Rethinking California

California has always been viewed as unique. Historian Carey McWilliams argues that the state is “exceptional” in its evolution—different from any other region of the globe and inhabited by a different breed of individuals. For McWilliams, California is “no ordinary state. It is an anomaly, a freak, the great exception among the American states.”¹ The novelist Christopher Isherwood once called California “a tragic land—like Palestine, like every promised land.”² Isherwood’s comparison of California to the metaphoric New Jerusalem suggests both a biblical utopia, a cornucopia of natural resources and yet an unsettled and tragic land, consumed by the turmoil of its people. It may be the earthly representation of the Garden of Eden or the twisted torment of paradise. Critics may deride California, its unique culture, its diversity and unconventional politics. But dismissing California belies its cultural and political significance. The Golden State is a dominant exporter of ideas. California’s popular culture is emulated from rural West Africa to the crowded capitals of the Pacific Rim. The state’s policy debates—ranging from the sublime to the surreal—are exported to the rest of the United States as grassroots movements and policy innovations. Thus from tax revolts to gay rights, from affirmative action to immigration, from term limits to welfare reform, California is widely viewed as a cradle of cutting-edge social and political movements.

A DIVERSE HERITAGE

In reality, California’s indigenous peoples were autonomous, nomadic, and diverse. Nearly 300,000 people lived in California before the first European explorers arrived. There were over 100 tribes, or “tribelets,” averaging only 250 individuals; together they spoke over 80 distinct dialects. California’s indigenous peoples may have had the greatest linguistic diversity in the world.⁴ The Tolowa Modoc, Shasta, and Kavok tribes (of the Athabascan family), for example, lived on the border between Oregon and California; the Kawaiisu, Vanyume, Kitanemuk, Serrano, Tubatulabal, Miwok, and Monache tribes (of the Penutian and Shoshonean families) inhabited California’s vast Central Valley region; and the Diegueno, Kamia, and Yuma tribes (of the Hokan family) dominated the southernmost part of the state, bordering Mexico.

These indigenous peoples evolved quite distinctly from their pre-Columbian cousins to the south. They had no common language, no regional confederation, and no permanent settlements—except for a handful of tribes such as the Mohave and Yuma that practiced agriculture. Nor were there great empires built like those of the Aztecs or Incas. California’s earliest inhabitants were hunter-gatherers who roamed their territories, living off the abundant plants and wildlife. This was both a blessing and a curse. These communities were empowered with their own self-government and autonomy, but ultimately they were too small to collectively withstand the onslaught of Spanish conquest and colonization.

Conquest and Colonization

In 1542, a half-century after Christopher Columbus first came to the “New World,” Spain claimed California as one of its possessions during the voyage of the Portuguese navigator Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo. The Spanish quickly lost interest in their new find, however. For almost two centuries, until the mid-1700s, Spain’s western Pacific territory remained an outpost of limited commerce and settlement. By this time other European powers, notably France, Russia, and England, were exploring the region for potential new trading and commerce opportunities. Russian fur-trading posts were being established along the northern coastline above San Francisco (hence the name of Sonoma County’s Russian River) and nearby Fort Ross.

For the next 50 years, the Spanish colonizers built a string of missions running the length of California. They established California’s first civilian settlements, or pueblos, in San Jose in 1777, and on September 4, 1781, they founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles. Due in part to the Napoleonic wars and the remoteness of the colony itself, Spain was unprepared to devote much, if any, of its resources toward full colonization. It ruled the colony by proxy via its royal viceroy in Mexico City and at the height of its conquest had only about 3,000 subjects loyal to Spain living in California. Instead it used hispanicization and the indentured servitude of the native people to develop its missions. The Franciscan padres were used as the principle instrument of colonization. Accounts by the Spanish military troops housed in the presidios adjacent to the missions describe unusually harsh treatment by the Franciscans—surpassing even the cruelty of latter-day institutional slavery. By the end of the eighteenth century, some 13,000 Indians were held in 18 missions across California.⁶

