APC Reducing Community to The Periphery Through Law & Racialization Discussion

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Assignment 1: Reducing Community to the Periphery through Law

You need to write at least 250 words and 3-4 Works Cited from different sources found in Module or Reading Log or Other Academic Site.

In chapter 1 of City of Inmates(I attached the book), Lytle-Hernandez provides us historical perspective of the development of California from the Tongva people to the American occupation of California.

Briefly discuss the rationale for using the indigenous population in California and Los Angeles to build pueblo and city of Los Angeles. This spans from the Spanish moment through the Mexican period right through American occupation.

Explain how the rationale is used to pass laws that target specific groups. What does social conditions create in a society?


Assignment 2: Laws and Racialization

You need to write at least 150 word.

1. Describe one significant law that you found most damaging to Mexican and Mexican-American communities in the American Southwest. Explain the law and what about the law made you choose it for discussion.

2. Describe the reasoning for leaving Mexico and travel to the United States in the 19th Century (not the 20th century). Read Chapter 1 from Becoming Mexican American.

You can download the book(Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945) for free by following this link http://93.174.95.29/main/BAA3B2DBBFF38794CF38073657723E3E

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City of Inmates Justice, Power, and Politics Coeditors Heather Ann Thompson Rhonda Y. Williams Editorial Advisory Board Peniel E. Joseph Barbara Ransby Daryl Maeda Marc Stein Matthew D. Lassiter Vicki L. Ruiz The Justice, Power, and Politics series publishes new works in history that explore the myriad struggles for justice, battles for power, and shifts in politics that have shaped the United States over time. Through the lenses of justice, power, and politics, the series seeks to broaden scholarly debates about America’s past as well as to inform public discussions about its future. More information on the series, including a complete list of books published, is available at http://justicepowerandpolitics.com/. City of Inmates Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 Kelly Lytle Hernández The Universi t y of N orth Carolina Press Chapel Hill This book was published with the assistance of the Thornton H. Brooks Fund of the University of North Carolina Press. © 2017 Kelly Lytle Hernández All rights reserved Set in Miller, TheSerif, and Egiziano types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Chapter 2 is largely based upon an article previously published by the Pacific Coast Branch American Historical Association and the University of California Press, Kelly Lytle Hernández, “Hobos in Heaven: Race, Incarceration, and the Rise of Los Angeles, 1880–1910,” Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 3 (August 2014): 410–47. Cover illustration: Mexican men incarcerated in the Los Angeles County Jail in the early 1930s. The Pedro J. González Papers (1915–1978), Collection 0060, courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hernández, Kelly Lytle, author. Title: City of inmates : conquest, rebellion, and the rise of human caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 / by Kelly Lytle Hernández. Other titles: Justice, power, and politics. Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2017] | Series: Justice, power, and politics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016039788| ISBN 9781469631189 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469631196 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Imprisonment—California—Los Angeles—History. | Discrimination in criminal justice administration—California—Los Angeles—History. | Criminal justice, Administration of—California—Los Angeles—History. Classification: LCC HV9956.L67 H47 2017 | DDC 365/.97949409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039788 Contents Introduction. Conquest and Incarceration 1 1 An Eliminatory Option 16 2 Hobos in Heaven 45 3 Not Imprisonment in a Legal Sense 64 4 Scorpion’s Tale 92 5 Caged Birds 131 6 Justice for Samuel Faulkner 158 Conclusion. Upriver in the Age of Mass Incarceration 195 The Rebel Archive 199 Notes 221 Bibliography 269 Acknowledgments 291 Index 293 Illustrations John Gast, American Progress11 Los Angeles County sheriff ’s office and jail 35 Cut made on Broadway (Fort Street), 1871 38 Chinese massacre victims in the Los Angeles County Jail yard, 1871 67 “Tramps Sleeping on Park Bench” Officers of the Chinese Six Companies Narcisa Higuera, 1905 President Porfirio Díaz, 1907 Ricardo Flores Magón 48 74 95 97 99 Credential for inductees into the PLM army 108 Magonista coded correspondence 115 Magonista secret code key Los Angeles County Jail, 1904 Ricardo Flores Magón and María Talavera Broussé 114 121 122 La Tuna Detention Farm, 1932 140 Housing quarters at Tucson Prison Camp #10, 1933 143 Escapee reward notice, Tucson Prison Camp #10, 1930s Pedro J. González and Los Madrugadores Los Angeles County Jail, early 1930s 142 152 155 The Downbeat Club, ca. 1941 166 Jessie Waters, San Quentin booking photo 173 Corrias Hillard, San Quentin booking photo 173 Florence Hicks, San Quentin booking photo Maizie de la Cruz, San Quentin booking photo “Officers Raid Home, Kill Man” “With or without papers, we will always be illegal” 171 173 176 212 Maps and Tables Ma p s Territorial Expansion of the United States, 1783–1848 13 The Tongva Basin 18 Ta bles Total Arrests by LAPD, 1887–1906 53 Arrests, by Race and Gender, for the Los Angeles City Jail, 1894–1906 56 Average Length of Sentence for Immigration Offenders, 1931–1936 145 Number of Mexicans Arrested by LAPD, 1928–1939 149 This page intentionally left blank City of Inmates This page intentionally left blank Introduction Conquest and Incarceration M ass incarceration is mass elimination. That is the punch line of this book. I had trouble arriving at such an unsettling idea, but the collection of two centuries of evidence documenting the long rise of incarceration in Los Angeles left me no other interpretation. Incarceration operates as a means of purging, removing, caging, containing, erasing, disappearing, and eliminating targeted populations from land, life, and society in the United States. Why Los Angeles? Los Angeles is a hub of incarceration, imprisoning more people than any other city in the United States, which incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth.1 Each night, nearly 17,000 men, women, and youth are locked somewhere in Los Angeles County’s $1 billion system of jails, detention centers, and one penal farm.2 There are also eighty-­eight other municipal jails, more than twenty juvenile detention halls and camps, and two federal facilities sited within the county.3 And just over the mountains lining the northeastern edge of Los Angeles County, Geo Group, a private prison company, operates a large immigrant detention center that contracts with the federal government to hold the spillover of deportees from the city.4 Therefore, in both size and scope, the project of human caging in Los Angeles is massive. Some say no city in the world incarcerates more people than Los Angeles.5 If so, Los Angeles, the City of Angels, is, in fact, the City of Inmates, the carceral capital of the world. By explaining when, why, and how Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, this book digs up the roots of the nation’s carceral core. It is a story that has never been told before. When I first began to research the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles, I quickly learned that L.A.’s penal habits took root much earlier than what scholars generally define as “The Age of Mass Incarceration.” 6 Mass incarceration is a relatively recent development, with sparks and triggers particular to the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. Federal, state, and local authorities steadily expanded the nation’s imprisoning capacity to crush the political insurgencies of the 1960s as well as warehouse, disci1 pline, and contain the massive land and labor dislocations wrought by globalization during the 1970s.7 Then, in the early 1980s, the national rate of incarceration skyrocketed when President Ronald Reagan declared the “War on Drugs,” triggering millions of arrests on both drug and violence charges. Police forces across the country also adopted the “Broken Windows” theory of policing, arresting millions upon millions on public order charges. By the end of the decade, the rate of incarceration in the United States topped historically uncharted levels. Never before had the United States caged such a large—or dark—percentage of its human population.8 Blacks and Native peoples, after all, share the highest rates of incarceration in the United States.9 They also share the highest rates of killings by police officers.10 And Latinos, namely Mexicans and Central Americans, fill the nation’s immigrant detention centers, which began to expand during the 1990s as new investments in U.S. immigration control and border enforcement funded millions of deportations.11 By 2010, the United States operated the largest immigrant detention system on earth.12 And, in recent years, U.S. Attorneys have aggressively prosecuted noncitizens for unlawful entry, sending thousands upon thousands of immigrants to federal prison every year.13 With Mexicans and Central Americans comprising nearly 97 percent of all deportees and 92 percent of all immigrants imprisoned for unlawful reentry, U.S. immigration control is the most highly racialized police and penal system in the United States today.14 But incarceration—and the patterns it harbors—boomed in Los Angeles far earlier than any of this. In fact, Los Angeles had become the carceral capital of the United States as early as the 1950s.15 Earlier still, the rate of incarceration during the 1930s in Los Angeles was no different than it is today.16 By 1910, Los Angeles already operated one of the largest jail systems in the country.17 And as far back as the 1850s the small town’s county jail was incessantly overcrowded. In other words, something with a very deep reach stirred the penal brew in Los Angeles. I did not know what it was, and the extant historiography of incarceration in the United States, which largely focuses on the particularities of race and labor in the U.S. South and the urban North, did not and could not answer all the questions I had about how a town in the U.S. West grew into the nation’s, if not the world’s, leading site of human caging.18 Race and labor were certainly key, but what about other central themes in the history of the U.S. West? What about indigeneity? What about immigration? What about borders? And borderlands? Full of these questions and many more, I headed to the archives to figure out the L.A. story. I quickly discovered that an archival void blankets much of the history 2 Introduction of imprisonment in Los Angeles. Sometime after Edward Escobar conducted research for his influential study, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Depart­ ment, 1900–1945, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as well as the L.A. City Archives destroyed all but four boxes of the LAPD’s historical rec­ords.19 Similarly, the Los Angeles Sheriff ’s Department (LASD) either does not have or will not share its records. The California Public Rec­ords Act exempts the state’s police forces from archiving most of the rec­ords they create. Therefore, the core institutional rec­ords related to the history of filling and managing the jails of Los Angeles are unavailable for public inquiry. But I was confident that the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles could not be so easily erased. Incarceration is a social institution.20 As the sociologist David Garland explains, the politics and processes of criminalization, arrest, detention, and punishment are fiercely entangled within “diverse currents of political and cultural life.”21 The idea of putting people in cages and the practices used to hold them there stretch beyond steel bars and stone walls. Therefore, I knew that the evidence of L.A.’s carceral past had to be deposited far and wide. To find it, I would just have to look further, search wider, and dig deeper. So that is what I did. For seven years, I pored over the city’s newspapers, noting any mention of jails. I scoured the personal papers of local elites, authorities, and activists, copying down any reference