The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco

6. Sites of Identification: Landscape

Landscape 147 SITES OF IDENTIFICATION 6 The importance of landscape in the study of colonial ethnogenesis in Alta California is far from coincidence. After all, the colonial settlers took their new collective ethnonym, Californios, from the toponym of the province. In doing so, they grafted themselves onto the land, and the reproduction and transformation of social identities became entangled with the reproduction and transformation of place. The strong bonds between colonial identity and place are a reminder that, at its most fundamental level, the colonization of Alta California was a transformation of spatial relations (Cook 1943): an appropriation of indigenous lands for colonial ends, and the ongoing movement of diverse human populations across both short and long distances as a means to accomplish these ends. For the military settlers at El Presidio de San Francisco, making the landscape their own was an ongoing project, one that first and foremost involved military undertakings to secure indigenous lands as colonized space. The military presence was intertwined with building and infrastructure construction, agricultural endeavors, and projects that harvested raw materials (both organic and mineral) from the land. In addition to these deliberate actions, new habitual patterns of land use gradually began to form, related to daily movement, travel, trash disposal, and other activities. Through all these practices, the military settlers shaped a new land for themselves and shaped themselves to fit this new land. The relationship between social identity and landscape is a recursive one. Space, writes social geographer Allan Pred (1990:26), “is both the medium and the outcome of human agency and social relations.” The intimate connection between space and identity stems from the body’s material continuity—the uninterrupted path through space and time that is traced through each person’s life. Collective and individual identities are formed in part through patterns of bodily movements that generate knowledge of one’s place in the world and one’s relationship to the social order. Feelings of being “lost,” “out of place,” or “in the right place” are practical expressions of this knowledge. Power is thus often materialized through control of space and bodily movement. Even the most mundane routines socialize people into prescribed roles and rules through the repetition of bodily practices (Bourdieu 1980; Butler 1990, 1993a). Michel Foucault (1975) particularly draws attention to physical manipulations of space (for example, buildings and structures) as power-laden technologies that control the movement of the body. Simultaneously, it is through bodily movement that people are capable of transforming their world by taking social action, for the meaning of a place is produced through the interactions and activities that occur there. Anthony Giddens approached this social production of place by employing two closely related concepts : locale and regionalization. Locales are physical sites where social interactions occur; regionalization refers to the patterned diªerentiation among locales (Giddens 1984:110–131). Regionalization includes such phenomena as the construction of an unevenly developed built environment, the shaping of land-use patterns, the appropriation and transformation of natural resources and natural landscape features, the generation of patterns of movement, and the accrual of symbolic meaning to certain places (Pred 1990:10). Although it is not always deliberate, regionalization is never random or meaningless. Through regionalization, power is materially expressed and materially contested . Space, like identity, is never homogeneous or fixed. Although there is often a persistent connection between place and community—as with the Californios and Alta California—there are always, in fact, multiple communities moving within and through contested and contingent places (Massey 1994). As chapter 3 describes more fully, the Presidio settlement housed a complex and diverse population: colonists and indigenous peoples; persons with varying mixtures of African, Mesoamerican Indian, Native Californian, and European heritage; o‹cers, soldiers, auxiliaries, and civilians; prisoners and wage laborers; men and women; children and adults. As this heterogeneous population coalesced into certain larger social collectivities and at other times fractured into smaller a‹liations and groupings, as people sought solidarity and mutual rapport with some and diªerentiated themselves from others, these constant negotiations of social boundaries occurred in and through spatial rela148 Spatial and Material Practices tionships. However, we must avoid simple conflations of social boundaries with spatial boundaries. At times, social diªerence is expressed and achieved through separation; but at other times, it is close proximity that allows the continued enactment of hierarchy and diªerentiation. This chapter considers the interplay between landscape and...