Juan Poblete
But the story as told by the foreign populations is not known to us. We can see only indirectly, through the furious and confused reports of the American themselves, how much of organized and coarse brutality these Mexicans suffered from the miners’ meetings.
—Josiah Royce, California
On the stage of this most raucous international fair in human memory, no actor played the part that had been his lot in his native land. The master became a servant, the lawyer a freight agent, the physician a long-shoreman. . . .
—Vicente Pérez Rosales, Times Gone By
The Immigrant eloquently shows the philosopher that not just the corner where he was born but the world is man’s homeland.
—Vicente Pérez Rosales1
At the time of the Gold Rush, important forms of connection between California and Chile became readily apparent in both Chile and the United States. First, there was an oceanic connection and a circuit that travelers and goods would follow. A Chilean newspaper presented it succinctly in 1848: “It is a true fever of immigration what has taken over a part of our population; a fever that the Americans will use to speculate. Their interest is to populate the Californias, give them more commercial value and create on the Pacific a State capable of balancing or even dominating if possible the mercantile ports on the coast, from Cape Horn to the Isthmus of Panama.”2 The quote embodies well the dual nature of the California challenge as seen from the southern Americas: It was both a great opportunity for Chilean commerce and people and a direct threat to the Chilean hegemony on the Pacific coast.
Second, as Brian Roberts has shown, those traveling around Cape Horn and through the Panama isthmus participated in processes of racialization that shaped the American perception of Latin American immigrants and residents. Roberts explains: “[T]here is evidence that forty-niners meant this darkness literally, that is, that these deeds had originated with the dark people of the rush, with Mexican bandits, Chilean gamblers, and Latina prostitutes. An examination of forty-niners’ contact with Latin America during their voyage to California reveals the social history of these ‘dark’ deeds.”3 These narratives of deeds by so-called dark people account for a good deal of the power of the Gold Rush over the American imagination, for they presuppose a middle-class northeastern reader for whom such deeds, in their blatant challenge to Victorian values of “repression, refinement and self-control,”4 would have been particularly egregious and attractive.
These racialized depictions raise important questions about how participants in this migration were affected by and responded to the formation of new social structures. A series of texts produced in Chile and California by Chilean and U.S. writers about the Gold Rush offers early expressions of the tensions between immigration, illegality, and citizenship. In the context of the early Gold Rush, all miners—American, Chilean, Peruvian, Mexican, Californio, Chinese, Australian—were in the words of Josiah Royce “trespassers” and “intruders” because they were all making private claims in what were legally federal lands. However, because land claims necessarily involved claims to citizenship, Gold Rush California could be seen as a kind of political, social, and cultural laboratory for the articulation of land rights and citizenship status for minority groups. My chapter analyzes Chilean author Vicente Pérez Rosales’s Diario de un viaje a California (1949) and his Recuerdos del Pasado (1882) and American philosopher Josiah Royce’s California: From the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco (1886) and argues that both authors considered the rights of those from differing racial, ethnic, and national origins who found themselves sharing a particular territory. This form of co-presence created the context within which answers were produced to the questions of who is the subject of rights and what are the legitimate grounds of such claims.
While both Pérez Rosales and Royce were severe critics of the many forms of abuse against racially and ethnically defined immigrants and indigenous peoples during the Gold Rush, they shared a racialized national imaginary that placed the interests of the state above those of the inhabitants of their territories. In turn, they distinguished between those who were considered desirable and undesirable inhabitants of the South of Chile and the U.S. Southwest, respectively. Or, to put it in a more provocative way, this chapter deals with the partially transnational origins of racial and ethnic discrimination in California and the emergence in the state and in Chile of a white social imaginary animating immigration and settlement policies.
Another connection, this time physical, between California and Chile, was described by Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna in his La Edad del Oro en Chile. Vicuña Mackenna highlights the close resemblance between the two geographies: “. . . that country which, being in a certain sense our antipode, would seem by its nature, orography, latitude, its productions, climate, geological phenomena only a reproduction of ours or vice versa.”5 Vicuña Mackenna’s point was twofold. On the one hand, he insisted, like so many of the Chilean Forty-Niners, on the geographic similarities of the two territories; on the other, he pointed to the natural similarity and complementarity of seasonal agricultural production in Chile and California which, given the multiple needs of the suddenly populated California, made them potential partners in the development of commerce.
