Race and Nation

Ethnic Systems in the Modern World

Paul Spickard, Paul Spickard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135930592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Race and Nation is the first book to compare the racial and ethnic systems that have developed around the world. It is the creation of nineteen scholars who are experts on locations as far-flung as China, Jamaica, Eritrea, Brazil, Germany, Punjab, and South Africa. The contributing historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and scholars of literary and cultural studies have engaged in an ongoing conversation, honing a common set of questions that dig to the heart of racial and ethnic groups and systems.
Guided by those questions, they have created the first book that explores the similarities, differences, and the relationships among the ways that race and ethnicity have worked in the modern world. In so doing they have created a model for how to write world history that is detailed in its expertise, yet also manages broad comparisons.

Part 1 Founding and Sustaining Myths

1 Guilty Pleasures

The Satisfactions of Racial Thinking in Early-Nineteenth-Century California

DOUGLAS MONROY

Up and down the coast of California, there are monuments to the Indians, the Spanish, and those Mexicans who called themselves Californios. Few of those people remain in or around those monuments –– the missions, the presidios, houses of elite rancheros, and an occasional Indian site — all imaginatively restored for the tourists and school children. These peoples appear on the landscape frozen in time, remnants of a distant past, though indeed more than a million Mexican and Mexican Americans — migrants of the twentieth century — live around California. The monuments have narratives that explain the different peoples’ histories but mostly they deny, distort, or even disappear their experiences. But there are real stories haunting those places, ones that have so much to do with race and nation, identity and power.

It is a much more fascinating story than even the fanciful re-creations. People who looked distinct from one another, who organized production differently, and who asserted or defended singular customary ways to various degrees, all encountered one another on a fabled landscape. In ways we can think of California as a “frontier, ” first New Spain’s far northern, then the United States’ far western. And, in many ways, the frontier paradigm is useful: when two peoples each with deeply developed spiritual and cultural principles that give them their sense of being human, converge on a frontier, there is often barbarism. This was true in California in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first for the calamitous encounter of the Catholic Spaniards and the tribal Indians, then for the violent confrontation of crusading Yankee Protestants with Mexican Californios and the remnant, but by then chaotic, native peoples. Those dramatic moments of Spanish soldiers capturing Indians who fled the missions and then lassoing Indian women to satisfy their lust, or of American men either lynching Mexicans who challenged Anglo supremacy or firing into helpless villages of Indians, stunningly reveal the horrible consequences of one people constructing other people in racial ways. It is these episodes, ones that condense and display people’s racial thinking in frightful and dramatic moments, which have usually attracted, with good reason, those of us interested in what usually is called frontier California.

It may well be, though, that California throughout its postcontact history can be understood not only as a frontier but as a place where different people met and then shared the landscape together. In this context, the development of racial thinking becomes associated not only with expropriation of lands and exploitation of labor but with explanation. That is, it is a way people accommodate, however hierarchically, to the presence of strangers on the landscape, and the spectacles of their religious practices, dress, labor, and (in this case) social and cultural decay, on a day-to-day basis. Nineteenth-century California is particularly compelling in this context because so many different people have lived together in the cities, towns, and countryside for so long, and because there has been some fluidity for individuals and groups in the matter of their rank. And it is a place where people very different in appearance and belief systems have encountered one another, a process that continues profoundly to this day.

Indian peoples lived upon the landscape of what would become California in small tribes or even bands. While anthropologists may group people according to language families and culture areas, life revolved around the small villages and the spirits unique to each, and around their hunting and gathering by which they had achieved self-sufficiency and a delicate balance with nature. While there were some commonalities between the various peoples, they had few secure and faithful bonds between them; they lived in decentralized villages, which squabbled, exchanged, and fought with one another; indeed retributive warfare, but not conquest or empire as in ancient Mexico, prevailed.

The Spanish could not have been more different: they, too, were several peoples — Castilians, Catalonians, Mallorcans, even Basques — but they were united under one Royal Crown and by One True God. Having been conquered by Romans, Visigoths, and Moors, they themselves moved to conquer new worlds in 1492, the year in which not only did Columbus sail but the last of the Moors and Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. The cross and the sword would be the twin, but often antagonistic, means of conquest. With actually little to offer, the self-sufficient peoples of the Americas, the Spanish priests, and civil authorities could only extend the Word of God and the promise of unity under the Crown, or put another way, the destruction of the Indians’ spirit world and village societies. The idea, though, was that the indigenous peoples would be Christianized and civilized such that they would become loyal subjects of his Catholic Majesty.

The Spanish not only conquered Indian peoples of the New World, but mixed with them. The blending of foods and of blood through concubinage and marriage brought forth in Mexico a profound racial and cultural mestizaje, or mixture, of the Spanish and Indian peoples. Oftentimes, it is hard for non-Latin Americans to understand how racial mixture and a concern for racial purity could exist congruously in the same society. Indeed, they could, as this essay will attempt to explain. While racial and caste tensions would inspire many troubles, the One True Faith would attempt to bind these diverse societies. Neither demos (the notion of the citizen) nor ethnos (the culture group) would bind this society because their ideas about membership in a community pre-dated the Age of Democratic Revolutions and because they were several ethnicities. It would be a corporate body politic, one patterned on the Church, a mystical body itself modeled on the body of Christ. The Church and the friars would lead this society much as if they were the head of the Holy Savior, and the rest — the Christianized Indians, mestizo settlers and soldiers, and civil authorities — would be integrated into the social hierarchy much like the feet and arms of the body of Christ.

