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Racial Fault Lines - The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Hardcover)
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Racial Fault Lines - The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Hardcover)
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This book unravels the ethnic history of California since the late
nineteenth-century Anglo-American conquest and institutionalization
of "white supremacy" in the state. Almaguer comparatively assesses
the struggles for control of resources, status, and political
legitimacy between the European American and the Native American,
Mexican, African-American, Chinese, and Japanese populations.
Drawing from an array of primary and secondary sources, he weaves a
detailed, disturbing portrait of ethnic, racial, and class
relationships during this tumultuous time.
The U.S. annexation of California in 1848 and the simultaneous
discovery of gold sparked rapid and diverse waves of immigration
westward, displacing the already established pastoral Mexican
society. Almaguer shows how the confrontation between white
immigrants and the Mexican "ranchero" and working class populations
was also a contestation over racial status in which racialization
influenced and was in turn influenced by class position in the
changing economic order. Partly because of the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo, which granted U.S. citizenship and other rights, parts of
the Mexican population were integrated into the emerging Anglo
society more easily than other racialized groups. A case study of
Ventura County highlights declining political and economic fortunes
of the Mexican elite while showing how Mexican, Japanese, Chinese,
and Indian populations were permanently relegated to the bottom of
the class structure as unskilled manual workers.
The fate of the Native American population provides perhaps the
most extreme example of white supremacy during the period. Popular
conceptions of Native Americans as "uncivilized and "heathen,"
justified the killing of more than 8,000 men, women, and children
between 1848 and 1870. Many survivors were incorporated at the
periphery of Anglo society, often as indentured laborers and
virtual slaves.
Underpinning the institutional structuring of white supremacy were
notions such as "manifest destiny," the inherent good of the
capitalist wage-system, and the superiority of Christianity and
Euro-American culture, all of which helped to marginalize non white
groups in California and justify Anglo-American class dominance. As
other racialized groups assumed new roles, Almaguer assesses the
complex interplay between economic forces and racial attitudes that
simultaneously structured and allocated "group position" in the new
social hierarchy.
California remains a contested racial frontier, as political
struggles over the rights and opportunities of different groups
continue to reverberate along racial lines. "Racial Fault Lines" is
an invaluable contribution to our understanding of ethnicity and
class in America, and the social construction of "race" in the Far
West.
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