine-tails. In later years, ethnic minority groups formed cultural and political organizations with which to survive and at times to resist white discrimination in Napa. But for now, in the context of community narratives, invented tradition, and wars of position, I will focus on discourse, and on one community that was able to produce counter-narratives in nineteenth-century Napa. Because of their access to Euro-Americans such as Hubert Bancroft, some nineteenth-century Californios were able to challenge the dominant narratives of their own time. In Napa, this created possibilities for disruption on at least three levels. On one level of resistance, actions of the subaltern intersected with narratives by dominant groups in such a way as to disrupt their meta-narrative—specifically Bear Flag’s account of the Bear Flag incident. In his narrative, Bear Flag constructed Californianas as women who desired white men. In doing this he was consistent with other white mythologies concerning Californianas that were popular among Euro-Americans at the time. On the other hand, there was a group of women he encountered who challenged his presuppositions. In one of his many articles Bear Flag “recollected” some of Gillespie’s regulations for the purpose of keeping order in the town. One was that no Mexican sho’d gallop his horse through the streets; penalty for violation—guard house. Another was that four men should not stand talking in the street; penalty for violation—guard house. Men caught gambling, were to forfeit the money and—guard house. I think he broke up the fandangos, too, for I do not remember of them having one all the time we were there. By such annoyances he gained the ill will of the inhabitants, and in order to show their respect for him, the “Señoritas” sent him a present of peaches. Before sending them, however, they first rolled them

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in the fi ne fur-like prickles of the tunar [sic], or fruit of the cactus; and it was a full week before he got them all out of his mouth.88

The actions of the Californianas did not disrupt Bear Flag’s prejudices enough to alter the general description of them in his narrative, but he did not forget the event. Instead, he included it in the public narrative he provided in the Napa Recorder. And so this disruptive event, where subaltern action meets linear narrative, was reiterated in Napa’s English-language press. A second level at which Californios disrupted the narrative of Napa and the larger meta-narrative of the “errand in the wilderness” was through the production of their testimonios. By the 1870s, when Hubert Howe Bancroft’s agents solicited testimonios from the Californios, EuroAmerican iterations of the Bear Flag incident dominated the mythic landscape of Northern California. Vallejo and other Californios ultimately agreed to speak to Bancroft’s agents, hoping that they could counter the distortions of their histories produced by Euro-Americans.89 Genaro Padilla has argued that Vallejo’s decision to speak with Bancroft’s agent was, in part, “a form of discursive revenge on negative representations of Mexicans that were being constructed during his own lifetime.” 90 While Bancroft restricted the use of the testimonios to source material for his History of California, in 1914, Platón Vallejo took history into his own hands and published his memoir in the San Francisco Bulletin.91 Platón wrote of the Osos coming to Sonoma and taking his father prisoner and of his father leaving with the Osos in good spirits, convinced that he would be protected. He also wrote of the many misdeeds and injustices his father suffered at the hands of the Osos. The conclusion to his narration of the Bear Flag incident was that “California has many noble incidents in its history. It is strange that one has been selected for canonization that will never bear a close analysis of facts.” 92 For the early twentieth century, his account stands out as unique because it was an overtly disruptive narrative published in an Englishlanguage paper.93 Ironically, Hubert Howe Bancroft’s work also played a role in disrupting heroic narratives of the Bear Flag incident, and this is the third specific disruption that I will address in this brief essay. Published at the close of the nineteenth century, Bancroft’s History of California holds perhaps one of the best-known accounts of the Bear Flag incident; as such, it stands as a pivotal work in the struggle over representations of California history and the incident itself. As others have noted, Bancroft believed he had a mission to fi nd the facts in order to write an objective history of

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California. He also believed that Euro-Americans were destined to possess the state and that the Californios unjustly blamed Euro-Americans for their subjugation.94 According to Bancroft, their fall was due to their own mistakes and character flaws.95 At the same time, the history that Bancroft’s staff produced debunked the myth of Euro-American immigrants as heroes of the Bear Flag incident—thereby causing a rupture between the narrative as told by one historian at the national level, and the narrative that continued to dominate local and national discourses.96 When Bancroft’s history was published in 1886, it disappointed the Californios who had entrusted his staff with their histories. The tone of the work was sometimes condescending, and at times, including his discussion of Vallejo’s imprisonment, he accused the Californios of exaggeration. At the same time, he acknowledged that Vallejo’s treatment at the hands of Frémont’s men was “a gross and inexcusable outrage.” 97 Even more important to the historiography of the Bear Flag incident, Bancroft portrayed the men of the insurrection as “persons who had nothing to risk either of property or reputation.” 98 Euro-Americans in northern California moved quickly to contain the damage done by Bancroft. As U.S. citizens who based their legitimacy on a myth of the Bear Flag incident as a founding moment of republicanism in the West, they had a stake in rescuing the reputations of the filibusters. Members of the Society of California Pioneers therefore denounced Bancroft’s History of California and filed petitions to revoke his honorary status in their society. In February of 1894, proceedings were held during which a proclamation was made that “Bancroft’s denunciation of Fremont . . . and his designation of the men of the Bear Flag party as vagabond settlers, are plainly the vaporings of a mind distorted by prejudice, or envenomed by malice.” 99 At the close of their proceedings, the society voted to expel Bancroft from their membership.100 In the history of Napa and the state of California, Euro-Americans used stories and histories in conjunction with a rhetoric of republicanism to construct an imagined community where they were manifestly destined to rule California and where the Californios and California Indians who preceded them, as well as African American, Chinese, and Mexican immigrants who followed them to the area, were unworthy of self-rule. Yet, through a variety of actions, racially oppressed communities challenged these narratives. The resistance of Californios and Indigenous peoples in Northern California is important because it demonstrates ongoing resistance to dominant and destructive narratives in a particular space, and because

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it was part of a larger national resistance. In the post-invasion era, a discourse of resistance infused Californio testimonios and writings throughout the state. This literature of resistance is also found in test imonios, in the Spanish-language press, and in the personal correspondence of Chicanas/os not only in California but also in Texas and New Mexico.101 Indigenous peoples throughout California created a similar language of resistance to be passed down through generations in their own communities, and strategically introduced to anthropologists— narratives of resistance that directly challenged the racist and forgetful narratives of the dominant Euro-American culture.102 As will be discussed in Chapter Six, discourse was just one resistance tool that subaltern communities utilized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The resistance of racially oppressed peoples throughout the nation, and specifically in Napa, demonstrates that strategies discussed by postcolonial theorists such as Ernest Renan and Homi K. Bhabha can be implemented in real-life situations. It was Bhabha, in “Dissemi Nation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” who argued that the nation-state is never in a state of equilibrium. Like Eric Hobsbawm, he argued that instability and changing historical circumstances dictate continual rearticulations of the nation. He also claimed that such rearticulations create a continual possibility for challenges to the nation and forced forgetfulness.103 Thus, because in their quest to fi nd equilibrium, both local communities and nation-states require reiterations, endless possibilities for challenging the dominant order continue to emerge.

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sou rc e br e a k : ci v i l i z e d m a n

In the nineteenth century, the courts were one of the few places where Chinese immigrants could challenge racist institutions and win. In 1887, in the town of Napa, a laundry owner by the name of Sam Kee challenged a racist laundry ordinance and won. The court’s opinion in the case, as with other similar cases, can tell us much about nineteenthcentury desires to protect property rights and the way those desires sometimes confl icted with a desire to exclude non-whites from the protection of the state. Such cases also demonstrate the tensions between local, state, and federal institutions when they reached different conclusions regarding citizenship, entitlement, and property rights.

in re sam kee Opinion by J. Sawyer The petitioner is imprisoned in pursuance of a judgment of a justice of the peace of Napa county, for a “misdemeanor by maintaining and carrying on a public laundry, where articles are washed and cleansed for hire, at a house situated on Main street, between First and Pearl streets, in the city of Napa, contrary to ordinance 146 of said city of Napa, prohibiting the establishment, carrying on, or maintaining of public laundries or wash-houses in certain limits.” The provisions of the ordinance under which the conviction was had are as follows: “Section 1. It shall be unlawful for any person or persons to establish, maintain, or carry on the business of a public laundry or wash-house, where articles are cleansed for hire, within the following prescribed limits of the city of Napa: Commencing at the south-easterly corner . . .”

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“Section 2. Any public laundry or wash-house, established, maintained, or carried on in violation of this ordinance, is hereby declared to be a nuisance.” “Section 3. Any person violating any provision of this ordinance shall, upon conviction thereof, before any court having jurisdiction to try the offence, be punished by a fi ne not exceeding one hundred dollars, and an alternate judgment may be given requiring such person to be imprisoned until said fi ne is paid, not to exceed one day for each dollar of the fi ne.” The laundry business has been carried on by the petitioner and his predecessors, at the location occupied by him, for 20 years, and by the petitioner himself 8 years. There is nothing tending in the slightest degree to show that this laundry is, in fact, a nuisance, and the uncontradicted allegations of the petition are that it is not. So far as appears, it is only made a nuisance by the arbitrary declaration of the ordinance; and it is beyond the power of common council, by its simple fiat to make that a nuisance which is not so in fact. Yates v. Milwaukee, 10 Wall. 505. To make an occupation, indispensable to the health and comfort of civilized man, and the use of the property necessary to carry it on, a mere arbitrary declaration in a city ordinance, and suppress it as such, is simply to confiscate the property, and deprive its owner of it without due process of law. It also abridges the liberty of the owner to select his own occupation and his own methods in the pursuit of happiness, and thereby prevents him from enjoying his rights, privileges, and immunities, and deprives him of equal protection of the laws secured to every person by the constitution of the United States. On the authority of the case cited . . . the ordinance is held to be void, as being in contravention of the constitution of the United States. The prisoner is entitled to be discharged. Let him be discharged.

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Chapter Six

r ac e d bodi e s i n w h i t e spac e s

Following the U.S. invasion, and then the discovery of gold in California, Euro-Americans swarmed into the West, especially into California. Prior to the invasion, in 1846, Euro-Americans in California numbered only 1,180. By 1860 they numbered 323,177.1 Upon their arrival, many Euro-Americans met a population that was more diverse than they had ever encountered. And this diverse body of peoples, many of whom preceded the arrival of Euro-Americans by generations, also claimed a right to live, labor, and prosper in the West. Some of them, such as the Californios, also claimed U.S. citizenship—yet, as this chapter will argue, that citizenship was not necessarily equal to the citizenship claimed by the newly arrived Euro-Americans.2 The newly-arrived Euro-Americans brought with them a legal system rooted in white supremacy, a document crafted to protect the property of white men, and immigration and citizenship laws that excluded people of color, men and women alike. The U.S. Constitution inscribed slavery into the law of the land in seven different places, at times referring to African Americans as “all other persons,” and other times as “person[s] held to service.” 3 And the nation’s earliest immigration and naturalization act stipulated that only “free white persons” could become naturalized citizens.4 The inscription of race and white supremacy into U.S. law determined not only the status of future immigrants to the United States, but also the status of peoples living in lands the United States acquired through purchase, wars, and other colonial efforts. The U.S. West was one of these sites. While the Euro-Americans arriving in the region were newcomers, they had an advantage over the rest of the population; the legal system they brought with them privileged them, on the basis of their race, over both the peoples that preceded them to the area and later non-white immigrants. More important for this study, throughout the nineteenth century a number of diverse communities throughout the West survived, and, at times, flourished. In California, Indigenous peoples, Chicanas/os, and Blacks built and

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table 6.1. california population 1850 to 1870 Year

White

Black

Indigenous

Asian

1850 1860 1870

91,635 323,177 499,424

962 4,086 4,272

No record 28,000 23,000

No record 34,933 49,310

Source: S. F. Cook, The Conflict between the California Indians and White Civilization, vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 96; U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 19. California—Race and Hispanic Origin: 1850 to 1990.” While neither Cook nor the Census Bureau provides American Indigenous population statistics for 1850, Cook places their numbers at 85,000 for 1846. Thus, there was a dramatic decrease in American Indigenous population before and after the U.S. invasion.

rebuilt communities. The continuing presence of these racialized communities, under a new socio-political system, would give rise to new confl icts over power and resources in the West and in Napa, California. As Californios, Mexican immigrants, Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants struggled for power and resources under a legal system designed to disadvantage them, they engaged in bold acts of resistance that many of today’s scholars would quickly recognize as oppositional politics. When one door/strategy was closed to them, they opened/constructed another.5 The strategies they utilized differed based on how the dominant society interpreted their bodies and according to the specific historical circumstances of their times, thus drawing attention to the very real historical and material differences among communities of color. The similarities in their oppositional strategies, however, also draw attention to the ways that our histories and struggles, even in the nineteenth century, overlap. After the U.S. invasion, the U.S. West became an uneven battleground where racialized people battled racist institutions with diverse and oppositional strategies. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised Californios U.S. Citizenship, and several court cases, including People v. de la Guerra, affirmed their white status, thus providing some Californios with an edge over other racialized groups in the West.6 Californios, and later Mexican immigrants, claimed a tenuous entitlement to American whiteness and American freedoms. African Americans gained access to de jure citizenship with the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, yet, as will be discussed

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below, de facto rights and freedoms seldom followed.7 And arriving in the late nineteenth century and providing much needed labor in the West, Chinese immigrants were denied citizenship on the basis of their race; lacking a political voice, they became a target of white violence throughout the region.8 Yet racialized communities founded newspapers, political organizations, and mutual aid societies throughout the West. African Americans founded schools and churches; all three communities challenged inequalities through the court system. And all three communities were able to take advantage of the social upheaval that followed the Civil War; at times, their challenges were successful.9 It was the dominant narratives of the nineteenth century that enabled Euro-Americans in the West, and in Napa in particular, to practice violence and discrimination against racialized peoples on a daily basis in their everyday lives. The narratives established in the local press and public schools provided whites with a sense of entitlement that normalized what Evelyn Nakano Glenn so aptly termed “unequal freedom.” 10 When racialized communities fought discrimination then, they were forced to do battle on several fronts, in communities, courtrooms, and other discursive fields. In this chapter I will map the histories, struggles, and oppositional strategies of three specific communities: Chicanas/os, Chinese immigrants, and African Americans. Throughout the nineteenth century, racialized working-class communities were able to survive, in part, through utilizing resources provided by the middle class and/or landowning classes of their communities. At times, however, the prominence of these very small yet visible business and landed classes muted the many and multiple struggles of the laboring majority. And so this chapter attempts to tease out some of these muted, multiple struggles. I close by examining one specific community, the Chinese immigrant community, in detail, in part because so little has been written about Chinese immigrants in Napa, but also because the Chinese, when excluded from citizenship, found, created, and utilized new spaces of resistance.

californios and mexican immigrants in white spaces In California, Senator Gwin’s 1851 Land Act was just one among many white strategies to displace Californios and free up land for “Yankee Settlers.” 11 Other laws soon followed, many of them direct attacks on

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the livelihood and culture of Chicanas/os. Among the most overtly racist of these laws was the “Greaser Act,” an act which boldly utilized the racialized discourse of nineteenth-century popular narratives and inscribed it into law. Passed by the California State Congress in 1855, its language inscribed the label “Greaser” into law, with section two of the act referring to, “all persons who are commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish or Indian Blood.” 12 The law allowed local authorities to target racial and ethnic minorities and press those they deemed vagrants into forced labor.13 Most of these new racialized laws were part of a larger history of U.S. white Protestant anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic agitation. Within larger discourses of racial and cultural purity, temperance crusades and Sabbath laws were weapons in a white war against what one twentiethcentury historian termed “cultural pollution.” 14 In the West, most of these laws were directly tied to the anti-Catholic hispanophobia of the newly arrived white Protestant population of the state.15 Thus 1855 also saw California’s first wide-scale passage and enforcement of Blue Laws. The state enacted a law against bull, bear, and cock fights, as well as circuses or “noisy amusements.” The penalty for holding such events was a fine that could range from ten to five hundred dollars. It allowed white law enforcement officers, as well as the courts, a wide berth in enforcement. Not surprisingly, the law was enforced unequally throughout the nineteenth century.16 Yet throughout California, Mexican citizens continued to immigrate to California—many of them to mine, as they had in generations prior to the war.17 The presence of new immigrants in spaces now claimed by Euro-Americans set off new and dynamic social struggles over rights, identity, and resources. As the dominant culture lumped Californios together with the newcomers, often under the racial category of “greaser,” older Californio families struggled to distinguish themselves from the newcomers.18 In a republic where only whites had full access to citizenship and citizenship rights, Californios pursued a white identity—and a small number, a very small number, were able to achieve it. The price for doing so was high; such families became “gringoized.” In those moments when they were able to claim a white heritage, it could only be under the guise of a newly constructed “Spanish Fantasy Past,” as romantic characters in the white imagination and relatedly, in local booster events.19 The majority of Californios did not have the option of assimilating. Instead, they, like recent Mexican immigrants, were segregated into newly

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emerging barrios. Californios and Californianas alike lost their land under the Gwin Act. Californianas were under an added disadvantage because, as landholders, they lost legal status in the new order. In Spanish and Mexican California, landed women had handled family legal matters while their husbands were away on campaigns and other business. In Spanish and Mexican California they were also recognized as landholders in their own right. Under the new regime, however, only single women could enter into contracts at all. This dramatic loss in legal status affected not only women’s landownership, but their overall economic status. Whereas in the 1850s the average value of a Californiana’s wealth and personal goods was estimated at $716, by the 1870s, it was $145.20 Californios and Mexican immigrants were also restricted to lowerpaying, low-skilled jobs in the secondary labor sector. And the secondary sector soon became a closed space. Young Euro-Americans were often able to begin their careers in the secondary sector and later move into the primary labor sector—that portion of the labor market requiring additional training and carrying with it possibilities for promotion and advancement. People of color, including those now called Chicanas/os, by the close of the nineteenth century were cut off from such opportunities. If they began their careers in the secondary sector, they would also end their careers there.21 The unique circumstances of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, granting Mexican citizens white status and access to American citizenship, provided a tool for some Chicanas/os, men and women alike, to fight for rights and resources through the judicial arena. Yet from the mid- to late nineteenth century, Euro-Americans skirted the law and successfully segregated racialized minorities throughout California and the West. By the early twentieth century, the dominant society had successfully restricted Chicanas/os from basic resources such as education, employment, and housing.22 Speaking back by telling their narratives to Bancroft’s staff was just one of many strategies that Californios used to fight white domination. Along with other Chicanas/os, they also fought back through the courts and through mutual aid societies. At times, their efforts through the courts were successful. In 1851, for example, the same year that Senator Gwin passed his Land Act, Californians passed a Foreign Miners’ Tax stipulating that foreign miners must pay a monthly fee in order to work in California’s mines.23 The prosecution argued that Mexican Americans were subject to the tax because they were not yet citizens. Fortunately, the courts disagreed.24 While the courts’ decision provided some Californios with the opportunity to work the mines, it did little

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for those whom Euro-Americans and white immigrants refused to recognize as citizens, or for the Chinese miners who soon bore the brunt of white supremacist legislation and violence in the West.25 In Napa Chicana/o communities were diverse, comprised of landowning families who settled in Napa prior to the invasion, laborers from the same time, and new arrivals who immigrated in search of labor following 1848. Of the landowning Californios, the Juárez family was the most prominent and powerful. They weathered the invasion by assimilating into the dominant culture. While their roots were mestizo, by the time of the invasion they identified as Spanish.26 By the time of the invasion, as well, they were land rich, and won favor with the EuroAmerican invaders, in part by donating large tracts of land to Napa town. In 1858, for example, Cayetano Juárez donated forty-five acres of land for the town’s use as a cemetery.27 As with the landed class throughout the West, assimilation came with a price. In giving away large tracts of land Juárez acknowledged that Napa was no longer part of a ranch economy. In the new capitalist economy his children would become middle-class professionals. He and María Juárez paid to send their children to public schools in Napa where tuition ranged from $1.50 to $2.00 per month. Report cards for their sons Dolores, Augustinio, and George hint at another price the family paid for their education. Names were misspelled: “Dolores” was called “Delores,” and Cayetano was addressed as “Cataln Juares.” 28 Other accounts of the public schools tell of Euro-American students treating Californio children as exotic.29 Yet the boys were good students and received good marks in all their classes, their lowest mark was “passing,” their highest, “perfect.” 30 As they grew older, they were sent to boarding school in Benicia. And their parents’ investment paid off. Most of the men entered professions, and all but one of the children married into the white middle class.31 Dolores Juárez, the eldest son, led several brass bands in Napa.32 Most Californios, however, did not have the opportunities enjoyed by the Juárez family. Prior to the invasion, they labored on the land of Salvador Vallejo at the southern end of Napa, as well as on the ranchos of don Cartareña and Cayetano Juárez.33 After the invasion, many of these men continued to work on Californio-owned ranchos, but when landed Californios lost their property, they were pushed to a segregated area of Napa called “Spanish-town.” 34 Thus, as with most nineteenth-century racialized communities, the fate of poor and working-class people was tied to that of their wealthier members. When the landed Californios

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lost their land, the laborers who had worked their land were pushed into the secondary labor sector and into the barrio.35 With the Mexican and Chinese immigrants who followed them to the area, these early Californios formed the labor pool with which local capitalists successfully exploited the quicksilver mines of Napa.36 As in barrios throughout California, this segregated area was a site of contradictions, where people came together to celebrate in community centers such as García Hall and shared a common language and culture, but, at the same time, were cut off from many city and county resources.37 The barrio thus served as a “third space,” a site of resistance formed in the interstices of structural inequalities. As with most third spaces, it was not a site to romanticize.38 Newspapers from the time portrayed the neighborhood as a high crime area and, at times, referred to the residents of Spanish-town as “degraded men and women” and “lousy, diseased greasers.” 39 The young Euro-American men of the town played a significant role in creating the image. Parents decried the “corrupting influence” of the neighborhood on their boys. Yet their boys continued to travel to the east side of town, at times to attend dances and socialize with friends, but at other times to engage in violence and perhaps provoke violence in their neighbors’ homes.40

african americans in napa and the west “No black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be permitted to give evidence in favor of, or against, any white person . . .”

Between 1850 and 1852, the Black population of California doubled. The newcomers, like their Black predecessors, were diverse, arriving from Latin America and Jamaica, as well as from the northern and southern states. Initially, the overwhelming majority of migrants and immigrants were male; like other immigrants, they came to California for land and gold. By 1860, however, the gender ratio began to level out and women comprised 30 percent of the population. Many of the newcomers brought with them organizing and political skills which would prove critical in Black rights struggles throughout the new state.41 When, in 1850, California was admitted as a free state, the freedom of African Americans remained precarious. At the constitutional convention, Southern representatives, such as Senator Gwin, fought hard to have California admitted as a slave state. Once they failed, they worked to preserve the status of African Americans as property. In 1852, when the state legislature passed its Fugitive Slave Law, pro-slavery advocates

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argued for a clause defi ning escaped slaves, including slaves who escaped when California was still part of Mexico, as fugitives. And they won. With the passage of the 1852 law, some Southerners found judges willing to bend the law in their favor and brought slaves to California to work in the mines. African Americans who moved to the state risked entrapment by unscrupulous Southerners who might claim them as escaped slaves.42 Despite the 1852 law, African Americans were able to create opportunities for themselves in California. Black miners labored alongside Latin American, Chicano, Chinese, and European and Euro-American miners. True, they avoided mines where Southerners labored, yet most institutions, including businesses and restaurants, were integrated. By 1860, this changed as Euro-Americans established segregated institutions, a race-stratified labor force, and unequal access to resources. African Americans, in turn, began networking with other racialized minorities to create safe social spaces, and with African Americans throughout the West to engage in local, state, and federal legal battles.43 Within this increasingly rigid society, African Americans formed a class-stratified society. Most middle-class jobs were in the service sector. Ship stewards, cooks, mechanics, and barbers were in high demand throughout the West, and consequently drew the highest pay. The wealthiest households, in San Francisco, employed Chinese immigrant servants. One African American man, in Sacramento County, found work as a medical doctor, and a handful of formally educated clergymen were able to found congregations. The skills necessary to acquire and maintain these positions also added to their status. Most African Americans, however, found themselves in the secondary labor market. Closed out of most skilled trades, they worked as servants and laborers.44 The diverse background in class, education, and skills that African Americans brought with them enabled them to challenge the racial barriers Euro-Americans imposed on them. In 1851, in Sacramento, the Reverend Bernard Fletcher founded the first African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in the West. Other churches soon followed in San Francisco and in Napa. All of the churches had Sunday schools, and many of them grammar schools and libraries.45 With the rise of Black institutions in California’s cities, most Black families gravitated toward urban areas; single men remained in rural districts and mining areas— as did mixed-race families.46 Just three years after the founding of the first AME church, a small handful of Black businessmen organized the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California. While the convention

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excluded women from participation, its accomplishments proved formidable. The convention itself was the result of violence and discrimination against Blacks in the West. Increased violence and discrimination convinced Black leaders that a statewide convention could not be delayed. In 1851, in San Francisco, a Black businessman by the name of Lester was assisting a white customer at his shoe emporium. The white customer had a disagreement with Lester over an unnamed matter and brutally beat him with a cane, then exited the store, stealing a pair of boots. The thief, perhaps, knew that he could act with impunity, because there were no other white customers in the store. Blacks, because of California’s Criminal Proceedings Act, could not testify against whites in a court of law.47 The same year Lester was attacked at his business, another Black professional was attacked, also in San Francisco. This time, the victim, a barber, did not survive; his attacker got away with murder.48 Two public attacks against their colleagues in one year sent a clear message to Black San Francisco businessmen that their class status could not protect them from white violence. And so they began to coordinate efforts to work for the repeal of Section 14 of the Criminal Proceedings Act.49 While the ramifications of the Criminal Proceedings Act became increasingly apparent, another statute also pushed Black leaders to action. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1852 was about to expire. With southern factions throughout the state still working to bring the institution into California, African Americans feared backlash and the passage of more draconian laws if they did not act. And so in 1855 they organized the First State Colored Peoples Convention. Meeting in San Francisco, representatives from throughout the state reported on the status and accomplishments of their respective communities; they also prioritized challenges to discriminatory laws and institutions. At the close of the convention they published 5,000 copies of their proceedings; they also began collecting petitions to appeal Section 14 of the Criminal Proceedings Act. The efforts of California’s Black leadership would finally succeed in 1863 when the state legislature repealed the ban on Black testimony. Unfortunately, a ban on Chinese and Indigenous testimony remained.50 Beginning in the 1860s, Black newspapers provided yet another site of resistance. In 1862, Phillip A. Bell, an experienced newspaper political activist, along with Peter Anderson, another experienced newspaperman, founded the Pacifi c Appeal. The Pacifi c Appeal soon became an organizing tool for Black Americans.51 Reporters traveled throughout the region, visited Black communities, and reported their status and struggles, often on the front pages of their paper. When Bell and Anderson later

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split over political differences, Anderson went on to found the Mirror of the Times. There were then two resources for addressing Black needs, news, and struggles in the West.52 Napa’s African American community was both reflective of and constitutive of the larger Black population of California and the West. Like Black communities throughout California, Blacks in Napa were class stratified, with a small middle class serving as a bridge between white and Black communities. At the same time, this small middle class networked with other Black spokesmen throughout the state. Like the EuroAmericans of Napa County, African Americans lived elsewhere in the United States before moving west. Unlike the Euro-Americans of the area, the majority of whom came from Missouri, Kentucky, or Tennessee, African Americans moving to Napa came from throughout the United States.53 Many came from the South. Perhaps, like other Black newcomers to California, they were brought west as slaves and purchased their freedom, or fled their enslavers and built a new life for themselves far from the Mason-Dixon line.54 Others came from northern cities such as New York and Massachusetts.55 The majority of these newcomers were laborers. Men and women alike worked as cooks and servants, though most Black men, like Chinese immigrants and Chicanos, worked as day laborers. A significant minority of men worked in skilled professions; among twenty-four adult black males listed in the 1860 census, one was a blacksmith, one was a chain maker, one was a farmer, and two were barbers.56 According to an informant living in Napa at the time, even more men may have worked on their own farms, with the census undercounting the number of Black farmers in the Napa area.57 It is the two barbers, the men of the Hatton family, who served as a bridge between the small Black community in Napa and communities beyond the valley. In 1855, Edward Hatton, the head of the Hatton family, traveled to Sacramento to participate in the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California, thus serving as a bridge between the Black community in Napa and Black communities throughout the state. In Sacramento he not only reported on the status of African Americans in Napa, but also obtained news and political strategies to bring back home.58 Thus the Black leadership of Napa played a role in the efforts that eventually won African Americans the right to speak in California’s courts, as well access to public education for their children.59 By 1860, the elder Hatton had not only established himself as a small businessman in Napa, he had invested in property and owned $1,000

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in real estate.60 His business was located in the downtown area, at the corner of Brown and Clay, where Black and white patrons alike could fi nd him. The central location of his business made it possible for him to act as a bridge between Black residents in Napa and communities outside of the county lines. Edward Hatton, and later his son, Joseph, acted as distributors for a San Francisco–based Black newspaper, the Pacifi c Appeal, and at times sent letters to the editor informing the readership of the status of African Americans in Napa. Through his invitation, editors of the paper eventually came to visit Napa and stayed with the Hattons while they visited the town. The ties that the Hattons established and maintained with the Pacifi c Appeal would later allow the Black community to enter onto Napa’s ideological field and actively challenge the white press. In May of 1862, a number of reporters and staff members from the Appeal visited Napa, where they were hosted by the Hattons. The Appeal’s initial Napa report was surprisingly positive, noting that while Black children were excluded from the public schools system, there was a small number of successful farmers among the Black population in Napa, and African Americans living within Napa town seemed to be treated “civilly.” 61 Despite these positive comments, three months later the editors of the Appeal noted a different side to the white citizens of Napa. In an article titled “Negrophobia,” they addressed the racist articles that Napa’s secessionist Pacifi c Echo published on a regular basis. Ironically, one of the offensive articles was a racist reaction against emancipation celebrations held in San Francisco that year—celebrations attended by the Hatton family.62

chinese immigrants and the law “Use of These Terms Must, by Every Sound Construction, Exclude Everyone Who Is Not of White Blood . . .”