Among these mestizos were many of the people who would call themselves Californios, a regional variety of the new Mexican nation that would win independence from Spain in 1821. Their lives revolved around their extended families, their faith, and simultaneously having some Indians work for them and then engaging in desperate warfare with others. California was part of this emerging Mexican nation that sought desperately to forge a national will out of a population divided by caste and regional allegiances, and which argued and fought over whether reason and democracy or faith and authority would guide it.

From the east would come the Americans to California, which was to them the golden prize of the Mexican American War (1846–1848). Their understandings of the peoples who differed from their own fair-skinned appearance had mostly to do with the fights with warrior Indians of their east coast and the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys, not the missionized Indians of California or those who had avoided the missions and whom the Americans called “diggers, ” allegedly because they dug for roots. Or knowing these strange people would have to do with their experience with African slavery, which twisted into their minds all manner of ideas about non-White peoples and about the mostly repulsive, but sometimes attractive, practice of racial mixing. In contrast to the Spanish, the Americans (owing to their English Puritan history) only rarely contrived to convert indigenous peoples into dedicated citizens of the nation, but rather to rid the place of them so that White, republican families could assume their place on the landscape. The Spanish, the Californios, and the Americans all presumed that their activities fulfilled God’s plan.

On the one hand, in nineteenth-century California, and most everywhere at most every time, racial thinking has been so easy to dissect and refute — and thus condemn — because of its logical contradictions, its lack of scientific evidence, or its gross misuse of science. But perhaps it is these very inconsistencies, its rejection of evidence and logical rigor, that provide so much of the guilty pleasure of racial thinking. Notions of race, now so facilely deconstructed in the postmodern academy, have compelling explanatory powers that enable people, like those of early California, to harmonize that which seems so incongruous to them, especially when encountered on a strange terrain.

My point here will be that racial thinking, a phrase I prefer over racism at this point in my analysis because I am first concerned with how people get certain ideas implanted in their consciousness, has been a way that people reconcile what they know to be right and true to the activities, beliefs, and conduct — in other words, the spectacle — of alien people they encounter either in their travels or when strange people come, voluntarily or under various forms of coercion, to their place. How, in other words, people experience one another at ground level. I will wrestle with the idea, scary in its implications, that what people look like, their dress or their phenotype, proved to be the most ready explanation for various nineteenth-century Californians’ emotional and cognitive solutions to their disorienting and anxiety-producing encounters with people from different cultures and nations.

One cannot help but be struck with how the thinking of the Spanish priests changed as the native peoples they encountered did not cohere with their European Christian scheme of embracing the True Word of God. The Viceroy in Mexico City, Antonio María Bucareli, waxed optimistic in 1774 when he entertained “strong hopes of extending, among the many heathen tribes . . . , the dominion of the king and the knowledge of our true religion (which is the principal purpose of his Majesty . . . ) by means of the missions. ” All boded well, for, as Father President Fermín Lasuén, successor to Padre Serra as Father President of the California missions, put it in 1771 “the country is most beautiful, the heathen very numerous and very docile, and by planting crops we may be able to replant our voices, with all assurance that with the favor of God the most abundant harvests for things both eternal and temporal may be reaped. ” The priests referred hardly at all to the Indians’ phenotype, though, in the matter of appearance in the words of Father Zalvidea, that “they are much addicted to nudity, ” could hardly escape their gape. ¹

It should be apparent how, for these European men of the cloth, Indian people could become more fully human by two simple steps: they could adopt the True God and wear clothes. In the brilliantly revealing words of Cabeza de Vaca, garbed and screaming at naked Indians, “I am more human than you are. I have a God!” In California, Padre Lasuén put the matter more thoughtfully: “Here then we have the greatest problem of the missionary: how to transform a savage race such as these into a society that is human, Christian, civil, and industrious. ”² With that policy in mind about the qualifications for “being human, ” it is not difficult at all to imagine the incomprehension of the priests and the civil authorities about Indian intransigence about realizing their potential as human beings.

The priests, armed with faith, albeit lagging, in the equality of the souls of all of God’s children, remained more sanguine about the missionizing project than the civil authorities for whom the natives seemed much like the detritus of an otherwise fruitful countryside. Yet, the more optimistic priests and the actually more pragmatic functionaries of the crown quickly came to similar understandings of the Indians’ continuing with their familiar spirits and lack of dress. “The Indian by nature is apathetic and indolent, ” said Padre Narciso Durán, Father President of the missions from 1825 to 1827. “Their characteristics are stupidity and insensibility. ” Padre Venegas expatiated frankly: “want of knowledge and reflection; inconstancy, impetuosity and blindness of appetite; and excessive sloth and abhorrence of fatigue; an incessant love of pleasure, and amusement of every kind, however trifling or brutal; in fine, a most wretched want of everything which constitutes the real man, and renders him rational, inventive, tractable, and useful to himself and society. ” One of the grandees of southern Alta California, Don Juan Bandini, simply claimed that “The Indians are naturally dirty and lazy; their heritage is misery, ignorance, and stupidity, and their education is not calculated to develop their reason . . . and the gálico más refino [venereal disease] among them is very natural. ”³ How else but to explain the obvious and abysmal failure of the missionizing effo...