to incarceration. Similarly, I combed the records of local institutions and organizations, such as public health agencies, labor unions, the city council, unemployment bureaus, and political groups. I hung out in the basement of the Los Angeles County Courthouse, calling up cases from the past. The clerks would only give me three files at a time. It took awhile. When several of my archival finds pointed beyond the city, I followed them, too, reviewing a map once hidden in a Spanish colonial vault, scanning slave censuses written on South Carolina plantations, and even decrypting coded letters mailed to Mexico City. It was a grueling archival slog, but the chase was rewarding. Despite the destruction of public records, the making of the largest jail system in the United States left 200 years of evidence scattered across the city, the nation, and the world. Those who hoped to leverage human caging in Los Angeles to resolve social tensions and reach political objectives both deep within and far beyond the city wrote decrees, passed laws, published articles, and signed contracts, leaving behind reams of archived rec­ords. In general, they tended to be people with enough substantive political and cultural power to orchestrate who gets criminalized Introduction 3 and incarcerated, and who does not. Among them were colonists, citizens, landowners, and even foreign presidents. But many people fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. They were an eclectic bunch, including the incarcerated as well as journalists, musicians, migrants, mothers, and many others. They, too, left records. In fact, rebels and their many struggles with incarceration clog the historical record. The words and deeds of dissidents constitute what I call a “rebel archive” that evaded LAPD and LASD destruction. Comprised mostly of broken locks, secret codes, handbills, scribbled manifestos, and songs, the rebel archive found refuge in far-­flung boxes and obscure remnants. But it also thrives in plain sight. The rebels’ words thundered in the halls of the U.S. Congress, their resistance forced the U.S. Supreme Court to issue emergency rulings, and their rebellions broke across bars and borders, changing the world in which we live. And in the summer of 1965, an uprising against the violence of human caging in the city exploded, burning the carceral core of Los Angeles to the ground but leaving an archive of ashes and embers behind. I collected every scribble, song, and ember I could find. In the end, the rebel archive held more than enough evidence for me to write six stories spanning two centuries. The first story begins many millennia ago when the region now called the Los Angeles Basin was solely occupied by the Indigenous communities today collectively known as the Tongva-­Gabrielino Tribe. This story is vital because there is no evidence that Tongva-­Gabrielino communities ever tried or experienced human caging until the Spanish Crown dispatched a small group of colonists to establish El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles del Río Porciúncula, the City of Angels, in 1781.22 One of the first structures these colonists built was a jail.23 In time, the colonists and their descendants filled the jail with indios. Throughout the next century of colonial occupation in the Tongva Basin—spanning the Spanish colonial period (1781– 1821), the Mexican era (1821–48), and the early years of U.S. rule (1848– 70s)—Indigenous peoples consistently comprised a substantive, if not majority, portion of the incarcerated population in Los Angeles. Chapter 1, therefore, firmly grounds the origins of incarceration in Los Angeles with the dynamics of conquest and colonialism in the Tongva Basin. Chapter 2 moves deeper into the U.S. era, chronicling how, between the 1880s and 1910s, authorities in Los Angeles redirected and expanded the city’s carceral capacity. They did so while targeting a particular population: poor white men, namely those popularly disparaged as “tramps” and “hobos” for migrating constantly, working little, and living and loving 4 Introduction beyond the bounds of the nuclear family ideal. By 1910, when white men comprised nearly 100 percent of the local jail population, Los Angeles operated one of the largest jail systems in the country. And, as the city rapidly grew during these years, Los Angeles authorities operated a large convict labor program. In turn, white men sentenced to the chain gang cut roads, beautified parks, built schools, and so on. Chapter 2 details the rise of white male incarceration at the turn of the twentieth century and unveils the little-­known history of how incarcerated white men built the infrastructure of the growing city. From Sunset Boulevard to the paths winding around Dodger Stadium, city residents still walk, ride, and run on the imprint of their labors. The third chapter is a western tale of national and global import. That tale, which sutures the split between the history of incarceration within the United States and the history of deportation from the United States, swirls around the passage of the 1892 Geary Act, a federal law that required all Chinese laborers in the United States to prove their legal residence and register with the federal government or be subject to up to one year of imprisonment at hard labor and, then, deportation. Chinese immigrants rebelled against the new law, refusing to be locked out, kicked out, or singled out for imprisonment. Launching the first mass civil disobedience campaign for immigrant rights in the history of the United States, Chinese immigrants forced the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a set of sweeping and enduring decisions regarding the future of U.S. immigration control. Buried in those decisions, which cut through Los Angeles during the summer of 1893, lay the invention of immigrant detention as a nonpunitive form of caging noncitizens within the United States. It was then an obscure and contested practice of indisputably racist origins. It is now one of the most dynamic sectors of the U.S. carceral landscape. The fourth chapter sheds new historical insight on a key but little-­ studied demographic of incarceration in the United States: Mexicanos, including immigrants from Mexico and U.S.-­born persons of Mexican descent. It is a story that unfolded across the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands but peaked in Los Angeles when, in the summer of 1907, two LAPD officers kicked in the door of a shanty on the outskirts of town and arrested three leaders of a rebel movement to oust Mexico’s president, Porfirio Díaz. These men, Ricardo Flores Magón, Librado Rivera, and Antonio Villarreal, were political exiles living in hiding in the United States. Their arrests, as with the arrests of thousands of their supporters across the borderlands, were part of President Díaz’s counterinsurgency campaign to cage (if not kill) Magón and crush his rebel movement, which demanded Introduction 5 massive political reform and land redistribution in Mexico. Yet, while incarcerated in Los Angeles, Magón, Villarreal, and Rivera cultivated new ways to stoke rebellion in Mexico. Their ongoing assault on the Díaz regime pushed Mexico toward the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17). Therefore, Chapter 4 unearths how the incarceration of Mexicanos in the United States surged during the age of revolution in Mexico. It is an epic tale. The fifth chapter continues to chart the rise of Mexican and Mexican American incarceration in the United States. Like Magón’s rebellion, it is a tale that unfolded in Los Angeles and across the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands. Like the history of immigrant detention, it is a story about the collision of deportation and incarceration. But in particular, Chapter 5 examines how, during the 1920s and 1930s, the politics of controlling Mexican immigration to the United States directly prompted the criminalization of unauthorized border crossings and, in turn, triggered a steady rise in the number of Mexicans imprisoned within the United States. Home to the largest Mexican community within the United States, Los Angeles was ground zero for the politics and practices of Mexican incarceration in these years. The sixth and final story spans the decades between the 1920s and the 1960s. In these years, as Los Angeles took center stage in the nation’s landscape of jails and prisons, the population of African Americans incarcerated in Los Angeles shot from politically irrelevant and slightly disproportionate to politically dominant and stunningly disproportionate. It has remained so ever since. Chapter 6 tracks the origins of the incarceration of blacks in Los Angeles. In particular, it details why and how black incarceration so disproportionately followed the expansion of L.A.’s African American community. Moreover, by exhuming the first recorded killing of a young black male by the LAPD, which occurred in South Central Los Angeles on the evening of April 24, 1927, this chapter details why and how police brutality so closely accompanied black incarceration in the city. It is a brutal history attended by persistent—and, in time, explosive—black protest, tracking how community members fought police brutality between 1927 and the outbreak of the Watts Rebellion in 1965. Indeed, race, policing, and protest became inextricable as Los Angeles advanced toward becoming the carceral capital of the United States. Once pricked, each of these stories tumbled out of the rebel archive, and each revealed a key chapter from L.A.’s carceral past with echoes in the nation’s carceral present. Today, Indigenous peoples are one of the most disproportionately imprisoned populations in the United States.24 Houseless and racialized queer communities also experience high levels 6 Introduction of policing.25 Immigration control remains a racialized enterprise, caging and removing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Mexicans, from the United States every year.26 And a stunning lethality remains bound to the caging of Black America.27 But all is not dire. Much like the magonistas, incarcerated men, women, and youth and their allies continue to stoke transformative social movements.28 Therefore, each of the stories stands on its own as a distinct and urgent history of the present. And each story could be expanded into a book of its own. Together the stories reveal something more. A hardy cord connects the chapters in this book. I did not see it at first, but after I pulled one story and then another and then another from the rebel archive, I wrestled with how such diverse stories might fit together. The stories range from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, address issues from vagrancy laws to immigration control to police brutality, and twist and turn through a variety of communities at particular moments in time. Frankly, I was stunned by all that the rebel archive forced me to consider, and there was only one thing I knew for sure: these six stories were forcing me to think more historically, critically, and expansively than I ever imagined I would about the making and meaning of incarceration in Los Angeles. But, in time, I began to see how each story aligned on the arc of conquest and, more specifically, settler colonialism in the city. The United States is a settler society. As such, its cultures and institutions are rooted in a particular form of conquest and colonization called settler colonialism.29 Settler colonialism differs from other, more familiar systems of colonialism because it is not organized around resource extraction or labor exploitation. Resource extraction (such as mining) and labor exploitation (such as chattel slavery) can and certainly do occur in settler societies, but neither extraction nor exploitation is the principal objective of settler colonial projects. Rather, settler colonial projects seek land. On that land, colonists envision building a new, permanent, reproductive, and racially exclusive society. To be clear, settlers harbor no intentions of merging with, submitting to, or even permanently lording over the Indigenous societies already established within the targeted land base. Nor do settlers plan to leave or to return home someday. Rather, settlers invade in order to stay and reproduce while working in order to remove, dominate, and, ultimately, replace the Indigenous populations.30 In the words of historian Patrick Wolfe, settler societies are premised on the “elimination of the native.”31 In addition to native elimination, settler societies strive to block, erase, Introduction 7 or