The history of Chinese immigrants in the West demonstrates the mutability and resilience of race and racist discourse in the United States. Although they harbored prejudices toward Californios and African Americans, most whites had no long-standing stock of racial animosity against the Chinese. And so they mobilized racial arguments used against Blacks and Californios against this new immigrant group. Such racial arguments were rooted in the now established ideology of white supremacy, which held that white people and white culture had to be protected from non-whites. While one of the primary organs for protecting

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white supremacy was the English-language press, the U.S. legal system was also critical in accomplishing the task. Throughout the late nineteenth century, Euro-Americans projected old fears onto the Chinese immigrant community; at the same time, they developed new racialized discourses, both in popular culture and in the law, that were markedly consistent with older laws, language, and fears. The push and pull factors bringing Chinese immigrants to the U.S. West were powerful, and as with so many other immigrant groups, were tied to colonial exploitation. Back home, China was devastated from the British Opium War of 1839–1842; taxes drove small farmers and businessmen into poverty, Britain flooded the country with opium, and the forced entry of Britain into the ports of China, especially in Guangdong, disrupted trade and local economies. Then internal uprisings broke out, and a series of floods followed, destroying crops and driving even more farmers into poverty. For many displaced workers and entrepreneurs, news of gold in California could not have come at a better time.63 Men left their families and made the long and hazardous journey to the U.S. West. Due to social restrictions in China, and discrimination in the United States, only a handful of women came to California—most not of their own volition.64 By 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, more than 300,000 Chinese had immigrated to the United States, most to California.65 While discriminatory restrictions against women were, in part, directly tied to the desire of white employers to maintain a highly mobile and dispensable workforce, they were also directly tied to racial panic. By the time the Page Act was passed in 1875, Euro-American Californians had noticed the diversity that surrounded them. As argued by Ronald Takaki, “they felt the need to protect their white society and saw the entry of Chinese women as a threat to racial homogeneity and their view of America as a ‘white man’s country.’” 66 The Page Act, which claimed to bar only prostitutes from immigration, but which effectively discouraged all women, successfully precluded the natural growth of the Chinese community in California. Between 1875 and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act seven years later, the immigration of Chinese women to California decreased by 68 percent. The community would not be able to sustain itself through natural increase.67 Most early immigrants worked as independent miners, merchants, and artisans. Merchants arriving with these early immigrants quickly established businesses that could serve as nexi between fellow immigrants and their homeland and played critical roles in establishing community

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organizations. Throughout the 1860s thousands of Chinese laborers worked on the railroads. More often than not, they filled low-pay/highrisk positions, pushing white workers upward into semi-skilled and skilled positions as teamsters, craftsmen, and foremen.68 By 1870, with the decline of the mines and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, an increasing number of Chinese immigrants were pushed into low-paying jobs throughout the secondary sector. In urban areas, such as San Francisco, fully 75 percent of the laboring populace worked in the secondary sector. Excluded from most professions, they found work as servants, in manufacturing, and increasingly, in laundries. The middle class maintained mercantile shops and worked as manufacturers, tenant farmers, and sweatshop owners.69 The initial reception of Chinese immigrants was mixed. On the one hand, in 1850, Chinese immigrants were invited to march in the San Francisco parade honoring the death of Zachary Taylor. There were no anti-Chinese demonstrations; newspapers covered their participation much like they did that of other groups that had been invited to participate.70 On the other hand, whites were quick to project old white–nonwhite binaries onto the new immigrants. In 1852, for example, Hinton Helper, an anti-slavery polemicist, drew on older traditions of racialized discourse to predict the future of the Chinese in America. Speaking to a largely sympathetic audience, he asserted, “No inferior race of men can exist in these United States without becoming subordinate to the will of the Anglo-Americans . . . It is so with the Negroes in the South; it is so with the Irish in the North; it is so with the Indians in New England; and it will be so with the Chinese in California.” 71 Ironically, it was just as he wrote and spoke these words that the Irish, by way of their access to citizenship, movement West, and embracing of white supremacist ideologies, were gaining white status and white privilege in the U.S. West.72 Like Chicanas/os, Chinese immigrants faced discrimination and violence that was rooted both in fear of economic competition and in cultural ignorance. While most whites had few preconceptions about the Chinese, some, including established professionals, did. Long before the Chinese immigrated to California, Euro-American merchants, missionaries, and diplomats had traveled to China. Missionaries returned frustrated that the Chinese refused to convert to Christianity and told stories of their efforts that painted the Chinese as “heathen” and backward. Merchants, angry at China’s long-closed ports, told similar tales. As a result, the Chinese who arrived in California sometimes encountered people with preconceived notions of their culture, and the preconceptions were

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not positive.73 And so when the Chinese succeeded in mining and formed successful labor communities, white labor reacted with violence. Much of the early violence took place in mining regions such as Folsom, California, where in 1858 white miners formed an anti-Chinese organization and drove approximately 30 Chinese miners from their claims. That same year a mob of about 150 white men drove another 200 Chinese miners from their claims near Alder Creek in Sacramento County. A local newspaper reported that most of the white men were themselves recent immigrants.74 In California, and throughout the West, violence and discrimination took shape in three distinct yet overlapping forms: labor discrimination, physical violence, and legal discrimination. In short, the Chinese were attacked on all fronts. Anti-Chinese agitation was key to the formation of organized labor in the West. In fact, the traditions of the shop card and the union label both fi nd their origins in California’s anti-Chinese labor history. In 1859, whites in San Francisco called for boycotts of Chinese-made products. Manufacturers with exclusively white workforces placed “made by white men” labels on everything from cigars to boots.75 Small and atomized boycotts were the norm until 1882, when trade organizations came together to found the League of Deliverance. Thereafter trades and businesses had a central office through which to organize their efforts. By the time the Workingmen’s Party established itself in the West, antiChinese agitation was its primary focus and remained so throughout the duration of its existence.76 Beginning in the 1870s and continuing through the 1890s, white vigilantes burned down Chinatowns and labor camps, beat and at times murdered Chinese workers, and destroyed the property of whites who dared to employ Chinese laborers or aid them in any visible way. Even white pioneers such as John Bidwell were not immune from their wrath. Bidwell had leased a building to a handful of Chinese entrepreneurs to use as a butcher shop. When white vigilantes discovered this they burned his barn, then proceeded to burn the property of a neighboring widow who had leased her orchard to Chinese.77 Whites who attempted to defend Chinese from street violence sometimes faced a similar fate. In San Francisco, when a Mr. Johnson attempted to protect a Chinese man from “half a dozen hoodlums,” he was physically assaulted.78 Community-wide acts of violence were matched by individual acts of violence in rural and urban areas throughout the West. Newspapers ran reports of white men “setting dogs” on Chinese immigrants, robbing them, and pelting them with rocks and bricks as they walked down

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streets.79 By the mid-1860s, the Sacramento Union could claim, “The practice of robbing Chinese has become so frequent of late, that scarcely a week passes by, without some of the Chinamen being attacked, beaten and plundered.” 80 While their numbers were few, Chinese women were not immune from white violence, and newspaper accounts report a white man slitting a woman’s throat, and another running a “chop stick” through the cheek of a Chinese immigrant woman. Even when traveling with their families, women were not safe from the violence.81 When young boys participated in acts of racist violence, they often directed their violent actions against young boys and against women. They threw rocks at young boys and beat them in the streets, at times with the support of their fathers. They also chased down women and stole their jewelry. By the late 1860s they were making excursions into laundry districts to vandalize Chinese businesses.82 Politicians responded to the demands of white voters with antiChinese legislation. Among the first pieces of anti-Chinese legislation was the Foreign Miners’ tax. It was aimed at curbing competition from Chinese and Mexican miners, and its advocates argued that the tax would placate white miners and thus quell anti-Chinese violence in the mines. It did not. Instead, it produced yet another venue for anti-Chinese violence. Men claiming to be deputies collecting taxes for the state and county approached Chinese miners and forced them to “pay the tax.” At times officials themselves interpreted the law as a license to infl ict violence upon Chinese miners.83 By 1862 the California legislature had a list of eighty-eight Chinese immigrants murdered by white men. Eleven of them were murdered by “Collectors of the Foreign Miners’ License Tax, sworn officers of the law.” 84 The same year that the California legislature passed the Foreign Miners’ Tax it also passed a commutation tax, requiring ship owners to post a $500 bond per foreign passenger or pay a five- to ten-dollar fee.85 Soon after, California courts, in People v. Hall, ruled that the Chinese could not testify against white men in court. Once again building upon a larger, national white/non-white binary, the court argued that the terms “black, Indian and mulatto” were intended to “exclude everyone who is not of white blood.” 86 In 1870 San Francisco passed an ordinance banning Chinese from public works, and seven years later its Board of Supervisors appropriated over a thousand dollars to the Citizens AntiChinese Committee.87 By 1882, when the federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, it built upon a long history of state and local anti-Chinese agitation and legislation.

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Barred from citizenship, the Chinese battled discrimination on a number of fronts, but ultimately, most of these fronts led to the courts.88 Upon their arrival most Chinese immigrants formed organizations according to their districts of origin; when discrimination against Chinese immigrants intensified, the businessmen who headed the district organizations mobilized and appealed to leaders in the dominant community. In San Francisco, they approached sympathetic Euro-American Protestant missionaries, and in one case were able to convince a Presbyterian minister to fi nd them a lobbyist to represent them in Sacramento.89 Equally important, they themselves eventually approached legislative bodies, armed with evidence of discrimination, to argue against further discriminatory legislation. As early as 1853, the heads of the district associations requested an interview with California’s Committee on Mines and Mining Interests. The committee was considering legislation that would dramatically increase the mining tax, or even ban immigrants from the mines, and violence against Chinese immigrants was on the rise. When the committee agreed to meet with them, the district leaders came armed with concrete data and strategic arguments. They began by dispelling the myth of “coolie labor,” and presented a carefully crafted report documenting the violence and discrimination Chinese immigrants faced throughout the mining regions of the state. They appealed to the republican traditions of the country, explaining that the Foreign Miners’ Tax, in conjunction with the ban on Chinese testimony, constituted nothing less than taxation without representation. Finally, they suggested that violence and discrimination against the Chinese in America could injure trade relations between the United States and China. The Committee returned to the California legislature and recommended against dramatic increases in the tax, arguing, in part, that such actions might injure trade with China.90 The role of the Six Companies remained crucial to Chinese survival throughout the nineteenth century. For in addition to regulating internal disputes within Chinese immigrant communities, the heads of the Companies served as spokespersons for immigrants, meeting with government officials, writing letters to the president, and securing legal aid for those willing to challenge discrimination through the courts. In the 1880s, when violence against Chinese immigrants escalated throughout the West, and white workers attempted to drive immigrants from the nation, it was the heads of the Six Companies who contacted the Chinese legation in Washington, and who demanded federal protection

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for their people. The federal government failed to provide such protection, but did send troops to protect Chinese representatives who came to investigate reports of violence.91

chinese immigrants in small-town america In Napa, the Chinese immigrant community, like that of its Chicana/o neighbors, was class stratified. Initially, only a small number of Chinese immigrants came to Napa. As of 1860, only 17 people had made the move from San Francisco, the initial destination of immigrants from the province of Guangdong. Labor shortages in agriculture and in the quicksilver mines soon pulled more immigrants to the area, so that by 1880 at least 905 Chinese immigrants resided in the southern end of Napa County; smaller communities were located throughout the county.92 Most Chinese immigrants worked as exploited laborers in agriculture, the tanning industry, the local cigar factory, and the mines.93 Like Napa’s other laborers, many Chinese kept small gardens that made it possible for them to survive on subsistence wages.94 Above the day laborers in socio-economic status were laundry owners, who worked long hours for low wages, yet controlled their own labor and that of the men who worked under them. Finally, there were businessmen such as Kwong Sam Long and Chan Wah Jack.95 Chan Wah Jack first arrived in the 1850s, and his descendents continued to live in Napa through the late twentieth century.96 The Chans were successful merchants, who, because of their socio-economic status, were able to win the respect of many of Napa’s Euro-American citizens. They, in turn, used their influence to help new Chinese immigrants survive in Napa.97 The social role that the Chan family played in the Chinese community of Napa was complex. From oral histories and English-language newspaper articles, it appears to have been very paternalistic, with the Chan family aiding less fortunate members of its community.98 At the same time, historically, such relationships have often been exploitative, playing a critical role in facilitating the continued oppressions of minority groups.99 Whether the relationship between the Chans and the laboring Chinese immigrants of Napa was exploitative or not, we may never know. What is apparent is that the well-being of the Chans, like that of other racialized minorities of their times, remained tied to the other members of their racialized community. Shortly after his arrival, Chan Wah Jack established a dry goods store, the Lai Hing Co., where Euro-American and Chinese residents alike came to shop.100 While the

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dry goods store was financially successful, the Chan family lived in Chinatown, and continued to live there until the last remnants of the neighborhood were demolished in the early twentieth century. After large numbers of immigrants arrived in Napa, Chan imported an altar of Peiti (God of the North) to Napa and established a temple where Chinese from the surrounding area could come and worship.101 New immigrants to the area often boarded at the Chan residence, and the dry goods store doubled as a bank where workers could deposit their earnings.102 The socio-economic status of the Chan family was bolstered by their being a family. When Chan Wah Jack and his spouse had a new baby, the local newspaper ran a notice announcing the child’s birth and noted that local ladies were visiting Mrs. Chan to see the newborn “almond eyed Celestial.” 103 In contrast, most Chinese laborers were unable to bring families with them to Napa because they could not afford to, and because employers throughout California often required single men— whom they viewed as temporary and migratory.104 Like Chicanas/os in Napa, most Chinese immigrants worked as laborers and lived in segregated areas of the county. Napa County had three Chinatowns, one in Napa town, one in St. Helena, and one in Calistoga. The Calistoga settlement was the most populous, with over 1,000 immigrants and their families living there at one time.105 The smaller community in Napa town, however, remained the most influential, because it housed the temple of Pei-ti.106 In addition to the Chinatowns, a number of labor camps were located near the mines and fields.107 According to local historian Charlotte Miller, harassment and threats of violence discouraged most laborers from leaving their labor camps and Chinatowns.108 Like Chicanas/os, then, Chinese immigrants were members of class-stratified communities, where middle-class members of their groups were able to move in and out of the margins of white society while laborers spend most of their time laboring, and retreated to segregated neighborhoods for rest and recreation. Unfortunately, the similarities between Chicanas/os and Chinese immigrants do not end with class stratification—for as with Chicanas/os, the violence that they experienced at a state and regional level was also reflected, and in part constructed, at a local level. Newspaper accounts from the 1870s, especially, demonstrate a tension between EuroAmericans who preyed on Chinese immigrants, robbing them, beating them, and attempting to drive them from the area, and yet other EuroAmericans who sought to protect the newcomers and who advocated for their continued residence in Napa and the larger nation-state. Some civic

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leaders argued that the “religion of China” taught humility, labor, and temperance. They also argued that the very white immigrants arguing for the expulsion of the Chinese were themselves violent and intemperate.109 Yet chronic reports of violence throughout Napa County demonstrate that their advice often went unheeded. While some Napa residents seemed content to list their complaints in the local news, advocating “proper legislation—not unlawful and disgraceful acts unbecoming civilized and law-abiding men,” others disagreed.110 Editorials and letters to the editor were sometimes grossly racist, describing Chinese immigrants as “illiterate pagan hordes,” and “pig-eyed yellow-skinned rascals.” 111 At the same time, reports of violence, throughout the region, became more common. And in Napa, as throughout the West, both adults and young boys played significant roles constructing Napa as a violent, anti-Chinese immigrant space. Napa’s young white men threw rocks at Chinese immigrants as they walked down the street, cut off their queues, set traps for them, or simply walked directly in their paths and knocked laundry out of their arms. Yet it was not always young Euro-Americans who attacked the men, for a report from 1874 records a Black youth throwing stones at a Chinese

photograph 6.1. Chinese family in front of temple in Napa. Photograph by Elmer Bickford. Courtesy of Napa County Historical Society.

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photograph 6.2. St. Helena Chinatown (Upper Napa Valley). Courtesy of Napa County Historical Society.

immigrant walking down Main Street.112 Throughout the 1870s, Napa’s Euro-American adults sometimes robbed the Chinese immigrants, set their dogs on them, and beat them. On at least one occasion, a group of men robbed a Chinese man, cutting off his ear. That same week a local Chinese laundry mysteriously burned to the ground.113

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Violence and threats of violence escalated in the following decades. In the late 1870s, white businessmen began receiving threats against hiring Chinese labor. In 1877, when T. L. Grigsby, one of the first Euro-Americans to immigrate to Napa, ignored a notice posted to his barn, it was burned down. One year later a branch of the Workingmen’s Party was founded in Napa; for their annual picnic, women from St. Helena and Napa worked together to decorate vehicles with signs that read “The Chinese Must Go.” 114 After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and after Chinese labor successfully struck for higher wages throughout the county, white labor became more aggressive in its tactics. Newspapers encouraged Euro-Americans to open “whites only” businesses. In 1885 an Anti-Chinese League formed in St. Helena. And in 1894, a White Labor Union formed in Calistoga. Bands of white laborers roamed from field to ranch driving Chinese laborers from their places of employment, and, as throughout California, Chinatowns and labor camps began to catch fire. More often than not, the cause of the fire was never determined.115

state and local resistance: the chinese and the courts Barred from citizenship, and consequently from voting, Chinese immigrants had few venues of resistance available to them other than the legal system. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the Chinese used the courts “to vitiate virtually every anti-Chinese measure enacted by the State of California and its municipalities.” 116 As the local, state, and later the federal governments passed discriminatory legislation, thousands of Chinese immigrants refused to abide by laws they deemed unconstitutional. At times, their strategies were successful, and the entire community benefited. At other times, they lost, demonstrating the dogged resilience of structural racism in nineteenth-century America. The structural racism against which Chinese immigrants battled was not a new phenomenon, but instead, was rooted in some of the earliest founding documents of our country. The law banning them from citizenship was passed long before they arrived on Western shores, with the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1790 stipulating that only “free white persons” could become naturalized citizens of the United States. This legislation would not be fully dismantled until 1952, with the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act.117 Initially, because the courts had not yet categorized them as non-white, some Chinese immigrants

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were able to become naturalized citizens.118 And so for their first two decades in the United States, Chinese immigrants coupled their multiple strategies with attempts to gain citizenship rights. From the middle of the century until its close, discriminatory legislation passed by local, state, and national legislatures would turn U.S. courts into a turbulent battleground. Through the courts, Chinese immigrants challenged barriers to citizenship, discriminatory taxes, and facially neutral laws that were designed to close down Chinese-owned laundries. As early as 1854, with People v. Hall, the Chinese faced a dramatic setback in the courts. A Euro-American male by the name of George W. Hall had murdered Ling Sing, a recent immigrant from the province of Guangdong. He was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Hall appealed his case, and the California State Supreme Court, under Justice Hugh C. Murray, overturned the verdict, ruling that Chinese testimony should not have been heard by the court. Extending the California ban against Black and Indigenous testimony against whites, Murray argued that the word black should have been interpreted to include everyone but “Caucasians.” 119 Reflecting and constructing the scientific racism of the time, he argued that the Chinese were “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior . . . who have nothing in common with us in language, country or laws.” 120 The Hall ruling sent a message to the larger white public that the Chinese, like African Americans and Indigenous peoples, could be cheated, beaten, and even murdered with impunity. Year after year, the Chinese challenged laws they deemed unfair and unconstitutional. Local and state courts decided against them, and ultimately the cases were appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court, where they were heard by Judge Sawyer. This was the case with challenges to anti-laundry laws. In nineteenth-century California, attempts to close down Chinese laundries comprised one of the most dramatic episodes in California legal history. In the words of David Bernstein, “During the worst period of anti-Chinese agitation, from the 1860s to around 1900, Western jurisdictions passed dozens of facially neutral laws intended to harm Chinese laundries. Maximum hours laws, zoning laws, licensing laws, and tax laws were all used in the war against Chinese laundries.” And the Chinese challenged these laws through “massive disobedience.” 121 Once pushed from the mines, Chinese immigrants created a space for themselves in the laundry business. By 1860, the majority of laundry workers in California were Chinese.122 Their visible presence made the laundry industry a target for anti-Chinese legislation. San Francisco took the lead in most of the anti-laundry measures—yet the strategy

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spread and soon became a mechanism joining local towns to larger discourses throughout the state. The first laundry case appeared in the Ninth Circuit Court in 1882. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance requiring laundry owners to obtain the signatures of twelve neighbors before they could obtain a permit. Justice Field, with Sawyer in agreement, argued that the statute was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.123 Similar ordinances followed until fi nally, in 1886, a case made it to the State Supreme Court that would change the playing field for the next two decades. In 1886, Yick Wo challenged an 1882 ordinance requiring laundries in wooden buildings to apply for permits to the Board of Supervisors. The Board had refused permits to all two hundred Chinese businesses applying for such a license, but granted them to eighty nonChinese operators. Yick Wo’s challenge was successful. The court ruled that “[t]hough the law itself be fair on its face and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discrimination between persons in similar circumstances . . . the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the Constitution.” 124 The ruling that a law could be facially neutral and yet unconstitutional reverberated throughout the state, even in the northern end of Napa County. By the 1880s, the Chinese, like their fellow immigrants in more urban areas, had established a foothold for themselves in Napa’s laundry industry. As in San Francisco, Euro-Americans struck back with a “Caucasian Laundry,” yet were unsuccessful in driving the competition out of business.125 Chinese laundries continued to flourish, and Napa eventually passed an anti-laundry ordinance forbidding laundries in specific areas of town. Unfortunately, and not coincidentally, the primary restricted zone included the laundry that Sam Kee had operated for eight years.126 A local court found Kee in violation and, of course, he appealed to the Ninth Circuit. And he was able to secure the services of Sam Reardon, the same lawyer retained by the Six Companies. Reardon argued that the ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment, and argued based on the case of Yick Wo that, even though the law was facially impartial, it was applied unevenly and was intended to deprive Chinese launderers of liberty and property. Sawyer, writing for the Ninth Circuit, agreed, and Kee was freed from jail and allowed to resume business.127 By the close of the century, in many ways, white supremacy won out. California made five million dollars from the Foreign Miners’ Tax—

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representing between 25 and 50 percent of state revenue for the latter half of the nineteenth century.128 Chinese immigrants were barred from citizenship, and by the close of the century, white vigilantes had successfully driven Chinese workers and families from most rural areas, including Napa.129 Yet the struggles of the Chinese in the courts, in large urban areas such as San Francisco as well as smaller semi-rural spaces such as Napa, demonstrate that, even in times of overwhelming white violence, there was resistance. Through coalitions with white missionaries and lawyers and mass disobedience—through oppositional political strategies—the Chinese were sometimes successful in challenging discriminatory legislation. And they left behind a legacy of litigation from which later generations could learn. A handful of Chinese immigrants ultimately survived in California, because of the militant struggles of hundreds of Chinese who broke laws they deemed unjust.130

summary and conclusion In the twenty-first century, U.S. citizens and residents of color, as well as their white allies, continue to do battle on an uneven playing field. Once again, the odds seem to be against us, with a conservative court dismantling affirmative action through decisions such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, then proceeding to declare unconstitutional other federal mandates protecting the rights of women, disabled people, and the elderly.131 This larger structural battle, as it was in the nineteenth century, remains part of a larger dialogical relationship—local and national trends feed each other. The courts dismantle affirmative action while white college students hold “affirmative action bake sales.” White students complain of “reverse discrimination” on the same campus where white fraternity members brutally beat an African American student, and a Black student was removed from his dormitory after the word “Nigger” was carved into his door. Just one semester earlier, on the same campus, a young gay Asian man was moved from his dorm after continued threats to his physical safety.132 What we learn from looking at nineteenth-century Chicana/o, Black, and Chinese immigrant histories is that if we are to succeed in any of our battles, we must engage in an oppositional politics— embracing a variety of strategies and ideologies with each new battle. Black, Chinese, and Chicana/o communities were sometimes successful in their battles when they were able to form coalitions, either across class lines within their communities, or across communities—locating allies within the

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dominant society. Later histories, such as that of the Oxnard strike of 1903, where Japanese and Mexican workers formed a coalition that successfully challenged exploitative wages and hiring practices in California’s beet fields, indicate that stronger coalitions across ethnic lines might have provided a formidable defense against white supremacist practices. After all, Chicanos and Chinese immigrants often labored side by side in Napa’s quicksilver mines. What would have happened if they had stood side by side and battled white violence? Perhaps the most important lesson that we can learn from the diverse, overlapping histories of nineteenth-century Napa and Greater Mexico is that we need to learn from the past—from what our antepasadas/os did and from what they “failed to do.” Their dispersed, subjugated, and now increasingly excavated histories provide us with maps of resistance. They can teach us the importance of oppositional politics, of coalition, and of a number of other lessons, yet to be gleaned from our past.