The Spanish empire began to unravel by 1822, when Mexico broke from its colonial orbit. As Mexico moved to shed its clerical ties to the church, it secularized the California missions, giving civilian authority to its pueblos and introducing economic reforms. Mexico awarded large land grants for the development of ranchos—some up to a quarter of a million acres—as patronage to settlers strongly connected to governors sent from Mexico City. Emboldened by Mexico’s weak administration, the rumors of a potential war between the United States and Mexico, and the onslaught of new American migrants flooding into California between 1830 and the mid-1840s, a short Yankee insurrection known as the Bear Flag Revolt began in 1846, led by John C. Fremont. The insurrection was soon to be overshadowed by the Mexican-American War.

The Mexican-American War

Following the Missouri Compromise, Texas applied for admission into the Union—as a slave state. This magnified the ongoing border dispute Texas had with Mexico, dating back to the 1830s. Against the backdrop of President James Polk’s desire to fulfill “manifest destiny”—not only for the annexation of Texas, but also much of Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and all of California, Arizona, and New Mexico—the Texas boundary dispute was enough to launch the Mexican-American War of 1846. By January 1847, the U.S. military was in control of much of this territory, encountering little resistance and eventually capturing Mexico City itself. The provisional government signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 to cede these territories to the United States in exchange for a payment of $15 million and the recognition that Mexican Californians could become U.S. citizens if they so wished and that land titles issued by Mexico and Spain would be honored. One interesting provision of the treaty, later repealed in the state’s second constitution, was the assurance that Spanish would remain one of California’s official languages, along with English.

California’s Boom

California’s status as a sleepy possession of the United States under military rule ended with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in January 1848. The gold rush brought in a quarter million settlers to the state between 1848 and 1853. Gold made California and the West a new promised land, first for miners, then for their suppliers, then for those who followed: ranchers, railroad tycoons, and land developers. Later, the discovery of “black gold,” or oil, fueled an economic boom in Southern California. Offshore drilling of oil started as early as the 1920s off the coast of Santa Barbara. By the 1870s “green gold,” or agricultural land, was to the Central Valley what gold was to Northern California and oil was to Southern California. By 1935 the great Central Valley, 100 miles wide and 500 miles long, was thriving due to the Central Valley Water Project, which created a grid of dams and channels to bring water to California’s fertile fields.

As each of these “booms” hit, so did the arrival of new settlers armed with their own set of Yankee prejudices. They eventually outnumbered the original Mexican Californians, most of whom had pure or mixed Mexican blood. Land grants were compromised, businesses stolen outright, and quasi-legal maneuvers forced many into squalor. The native Indian population fared even worse. A de facto genocide was conducted against them from the time of the mission period. Ravaged by Western diseases, embattled by each wave of new colonizers, whole tribes became extinct: By the census of 1880, only 6 percent of the original 300,000 native Americans remained.

A smattering of symbols constantly reminds us of a previous civilization swept aside in the crush of Americanization. They are emblazoned on the street names as directional icons: Pico Boulevard and Olvera Street. They are assigned as names to jurisdictional counties and cities as if they were some trophy snatched away in the victory of a war: Modoc County, Shasta County, Mono County, San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Ana, and San Bernardino. They are evident in such architectural styles as Spanish Colonial and in the romance of the Old West celebrated in museums and festivals, symbolically preserving relics of a displaced culture even as its legacy was erased.

