Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California (review)

Scholarly interest in the intersection of race and criminal justice in California continues to grow. Against this backdrop, McKanna's monograph is likely to attract the attention of a wide pool of scholars. Following the author's earlier exploration of frontier violence, Homicide, Race and Justice in the America West (Tucson, 1997), McKanna contends that racial animosity, social status, and marginality stimulated violence and influenced the treatment of defendants within the criminal-justice system.

The book is divided into four racially specific chapters that explore the interaction between the criminal-justice system and the indigenous population, Chinese migrants, Mexicans, and whites. Each chapter counts killings by members of a particular group, categorizes these murders by the victim's race, records indictments and convictions, and lists accompanying sentences. Sources include legal briefs, court testimony, police records, and newspaper accounts.

McKanna attempts several interdisciplinary interventions. In addition to the broadly conceived comparative ethnic framework, the chapters on Mexicans and Chinese include brief summations of the legal traditions of colonial Spain and of the Ch'in and Ch'ing dynasties. The book occasionally dispenses with its straightforward historical narrative to present picturesque depictions of violent incidents and their attendant trials.

On the whole, however, the work is both methodologically traditional and fundamentally flawed. In basing his discussion on incidents of legally defined homicide, McKanna ignores key issues. The presence of the state, both in the uneven application of the death penalty and through legal prohibitions against non-white court testimony, is generally ignored, as are extrajudicial killings. Given that estimates of the number of native Californians killed by whites between 1845 and 1900 range as high as 10,000, the detailed discussion of 106 murders by Native Americans—and the conclusion that these killings can be largely explained by alcohol or economic dislocation—seems off the mark. Physical expulsions, lynching, arson, and rape form a key context for the homicides that the author lists, and their absence limits the utility of the work.

This silence is unsurprising, given the book's second major fault. McKanna appears not to have engaged, and certainly does not cite, any of the relevant literature on race and Californian history. Instead, readers will find an outmoded sociological vocabulary of marginality alongside odd passages detailing the supposed link between Hispanic "traditions" of machismo and homicides committed by Mexicans (57), or the contention that the "solid support of clans and the Chinese Six Companies" provided a measure of social cohesion leading to a legal protection for Chinese workers that other minority populations lacked (50).

That McKanna has noticed important incidents that paint a clear portrait of the racialized nature of jurisprudence in nineteenth-century California may stand his work in good stead with students of crime in general and violence in the West in particular. Conceptual and methodological flaws, however, make it unlikely that this work will become the definitive statement on the subject.