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Chapter Seven

It is possible to give many instances of how the rule of colonial difference—of representing the “other” as inferior and radically different, and hence incorrigibly inferior—can be employed in situations that are not, in the strict terms of political history, colonial. These instances come up not only in relations between countries or nations, but even within populations that the modern institutions of power presume to have normalized into a body of citizens endowed with equal and nonarbitrary rights. Indeed, invoking such differences are, we might say, commonplaces in the politics of discrimination. —pa rth a ch at terjee, The Nation and Its Fragments

The aim of cultural difference is to rearticulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying position of the minority that resists totalization . . . where adding to does not add up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signifi cation. —homi k. bh a bh a, The Location of Culture

In “This Land Was Mexican Once,” I set out to demonstrate the existence of co-existing and conflicting histories in one “American” county, the role of history in constructing dominant discourses of the nation, and a way in which historians can write histories that are reflective of the coexisting and confl icting histories that structure the United States. Napa County is the focus of my study not because it is unique or different from other spaces in Greater Mexico/the U.S. West, but because it is similar to other places in so many ways. Many historical events that took place throughout Greater Mexico/the U.S. West took place in Napa. In Napa, as throughout Greater Mexico, a number of histories existed prior to the U.S. invasion; as such, Napa was an ideal site for examining co-existing and confl icting histories in the United States. The commonalities that

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Napa shared with other sites throughout the U.S. West indicated that if a bifurcated history of Napa could be written, similar histories could be written of other sites in the United States. On one level, this is a failed project. What you have just read is a series of micro-histories, many of them linear in themselves. But this is a first step—an important one on the path to new and different narrative forms. Bifurcated micro-histories, in fact, were rare in manuscripts that came just one generation before us. Today, with the work of Prasenjit Duara and Emma Pérez accepted by many in the academy, more and more texts are adopting this model. And so we reject one narrative, we tell several, we tell them all in one manuscript, and then we sit back and watch the text dialogue with itself. This is the technique of a growing number of scholars in my generation; I hope that young scholars picking up this text will develop more innovative ways of challenging linear narratives. “This Land Was Mexican Once” remains an early attempt. “This Land Was Mexican Once” is successful only because it was able to demonstrate the existence of confl icting and co-existing histories. It examined histories of Wappo-speaking people who shared a long history in Napa prior to the arrival of Spanish colonizers. Wappo-speaking peoples developed trade networks with other California Indian communities and engaged in cultural exchange with peoples both within and outside of their own language group. Sweat houses and menstrual rooms were central to Wappo lifeways, structuring gender roles within Wappo communities while reflecting gender divisions in larger Wappo society. When Spanish colonizers arrived in Central California, the new culture and socio-economic structures they introduced did not completely annihilate Wappo lifeways. Instead, they became competing forces. In Napa, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Wappo and Spanish lifeways and histories co-existed. After the founding of Mission San Francisco de Asís in 1769, many Wappo-speaking peoples traveled to San Francisco to enter the mission system, and there fused their traditional culture with a Spanish one. They attended mass and labored at the mission, while also participating in traditional funeral dances, holding sweats outside the mission walls, and going on paseos to visit their home communities. Other Wappo-speaking peoples avoided the mission. When Mission San Francisco Solano was built in the Sonoma Valley, to the immediate east of Napa, the Satiyomi, most probably a Wappo-speaking people, rose up to fight the colonizers. While Wappo histories continued to change under Spanish and then Mexican rule, Spanish and Mexican histories also developed in Napa.

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By focusing on Spanish colonial and then Mexicana/o histories as significant in themselves, “This Land Was Mexican Once” was able to demonstrate that these communities were complex and class-stratified societies. In Napa, where members of a small number of dominant families, such as the Vallejos and Juárezes, gained considerable wealth and status through colonizing processes, most Spanish colonizers and Mexicana/o settlercolonizers reaped fewer benefits. Women spent their days in hard manual labor while their spouses risked their lives in anti-Indian campaigns. Landless and dependent on a handful of dominant families for their welfare, soldiers and soldiers’ wives labored in a social position just above that of the Indigenous peoples of the region. Nonetheless, these settlercolonizers were essential to the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. By the time a rancho culture developed in Napa, Mexico had claimed its independence from Spain. Yet, despite a rhetoric of republicanism that permeated Mexicana/o politics of the time, Californianas/os did not modify their relationships with the Indigenous peoples of Napa; instead, they continued in their role of colonizers: exploiting both Wappo- and Patwin-speaking peoples for labor, claiming Wappo lands as their own, and benefiting socially and economically by their uninvited presence in the colonized’s country. Thus, Indigenous histories and Californiana/o histories throughout the Napa area continued to co-exist up to the time of the U.S. invasion. Often, such histories confl icted. The violence of the Bear Flag incident and the U.S. invasion added new chapters to these histories. Throughout the Bear Flag incident and its aftermath, Californianas/os were targets of Euro-American violence. Euro-American filibusters, many from the Napa Valley, murdered unarmed men from the Berryessa family; they imprisoned the men of the Vallejo family and held the town of Sonoma by force until the U.S. government imposed its own military rule on the town. The filibusters robbed the residents of Sonoma and then rode through Napa robbing Californio ranchos. They precipitated a war against the Californiana/o settlers who had welcomed them into northern Alta California—a war that was legitimized by the U.S. government when it declared war on Mexico and absorbed the Bear Flag incident into the larger war. While Napa became a place of violence for Californianas/os during and after the U.S. war, Californiana/o histories did not cease to exist because of this. Instead, new histories of resistance developed. Indigenous histories also continued through the U.S invasion. Where Californios were taken prisoner and Californio homes were robbed, Indigenous peoples were shot down in the streets of Sonoma. When

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Frémont’s men rode through Napa, they raped the Indigenous women they met. In some instances, such as the revenge of Sinaloa, where an Indigenous man rose up and killed the Euro-American who violently whipped him, the Euro-American invaders met with bold resistance. Often, however, it appears that survival, rather than bold resistance, was all that was possible. Following the Bear Flag incident, as noted by George Yount, Euro-Americans not only shot Indigenous peoples for “sport” but also went on expeditions of retribution where they killed entire communities. Prior to the rise of Euro-American dominance in Napa, then, a number of histories existed in Napa. Wappo-speaking peoples, Patwinspeaking peoples, and Californianas/os lived, labored, and died there. As each new group of migrants came to the area, the prior group did not disappear; instead, these varied societies and their histories coexisted. Their struggles against white supremacy were often met with violence: violent discourse, physical violence, and juridico-political violence. When Chinese immigrants came to Napa in the mid-nineteenth century, their stories were joined with those of Californios, Indigenous peoples, and African Americans who came before them. As with these earlier communities, their community histories and histories of resistance were rich and vibrant. How it was that these histories were collapsed into a linear history of Euro-American progress is not only intriguing, but might provide insights into the political consequences of how history is told. Scholars as diverse as Frantz Fanon, Ernest Renan, and Prasenjit Duara have discussed reasons why dominant groups are compelled to subjugate the histories of conquered peoples. Fanon explicated how colonizers erase the histories of conquered peoples in order to claim legitimacy for their colonizing practices.1 Renan argued that such erasures, especially of the violence of conquest, are essential to nation building. He asserted that “unity is always effected by means of brutality.” Such brutality must be forgotten, in part, through myths of heroism on the part of the conquerors.2 Finally, writing in the late 1990s, Pransenjit Duara mapped out a means through which modern nations have been able to accomplish this task—linear histories. Building on Enlightenment models of progressive histories, Duara argued, modern nations have effectively subjugated competing and subaltern histories by constructing linear national histories.3 In Napa, this scenario played itself out in the construction of the Bear Flag incident as a heroic moment in the development of the U.S.

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West. By painting themselves as Napa’s “pioneers” in the local press and in subscription books, Euro-Americans effectively subjugated the histories and peoples who preceded them to the area. The role of the Bear Flag incident, as part of the larger U.S. invasion, and the use of a language of “republicanism,” bolstered the ability of Euro-Americans to maintain dominance in Napa because it tied their histories to national ideologies of Manifest Destiny and white supremacy. In Napa, as in the larger nation-state, history has been used to legitimize the subordination of subaltern peoples. To end the story here would condemn both my profession of historian and myself. For it would appear that history is and can be nothing more than a tool in the hands of the oppressors. With it, dominant groups who have seized power through violence have legitimized their rule and excluded others from power. But here, I take issue with scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm and Homi K. Bhabha. For where they clearly point to the opportunistic uses of history by nation-states and dominant communities, they fail to acknowledge that history can be used as a counter-hegemonic tool.4 Where Bhabha argues that cultural difference can challenge oppressive power structures, he makes no allowance for history as an alternative disruptive tool.5 And so this work also builds on the work of Rudolfo Acuña, Antonia Castañeda, Emma Pérez, and Deena González—historians who have demonstrated ways in which we, as historians from subjugated communities, can use history as a tool to create new narratives—to write “against the grain.” 6 This volume joins an exciting and growing genre which argues that history can challenge hegemonic discourses—that history, like cultural difference, can disrupt dominant discourses and power structures. One means is through the use of subaltern texts, such as the Californio testimonios of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As noted in Chapters Two and Four, some Californios agreed to give their testimonios to the staff of Hubert Howe Bancroft, in the hope that future generations would learn their history—in other words, in the hope that there would be counter-narratives available to challenge the linear narrative of Euro-American progress that dominated U.S. history during their lifetimes. Platón Vallejo was able to directly challenge the dominant narrative by publishing his testimonio in an English-language newspaper at the turn of the century. Recently, Chicana/o scholars such as Genaro Padilla and Rosaura Sánchez have used the California testimonios to accomplish similar tasks.7 “This Land Was Mexican Once” is an attempt to build on this type of scholarship, where subaltern histories

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are brought “from the margin to the center,” thus disrupting dominant discourses of the nation. In addition to building on the work of Californianas/os and of Chicana/o scholars, “This Land Was Mexican Once” challenges the very structure with which much history is written. In this, I am not alone. Other scholars, such as Emma Pérez and Lisbeth Haas, have set out to write non-linear histories of Greater Mexico/the U.S. West.8 History and Forgetfulness builds upon the foundations of and is indebted to such work. Yet in order to directly challenge linear narratives of EuroAmerican progress, I suggest, perhaps another model for writing history would be useful—that of writing what Prasenjit Duara has called a “bifurcated history”—a history that first maps out dispersed histories co-existing in time, then turns to the dominant narrative that was used to cover and subordinate many of those histories to map out how such histories became dominant. Because of the importance of addressing the dominant narrative, “This Land Was Mexican Once” not only mapped out various histories that co-existed in Napa’s past, it also analyzed how Napa’s Euro-Americans created a linear history of their county that erased the histories with which their own stories co-existed and negated the violence they used to achieve dominance. Finally, it looked at an ongoing and evolving legacy of resistance that emerged following the establishment of Napa’s dominant historical narrative. Ultimately, “This Land Was Mexican Once” is one example of how historians can write bifurcated histories of the United States. In communities throughout the United States a number of histories continue to co-exist, often in conflict with one another. The dominant narrative of the nation-state, however, is too often one of linear progress that masks the inequalities embedded in our larger society. Bifurcated histories are one means by which historians can “disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, [thus] producing other spaces of subaltern signification.” 9

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no t e s

introduction 1. Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 16–17. 2. Berta Esperanza-Hernández-Truyol, “LatIndia and Mestizajes: Of Cultures, Conquests, and LatCritical Feminism,” Journal of Gender, Race & Justice 63, no. 3 (1999): 94–95. 3. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: aunt lute books, 1987), 3. 4. Here I adopt the practice of Américo Paredes, David Gutiérrez, and others, who mark the U.S./Mexico border and the region claimed by the United States as its Southwest as “Greater Mexico” in recognition of the socio-economic and cultural reality of the region. I use the term interchangeably with the colonial term U.S. West to mark the region as a site of continued struggle and confl ict. See David Gutiérrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the ‘Third Space’: The Shifting Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico,” Journal of American History 86, no. 2 (September 1999): 484. 5. Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 address to the American Historical Association was at the core of the mythology this first generation of Chicana/o historians addressed and disrupted. By introducing the concept of the U.S. West as a uniquely American space that produced rugged individuals and democratic institutions, Turner effectively centered the West as part of the U.S. nation while reinscribing older narratives of white supremacy onto national histories and origin myths. For an excellent discussion of this shift and challenges to it, see Antonia Castañeda, “Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 3rd ed., ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol Dubois (New York: Routledge, 2000). 6. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1988); Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard

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University Press, 1979); see, for example, Adelaida R. Del Castillo, ed., Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History (Encino: Floricanto Press, 1990). Between Borders remains one of the best resources for gendered history from the late twentieth century; many of the articles are now classics and used in twenty-fi rst century history and Chicana Studies classrooms. National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, Bylaws (National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, 1999), 6. For historiographies that map this shift see David Gutiérrez, “Significant to Whom? Mexican Americans and the History of the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly (November 1993): 519–539, and Deena J. González, “Gender on the Borderlands: Re-textualizing the Classics,” Frontiers 24 (2003): 15–29. 7. Quotation is from González, “Gender on the Borderlands,” 15. For Chicana/o historians who problematize the construction of power relations in Greater Mexico/the U.S. West, see, for example, Antonia Castañeda, “Women of Color and the Re-writing of Western History: The Discourse, Politics and Decolonization of History,” Pacifi c Historical Review 61 (November 1992); “Gender, Race, and Culture”; and “Presidarias y Pobladoras: Spanish-American Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770–1821” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1990). See also the work of Acuña and Camarillo, and Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); Genaro Padilla, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984); and Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: The Californio testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). While Sánchez and Padilla are literary scholars, their work is an important contribution to the field of Chicana/o history. For examples of postcolonial scholars who argue that nation-states exist in a state of disequilibrium, see Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Catherine Hall, “Histories, Empires and the Post-Colonial Moment,” in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies: Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (New York: Routledge, 1996); Homi K. Bhabha, ed., The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation? ” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990). 8. Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). This work is explicitly built on the scholarship of historians of the nation such as Eric Hobsbawm and upon the work of Chicana/o historians and literary critics such as Carey McWilliams, Genaro Padilla, and Ramón Gutiérrez, who highlighted the use of the past in creating the present, and who complicated the ways scholars view colonizing processes by noting class divisions within both colonized and colo-

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175

nizing communities. See especially Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1948; reprint, New York: Praeger, 1990); Padilla, My History, Not Yours; Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 9. Wilson, 8. 10. Duara, 28–30. 11. Ibid., 19–20. 12. Ibid., 71. 13. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992). 14. Camarillo; Ricardo Romo; Deena González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras.” 15. Here I use the terms migrant and immigrant in the way that Sucheng Chan, Colin Wayne Leach, and Donna R. Gabaccia use them. Migrants move between spaces, not necessarily nation-states, and this movement shapes their identity, values, and access to resources. Immigrants move from one nation to another and create a new home within the new nation. See Sucheng Chan, preface to This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), xxii, and afterword to Immigrant Life in the U.S.: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Donna R. Gabaccia and Colin Wayne Leach (New York: Routledge, 2004), 194–195. 16. Robert R. Alvarez, Jr. Familia: Migration and Adaptation in Baja and Alta California, 1800–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). See also Sister Mary Colette Standardt, “The Sonoran Migration to California, 1848– 1856: A Study in Prejudice,” Southern California Quarterly 57 (Fall 1976), reprinted in Between Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States, ed. David Gutiérrez (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 3–21. 17. For an example of this among ethnic Mexicans, see Ramón Gutiérrez, “Unraveling America’s Hispanic Past: Internal Stratification and Class Boundaries,” Aztlán 17 (Spring 1986): 79–101. 18. Devon Abbot Mihesuah, Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), xxii. 19. Randall Milliken, “An Ethnohistory of the Indian People of the San Francisco Bay Area from 1770 to 1810” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1991), 25. 20. Robert Heizer and Albert B. Elsasser, The Natural World of the California Indians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 28–30 and 37–44. Heizer and Elsasser follow A. L. Kroeber’s organization of dividing California into six main cultural areas. As a result, Napa, which is commonly referred to as located in Northern California, for such anthropologists is in the culture area of Central California.

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notes to pages 7–8

21. Samuel Barrett, Pomo Indian Basketry, 7, no. 3, of University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology (Berkeley: University Press, 1908): 134–265; Victoria Calkins, The Wappo People: A History of the California Wappo Indians as Revealed through a Series of Conversations with the Tribal Council (Santa Rosa: Pileated Press, 1994), 15, 20–21. Wappo basket makers in the twentieth century can often identify not only the tribal affiliation of an artist, but the person with whom the artist studied basket making. 22. Harold E. Driver, Wappo Ethnography, 36, no. 3, of University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 184–186. 23. For a discussion of Wappo struggles for tribal recognition where a modern-day tribe uses the name “Wappo,” see Calkins, 26–28. 24. For example, among academics, Acuña, in Occupied America, used “native Californians”; Helen Lara-Cea, in “Notes on the Use of Parish Registers in the Reconstruction of Chicana History in California,” in Between Borders: Essays on Mexican/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida R. Castillo (Encino: Floricanto Press, 1990), used “Chicana”; Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera, in The Chicanos: A History of Mexican Americans (1972; reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), used “frontier soldier” and “Californio”; Rosaura Sánchez used “Californio.” 25. See Rosaura Sánchez, 228–267, for an in-depth discussion of Californiana/o identity and Mexican independence. 26. González, Refusing the Favor. 27. Chan, preface to This Bittersweet Soil, xxii. 28. See Charlotte T. Miller, “Grapes, Queues and Quicksilver” (Napa County Library, 1966, mimeographed). For studies of anti-Chinese violence throughout California, see Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Robert F. Heizer and Alan F. Almquist, The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 154–177; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 216–289; Sucheng Chan, Asian Californians (Sparks: Materials for Today’s Learning, 1991), 27–56; and Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 29. John W. Ravage, Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997). 30. See, for example, Kimberlé Crenshaw, “The Intersection of Race and Gender,” in Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1996). 31. Thomas Hart Benton, “America’s Path to the Orient,” in Manifest Destiny and the Imperialism Question, ed. Charles L. Sanford (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), 45.

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177

32. George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (September 1995): 369–387; David Theo Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondence through Work in Women’s Studies,” in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology (Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1992). 33. See Lipsitz, Goldberg, McIntosh; see also Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 158–182; Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 165–173. 34. Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 174–177; Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 14, 101. John F. Miller, the author of the bill, openly appealed to fears that some Euro-Americans had of “amalgamation.” Thus, the Miller bill represented both Euro-American fears of labor competition and Euro-American fears of racial mixing. While Arthur vetoed the Miller bill, which would have prohibited skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States, advocates of the bill revised it and resubmitted it to the House and Senate that same year. The revised bill, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese skilled and unskilled workers for a period of ten years (to be renewed), was passed by both houses and signed into law as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. 35. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 441–449. Hall argues that a process of “cultural diaspora-ization taking place throughout Britain and its former colonies problematizes both the parameters of ‘British’ and ‘Black.’ ” Bhabha, The Location of Culture, similarly calls into question the viability of binaries such as self/other and past/present, and problematizes the myth of a stable nation. Similarly, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), draw attention to the permeability of supposed national boundaries and argue that the issue of transnational hybridism in culture, politics, and economics is played out simultaneously at the “global” and “local” level. 36. Goldberg, 29–33, 56. 37. Padilla, ix–x, 4–21; Rosaura Sánchez, ix, 2–9. Vincent Pérez, “Heroes and Orphans of the Hacienda: Narratives of a Mexican American Family,” Aztlán 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 33–106, is a useful critique of Padilla. 38. Madie D. Brown, “General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Hubert Howe Bancroft,” California Historical Quarterly 29, no. 2 ( June 1950): 152–153. To demonstrate that Bancroft misrepresented both Vallejo’s opinion of himself and

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notes to pages 10 –12

Cerruti’s obsequiousness, Brown printed copies of the initial correspondence that took place between Cerruti and Vallejo. The portion of Cerruti’s fi rst letter, which solicited information from Vallejo, read as follows: Being occupied at the present time in writing the history of California and especially that part dealing with the arrival of Americans in this country, I am very desirous “Citizen” General, that you should fi nd it convenient to supply me all possible data concerning your family; I already have details regarding Pico, Guerra, Pacheco and many other families and my book would not be complete without full particulars of the Vallejo family. (Brown, 152–153)

39. Padilla, 4–21; Rosaura Sánchez, 2–9. 40. Rosaura Sánchez, 6–29. For Bancroft and Manifest Destiny see also Haas, Conquest and Historical Identities, 171–174; Antonia Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras,” 9–18; David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), xvi–xvii. 41. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California 2:69 (San Francisco: History Company, 1886), quoted in Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras,” 10. Bancroft’s work is replete with similar statements. In comparing Spanish colonization with English colonization he went so far as to claim, “Immediate gain with glory, spiritual gain and material gain with the glory of conquest and lordly domination, was the purpose of the Spanish colonist. Like a child or a savage to gratify a passion or achieve a proximate result he would undergo any hardship; but in that thorough and persistent application for remote advantages which characterizes the higher order of intelligence he was found wanting. His passionate energy differed widely from that persistent industry which reared the political fabric of the Anglo-Saxons in North America.” Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral (San Francisco: History Company, 1888), 60. This bias has led some historians, such as Lisbeth Haas, to reject Bancroft’s writings as source material when writing on nineteenth-century California. See Haas, Conquest and Historical Identities, 171–174. For Bancroft’s bias, see also David Weber, The Mexican Frontier, xvi. 42. Henry Cerruti, “Ramblings in California,” 1874, MSS C-E 115:2, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 43. See especially R. Sánchez; Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras,” as well as “Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769–1848: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family,” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón Gutiérrez and Richard Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 230–259; R. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came. 44. Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras,” 88–89; Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “Honor, Ideology, and Class-Gender Domination in New Mexico, 1690–1846,” Latin American Perspectives 12, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 81–104; R. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 177–178; see also Richard Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered

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Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 45. James A. Sandos, “Between Crucifi x and Lance: Indian-White Relations in California, 1769–1848,” in Contested Eden; Castañeda, “Sexual Violence in the Politics and Policies of Conquest: Amerindian Women in the Spanish Conquest of Alta California,” in Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 46. Randall Milliken, A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769–1810 (Menlo Park: Ballena Press, 1995), 237–248; Sherburne F. Cook, The Conflict between the California Indians and White Civilization, vol. 1 (1943; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 174. 47. Solano’s name appears as “Isidora” in the original manuscript. At least one translation, however, lists her as “Isadora.” 48. Note that in the family history of Vivien Juárez Rose, and in the inter view of George C. Yount, housed at the Bancroft Library, neither Rose nor Yount writes of Vallejo as controlling the lives of nineteenth-century Californios. Instead, they write of him supporting the troops, facilitating land grants, and calling on the men of the area to fight against hostile Indian communities. In both accounts, Vallejo is written of as a respected patriarch. See Vivien Juárez Rose, The Past Is Father of the Present: Family Legends, 1737–1973, San Francisco and Napa County (Fairfield: Wheeler Printing, 1974), and George C. Yount, “Narrative as Told to Orange Clark,” MSS C-D 5189B, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. For summaries of Vallejo’s control over Californios in northern Alta California, see Rosaura Sánchez, 233–234; Alan Rosenus, General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1995), 13–22. 49. Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 3. 50. González, Refusing the Favor, 9. 51. Castañeda, “Engendering the History,” 252.

chapter 1 The subtitle of this chapter is an adjustment of Raymond Fogelson’s “The Ethnohistory of Events and Nonevents,” Ethnohistory 36, no. 2 (Spring 1989). 1. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 11–18. Here the term colonizer should be understood as used by Albert Memmi. Colonizers are Spanish subjects who came to Alta California and benefited from the exploitation and subordination of California Indians. By doing so they gained access to better jobs, status, and opportunities for profit than they would have had they stayed in the metropol.

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notes to pages 15–17

Mexicanas/os and Euro-Americans deviate from a model of colonization because California became a territory of their country. At the same time, their socio-economic systems necessarily subordinated groups who preceded them to the area, thereby providing Mexicanas/os and later Euro-Americans with similar benefits to those received by Europeans living in colonized countries. 2. Earl Couey, interview by author, tape recording, Napa, California, August 28, 1998. 3. Eduardo Galeano, “El descubrimiento que todavía no fue: España y América,” in El descubrimiento que todavía no fue y otros escritos (Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1986), 115. 4. For discussions of Spanish belief systems during the era of colonization, see Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 39–207, and “Honor, Ideology, and Class-Gender Domination,” 81–104; Olga Campa, Foreword to Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (reprint, México: Fontamara, 1989), 11–25; Manuel J. Díaz Cruz, “El Indio en la Documentación Colonial: Chiapas en el Siglo XVII,” in Las Raíces de la Memoria: América Latina (Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, 1996), 23–36; Doris Heyden, Introduction to Fray Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994). 5. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 101–110; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 210. Memmi argues that institutions such as language, culture, and history, what Braudel would term structure, are destroyed by colonizers in order to argue for the superiority of their own culture and to assert that the colonized did not have culture or history before colonization. Part of the process of decolonization, then, is to recover subordinated culture, language, and history. In Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, he makes a similar argument, that colonizers destroy the histories of the colonized in order to claim uplift. He also makes the explicit argument that because of this “a claim to a national culture in the past” is necessary to imagining a national future, and for recovering the psychic health of the colonized. 6. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 210. 7. Emma Pérez, “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor,” in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991), 161–162. See also Aída Hurtado, “Theory in the Flesh: Toward an Endarkened Epistemology,” Qualitative Studies in Education 16, no. 2 (2003). 8. Mihesuah, Indigenous American Women, 16–32. 9. Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 53, 85–105. 10. Fogelson, 134–138; Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. 1, trans. Siân Reynolds, rev. ed. ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 16. Quotations are from Braudel.