RAILROAD POLITICS

The Americanization of California could not have been accomplished without the arrival of the era’s new technology: the railroad. The railroad transformed the demographics, commerce, and politics of the state. The Central Pacific Railroad, founded by Leland Stanford, Collins Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins—the “Big Four”—transformed California during the 1860s from a remote island across the Sierra Nevada to an accessible destination. In six years California was linked by rail to virtually every major city in the United States. The heavy labor of building the rail lines and tunneling through the Sierras was done by a predominantly Chinese workforce, imported for their skill and willingness to work for a subsistence wage. Their impact on California’s emerging commercial infrastructure is surpassed only by their impact on California’s expanding cultural diversity.⁷

The last subsidy of the funding mosaic came from the federal treasury. For this, the Big Four relied on one of their own, Collins Huntington,¹⁰ to be their point person and advocate in Washington. Through Huntington’s East Coast political connections and his corporate position as vice president of the railroad, he was successful in getting Congress to pass the Pacific Railway Act in 1862. The federal government’s financial largess was the final link: It provided large land grants from the public domain. Over the next century, Southern Pacific would become the largest landholder in the state, controlling over 11.5 million acres, or approximately 12 percent of all the state’s land. The law also provided millions of dollars in long-term loans to subsidize the railroad. Upon completing the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the Big Four moved on to monopolize the state’s entire transportation system. By the 1880s, these four men controlled 85 percent of all transportation in the state.

Business development closely followed the state’s transportation growth. As a result of the Southern Pacific’s deep ties to the state’s economy, a vast political machine emerged on all levels of government in California. Political leaders, the state’s major newspapers, and even the judiciary had a strong pro-railroad bias. When it came to the state’s economic development, what was good for Southern Pacific was good for California. However, this marriage of corporate convenience was short-lived. The depression of the 1870s brought serious economic shifts to the state and consequently ushered in a more pessimistic mood, fueled by economic anxiety and manifesting in political activism and anti-Chinese xenophobia. The political empire built by the Big Four began unraveling, though the sustained power of Southern Pacific remained.

Xenophobia has been a common political feature in California since 1877. In September 1877, Dennis Kearney formed the Workingmen’s Party in San Francisco, which was not only the first official opposition to the railroads but also one of the first organized xenophobic movements. The Kearneyites turned to the streets for mob action, denouncing not only the Big Four cartel but invoking the more potent rallying cry “The Chinese must go.” Later, through more peaceful and traditional means of democratic change, they used the foil of the Workingmen’s Party to organize a united front at the constitutional convention of 1878, which ultimately produced the second of California’s two constitutions—the one in force today.

CALIFORNIA’S CONSTITUTION

The usual definition of constitution alludes to some framework of orderly systems and principles by which a diverse mass of citizens consent to be governed. This framework embodies not only “timeless” principles but also practical political compromises to resolve the power conflicts of the time in which they were written. California’s two constitutions (1849 and 1879) are both lofty, visionary, and inspirational documents—as well as windows to the political currents of the historical periods during which they were drafted and ratified.

The First Constitution

To prepare California for admission into the Union in 1850, a constitutional convention was held in the fall of 1849. Nationally, the debate over California’s admittance hung over the slavery controversy. Under the Missouri Compromise, California would be admitted as a free (non-slave) state. With this decided, the convention went about drafting the state’s first constitution. The 48 delegates borrowed heavily from constitutions of other states, notably those of New York and Iowa, two states where many of the delegates had previously lived.

The constitution established a plural executive branch, whereby the governor, lieutenant governor, controller, superintendent of public instruction, attorney general, and surveyor general would all be elected separately by the voters. The legislature was bicameral—a senate and an assembly. The judiciary would be composed of lower courts and a supreme court. San Jose was chosen as the state capital. Perhaps most noteworthy, however, was the state constitution’s explicit emphasis on basic civil liberties for its citizens. Article I, Section 1 of California’s first constitution asserts: “All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.” The U.S. Congress accepted the constitution, and on September 9, 1850, California was admitted as the 31st state in the Union.