Several other forms of connection between Chile and California also emerged during this period, including a textual or more broadly discursive connection formed by a series of texts in California and Chile. To the writings by Royce and Pérez Rosales already mentioned and the countless newspaper articles in both contexts, one could add those of Vicuña Mackenna, Ramón Jil Navarro, and Pedro Ruiz Aldea on the Chilean side, and Richard Henry Dana, Bancroft and his collaborators, and the many analyzed by Roberts and others on the American side. This textual connection is extended and well represented today in books such as Ariel Dorfman’s recent novel Americanos: Los Pasos de Murieta—concerning twin brothers who upon seeing Joaquín Murieta’s head at a bar embark on divergent California-based trajectories. Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune and Zorro are two other recent novels concerned with the early days of California in the form of historically based fictional explorations of the Gold Rush and Spanish and Mexican California. These last three texts share their interest in the foundational moment of California history, banditry, justice and the lack thereof, and their connections to the fate of Californios and Chilean immigrants. They are the latest examples within a constellation of texts exploring the California borderlands as a cultural contact zone. According to Robert McKee Irwin, in such a borderland a series of texts revisits at multiple times the life of a cultural icon from the different cultural and political perspectives of different populations. Contact zone texts are written and rewritten, told and retold, reproduced and changed orally and in various forms of writing by different communities, using their own protocols for historical and cultural interpretation. Studying Mexico’s northern borderlands, McKee proposes a transnational approach capable of considering “more than just a summation or fusion of two national cultures”6 incorporating both local and regional dynamics and other national immigrant aspects. It is in that spirit that I study Pérez Rosales’s and Royce’s texts, to see how the respective national histories help us understand the regional California one, and how the latter may have marked those national narratives.
California and Chile also share a history of sponsored and spontaneous immigration that has been crucial in their respective histories and developments. While the California context is apparent, immigration has been a constant in Chilean national history from the Germans who populated the South of the country and revolutionized Chilean social institutions in the nineteenth century to the Spaniards, Palestinians, Koreans, and Peruvians who transformed culture, commerce, and cuisines in the twentieth.
According to Roberto Hernández, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had one consequence not usually considered in U.S. or Mexican accounts: It gave the United States a new preponderant place on the Pacific Ocean and in so doing displaced Chile from that position: “At the beginning of 1848, a year full of international events, no other state on the Pacific had the importance of Chile as a maritime power, and no other had as many national ships at its disposal either.”7 These consequences were immediately apparent to the Chilean press at the time. El Mercurio de Valparaíso wondered, “What is going to happen with the Chilean fleet, with Chile’s maritime future? The occupation of Mexico has already taken Mexican markets away from Chilean commerce. They will become tributaries of the United States. Soon even American flour will come to Peru.”8
The historian Arnold Bauer confirms that both the Gold Rush in California and a similar rush in Australia a few years later had direct, differential, and long-lasting impact on the Chilean economy and society. Chile had “a natural advantage in supplying the new markets”: When ships rounded Cape Horn, the Chilean ports of Concepción and Valparaíso offered the first two welcoming stops. Along with Oregon, Chile was one of the most important producers of wheat on the Pacific. As a result, “the number of ships that called at Chilean ports doubled with the gold rush” and a full industry of wheat and flour to supply them emerged. “By 1855, however, sufficient grain was raised in California to take care of local needs, and except for rare bad harvests, Chilean wheat was not imported again. By the end of the decade California not only became self-sufficient but quickly ended the near monopoly that Chilean growers enjoyed in the Pacific. From 1858 on, Chile faced stiff competition from West Coast grains throughout the Pacific, and California flour was even offered for sale in Valparaíso.”9
Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, who visited San Francisco in 1853, had already anticipated much of this: “The development of this land[,] peopled by a youthful and energetic race, is bound to be swift and sure. ( . . . ) In terms of production it will be, beyond dispute, a formidable rival for Chile, which lies in a comparable southern latitude and produces the same things.”10 The Australian Gold Rush had a similarly contradictory trajectory for Chileans. While it prolonged the boom of the wheat and flour market well into the 1850s, it also showed Chile’s loss of a competitive edge in providing imports for Australia. This confirmed what California meant for Chile in the longer run: “Even under fortunate circumstances Chile was able to supply less than half of Australia’s imports in the peak year of 1855. After 1857, Australian export was effectively finished for Chilean producers: not because the market ‘closed’ but because of Californian competition.”11
The plight of compatriots in California itself had other resonances too. When the Chilean Argonauts were mistreated and expelled from their placers in California, a Chilean in San Francisco wrote demanding action from the Chilean state in a letter published in El Progreso in Santiago in March 1850: “Chileans need protection for their lives, their honor, and their interests. . . . They need protection in order to work as freely as an American without being coerced, insulted, and summarily executed by the outlaws of North America. Every day an abuse or an atrocity is perpetrated at the placers against the Chileans and there is nobody to protect these defenseless people.”12 An 1849 editorial in El Comercio de Valparaiso stated: “The exploration of the golden sands of the American river has been forbidden to Chileans, including under this patronymic all of the foreigners. This decision was not made by any established authority but by the same Yankee citizens who have been thus able to cheat their most prepared competitors.”13
What was emerging was a certain form of actively produced illegality or para-legality: the category of the foreign miner, whose rights to work the mines and rivers were increasingly questioned and then flatly violated and often denied. To be Chilean came to mean being a racialized, second- or third-class inhabitant whose only right or, even more, whose natural destiny was to work servicing American citizens. To be called “Chilean” in this context—not unlike being called “Mexican” in the United States today—became an index of a longstanding racialized dialectic between (white) Americans and their Latino others.