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11. González, Refusing the Favor. See also González, “La Tules of Image and Reality: Euro-American Attitudes and Legend Formation on a SpanishMexican Frontier,” in Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 12. R. Sánchez, Telling Identities, 50–95; Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 24–25. See also Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), esp. 102–106 and 120–121. See also C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). 13. Alfred Kroeber, “Elements of Culture in Native California,” in The California Indians: A Source Book, 2nd ed., ed. R. F. Heizer and M. A. Whipple (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 3–65. Heizer and Elsasser, The Natural World of the California Indians, 28–30; see also S. J. Jones, “Some Regional Aspects of Native California,” in The California Indians: A Source Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 92–93. 14. Milliken, A Time of Little Choice, 22. 15. Heizer and Elsasser, 3–4; William James Ketteringham, “The Settlement Geography of the Napa Valley” (M.A. thesis, Stanford University, 1961), 76; Milliken, “An Ethnohistory,” 69–70. 16. Cook, Conflict, 1:85–87. 17. Samuel Barrett, The Ethno-geography of the Pomo and Neighboring Indians, 6, no. 1, of University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology (Berkeley: University Press, 1908), 14–16; Heizer and Elsasser, 3–4. 18. Milliken, “An Ethnohistory,” 20–25. Sarris, 10. 19. Heizer and Elsasser, 3–4. 20. Cook, Conflict, 2:28. 21. Ibid.; see also Barrett, “Ethnogeography of the Pomo,” 16. 22. Milliken, “An Ethnohistory,” 413; Barrett, Ethno-geography, 271; Charlie Toledo, “Native Americans of the Napa Valley” (pamphlet, 1997), 1; Couey interview. Couey notes that it was with the incursion of the Spanish and their allies into Napa in the early nineteenth century that the Wappo were pushed further north, a process that would take more than a hundred years of Mexican and Euro-American aggression to complete. These are topics further discussed in later chapters concerned with colonization and conquest of the Napa area. Couey also notes that an offshoot of the Mishewal established themselves at the foot of Mount Konocti. They are the community of people who call themselves Lilik. 23. Guapo can be translated as “handsome,” “good-looking,” and/or “valiant.” 24. Yolande S. Beard, The Wappo: A Report (St. Helena, California, 1977), 43; Heizer and Elsasser, 19–22; Barrett, 10–40. Beard and Heizer and Elsasser comment that Spanish colonizers saw Wappo communities as valiant due to the

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notes to page 21

bravery and skill they demonstrated in war. Barrett argues that it was due to the dignity with which they suffered the punishments infl icted upon them by soldiers and missionaries. Also note that the term Ashochimi was sometimes used by early writers when writing about Wappo-speaking communities. According to Barrett, this term was a misconstruction of the word A’cotcamai—the name Southern Pomo used for the Wappo living in the area around Geyserville and along the Russian river (Barrett, “Ethnogeography of the Pomo,” 263). 25. Throughout this chapter and the following, I sometimes use the umbrella term Wappo because it has become a common term used and recognized by the Mishewal Wappo and by non-Wappo academics. At the same time, the term carries with it a contested history. Many Wappo-speaking people did not recognize the term in the early twentieth century. As a consequence, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, census numbers for Mishewal, Mutistul, and Meyahkmah were often grossly underreported. In the early twentieth century as well, C. Hart Merriam, an anthropologist working with the University of California, called the term Wappo “objectionable” and instead used the tribal name Miyakma. Finally, in the late twentieth century, the Mishewal community has used the term Wappo in some of its efforts for tribal recognition. While recognizing its origins in a history of colonization, I choose to use the term as an umbrella term for Mishewal, Mutistul, and Meyahkmah because of its usage by the Mishewal, and because of its common usage by professional anthropologists and the non-Wappo public of the late twentieth century. See C. Hart Merriam, Ethnographic Notes of California Indian Tribes, in Reports of the University of California Archeological Survey, no. 68, part 1 (Berkeley: University of California Archeological Research Facility, 1966), 22. Merriam’s strategy, unfortunately, did not account for the Mutistul and Mishewal, who shared similar language and cultural traits to those of the Meyahkmah. See also Calkins, The Wappo People, 23–27. 26. Toledo, 3; Couey interview; Jesse O. Sawyer and Alice Schlichter, Yuki Vocabulary, vol. 101 of University of California Publications in Linguistics ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1; Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1925), 378–379; Michael J. Moratto, California Archaeology (San Francisco: Academic Press, 1984), 537–538. Jesse Sawyer is the exception to this rule. According to Sawyer, early writers found some similarities between Wappo-speaking peoples and Yuki peoples living further north—separated from the Wappo by miles of Pomo lands. Among such writers was the eminent anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Sawyer, writing in 1984, however, argued that many of the Yukian elements in Wappo language were recent borrowings and that the Wappo therefore do not belong in the Yukian language “stock” or “family.” Other linguists, however, continue to disagree with Sawyer. Moratto’s California Archaeology, published in 1984, places the Wappo within the Yukian language stock. Earl Couey also places the Wappo language within this family.

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27. Driver, 194. Robert Heizer, The Archaeology of the Napa Region, 12, no. 6 in Anthropological Records (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 227–228. 28. Heizer and Elsasser, 22; Ketteringham, 76; Driver, 194. 29. Beard, 56; Driver, 191. Beard notes that until the 1930s, when tourists, anthropologists, and others depleted the supply, the area around the quarry was covered with pieces of broken and cut obsidian that appeared to have been left behind by obsidian workers. It is Driver who notes that obsidian arrow points were rubbed with angelica before sale or usage. See also Robert Heizer, The Archeology of the Napa Region, 228. 30. Victoria Patterson, “Evolving Gender Roles in Pomo Society,” in Women and Power in Native North America, ed. Laura F. Klein and Lillian A. Ackerman (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 133. While we do not have records to indicate whether men and/or women worked clamshells into beads, among the Pomo, who held very similar gender divisions of labor to those of the Wappo, both men and women performed this task. 31. Driver, 184, 194; Ketteringham, 76. Driver notes that men sometimes used grasshoppers as bait when catching trout, but they did not use hooks. Instead, they made fishing poles of three- to four-foot poles and long pieces of hair. Grasshoppers were tied to the end of the piece of hair, and when the trout swallowed the grasshopper, the hair snagged in its teeth. Fish were preserved by removing the intestines and cutting the head off with a fl int knife. Then they were either dried in the sun or smoked indoors before the fishermen returned home. 32. Sarris, 53. 33. Janet Spector, What This Awl Means: Feminist Archeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1993), 9. 34. Jesse O. Sawyer, English-Wappo Vocabulary, vol. 45 of University of California Publications in Linguistics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 7; Beard, 47. 35. Samuel Barrett, Pomo Indian Basketry, 136, 162–168; Calkins, 14–21; Alfred L. Kroeber, “California Basketry and the Pomo,” in The California Indians: A Source Book (Berkeley: University of California Press), 327. The gendered aspects of basket weaving form a link between early Wappo history and the twentieth century. When Jane Couey, a descendent of Mishewal-Wappo chief Kanetuch’ma, was nine years old, she was given her first coiled “start” to begin learning to weave. Likewise, when Laura Somersal (1893–1990) was a little girl, someone handed her a start and told her that because she was going to be a woman one day, she needed to learn to weave. As a woman, Somersal was so respected for her knowledge of and skill at basket weaving that the Smithsonian Institution asked her to act as a consultant for their California Indian basket collection (see Calkins, 15, 20). 36. Driver, 186, 199. Driver cites acorn gathering as one of the few productive activities a man could engage in while his wife was menstruating. See also Sawyer, English-Wappo Vocabulary, 1.

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notes to pages 24–29

37. Beard, 51; Driver, 186–187. 38. Devon A. Mihesuah, “Commonality of Difference: American Indian Women and History,” American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 21–22. 39. Milliken, Time of Little Choice, 22. 40. Driver, 87; Beard, 50–54. 41. Driver, 185–186; Beard, 50–51. 42. Driver, 184–186; Beard, 50. 43. Sawyer, English-Wappo Vocabulary, 83; Driver, 185–186. 44. Susan F. Harding, “Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamentalist Baptist Conversion,” American Ethnologist 14, no. 1 (February 1987): 168. 45. Stewart Guthrie, “A Cognitive Theory of Religion,” Current Anthropology 21, no. 2 (April 1980): 182; Talal Asad, “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man 18, no. 2 (June 1983): 237. 46. Alfred Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1925), 379. 47. Ibid., 364–365. 48. Here the research of Earl Couey confi rms the research of Alfred Kroeber. Whereas Kroeber did not specifically name Taikomol as the principal character in Wappo ceremonies, he did name Taikomol as the principal actor for the Yuki, who belonged to the same language group as the Wappo. Likewise, Couey, in an interview with the author, confirmed that among the Wappo, stories of Coyote were sometimes common because anthropologists insisted on asking questions about Coyote. According to Couey, Taikomol remained the principal deity in Wappo mythology. Earl Couey interview. 49. Alfred Kroeber, “Principal Local Types of the Kuksu Cult,” in The California Indians: A Source Book, ed. Robert Heizer and M. A. Whipple, rev. and enlarged (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 485–493. 50. E. M. Loeb, The Western Kuksu Cult, 33, no. 1, of Publications in American Archeology and Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1932), 109–110; Earl Couey, commentary on chap. 2, March 20, 2000. Loeb discusses construction of brush and subterranean houses. It was Earl Couey, in our conversation of March 2000, who pointed out that larger communities maintained permanent dance houses. 51. Loeb, 109–111. 52. Ibid., 110–111. 53. Lanny Pinola, “Humor and California Indian Story Workshop,” at the 4th Annual California Indians Storytelling Festival and Symposium, Ohlone Community College, November 14, 1998. Pinola, a Kashia Pomo storyteller, notes that humor was and even today often is integrated into important rites and ceremonies within Central California Indian cultures. 54. Heizer and Elsasser, 33–34. This belief may have facilitated Spanish colonization because, with the outbreak of disease epidemic, California Indians

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notes to pages 29 –33

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blamed themselves for failing to observe their rituals correctly. See also Milliken, “An Ethnohistory,” 14. 55. Haas, Conquests; R. Sánchez, esp. 50–95. 56. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. 57. Ibid., 24–25. 58. Mary Virginia Rojas, “ ‘She Bathes in a Sacred Place’: Rites of Reciprocity, Power and Prestige in Alta California” (M.A. thesis, Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1997). 59. Patterson, 131. 60. Guthrie, 182; Asad, 251. 61. Paul Radin, Wappo Texts, 19, no. 1, of University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1924), 45. 62. “Chicken-hawk and His Brother,” as told to Paul Radin by Jim Tripo. Ibid., 73–75. 63. Robert Heizer, ed., The Archeology of the Napa Region, 236. 64. Beard, 46; Driver, 181–190. 65. Rojas Muños, 1, 17–19. 66. James Axtell, ed. The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary of the Sexes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 55–57. 67. Ibid., 55–69; Theda Perdue, “Writing the Ethnohistory of Native Women,” in Rethinking American Indian History, ed. Donald L. Fixico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 79; Theodore Kroeber, The Inland Whale: Nine Stories Retold from California Indian Legends (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 168–175 and 179–183. 68. T. Kroeber, The Inland Whale. According to T. Kroeber, this story was told by the Maidu, Wintu, Modoc, Yana, Shasta, Achomawi, and Atsugewi, all peoples living north of the Wappo. I include it here because it contains restrictions regarding male contact with menstruating women—as did the Wappo— and because it is a fi ne description of a young woman by herself in a menstrual room. That Wappo women and girls spent the four days alone is yet another ritual that the community shared with their neighbors. According to the Wappo informants that Driver worked with, if more than one menstruating girl was in the room, “all would go crazy” (see Driver, 199). 69. T. Kroeber, 54–65. 70. Beard, 48; Driver, 197. Driver notes that Wappo communities had at least two different kinds of doctors: “sucking doctors,” who sucked sources of sickness out of patients’ bodies, and “singing doctors,” who sang and, at times, danced. Wappo tribal consultant and historian Earl Couey believes it was most probably a singing doctor who performed the ritual at the family ceremony. 71. Rojas, 13–19, 27, 33. 72. T. Kroeber, 180. 73. Driver, 198–199.

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notes to pages 34–41

74. Ibid., 197. 75. Ibid., 199; Beard, 48. Beard states that the couvade was observed more “seriously” among the Wappo than in other Indigenous communities in California. 76. Driver, 199. 77. Robert Heizer, Francis Drake and the California Indians, 1579 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 259–261. 78. Dee T. Davis, ed., “Stories of Napa County” (Napa County Library, c. 1940, mimeographed), 1–3. 79. Renato Rosaldo, “From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986): 77–93. 80. Barrett, Ethno-geography, 28. Barrett comments that extant documents are not specific enough to know where Drake anchored, only that it was probably this site. Calling the bay located to the south of Point Reyes “Drakes Bay” was an educated guess. 81. Beard, 15–16; Barrett, Ethno-geography, 36–37, n. 7. Beard holds that the communities that went out to greet Drake were Coast Miwok, though others, such as Barrett, hold that the baskets of which the English wrote were probably made by Pomo-speaking communities. 82. Heizer, Francis Drake and the California Indians, 274. 83. Early English Voyages to the Pacifi c Coast of America from Their Own, and Contemporary English Accounts (Los Angeles, California, 1903), 75–79 in Barrett, Ethno-geography. 84. Sir Francis Drake, The World Encompaffed (London: Nicholas Bovrne, 1628), in Sir Richard Carnac Temple, The World Encompassed and Analogous Contemporary Documents Concerning Sir Francis Drake’s Circumnavigation of the World (London: Argonaut Press, 1926), 53–54. 85. Ibid., 59–60. 86. Barrett, Ethno-geography, 33–35. 87. Heizer, Francis Drake, 259–273.

chapter two 1. Diario de Alférez José Sánchez, 6 Julio 1823, Archives of California, Vol. 11, 145, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 2. Ibid., 146. 3. Ibid., 145–163. 4. Ibid., 150. 5. Honoria Tuomey and Luisa Vallejo Emparan, History of the Mission Presidio and Pueblo of Sonoma (Santa Rosa: Press-Democrat Publishing, 1923), 17–20. 6. Marie E. Northrop, Spanish-Mexican Families of Early California: 1769– 1850, Vol. I (Burbank: Southern California Genealogical Society, 1987), 303;

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notes to pages 41–4 4

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Lista de la Companía del Presidio de Monterey, MSS C-R 9, Carton 3, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 7. Myrtle M. McKittrick, Vallejo, Son of California (Portland: Binfords and Mort, 1944), 36–45. 8. Manuel Patricio Servín, “California’s Hispanic Heritage: A View into the Spanish Myth,” in New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540–1821, ed. David J. Weber (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979), 122; Milliken, A Time of Little Choice, 204–216. 9. Most accounts of resistance found in the Californio testimonios refer to uprisings by the “Satiyomi.” While Satiyomi is not a Wappo word (Couey interview), it appears that many Californios, including Salvador Vallejo and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, called Wappo-speaking peoples “Satiyomi.” See Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas sobre California,” 1874, MSS C-D 22, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California; Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos y Personales Tocante á la Alta California,” MSS C-D 19–21, the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California; Julio Carillo, “Narrative of Julio Carillo as Given by Him to Robert A. Thompson, Editor of the Santa Rosa Democrat,” MSS C-E 67, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. Because there were also Coast Miwok peoples in the area, it is possible that settlers also met resistance from them. 10. D. Davis, “Stories of Napa County.” 11. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 4–9. 12. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, xviii. 13. Census records for the Mexican era do not list Napa separately from Sonoma. From land records, we know that the Berryessas, Rodriguezes, Higueras, Friases, Juárezes, and the family of Salvador Vallejo settled in Napa prior to the U.S. invasion. Salvador Vallejo, the Juárezes, and “Don Cartareña” were noted for employing landless Californios as well as Indigenous peoples. It is unclear how many other landed families employed former soldiers and other landless workers. In addition to this, Edward Bale and George Yount both married Californianas and lived on their ranchos in Napa. See Harry Lawrence Gunn, History of Solano County and Napa County: From Their Earliest Time to the Present Time (Chicago: S. J. Clark Publishing Company, 1926); Rose, The Past Is Father of the Present; “Old Timer Recalls Napa,” Napa Recorder, October 6, 1915; Henry Cerruti, “Ramblings in California,” MSS C-E 115:25, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 14. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas sobre California”; Rosalía Vallejo de Leese, “History of the Bear Flag Party,” 1874, MSS C-E 65:10, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California; Rose, The Past Is Father of the Present, 5–12. 15. Ann duCille, Skin Trade (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 56; Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991), 60. 16. “Información sobre la legitimidad y limpieza de sangre de Don Ignacio Vicente Ferrer Vallejo,” MSS C-B 1:14–19; Alexander Hunter, Vallejo: A

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notes to pages 4 4–46

California Legend (Sonoma: Sonoma State Historic Park Association, 1992), 1–2; Rosaura Sánchez, Beatrice Pita, and Bárbara Reyes, eds., “Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo,” CRÍTICA (Spring 1994): 138. 17. Sister Mary Gene McNally, “Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s Relations with the Indians of California’s Northern Frontier, 1825–1842” (M.A. thesis, Dominican College of San Rafael, 1976), 1–2; Sánchez, Pita, and Reyes, 138; Madie Brown Emparan, The Vallejos of California (San Francisco: Gleeson Library Associates of the University of San Francisco, 1968), 1–3. 18. Emparan, 2; Alan Rosenus, General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1995), 3–5. 19. “[N]i mescala de Indios, Negros, Mulatos, y otras castas, o recien convertidos a Nuestra Santa Fe,” in “Información sobre la legitimidad y limpieza de sangre de Don Ignacio Vicente Ferrer Vallejo,” MSS C-B 1:14–19, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. See also Antonia Castañeda, “Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769–1848: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family,” in Contested Eden: California before the Goldrush, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 241–242. 20. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale, 1992), 19–21; Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 194–195. See also Ramón Gutiérrez, “Honor, Ideology, and Class-Gender Domination,” 81–104. 21. Jack D. Forbes, “Hispano-Mexican Pioneers of the San Francisco Bay Region: An Analysis of Racial Origins,” Aztlán 14, no. 1 (1983): 177–178; Haas, Conquests, 9–10; Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities, 9–10; Robert H. Jackson, Race, Caste, and Status: Indians in Colonial Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 4–12. 22. R. Douglass Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 7–14. 23. Ibid., 69–70. 24. Haas, 9–10; Sánchez, 9–10; Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 326–328; Antonia Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras: SpanishMexican Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770–1821” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford, 1990), 6. 25. Sister Mary Gene McNally, “Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s Relations,” 2–3; Hunter, Vallejo: A California Legend, 2–3. Northrop, 350–352. See also Emparan, 2–3. Emparan states that Vallejo delivered the baby. The only other source I have found with this claim, however, is Rosenus, which references Emparan. 26. McNally, 25–28; Rosenus, 7–16. 27. McNally, 48–79; George C. Yount, George C. Yount and His Chronicles of the West: Comprising Extracts from His “Memoirs” and from the Orange Clark Narrative, ed. Charles L. Camp (Denver: Old West Publishing Co., 1966), 131–132. 28. McNally, 74–75; Marcus Edmond Peterson, “The Career of Solano, Chief of the Suisuns” (M.A. thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1957), 22–23.

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notes to pages 47–49

189

There were two “Battles of Suscol.” The fi rst is the one recounted above, where the Suisun and others under Sem Yeto battled against Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. Years later, however, Sem Yeto and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo together defeated peoples who, under the leadership of Narciso, came to the Napa area to drive the Californios away. See Peterson, 59; George C. Yount, “Narrative as Told.” 29. Peterson, 22–23. Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Memoir of the Vallejos: New Light of the History, before and after the Gringos Came Based on Original Documents and Recollections of Dr. Platón Vallejo (1914; reprint, Fairfield: James D. Stevenson Publisher, 1994), 22–23. 30. Peterson, 23–24. 31. Note that in the Juárez family history of Vivien Juárez Rose, and in the interview of George C. Yount, housed at the Bancroft Library, neither Rose nor Yount writes of Vallejo as controlling the lives of nineteenth-century Californios. Instead, they write of him supporting the troops, facilitating land grants, and calling on the men of the area to fight against hostile Indian communities. In both accounts, Vallejo is written of as a respected patriarch. See Rose, The Past Is Father of the Present, and Yount, “Narrative as Told to Orange Clark.” For summaries of Vallejo’s control over Californios in northern Alta California, see Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities, 233–234. 32. “1790 Padrón de los vecinos del Presidio de San Francisco,” MSS CA50, 1:85–91, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California; “Presidio de San Francisco Lista de la Compañía, 1782,” in the Z. S. Eldredge collection, C-R9, Carton 3, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California; Forbes, “Hispano-Mexican Pioneers,” 178–186; Servín, “California’s Hispanic Heritage,” 119–133. 33. Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras,” 118. 34. Ibid., 144–145. 35. “1790 Padrón de los Vecinos del Presidio de San Francisco.” 36. Castañeda, 142–146; Servín, 122. 37. Castañeda, 156–158. 38. Forbes, 178. 39. Servín, 122. 40. Juárez Rose, The Past Is Father of the Present, 4–7; Rosenus, 15–16; Peterson, 22–23. 41. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier 1821–1846, 6. News could not be carried overland to California because the Yuma of the Colorado River area overthrew their would-be colonizers in 1781. This made it hazardous for Spanish and Mexican colonizers to travel through their region. 42. Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 15–16; David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 130–139; Antonio María Osio, The History of Alta California: A Memoir of a Mexican California, trans. and ed. Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

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190

notes to pages 50 –52

1996), 69–70; Steven W. Hackel, “Land, Labor, and Production: The Colonial Economy of Spanish and Mexican California,” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 129–136. 43. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas,” 35; Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 135–136. 44. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, xiii, 122–141; Hackel, 131–133; Sánchez, 169–170. 45. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 43–60; Ralph B. Wright, California’s Missions (1950; reprint, Arroyo Grande: Hubert A. Lowman, 1978), 93. 46. Wright, 93; Honoria Tuomey and Luisa Vallejo Emparan, History of the Mission Presidio and Pueblo of Sonoma (Santa Rosa: Press-Democrat Publishing, 1923), 2–15. 47. R. A. Thompson, The Russian Settlement in California: Fort Ross (Oakland: Biobooks, 1951), 6–42. Russians had visited the area around Bodega Bay prior to the establishment of Fort Ross. According to Thompson, in 1809 the Russian ship the Kodiak anchored at the bay for eight months. Its crew erected a few buildings, established friendly relations with local peoples, and trapped and traded for furs. The founding of the fort in 1812 was a return to the site where they had previously erected the buildings and established trade relations. Once the fort was built Comandante Arguello, of the San Francisco Presidio, sent an expedition to investigate the site. Other expeditions followed, including one led by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo in 1835. The founding of the mission in 1823, as well as the Sonoma Presidio and subsequent land grants in 1835, were attempts to block further Russian settlement in Alta California. 48. Alférez José Sánchez, Diario, 6 Julio 1823, MSS C-A 56: 145, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 49. Ibid., 145–148. See also Wright, 93–94; Milliken, A Time of Little Choice, 238. 50. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Historicas,” 34–39; Tuomey and Vallejo Emparan, 17–59; McNally, 26–27, 38–83. 51. “Información sobre la legitimidad y limpieza de sangre de Don Ignacio Vicente Ferrer Vallejo.” 52. Cope, 55–70; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 91–146; Gabriel Gutiérrez, “Bell Towers, Crucifi xes, and Cañones Violentos: State and Identity Formation in Pre-Industrial Alta California” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1997), 153–156, 179. 53. Yount, George C. Yount and His Chronicles, 121–132. See also Norton L. King, Napa County: An Historical Overview (Napa: Office of Napa County Superintendent of Schools, 1967), 11–17. 54. James A. Sandos, “Between Crucifi x and Lance: Indian-White Relations in California, 1769–1848,” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed.