The Second Constitution

THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT’S LEGACY

The Progressive movement emerged in California in the early 1900s, following a national trend, and brought about significant reforms in the way Californians viewed government. Every time we enter the voting booth to exercise our right to direct democratic initiatives to improve the living, working, and environmental conditions brought on by industrial and postindustrial society, we are participating in political reforms brought about by the Progressive movement. The Progressives were a professional, mostly white, middle-class reform movement that emerged as a response to the political corruption and excessive special-interest power that had been commonplace in major urban cities throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. They sought “progressive” reform, greater access to government, and greater control over “undesirable” classes—specifically working-class and immigrant populations. In California, that meant taking on the Southern Pacific Railroad. As the dominant corporation of its day, the Southern Pacific Railroad heavily influenced the legislature, courts, and most local and county offices.

The Progressives also fought for increased citizen participation and more accountability of elected officials. One of the defining variables that distinguished the California Progressives was their common distrust for centralized power and their desire to democratize every aspect of the decision-making process in order to incorporate more voices. As Chapter 7 discusses, the tools of “direct democracy” favored by the Progressives are still used today as an essential part of the electoral arsenal. Since the 1970s, a number of significant issues have reached the policy agenda through the initiative process, which was brought about by the Progressive movement. Proposition 13 (property tax reform), Proposition 187 (cutting basic services to undocumented immigrants), and Proposition 227 (banning bilingual education) owe their existence to the Progressive legacy.

The Progressives first organized the larger urban centers of California, and by 1907 had created the Lincoln-Roosevelt League within the Republican Party. The league was successful in fielding its own slate of reform candidates to the state legislature, and by 1908 they were in the statehouse, pushing for the dismantling of machine politics. They ended party nominations of future candidates by introducing the direct primary, allowing voters to directly choose their candidates. In 1910 Progressive Republican Hiram Johnson was elected governor, clearing the way for significant Progressive reform. His campaign theme was simple but effective: “Kick the Southern Pacific out of politics.”

The Progressive Social Agenda

The Progressives were interested in more than political reform. They also pursued a nativist social agenda that sought to regulate class, cultural, and racial deviation from what they considered the white, middle-class norm. The message of the Progressives resonated and found saliency against a backdrop of large waves of immigration from western and southern Europe. The Progressive agenda became a national blueprint for business and upper-middle-class elites to close ranks against emerging ethnic constituencies and reframe the cultural debate in the language of electoral reform and government efficiency.¹¹ The Progressives led the national debate on more restrictive immigration reforms driven by the racism of “yellow-peril” hysteria. California was their testing ground. Noncitizens were forbidden to own land in the state. Chinese immigration was cut off by 1882 and Japanese immigration by 1924. Soon new “aliens” came from the South (Mexico) to feed the need of California growers for cheap agricultural workers. In this context, one can see that the current fight over California’s social and cultural soul is only the latest onslaught in a century-long debate about what it means to be a Californian.

Newspapers, photos, diary notes, articles, stat sheets, and books—Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, Rudy Acuña’s Occupied America, Raymond Chandler’s The High Window, Susan Kelly’s Mastering Word Perfect 5—and family heirlooms surround me in a pile across what was once my father’s bedroom. He stood at the picture window to my right during the air-raid blackouts of World War II, watching searchlights crisscross skies just like tonight’s when a rusty-gray blanket hides the handful of stars that can survive the city glare.

And I begin by lighting a votive candle emblazoned with the image of San Martín de Porres at the altar where I’ve gathered together the objects of the living and the dead: grandmother’s finely molded hand mirror with the Deco engraving on the back (if I look into it now will I see her face instead of mine?); the wallet-sized photo of my girlfriend, her stare questioning my soul from three thousand miles away in Guatemala City where maybe I’d rather be; the brittle yellowed leaf from Palm Sunday at the Old Plaza Church, where Father Luis Olivares showered the thousands of Mexicanos and Centroamericanos surrounding him with holy water; the calling card that Hector Oqueli handed me three months before he was kidnapped and assassinated in Guatemala City; the cassette sleeve with the red-black-yellow slogans that Dago the ardent revolutionary gave me a month before a Salvadorian army bullet pierced his lung and he convulsed into his final breath during the FMLN guerrilla offensive of 1989 in downtown San Salvador.