Josiah Royce’s California from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character was published in Boston in 1886. It was a commissioned work that afforded the author a chance to test, against the historical particularities of his native California,14 some of his more general philosophical ideas explored in books such as The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).15 California’s main focus was dual: “This book is meant to help the reader toward an understanding of two things: namely, the modern American state of California, and our national character as displayed in that land.”16 Royce’s method is to pay significant attention to historical specificities without simultaneously losing track of the grander design being drawn, logically governing the multiplication of individual and local stories to philosophically fit them into one big picture. For what must be seen in reading California, Royce states, is that “We Americans therefore showed in early California new failings and new strength.”17 Among the former, he counted “a novel degree of carelessness, [ . . . ] a previously unknown indifference to our social duties, and an indifference to the rights of foreigners, whereof we cannot be proud.”18 On the new strengths Royce concluded: “[W]e also showed our best national traits—traits that went far to atone for our faults.”19
In the “process whereby a new and great community first came to a true consciousness of itself,”20 there were forces of order and forces of disorder. Royce was explicitly writing against an already prevalent romanticization of frontier justice and of jolly and drunk American miners that miraculously came together to form a prosperous society. For the Harvard philosopher, the excesses of the Gold Rush marked the low point of an emerging state of California and its society. For him, the disruptions were not produced by an external agent and were not simply the result of the accumulation of too many young and ambitious men in one place, but instead “the symptom of an inner social disease.”21 The disease, according to Royce, was forgetting that the individual is to serve the social order and not despise or use it for his own shortsighted gain. The crimes were circumstantially connected to “this hatred of foreigners, this blind nativism”22 but more crucially a reflection of a broader social ailment: “If we leave out the unprovoked violence frequently offered to foreigners, we may then say that well-known crises and tragedies of violent popular justice during the struggle for order were frequently. . . . simply the outwards symptoms in each case of the past popular crimes of disloyalty to the social order.”23
The cure against that disease may have cost a few “greasers” (Royce’s word) their lives, like that of the infamous pregnant “young woman of Spanish American race” subjected to lynch law and hanged by a mob in 1851, an event that Royce laments. But this violence resulted in the end, in Royce’s view, in a transformation and rebirth that should make any American proud: “[T]he moral elasticity of our people is so great, their social vitality so marvelous, that a community of Americans could sin as fearfully as, in the early years, the mining community did sin, and could yet live to purify itself within so short a time, not by a revolution, but by a simple progress from social foolishness to social steadfastness.”24 This we could call the philosophical productivity of the story. While Royce’s expressed desire was to write against easy celebrations of American frontier spirit and acknowledge the many abuses and crimes committed, especially against those who were deemed foreign and illegitimate, his conclusion is still a redemptive narrative of a self-organizing state and citizenry. This narrative in the end explains away or elides the constitutive role of a racialized social and economic regime that underpinned the state’s organization. This was philosophy working for the State.
Bayard Taylor, one of the few American Argonauts who preferred writing to mining in Gold Rush California, put it more succinctly in his El Dorado: Adventures on the Path of Empire: “Hundreds of instances might be adduced to show that the worst passions of our nature were speedily developed in the air of California, but the one grand lesson of the settlement and organization of the country is of a character that ennobles the race.”25
Looking at the issue from the viewpoint of the Californios and their foundational role in the history of Mexican Americans in California, Leonard Pitt, on the other hand, sees the history of the Gold Rush as producing long-lasting but different results. In The Decline of the Californios, he gives us a brief indication of how transformative the Gold Rush may have been for Californios: “After a century of slow population growth, during which the arrival of twenty five cholos or fifty Americans seemed a momentous occasion, suddenly California faced one of the swiftest, largest, and most varied folk migrations of all time. . . . Briefly told, the story of the Californians in the gold rush is their encounter with 100,000 newcomers in the single year of 1849—80,000 Yankees, 8000 Mexicans, 5000 South Americans, and several thousand miscellaneous Europeans—and with numbers that swelled to a quarter million by 1852.”26
But in addition to shocking the Californios, the Gold Rush—with its sizable population migrations and its history of displacement, conflicting claims over property and civil rights, and the ensuing development of frontier justice—had other effects that Pitt highlights. In a negative contrast of self and other, all people of Latin American origin, including old-time Californios, were seen as belonging to the same despised people: “[A]ngry Yankees simply refused to recognize any real distinctions between Latin Americans. . . . all the Spanish-speaking were lumped together as ‘interlopers’ and ‘greasers.’”27
There was still another related consequence. While the influx of new immigrants from Mexico, Peru, and Chile generated a white hate of Hispanics, those factors also acted as catalysts that both geographically and symbolically forced those Latin American Forty-Niners who stayed, after being displaced from their claims, to fuse with the old Californios in: “the established old communities of California. . . . This tended to break down the old and somewhat artificial distinction between ‘Native Californians’ and ‘Mexicans.’ The fusion went on continuously thereafter.”28
This we could call the double racial and ethnic productivity of the story. If the California Gold Rush allowed for the constitution of the new state, that process of self-formation was marked not only by the remarkable upward social mobility of many American miners and merchants full of Western frontier spirit but also by the corresponding disenfranchisement of Californios, the disdain for foreign nationals of color, and by the formation of groups of racially and ethnically marked second- and third-class citizens or noncitizens who were often henceforth violently dispossessed of their rights and properties.