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notes to pages 53–55

191

Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 216–218. 55. Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Memoir of the Vallejos, 45–46. Note that Vivien Juárez Rose’s account of the story has Cayetano Juárez coming to the rescue of Vallejo, rather than leading the desertion. Both the memoir of Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and the testimonio of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo contradict her narrative. Juárez Rose, 4–5. 56. Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 45–46. 57. Ibid., 46. 58. Ibid. 59. Dee T. Davis, History of Napa County (Napa: Napa County Superintendent of Schools, 1956), 11–12. 60. Yount, “Narrative as Told to Orange Clark.” 61. Juárez Rose, 23. 62. Based on presidio census records for 1782. “Presidio de San Francisco Lista de la Compañía, 31 Agosto de 1782,” and “Presidio de Monterey 31 Julio de 1782 Lista de la Companía del Referido Presidio,” in Z. S. Eldredge Collection, C-R 9, Carton 3, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. These records listed whether or not the soldier knew how to write. The literacy rate of 25 percent is for soldiers and not officers. Officers had a much higher literacy rate; three out of four officers at the San Francisco presidio could write. Four out of five officers at the Monterey Presidio were literate. 63. David Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 185–233, notes that education was highly valued under Mexican rule and that the government attempted to have schools established in all towns throughout the Republic. In the north this became more pragmatic after the colonists of the Hijar-Padres expedition arrived with twenty-two more schoolteachers. In addition, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo acquired a printing press in late 1836 (or early 1837), which was used, in part, to print schoolbooks. Stories of the Juárez children commuting in an ox-cart to attend school in Sonoma, where “one-hundred Spanish children went to learn,” further support the possibility that education became increasingly accessible to Californios under Mexican rule. See Juárez Rose, 24. See also Antonio Francisco Coronel, “Cosas de California,” MSS C-D 61: 1–14, the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 64. Juan Antonio Sánchez in Henry Cerruti, “Ramblings in California,” MSS C-E 115: 25, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 65. Josiah Beldon, “Testimonial,” MSS C-D 42, 1878, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 66. “Old Timer Recalls Napa,” Napa Recorder, October 6, 1915. 67. For the Juárez family, of Cayetano’s generation, only one person married a Euro-American. Of his children, many of whom were born post–U.S. invasion, seven out of eight children who married, married Euro-Americans. An interesting note is that Francesca Juárez, the youngest of the daughters, married

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notes to pages 55–58

Edward Bale, Jr., the son of María Soberanes and Edward Turner Bale. See Juárez Rose, 1–2. 68. Yount, “Narrative as Told to Orange Clark.” See also Rosaura Sánchez, 211–217, who argues that in such marriages women constituted human capital. 69. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 183. Weber cites A Journey to California, 1841 . . . The Journal of John Bidwell, ed. Francis P. Farquer (Berkeley, 1964), 45. Bidwell makes similar arguments in his article “Life in California before the Gold Discovery,” in Echoes of the Past (California: Resources Agency Department of Parks and Recreation, 1987), 163–183, fi rst published in the Century Magazine 41, no. 2 (December 1890). 70. Gabriel Gutiérrez, 319–323; Rosaura Sánchez, 198–217. 71. Sheila Skjeie, “Edward Turner Bale: A Pioneer Miller in the Napa Valley,” written and produced for the California Department of Parks and Recreation Interpretive Services, mimeographed, 1976, III-3–III-5. 72. Ibid.; Dean Albertson, “Dr. Edward Turner Bale,” California Historical Society Quarterly 28, no. 3 (September 1949): 263. Albertson notes that Bale had arranged to sell some mules to Ricardo. Ricardo paid the money for the mules but Bale never delivered them. When Ricardo requested that his money be returned, Bale refused—hence the lawsuit. 73. Skjeie, III-8. 74. Ibid., III-9; Albertson, 263; Edwin Louis Bruck, “Sketch of an Early California Doctor,” MSS C-D 5174: 5, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 75. Skjeie, III-9; Peterson, 69. 76. Peterson, 69. 77. Skjeie, III-9. According to Peterson, Bale was later tried and found guilty, but was set free because there were English ships along the Pacific coast and General Vallejo did not want the incident to turn into an international affair (see Peterson, 69). 78. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Historicos,” in CRÍTICA (September 1994): 140. “[P]ara ellos no existia mas ley que su voluntad o capricho, ni reconocían otro derecho que la fuerza.” 79. Skjeie, III-11; Bruck, 7. Bruck notes that Bale later enlisted as a volunteer surgeon under Fremont. 80. Rosaura Sánchez, 226. 81. R. F. Heizer and M. A. Whipple, eds., The California Indians: A Source Book (1951; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Laura F. Klein and Lillian A. Ackerman, eds., Women and Power in Native North America ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); T. Kroeber, The Inland Whale; Driver; A. L. Kroeber, The Patwin and Their Neighbors, 29, no. 4, of University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1932); Barrett, Ethno-geography; Ketteringham; Beard. 82. Milliken, “An Ethnohistory,” 214–217; Cook, The Conflict, 60, 174. 83. Milliken, A Time of Little Choice, 237–248.

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notes to pages 58–59

193

84. Rosaura Sánchez, 50–89; Albert Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). See also Cook; Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras.” 85. Pierre Vilar, Spain: A Brief History (1967; reprint, New York: Pergamon Press, 1977), 19–29; José Luis Arriaga, Juan Churruca, Guillermo Escartín, Xavier Moreno Lara, and Juan Ontza, Historia de España (Bilboa: Ediciones Mensajero, 1979), 105–120. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 16–24, and David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America. Weber argues that this homogeneity, especially in terms of political structure, provided Spanish colonizers with strategic advantages over most peoples of North America, who continued to base their political decisions in “a slow process of achieving consensus.” 86. Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” 60. Balibar’s theoretical discussion of race and nationalism helps to explain the relationship between Spain’s nationalism and the racial ideologies Spanish colonizers brought to Alta California. Balibar argued that racism often fi nds its roots in nationalism, because there is no such thing as an “a priori” national; the only way a “true national” can know himself or herself is through the defi nition of the “other.” Historically, this othering has been frequently tied to racism and to anti-Semitism. During the rise of nation-states throughout Europe, country after country focused on Jews as the other, a pattern that continued into the twentieth century, with Nazi Germany as the best-known occurrence in recent history. 87. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 40–41. 88. Campa, 15–25; Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12–14. If they and their rulers could agree that the peoples of the Americas had no souls, then they, as Christians, could take all the land they encountered and claim it as their own. If, however, the peoples of the Americas had souls and were capable of reason, then they would have a right to the land they inhabited. Spanish colonizers continued to use language describing American Indians as “beasts” even after their colonization of California in the eighteenth century. For example, Pedro Font, a missionary who accompanied Juan Bautista de Anza on his second expedition to Monterey, grudgingly acknowledged that the Indians had souls and were worthy of salvation, while commenting in his diary that “they do not even know the transitory conveniences of the earth in order to obtain them; nor much less, as it appeared to me from what I was able to learn from them, do they have any knowledge of the existence of God, but live like beasts, without making use of reason or discourse, and being distinguished from beasts only by possessing the bodily or human form, but not from their deeds.” From Pedro

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notes to pages 59 – 60

Font, Diary of the Anza Expedition, 110–112, cited in Heizer and Almquist, The Other Californians, 3. 89. David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 20. 90. R. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 194–195. See also Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 210; Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, 3. 91. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo began his military career under Spain and reached his height of power under the Mexican Republic. For works that focus on the role of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo in the colonization of northern Alta California, see Yount, George C. Yount and His Chronicles; Rosenus; Alexander Hunter, Vallejo: A California Legend; Emparan; Tuomey and Vallejo Emparan. There is even a children’s book available that celebrates Vallejo’s role in “developing” California: Esther J. Comstock, Vallejo and the Four Flags (Grass Valley: Comstock Bonanza Press, 1979). Vallejo and the Four Flags was still in print as of fall 2000 and was available at most state parks in northern California. 92. Yount, George C. Yount, 133. 93. Heizer and Almquist, The Other Californians, 1–3. Heizer and Almquist argue that the force used by Spanish colonizers was tied to their perception of California Indians as heathens in need of salvation. Their heathenism, then, justified their position of servitude. According to Ramón Gutiérrez, the colonizer’s enslavement of American Indians resulted in an association of dark skin with servitude. See Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 194–203. 94. See Sánchez, 57–61; Haas, 2, 30–32. 95. Sánchez, 57–61. 96. While there is a secondary account available on Sem Yeto (Peterson, “The Career of Solano, Chief of the Suisuns,”) the richest accounts of Sem Yeto’s life remain testimonios from the Vallejo family. See Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos y Personales”; Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Memoir of the Vallejos; Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas sobre California.” See also Yount, George C. Yount and His Chronicles. 97. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 177–178. For further discussion of colonization and honor see Ramón Gutiérrez, “Honor, Ideology, and ClassGender Domination,” 81–108. 98. There were very few exceptions to this rule, though a small number of women managed to cross this binary by passing as men. The most famous instance of this is a Spanish woman soldier in the Americas named Catalina de Erauso, who fled the convent before taking fi nal vows, cross-dressed, and lived and fought as a soldier in Peru. Even Erauso made it a point, in her memoir, to state that throughout her exploits, she kept her hymen intact. See Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 65–66. 99. Jeanne Vickers, Women and War (New Jersey: Zed Books, 1993), 21. According to Vickers, “Rape in war and civil disturbances seems endemic.”

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notes to pages 60 – 63

195

Soldiers use rape as a means of control and punishment over the enemy’s population; the failure of governments to take official action against soldiers for rape gives such actions the government’s sanction. 100. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 80. See also Trexler, Sex and Conquest; Albert Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 101. Castañeda, 88–89. In this instance the violence was brought to the attention of the California authorities because one of the girls died. That the girls were young, “pequeñas,” is noted in the military correspondence regarding the incident; see MSS C-A I:180, 1774, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 102. Castañeda, 88–89. 103. Ibid., 76–83. 104. Milliken, “An Ethnohistory,” 214–217. 105. Dee T. Davis, “Stories of Napa County,” 1–3. 106. Robert Heizer, ed., The Archeology of the Napa Region, 12, no. 6, of Anthropological Records (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 242–246. For discussions of hunting and gathering societies and territorialism, see Walter Goldschmidt, George Foster, and Frank Essene, “War Stories from Two Enemy Tribes,” in The California Indians: A Source Book, ed. R. F. Heizer and M. A. Whipple, 2nd edition rev. and enlarged (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 445–458; Robert Heizer and Albert Elsasser, The Natural World of the California Indians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 82–112. 107. Milliken, “An Ethnohistory,” 20. 108. Ibid., 305–321; Peterson, 7–10. 109. Davis, “Stories of Napa County,” 1–3. 110. Stephen Powers, Tribes of California (1877; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 200–203. According to the story, the community moved north to the Russian River area, but the region was so rich with brush and other vegetation that the geysers were not visible. Then one day, when two men were out hunting, they saw a bear. Both men shot at the bear and were able to wound it. The bear fled into the nearby thick brush and from there up a canyon. When the hunters caught up to the wounded bear, they found themselves standing in front of a field of seething geysers. Eventually, the community came to use the lower geysers for medicinal purposes. 111. Milliken, 210, 324–330. 112. Ibid., 117–133; Sherburne F. Cook, The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization, vol. 2 (1943; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 34–36; Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization, 15. 113. Milliken, 210. 114. Yount, George C. Yount, 132–136, 142; Yount, “Narrative as Told to Orange Clark,” MSS C-D 5189B: 70. It is interesting to note that anthropologist Randall Milliken argued that Indians were not brought to the mission by force.

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notes to pages 64– 66

Drawing on the research of Francis Guest, “An Examination of the Thesis of S. F. Cook on the Forced Conversion of Indians in the California Missions,” Southern California Quarterly 61 (1979): 1–77, Milliken held that because Cook mistranslated the word empresa for “impressment,” his thesis of forced conversion was flawed. As will be discussed below, however, documents from the archives of California explicitly recount instances where Californio soldiers forcibly took prisoners to the missions, where they were baptized (see Milliken, 213, n. 13). Documents for the history of Napa and the surrounding area also demonstrate that presidio soldiers took Indigenous people to the missions against their will. 115. For an account of Vallejo and his troops bringing Satiyomi people to Mission San Francisco Solano following their defeat in an 1832 battle, see Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas sobre California,” MSS C-D 22: 93–95. See also Yount, George C. Yount and His Chronicles, 132–136, 142; Yount, “Narrative as Told to Orange Clark,” MSS C-D 5189B: 70. 116. Milliken, A Time of Little Choice, 237–248; Cook, The Conflict between the California Indians and White Civilization, vol. 1, 174. 117. A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, 364–365, 379; A. L. Kroeber, The Patwin and Their Neighbors, 417–423; Loeb, The Western Kuksu Cult, 107. 118. François de la Pérouse, Monterey in 1786: Life in a California Mission (reprint, with an introduction by Malcolm Margolin, Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1989), 78. François de la Pérouse, a French visitor to Mission San Carlos, in what is today called Monterey county, commented on the pictures that flanked the altar in the mission chapel: to the one side was a picture of paradise, to the other a depiction of hell. It was the picture of hell, however, that Pérouse most remembered. He wrote in his journal that it reminded him of the work of Jacques Callot, the seventeenth-century engraver who was infamous for his depictions of the horrors of war and of the macabre. For secondary accounts that discuss Roman Catholic teachings and California Indians, see Jackson and Castillo, Indians, Franciscans and Spanish Colonization, 52. 119. Sánchez, 50–53. For Sánchez, the missions are “heterotopias,” places of crisis where contradictory discourses exist and where the sites themselves are reflective of and constitutive of social and economic relations outside of the site. See also Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24–27. 120. Pérouse, 88–89. 121. Louis Choris, in August C. Mahr, The Visit of the “Rurik” to San Francisco in 1816 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1932), 96–97; Sánchez, 85–86. See also Heizer and Almquist, The Other Californians, 10. Heizer and Almquist cite an account by Julio Cesar, a California Indian youth, who sang at mass at Mission San Luis Rey. 122. Tuomey and Vallejo Emparan, 17–18. 123. Adelbert von Chamisso, in Mahr, The Visit of the “Rurik,” 81–83. 124. Pérouse, 93.

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notes to pages 66 – 68

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125. McNally, 139; Sherburne F. Cook, vol. 1, 153. 126. Chamisso, 81–83. 127. Ibid., 83. 128. See, for example, Cook, The Conflict, vol. 1; Sánchez, 69, 88; Malcolm Margolin, introduction to Pérouse, Monterey in 1786, 193–199; Sandos, “Between Crucifi x and Lance,” 215–216. 129. Cook, vol. 1, 19–20. 130. Sandos, 215–216. Historians and ethnographers have not reached a consensus on what disease spread throughout Alta California at this time. Some argue it was malaria, yet it is unlikely that malaria would have been carried south (from colder climates). 131. Sherburne Cook, The Epidemic of 1830–1833 in California and Oregon, 43, no. 3, of University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 321–322. 132. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Historicas sobre California,” 45. 133. Yount, “Narrative as Told to Orange Clark,” 61–62. 134. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas sobre California,” 83–95; Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 22; Peterson, 12–20; McNally, 74–75; Cayetano Juárez, “A Few Notes Referring to Cayetano Juárez, Captain of California’s Militia in 1841,” MSS C-E 67: 1, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 135. Julio Carillo, “Narrative of Julio Carillo as Given by Him to Robert A. Thompson, Editor of the Santa Rosa Democrat,” MSS C-E 67: 8, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 136. Beard, 43; Elsasser and Heizer, The Natural World of the California Indians, 19–22; Barrett, Ethno-geography, 271; Toledo, “Native Americans of the Napa Valley.” Note that while Carillo says the Satiyomi are Guapo peoples, Earl Couey, Wappo tribal consultant and historian in the later twentieth century, stated that the name “Satiyomi” made no sense in Wappo. Couey interview. It is possible, then, that the Satiyomi were not Wappo; that Satiyomi was the Patwin or the Coast Miwok name for Wappo communities; or that Satiyomi is just a very bad and corrupted transliteration of what some Wappo communities were called in the early nineteenth century. 137. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas sobre California,” 86; Peterson, 25. 138. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos y Personales Tocante á la Alta California,” 10; Peterson, 35–38. 139. Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 12–18, 120. 140. Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 51–52; Peterson, 31–32, 45. 141. Peterson, 41. 142. Secularization of most Alta California Missions began in 1834, by order of Governor Figueroa. For Mission San Francisco Solano, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was placed in charge of the mission’s secularization and distribution of the mission’s cattle and land to Christianized Indians. See Weber, The Mexican

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notes to pages 69 –77

Frontier, 51–66; Sánchez, 122–159. That the mission had yet to be fully dismantled as late as 1839 is clear from correspondence by Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado to William Hartnell, Visitor General to the Missions, who continued to visit San Francisco Solano at that time. See “Letter from Juan Bautista Alvarado to the Visitor General of the Missions,” MSS C-B 7: 277, and “Letter from Alvarado to Hartnell,” MSS C-B 6: 473, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 143. Dorotea Valdez, testimonio in “Sketches of California Pioneers,” MSS C-E 65, folder 8, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 144. Sandos, 215. 145. Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 51–52; Peterson, 45. 146. Yount, George C. Yount and His Chronicles, 153–154; Beard, 35; McNally, 131. 147. McNally, 131–132. 148. As early as 1835 many ranchos in the Napa area exploited Indian labor. It was estimated that fifty to one hundred Wappo-speaking people lived and worked on Edward Turner Bale’s rancho, another four hundred people on the Camus Rancho, and six hundred on Salvador Vallejo’s hacienda. See Beard, 35. 149. Mrs. Juárez Metcalf, interview, 1894, MSS C-R 5, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.

source break: bear flag narr atives 1. Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Memoirs of the Vallejos, 67–69. 2. Thomas Jefferson Gregory and Other Well Known Writers, History of Solano and Napa Counties, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1912), 46. 3. Rosalía Vallejo de Leese, dictation, “History of the Bear Flag Party.”

chapter three 1. See, for example, the Napa Valley Register for any year. June of 1996 contains numerous dominant narratives, in part because it marked the 150th anniversary of the event. 2. Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras,” 9–27. 3. Acuña, Occupied America. 4. Mike White, “Protests Planned at Revolt Celebration,” Napa Valley Register, Sunday, June 2, 1996, 1D. 5. Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras.” 6. Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities; Padilla, My History, Not Yours. 7. In 1834, shortly after the Centralists took power of the federal government, they reorganized the former territories of Mexico into departments— some argue, in order to gain better control over frontier lands. Each department was organized into districts. In Alta California, both Napa and Sonoma were

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199

part of the District of Sonoma. Each district was supposed to be governed by a prefect who answered to the governor. The governors sent to California by Mexico, both Mariano Chico and Nicolás Gutiérrez, proved unacceptable to the Californios, resulting in political unrest and eventually revolts. See Rosaura Sánchez, 237–238; David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 32–33; Monroy, Thrown among Strangers, 126. 8. Rosaura Sánchez, 252–254; David J. Weber, 267, 12; Bancroft, History of California, 5: 138 n. 21. Sánchez argues that even Vallejo, who remains notorious for advocating annexation to the United States, worried about possible dispossession and violence by the United States. Weber notes that Californios and Mexicanos spoke about the United States as a threat throughout this period. Weber writes that in a Chihuahua newspaper one writer warned that if the United States were to annex the northern territories, Mexican citizens would be treated “as beasts” because “their color was not as white as that of the conquerors.” As early as 1822 Mexico’s fi rst minister to the United States had warned his countrymen that “the haughtiness of these Republicans does not permit them to look upon us as equals but as inferior; their conceit extends itself . . . to believe that their capital will be that of all the Americas.” At the time of the incident, according to Bancroft, Pío Pico warned, “The North American nation can never be our friend. She has laws, religion, language, and customs totally opposed to ours. False to the most loyal friendship which Mexico has lavished upon her, to international schemes, she has stolen the department of Texas, and wishes to do the same with that of California—thus to iniquitously dismember the Mexican territory, to tarnish the flag of the tres garantías and raise her own, increasing the number of its fatal stars.” 9. Rosaura Sánchez, 125. 10. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 189. 11. Osio, The History of Alta California, 212–215. 12. Ibid., 215–221. For secondary accounts of Micheltorena, see David Weber, 269–270; Rosaura Sánchez, 244–245; Monroy, 175. 13. Bureau of the Census, 1850 Census of Napa County; Lin Weber, Old Napa Valley: The History to 1900 (St. Helena: Wine Ventures Publishing, 1998), 48; Elsie Currey and Rebecca Yerger, “Pioneer Women of the Napa Valley: The Feminine Role and Influence in the History of Napa Valley” (Historical Fact Sheet printed to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Napa [Napa, 1997]); for the larger region beyond Napa, see David J. Weber, 202. 14. Dale L. Walker, Bear Flag Rising: The Conquest of California, 1846 (New York: Forge, 1999), 46–50, 65–90; Bancroft, History of California, 5, 104; McKittrick, 198–211. 15. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos y Personales,” MSS C-D 19:383–384. 16. Lin Weber, 36–37. 17. Gabriel Gutiérrez, “Bell Towers, Crucifi xes, and Cañones Violentos,” 322–337.

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notes to pages 79 –82

18. McKittrick, 197; Lin Weber, 44. 19. Lin Weber, 45. 20. Ibid., 51. 21. Ibid., 49–53. 22. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos y Personales,” 388– 390. 23. Lin Weber, 54. 24. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos,” MSS C-D 21: 119; Walker, 43–45. 25. Lin Weber, 79. 26. Walker, 120–123; Lin Weber, 79; Virginia Hanrahan, “Napa County History, 1823–1848,” mimeographed, 1948, Napa County Public Library. 27. John Eagan, “Gathering the Flocks,” Napa Valley Register, November 7, 1998, 4–5. Napa County Historical Society 50th Anniversary Special Edition. 28. Lin Weber, 45. 29. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos,” 338–390; Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas,” 102–103; Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 60; Nicolas Carriger interview in Cerruti, 45. 30. McKittrick, 198–199. 31. Ibid., 240. 32. David J. Weber, 202. 33. Lisbeth Haas, “War in California, 1846–48,” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 336. Haas draws in part on Reginald Horsman, who argued that the white supremacy of the new immigrants had roots in Northern Europe but was fueled and changed in the United States, where it was used to justify nineteenth-century U.S. expansionism. See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 116–138. See also Takaki, Iron Cages, 154– 164, and Heizer and Almquist, The Other Californians, 138–142. 34. Lin Weber, 44–46. 35. Bancroft, History of California, 5: 102–104; see also Haas, “War in California,” 337–339; Horace Davis, “The Oregon Trail,” in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1910), 28–30. Davis states that Frémont was in the area with the U.S. Army Topographical Engineers and that he received the work through the intervention of his father-in-law, Senator Benton. He also asserts that Frémont carried a howitzer with him on his tour of Alta California. 36. Bancroft, History of California, 5: 103. 37. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos,” 111–119. For the Californios, the term Bear was not neutral. As pointed out by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, bears were a threat to the economy of Alta California; they destroyed cattle and remained a dangerous threat to the people of the area. Vallejo also refers to the Osos as “the bandits,” los salteadores.

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notes to pages 82–84

201

38. Robert Semple, in Monterey Californian, September 5, 1846, cited by McKittrick, 261. 39. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos,” 111–112; Salvador Vallejo, 101–102. 40. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos,” 111–113; McKittrick, 147; for details on Leese’s immigrant origins, see Lin Weber, 36–37. 41. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 111–113. Vallejo is careful to point out that Bolieu was a Canadian immigrant, not Californio and not Euro-American. The divide during the incident was primarily Euro-American versus Californio, though some naturalized Mexican citizens sided with the Californios, and a small number of immigrants from countries outside the United States sided with the filibusters. 42. Rosalía Vallejo de Leese, “History of the Bear Flag Party,” 1874, C-E 65:10, the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. According to Vallejo de Leese, Pepe de la Rosa ran to her house to let her know that the trappers had surrounded her parents’ residence. When she rushed out of her home to see if her family was safe, she saw Kelsey trying to kill her uncle “in cold blood.” 43. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos,” 113. 44. Ibid., 113–115. Vallejo notes that the “bear” looked more like a hog than a bear. Others, viewing the flag in the twentieth century, have reached similar conclusions. See Mike White, “The Fat Hamster That Roared: Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Bear Flag Revolt,” Napa Valley Register, June 2, 1996, 1D. 45. Dee Davis, History of Napa County, 25–26; Betty Malmgren and Rebecca Yerger, “Bear Flag Revolt: The Story of the Founders of the City of Napa,” Fact Sheet Printed to Commemorate the 150th Anniversary of Napa (Napa, 1997). 46. Thomas Jefferson Gregory, History of Solano and Napa Counties, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1912), 46; see also Bear Flag, “Reminiscences of ‘Old Times,’ ” Napa County Reporter, June 15, 1861, 1; White, “The Fat Hamster That Roared,” 1; Rebecca Yerger, “Of Pioneers and ‘Petticoat Bears,’ ” Napa Valley Register, June 2, 1996, 1. For a critique of nineteenthcentury romanticizations of the incident, see Padilla, especially chap. 1. 47. Rachel Elizabeth Cyrus Wright, “Early Upper Napa Valley” (California State University Stanislaus Library, 1974, photocopy); Virginia Hanrahan, “Historical Napa Valley” (Napa County Library, California, 1948, mimeographed). It is interesting that most Euro-American accounts that acknowledge the violent acts of the Kelseys and other Missouri immigrants remain unpublished. 48. William Ralganal Benson, “The Stone and Kelsey Massacre,” in The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs and Reminiscences, ed. Malcolm Margolin (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1981), 166–173; Hanrahan, “Historical Napa Valley,” 93–97. The deaths of Stone and Kelsey gave rise to one of the largest massacres of Indians in the history of northern California. 49. For examples of the happy imprisonment myth, see Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision, 1846 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1943), 219–221;

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202

notes to pages 84–87

Thomas Jefferson Gregory, et al., History of Solano and Napa Counties, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1912), 45–48. 50. Bancroft, 5: 124–125. For a discussion of the biases of Bancroft and his assistants, see Sánchez, 2–49; Padilla, chap. 1; Haas, Conquest and Historical Identities, 171–174. 51. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, MSS C-D 21: 128. According to Vallejo, Carillo was traveling under a passport issued by Lieutenant Mifron of the United States; that the Osos imprisoned him was yet another indication that they were not operating under the laws of any country. 52. Victor Prudón to Thomas Oliver Larkin, in George P. Hammond, ed., The Larkin Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 5: 156–157. “Nuestra prisión y todo qe se le ha seguido, forma una historia demasiado larga pa ponerla aquí, y solo dire qe es lamentable nuestra situación, pues qe se ha aumentado el horror de la prisión con una incomunicación absoluta, de suerte qe ni nosotros sabiamos lo qe pasaba fuera de aquí, ni nadie sabia lo qe habia sucedido con nosotros.” 53. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, MSS C-D 21: 115–116. 54. Rosalía Leese de Vallejo, MSS C-E 65: 10. 55. Osio, The History of Alta California, 223. Osio argues that it was this event that turned Don José Castro, Don Ángel’s nephew, against Frémont. When news of the attempted assault reached him in Monterey, Don José planned an attack against Frémont. It was because of this, Osio argued, that Frémont entrenched himself in the Natividad Mountains. See also Walker, 93. 56. Because the attempted rape occurred in March, several months before the Bear Flag incident, and because the Castros were a landed family, there is a strong chance that the Californios in the Sonoma and Napa Valleys heard about it prior to the arrival of Frémont’s men in their area. 57. Juárez Rose, The Past Is Father of the Present, 132–133. 58. Ibid., 6. 59. Salvador Vallejo, MSS C-D 22: 115–116. 60. Bancroft, 5: 160–161; Sánchez, 265; Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 30. 61. Bureau of the Census, 1880 Census of Napa County. For the Napa Census of 1880 I counted anyone with a Spanish surname, anyone who was born in Mexico, and/or anyone for whom one or more parents was born in Mexico as of Mexican origin or Mexican descent. All persons with Spanish surnames, coincidentally, were either born in Mexico or California. While the Berryessas were originally categorized as “Indian” by the census taker, their race was changed to “white” in the same hand that wrote the original “I.” Why the census taker originally categorized the Berryessas as Indian, and why he recategorized them as white, is not certain. 62. Pitt, 31.