remove racialized outsiders from their claimed territory. Even as many settler societies depend on racialized workforces, settler cultures, institutions, and politics simultaneously trend toward excluding racialized workers from full inclusion in the body politic, corralling their participation in community life, and, largely shaped by rising and falling labor demands, deporting, hiding, or criminalizing them or otherwise revoking the right of racialized outsiders to be within the invaded territory. Settlers rarely agree on how to accomplish any of this. For example, some settlers import, recruit, or otherwise cultivate structurally marginalized and racialized workforces—such as enslaved Africans in southern cotton fields, contracted Chinese laborers on western railroads, and unauthorized Mexican border crossers on southwestern farms. Their objective is to fuel the expansion of settler-­dominated industries with cheap, subjugated, and when possible, disposable labor. Settler factions seeking total racial purity within the settler-­claimed territory fiercely contest their actions. So settlers furiously debate one another over how to best promote their interests and dominance over land and life in the invaded territory. And targeted communities always fight back, finding many ways to elude elimination and undermine disappearance. Therefore, what matters in the analysis of settler societies is not so much whether processes of native elimination and racial disappearance are consistent or ever achieved but, rather, how settler fantasies perpetually trend settler societies toward these ends. As Lorenzo Veracini puts it, “The settler colonial situation is generally understood as an inherently dynamic circumstance where [both] indigenous and exogenous Others progressively disappear in a variety of ways.”32 Throughout this book, I use a variety of terms to describe what Veracini calls projects of “disappear[ing]” Indigenous peoples and racial outsiders. I use “purge,” “erase,” and “banish,” to name a few. But I most commonly use “elimination.” This does not mean that the processes of disappearing Indigenous peoples and racial outsiders are indistinct or interchangeable. For Indigenous peoples and societies, disappearing is a matter of land and sovereignty. Settlers want their land. To take their land, settlers must extinguish Native peoples as sovereign communities. For racialized outsiders, disappearing is a matter of labor and social order. While hoping to construct, reproduce, and preserve an idealized settler community on Native land, settlers often use various forms of coerced, unfree, and racialized labor to build and sustain that community. On the ground, of course, no hard line separates histories of Native lands and racialized labor in settler societies. Indigenous peoples, for example, have been subject to 8 Introduction enslavement and forced labor in the United States. In fact, scholars are increasingly uncovering how the brutal conditions of forced labor played a pivotal role in breaching Native sovereignty and survival and, in turn, facilitating settler access to Native lands.33 And for most peoples of African descent in the United States, our arrival on slave ships entailed being stripped of land, kin, and indigeneity.34 But the messiness of historical experience is not why I use a variety of terms in this book or why I rely most heavily on just one: “elimination.” I do so because, as Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith have put it, “a logic of settler colonialism [i.e., elimination] structures the world for everyone, not just for native peoples.”35 To reflect the timbre of settler colonialism and its foundational eliminatory logic for everyone in a settler society, but especially Indigenous and racialized communities, I name incarceration “elimination.” It has been deployed in different ways in different times against different Indigenous and racially disparaged communities, but the punch line has been the same: elimination in the service of establishing, defending, and reproducing a settler society. Incarceration has been just one of many “eliminatory options” deployed in settler societies.36 Some options are particularly brutal and, thereby, plainly recognizable. In the nineteenth-­century United States, for example, Anglo-­American settlers pushing their settlements west toward the Pacific Ocean used wars, raids, and even genocidal tactics to clear the landscape of Native peoples and societies.37 They also massacred Chinese immigrants.38 But Anglo-­American settlers also levied more subtle methods, such as child adoptions, land laws, education projects, immigration restrictions, racial segregation, and religious conversion.39 “Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal,” writes Wolfe.40 However, the variability of elimination does not reflect an ounce of inconstancy. “Invasion is a structure, not an event,” in the words of Wolfe.41 It is constant. It is dynamic. It is ongoing. It is ubiquitous. Simply put, in a settler society such as the United States, the days of conquest are not over, and this holds meaning for all of us. When I began researching the history of incarceration in Los Angeles, I did not anticipate confronting matters of conquest or systems of elimination. The history of incarceration in the United States is a field of study largely dominated by analyses of labor control and racial subjugation. In turn, settler colonialism, a method of inquiry most powerfully developed in the field of Indigenous studies, and what it means for all of us, was not on my radar. But the rebel archive demanded that I expand my interpretive horizons to make sense of the stories I found. The stories certainly reIntroduction 9 vealed carceral histories of labor control and white supremacy, but there was always something more lingering within and between the chapters. An outpouring of extraordinary scholarship on settler colonialism helped me to grapple with it. I also considered the extraordinary work of Angela Davis, one of the world’s leading scholars of carcerality, who urges researchers to analyze state violence in the United States, namely policing and incarceration, in ways that “acknowledge that we all live on colonized land.”42 So I listened to the rebels, worked their archive, and read up on the history of the United States as a settler society. The more I listened, worked, and read, the more clear it became that incarceration is a pillar in the structure of invasion and settler colonialism in the Tongva Basin. The dynamics of elimination thread through the chapters and bind them together over time. Los Angeles is a city of conquest. Established when eleven Spanish families invaded the Tongva Basin in 1781, it began as a small outpost on the edge of Spain’s crumbling empire in the Americas. Scholars debate whether Spanish conquest took a settler colonial form in the Americas. Some say yes, pointing to evidence of Native elimination campaigns in Argentina and elsewhere.43 Others say no, arguing that a culture of hybridity guided practices of colonial dominance in the Spanish Americas.44 In Los Angeles, the story was mixed. Spanish colonists arrived in the basin in search of land. On that land, they intended to permanently remain, building a new and better world for themselves, their children, their children’s children, and so on. But the colonists did not imagine a community without Natives. Rather, the colonists’ identities, families, and economies depended on Native laborers. Therefore, between the founding of the city during the Spanish colonial era and through the Mexican period, the evolving caste of colonists and their descendants in Los Angeles negotiated, battled, struggled, and maneuvered to establish dominance over land, life, and labor in Tongva territory. Among their many strategies of conquest, the colonists used violence, expulsion, spiritual conversion, and famine. They also criminalized Native autonomy and used imprisonment to transform Natives into unfree workers, forcing themselves, as colonists, to the top of a new social order in Tongva territory. Total Native elimination, however, was not their endgame. Subjugation was. That changed in 1848. The U.S.-­Mexico War (1846–48) opened a new age of colonization in the Tongva Basin. The war was an apex moment in the making of the United States as a settler society, namely, a white settler society, premised on the elimination of Native peoples as sovereign communities.45 Four 10 I n t r o d u c t i o n John Gast’s iconic painting American Progress (1872) powerfully visualized nineteenth-­century notions of Manifest Destiny and Anglo-­American conquest in the post-­1848 western United States. In 1992, Autry Museum of the American West, located in Los Angeles, purchased the original painting, making American Progress a centerpiece of its permanent collection. (PGA—George A. Crofutt—American Progress, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-­DIG-­ppmsca-­09855) decades prior, President Thomas Jefferson (1801–9) began the sweeping postindependence Anglo-­American push across the continent by conducting secret negotiations with Napoleon Bonaparte to purchase the Louisiana territory from France.46 Completed in 1803, the Louisiana Purchase added 800,000 square miles to the national territory, extending the western boundary of the United States to the Rocky Mountains, 2,000 miles beyond the original thirteen colonies. Anglo-­American settlers rushed in, warring with, kidnapping, killing, converting, and, finally, expelling Indigenous peoples and, in many cases, importing enslaved Africans to work the land.47 Native elimination, labor subjugation, and white supremacy were intimately intertwined as the United States expanded west as a white settler society. By 1819, Spain and Great Britain had ceded Florida and several other tracts to the United States. In 1845, the Republic of Texas I n t r o d u c t i o n 11 joined the union. In 1846, the United States and Great Britain ended years of bitter dispute over a western quadrant of North America, agreeing to split the Oregon Territory. With the southern portion of the Oregon Territory in hand, the United States claimed a sliver of land stretching between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, encouraging President James K. Polk and many Anglo-­Americans to believe that they were on the brink of fulfilling what many believed was their “Manifest Destiny” to permanently claim, occupy, and control a massive territory on the North American continent.48 All that stood between them and their full-­bellied providence was the acquisition of Mexico’s northern hinterlands. So in the spring of 1846, President Polk ordered the U.S. military to invade Mexico, provoking the outbreak of the U.S.-­Mexico War. The United States won the war. As the victor in a war of conquest, the United States forced Mexico to cede all territories it claimed lying north of the Rio Grande River and west to the Pacific Ocean. On that land, Polk and many others imagined Anglo-­ American men leading nuclear families in an unending enterprise of settling, procreating, and dominating life and society. This was the vision of white supremacy girded by patriarchy that guided U.S. land claims in the region. But it would take more than war with Mexico to make any such fantasy a reality. Across the new U.S. West, Indigenous peoples, Spanish colonists, Mexican citizens, and global migrants had long lived and passed beyond the reach of colonial dictates and state authorities. The Mexican state, preceded by the Spanish Crown, had laid a tentative claim to the region, but papers stamped in faraway places never translated into clear social and political dominion. The new U.S. West was, in fact, a contested land. Many of the Indigenous peoples who had long lived upon the land never conceded to Spanish or Mexican authority.49 Neither they nor many of the arrivants to come—such as Chinese immigrants, Mexican migrants, and, in time, African American citizens—would concede to the imagined destiny of Anglo-­American conquest in the region.50 Facing constant and enormous resistance, Anglo-­American settlers pushed into the contested territories of the new U.S. West. Determined to build a homeland in a conquered land, they funded massive and diverse programs of Native elimination, ranging from waging wars of removal to operating schools of cultural extinction. The goal was to replace Indigenous societies on the land. They also rapaciously consumed racialized labor while building structures of racial erasure, outlawing interracial marriages, adopting racially restrictive residency codes, and passing new immigration laws.51 And they invested in imprisonment, spurring 12 I n t r o d u c t i o n CANADA WASHINGTON Oregon Territory 1846 MONTANA N British Cession 1818 NORTH DAKOTA OREGON VERMONT MINNESOTA IDAHO NEW HAMPSHIRE MASSACHUSETTS WISCONSIN SOUTH DAKOTA MAINE NEW YORK MICHIGAN WYOMING RHODE ISLAND NEBRASKA NEVADA Mexican Cession 1848 CALIFORNIA Louisiana Purchase 1803 Spanish Cession 1819 UTAH ILLINOIS INDIANA KANSAS DELAWARE WEST VIRGINIA United States KENTUCKY 1783 MISSOURI SOUTH CAROLINA ARKANSAS MISSISSIPPI ALABAMA TEXAS VIRGINIA GEORGIA LOUISIANA Spanish Cession 1819 FLORIDA Spanish Cession 1819 (West Florida) MEXICO 0G U L100 F O F 200 300 mi MEXICO 0 100 200 300 400 500 km Territorial Expansion of the United States, 1783–1848. (From USGS, The National Map, http://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/printable/territorialacquisition.html) MARYLAND NORTH CAROLINA TENNESSEE OKLAHOMA Texas Annexation 1845 NEW MEXICO CONNECTICUT NEW JERSEY OHIO COLORADO ARIZONA PA C I F I C OCEAN PENNSYLVANIA IOWA Spanish Cession 1819 (East Florida) AT L A N T I C OCEAN a phenomenal carceral boom by broadly caging a diverse cast of Native landholders and racialized outsiders variously criminalized, policed, and caged as vagrants, drunks, hobos, rebels, illegal immigrants, and illegitimate residents trespassing in their white settler society. Indeed, as viewed from Los Angeles, incarceration began with Spanish invasion and expanded during the Mexican era but boomed after the U.S.