For many Americans in California this violence was made much more acceptable and often even legitimate once the “true nature” of these darker people was considered. The authors of the Annals of San Francisco, “the primary historical source for the period” and also “a delightful narrative for general readers” according to the facsimile reissue of 1999, were in 1855 clear in this regard: “[A]ll the Mexicans and Chilians[,] [sic] like the people of negro descent, were only of the commonest description. The women of all these various races were nearly all of the vilest character, and openly practice the most shameful commerce.”29
While acknowledging different degrees of education and literacy between Chileans and Mexicans and other people of Hispanic descent, there were some general traits that not only could be highlighted but would in fact explain some of the violence descended upon them:
The Hispano-Americans, as a class, rank far beneath the French and German. They are ignorant and lazy, and are consequently poor. . . . Both peoples [Mexican and Chileans], when roused by jealousy or revenge, as they often are, will readily commit the most horrid crimes. . . . The Hispano-Americans fill many low and servile employments, and in general engage only in such occupations as do not very severely tax either mind or body. They show no ambition. . . . They seem to have no wish to become naturalized citizens of the Union, and are morally incapable of comprehending the spirit and tendencies of our institutions.30
What emerges thus is not simply a picture of isolated or even generalized racism but a much more complex set of connected propositions that create what we could call a form of structural racism tied to a highly productive political economy. In it, certain subjects are always below the radar of deserving citizenship, inclined to the most menial jobs, lacking in ambition and initiative, victims of “destiny, dirt, ignorance, and sloth.”31 In other words, radically un-American, or perfect fodder for what Mae Ngai has called, in a different context, “impossible subjects.” Studying the racialized restrictions on Third World immigrants to the United States from 1924 to 1965, Ngai has outlined the emergence of the illegal alien as a racialized and discriminated-against actual presence that cannot turn itself into a full person. This specific form of limited belonging, this “inclusion in the nation [that] was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility,”32 forms the basis of what Nicholas de Genova has called the economically highly productive deportability of the undocumented worker. My contention, then, is that the case of racialized foreign others in the California Gold Rush was already a manifestation of this later logic of the production of exploitable subjects.
In a passage full of irony, Royce correctly identifies this xenophobic racism but goes on to attribute it to “a social disease” eventually overcome in what he calls “The Attainment of Order”: “Therefore the life of a Spanish American in the mines in the early days, if frequently profitable, was apt to be a little disagreeable. It served him right, of course. He had no business, as an alien, to come to the land that God had given us. And if he was a native Californian, a born ‘greaser,’ then so much the worse for him. He was so much the more our born foe; we hated his whole degenerate, thieving, landowning, lazy, and discontented race.”33 Rather than being overcome by “the attainment of order,” as Royce would have it, I maintain that this racism against so-called foreigners and alleged barbarians became a permanent feature of California society, regulating relations among racial and class groups and affecting access to rights, property, and labor. Moreover, as in the late twentieth century—during which a significant increase in Latin American–origin migration since 1965 has had the effect of re-racializing the native born Chicano population—in the middle of the nineteenth century a massive migration of Latin Americans also played a crucial role in reshaping the ethnic and racial status of native Hispanics, which, in turn, planted the seeds for the eventual emergence of pan- or transnational forms of Hispanicity or Latinidad.
In his Recuerdos del pasado, published in 1882, Vicente Pérez Rosales begins the section on California with a rich but ambiguous paragraph, setting the stage for his extended memoir as a Forty-Niner: “Twenty nine years have passed since foreign immigration, with its usual accompaniment of enterprise, energy and progress, began to reach the lonely and remote regions that today make up the flourishing State of California. . . . [dormant under Spanish rule for centuries] Another more enterprising and more daring race had to come.”34 The passage is ambiguous because it is unclear who the foreign immigrants were and whether that category included the Forty-Niners from other parts of the United States. Both a celebration of the progressive role of immigration and of American industriousness, the passage manages to suggest that foreign and American workers and miners operated under a single conceptual umbrella: immigration, and foreign immigration at that.