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63. Ibid., 173. 64. “Grand Jury Report,” Napa Reporter, September 12, 1863, 1; “Court of Sessions,” Napa Reporter, December 19, 1863, 3. 65. The 1880 census records members of the Berryessa family holding land just north of Yountville. None of the names listed in the census matches any of those associated with the Mallacomes grant, the original piece of land owned by the family in Napa. The land, however, was part of the original grant. According to Gunn, History of Solano County and Napa County, 2: 271–272, José Santos Berryessa was granted Rancho Mallacomes by the then governor of California, Manuel Micheltorena, in October of 1843. While Euro-Americans successfully claimed 2,559.94 acres of the northwest portion of the property, the Berryessas filed a claim for the land in 1852 and their claim was confirmed in 1854. They never recovered the northwest portion of the property from the squatters. Rancho Las Putas was granted to José Jesus Berryessa and Sisto Berryessa in November of 1843. In May of 1852 their wives, María Anastasia Higuera de Berryessa and María Nicolosa de Berryessa, filed petitions as claimants. Their claim was confi rmed by the land board in 1852 and upheld by the appeals court in 1855. Court fees and debt continued to eat away at the grants until by 1895, according to districting maps at the Napa County Planning Office, the Berryessas were dispossessed of all landholdings in Napa. 66. This is because the Patwin formed alliances with the Spanish shortly after their arrival in the Sonoma and Napa Valleys. Because of this, they were welcomed at the Sonoma Presidio and often served as soldiers with the presidio army. See Peterson, “The Career of Solano, Chief of the Suisuns”; Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. 67. For a discussion of violence and conquest see Castañeda, “Presidarias y Pobladoras,” 27–89; Antonia Castañeda, “Sexual Violence in the Politics and Policies of Conquest: Amerindian Women in the Spanish Conquest of Alta California,” in Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatríz M. Pesquera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Vickers, Women and War; Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy; Trexler, Sex and Conquest. 68. Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 71–73; Peterson, “The Career of Solano, Chief of the Suisuns.” 69. Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 73. 70. Salvador Vallejo, MSS C-D 22: 149–150. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 133. 73. Here, the historical pattern is reflective of what Albert Camarillo found in his study of Santa Barbara rather than that which Tomás Almaguer found in his study of racial and ethnic confl ict in California. Almaguer argued that Californios were not relegated to the bottom of the social order. Instead, they came to inhabit a middle ground where they did not necessarily have the status of

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notes to pages 89 – 91

Anglo-Americans, but where they were not discriminated against as harshly as other groups such as Chinese immigrants. Discriminatory practices against working-class ethnic Mexicans, according to Almaguer, become common only after large numbers of ethnic Mexican immigrants arrived in California, thus providing a threat to white labor. In the nineteenth century, he argues, ethnic tensions were rooted in class-specific struggles between Californio landholders and Euro-American capitalists. See Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 63–73. Camarillo found a different pattern in Santa Barbara. He found that most landholders were dispossessed and the majority of ethnic Mexicans faced overt discrimination in nineteenth-century Santa Barbara. He also found that less than 5 percent of the population was able to assimilate into middle-class Euro-American society. According to Camarillo this small group was from the landed classes of California. As part of their strategies for survival, they made use of a romanticized “Spanish” tradition to maintain acceptability. See Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society, 69–70. 74. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 35–36, 48–82. 75. Ibid., 83–86; Griswold Del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 73–75; Sánchez, 275–279. 76. Pitt, 86. 77. Beard, The Wappo: A Report, 36; Cerruti, “Rambling in California,” 1874, MSS C-E 115: 61. See also Pitt, 36–96. 78. For land grant histories see Lyman L. Palmer, A History of Napa and Lake Counties, California (San Francisco: Slocum, Bowen and Co., 1881); 1895 Districting Map of Napa County, Napa County Planning Office. 79. Bureau of the Census, 1860 Census of Napa County. 80. “Lynch Law,” Napa Reporter, May 9, 1863, 2. 81. Letter, George W. Harrison to Captain DuPont, March 17, 1847, as reprinted in Heizer, Destruction of California Indians: A Collection of Documents from the Period 1847 to 1865 in Which Are Described Some of the Things That Happened to Some of the Indians of California (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1974), 6. 82. Yount, “Narrative as Told to Orange Clark,” 78. 83. Ibid., 85–86. 84. “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,” sections 3, 14, and 20, as reprinted in Heizer, Destruction of the California Indians, 220–224. 85. “Amendments to the Act of April 1850,” section 3, as reprinted in Heizer, 224–225. 86. Beard, 36–39. 87. “Newspaper Article,” San Francisco, 1861, in Heizer, 241; “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, April 22, 1850,” section 6, in Heizer, 221. 88. Beard, 38. According to Beard, the prevalence of rape, kidnapping, and forced labor contributed to practices of infanticide.

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89. Sánchez, 58–59; “Información sobre la legitimidad y limpieza de sangre de Don Ignacio Vicente Ferrer Vallejo,” MSS C-B 1:14–19; Hunter, Vallejo: A California Legend, 1–2; Sánchez, Pita, and Reyes, 138. 90. Here I use hispanophobia in the same sense that Raymund Paredes uses it in “The Origins of Anti-Mexican Sentiment in the United States.” Paredes uses the term to describe irrational fear/dislike for anything related to Spain—race, culture, and so on. With such fears, mestizaje is also viewed as an evil threat. Raymund Paredes, “The Origins of Anti-Mexican Sentiment in the United States,” New Scholar 6 (1977): 139–157. 91. The origins of the racial slur “greaser” later became an important issue in the testimonios of the Vallejo men. See Salvador Vallejo, 122–124; Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 21. While Salvador and Platón both had theories regarding its origins, I was not able to fi nd a consensus. According to Salvador Vallejo, there were two possible origins to the word. The fi rst of these had more to do with the Missouri insurrectionists than with the Californios. In this origins story, the Missourians who came to the Napa-Sonoma area were very dirty people. By the time they arrived over the Sierra Nevada, their hands, faces, clothes, and mattresses were all a greasy mess, and so the Cainameros, allies of the Californios, came to call them mantecosos, “greasers.” The Missourians, once they gained power in numbers, began to call the Indigenous peoples the same, and because they lumped the Californios together with the California Indians, the name was applied to both. In the other origins story, working-class Californios and Mexicanos were forced to work greasing the wheels of American soldiers during the U.S. war, and so the “soldiers of Uncle Sam” came to call all Mexicanos and Californios “greasers.” According to Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the slur had its origins in the hide and tallow trade of early California. In this origins story, tallow and hide merchants were referred to as mantequeros, or “grease merchants.” English-speaking people transposed this into greaser, and considered the label a compliment both for themselves and for others. It was much later that Euro-Americans used the word as a slur against Californios and Mexicanos. 92. Paredes, 139–143, 156–157. Paredes argues that Robertson’s History of America, which characterized the population of Mexico as comprised of two inferior races, was the most popular study of its kind until Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. Robertson’s work was also serialized in periodicals throughout the United States. 93. Lin Weber, 44–46. 94. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 14–23; Charles B. Churchill, “Thomas Jefferson Farnham: An Exponent of American Empire in Mexican California,” Pacifi c Historical Review 60, no. 4 (November 1991): 517–537. 95. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (reprint, New York: World Publishing Co., 1946), 90. While at times Dana evaluates the Californios in a positive light, giving them attributes

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notes to pages 92– 97

such as “beautiful voices,” when he compares them to Yankees he insists upon their inferiority. His harshest words, however, are reserved for men whom he meets in Chile. It was of them that he wrote, “The men appeared to be the laziest people upon the face of the earth; and indeed, as far as my observation goes, there are no people to whom the newly-invented Yankee word of ‘loafer’ is more applicable than to the Spanish Americans” (Dana, 90–96, 60). 96. Bancroft, History of California, 5: 156.

chapter four 1. Osio, The History of Alta California, 223; Marie E. Northrop, SpanishMexican Families of Early California: 1769–1850, vol. 1 (Burbank: Southern California Genealogical Society, 1987), 95, 107. 2. Juárez Rose, The Past Is Father of the Present, 1–3. 3. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas sobre California,” 133. 4. Osio, 223. 5. Rosalia Vallejo de Leese, “History of the Bear Party,” 10; Padilla, My History, Not Yours, 148–149. 6. González, Refusing the Favor, 3–11; Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary, 22–27. 7. McKittrick, Vallejo, Son of California; McNally, “Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s Relations with the Indians of California’s Frontier 1825–1842.” 8. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father of the Present, and Yount, “Narrative as Told to Orange Clark; Sánchez, 233–234; Alan Rosenus, General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1995), 13–22. 9. Sánchez, Telling Identities, 57–61; Haas, Conquests, 2, 30–32. 10. Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Memoirs of the Vallejos. 11. For an account of artisans arriving with the Híjar-Padrés expedition, see Coronel, “Cosas de California,” MSS C-D 61: 1–14. According to Coronel, Vallejo deported the leadership of the expedition, but the settlers, including teachers and artisans, settled in towns throughout the area. 12. Juan Antonio Sánchez, in Henry Cerruti, “Ramblings in California,” 25; Josiah Beldon, “Testimonial,” 1878, MSS C-D 42 Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 13. Enloe, Maneuvers, 3. 14. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 24–25, 36. See also Heizer and Almquist, The Other Californians, 17–22; Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities, 62–88; Hackel, “Land, Labor, and Production,” in Contested Eden. 15. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 6. 16. Roy L. Juárez, San Rafael Independent, March 25, 1950. 17. “1790 Padrón de los vecinos del Presidio de San Francisco,” MSS CA50, 1:85–91, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California; “Presidio de San Francisco Lista de la Compañía, 1782, in the Z. S. Eldredge collection, C-R9, Carton 3, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.

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notes to pages 97–102

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18. Castañeda, “Engendering History,” 243; David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 324–325. 19. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 17. 20. For these later land grants see Palmer, History of Napa and Lake Counties, and A Napa County History (Office of Napa County Superintendent of Schools, 1956), 10–13. 21. For a more detailed discussion of the family as corporate institution see Castañeda, “Engendering History,” 238–252; Sánchez, Telling Identities, 191–227. 22. Isabel O. Burr, “Interview with Mrs. Guarez [sic] Metcalf,” 1894, MSS C-R5, Box W85–052, Mary Barns, Miscellaneous Folder; Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 31, 36. 23. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 32–33. 24. Ibid., 12, 32; see Weber (216) for a discussion of Californianas with similar routines. 25. Enloe, Maneuvers, xii, 3. 26. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 4. 27. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas sobre California,” 1874, MSS C-D 22: 104. 28. Sánchez, Telling Identities, 155, 191. See also Apolinaria Lorenzana, “Memorias,” in Crítica (Spring 1994), 12; Juárez Rose, 12, 32. 29. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 5, 12, 23. 30. Heizer and Elsasser, The Natural World of the California Indians, 3–5, 41–44. 31. Calkins, The Wappo People, 25; Sarris, 53. 32. Albert Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, 2–10; Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 23–25. 33. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 17–23. 34. Burr, “Interview with Mrs. Guarez Metcalf.” 35. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 32. 36. Ibid., 1–2. 37. David Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 218; Oakah L. Jones, Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 219; Castañeda, “Engendering History,” 244; Sánchez, Telling Identities, 190–194. 38. Castañeda, “Engendering History,” 244. 39. For recent discussion of patriarchy, reproduction, and colonization, see Madhu Dubey, “The ‘True Lie’ of the Nation: Fanon and Feminism,” Differences 19 (Summer 1998): 1–29. 40. For a detailed account of Californianas as objects of exchange between corporate families, see Sánchez, Telling Identities, 191–226. 41. “Death of Mrs. Frias,” Napa County Reporter, December 11, 1891, 6. 42. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas,” 22; see Castañeda, “Engendering History,” 241–242, for the origins of the certificate. 43. Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination; Forbes, “Hispano-Mexican Pio-

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notes to pages 102–106

neers of the San Francisco Bay Region,” 175–189; Servín, “California’s Hispanic Heritage,” 119–131. 44. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 2. 45. “Padrón de los vecinos del Presidio de San Francisco, 1790”; Forbes, 175–176; Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 1–3. 46. Forbes, “Hispano-Mexican Pioneers,” 178. See Jones, Paisanos, and Sánchez, Telling Identities. 47. Haas, 9–10; Sánchez, Telling Identities, 9–10. See also Jackson, Race, Caste, and Status, 4–12; Jones, Paisanos, 219. 48. Platón Vallejo, Memoirs of the Vallejos, 46. Platón states that General Vallejo explicitly granted Napa land to Juárez so that he would “help us civilize this fi ne country.” 49. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 4; see also McNally, Vallejo’s Relations. 50. A search of “California Mission Records, 1778–1912,” trans. Ramón Felipe Preciado, and “An Alphabetized Listing of the California Mission Vital Record,” compiled by Thomas Workman, II (Genealogical Society of Utah), did not list any Enrique Licaldo. Several families by the name of Lisalde lived in Alta California, but no one named Enrique Lisalde or Licaldo. 51. José Limón, “La Llorona, the Third Legend of Greater Mexico: Cultural Symbols, Women, and the Political Unconscious,” in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida R. De Castillo (Encino: Floricanto Press, 1990), 407–409; Ana María Carbonell, “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros,” MELUS 24, no. 2 (1999): 53, 64. 52. Tey Diana Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 76. 53. Miguel Leon-Portillo, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (1962; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Castañeda et al., eds., Literatura Chicana: Texto y Contexto (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972); José Limón and Robert Franklin Gish, Beyond Boundaries: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano Literature (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 110–127. 54. Castañeda et al., Literatura Chicana, 97–101; Rebolledo, Women Singing, 62–64. 55. Limón, “La Llorona,” 413–427. 56. Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military, 18–25, 120. 57. Platón Vallejo, Memoirs, 30–33. See also McKittrick, Vallejo, 188. 58. “Old Timer Recalls Napa,” Napa Recorder, October 6, 1915. 59. Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 17. 60. “1790 Padrón de los Vecinos del Presidio de San Francisco.” 61. Enloe, Maneuvers, 153–188. 62. Platón Vallejo, Memoirs, 45–46; Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 4–5. 63. Platón Vallejo, Memoirs, 30.

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64. Salas, 18–25, 120–121; Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 32–33. 65. Platón Vallejo, Memoirs, 30–33. 66. Ibid., 45–46; Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 4–5; Dee T. Davis, History of Napa County, 11–12; Yount, “Narrative as Told to Orange Clark,” MSS C-D 5189B: 66. 67. McKittrick, Vallejo, 188, 192. 68. McNally, Vallejo’s Relations, 74–75; Peterson, “The Career of Solano, Chief of the Suisuns,” 21–25; Platón Vallejo, Memoirs, 22–23; George C. Yount, “Narrative,” 66–71. 69. Isidora Filomena Solano, “Testimonio,” 1874, MSS C-E 65:12, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 70. For Californio testimonios as resistance see Padilla, My History, Not Yours, preface and 4–16; Sánchez, Telling Identities, preface. 71. See Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero, Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 17–18. 72. Isidora Filomena Solano, “Testimonio.” 73. Ibid. 74. See, for example, Castañeda, “Engendering History.” 75. Peterson, “Career of Solano,” 25. 76. Isidora Solano, “Testimonio.” 77. Hurtado, Indian Survival, 25; Castañeda, “Sexual Violence,” 15–29. 78. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Historicas,” 47; Cayetano Juárez, “A Few Notes Referring to Cayetano Juárez, Captain of California’s Militia in 1841,” MSS C-E 67: 3, also contains accusations of Mercado behaving immorally with women, though it is unclear if he is referring to Californianas or California Indian women. 79. Salvador Vallejo, “Notas Históricas,” 97–98; Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Recuerdos Históricos y Personales Tocante á la Alta California,” MSS C-D 19: 329–341; see also Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, circular, 1838, on fi le at the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California; McNally, 86–89. 80. Cook, Conflict, 16–54, and The Epidemic of 1830–1833; Sánchez, Telling Identities, 69, 88; Malcolm Margolin, Introduction to Pérouse, Monterey in 1786, 20–36; Milliken, A Time of Little Choice, 193–199; Sandos, “Between Crucifi x and Lance,” 215–216. 81. Cook, Conflict, 19–20. 82. Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, 27.

source break: the white mind 1. 2. 3. 4.

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“To the White Men of America,” Napa County Reporter, July 18, 1868, 1. “John Chinaman’s Jubilee,” Napa County Reporter, June 12, 1869, 1. “Negroes in Our Schools,” Napa County Reporter, August 3, 1872, 1. Napa County Reporter, June 22, 1867, 3.

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notes to pages 116 –118

chapter five 1. For studies of this historical phenomenon at the national level, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995). 2. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 81–83. 3. See for example Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Renan, “What Is a Nation?.” 4. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 130–131, 145–146; Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 210; Memmi, 52. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argued that colonizers use history to control the colonized. By distorting and erasing the histories of the oppressed, the oppressors can claim to be their saviors, bringing progress and civilization to a people who had none. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon further developed this theory, arguing that in order to prevent blacks from rebuilding, reconstructing themselves, the French also took away their cultural tools and replaced them with artifacts that were necessarily racist. The only way that colonized Blacks could then reconstruct themselves was in the image of the colonizer. For a discussion of invented traditions, holidays, and symbols, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 5. See especially Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990), 269–347. For discussions of mid-nineteenth century political parties and racism, see also Roediger, 65–92 and 133–163, and Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 6. Meier and Rivera, The Chicanos, 70. See also Acuña, Occupied America, 12–24. 7. Saxton, The Rise and Fall, 321–347; Takaki, Iron Cages, 80–193. 8. For literature on the attempted extension of citizenship rights to freedmen, and the white backlash that followed, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (1935; reprint, New York: Meridian Books, 1962); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 9. For the Chinese Exclusion Act, see Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 110–116, and Chan, Asian Californians, 50–51. For information on Croly, see Werner Sollors, “National Identity and Ethnic Diversity: ‘Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island’: or Ethnic Literature and Some Redefi nitions

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211

of ‘America,’ ” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 93. 10. Sollors, 93–102. Sollors notes that they also founded the Society of the Mayflower just four years later (1894). 11. New York Tribune, September 16, 1906. Cited in Identity, Community, and Pluralism in American Life, ed. William C. Fischer, David A. Gerber, Jorge M. Guitart, and Maxine S. Seller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 7–8. Clearly, the dominant population of the United States did not feel their efforts were fully successful, or the restrictive immigration acts of 1921 and 1924 would not have passed. Yet the quotas imposed on peoples immigrating from Southern and Eastern Europe did not compare with the draconian Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, or the continued ban on citizenship for non-white immigrants. 12. Fischer et al., 8–10. 13. Programs, Teacher’s Institute of Napa County, 1897–1906, Microfilm, California State Archives, Sacramento, California. Programs are not available for earlier years. 14. Program, Teacher’s Institute of Napa County, 1903. 15. Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856– 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 63–66, 140–145. 16. Heizer and Almquist, The Other Californians, 95–97. 17. Statutes of California, Sixteenth Session, 1865–1866 (Sacramento: O. M. Clays, State Printer, 1866), 397 (section 53, “Of Schools,”). 18. Ibid., 398. For a detailed discussion of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its protection of the Spanish language in conquered territories, see Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. 19. Statutes of California, 1873–1874 (Sacramento: State Printer, 1874), 211. 20. Foner, Free Soil, 18–19, 90–91. 21. Stanley W. Lindberg, The Annotated McGuffey: Selections from the McGuffey Eclectic Readers (San Francisco: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1976), xv; Richard Mosier, Making of the American Mind: Social and Moral Ideas in the McGuffey Readers (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 168. 22. While William H. McGuffey wrote most of the Readers, his brother Hamilton wrote some of the lessons and his wife, Harriet, most probably compiled the Primer. See Lindberg, xvii. 23. For example, the Second Reader (1838) has thirty-three lessons about boys and only seven about girls. See also Harvey Minnich, William Holmes McGuffey and His Readers (New York: American Book Co., 1936; reprint, Detroit: Gail Research, 1975), 1–19, 53–114. 24. John H. Westerhoff III, McGuffey and His Readers: Piety, Morality, and Education in Nineteenth-Century America (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1978), 28–41. 25. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 444, 458–459; Westerhoff, 28–32.

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notes to pages 122–126

26. Ahlstrom, 126–131; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “The Grid of History: Cowboys and Indians,” Monthly Review 55, no. 3 (July/August 2003): 85. 27. D. A. Saunders, “Social Ideas in McGuffey Readers,” Public Opinion Quarterly 5, no. 4 (Winter 1941): 581, 588; Westerhoff, 28–32, 41–42. 28. Dunbar-Ortiz, 85. 29. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers, 58, 67–73; Richard Vanderbeets, “The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual,” American Literature 43, no. 4 (January 1972): 548. 30. Saxton, Rise and Fall, 321–332; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 81–186. 31. Minnich, 10; Mosier, 17. 32. Mosier, 98–105. 33. McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader, rev. ed. (New York: Van Antwerp, Bragg and Co., 1879), 128–132. Also interesting is that in the story, rather than compare the rider with riders in the American Southwest, McGuffey’s writers compare him to Arabian riders. 34. McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader, rev. ed. (New York: Van Antwerp, Bragg and Co., 1879), 29. 35. Ibid., 44–45. 36. McGuffey’s Second Eclectic Reader, rev. ed. (New York: American Book Company, 1879), 35–37. 37. McGuffey’s Third Eclectic Reader, rev. ed. (New York: American Book Company, 1879), 172–174. 38. “Europe and America,” in McGuffey’s New Fifth Eclectic Reader: Selected and Original Exercises for Schools (New York and Cincinnati: Winthrop B. Smith and Co., 1857), 271. 39. “Character of the Puritan Fathers of New England,” in ibid., 249. 40. Skip Porteous, “Anti-Semitism: Its Prevalence within the Christian Right,” Freedom Writer, May 1994, 6. Porteous was referring to passages in the Fourth Reader. See Bohning for a discussion of the authorship of the Readers. 41. Mosier, 40. 42. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 32–33; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 208–248; Takaki, Iron Cages, 160–163. 43. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 15–16. 44. Today, analysts of McGuffey’s Readers often note their Protestant tone in relation to industry and morality. See Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “A Historical Perspective on School Reform,” Educational Forum 59 (Spring 1995): 279; James W. Fraser, Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 32–45; Lindberg, xvi; Mosier, 84. 45. “Meeting of Pioneers,” Napa Reporter, June 8, 1861, 1. 46. “Meeting of Pioneers,” Napa Reporter, March 14, 1874. 47. “Colonel Clyman’s Narrative,” Napa Reporter, August 3, 1972, 1, and August 10, 1972, 1. Narratives such as Clyman’s could run on the front page of the Reporter for a month or more.

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notes to pages 126 –130

213

48. For discussions of myth, colonization, and nation building, see Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 210; Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 52; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge, 1990). 49. Laurie Marcus, “Women in the West: Nancy Kelsey Her Story,” in Late Harvest: Napa Valley Pioneers’ Collector’s Edition (California Indigenous Arts Organization, 1984), 16. 50. See, for example, “The Death of Captain Grenville P. Swift,” Napa Reporter, May 1, 1875, 3; “Another Pioneer Gone,” Napa Reporter, March 18, 1876, 3. 51. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 15–16. 52. The articles appeared over a period of five months, from March through June of 1861. 53. See, for example, “Reminiscences of ‘Old Times,’” Napa County Reporter, June 15, 1861, 1. “If I remember right, in my last chapter, the Greasers were approaching the quartel, with a good deal of noise and not much else.” 54. Renan, “What Is a Nation? ” 8–11. 55. Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities, 197–200; Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities, 85–85, 102, 173. See also Padilla, My History, Not Yours, 109–152. 56. Bear Flag, “Reminiscences of ‘Old Times,’” Napa County Reporter, April 13, 1861, 1. 57. Euro-American men who married Californianas sometimes subscribed to this same ideology, thus objectifying their own spouses. See Gabriel Gutiérrez, “Bell Towers, Crucifi xes, and Cañones Violentos,” 321–323. 58. Bear Flag, “Reminiscences of ‘Old Times,’” Napa County Reporter, April 13, 1861, 1. 59. Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 23; Horsman, 233, provides yet another example of such white mythologies. In a Boston newspaper from the same time period, he found the following: The Spanish maid, with eye of fire,/ At balmy evening turns her lyre/ And looking to the Eastern sky,/ Awaits our Yankee Chivalry/ Whose purer blood and valiant arms,/ Are fit to clasp her budding charms.

60. Rosaura Sánchez, 198. 61. Juárez Rose, 6; Vallejo de Leese, “History of the Bear Flag Party.” See also Padilla, 25. 62. Gregory, History of Solano and Napa Counties, 22. 63. National Union Catalogue of Manuscript Collections (Alexandria: Chadwyck and Healey, 1988). 64. Calkins, The Wappo People, 23; Beard, The Wappo: A Report, 34. 65. Beard, 13. Throughout the later nineteenth century, references Napa’s English-language press made to California Indians demonstrate that Euro-Americans economically exploited California Indians. Because of California’s 1850 “Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,” it was legal for

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notes to pages 130 –137

Euro-Americans to indenture Indian children. A reference to “Susie Williams, an Indian girl,” who was a “good girl and ever a faithful servitor,” as well as school census reports that listed “Indian children who live under the guardianship of white persons,” indicates that residents in Napa engaged in this practice. See “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians” and “Amendments to the Act of April 1850” as reprinted in Heizer, Destruction of California Indians, 220–225, and “Death of Susie Williams,” Napa Daily Register, August 28, 1880, 3; Napa County Reporter, June 25, 1870, 3. 66. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 107–130; Saxton, Rise and Fall, 26–28. 67. “March of Civilization,” Napa County Reporter, August 23, 1862, 2. 68. “Found Dead,” Napa County Reporter, February 17, 1872. 69. Clarence Smith and Wallace Elliot, Illustrations of Napa County California, with Historical Sketches (1878; reprint, Fresno: Valley Publishers, 1974), 2. 70. For a discussion of uses of the “March of Civilization” throughout the U.S. West, see Saxton, Rise and Fall, 67–72. 71. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 97, 141–179. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 115–125. 74. Napa County Reporter, January 30, 1869, 3. This was a brief article recounting the activities of “Napa’s Minstrels” in the 1850s. 75. Commercial Advertisement, Napa Reporter, August 8, 1874, 2; Napa High School Napanee, 1932, at the State Library California Room, Sacramento, California. It is an interesting note that for the high school troupe, both men and women participated in the “burnt cork” productions. 76. Roediger, 97. 77. “More Nigger,” Pacifi c Echo, April 11, 1863, 2. 78. “A Few Words,” Napa County Reporter, August 10, 1867. 79. “Glorious News,” Napa County Reporter, September 7, 1867. 80. “Monkey Suffrage” is a headline from the Napa County Reporter, May 8, 1869, 4. 81. See McGuffey’s New Fifth Eclectic Reader, 271. 82. “To the White Men of America,” Napa County Reporter, July 18, 1868. Italics in the original. 83. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 100. 84. For discussions on this phenomenon at the state and national levels, see Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 19–21; Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 292–299; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 99–103. 85. “John Chinaman’s Jubilee,” Napa County Reporter, June 12, 1869. 86. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 14, 375–378; Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), 9, 79, 400. 87. Napa County Reporter, September 6, 1873, 3. 88. Bear Flag, “Reminiscences of Old Times,” Napa Recorder, June 15, 1861, 1.

