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Thrown Among Strangers

University of California Press

The women of Isanthcag-na ran to the brush, and the men hastened to put out their fires in their round huts, when the people first sighted the strangers. These must be gods, for they created fire when they struck wood against small pieces of flint. Yet when one of them fired a musket at a bird and killed it, they knew, terrified as the sound and flash made them, that these strangers were men, like their own, who took life. No Y-yo-ha-rivg-nain, or Giver of Life, would act this way. When the peoples of Isanthcag-na, the more populous Yang-na located to the east, or of the other villages accepted the gifts of corn and beans from the hairy Iberians, they quickly buried them in a safe place away from the village. Their one god, Qua-o-ar, had already given them their foodthe staple acorn along with deer, coyote, snake (not rattler, though), raccoon, skunk, crow, blackbird, plus all kinds of berry, wild sage, and the esteemed roasted grasshopper. It was not that the strangers' food was necessarily poisonous, only that each people's world had its own food, and the corn and beans were not of theirs. Soon, however, their suspicions heightened about this food when two of the men found that huge stalks and plants protruded through the earth where they

had buried the alien victuals. The wizards "pronounced it white witchcraft," according to two of the people, whom the Spanish renamed Gabrieleqos after the mission that would bring them the European godwho took as well as gave lifeand everlasting salvation.1

The Iberians' accounts of these events were very different from the villagers'. When the padres arrived in 1771, "a great multitude of savages . . . appeared and with frightful yells attempted to prevent the founding of the Mission. . . . One of the Fathers produced a canvas picture of Our Lady of Sorrows." Fray Pedro Cambsn recorded that "at the sight of it they became as if transfixed in wonderment, and all of them threw their bows and arrows on the ground, as 'Tomeares' or Chiefs took from around their necks the necklaces they value so highly . . . and placed them at the feet of the Sovereign Queen of the Angels." Father Junmpero Serra, as close to a patron saint of California as there is, related to the viceroy of New Spain that "the start of this mission gave promise of great things both on the spiritual and temporal side." Again the mother of the son of their god worked her wonders:

As for the Indian women, when the Fathers showed them a beautiful painting of the Most Blessed Mary, artistically executed, . . . they were so taken with it that they could not tear themselves away from it. They went to their homes and came back loaded down with seeds and provisions, which they offered to the holy image. . . . It is easy enough to say their actions were prompted by the foolish idea that the Most Holy Virgin was to eat them. But the very sight of how intent they were, and how much in earnest, touched one to the heart, and made one feel sure that they would pay even greater homage to the Great Queen when in the light of the faith they would come to know how exalted she was.

These passages reveal a clear dissonance between the views of the Iberians and the native inhabitants about their first meetings at the place that would become Los Angeles.2

This inconsistency is not simply ironic. Patterns of life and labor in California and the Southwest of the United States, which prevail to the present day, arose in part from the Europeans' peculiar notions about these people they called Indios.3 Indeed, their various interactions with the California

Indians originated the area's labor system and begot the social relations between Spaniards and natives. But more than issues of who should actually work and who should control labor and its products comprise production relations. History shows that production happened not simply when people, land, capital, and markets were brought together. Those invisible bonds we call culture, peoples' customary habits and preferences for how life should be carried on, bore heavily on the emergence of production in California. The Indians' techniques for engaging the land to produce their subsistence would need to undergo profound alteration when the Europeans brought a new labor system to replace their customary ways. However, the production system that actually emerged upon the landscape derived from the forced union of European and native cultures, resembling neither genuinely but representing instead the Indian adaptation to the demands of Iberian imperialism. Thus in this chapter I will first describe and analyze the Indian lifeways of southern California both because they are important to understand for their own sake and because we must know how Indians lived if we are to understand the difficulty they had emulating how the Spanish wanted them to live. Next comes an analysis of the Europeans' vision for the Indians and their strategies for realizing their objectives. We will see how Spanish geopolitical ambitions and fears, coupled with a usually sincere desire to make the "heathens" into gente de razsn, or "people of reason," laid the foundation for California's rural and urban industrial system. Feudal Castilian assumptions about race, civilization, religion, and the relations between fathersfamilial and priestlyand their women and various "children," all came to bear on the social relations that prevailed. Later, in 1848, the Anglo-American military would formally capture this land, replete with those social relations, for capitalist labor and exchange markets.

Indios

Of course, these were not the first native peoples the Spanish had encountered in their quest for converts, gold, and empire in what they perceived as the New World. Not only weapons

but particularly disease and interimperial rivalries had already thoroughly subdued the peoples that occupied the viceroyalty of New Spain. Establishing their empire where the warrior Aztecs were only the most recent of tollanes, or imperial city-states, the Iberians pushed northward as early as the famous and ill-fated Coronado expedition of 1540. There, at their far frontier, they encountered Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande Valley, who engaged in irrigated agriculture more sophisticated than the Europeans' and for the most part lived peacefully with one another. Nearly two hundred years before their efforts in California, the Spanish attempted to assimilate these Indians into their civilization and empire. These people, whose religion had enabled them to live successfully on the land for generations, revolted at the Spanish efforts to remake them, and they cast out the intruders in 1680. But the Spanish once again tried to "civilize" the native inhabitants of the northern frontier in 1769, this time in California.

Unbeknownst to most Europeans, the natives they encountered varied more widely than did the different European peoples themselves. To the Spanish they were all gentiles (heathens), though the adjectives preceding this word ranged from miserios (miserable) to desgraciados (wretched) to pobres (poor). In the medieval European world, where God and the Devil competed incessantly for the souls of humans, it made sense to lump all these gentiles together as Satan's children. The California ones, said Juan Bautista de...