At the moment of writing his Recuerdos, decades after his travails in California, Pérez Rosales was in a rare historical position. Having been one of those racialized Hispanic American darker immigrants in the Gold Rush (although he often could or would try to pass as French), and having suffered the consequences of that status, he had gone on to become the officer in charge of promoting and implementing German immigration to Chile. Thus a former immigrant to the United States in charge of thousands of European immigrants to Chile confirmed the connection between these two stages of his life. A few pages later, Pérez Rosales clarifies his thoughts: “I repeat, however, that it would be a great error, as well as an injustice, to attribute the phenomenon of this transformation [of California] solely to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is also the product of the individual contributions of the most daring and enterprising elements of the superior strata of every other human race.”35
Along with their immigrant status in this newly acquired California, white U.S. Forty-Niners and white Chileans shared two additional traits at the time of the Gold Rush. They considered themselves particularly civilized and enterprising, and they had a low opinion of Mexican miners and an even lower one of Native Americans. Praising what he deemed California pioneer J. A. Sutter’s effective treatment of the natives, Pérez Rosales declares: “At the outset, then Sutter was cruel, . . . attending by turns to the sword and the plow, he fought, won, worked the land, forced the conquered to labor on it; and only when the treacherous and fickle tribes were fully persuaded that they had to choose between death and submission did our pioneer begin to set in motion all those civilizing ideas that do him honor.”36 Barely six pages later, however, the line separating civilization from barbarism is much less clear. Here Pérez Rosales, posing as French and invoking Lafayette, arrives just in time to save a Chilean compatriot about to be hanged in Gold Rush California: “The cause of this act of hasty and barbaric justice was our scatter-brained countryman’s meddlesome character. . . . since a shovel had gone astray and the only likely suspect was that scion of Africans, which is what the Yankees called the Chileans and the Spaniards, the theft was attributed to him, and without further ado those savages set themselves up as a jury and were about to do with Alvarez what was often done everywhere with known thieves.”37
Thus begins an account that would include equal amounts strong denunciation of the arbitrariness and racism of Americans, as well as tributes to their civilizing might. The foreign miners, but especially the racialized ones—including thousands of Mexicans, Peruvians, Chileans, and Chinese—quickly became the victims of discriminatory and arbitrary legal and paralegal activities. Those included summary trials and executions, forced displacement from their placers, and a racially enforced law taxing foreign miners $20 a month for access to the gold fields.38 Pérez Rosales’s narrative combines strong support for the beneficial aspects of immigration on the development of the nation, a clear view of the need to eliminate or subjugate Native Americans, as well as critiques of the blatant and, in Pérez Rosales’s view, mistaken racialization of and violence against those immigrants. His perspective is that of the residing immigrant that he could have become in California, but it is also a nineteenth-century white national immigrant view. His critiques of illegitimate violence and arbitrariness are shaped by his immigrant experience, but also by a class, race, and nationality-inflected worldview of the salutary effects of white European foreign immigration in the Americas.
California first appears to Pérez Rosales, who came for gold along with “four brothers, a brother-in-law, and two trusted servants,” as a land of great opportunity and radical democratization, a new social space open to all kinds of progressive developments. Just arrived in San Francisco and even before they reached land, they were welcomed by an account that “the stories being told in Chile couldn’t hold a candle to reality. . . . that we had reached the land of equality, and that the noble and the plebeian walked shoulder to shoulder in California.”39 This radical leveling of the social field seemed, at least at first, capable of erasing or neutralizing other more recalcitrant forms of social distinction such as race and nationality. But then, as we know, the Golden State turns bad for Pérez Rosales and other nonwhite immigrants. Expelled like many of his compatriots from his placers, he would move from gold-seeking in mining to a rediscovery of the more sober economic and social potential of commerce and industry. He first lamented his crew’s own blindness to real estate (at one point offered at low or no cost and then, just a year later, highly valued in the emergent urban centers of California) as a way of finding a fortune. Summarizing his trajectory, he wrote: “What had we done since the joyful day that had seen us arrive in California? For a while we had been in the freight business, we had been miners, and things had gone badly for us in the mines. . . . [We] had been merchants. . . . [W]e had become Frenchmen, drowned, been poisoned. . . . What was there left for us to be? . . . the idea of setting up a hotel.”40
It is clearly not an accident that the name of the restaurant-hotel Pérez Rosales and his group founded after their hasty and forced exit from their mining efforts was “Restaurant de los Ciudadanos.” What was being claimed was not simply one of the few kinds of activity left open to foreign immigrants, but also their final and perhaps desperate affirmation of a certain claim to rights in their new polis. Using biblical language, Pérez Rosales hints at the true racializing nature of the process that had turned them from immigrants into pariahs. Victims of spontaneous and coordinated legal and illegal violence, the displaced Chileans began retreating. He writes, “While this was going on, Sacramento kept filling up with Chileans, who, driven from the placers by the lack of security, came grumbling and dispirited to seek refuge there; and as though the new laws and Yankee hostility were not enough to destroy the accursed race, the weather decided also to take a hand in the matter.”41
He closes his California account with a melancholic thought: “We went for wool and, like so many others, we came back shorn, but satisfied because we had steadfastly stood our ground till we had fired our last shot.”42 Writing three decades after his California adventure and having had significant experience promoting German immigration to the South of Chile, Pérez Rosales was in a position to extract what he then saw as the true moral of his experience in the United States. He lamented his own blindness, as an adventurous and ambitious immigrant to the Golden State, to the sober benefits of real estate investment, commerce, agriculture, and industry. Because in the end he realized that “to judge from what I have seen up to now, gold will some day be the least of California’s riches. . . . because the industrious Yankees will wisely prefer the inexhaustible sources of agricultural and manufacturing wealth.”43
This conclusion was as much a result of his own travails in California as it was a reflection of his ideas about the true contribution that the right kind of immigrant could make to a country. Those “right” immigrants excluded the proletarian and the adventurers and included the capitalist, the artisan, and the farmer. Their capacity to become a force of progress in their adopted country depended on access to property, religious and civic tolerance, and the right kinds of laws and policies. One example of the last of these was the 1845 law on immigration in Chile that, according to Pérez Rosales, put immigrants “in a better position than the nationals.”44 By far, however, the most crucially important aspect of a good immigration policy was access to citizenship: “Much more than unlimited religious freedom, easy access to citizenship influences the spirit of those who migrate. The migrants give up citizenship when abandoning their home countries, and this causes a deep vacuum in their souls that can only be filled in the adopted country, erasing with nationalism the title of foreigner from their foreheads.”45
After California, Pérez Rosales had a second chance to show what foreign immigrants, treated the right way and given full access to citizenship, could do for a country, and yet he also confirmed that this process was frequently connected to multiple forms of racism and sometimes involved preferential treatment for white immigrants and the displacement of less-favored populations. White immigrants and Native Americans continued to perform different roles within the national political imagination. This we could call the southern hemisphere form of national political productivity of the experience of immigration in the Gold Rush.