I continue by turning off the overhead light so that the candle flame transforms the shadow of the crucifix into a pair of outstretched arms. The faint, wavering light glows upon the photos of my late grandparents.

I do this alone, in my grandparents’ house in the L.A. neighborhood north of downtown known as Silver Lake. I do it because my grandmother once did it, each night with me before I said my prayers. I do this and many other things like it, here in this house, because I feel as if somehow my grandparents were living through me when I do. This is important—it is my history. There is much else that is my history, too; the things that pertain to my particular generation, which I experienced directly or indirectly and that make up my cultural and political vocabulary. Everything from Watergate to the Flintstones to Robert Kennedy’s assassination and the time the white hippie from Marshall High spit on me, the brown scrub, while I walked home from Franklin Elementary; to the earthquakes and dozens of noir and war movies I watched with my father; to Rubén Salazar’s death at the Chicano Moratorium and later on my own belated encounter with Revolution via Nicaragua and El Salvador and the subsequent disillusionments, and the sex, lies, and performance art of the eighties, and now The Walls Coming Down.

And this is as close as it gets to home, right here in Silver Lake on this cool L.A. summer night looking down on a deserted Glendale Boulevard, a block above where my grandparents worked themselves into alcoholism and heart attacks at La Ronda, the Mexican restaurant they owned in the fifties and sixties and that now is a gay bar. “As close as it gets,” because my home is L.A. and L.A. is an antihome. So, this journal is an attempt to gather together the strewn shards of my identity scattered like the beads of broken glass across the Golden State Freeway three miles north of here, where a few days ago a big rig hauling fifty thousand pounds of tomatoes crushed a trailer home, killing three of four members of a tourist family who’d come all the way from Canada to visit Disneyland.

What surrounds me is my history, I repeat to myself. The words become my mantra: I must have a history.

“Baptism Souvenir,” it says, in badly printed, kitschy cursive on the cardboard frame. “Our Lady Queen of the Angels (Old Mission Plaza).” A smiling kid swathed in virgin white, laid out horizontally before the silver-haired priest (hornrimmed glasses, lips pursed), who the frame catches right at the moment he’s letting the water fall on my head.

Our Lady Queen of the Angels Church, popularly known as La Placita, is the historic center of the city: where the city began, where I began. Every Sunday, at this modest mission founded in 1781, an average of 250 Mexicanos, Chicanos, and, increasingly, Centroamericanos, bring their babies to be baptized in the chapel christened Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula—the original, overwrought Catholic name for L.A. They come, dressed to kill in rented suits and home-stitched silk dresses, and the photographers swarm around them, exactly as one George A. Pérez (whose name is printed on the back of the cardboard frame) accosted my family one Sunday twenty-eight years ago. I am cradled by my grandfather, whose hair is just beginning to turn gray. His aquiline, northern Mexican nose gives him an air of dignified mestizo-ness, right on the border between the indígena and the Spaniard; my grandmother (softer feathers, light-complected, large eyes, less intígena) holds my hand.

It is 1962, just before the October Missile Crisis. My grandparents’ restaurant has taken shape on Glendale Boulevard. Elvis Presley stopped by not long ago (my grandparents had no idea who he was) and wrote, “Nice place, great food. Elvis Presley,” on a napkin that is now my younger sister’s prized possession.

My father is doing litho work at a place called Rapid Blue Print, making very good money ($1.50 an hour) for a first-generation Mexican. He likes to slick his hair but he is not a pachuco—he’s proud to speak an accentless English as well as a perfect Spanish. And, as he will still say thirty years later, is proud to be better off than the chusma, the recently arrived immigrants who gather in squalor in the barrios to the south and to the east of La Placita. My mother’s English is still awkward and heavily accented; she’s doing her best at playing the classic housewife, watching a lot of TV (which inspires her to do her hair up Jackie Kennedy-style), singing nursery rhymes to me in Spanish in the afternoons, and probably still thinking a lot about her native El Salvador, which she left only a few years before.