-­Mexico War, growing into a thick and pliant pillar in the structure of U.S. conquest. Anglo-­American invaders first eviscerated Native land rights with sweeping acts of Indian criminalization and caging, and then, as Native elimination continued by other means, the emerging Anglo-­American settler elite nimbly shifted and reshifted the project of human caging to include a range of communities defined as outsiders and deviants in the new U.S. West. Beginning in the 1880s, the settlers disparaged, criminalized, and caged poor white itinerant men who, by migrating constantly, living in homosocial communities, and loving in homosexual ways, either could not or would not abide by Anglo-­American settler norms such as heading nuclear families, acquiring Native land, and permanently settling down. The settler family, after all, was the building block of the new social order in the conquered territories.52 Then, with the passage of a series of carcerally inflected immigration laws, Anglo-­American settlers attempted to deny Chinese immigrants the right to enter the settler-­claimed territory while, later, allowing Mexican migrants to work in seasonal industries but not permanently settle north of the border. And when large numbers of African Americans defied the vision of Manifest Destiny by migrating west in the early twentieth century, the response was swift and punitive as settler communities created conditions for criminalizing, assaulting, and caging black citizens. By the 1950s, L.A. had the largest jail system in the United States, and blacks comprised an ever-­increasing share of the city’s incarcerated population. When black residents fought back, city elites dismissed their protests until thousands upon thousands of black youth took to the streets and ignited the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Amid this history of elimination and incarceration tracking through the Tongva Basin, Ricardo Flores Magón and his band of political dissidents crossed the U.S.-­Mexico border, threatening to oust Mexico’s president and restore both Native and communal landholdings. U.S. authorities responded, working across borders to cage the insurgency and its radical notions of “Land and Liberty!” for the Indigenous and dispossessed, because if the rebels were to succeed, their uprising would not only upend U.S. capital investments in Mexico but, quite possibly, ripple north, wreaking havoc for white supremacy and the enduring colonial occupation of Indigenous lands across the North 14 I n t r o d u c t i o n American continent. U.S. and Mexican officers found and caged the rebels in Los Angeles. But the rebels continued to fight, using their incarceration in the Los Angeles County Jail to spark new waves of revolution in the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands. When chronicled like this, through the lens of a settler colonial looking glass, the six stories held by the rebel archive offer more than scattered episodes from L.A.’s carceral past. They are two centuries of evidence documenting how the eliminatory trends of settler colonialism twisting through the Tongva Basin made Los Angeles, the City of Angels, into the City of Inmates, the carceral capital of the United States. Chapter 1 starts this story the only way such an epic tale of incarceration, elimination, and revolution, too, could begin: in the Tongva Basin long before the invaders arrived and, in time, built one of the largest systems of human caging that the world has ever known. I n t r o d u c t i o n 15 1 An Eliminatory Option Stringent vagrant laws should be enacted and enforced compelling such persons [Natives] to obtain an honest livelihood or seek their old homes in the mountains.—“Presentment of the Grand Jury, February Term,” Los Angeles Star, March 12, 1859 N ocuma held the world in his hands and created everything within it: the animals, trees, land, and seas full of fish. Since the world was in constant motion, Nocuma placed a small black rock in the middle to hold it in its place. Then he grabbed a chunk of clay and made man (Ejoni) and woman (Áe). Ejoni and Áe had children, and their children had children, and so on until a man named Weywoot was born. Weywoot was a cruel and ambitious man who tried to control all life from his home in Povuu’nga (near Long Beach, California). The people rose up and killed Weywoot, burning his body on a pyre at Povuu’nga. Following Weywoot’s death, a rational deity named Attajen arrived and granted shamanic powers to people charged with controlling the food supply. Years later, a man named Chengiichngech was born and taught all the people the laws and rituals needed to preserve life on the land. When Chengiichngech died, he took the name Quagaur and ascended to heaven, where he remains watching over the descendants of Ejoni and Áe, the Kumivit. This is how life came to be in the Tongva Basin.1 Western scholars tell different tales about the origins of life in the Tongva Basin. According to some, humans first arrived in the basin after their slow migration out of Africa thru Asia and across the Bering Strait into the Americas.2 Sometime around 11,000 B.C., successive generations of small family groups called “bands” turned right at the southern tip of the Great Basin (Utah/Nevada/California). They gradually pushed across Death Valley, the continent’s driest and hottest desert, before penetrating a narrow break between northern and southern mountain ranges. On the other side lay a vast and flat grassy basin set between desert, mountains, and the sea. Some bands stopped and settled along the creeks and rivers that pour into the basin from the mountains.3 On plots ranging from fifty to hundreds of square miles, they built dozens of communities and villages. Nestled between the San Gabriel Mountains and Saddleback Peak 16 were Pashiinonga, Wapijanga, and Tooypinga.4 Down near what are now the cities of Watts and Compton, members of the Tajáuta village lived. And the current downtown Los Angeles area was home to the Yaanga village. Other lineages and communities journeyed farther west until they encountered the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific. Along the rich coast and its wetlands, they halted at the shore, establishing villages such as Topaa’nga and Povuu’nga. Some still pressed on. Felling trees and carving them into ti’ats (canoes), they paddled across the sea to reach three small islands located sixty miles from the shore.5 There, across a petite coastal archipelago, they established communities, such as Pimu on the largest island, Pemuu’nga.6 More recently, Western scholars have begun to tell another story. Many now believe that human life began in the Tongva Basin when Natives sailed south along the great “Kelp Highway” that lines California’s Pacific Coast. In time, they peopled the islands, then the mainland, trekking east across the desert and toward the Colorado River Basin.7 However life began in the basin, archaeological evidence suggests that Tongva communities have lived in the region for at least 7,000 years.8 By A.D. 1769, when small groups of Spanish colonists began to arrive with hopes of permanently settling in the region, up to 10,000 people were already in the basin and on its islands. Speaking a shared Uto-­Aztecan language, the independent bands of the basin loosely identified as members of a broader social and cultural group called the Kumivit, or as they are commonly called today, the Tongva-­Gabrielino Tribe.9 Settled across 1,500 square miles stretching from islands to desert, most Tongva villages clustered around the rivers, creeks, and tributaries that wound through the basin. In every community, parents and elders used stories and songs to teach children about the boundaries and bounties of their village’s homeland. As archaeologist Brian Fagan puts it, California was an “edible landscape.” 10 Along the southern coastline, Tongva families harvested a steady and diverse supply of food. Wetlands and tide pools nourished mollusks and waterfowl. Freshwater rivers and creeks were gathering places for minks, otters, deer, and rabbits. Coastal and inland waters also nourished expansive riparian forests, which hugged the shore and bent along the rivers through the Tongva Basin. Armies of oak trees rose from the beaches and the riverbanks, marching for miles across the basin and punching toward the sky. Around 2500 B.C., Tongva families began reaping nutrient-­dense acorns from these mighty oak trees. With each family claiming individual trees and parcels, men, women, and children worked together to collect acorns, but it was Tongva women who A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n 17 TATAV I A M SERRANO SANTA SUSANA MOUNTAINS SAN BERNARDINO MOUNTAINS SAN GABRIEL MOUNTAINS Pasheeknga Achooykomenga Tohuunga SAN FERNANDO Muuhonga Pakooynga VALLE Y Wiqanga ’Atavsanga VERDUGO Kaweenga HILLS Siutcanga CHUMASH ’Aluupkenga Sheshiikwanonga Sonaanga ’Akuuronga Haahamonga SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS SAN G ABRIEL VALLE Y Shevaanga Tooypinga R io Ho nd Yaanga Pemookanga PUENTE HILLS o San Gabriel C H IN O H IL L S River Naxaaw’nga-Sehat sA ng eles River S A N TA A N A P L A I N Sa nt a Hotuuknga Chaawvenga Xuuxonga ’Aataveanga ’Ichunash Wapijanga Pashiinonga Huutnga Swaanga ’Ahwaanga Povuu’nga Haraasnga Toveemonga Kiinkenga Cha nn aR An PaXávXanga r ive N SANTA ANA MOUNTAINS CAHUILLA Pasbenga Lukúpa el Kengaa SANTA ANA MOUNTAINS Pemuu’nga PAC I FI C OCEA N Kiinkepar Homhoa Horuuvnga Chokiishnga Tevaaxa’anga S an P edro Wa’aachnga SAN BERNARDINO VALLE Y ’Ochuunga k ree Geveronga aC on Saa’anga l l a Tajáuta B La Lo Waachnga S ANTA MO NIC A B AY Weniinga ’Ahwiinga Maawnga Topaa’nga Kuukamonga ’Ashuukshanga 0 0 5 10 10 15 mi 20 km LUISEÑO The Tongva Basin. Researchers estimate that there were at least fifty villages in the Tongva Basin at the time of Spanish conquest. This map reflects some of the villages’ approximate locations as well as the territories of neighboring tribes. (From McCawley, First Angelinos, 24, 36, 42, 47, 56) performed the hard work of remaking the bitter jawbreakers into food. For days and days, women crushed, washed, and leeched the tannins from the acorns, transforming the tough seeds into nutrient-­rich breads, soups, and mashes. Their labor fueled a culinary and nutrient “revolution” that rolled up and down the Pacific Coast, creating a period of robust population growth among the Indigenous peoples of California. By the mid-­ eighteenth century, the region that would become California was home to more than 310,000 people, making the coastal region one of the most densely populated areas on the North American continent. Only central Mexico maintained a higher population density.11 What is today California was also one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions of the world. Of all the Native languages originally spoken within the present borders of the United States, California was home to more than one quarter of them. Most had Uto-­Aztecan roots, but one was entirely unique to the region. These languages mapped tribal