After his difficult and complex experience in Gold Rush California from 1849 to 1850, Vicente Pérez Rosales returned to Chile and, in the same year, was named colonization agent for the southern Valdivia region. There he would help settle the first wave of German immigrants, followed later by other numerous groups of Germans. Pérez Rosales—who eventually published a series of texts extolling the virtues of the Valdivia region, the German immigrants, and the beneficial aspects of an immigration and colonization policy—was also sent to Europe for four years as Chilean colonization agent and consul general, first to Hamburg and then to Denmark, Prussia, and Hannover.46 In Europe he wrote in French and published in Germany an Essai sur le Chili (1857, soon translated as Ensayo sobre Chile and published in Santiago in 1859). The book was both a practical answer to the many questions about Chile that Pérez Rosales regularly received from scientists and potential immigrants, and part of his state-mandated task of celebrating the virtues of the country to interested European immigration agents and immigrants.
Comparing his life in California with his new location in the South of Chile, and perhaps using all the wisdom acquired as a struggling but ultimately proud immigrant, Pérez Rosales states his vision of the role of foreigners in the advancement of the nation:
The spirit of progress was only dormant, not dead. . . . and so much so that the presence of a foreign element, even on a very small scale, has sufficed. . . . to awaken the province of Valdivia from the stupor in which neglect had sunk it. . . . [Valdivia] lacked the stimulus that only foreign immigration can supply to a society stupefied by inertia. . . . A country like ours absolutely requires the active collaboration of the foreign element, a powerful factor that, as it tries to enrich itself, enriches the country offering it shelter.47
However, showing the limitations of a national white imaginary, he reflected on Sutter’s treatment of Native Americans in California and compared it to the Spanish and Mexican way of the missions as well as the effort in Chile “to win over and civilize our Araucanians.” He wrote, “[B]ecause the wild Indian, stubborn or dominated by his bad instincts, will accept peace, work, and respect for the property of others only once he is persuaded that as soon as he comes within rifle range, if he comes with hostile intentions, he will die or be enchained.”48
Pérez Rosales thus actively participated in the implementation of an immigration policy that was generous and proactive toward European white immigrants at the same time that it was racist and ethnocentric against natives and mestizos. Lamenting state budget priorities that still funded an army presence but not enough enticements for German immigrants, Pérez Rosales complained, “[O]nce again, foreign immigration[,] which alone could incorporate the natives into society without exterminating them, was passed over.”49 In what one could call vigilante-style civilization, however, he clarified exactly what such a new policy would entail. Recommending that the nation instead of the army bring 2,000 European families and give them “modern arms,” Pérez Rosales concluded, “So substantial a group of foreigners would not flinch before the natives. No matter how bold and brave he may be the Indian is not likely to get in the way of a rifle that would wound or kill him as soon as he comes within range, even if he has lost some of his former fear of firearms.”50
Such was the civilizational knowledge Vicente Pérez Rosales drew from the combination of his immigration-related experiences in California and the South of Chile. Three decades later, the Chilean state (and Chilean public opinion) would justify the annexation of significant portions of Peruvian and Bolivian territories, using California and Manifest Destiny–style racialized arguments against “inferior races.” What Ericka Beckman has called “the creolization of imperial reason”51 ended up ideologically positing a distinctive white identity for the Chilean nation, confirmed immediately after the War of the Pacific by a campaign against the same Mapuche Indians Pérez Rosales had dealt with.
Back in the United States, Josiah Royce would, in turn, correctly analyze many of the real issues that had been at stake in Gold Rush California: the corrupting effect on the social and political community from an absence of formal institutions for the administration of justice and the institutionalization of discrimination against community members. Both had led to an abundance of selfishness and violence. However, Royce himself ended California by covering up the problem he had correctly detected. Yes, there was an extended wild period in the Gold Rush; yes, abuses were committed and rights violated; but once the dust settled, the story that emerged was, for Royce, a civilizational and moral one. Order prevailed and the interests of the community were correctly placed above those of the selfish individual. What Pérez Rosales and Royce shared was their inclination to see the nation-state as the evidence of moral progress and community growth. They both excused or even justified the constitutive violence (created by the policies and practices they celebrated) against Hispanics, Native Americans, and other undesirables. Decentering the national, a comparative and transnational approach makes evident the ugly continuity of this form of organized racism in the state-making history of the continent.