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notes to pages 137–14 4

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89. Padilla, ix–x, 4–21; Rosaura Sánchez, ix, 2–9. See also Madie D. Brown, “General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Hubert Howe Bancroft,” 151–155. 90. Padilla, 24. 91. Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Memoirs of the Vallejos, cover page; for Bancroft’s uses of the testimonios see Padilla, 25–27; Rosaura Sánchez, 6– 29; Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities, 173–174. 92. Platón Vallejo, 69–70. 93. Such challenges were more common in Spanish-language newspapers such as San Francisco’s Voz del Nuevo Mundo, where Salvador Vallejo challenged white mythologies regarding his family. 94. Rosaura Sánchez, 29. 95. Ibid., 26. 96. Bancroft, History of California, 5: 101–190. 97. Ibid., 124–125. 98. Ibid., 104, 107. 99. “Proceedings of the Society of California Pioneers in Reference to the Histories of Hubert Howe Bancroft” (San Francisco: Sterett Printing Co., 1894), 10. 100. Ibid., 32–35. 101. Padilla, 3–41. 102. Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive, 17–34, 79–114. 103. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, 310–312.

chapter six 1. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 206; U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 19. California—Race and Hispanic Origin: 1850 to 1990,” www.census.gov/ population/documentation/twps0056/tab19.pdf. Accessed January 17, 2003. 2. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 18–51. 3. Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), 34–35. 4. Glenn, 25–25. 5. Chéla Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders 10 (1991): 1–24. 6. Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 69. 7. Foner, Reconstruction, 253–271, 422–449. 8. David E. Bernstein, “Lochner, Parity, and the Chinese Laundry Cases,” William and Mary Law Review 41 (1991): 211. 9. Griswold del Castillo; Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society; McClain, In Search of Equality; Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: Norton, 1998). 10. Glenn, Unequal Freedom, 6–13.

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notes to pages 14 4–147

11. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 86. 12. Heizer and Almquist, The Other Californians, 151. It was not until one year later that the law was amended to eliminate the word Greaser. 13. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 57. 14. Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 31. 15. Camarillo, 108. 16. Heizer and Almquist, 151. In addition to the state law, towns passed similar punitive ordinances. See Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 195–197. 17. Robert R. Alvarez, Jr., Familia, 33–35; Standardt, “The Sonoran Migration to California,” 3–21. 18. David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 4–6. 19. Camarillo, 69. 20. Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s–1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 7, 53–58, 124–146. 21. Camarillo, 101–132; Romo, East Los Angeles, 25–40, 61–77; Glenn, Unequal Freedom, 144–189; Denise Segura, “Chicanas and Triple Oppression in the Labor Force,” Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender (1986; reprint, National Association for Chicano Studies, 1990), 45–65. 22. Glenn, 188; Chávez-García, xvii. 23. McClain, “In Search of Equality,” 12; Acuña. 24. Castillo, 68–69. 25. McClain, “In Search of Equality,” 12–20. 26. “Padrón de los vecinos del Presidio de San Francisco, 1790,” MSS CA 50 vol. 1:85–91, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California; Juárez Rose, The Past Is Father of the Present, 2. 27. Juárez Rose, Past Is Father, 19. See also Louis Ezettie, “Napa’s Past and Present,” Napa Register, July 19, 1975, 11A. As part of the deed, he stipulated that Californios of Spanish decent should be buried without charge. 28. Report Card, “Cayetano Juárez Documents,” MSS C-B 584, vol. I, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. 29. See, for example, Lyman Palmer’s A History of Napa and Lake Counties, 95. Student names such as Pedro, Angelo, and Victoria were called “queer, quaint, and curious.” 30. “Cayetano Juárez Documents,” MSS C-B 584 vol. I. This volume contains a small collection of correspondence between public school administrators and the Juárez family, as well as family correspondence regarding the education of the males in the family. 31. Juárez Rose, 2. Sinforosa, one of the oldest daughters, married Incarnación Pacheco.

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notes to pages 147–149

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32. Juárez Rose, 40–41. For a complete family tree including Napa marriages, see MSS C-B 584 vol. II at the Bancroft Library. 33. Gunn, History of Solano County and Napa County; Juárez Rose; “Old Timer Recalls Napa,” Napa Recorder, October 6, 1915; Enrique Cerruti, “Rambling in California,” MSS C-E 115:25, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. Vallejo, Cartareña, and Juárez were all noted for employing landless Californios as well as Indigenous peoples. It is unclear how many other landed families employed former soldiers and landless workers. 34. Louis Ezettie, “Napa’s Past and Present,” Napa Register, July 19, 1985, 11A: Louis Ezettie, “Looking into Napa’s Past and Present,” Napa Register, July 9, 1983, n.p. 35. Camarillo documented a similar phenomenon in Southern California. See Camarillo, 79–99. 36. Bureau of the Census, 1860 Census of Napa County. The 1860 census lists ethnic Mexican and Chinese immigrants laboring at the same occupations. While, by this time, these communities were segregated into separate labor camps and neighborhoods, there are some ethnic Mexican and Chinese immigrant workers who are listed in the same boardinghouses. 37. Palmer, History of Napa and Lake Counties, 147–149; Louis Ezettie, “Napa’s Past and Present,” Napa Register, July 19, 1975, 11A: Louis Ezettie, “Looking into Napa’s Past and Present,” Napa Register, July 9, 1983, n.p. Palmer mentions Spanish-town only in relation to crime in early California. It is Louis Ezettie who discusses cultural events that took place in the barrio. 38. Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism”; Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 36–39; Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary, 5, 33–35; David Gutiérrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the ‘Third Space.’” While both Bhabha and Gutiérrez over-romanticize the “third space,” both Pérez and Sandoval have demonstrated concrete ways in which the concept remains viable and important for understanding possibilities for disruption in decolonial spaces. 39. Napa County Reporter, August 22, 1874, 2; February 9, 1867, 2; February 9, 1867, 3. 40. Napa County Reporter, February 9, 1867, 3; Palmer, History of Napa and Lake Counties, 149–150, 153. 41. Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 83–84; Rudolph M. Lapp, “The Negro in Gold Rush California,” Journal of Negro History 49, no. 2 (April 1964): 84–86. Lapp notes that some of the immigrants included Oberlin graduates. 42. Delilah L. Beasley, “Slavery in California,” Journal of Negro History 3, no. 1 (1918): 38, 40–41. 43. Taylor, 85–87; Lapp, 89. 44. A. Odell Thurman, “The Negro in California before 1890” (M.A. thesis, College of the Pacific, 1945), 50–53; Taylor, 86; Lapp, 87. 45. Taylor, 87–88; Lapp, 89–91.

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notes to pages 149 –154

46. Lapp, 86–87. 47. Taylor, 91; McClain, In Search of Equality, 21. 48. Lapp, 95. 49. Taylor, 91–92. 50. Ibid.; Beasley, 42. 51. Taylor, 93–94. 52. Ibid. 53. Bureau of the Census, 1850 Census of Napa County. For Euro-Americans migrating to Napa, 26 percent were from Missouri, 11 percent from Illinois, and 7 percent from Tennessee. In addition, many immigrants from further east lived for a number of years in Missouri before crossing the Sierra Nevada. 54. Thurman, 32–37. According to Thurman, the number of slaves who successfully fled their masters prompted the California state legislature to pass a fugitive slave act to complement the federal law. See also Taylor, 74–94. 55. Bureau of the Census, 1860 Census of Napa County; Napa County Register of Deaths, 1873–1903, Napa County Records Office, Napa County, California. 56. Bureau of the Census, 1860 Census of Napa County. 57. Den Nota, Letter to the Editor, the Pacifi c Appeal, September 6, 1862, 3. 58. Proceedings of the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California (Sacramento: Democratic State Journal Print, 1855), 16. 59. Ibid.; Proceedings of the California State Convention of Colored Citizens (San Francisco: The Elevator, 1865). See also Taylor, 109–111, 202–210. 60. 1860 Census of Napa County; Pacifi c Coast Business Directory, San Francisco: Henry and Largely, 1867, 71–73. 61. “A Visit to Napa,” Pacifi c Appeal, May 31, 1862, 3. 62. “Negrophobia” and “Emancipation,” Pacifi c Appeal, August 2, 1862; “Visitors,” Pacifi c Appeal, August 2, 1862, 2. 63. Chan, Asian Californians, 1–12; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 31–33. 64. Takaki, Strangers, 36–37; Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 20–21. Women were more likely to immigrate to Hawaii, where employers preferred workers with families. 65. Chan, Asian Californians, 1–2. 66. Takaki, Strangers, 39–40. 67. Ibid., 40; Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 77. 68. Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 63–66. 69. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 28–29. 70. Charles J. McClain, “The Chinese Struggle for Civil Rights in Nineteenth-Century America: The First Phase, 1850–1870,” in Chinese Immigrants and American Law, ed. Charles J. McClain (New York: Garland, 1994), 162–163. 71. Saxton, 19. 72. Ibid., 27–30.

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219

73. Chan, 40. 74. B. S. Brooks, Appendix to the Opening Statement and Brief of B. S. Brooks on the Chinese Question (San Francisco: Women’s Co-Operative Printing Union, 1877), 9. 75. Saxton, 73–74. 76. Ibid., 170–176 77. Chan, 45. 78. Brooks, 57. 79. Ibid., 20, 27. 80. Ibid., 19. 81. Ibid., 13, 35, 45, 82. Ibid., 32–39, 47. 83. Chan, 42; McClain, “The Chinese Struggle,” 539; Brooks, 13. 84. John Hayakawa Torok, “Reconstruction and Racial Nativism: Chinese Immigrants and the Debates on the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and Civil Rights Laws,” Asian Law Journal 3 (1996): 66. 85. McClain, “The Chinese Struggle,” 539. 86. Torok, 65; Linda C. A. Przybyszewski, “Judge Lorenzo Sawyer and the Chinese: Civil Rights Decisions in the Ninth Circuit,” in Charles McClain, ed., Chinese Immigrants and American Law (New York: Garland, 1994), 340. Quotation is from People v. Hall, cited in Przybyszewski. 87. Bernstein, “Lochner, Parity, and the Chinese Laundry Cases,” 223–229. 88. Miller, “Grapes, Queues and Quicksilver,” 62–66, mimeographed. Throughout the state they organized lodges, both Masonic lodges and lodges based on kin groups back home. Even in Napa, where the middle class was very small, middle- and working-class immigrants came together in both styles of organizations. 89. McClain, “The Chinese Struggle,” 180. 90. Ibid., 168–171. 91. Takaki, Strangers, 113–115; McClain, In Search of Equality, 174. 92. Carolee M. Luper, “The Chinese in the Napa Valley,” Napa Valley Magazine, October 1979, 72. Ms. Luper took her statistics from the Chinese Historical Society in San Francisco. 93. Miller, 1–28; Napa County Reporter, “Burglary,” July 18, 1874, 3. 94. For the Chinese community in Napa town, community gardens were maintained at two different locations: one in the downtown area on Main Street, and another on Suscol Road, on the outskirts of town. See Lynn Penny, “Napa’s Chinese Community,” Napa Register Vintage 2000, in Box 22, Napa County Historical Society. 95. Newspaper business advertisement, Napa Register, April 18, 1874, 4; Penny, “Napa’s Chinese Community.” 96. “Sam Brannon, E Clampus Vitus, Chinatown Plaque Dedication,” pamphlet, August 18, 1979, Napa County Historical Society, Box 22.

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notes to pages 158–164

97. Rebecca Yerger, “Dimension of Napa’s Old Chinatown Revisited,” Napa Valley Register, September 1, 1996, 7C. 98. Louis Ezettie, “Looking into Napa’s Past and Present,” Napa Register, August 25, 1979, 14A; Rebecca Yerger, “Dimension of Napa’s Old Chinatown Revisited,” Napa Register, September 1, 1991, 7C; “Chinese in Napa,” Chinese Historical Society of America Bulletin 6, no. 1 (January 1970): 7–8. 99. Chan, Asian Californians, 30–32. 100. Luper, “The Chinese in the Napa Valley,” 71; King, Napa County: An Historical Overview, 67. 101. “Chinese in Napa,” Chinese Historical Society of America Bulletin, 7. 102. Yerger, “Dimension of Napa’s Old Chinatown revisited,” 7C. 103. Napa County Register, February 16, 1867, 3. 104. Takaki, Strangers, 37–39. Takaki noted that immigration patterns were dramatically different in Hawaii, where employers preferred to bring over men with their families intact. 105. Lynn Penny, “Chinatown Is Gone, But Trees Still There,” Napa Register, March 1975, 13V. 106. “Chinese in Napa,” Chinese Historical Society of America Bulletin. 107. Lynn Penny, “Chinatown Is Gone”; Miller, “Grapes, Queues and Quicksilver,” 56–59. Miller notes that a Mexican labor camp was located near one of the Chinese labor camps. 108. Miller, 102–118. 109. Napa Reporter, October 15, 1870, 2; “Wisdom Ever Teaches Humility,” Napa Reporter, February 13, 1875, 1. 110. Napa Reporter, April 8, 1876, 2. 111. Napa Reporter, May 28, 1870, 1; “Indignant Young America,” Napa Reporter, January 29, 1876, 2. 112. “Taken Prisoner,” Napa Reporter, December 12, 1873, 3; Napa Reporter, July 31, 1875; Miller, 97. For the report of the African American youth throwing stones, see “The Town Crier,” Napa Reporter, March 28, 1874, 3. 113. Miller, 59–62, 112–116; “St. Helena and the Chinese,” Napa Reporter, February 18, 1871, 2. 114. Miller, 14, 147. 115. Ibid., 13–17, 59–62, 146–148. 116. McClain, “Chinese Struggle,” 162. 117. Nakano Glenn, 24; Chan, Asian Californians, 43, 51. 118. Chan, 43. 119. McClain, “The Chinese Struggle,” 176–178. 120. People v. George W. Hall, Cal. Lexis 137 (1854). 121. Bernstein, “Lochner, Parity, and the Chinese Laundry Cases,” 232–235. 122. Ibid., 220. 123. Przybyszewski, 350. 124. Re Yick Wo, 118 U.S. 252 (1886).

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221

125. “Caucasian Laundry,” Napa Reporter, November 25, 1871, 2. 126. Bernstein, 256. 127. Re Sam Kee, U.S. App. LEXIS 2675 (9th Cir. 1887). 128. Takaki, Strangers, 81–82. 129. Miller, 142–144. 130. McClain, “The Chinese Struggle,” 162, 180. 131. Margaret Z. Johns and Rex Perschbacher, The United States Legal System: An Introduction (North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2002), 79–80. In U.S. v. Morrison, the Court struck down provisions of the Violence against Women Act; in Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents, it held that states could not be forced to implement the Age Discrimination and Employment Act; and in Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, it held that provisions in the Americans with Disabilities Act violated states’ rights. 132. These are all events that took place on the author’s own campus at the turn of the century.

conclusion 1. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 130–131, 145–146; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 210. 2. Renan, “What Is a Nation? ” 11–19. Quotation is from page 11. 3. Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 4–16. 4. Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780; Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition. 5. Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990). 6. For an article that specifically addresses writing “against the grain,” see González, “Gender on the Borderlands.” See also Acuña, Occupied America; Castañeda, “Women of Color and the Re-writing of Western History”; and, of course, Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary. 7. Padilla, My History, Not Yours; Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities. 8. Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary; Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities. See also Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe; Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989). 9. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 160, 162.

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California State Archives Programs, Teacher’s Institute of California, 1897–1906.

Napa County Planning Offi ce Map of Napa County, 1895. Map of Napa County, 1921.

Napa County Historical Society Berreyessa Folder. Box 22, Chinese in Napa. Lolito at the Chicken Ranch, Cayetano Juárez, María de Jesús Higuera Juárez. Napa County Historical Society Gleanings, vols. 2–4. Portraits of Dolores Juárez, Juárez Chicken Ranch, Dolores Juárez with his son.

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books and articles Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 3rd ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1988. Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

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I N DE X

Italic page numbers refer to figures, tables, and photographs. Acuña, Rodolfo, 2, 3, 9, 76, 171 African Americans: and black minstrelsy, 131, 134, 214n.75; and Chinese immigrants, 160–161; citizenship of, 143–144; cultural history of, 8; dehumanization of, 112–115, 132; education of, 114–115, 119, 151–152; and legal system, 143, 148–151, 163; newspapers of, 150–152; population of, 143, 148, 151; segregation of, 13; as threats to republican institutions, 116–117, 129–135, 138; and U.S. Constitution, 142, 143–144 Almaguer, Tomás, 125, 203–204n.73 Altimira, José, 40–42, 51, 70 Alvarado, Juan Bautista, 50, 56, 78, 198n.142 Anglo-Americans. See EuroAmericans Anzaldúa, Gloria, 2, 173n.3 Argüello, José Darío, 46, 62 Asians: population of, 143. See also Chinese immigrants assimilation, 81, 118, 145–147 Bale, Edward Turner, 55–57, 187n.13, 192nn.72, 77, 198n.148 Bancroft, Hubert: and Bear Flag incident, 82–84, 137–138; and

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Manifest Destiny, 10, 75; on Spanish colonization, 178n.41; and testimonios, 10, 94, 136, 138, 146, 171, 177–178n.38 Barrett, Samuel, 182n.24, 186nn.80, 81 battle of Suscol, 46–47, 67, 189n.28 Beard, Yolande S., 91, 181–182n.24, 183n.29, 186nn.75, 81 Bear Flag incident: and Bancroft, 82–84, 137–138; and Californianas/os, 12, 14, 76, 82–88, 136, 201n.41; and 1841 caravan, 79–80; and Euro-American histories, 73, 75, 83–84, 125, 127–129, 136–138, 170–171; and Euro-American immigrants, 12–14, 43, 57, 82–84, 116, 201n.41; and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 72–74, 82–84, 88, 128–129, 138, 201nn.41, 42, 44, 202n.51; myth of, 117, 126–127; Platón Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo on, 72–73; and testimonios, 12, 84, 87–88, 137–138; Rosalía Vallejo de Leese on, 73–74; and violence, 86, 87–88, 92, 127, 169 Benton, Thomas Hart, 8, 89, 131 Berryessa, José Jesús, 54, 57, 203n.65 Berryessa family: and Euro-American histories, 126; land holdings of,

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index

43, 187n.13, 203n.65; murders of, 86–87, 169; race of, 87, 202n.61; service under Vallejo, 52, 103 Bhabha, Homi K., 139, 167, 171, 177n.35, 217n.38 Bidwell, John, 55, 155 bifurcated histories, 3–4, 168, 172 blancos, 107, 108 Braudel, Fernand, 17, 180n.5 California, state constitution of, 119–120 California Indians: and Bear Flag incident, 12, 84, 87–88; and colonizer/colonized relationship, 102; cultural areas of, 7, 18–19, 175n.20; displacement of, 42, 61– 62, 70, 100, 195n.110; and Drake, 34–38; and epidemic of 1832, 67; and Euro-American immigrants’ myths, 13, 129–130; EuroAmericans’ economic exploitation of, 15–16, 66, 91, 213–214n.65; as hunting and gathering societies, 7, 18–19, 64, 70; and legal system, 91, 143, 150; precolonial histories of, 18, 38; and racial order, 58, 70, 194n.93; and republican rhetoric, 129, 138; and social stratification, 52; and Spanish colonizers, 42–43, 58, 179–180n.1; and Spanish mission system, 57, 58, 62– 66; and village size, 19–20. See also Indigenous peoples Californianas/os: agency of Californianas, 88, 111; assimilation of, 145–147; attacks on Indigenous peoples, 63– 64; and Bear Flag incident, 12, 14, 76, 82–88, 136, 201n.41; Californianas and Llorona stories, 103–104; Californianas and sexual violence, 5, 11–12, 85, 128, 202n.56; Californianas as

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camp followers, 68; Californianas as landholders, 146; and California state constitution, 120; children as sign of status, 101; ethnicity of, 8, 89, 92, 205n.91, 205–206n.95; Euro-American myths about Californianas, 127–128, 136–137, 213n.59; exclusion from pioneer societies, 126; exploitation of labor of Indigenous peoples, 95–100, 105, 110, 169, 187n.13; and intermarriage with EuroAmerican immigrants, 55–56, 79, 191–192n.67, 213n.57; landownership of, 89– 90, 144, 146–148, 169, 217n.33; and legal system, 90, 143, 145–147; manual labor of Californianas, 169; and Osos, 82, 84–86, 128, 200n.37; and political unrest of 1840s, 77, 199n.7; population of, 43, 55; and racial order, 58; relations with Euro-American immigrants, 13, 57, 79–82, 89– 90, 92, 93, 97, 204n.73; resistance in Euro-American/Californio intermarriage, 55–56; resistance of, 94, 128–129, 136–139, 146; social stratification of, 43–44, 70, 94, 100, 110, 169, 203–204n.73; and Solano’s stories, 108; and Spanish mission system, 41, 50, 109; and Spanishtown, 90, 105; status of Californianas, 12, 60– 61, 94, 194n.98; and Sutter, 78; U.S. as threat to, 199n.8; U.S. citizenship of, 142, 143, 146–147; white status of, 89, 143, 145 Calistoga, California, 159, 162 Camarillo, Albert, 3, 4, 76, 203– 204n.73 Carrillo, Julio, 67, 84, 197n.136, 202n.51 Carrillo, María Benicia, 86

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index Castañeda, Antonia, 4, 13, 47, 61, 76, 109, 171 Castro, Ángel, 85, 93, 202n.55 Castro, José, 77, 82, 202n.55 Catholicism, 41, 55, 145. See also Spanish mission system Caymus people, 63, 71 census records, 9, 87, 94, 97, 102, 202n.61 Cerruti, Enrique, 10, 94, 107, 111, 178n.38 Chan, Sucheng, 8, 175n.15 Chan Wah Jack, 158, 159 Chicana/o scholars, 3, 11, 76–77, 94 Chicanas/os: Chinese immigrants compared to, 154, 159, 166; as colonized people, 2; communities of, 142–143, 147; histories of, 17–18, 169; and legal system, 145; resistance of, 139; and secondary labor sector, 146; segregation of, 13. See also Californianas/os; Mexican immigrants Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 118, 153, 156, 177n.34, 211n.11 Chinese immigrants: arrival in Napa County, 5, 8, 13; challenge of racism, 140–141; dehumanization of, 112–114, 132; denial of citizenship for, 144, 157, 162–163, 165; discrimination against, 157, 163, 165, 204n.73; histories of, 6, 144, 170; and legal system, 143, 147, 150, 152–158, 160, 162–165; and Miller bill, 9, 177n.34; and mining, 148, 153, 155, 157–159, 166; segregation of, 13, 159, 217n.36; as servants, 149; in small towns, 158–162; as threats to republican institutions, 116–117, 129–132, 134–135, 138; violence towards, 8, 144, 154–162, 165–166 Chinese women, 153, 156, 218n.64

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citizenship: of Californianas/os, 142–143, 146–147; defi nition of, 119–122, 143–145, 162; denial of citizenship for Chinese immigrants, 144, 157, 162–163, 165 civil rights, 131, 132, 133 Coast Miwok peoples, 7, 21, 22, 34–36, 186n.81 colonization: and Californiana/o histories, 42; Californianas’ role in, 97, 99, 110; and Chinese immigrants, 153; continuation of, 2, 15; and disease, 66– 67; EuroAmericans’ role in, 23; and gender, 60– 61; and Indigenous women, 109–111; and Llorona stories, 103–104; soldiers’ wives’ role in, 106; and Spanish mission system, 58, 64– 65, 70; violence of, 16, 110 colonizer/colonized relationship: colonizers’ erasing of histories, 3, 16, 116, 170, 180n.5, 210n.4; and colonizers’ mythologies, 126; and gender stratification, 60– 61, 70; and Llorona stories, 107; and miscommunication, 37; and power relations, 2, 58, 193n.85; and racial order, 58, 102; and settler-colonizers, 7–8; and social stratification, 61, 95; and Spanish missions, 57–58; and violence, 58, 61, 69, 195n.101; and Wappo-speaking peoples, 71, 89, 168–169 Couey, Earl, 17, 181n.22, 182n.26, 184nn.48, 50, 185n.70, 197n.136 Dana, Henry, 92, 205–206n.95 de Anza, Juan Bautista, 47, 48, 102, 193n.88 de la Rosa, Pepe, 73, 82–83, 85, 201n.42 Democratic Party, 117, 132–133

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disease, 57–58, 61, 63, 66– 67, 69, 109–110, 197n.130 Drake, Francis, 18, 34–38, 186nn.80, 81 Driver, Harold E., 183nn.29, 31, 185nn.68, 70 Duara, Prasenjit, 3–4, 168, 170, 172 economy: economic mobility, 95; hybrid economy of Indigenous peoples, 100; and Mexican independence, 49; ranch economy, 55; and Spanish mission system, 50–51, 63; and Wappo-speaking peoples, 29, 32, 38. See also trade networks of Indigenous communities education: of African Americans, 114–115, 119, 151–152; of Mexican settler-colonists, 191n.63. See also public school system Elsasser, Albert, 181–182n.24 engendered histories, 12–13 Enlightenment, 4, 170 Enloe, Cynthia, 12, 96 español, as racial category, 45, 48, 95, 97, 101, 102 ethnicity: of Californianas/os, 8, 89, 92, 205n.91, 205–206n.95; ethnic confl ict, 55–57, 92; ethnic identities, 6– 9, 89; and labor coalitions, 166; and textbook bias, 121 ethnic Mexicans: as threats to republican institutions, 116, 129–132, 134–135; white humor directed against, 131–132, 135–136. See also Californianas/os; Chicanas/os; Mexican immigrants; Mexican settler-colonizers Euro-American immigrants: and Bear Flag incident, 12–14, 43, 57, 82–84, 116, 201n.41; and family size, 101; filibusters of, 71, 80, 83–84, 87–88, 126–127, 138, 169;

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and Indigenous women, 109; and intermarriage with Californianas/os, 55–56, 79, 191–192n.67, 213n.57; land claims of, 57, 89, 203n.65; population of, 55–57, 77–81, 89; relations with Californianas/os, 13, 57, 79–82, 89– 90, 92, 93, 97, 169, 204n.73; and Solano’s stories, 108; and Spanish colonizers, 42; violence of, 83–84, 90– 91, 93, 94, 116; and Wappospeaking peoples, 21 Euro-Americans: as “Americans,” 8– 9, 13, 118, 122–125; economic exploitation of California Indians, 213–214n.65; fears of amalgamation, 177n.34; and legal system, 142, 146–147; population of, 142, 143, 151, 218n.53; relations with Chinese immigrants, 153–155, 158–162, 164; and republican rhetoric, 134–135; violence mobilized by, 2–3, 8, 13 Fanon, Frantz, 2, 170, 180n.5, 210n.4 feminist historians, 60, 104 Fifteenth Amendment, 135, 143 Figueroa, José, 47, 197n.142 First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California, 149–151 Foreign Miners’ Tax, 146, 156–157, 164–165 Fort Ross, 51, 69, 109, 190n.47 Foucault, Michel, 17, 18, 29 Fourteenth Amendment, 143, 164 Franciscans, 15–16, 58, 64– 66 Frémont, John: and Bear Flag incident, 43, 72–74, 83–84, 87, 136, 138; and Castro, 202n.55; and Euro-American immigrants, 82, 93; and María Higuera Juárez, 94, 96, 103, 111, 128; surveying of Alta