affiliations. The estimated sixty different tribes living within the present boundaries of California spoke as many distinct languages. Moreover, each village also developed a distinctive dialect of its own. Therefore, within a single day’s walk in the Tongva Basin, a traveler would encounter numerous languages and even more dialects.12 When Europeans first began to explore the Tongva coast in the sixteenth century, they marveled at the region’s bounty and diversity. In their travels along the coast, they noted surpluses of foods and goods. Dried meats hung from roofs, behemoth granaries stored acorns, and large homes built of tule reeds were filled with rabbit skin blankets, grass mats, and colorful baskets. Some of the travelers attributed the abundance to the region’s Mediterranean landscape, but it was work, family, and the teachings of a shaman-­hero named Chengiichngech that sustained life in the Tongva Basin.13 Everyday labor was highly gendered in the Tongva Basin. Women gathered and cooked foods. Men hunted. To perform their tasks effectively, men and women received training from their parents and elders about the land, the seasons, and the resources in their community, which often included a principal settlement, numerous hunting and gathering camps, religious sites, and large fields for games and celebrations. From their principal settlement, families would migrate seasonally to orchards and hunting grounds. Generations of experience guided their labor, but ongoing study was also important as epiphenomenal ecological events changed the landscape of their lives.14 Skilled work was also gendered. Men taught their sons how to build A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n 19 boats or craft arrowheads. Women taught their daughters how to weave the basin’s sturdy grasses—some of which grew to six feet high—into baskets. Crafted to store water, warehouse acorns, hold babies, and so much more, their baskets were vital social and economic commodities. Those made by well-­trained women from the grassy Tongva Basin were extremely valuable and were traded up and down the coast and across the desert as far as the Great Basin region, bringing everything from beads to slaves into a village.15 In addition to the organization of labor by gender and family, a Tongva chief, often known as a tomyaar, served as the social, political, and economic leader for his, or sometimes her, village. Inheriting the position from his or her father, a tomyaar was trained since childhood to speak multiple languages, negotiate social relations, and intimately understand the specific ecology of the village. With this knowledge, tomyaars were responsible for directing the community’s seasonal migrations for hunting and gathering and for receiving, storing, and redistributing from hunters. The tomyaar, in other words, guided the community’s labor and stewarded its economic well-­being. To regulate behavior and relations within a community, a tomyaar would correct misconduct with supernatural warnings, persuasion, banishment, and fees, requiring men or women guilty of wrongdoing to pay fines in the currency of shell-­ beads, food, or animal skins. Only rarely would a tomyaar order an execution. Murder and incest as well as misbehavior in religious sites and the mishandling of community food stores could all be punished by death in many Tongva communities. But execution as well as imprisonment, forced labor, or any form of corporal punishment was rare within California’s Indigenous communities. The lack of physical coercion extended into parenting practices. “Parents rarely, if ever, beat their off-­spring,” writes historian Steven Hackel.16 Another important role served by a Tongva tomyaar was to maintain diplomatic relations with other villages and tribes. By speaking multiple dialects and traveling widely across the basin, a tomyaar engaged in trade, maintained political alliances, and also helped community members find spouses. In hard times, intermarriage and trade relations proved essential. For example, when tempests struck and destroyed a community’s food surpluses, trade and diplomacy provided access to emergency food supplies. In times of strained political relations, a tomyaar could mobilize men for war, but constant trade and extensive intermarriage generally mitigated the lethality of conflict.17 Although a tomyaar’s leadership depended on his or her knowledge and able stewardship of a community’s economy and social relations, a 20 A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n complex spiritual system firmly undergirded social order in the Tongva Basin. Across southern California, the Tongva and nearby tribes shared a spiritual belief system in which Chengiichngech, a shaman-­like hero, set and enforced the rules of everyday life. Trained to care for the sick and mediate between the natural and supernatural worlds, shamans used rituals and guides to help community members worship Chengiichngech. Hunters and fishers, explained shamans, were barred from eating their own catch because Chengiichngech required them to give their catch to the tomyaar, who would redistribute the catch across the community. Hunters and fishers obeyed. If not, injury, illness, or a natural disaster could result when Chengiichngech ordered his “avengers,” such as bears, serpents, and supernatural deities, to descend from the mountains and strike against the disobedient. As one member of the Tongva Tribe explained in the early nineteenth century, Chengiichngech, who took the name Quagaur when he ascended to a life in the stars, watched carefully to make sure every person heeded his counsel: “Those who obey not my teachings, nor believe them, I shall punish severely. I will send unto them bears to bite and serpents to sting them; they shall be without food, and have diseases that they may die.” 18 Careful research with Tongva oral histories, archaeological evidence, and linguistic analyses are still revealing many of the complexities of the millennia of life in the region today known as Los Angeles. However, what this work has already made indisputably clear is that life in the Tongva Basin was ordered, dynamic, and generations deep before Europeans began to explore the Americas. Tongva life was grounded by an earned and intimate knowledge of the edible landscape and enriched by extensive social, cultural, political, and spiritual relations across the region. Therefore, when a Spanish ship first appeared on the Tongva horizon, local tomyaars knew more about the Spaniards than the Spaniards knew of the Tongva. Their extensive trade networks had long carried news of a powerful new band of men traveling by land and sea.19 Spanish Invasion After the Spanish conquest of Mexico (1519–21), stories of bearded men and towering beasts cascaded along trade routes in the Americas. Some of the stories were frightening. The travelers had powerful weapons. They sliced up humans and blasted balls of fire. So fearsome were their weapons that the new tribe had broken the mighty Aztecan Empire and occupied its land. They raped women and stole children. But other stories A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n 21 told that the new trading partners carried unique and valuable goods. Therefore, when the Spanish explorer Juan Francisco Cabrillo and his crew anchored their ships along the Tongva coast in 1542, the women fled and the men from the local village jumped into ti’ats and paddled out to meet the ships. The men were prepared to fight or trade. When Cabrillo signaled that he had no interest in battle, Tongva men boarded their ships to inspect and exchange goods with the strange visitors. For the next few days, Cabrillo and his men traveled along the coast, trading with island communities.20 And then the visitors were gone. They did not return for many years, mostly because they were disappointed by what Cabrillo and his crew found—or, more precisely, did not find—in California. A peculiar fantasy animated early Spanish explorations in California. Shortly after Christopher Columbus’s 1492 journey across the Atlantic, the Spanish writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo penned a wildly popular book, The Adventures of Esplandian, which told the tale of Queen Calafia. Queen Calafia, wrote Montalvo, was a tall and powerful black woman dusted in gold. She ruled over a bountiful island of black female warriors trained to kill any man they found wandering into their mythical realm. The legend of Queen Calafia inspired Spanish explorers to push north of Mexico where they imagined her island—and gold—to be.21 After plundering Mexico, Hernán Cortés, the conquistador of Mexico, planned to be the first Spanish explorer to conquer the lands of Queen Calafia. His crews failed to penetrate beyond Baja California, beaten back by the Indigenous populations.22 A few years later, Juan Francisco Cabrillo, a “captain of crossbowmen” during Cortés’s invasion of Mexico, hoped he could be the one to find Queen Calafia’s island.23 Cabrillo successfully navigated the California coast, traded with local tribes, and planted a Spanish flag on their shore. But he found no black women dusted in gold. Nor did Cabrillo ever return home; he cut his leg on a rock and died of gangrene.24 Cabrillo’s crew sailed home without him, reporting that they had pierced north of Baja California but found no evidence of a black queen or her gold. Spanish authorities were disappointed. They “claimed” the region, naming it Alta California, but made no attempt to colonize it. No gold. No colonization. Sixty years would pass before Spanish authorities dispatched another ship to California. The visit would again be brief. In 1602, a Spanish crew led by Sebastián Vizcaíno returned to explore the Alta California coast. Despite Cabrillo’s disappointing expedition, Vizcaíno still chased the legend of Queen Calafia. From the Tongva islands, Vizcaíno and his crew sailed up the coast, trading with villages, searching for gold, and drawing a map of the region.25 They, too, found no gold. 22 A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n So, upon Vizcaíno’s return to Spain, Spanish authorities seized his map, locked it in a vault, and stopped sending ships to California. It would take more than a century and a massive change in global politics for Spanish authorities to crack open the vault and authorize another expedition to California. Once they did, Tongva peoples immediately noted something had changed in the visitors. This time, the Spaniards would enter the Tongva Basin not by sea but by land, driving sprawling herds of cattle, horses, and sheep. Men in robes led the expedition attended by warriors. And this time the visitors planned to stay. The Spanish Crown decided to establish a permanent presence in Alta California for one reason: geopolitics. At the close of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Britain scored a major set of territorial victories in the Americas, undermining Spain’s dominance in the region. So the Spanish Crown retrieved Vizcaíno’s map from a vault and made plans to secure its claims in the Americas by colonizing Alta California. The Spanish Crown chose the Franciscan order to lead the enterprise. Hoping to find new converts for the Catholic faith, the Franciscan order took the job.26 Despite the politics of empire and faith motivating the Franciscan expedition into Alta California, the Spanish arrival was a pitiful scene. In January 1769, a Franciscan expedition had departed from Baja California in several stages. Comprised of 300 men, ships, and numerous pack animals, the expedition split into land and sea routes. Of the three ships that left Baja California, one was lost at sea. Nearly every man on the other two ships fell sick with scurvy. Anchored off what is now San Diego, men with pale and spotted skin stumbled onto the shore vomiting and lethargic. Then they returned to their boats to retrieve the bodies of the dozens of men who had died among them at sea. The two expeditions that arrived by land fared better. They arrived thin from deprivation and dehydration, but relatively few men had died during the overland trips. However, once reunited with the seafarers in San Diego, they, too, spent most of their time dying or digging ditches to bury the dead.27 In all, fewer than 100 men of the original 300 lived beyond the summer of 1769. But even this paltry and sickly number was enough to begin the Spanish occupation of Alta California. Supported by supplies and reinforcements from Mexico, the group began establishing missions. Eventually they would build twenty-­one missions along the California