After the war with Mexico, coexistence in Gold Rush California marks the second extended white U.S. engagement with people of Hispanic origin (what we would more generally call Latinos today). The racialized interactions among people from different areas ended up generating a caste system, a form of discriminating and legitimized practice of para and legal racism that would regulate the co-presence within the national territory of people of color and whites. What arises then, instead of the purely teleological narrative of California’s self-constitution, is not a different tale marked by a sin of youthful hurriedness but constituted by the para-legally sanctioned practices of discrimination and racism that have since regulated the contact between racially and ethnically marked populations.
What emerged was a racial formation characteristic of the Southwest, different from the black and white formation dominant in the rest of the United States, and one in which the actual and perceived Latino foreigner played a constitutive role. Tomás Almaguer, studying “the historical origins of white supremacy in California,” has spoken of a basic racializing system structuring relations of inequality and based on social closures that prevent competitors deemed as outsiders from entering into competition with insiders for social and economic rewards: “The particular success of European-American men in securing a privileged social status was typically exacted through contentious, racialized struggles with Mexicans, native Americans, and Asian immigrants over land ownership or labor-market position.”52
The blatant racism of the early Gold Rush that Pérez Rosales and Royce wrote against cannot be excused or bracketed as an anomaly. Instead, it has to be recognized as a long-lasting trait of California’s relations with nonwhite immigrants and non-immigrant populations. Studying what he calls the “critical legacy of the Gold Rush era,”53 Stephen J. Pitti analyzes the crucial role of racism in the disenfranchisement and dispossession of old Californios and newly arrived Mexican and Chilean miners in his The Devil in Silicon Valley (the devil is of course racism itself). According to Pitti, the San José area became the destination of thousands of Mexican and Chilean miners displaced from their claims by the combined effect of the Foreign Miners Tax and Anglo racism. Two thousand of them landed in what is now known as the Silicon Valley, and many worked in the New Almaden mercury mine in what Pitti calls “the largest Latino immigrant population in the United States”54 and “the first Latino industrial workers in the United States.”55 In the company-segregated Spanishtown, these Mexicans and Chileans experienced a newly racialized regime of social relations and labor—that, according to Pitti, has continued to keep “many Latino residents confined to menial occupations in ways long dictated by ideologies of race”56—and, partly as a result of this shared experience of white racism, developed in the next two decades a strong transnational (Mexican and Chilean) culture of labor organization and activism.57
According to Bonnie Honig’s Democracy and the Foreigner,58 in the American political tradition foreign immigrants have often been a catalyst of at least two discourses that, in trying to answer the questions “How should we solve the problem of foreignness” and “What should we do about them [foreigners],” have become crucial for the U.S. political imaginary. On the one hand, they force social scientists to ask if the alleged equilibrium between social integration (homogeneity) and democratic system has been altered or could be threatened by the presence of foreign elements such as immigrants, who supposedly would not share the cultural principles that sustain the nation. On the other hand, the immigrant is central to that national imaginary insofar as immigrants choose freely and actively to belong to that community of citizens and thus, they confirm for the native-born the many advantages of their belonging. Such imaginary also considers the country as the land of freedom and opportunity for anybody who, regardless of class, origin, or religion, is willing to work and save to reach success. If the doors are closed for the immigrants, internal coherence is, at least hypothetically, reinforced even while a central value to American self-perception is sacrificed. On the other hand, if the doors are opened, the alleged identity of the we is questioned by its pluralization and widening.
While Honig’s reading of the politico-philosophical role of the foreigner in American history has been justly celebrated as a radical and pioneering effort, I would like to add the question of the foreigner’s politico-economic yield. Here there is less a contradictory relation to the foreigner and more a high political and economic productivity that empowers dominant white sectors of the American population while it disempowers immigrants and people of color. The heuristic value of the foreigner, allowing a more complex understanding of the American, does not just stem from their simple provisional exclusion (affecting historically both European and non-European immigrants) on their way to assimilation but is instead part of a wider but also more specific phenomenon: the integral role of racism against people of color in American history.
In addition to generating a socioeconomic structure based on and regulating racism against perceived “foreigners,” the California Gold Rush could be seen as providing one of the origins of the category of the illegal alien that would have such a long, constitutive, and productive history in the state to this day. During the Gold Rush, many Latinos would quickly move from the category of foreign miners to that of illegal and undeserving foreigners. Racism limited claims to rights by placing the actor claiming rights in a special category of sub-subjects, intrinsically incapable of such good behavior or with a natural tendency to conflict with it. In those years, too, the seeds of the future legal codification of the connections and disconnections between race and citizenship were planted in ways that would then and later affect not just Latinos but also other national immigrant groups, including Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos.59 Racialized foreigners of color, both documented and undocumented, have thus been working and been made to work politically, ethnically, and philosophically for the state of California in ways that not only must be added to their significant economic contribution but have, in fact, created the conditions under which those economic contributions have been most profitable for the dominant white population. Those conditions include what we could call the racialization, permanent stain, and suspicion of foreignness extended to most U.S.-born ethnic communities of color. This chapter has sought to excavate some of the regional, national, and transnational origins of such a configuration.
