Devil\'s in Silicon Valley: Northern

¶ … Devil's in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican-Americans

Father it hurts!" So begins Stephen J. Pitti's the Devil's in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican-Americans (8). This describes an early native Californian's perception of Christian baptism, which was figuratively if not literally violent to the Indians of 18th century California. In his book, the historian Pitti attempts to address a historical gap in the academic and popular literature of the history of California. Rather than focus on the pioneers or the gold rush miners, Pitti examines how Mexican-American, Indian, and non-white labor drove the economic prosperity of the region.

These non-Anglos enjoyed little financial rewards for the gains they won for the state's Caucasian settlers. The discrepancy of the fortune of whites and non-whites traces back to the earliest missionaries. Then, "the friars undoubtedly resorted to more [and more] brutal tactics to ensure that non-Christians entered their Christian community" of the day (15). Indos, the native people, were viewed as inferior even after they were converts. As white settlements grew more populous in the 1840s, scientific and anthropological justifications of white supremacy took hold. The mixed race Californios were "indolent" and forced the Indian "savages" to work rather than work themselves, and thus were not worthy of the land on which they lived (26).

Of course, in the racial schema of later settler's viewpoints, all non-whites, including mixed race persons, Indians, and members of the so-called "Spanish races" were grouped together as inferior peoples (35). The one fitting irony of this sad development was that the Spanish missionaries who once degraded the native inhabitants were now elided with these same peoples, as both Spanish and Indian races were called "hairy," and bestial, in contrast to Anglos (35). The 19th century ideology of colonizing the West, Manifest Destiny, was justified as the triumph of Christianity over heathenism, civilization over brutality and base nature, progress over backwardness, and of course, the American spirit over the chaos of Mexican and Indian misrule. For example, the construction of Mexican adobe, appropriately designed to keep out the heat of the sun was characterized as primitive and thus inferior to the Anglo method of constructing more complicated houses back East, although these types of structures were designed to keep heat trapped within the home (35).

The Golden State" as California came to be called "rested on a foundation of racial discrimination," both economic and ideological (32). Despite the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, which conferred American citizenship to the 100,000 or so Mexicans residing on the U.S. side of the newly drawn Mexican-American border, these persons remained marginalized by the Anglo community. This was exacerbated after the discovery of gold in the same year as the signing of the treaty (32). Speculation for land grew wild, as more and more Americans flooded the area, and whites controlled the buying, selling, and ownership of property (39). Despite the treaty, only twenty Mexican men and six Mexican women held property in California by 1860, according to the laws of the United States. The numbers of Mexicans possessing a "personal estate" dropped drastically, even while despised settler groups from the East, such as the Irish, increased their ownership of territory.

The loss of the profits of property ownership in the capitalist American system, which was at its most rapid stage of development during the 19th century in California, reduced non-whites to laborers, not owners. The greater the desire to create a "settler's paradise" the greater the anxiety of the so-called "greasers" in the Anglo's midst. (54) "Hispanics of good character," meant Hispanics willing to toil in the gold, and later when they were driven out, other types of mines -- good Hispanics were not Hispanics who desired to better their lot and fulfill the American dream of becoming property owners.

Pitti's work is grounded in substantial historical documentation, as he provides potent statistical evidence that documents the drain of the Hispanic owning members of the population, and the growing numbers of Hispanic workers. The self-justifying racism of missionaries, homesteaders, miners, and industrialists grounded in the dubious scientific jargon of the day is also scrupulously documented in his account. But in addition to his thoroughness, he presents a compelling intellectual portrait of the period as well as a strong historiography.