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

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION Ethnogenesis refers to the birthing of new cultural identities. The emergence of a new ethnic identity or the reconfiguration of an existing one is not simply a question of terminology. Moments of ethnogenesis signal the workings of historical and cultural shifts that make previous kinds of identification less relevant , giving rise to new forms of identity. Studying ethnogenesis, as it happens today and as it has unfolded in the past, provides a means to trace the changing contours of social life. At its core, the investigation of ethnogenesis reveals the politics of social diªerence. Identities simultaneously provide ontological security (we know who we are) and are flashpoints in social conflict (“Don’t call me that!”). We can thus conceptualize ethnicity as a cultural dialogue rather than as something fixed and essential: “an unarticulated negotiation between what you call yourself and what other people are willing to call you back” (Hitt 2005:40). The politics of identities point to relationships of authority and coercion—the power to name oneself is, for example, quite diªerent from the power to assign a name to others. This book presents an archaeological and historical study of ethnogenesis among colonial settlers in San Francisco, California, during its years as a Spanish presidio, or military outpost (1776–1821). The settlers were a diverse group of families who had been recruited primarily from the present-day Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Baja California, and Baja California Sur. Most settlers had some combination of Mexican Indian, African, and European ancestry. Under Spanish-colonial law, the settlers were classified according to the sistema de castas, an elaborate racial code in which lighter skin generally corresponded with higher social rank. Many people at El Presidio de San Francisco and in other parts of the Spanish Americas actively manipulated the sistema de castas to improve their social standing—for example, by reporting a higher-ranking casta, or racial status, on their military enlistment or marriage papers than the one they had been assigned at birth. But in California at the end of the eighteenth century, the colonial settlers went a step further and rejected the sistema de castas altogether. One priest in charge of recording casta information in census records lamented that “such enumeration was in vain since the inhabitants of the district considered themselves Spaniards” (Miranda 1988:271). The colonial residents started to describe themselves as gente de razón (literally, people of reason), hijos and hijas del país (sons and daughters of the land), and, increasingly, Californios and Californianas (Californians ). The new Californio ethnic identity simultaneously referenced the region in which the colonial settlers lived and emphasized Spanish ancestry at the expense of indigenous and African identities. The settlers continued to refer to themselves as “Californios” throughout the region’s years as a Mexican province (1822–1846) and as a new U.S. state (from 1850 to the present). Although the term faded from common use in the twentieth century, many modern descendants of California’s Spanish colonists still proudly call themselves “Los Californianos ” and maintain a pedigreed heritage organization that commemorates the historical contributions of their ancestors (fig. 1). The case of colonial ethnogenesis at El Presidio de San Francisco is significant in its own right: as the first colonial settlement in what has come to be one of the world’s major metropolitan areas, the actions of its residents have had broad historical ramifications. But the significance of this study derives in equal measure from this settlement’s commonalities with other colonial outposts throughout the world. Too often, archaeologists and historians emphasize a firm divide between European colonizers and indigenous victims of colonization, treating the categories of “colonist” and “native” as static groupings. The case of El Presidio de San Francisco—in which colonized peoples were relocated to serve as colonizers—is typical of the frontier settlements of many prehistoric and historical empires. The investigation of colonial ethnogenesis in San Francisco documents how a pluralistic community of displaced families reinvented itself as a unified colonizing force, a phenomenon that has occurred countless times in frontier colonial settlements across history and throughout the globe. Four core themes shape this study of ethnogenesis: colonization, material practice, overdetermination, and sexuality. Colonization is the appropriation of a previously autonomous region and its transformation into a dependency under the control of a remote entity. Colo2 Introduction nization transformed...