1 Josiah Royce, California from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco (Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Publishers, 1970), 286; Vicente Pérez Rosales, Times Gone By: Memoirs of a Man of Action, trans. John H. R. Polt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 270; Pérez Rosales, Memoria, 27.
2 Quoted in Roberto Hernández, Los Chilenos en San Francisco de California (Valparaiso: Imprenta San Rafael, Vol. 1.I, 1930), 39. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish in this chapter are mine.
3 Brian Roberts, “‘The Greatest and Most Perverted Paradise.’ The Forty-Niners in Latin America,” in Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World, ed. Kenneth N. Owens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 73.
4 Ibid., 72.
5 Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, La Edad del Oro en Chile (Santiago: Editorial Francisco de Aguirre, 1969), 238.
6 Robert McKee Irwin, Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico’s Northwest Borderlands (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xvi.
7 Hernández, Los Chilenos, 13.
8 Quoted in Hernández, Los Chilenos, 14.
9 Arnold Bauer, Chilean Rural Society: From the Spanish Conquest to 1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 63.
10 Quoted in Edwin A. Beilharz and Carlos U. López, eds., We Were 49ers! Chilean Accounts of the California Gold Rush (Pasadena: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976), 206. I have slightly modified the translation. Original in Viajes, 9.
11 Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 63.
12 Quoted in Hernández, Los Chilenos, 187.
13 Ibid., 131.
14 His mother, Sarah Royce, wrote at his request a full account of her California memories that was fundamental to Royce in his writing and may account for some of the emphasis on the role of religion and families or lack thereof in that history. Sarah’s text was later published as a book, under the title A Frontier Lady.
15 John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 144–56.
16 Royce, California, 3.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 3–4.
19 Ibid., 4.
20 Ibid., xvii.
21 Ibid., 296.
22 Ibid., 219.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 296.
25 Bayard Taylor, El Dorado: Adventures on the Path of Empire (Santa Clara: Santa Clara University/Heyday Books [1850], 2000), 249. For Taylor, the “race” here was, of course, that of white Americans in California.
26 Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californios, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 52.
27 Ibid., 53.
28 Ibid., 68.
29 Frank Soulé, John H Gihon, and James Nisbet. Annals of San Francisco (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books [1855], 1999), 412.
30 Ibid., 472.
31 Ibid.
32 Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4.
33 Royce, California, 286–87.
34 Vicente Pérez Rosales, Recuerdos del Pasado. 1814–1860 (Santiago: Imprenta Gutenberg, third edition, 1886), 207–8.
35 Ibid., 211.
36 Ibid., 214.
37 Ibid., 221. For a detailed account of Anglo abuses against Chileans and their responses to such violence in Gold Rush California, see Fernando Purcell, “Becoming Dark: The Chilean Experience in California. 1848–1870” in How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences, ed. José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009).
38 Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York: The Modern Library, 2007), 86.
39 Pérez Rosales, Recuerdos del Pasado, 226.
40 Ibid., 299.
41 Ibid., 280.
42 Ibid., 294.
43 Ibid., 255.
44 Pérez Rosales, Times Gone By, 45.
45 Ibid., 50.
46 Rolando Mellafe, “Introducción,” in Ensayo sobre Chile, ByVicente Pérez Rosales (Santiago: Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile, 1986), 21–22.
47 Pérez Rosales, Ensayo sobre Chile 300–1.
48 Ibid., 214.
49 Ibid., 352.
50 Ibid.
51 Ericka Beckman, “The Creolization of Imperial Reason. Chilean State Racism in the War of the Pacific,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2009): 74–75.
52 Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines. The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3.
53 Stephen J. Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 76.
54 Ibid., 41.
55 Ibid., 51.
56 Ibid., 4.
57 Racially based but economically productive violence could also be even more direct. Mike Davis in No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the US-Mexico Border (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006) proposes to consider vigilantism (i.e., “ethno-racial and class violence [or threat of violence]”): “a distinctive system of locally sanctioned violence throughout the former Western frontier states. . . . Vigilantism—often extolled from the pulpit or editorial page—policed the boundaries of ‘whiteness’ and ‘Americanism’” (17). This we could call the long-lasting political productivity of the story of the Gold Rush as it relates to the presence and perception of people conceptualized as racially othered foreigners. Thus, in studying the history of lynching in the West, Ken Gonzales-Day can state, “One of the fundamental goals of this book is to allow the nation. . . . to finally acknowledge that when taken collectively, the lynching of American Indians, blacks, Chinese, and Latinos constituted the majority of cases of lynching and extrajudicial executions in California [between 1830–1935].” (Lynching in the West. 1850–1935 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 14.
Historical understandings of popular justice including lynching in the West have managed to obscure this fact, idealizing frontier justice as a manifestation of direct democracy and community self-organizing when it was in fact one extreme manifestation of the above-mentioned xenophobic and racialized inter-group logic.
58 Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
59 Ngai, Impossible Subjects (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).