coast. They established their fourth, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, on Tongva territory in the summer of 1771.28 Prior to establishing Mission San Gabriel, a troop of Spanish priests, soldiers, and beasts crisscrossed Tongva territory for two years (1769–71). They traveled north, south, and all around, searching for a mission site. A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n 23 According to the Franciscans, villages in Tongva territory greeted their arrival with gifts of food and invitations to settle in the basin. According to one Indigenous memory of the Spanish invasion, villages diplomatically gave the visitors enough supplies to continue their journey elsewhere.29 These differing understandings of the Spaniards’ right to remain in the Tongva Basin soon erupted into battle. In the summer of 1771, two Spanish priests and ten soldiers drove their beasts east across the basin and talked of building a new religious center along the Rio Hondo. As the herd of beasts and men made their way toward the river, Tongva tomyaars from nearby villages organized a war party. “In full war-­paint and brandishing their bows and arrows, with hostile gestures and blood-­curdling yells,” the Tongva warriors forced the priests and guards into foxholes.30 The Tongva warriors had the Spaniards pinned down. According to one of the priests, Father Pedro Benito Cambón, the Spanish mission was doomed until he lifted a painting from his hiding place. As Cambón put it, the painting, La Dolorosa, was a transcendent religious image that “transfixed” the Tongva warriors.31 He believed it inspired the two tomyaars among them to set down their bows and lay an offering of sacred necklaces before La Dolorosa. Allowed to stay, the priests and soldiers spent the next few months building a small mission.32 Around it they built a defensive stockade. Members of the local villages often visited the stockade to trade and, according to the priests, to make offerings to La Dolorosa. When the soldiers tried to limit their entrance to four or five people at a time, Tongva men and women reacted immediately.33 The visitors had no right to restrict Tongva life, mobility, or autonomy. Infuriated, they stormed the stockade. The soldiers stopped the attack with a volley from their muskets, but the battle was only beginning. When a Spanish soldier raped the wife of a local tomyaar, an alliance of Tongva warriors returned to the stockade. Quietly, the warriors surrounded the mission and launched a multipronged assault, attacking in successive waves from various strategic positions. The siege continued until a soldier shot and killed the tomyaar who led the revolt, prompting the warriors to retreat.34 In the morning, the Spanish soldiers reveled in their victory. They decapitated the fallen tomyaar and impaled his severed head on a pole in the stockade. But just beyond the posts, smoke choked the horizon. Fires burned across the basin, signaling that allied Tongva villages were organizing an attack. Fearing that the ten guards stationed at the mission could not repel the next Tongva strike, the priests dispatched couriers to 24 A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n the nearest Spanish garrison. The couriers begged the garrison to send additional guards to the mission.35 Tongva warriors initiated several more attacks, but the soldiers and their reinforcements repelled each attempt. Unable to oust the armed soldiers and priests from the basin, many of the surrounding Tongva villages packed up and moved away, establishing new villages elsewhere in the basin.36 Those who remained near the mission found it increasingly difficult to live either with or apart from the mission. Not only did the foreign soldiers roam the basin raping women and snatching children (they took the entire village of Tooypinga during one punitive military drive), but the mission’s herds trampled and devoured the Tongva’s edible landscape.37 Hunger drove Tongva families to seek food at the mission. By 1785, hundreds of people from villages across the basin—such as Juyuabit, Amupubit, and Tibajobit—were living at the mission.38 And priests from other missions sent Native men, women, and children from faraway communities to Mission San Gabriel. Indeed, they scattered Native peoples across the twenty-­one missions strung along the California coast. At the San Gabriel Mission, priests required Native peoples to adopt a new way of life.39 For example, the priests required men and women to wear Spanish clothes and learn new jobs, such as farming and candle making. The priests punished those who shirked. Most often, the priests administered whippings, denied food, or tied idlers to a post. The priests also demanded that men and women live separately, unless married in the church. To guarantee gender segregation, the priests locked unmarried women and girls over the age of eight years in dormitories at night.40 In so doing, the mission conducted the first experiment in human caging in Tongva territory.41 For the priests, the official objective of caging women and girls was to compel behaviors concordant with the priests’ spiritual and cultural beliefs. Conversion was the Franciscan objective in California. After compelling new behaviors and instructing Tongva men, women, and children about a god named Jehovah with a son named Jesus, who, instead of their mystical shaman named Chengiichngech, had provided the necessary lessons for leading life, the priests baptized as many first peoples of the basin as possible. By 1785, the priests at Mission San Gabriel had baptized 1,200 Natives. They called them neophytes, former heathens converted to Catholicism by the sacrament of baptism.42 How much the neophytes embraced Catholicism remains a lively debate among scholars.43 Regardless of the degree of conversion, the San Gabriel Mission had, by the end of 1771, emerged as a fixed outpost for the A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n 25 Spanish Empire in the Tongva Basin. The priests and soldiers assigned to the mission spent several months fighting to secure their stockade against attacks from local villages, but under hoof, musket, and faith, the San Gabriel Mission significantly changed life on Tongva land. Next came a town.44 Los Angeles, California Soon after the priests and soldiers secured Mission San Gabriel, the Spanish Crown instructed the colonial governor of California, Felipe De Neve, to find a location where Spanish families could be sent to live in the region. The priests at San Gabriel had asked the crown to establish a town nearby, believing that a town filled with Spanish families would somehow subdue the soldiers, discouraging them from raping Native women and girls. Governor De Neve selected a town plot alongside a river located eleven miles west of the mission. He named the town El Pueblo Sobre el Rio de Nuestro Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles del Rio de Porciúncula. Its plot neighbored the Yaanga village of the Tongva Tribe. Aware of the troubles that had plagued the San Gabriel Mission, De Neve visited the village to negotiate with the tomyaar regarding the possibility of bringing families to settle nearby. The tomyaar, according to De Neve, approved of the plan.45 Within six months, the first batch of families arrived. To entice families to settle in California, the Spanish Crown offered free land, seed, implements, and herd animals, plus guaranteed salaries and an exemption from taxation for five years. Even with all of these perks, it proved difficult to find families willing to relocate to the Tongva Basin. In 1781, California remained on the distant outer rim of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. By then, only several dozen Franciscan priests and Spanish soldiers lived among an Indigenous majority in the region. And maps, until recently, had described Alta California as Terra Incognita, an uncharted expanse perched far beyond the frontier of all European empires in the Americas. Few men and women were willing to leave Mexico for a life beyond the brink of empire. Only those who had more to gain than lose proved willing to settle in Alta California. Of them, most were mixed-­race families.46 Throughout the Spanish Empire, colonial authorities distributed rights, privileges, and taxation according to a complex but rigid racial hierarchy known as the casta system. According to the casta system, peninsulares, men born in Spain, sat atop the colonial regime. They were free to own large swaths of land, engage in global commerce, own slaves, and travel, 26 A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n and they paid no head taxes. Their children born in the Americas, criollos, enjoyed many similar privileges, but they had more limited trade and employment opportunities. At the bottom of the casta system were Natives and Africans. Legally defined as minors, Natives were considered wards of the church and state. Africans, almost all of whom arrived enslaved in New Spain, were, even after emancipation, subject to curfews, formally banned from certain employment categories, and effectively barred from political office and landownership. The casta system also meticulously defined the growing mixed-­race population of colonial Spain. Their lives were variously taxed, regulated, and limited by casta restrictions. Racial categorization, therefore, played a significant role in limiting rights and benefits in colonial Mexico. Laid over the casta matrix was an overarching cultural logic placing all persons into one of two groups, gente de razón (people of reason) or gente sin razón (people without reason). Gente de razón included all Spaniards, criollos, and castas who were culturally Hispanic, defined as Catholics who spoke Spanish and dressed in typical Spanish styles. Gente sin razón included unbaptized Natives, slaves, and all “unacculturated” persons.47 Of the original eleven families recruited to settle in colonial Los Angeles, most were led by men and women from the middling and lower levels of the casta system. Ninety-­five percent of the town’s first colonists claimed some degree of African or Native ancestry. By moving to the rim of New Spain, they escaped to a place where casta restrictions were largely unmonitored and unenforced. They also gained access to landownership, a coveted status that was difficult to achieve for poor castas in New Spain. Making the journey into Terra Incognita, therefore, presented the rare opportunity for castas from New Spain to lift themselves atop both land and life.48 Arriving in the summer of 1781, the original colonists of Los Angeles—numbering just forty-­four men, women, and children—immediately began to build a new town. At the center, they cleared away the tall grasses and dense brush for a plaza. In a rectangle around the plaza, they constructed homes of wood and adobe. To the east of town, they fenced in corrals for horses, chickens, and goats and cleared more grasses and brush for growing food. And on the edible landscape around the town, they grazed nearly 1,000 head of cattle. But they did not do all this work on their own.49 By trading knives, cloth, and glass beads for labor, the colonists recruited additional help from the Yaanga village.50 Together, the castas, or Californios, as they liked to call themselves, and their Yaanga neighbors, who referred to themselves as Yaangavit, built Los Angeles, the City of A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n 27 Angels. But the town that the Yaangavit and the Californios were building together was quickly becoming deeply inequitable.51 In particular, as the colonists’ herds expanded, they devastated the Yaanga village’s edible landscape, pushing the village into economic dependency. Hungry, the Yaangavit entered new trade and work relationships with the colonists. The Californios, in turn, slowly gained access to a dependent workforce. For the Californios, the formation of a dependent, Indigenous workforce served as a crucial counterpoint to their newfound status as landowning colonists at the edge of the Spanish Empire. Living so far away from colonial authorities, the Californios translated local labor relations into a familiar but new social order. In particular, they set aside the technicalities of the casta matrix for the simpler divide between gente de razón and gente sin razón. As Catholics who owned land and dressed in Spanish styles, the mixed-­race colonists defined themselves as gente de razón, elite members of the new society emerging in the City of Angels. The men, women, and children of the Yaanga village, on the other hand, were gente sin razón, dependent laborers who wore little clothing and worshiped Chengiichngech, a heathen god.52 Into the nineteenth century, the colonists settling in Los Angeles carefully tended to the divide between themselves and the Indigenous peoples in the region. The hierarchy between Californios and Natives was the “structuring principle of [their] settler colonial-­society.” 