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index California, 81–82, 200n.35; and violence towards Californios, 86; and violence towards Indigenous women, 88, 170. See also Osos Fugitive Slave Law of 1852, 148–150, 218n.54 gente de razón, 59– 60, 107, 108 gente sin razón, 59– 60 Gold Rush, 75, 142, 148, 153 González, Deena, 4, 7, 12, 16–18, 171 “greasers,” 92, 127, 134, 145, 148, 205n.91 Gregory, Thomas Jefferson, 72–73, 129 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 89, 119–120, 143, 146, 211n.18 Gutiérrez, David, 173n.4, 217n.38 Gutiérrez, Ramón, 174n.8, 194n.93 Gwin, William, 89, 144, 148 Gwin Act, 89, 144, 146 Haas, Lisbeth, 29, 172, 178n.41, 200n.33 Hatton family, 151–152 Hawaii, 218n.64, 220n.104 Heizer, Robert F., 37, 181–182n.24, 194n.93 heterotopias, 18, 29–30, 38, 196n.119 Higuera family, 52, 95, 101–102, 126, 187n.13 Híjar Padrés expedition, 82, 95, 206n.11 hispanophobia, 92, 145, 205n.90 Hobsbaum, Eric, 139, 171, 174n.8 Horsman, Reginald, 125, 200n.33, 213n.59 imagined communities, 125, 127, 128 immigrants: anti-immigrant agitation, 145; immigration laws and citizenship, 142, 162; immigration patterns of Napa County, 5, 6,

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79–80; meaning of, 175n.15; and public school system, 118–120. See also Chinese immigrants; EuroAmerican immigrants; Irish immigrants; Mexican immigrants Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1790, 162 Indigenous children, 23, 62, 65, 91, 100, 104, 214n.65 Indigenous communities: Californianas/os’ wars against, 43; communal land owning of, 100; decimation of, by disease, 67; Euro-American immigrants’ raiding of, 90; nineteenth-century survival of, 142–143; and Spanish colonizers, 5, 12; Mariano Vallejo’s wars and treaties with, 46, 52, 54, 59, 63– 64. See also trade networks of Indigenous communities Indigenous histories, 6, 17, 76, 117, 169, 170 Indigenous peoples: and Bear Flag incident, 87–88; Californianas/os’ exploitation of labor of, 95–100, 105, 110, 169, 187n.13; depicted as savages, 122, 124; and Euro-American histories, 76; Euro-American immigrants’ slaughtering of, 90– 91, 130; as fi rst peoples of hemisphere, 6; and Kelsey brothers, 83; land of, 42, 62, 70, 95, 100, 110–111, 169; and legal system, 91, 143, 150, 163; and McGuffey’s background, 121–122; Mexican settler-colonizers’ relations with, 15, 44, 50, 100, 169; and pioneer society accounts, 126; population of, 143; and racial order, 45, 59, 193n.88, 194n.93; and reservations, 129–130; resistance of, 42, 46–47, 58, 61– 62, 65– 66, 136, 138–139, 170; and Spanish

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248

index

expedition of 1823, 40–42; and Sutter, 78. See also California Indians; Patwin-speaking peoples; Pomo-speaking peoples; Wappospeaking peoples; and other specifi c peoples Indigenous women: and Bear Flag incident, 87–88; and community leadership, 20; and disease, 109–110; and infanticide, 91, 204n.88; María Higuera Juárez’s relationship with, 99–100, 111; as servants, 96, 100; and sexual violence, 12, 83–84, 88, 93, 109, 129, 170; social stratification of, 94, 110; as soldiers’ wives, 106; and Spanish mission system, 108–109, 111; status of, 19 indio, as racial category, 45 Inquisition, 45, 52 Irish immigrants, 9, 154 Jews, 59, 124, 193n.86 “John Chinaman’s Jubilee,” 113–114 Juárez, Cayetano: and anti-Indian campaigns, 103, 110; and Bale, 56; donation of land to Napa town, 147, 216n.27; and employment of Indigenous peoples, 71; family of, 101; Frémont’s raid on rancho, 86, 93, 96, 97; land grant of, 53, 97, 208n.48; service under Vallejo, 52–53, 191n.55 Juárez, María Higuera: children of, 101, 147; and defense of property, 86, 93– 94, 96–103, 111, 128; and militarized society, 12, 85, 99, 103, 110; photograph of, 98 Juárez family: and Bear Flag incident, 86, 87, 89, 93; and employment of Indigenous peoples, 187n.13; and Euro-American/Californio intermarriage, 191–192n.67; fam-

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ily papers of, 10, 189n.31; land claims of, 43, 90, 97, 147; and local pioneer societies, 126; and public school system, 147, 216n.30; and race, 87, 89, 92, 101–102; and service to Vallejo, 54, 103; and social stratification, 44, 52, 87, 92, 95, 101, 169; and Uluca people, 100 Kee, Sam, 13, 14, 140–141, 164 Kelsey, Andrew, 78, 80, 83–84, 126, 201nn.47, 48 Kelsey, Benjamin, 78, 80, 83, 88, 126, 201nn.42, 47 Kroeber, Alfred L., 18–19, 27, 175n.20, 182n.26, 184n.48 Kroeber, Theodore, 32–33, 185n.68 Kuksu religion, 27–30, 37–38, 62, 64, 71 labor: of African Americans, 149, 151; child labor, 123–124; and ethnic coalitions, 166; fears of competition, 177n.34; forced labor, 15–16, 66, 91, 109, 145; gender divisions of, 22, 23–26, 30–31, 183n.30; labor camps, 159; landless workers, 54–55, 95– 96, 105, 147–148, 187n.13, 217n.33; manual labor of Californianas, 99, 101, 110; organized labor, 155, 162; rancho laborers, 70–71, 98– 99, 146, 147, 198n.148; secondary labor sector, 146, 148, 149, 154 Land Act of 1851, 89, 144, 146 land grants, 52–56, 79, 95, 97, 107, 208n.48 landownership: of African Americans, 151–152; California Indians’ communal ownership, 20, 100; of Californianas/os, 89– 90, 144, 146–148, 169, 217n.33 Leese, Jacob, 79, 82–83

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index legal system: and African Americans, 143, 148–151, 163; anti-laundry laws, 14, 140–141, 163–164; and California Indians, 91, 143, 150; and Californianas/os, 90, 143, 145–147; and Chinese immigrants, 143, 147, 150, 152–158, 160, 162–165; and racialized minorities, 142–146; and white supremacy, 142, 147, 152–153, 164–165 Licaldo, Enrique, wife of, 12, 94, 96, 103–107, 110, 111 linear histories: challenging of, 168, 171–172; and erasure of violence of founding, 127, 128; and local press, 116, 117, 171; and republicanism, 129; resistance to, 117, 138–139; subordinated histories compared to, 14, 116, 170, 172; of U.S. nation-state, 4, 13 Llorona stories, 103–107 local/national connections, 4, 6, 130, 138, 139, 165 local press: and Chinese immigrants, 155–156, 159–160, 162; and EuroAmerican immigrants’ myths, 13; and imagined communities, 125, 127, 128; and linear history, 116, 117, 171; and national identity, 2; and racialized minorities, 14, 144; racism of, 125, 152, 160; and republicanism, 129–136; and resistance of Californianas/os, 136–137; and social structure, 105; and story of María Higuera Juárez, 96– 97; and white supremacy, 112–115, 125–129, 132–135, 153 Manifest Destiny, 10, 13, 75–79, 81, 91, 125, 171 marriage: and Euro-American/Californio intermarriage, 55–56, 79, 191–192n.67, 213n.57; marriage rec-

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ords, 9, 18, 94; and racial mixing, 49, 50; and social stratification, 52; of soldiers, 106 Marsh, John, 79–80, 81, 92 McGuffey, Hamilton, 122, 124 McGuffey, William H., 121–122 McGuffey’s Readers, 120–125, 212nn.33, 44 Memmi, Alfred, 2, 179n.1, 180n.5 menstrual rooms, 18, 29–30, 32–34, 38, 57, 62, 71, 168, 185n.68 mestizos, 3, 45, 48, 76, 95, 102 Mexican immigrants: discrimination against, 204n.73; and Euro-American immigrants’ myths, 13; histories of, 6; Irish immigrants distinguishing selves from, 9; and legal system, 143, 146; and mining, 5, 145, 148; segregation of, 145–148, 217nn.36, 37; social location of, 8; as threats to republicanism, 138 Mexican independence, 42, 49–51, 95, 169 Mexican settler-colonizers: characteristics of, 47–51; education of, 191n.63; and ethnic confl ict, 55–57; expedition of 1823, 40–42; family size of, 101; and Indigenous communities, 5; marriages to Euro-American immigrants, 55, 191–192n.67; militarized society of, 12, 42, 53, 85, 96, 106; and pioneer societies, 126; population of, 43, 77; relations with Euro-American immigrants, 91; relations with Indigenous peoples, 15, 44, 50, 100, 169; and social stratification, 52, 95. See also Californianas/os Meyahkmah peoples, 20–21, 182n.25 Micheltorena, Manuel, 77, 203n.65 migrants, 4–5, 19–20, 175n.15. See also immigrants

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Miller bill, 9, 177n.34 Milliken, Randall, 7, 195–196n.114 miscegenation, 118, 132 Mishewal peoples, 21, 181n.22, 182n.25 Mission Dolores, 40, 61, 64 Mission San Carlos, 65, 196n.118 Mission San Diego, 41, 42, 57 Mission San Diego de Alcala, 44 Mission San Francisco Asís, 42, 51, 57–58, 62– 64, 67, 70, 109, 168 Mission San Francisco Solano, 42–43, 51, 61, 63– 64, 66–70, 108–109, 168, 197–198n.142 Mission San José, 58, 63, 64, 70 Mission San Rafael, 40 Monterey Presidio, 46, 54, 57, 61, 191n.62 Montgomery, John, 85, 86 Mutistul peoples, 20–21, 182n.25 national identities, 2, 6, 59, 124–125 National Monument to the Forefathers at Plymouth, 124, 181 nation building, 2, 58–59, 126, 127, 170 “Negroes in our Schools, The,” 114–115 non-events, 17, 29 Nueva Helvetia, 78, 81, 82 oral histories, 94 Osio, Antonio, 77, 202n.55 Osos, 5, 82–89, 92, 128–129, 200n.37 Padilla, Genaro, 10, 76, 107, 137, 171, 174n.8 Paredes, Raymund, 205nn.90, 92 patriarchal structures, 52, 53, 55, 60, 101, 104, 106 Patwin-speaking peoples: alliances with Spanish colonizers, 39, 47, 68– 69, 203n.66; and Bear Flag

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incident, 87–88; deaths from disease, 67; and displacement of Wappo-speaking peoples, 61– 62, 70; forcible removal of, 129–130; as hunting and gathering society, 62– 63, 99–100; and Mexican settler-colonizers, 44; precolonial histories of, 5, 170; relationship with Californianas/os, 46–47, 71, 89, 100, 169; religious ceremonies of, 27, 62, 64; social structures of, 38–39; and Spanish mission system, 5, 57–58, 62, 64; Vallejo’s campaigns against, 103 People v. de la Guerra (1870), 143 People v. George W. Hall (1854), 156, 163 Pérez, Emma, 2, 16, 17, 168, 171, 172, 217n.38 Pérouse, François de la, 66, 196n.118 Petaluma hacienda, 70–71, 95 Petaluma peoples, 40, 41 pioneer societies, 116–117, 126–128, 138 Pitt, Leonard, 87, 128 politics of domination, 1, 15, 42, 47, 126 Pomo-speaking peoples: baskets of, 23, 35; cultural traits of, 7; and Drake, 34–36, 186n.81; and gender divisions of labor, 183n.30; and Kelsey, 83–84; mythology of, 30; religious ceremonies of, 27, 64; social structure of, 38; and Wappospeaking peoples, 21, 22, 34 property ownership, 122, 140–142. See also landownership Protestantism, 145, 157 Prudón, Victor, 43, 73–74, 82–84 public school system: and African Americans, 151–152; curriculum of, 117–120; and Juárez family, 147, 216n.30; and national identity,

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index 2; and patriotism, 119, 123–124; and racialized minorities, 144, 147, 216n.29; textbooks of, 13, 92, 120–121, 123, 125 Puritans, 92, 124 racial discourses, 13, 116, 117, 128, 131, 153 racialized minorities: and African Americans in U.S. West, 148–152; Californianas/os in white spaces, 144–148; and Chinese immigrants, 152–162; and defi nition of citizenship, 120, 143–144; and legal system, 142–146; obstacles faced by, 13, 14 racial mixing, 48, 50, 149, 177n.34 racial order: and Bear Flag incident, 92; and social stratification, 45–46, 58, 95, 101–102, 110; and Spanish colonizers, 44–47, 51–52, 58– 61, 70, 102, 193nn.86, 88, 194n.93; and Spanish expedition of 1823, 41–42; and whites, 154, 156 racism: Chinese immigrants’ challenge of, 140–141; of EuroAmerican immigrants, 81, 92; and “greaser,” 92, 127, 205n.91; and Llorona stories, 104; of local press, 125, 152, 160; and Manifest Destiny, 75; of Osos, 86–87, 92; and political party rhetoric, 117; racist histories, 76, 127; of Spanish colonizers, 59– 60; structural racism, 162, 163; of United States, 77, 199n.8 rancho families, 5, 54, 71, 85–86, 89– 90, 93, 97, 169, 198n.148 rape: and colonized women, 60– 61, 195n.99. See also violence Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 104, 111 Reconquista, 59, 60 Renan, Ernest, 127, 139, 170

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republicanism, 77, 116–117, 122, 127, 129–136, 138, 171 Republican Party, 117, 132–133 resistance: and African American press, 150–151; of barrios, 148; and Bear Flag incident, 12, 129, 136; of Californianas/os, 94, 128–129, 136–139, 146; of Chinese immigrants, 162–165; to Euro-American/Californio intermarriage, 55–56; to Euro-American linear histories, 117, 138–139; histories of resistance, 144, 169–172; of Indigenous peoples, 42, 46–47, 58, 61– 62, 65– 66, 136, 138–139, 170; and local/national connections, 4, 139; as oppositional politics, 143–144, 165–166; to Spanish colonizers, 62, 67, 71; and testimonios, 94, 107, 137, 139, 146, 171 Rivera y Moncada, Fernando Xavier de, 44, 47–48 Rodríguez, D. A., 54 Rodríguez family, 52, 95, 126, 187n.13 Rose, Vivien Juárez, 96, 179n.48, 189n.31, 191n.55 Russians, 51, 190n.47 St. Helena, California, 159, 161, 162 Sánchez, Alférez José Antonio, 40–42, 51 Sánchez, José Tadeo, 41 Sánchez, Rosaura, 10, 17–18, 29, 55, 76–77, 107, 128, 171, 199n.8 San Francisco Presidio: and antiIndian campaigns, 104; and Cayetano Juárez, 52; census of 1782, 102; and family of María Higuera Juárez, 97, 100, 103; literacy of common soldiers of, 54, 191n.62; married soldiers of, 106; racial categorization for, 49; and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 48, 95

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San Francisco region: and Chinese immigrants, 154–158, 164–165; racial categorization for, 49; racial categorization of married couples, 49, 50; and Spanish colonizers, 102 Santa Fe, New Mexico, 3, 18 Satiyomi peoples, 47, 67– 68, 108, 168, 197n.136 Sawyer, J., 140–141, 163, 164 segregation: in barrios, 145–148, 217nn.36, 37; of Chinese immigrants, 13, 159, 217n.36; of public school system, 119–120 Semple, Robert, 72, 82, 83, 96, 126 Serra, Junípero, 44, 47, 50, 61 settler-colonizers, 7–8, 40, 41, 49, 50. See also Mexican settler-colonizers Sinao, 12, 88, 136 Six Companies, 157–158, 164 social stratification: of African Americans, 149–151; of Californianas/os, 43–44, 70, 94, 100, 110, 169, 203–204n.73; of Chinese immigrants, 158–159; and colonizer/colonized relationship, 61, 95; of Indigenous women, 94, 110; and public school textbooks, 122–124; and racialized minorities, 147; and racial order, 45–46, 58, 95, 101–102, 110; and social structures, 105; and Spanish mission system, 42–43; under Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 51–55, 70; and violence, 11, 87, 88 social structures: and Bear Flag incident, 89; of California Indians, 18; and Indigenous alliances with Spanish, 39; and Llorona stories, 104; and Mexican independence, 49, 95; and Mexican settler-colonizers, 51; and primary sources, 9; role of histories in, 1; role of women in, 110; and social

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stratification, 105; of Wappospeaking peoples, 11, 24, 29–34, 38; and Western linear narratives, 3 Solano, Isidora Filomena, 12, 94, 96, 107–110, 111 Sonoma, California, 56, 82–84 Sonoma County, California, 5, 11, 40–41 Sonoma Presidio: and anti-Indian campaigns, 5, 52, 104; and Californios, 43; founding of, 48, 52, 53; military wives of, 106; and Patwin-speaking peoples, 203n.66; and Russians, 190n.47; and Sem Yeto, 69; soldiers’ dependence on Vallejo, 54 Sonoma Pueblo, 71, 85, 88 Sonoma Valley, California, 5, 42–43, 46–47, 58, 75, 95 South and Southerners, 119, 149, 150 Spanish colonizers: Bancroft on, 178n.41; and California Indians, 42–43, 58, 179–180n.1; and Indigenous communities, 5, 12; naming of, 7; Patwin-speaking peoples’ alliances with, 39, 47, 68– 69, 203n.66; political domination of, 15; population of, 43; and racial order, 44–47, 51–52, 58– 61, 70, 102, 193nn.86, 88, 194n.93; and San Francisco region, 102; and Wappo-speaking peoples, 15, 21, 61– 63, 168, 181–182n.24, 184–185n.54, 195n.110 Spanish language, 89, 100, 120, 139, 211n.18, 215n.93 Spanish mission system: and California Indians, 57, 58, 62– 66; and epidemic of 1832, 66– 67; and expedition of 1823, 40–42; forced admission to, 63– 64, 195–196n.114; goals of, 37; and Indigenous

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index production units, 23; and Indigenous village structure, 20; and Indigenous women, 108–109, 111; and Mexican settler-colonizers, 55; and Patwin-speaking peoples, 5, 57–58, 62, 64; religious art in, 64, 196n.118; and religious instruction, 15–16; resistance to, 42, 58, 61, 65– 66; secularization of, 50, 67–70, 197–198n.142; and social stratification, 42–43; soldiers accompanying friars, 47; and structuring of past, 29; and Wappo-speaking peoples, 5, 42, 57–58, 61– 62, 64. See also specifi c missions Spanish soldiers, 43, 47, 50–52, 54, 95, 103–107, 110, 169, 191nn.62, 63 stories: importance of women’s stories, 110–111; Llorona stories, 103–107; and social structures, 1, 30–33; and Spanish mission system, 64– 65 Suisun peoples, 46–47, 62, 68, 94 Sutter, John, 78, 81, 108 Sutter’s Fort, 78, 81, 82, 84, 88 sweat houses, 18, 29–32, 38, 57, 62, 71, 98, 168 Swift, Granville, 78, 80, 126 Takaki, Ronald, 125, 134, 153, 220n.104 testimonios: and Bancroft, 10, 94, 136, 138, 146, 171, 177–178n.38; and Bear Flag incident, 12, 84, 87– 88, 137–138; as primary sources, 9, 10–11; and resistance, 94, 107, 137, 139, 146, 171; of Solano, 107–110; and Wappo-speaking peoples, 187n.9 Texas, 77, 199n.8 third space, 148, 217n.38 Thirteenth Amendment, 143

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“To the White Men of America,” 112–113 trade, in Alta California, 49–51 trade networks of Indigenous communities: and economic and cultural links, 5, 57; effect of Spanish mission system on, 63; and Franciscans, 16; and Indigenous alliances with Spanish, 39; and migration, 19–20; and rancho laborers, 98– 99; and resistance to Californianas/os, 47; role of language in, 7; of Wappo-speaking peoples, 21–23, 26, 34, 38, 168 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 75–76, 173n.5 Uluca people, 71, 97– 98, 100 United States: annexation of California, 77, 148, 199n.8; linear histories of nation-state, 4, 13; and war with Mexico, 5, 118, 125, 169. See also U.S. invasion; U.S. West U.S. Constitution, 135, 142–144, 164 U.S. invasion, 5, 8, 15, 18, 52, 69, 96– 97, 110, 169–170 U.S. West: African Americans in, 148–152; and anti-Catholic hispanophobia, 145; and Bear Flag incident, 170–171; Chinese immigrants in, 152–155, 157; and legal system, 142; and oppositional strategies, 143; public school system in, 120–121, 125; republicanism in, 127; Turner’s concept of, 76, 173n.5 Vallejo, Francisca Benicia Carillo, 82, 85, 95, 106 Vallejo, Ignacio, 44–45, 46, 102 Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe: and Alvarado, 78; and annexation to U.S., 77, 199n.8; anti-Indian

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campaigns of, 93, 102, 107, 108; arrest of, 5, 43, 57, 71, 73–74, 82–86, 129; and Bale, 56, 57, 192n.77; and battle of Suscol, 46–47, 189n.28; and Bear Flag incident narratives, 72–74, 82–84, 88, 128–129, 138, 201nn.41, 42, 44, 202n.51; and education, 191n.63; and Euro-American immigrants, 57, 79, 80–82, 85; and Híjar Padrés expedition, 206n.11; and Indigenous peoples, 66, 187n.9; and José Tadeo Sánchez, 41; and Juárez family relations, 52; military career of, 46–47, 51, 190n.47, 194n.91; and Osos, 82, 89, 200n.37; as powerful patriarch, 47, 52–53, 70, 95, 106–107, 179n.48, 189n.31; and racial standing, 46, 92; Sem Yeto’s relationship with, 53, 67– 69, 71, 87–88, 94, 107–108, 194n.96; social stratification under, 51–55, 70; and Spanish mission system, 63, 68, 70, 197n.142; testimonio of, 10, 137, 177–178n.38, 191n.55 Vallejo, Platón Mariano Guadalupe, 72–73, 75, 137, 171, 191n.55, 205n.91 Vallejo, Salvador: arrest of, 5, 43, 71, 74, 83–84, 86, 129; and Bale, 56; and Bear Flag incident narratives, 73, 74, 82–84; challenge to white mythologies, 215n.93; and Euro-American immigrants, 57, 80, 82; and “greaser,” 205n.91; and Indigenous peoples, 67, 187n.9; land claim of, 89; and landless workers, 54, 105, 187n.13; military career of, 51; and racial standing, 92, 101; and sea otter trade, 50; and Solano, 107; and Spanish mission system, 63, 109; testimonio of, 10, 87

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Vallejo de Leese, Rosalía, 10, 73–74, 85, 88, 94, 128, 201n.42 Vallejo family: and Bear Flag incident, 86–87, 89; land holdings of, 97; and pioneer societies, 126; and race, 87, 89, 92, 101–102; and social stratification, 43–44, 87, 89, 92, 95, 101, 169 violence: towards African Americans, 150; and Bear Flag incident, 86, 87–88, 92, 127, 169; towards California Indians, 130, 169–170; and Californianas’ living conditions, 101, 103; towards Californianas/os, 169; towards Chinese immigrants, 8, 144, 154–162, 165–166; of colonization, 16, 110; and colonizer/ colonized relationship, 58, 61, 69, 195n.101; domestic violence, 106; of Euro-American immigrants, 83–84, 90– 91, 93, 94, 116, 148; Euro-Americans’ mobilizing of, 2–3, 8, 13; towards Indigenous women, 108–109; and Llorona stories, 103, 104, 107; of militarized society, 53, 99, 106; and racial order, 60; sexual violence, 11–12, 83–85, 88, 93, 109, 128–129, 170, 202n.56; and Spanish mission system, 66 Wappo men, 23–26, 28, 31–32, 183n.36 Wappo-speaking peoples: baskets of, 7, 23–24, 176n.21, 183n.35; and Bear Flag incident, 88; and colonizer/colonized relationship, 71, 89, 168–169; cultural development of, 19; deaths from disease, 67; and Drake, 34–38; forcible removal of, 12, 129–130; and gendered divisions of labor, 22, 23–26, 30–31; as hunting and gathering

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index society, 23–26, 32, 62– 63, 99–100; and Mexican settler-colonizers, 15, 44; mythologies and religious practices, 26–29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 57, 64, 184n.48; and obsidian, 22, 183n.29; precolonial histories of, 5, 11, 15, 16–17, 18, 20–21, 168, 170; relationship to land, 100, 169; relationship with Californianas/os, 100, 169; and Sem Yeto, 87; social structure of, 11, 24, 29–34, 38; and Spanish colonizers, 15, 21, 61– 63, 168, 181–182n.24, 184–185n.54, 195n.110; and Spanish mission system, 5, 42, 57–58, 61– 62, 64; trade networks of, 21–23, 26, 34, 38, 168; Vallejo’s campaigns against, 103; Wappo as contested term for, 182n.25. See also Meyahkmah peoples; Mishewal peoples; Mutistul peoples; Satiyomi peoples Wappo women, 19, 23–26, 28, 31–32, 38, 183n.35 whites: and defi nition of citizenship, 119, 145, 162; and legal system, 145, 147; and racial identity, 9, 116; and racial order, 154, 156; and republican rhetoric, 129–136. See also Euro-Americans white supremacy: common goal of, 9, 122; and Euro-American histories, 171; and Euro-American immigrants, 81, 200n.33; and legal sys-

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tem, 142, 147, 152–153, 164–165; and linear histories, 13; and local press, 112–115, 125–129, 132–135, 153; narratives of, 134, 173n.5; and public school system, 117, 125; and violence, 170 white women, 118, 122–123, 128–129, 132, 162 women. See Californianas/os; Chicanas/os; Chinese women; Indigenous women; Wappo women; white women Yeto, Sem: and Bale, 56–57; and battle of Suscol, 46–47, 189n.28; and Indigenous women, 109; and racial order, 60; relationship with Vallejo, 53, 67– 69, 71, 87–88, 94, 107–108, 194n.96; wife of, 12, 94, 107, 108 Yount, George C.: and 1841 caravan, 80; employment of Indigenous peoples, 71; and Euro-Americans’ killing of Indigenous peoples, 170; and gold discovery, 90– 91; and Indigenous peoples’ death from disease, 67; marriage of, 187n.13; service under Vallejo, 52, 54, 59, 63– 64; on Vallejo, 179n.48, 189n.31 Yukian-speaking peoples, 21, 27, 182n.26

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