My parents live in their newly built house in Silver Lake (only five minutes away from my grandparents). It’s all very idyllic and I’m the model firstborn son; my parents have representatives of the fledgling Latino middle class over to the house often for martinis and cha-cha dancing, the men with Brylcreamed hair wearing sharp suits and thin ties and the women with knee-length solid-colored or polka-dotted dresses and teased, Roman-arched hair.

Father must work eighteen, sometimes twenty hours a day, and this begins to take its toll on my mother. Late one night, alone in the house with her son fast asleep, the isolation, her longing for the comfort of the large family she left behind in El Salvador and the vastness of a city she doesn’t understand bring her to the verge of a breakdown. She locks herself in the bathroom. My father comes home and finds her still there, shaken and wordless, in the early morning hours. From this moment on, I begin to have nightmares about monsters lurking outside in the darkness of the city, poised to leap out and tear my family apart.

Nearly thirty years later, I’m still hanging out at La Placita. Something in or about that baptism water.

Today, a pierced blue sky. The famous “Santa Ana winds” have returned with their dry cowboy heat and blown the smog out to sea. Y.—who is here for a month before she returns to Guatemala—and I awake, slightly hungover, in my father’s old bedroom. (Father told me recently that sleeping with a woman who is not my wife in my grandmother’s house is probably enough to make her turn over in her grave.)…

We straggle out of bed and arrive at La Placita just in time for the eleven-thirty mass. La Placita today is not the church it was before the arrival in 1981 of Father Luis Olivares. Back then, it still leaned toward a touristy quaintness and was mainly attended by the Chicano and Mexicano middle class. Today, shrines paying tribute to the various Latino communities that make up the parish adorn the walls of the church—El Cristo Negro de Esquipulas (Guatemala), El Santo Niño de Atocha (El Salvador), El Señor de los Milagros (Peru), and, Olivares’s favorite, the expressionistic lithograph depicting the assassination of Salvadorian archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. Surrounding the church and in the internal patio, Olivares has allowed dozens of Latino street vendors to sell their wares, everything from bootlegged cassettes, tamales and champurrados to blinking plastic roses. The vast majority of the parishioners are recent arrivals—Mexicanos and Centroamericanos who came to La Placita because they already knew of the church and its controversial pastor long before they began their dangerous journeys north. La Placita has become a mythic haven on the well-trodden path to the American Dream; hundreds sleep in the church’s shelter every night. In 1985, Olivares declared La Placita—in public defiance to the Immigration Reform and Control Act—a “sanctuary” for Central American refugees and the destitute undocumented from Mexico.

Whether or not La Placita will remain a haven for the poor is now in question, however. Months ago, Olivares’s superiors of the Claretian Order announced that he would be transferred to a Fort Worth parish. And then, only two weeks before his scheduled departure, he fell gravely ill with what was initially diagnosed as meningitis with complications.

This Sunday was to have been his farewell. We enter the church, squeezing in with the typical overcapacity crowd. To everyone’s surprise, Olivares is at his usual post, beneath the large image of the Vfrgen de Guadalupe to the left of the altar. His head is bowed with exhaustion, and he is still wearing a hospital I.D. bracelet (his condition is listed as “serious” at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, and he will be rushed back immediately after the service). All eyes are fixed upon the now-fragile Olivares, whose voice once boomed out from the pulpit, challenging his parish to confront its enemies: the migra—the Immigration and Naturalization Service agents who flash their badges and ask for green cards—the LAPD, the U.S. government. He cradles his head in pain.