53 Native men, women, and children doing manual labor, writes historian David Torres-­ Rouff, were the “material basis of the [colonists’] elite economic and social status.”54 While Native labor remained the most basic element of the social divide in colonial Los Angeles, clothing, religious ceremonies, and family relations also set the gente de razón apart from gente sin razón. Violence, too, played a significant role as the Californios (gente de razón) claimed a right to capture and discipline Native peoples (gente sin razón). Social hierarchy also lived within the colonial justice system, especially as Spanish authorities criminalized Indigenous practices such as burning fields and denied Natives the right to refuse to work, prohibited Natives from riding horses without stamped approval by military authorities, and banned everything from Native insolence to uprisings. As Steven Hackel puts it, “Spanish systems of law and justice by design fostered and enforced a social hierarchy with Indians at the bottom.” 55 To punish Native lawbreakers, colonial authorities deployed imprisonment and convict labor, but corporal punishments, such as flogging, hobbling, and shackling, dominated.56 Corporal punishment reigned because, according to many Spanish authorities, Indigenous peoples were “weak, irrational, and 28 A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n culturally inferior people (gente sin razón)” who could not and would not adjust to the colonial order without physical punishment.57 They incorporated this sentiment into colonial law, establishing a separate legal system for Natives throughout New Spain. In California, the results were brutal, breaking open a punishing new reality for Native peoples who historically had not used physical coercion to compel behavior or punish wrongdoers but, after the invaders arrived, “lived under the [constant] threat of Spanish violence.”58 The reliance upon corporal punishment meant that neither a cultural logic nor a legal structure was in place during the Spanish colonial era to advance significant investments in imprisonment as a principal form of punishment, in particular, or social control, in general. Therefore, one of the first buildings colonists built in Los Angeles was a jail, but incarceration did not become a social institution in the city until the end of the Spanish colonial era.59 The War for Mexican Independence (1810–21) ended Spanish colonial rule across Mexico.60 Largely fought in central Mexico, the war was a popular rebellion by criollos, castas, indios, and Africans against the colonial order. The disparate and diverse communities of New Spain held differing objectives for their uprising, but they shared the goal of casting off the shackles of Spanish colonialism, namely the casta system.61 At the long war’s close, three centuries of Spanish colonial rule ended. Upon establishing the Republic of Mexico, the revolution’s leaders smashed the casta system by adopting a constitution that defined all adult men, regardless of race or religion, as citizens equal before the law. The formal equality of citizenship (among men) threatened to unmoor the racial and cultural divides of the colonial era, but colonial inequities powerfully persisted in the age of citizenship.62 In particular, explains historian and gender studies scholar Robert Buffington, after revolutionary leaders ended the casta system, “the opposition of criminal and citizen became the fundamental dichotomy within modern Mexican society.” 63 That dichotomy, continues Buffington, was largely mapped over the social divides first established during the Spanish colonial era. As such, the jails and prisons of the new republic quickly filled with the historically marginalized, namely Natives but also Africans and poorer and darker castas. Once imprisoned, the incarcerated population of Mexico lost most citizenship rights. Therefore, as Buffington explains, “criminal acts rather than . . . ‘natural conditions’ . . . provided elite policy makers the flexibility needed to legally delimit the all-­too-­inclusive (if still male) category of the citizen.”64 Crime and punishment, in other words, emerged as the platform A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n 29 for the inequities of the Spanish colonial era to flourish in the Republic of Mexico. By the end of the 1820s, the new nation’s jails, prisons, and convict labor crews were overcrowded with the historically marginalized of the Spanish colonial order, largely a population of Natives, Africans, mulattos, and mestizos. Most of the nation’s imprisoned were arrested on public order charges.65 It is significant that public order charges drove the rise of incarceration in the early Mexican period and still remain leading causes of arrest in the twenty-­first-­century United States. Public order charges, such as vagrancy, disorderly conduct, and public drunkenness, systematically penalize the landless, homeless, and underemployed. Those who live their lives in public—sleeping, eating, arguing, loving, drinking, playing, etc.— are the most vulnerable to public order arrests, which effectively imprison them for living, as so much of their lives are lived in public. Therefore, by caging the houseless, landless, and underemployed for living in public, public order charges regulate, limit, and ultimately deny their “right to be” within a territory.66 In Mexican Los Angeles, the social divides cast from the Spanish colonial era looked a bit different, since the inequities of the Spanish invasion in the Tongva Basin largely pivoted on a two-­part hierarchy between the Californios and Native peoples. Yet, as elsewhere in Mexico, the Californios maintained those divides by broadly criminalizing Natives for arrest and imprisonment on public order charges. In particular, the Californios worked to strip away the Native “right to be” in the town unless subject to the authority of an employer. It was in these years, as Californios used a variety of methods to claim more and more land in the basin, that the inequities of invasion became anchored within a set of carceral practices. City of Inmates Before Mexican independence, the Californios complained that the Franciscan missions monopolized all of the fertile coastal lands of California. Mariano Vallejo, for example, was a retired soldier who grumbled, “Many soldiers . . . do not know how they are going to settle with their growing families. . . . It is just [the case] that twenty-­one mission establishments possess all the fertile lands of the peninsula [California] and that more than a thousand families of gente de razón possess only that which has been benevolently given them by the missionaries.” 67 From Vallejo’s perspective, which was generally held by soldiers, missionaries, and settlers in Spanish California, the Spanish Crown owned 30 A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n California and held the right to land distribution. In fact, Spain’s claim to California was neither secure nor uncontested. In 1812, Russia established a fort in northern California. Despite Spanish colonial bans on global trade within its outer provinces, Anglo-­American traders scoured the California coast doing business with local settlers. And California’s tribes and villages led at least three major rebellions at the missions and launched numerous and constant guerrilla attacks on the homes and beasts of the invading Spaniards. One of the most notable uprisings occurred on October 25, 1785, when a twenty-­four-­year-­old female shaman named Toypurina from the Jachivit village rallied warriors from at least eight villages for an attack against the San Gabriel Mission. The mission’s guards quickly toppled the uprising, subjecting all suspects to twenty-­five lashes each and caging at least twenty of the warriors, including Toypurina, in the mission’s jail. But Toypurina’s protest was not over. At her trial, she testified that she was “angry with the Padres and with all of those of this Mission because they had come to live and establish themselves in her land.”68 Mission authorities found her guilty of insurrection and imprisoned Toypurina for two years before permanently banishing her from the Tongva Basin.69 But Toypurina’s dissent affirms that Spain’s claim to California was largely an agreement made and respected only by the Spanish Crown and the 3,400 Spanish colonists living among a Native majority in California.70 Yet, according to them, Spain had granted broad swaths of California to the Franciscans in exchange for their leading Spanish settlement in the region. So when the War for Mexican Independence ended the Spanish colonial era, the Californios wrote laws to strip the Franciscans of their massive landholdings. Attacking the mission system as antiquated, they argued that neophytes needed to be emancipated from the missions as colonial subjects had been emancipated from Spanish colonial authority. By transforming the missions into parish churches, they explained, the new republic could liquidate the Franciscans’ massive landholdings and redistribute that land to citizens. Their lobby was successful. In 1834, the Mexican government “secularized” the Franciscan missions in California. According to the secularization act, mission lands and herds were to be redistributed to citizens, beginning with the emancipated neophytes. But Mexican authorities put citizens like Vallejo in charge of discharging mission lands. These Californio men systematically denied Native peoples access to the nearly 8 million acres of mission lands redistributed in Mexican California. In the Los Angeles Basin, only 20 former neophytes from the San Gabriel Mission, collectively known as Gabrielinos, received any A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n 31 land from secularization, and most of their plots were relatively small. For example, Prospero Elias Domínguez (Gabrielino) was granted a 22-­acre plot near the mission, while Mexican authorities gave the remainder of the mission’s 1.5-­million-­acre landholdings in sweeping proportions to a few colonist families. Governor Juan Alvarado granted the Machado and Talamantes families nearly 14,000 acres, covering what is now most of West Los Angeles. Antonio María Lugo received an even larger land grant, Santa Ana de Chino, which covered nearly 22,000 acres, singly dwarfing the total acreage given to all 20 Gabrielinos awarded land from the San Gabriel Mission.71 In all, Mexican administrators split most of the San Gabriel Mission’s landholdings and herds among just 50 Mexican men and women in the Los Angeles Basin.72 In 1846, 140 Gabrielinos signed a petition demanding access to mission lands. Californio authorities rejected their petition.73 The land grants made a handful of L.A.’s Californios into extraordinarily wealthy rancheros. By grazing cattle on the basin’s edible landscape, the rancheros multiplied their herds and began to participate in a lucrative trade in hides and tallow. In exchange for opulent goods brought to California by Anglo-­American merchants, the rancheros sold more than $1 million worth of hides between 1822 and 1844.74 But the land grab that transformed a few Californios into wealthy rancheros made refugees of the Gabrielinos. Moreover, as the rancheros’ herds multiplied, they extended and exacerbated the degradation of the basin’s landscape. Dispossessed in a trampled basin—a basin that less than one century earlier had sustained a bounty of Tongva life—many neophytes and entire villages fled inland, away from the invaders and their devastation. Others headed to Los Angeles. The number of Native people living in Los Angeles more than doubled from 200 in 1820 to 553 (amid a total population of 1,088) in 1836. At the nearby Yaanga village, the Native population also increased and diversified as Gabrielinos and people of various tribal backgrounds moved to the Tongva village after secularization.75 In Mexican Los Angeles, Californios depended on Native labor as much as ever during the 1830s and 1840s. The wealth created by the hide and tallow trade was transforming Los Angeles from a tiny settlement into a thriving town built around the lavish interests and needs of the rancheros and their families. Near the historic plaza at the center of town, the rancheros built large adobe homes. On the narrow dirt roads cutting away from the plaza, “taverns, billiard parlors, and retail shops selling cloth, shoes, chocolates, and other imported goods” clustered near the ran32 A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n cheros’ plaza estates.76 Artisans and craftspeople hustled steady work fabricating the ornate saddles, lassos, and furniture for the rancheros’ homes and ranches. But Native labor remained the key factor in the creation of both economic and social status in and around Mexican Los Angeles.77 Natives cooked, cleaned, built, hauled water, and did most of the common labor that kept the town and its households afloat. They were the “hewers of wood and haulers of water”: those whose labor sustained life in the city.78 By 1844, of all the Natives living in Los Angeles, most worked as servants.79 On the ranches surrounding the city, Natives tended and slaughtered the cattle, cleaned the hides, rendered the tallow, and hauled all of it to the shore, where merchant ships carried the skins and fat away. Although not every Californio was a wealthy ranchero, even middling Mexican families and ranchers in and around Los Angeles tended to employ at least one Native servant. Most paid no wages. Rather, in exchange for food, housing, and clothing, Native servants worked for Californio families and ranchers for indefinite terms. But the Californios of Los Angeles had concerns about the growing number of Indigenous peoples living in and around Los Angeles. Too many indios, they complained, spent their days playing peon (gambling) at the village or drinking in grog shops near the plaza. According to the Californios, who had carefully organized the local culture and economy around Native labor, there was no place for Natives living but not working in Mexican Los Angeles. In turn, the ayuntamiento (city council) passed new laws to compel Natives to work, or be arrested. In January 1836, the ayuntamiento required all Californios to sweep across the town every Sunday night to arrest “all drunken Indians.” The alcalde (mayor) required all those arrested to pay a fine or be subject to forced labor on public works projects.80 By 1844, the ayuntamiento had ordered that all unemployed Natives were to be arrested and sentenced to labor either on public projects or for private employers.81 Therefore, in a pueblo their ancestors had built in a basin their villages had inhabited for millennia, Tongva men and women, along with an increasingly diverse set of their Native neighbors, filled the jail and convict labor crews in Mexican Los Angeles. “Through these policies and practices,” writes David Torres-­Rouff, “elite and middling Angelenos imposed improvised versions of labor control resembling slavery.”82 But incarceration of Indigenous people in Mexican Los Angeles smacked of more than labor control. In these same years, the ayuntamiento also forced the principal settlement of the Yaangavit to move farther and farther away from town. By the mid-­1840s, the ayuntamiento had forcibly A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n 33 relocated the principal settlement of the Yaanga village eastward across the Los Angeles River, placing a physical divide between Mexican Los Angeles and the nearest Native community. The relocation of the Yaanga village—compounded by the imprisonment on vagrancy charges—­operated to cage Natives living autonomous lives in and around Los Angeles. It did not work. Native men, women, and children continued to live (not just work) in the city. On Saturday nights, they even held parties, danced, and gambled at the removed Yaanga village and also at the plaza in the center of town. So on February 19, 1846, twenty-­six Californios from Los Angeles sent California’s Governor Pío Pico a petition. “We ask that the Indians be placed under strict police surveillance or the persons for whom the Indians work give [the Indians] quarter at the employer’s rancho.”83 It was one of the last petitions they ever wrote as Mexican citizens. Amid the campaign to crush Native autonomy in Mexican Los Angeles, the U.S.-­Mexico War came and went. A few skirmishes erupted in Los Angeles, but by October 1847, U.S. troops had occupied the city. In February 1848, the war formally ended when representatives of the U.S. and Mexican governments signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, making Los Angeles, California, a U.S. town. According to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded to the United States 525,000 acres of land between Texas and California. The people living in this region had only nominally and occasionally recognized Mexican rule. Many routinely rebelled, categorically rejecting the claim that the Spanish Empire followed by the Republic of Mexico ruled land and life in the region. Most famously, the Comanche Empire dominated life and land in Comanchería, an expanse between present-­day Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. They warred with Indigenous communities, Mexican settlers and troops, and after 1848, U.S. troops and African American infantrymen popularly known as Buffalo Soldiers.84 In the Los Angeles Basin, inland Tongva villages and their neighbors, namely the Southern Paiutes, mounted multiple uprisings and raids against the Spanish invaders and their Mexican successors.85 Russian fur traders maintained a fort in northern California between 1812 and 1842.86 And even the Mexican rancheros from Los Angeles occasionally rejected Mexican rule, twice ousting territorial governors appointed by the Mexican federal government.87 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its proclamation of U.S. rule, therefore, meant little in the contested lands between Texas and the Pacific Ocean. To push U.S. conquest toward any real dominance would require systems, structures, and practices that wove Anglo-­ American invasion into the fabric of everyday life in the new U.S. West. In 34 A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n An early but undated image of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office and jail. Note the jail’s location amid the city’s land and railroad offices. (C. C. Pierce Collection, Los Angeles Public Library) particular, the popular vision of Manifest Destiny—that is, the racial fantasy of Anglo-­American men and their families dominating land and life in the new U.S. West—was an idea that needed footing to flourish. In this, imprisonment would play a central role. Imprisonment was the first act of governance in Anglo-­American Los Angeles. Before the first vote was ever held in the new U.S. town, the transition team in charge of guiding the shift from Mexican to U.S. rule hired a jailer. It was the jailer’s job to hold and feed people incarcerated in the county jail, which was the only publicly owned building in Los Angeles.88 The local jail, therefore, represented the foundational structure of U.S. conquest in Los Angeles. Native elimination was one of its principal functions. The county jail had several functions during the early decades of Anglo-­ American rule in Los Angeles. Los Angeles was a violent and turbulent town. During the 1850s and 1860s, dispirited gold prospectors, filibusterers, and gamblers regularly passed through the town. They shot one another in gambling disagreements. They stabbed one another on the street for no apparent reason to passersby. Los Angeles, many said, was the nation’s murder capital.89 One minister visiting Los Angeles famously despaired, “The name of this city is in Spanish the City of Angels, but A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n 35 with much more truth it might be called at present the city of Demons.”90 Historian John Mack Faragher’s recent study on the topic confirms Los Angeles as a den of interpersonal and domestic violence.91 Moreover, as historian Bill Deverell has deftly explained, a “race war” erupted between Mexicans and Anglo-­Americans during the early years of U.S. conquest.92 And both Mexicans and Anglo-­Americans (often jointly) attacked Native peoples in and around the city. Anti-­Indian and intra-­Native violence roared in the city during the early years of U.S. conquest. In turn, the local jail held many murderers, gamblers, and horse thieves for trial, or at least until the town’s busy vigilante community kicked down the doors of the jail and hanged the accused in the streets. As such, the surge of imprisonment in early Anglo-­American Los Angeles can be understood as a site of establishing the rule of law in the new U.S. town. This, in fact, has long been the prevailing interpretation of crime and punishment in the U.S. West after U.S. conquest.93 But extensive evidence also suggests that local elites mostly used the county jail to cage substantive portions of the Native community, largely on public order charges. Establishing the rule of law in Anglo-­American Los Angeles, therefore, mostly meant denying Natives the “right to be” in Los Angeles. After the U.S. Congress granted California statehood in 1850, some of the state’s first laws targeted Native peoples for arrest, incarceration, and forms of convict labor. One of the first laws passed by the new California state legislature, the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, targeted Native peoples for easy arrest by stipulating that they could be arrested on vagrancy charges based “on the complaint of any reasonable citizen.” 94 The Los Angeles Common Council echoed state law with municipal public order codes that did not specifically target Native peoples but that local law enforcement officials, namely rangers and marshals, sweepingly enforced against “Indians,” in particular. As many Anglo-­ American settlers in Los Angeles observed, white gamblers and drunks crowded the town with impunity. “White men, whom the Marshal is too discreet to arrest,” grumbled the local press, spilled out of the town’s many saloons, streets, and brothels, but the aggressive and targeted enforcement of state and local vagrancy and drunk codes filled the Los Angeles County Jail with Natives, most of whom were men.95 So disproportionate was the imprisonment of Native men in Los Angeles that the common council described the jailer’s monthly salary as payment for “board[ing] Indians as city prisoners.”96 Of the large number of Natives incarcerated in Los Angeles, many spent their days working on the county chain gang. Established soon after 36 A n E l i m i n a t o r y O p t i o n Los Angeles became a U.S. town, the chain gang was assigned to work in “the streets, alleys and other places, either public or private, in the city as he [the mayor] shall deem proper.”97 To supervise the county chain gang, the council hired an overseer whom they authorized to use “chains, balls, or other means as he shall deem necessary for the security of all prisoners under his charge, and to prescribe or administer, or cause to be administered, such punishment as shall be necessary to keep good order among the prisoners, and to compel them to work.” 98 Given the large number of Natives sentenced to the chain gang, the common council often offhandedly referred to the overseer’s salary as compensation for “superintending Indians on public works.”99 On the chain gang, Natives swept and cleaned the streets of the new U.S. town. They kept the town’s muddy roads clear of debris, namely, the horse manure, sewage, and dead animals that littered the town during the 1850s and 1860s. But as the local population grew and changed, the demands on the county chain gang expanded to include crucial road construction projects as well. During the 1850s and 1860s, the California Gold Rush spurred an unprecedented human migration to California. With the gold mines receiving tens of thousands of migrants every month, the total state population surged from roughly 92,000 in 1850 to 380,000 in 1860. In Los Angeles, located hundre...
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Assignment 1: Reducing Community to the Periphery through Law
The indigenous population in California and Los Angeles were used by Spanish
colonialists to build pueblo and the city of Los Angeles. They had initially intended to settle in
the basin permanently and establish homes for themselves, their children, their children’s
children, and so on. They, however, thought it best to keep the native people around, who would
then provide them with labor. This was not taken kindly by the natives, and the colonialists
negotiated, struggled, and fought to establish dominance. The Sp...


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