Associate pastor Michael Kennedy officiates the mass, but when it comes time for the homily, he hands the microphone to Olivares, who is so weak he can barely hold it. His voice begins in a weak whisper, but soon he is weaving a powerful and emotional sermon. He confides that the doctors have given him one or two years of life. “But I do not fear my death, my brothers and sisters. One must accept the will of God. If He wants me to stay on in this, this,” he says, summoning a weak somewhat ironic smile before going on, “vale of tears, then I will stay. If He wishes me to leave, I will leave.”

Father Luis Olivares bids La Placita farewell with these words: “Like John the Baptist called … so each of us, upon being baptized, is called to be a prophet of love and justice. I ask the Lord for a special blessing for this community that has fought so hard for justice, not only here and in Central America, but all over the world. May it continue to do so, to live out the true meaning of the Gospel.” After saying this, he sinks back into the wheelchair, exhausted.

After the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, and during the traditional mutual offering of peace, an old Mexicana painfully canes her way up to the altar to touch Olivares. Next, a communion-aged boy does the same. Soon, a steady stream of parishioners is tearfully laying hands upon him. But suddenly a tall, attractive blond woman who has been standing near Olivares … puts a stop to this. Towering over the children and ancianos with tears in their eyes, she tells them to go back, “No más, no más,” in a thickly accented Spanish.

Five days later, during my morning ritual at the Silver Lake house, I open the front door and pick up the morning edition of the L.A. Times. I scan the Metro section…. That page is now torn out, gathering dust on the floor along with all the other clippings:

Activist Priest Says He Has AIDs

Father Luis Olivares, the activist Roman Catholic priest and long-time champion of Central American refugees who had been hospitalized for the past month with meningitis, revealed Thursday that he has AIDS. Doctors said they believe that he contracted the disease from contaminated needles while undergoing treatment for other ailments while traveling in Central America… .

L.A. history begins at La Placita, and ends at La Placita… .

SUMMARY

California is no ordinary state. Its politics stem from the unique blend of circumstances and personalities that molded its history. Diverse groups—from California’s original inhabitants to the early Europeans, to the Mexican conquest and the early gold prospectors, to the great post-World War II migration and its contemporary immigrants—have been arriving for generations in pursuit of opportunities, a pristine environment, and a better quality of life. Difficulties and growing pains notwithstanding, this great blending of peoples continues to be a testimony to the Golden State and its open arms.

NOTES

1. Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception (Westport, NY: Greenwood Press, 1971), p. 24.

2. Christopher Isherwood, as quoted in Leonard Michaels, David Reid, Raquel Scheer, eds., West of the West: Imagining California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 310.

3. Quoted in Sucheng Chan and Spencer C. Olin, Major Problems in California History (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), p. 30.

4. Philip L. Fradkin, The Seven States of California: A Human and Natural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 3.

5. James N. Gregory, “The Shaping of California History,” in Sucheng Chan and Spencer C. Olin, Major Problems in California History (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), p. 18.

6. David Lavender, California: Land of New Beginnings (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), p. 69.

7. The State Railroad Museum in Sacramento’s Old Town is a superb testament to the contribution Chinese Americans made to California’s emerging importance as a political and economic power.

8. The Southern Pacific Railroad was acquired by the Central Pacific to provide regional rail links with the state, and it eventually became the namesake of the entire corporate identity.

9. Ward McAfee, California’s Railroad Era: 1850–1911 (San Marino, CA: Golden West Books, 1973), p. 123.

10. By the 1850s in Los Angeles, the Huntingtons were constructing a vast inter-urban streetcar system known as the Pacific Electric Company and constructed some 1,200 miles of track for their streetcars, which would feed the new main railroad depot built as Central Station.

11. See H. Eric Schockman, “Is Los Angeles Governable?” in Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise, eds., Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), pp. 57–75.

	C H A P T E R	2
	California’s Political History

	Featured Reading / Pages 19–23 Rubén Martínez La Placita