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The Limits of Ethnogenesis My concern has been to show how real people . . . were caught up in larger social and cultural processes and how they articulated their sense of who they were in this context. Lucas 2006:177 287 CONCLUSION This study has traced the history of a group of colonized subjects who were recruited and relocated to serve as colonizing agents of the Spanish crown. It is often the most disadvantaged members of society—those with the fewest options, those who are viewed as expendable—who are pressed into service on the front lines of others’ imperial projects. The military settlers who founded and maintained El Presidio de San Francisco were no exception. Despite the known danger and deprivations, joining the Anza expedition oªered tantalizing opportunities for economic betterment and a fresh start in a new land. Drawn into a web of nation building and empire, the settlers were subjected to military and religious disciplines and transformed by their new roles and responsibilities. But the settlers were not simply passive cogs in a clockwork machinery of imperialism ; they altered the very institutions that had enlisted them. Colonial ethnogenesis —the emergence and articulation of a shared identity as Californios—was one way that the military settlers transformed colonial systems of power. Their repudiation of the sistema de castas can be understood as a collective refusal to define themselves and their fellow settlers by their ancestry or the color of their skin. And yet their new, shared Californio ethnicity was a means through which the military settlers consolidated their new status as colonizers and naturalized their dominance over Native Californians. This study has investigated the transformation of colonial identities on the micro-scale by closely examining the archaeological and documentary traces left behind by the military settlers garrisoned in San Francisco during Spain’s domination of California’s central coast (1776–1821). This approach is signi ficantly diªerent from that taken by the majority of historical studies on the subject, which generally attribute Californio ethnogenesis to macro-scale economic , political, and demographic events in California’s later years as a Mexican province (1822–1847) (see chapter 4). As the foregoing chapters demonstrate , colonial ethnogenesis began during the earliest decades of colonization; colonial identities were never fixed and changed continuously throughout the Spanish-colonial and Mexican era. Moreover, these changes in colonial practices of identification occurred, in part, from the “bottom up”—through the routines, strategies, and tactics that settlers used in their everyday lives as residents of Spain’s northernmost military outpost. It is essential to focus on the ways that material practices participated in these negotiations of social identity. Material practices are potent sites where governmentality and institutional disciplines interface with social agency. They are a middle-range scale of meaning-making through which relations of power are negotiated and contested. In colonial San Francisco, every aspect of personal life—the house one lived in, the food one ate, and the clothes one wore—was structured by military and religious institutions. Yet the institutionalization of daily life was never complete. The residents of El Presidio de San Francisco always retained some capacity to act in ways that mattered and, in doing so, participated in shaping the social and material order. This concluding section draws together the archaeological and historical analyses detailed earlier, highlighting those material practices that were particularly salient in the emergence and consolidation of Californio identity. It then returns to the theme of overdetermination (first elaborated in the introduction). Rather than attributing colonial ethnogenesis to any one “root cause,” this book argues that colonists forged their new collective identity through a matrix of material practices and discursive strategies that contributed to within-group identification, distinction from Native Californians, the establishment of labor regimes, heightened attention to diªerential masculinities, changes in colonial women’s roles in the community, and greater emphasis on the sexual politics of ethnic respectability, honor, and shame. This conclusion next examines the broader implications of this study in the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology and in the history of colonialism, situating the case of El Presidio de San Francisco in comparative perspective by contrasting it with other colonial ventures. Structural conditions of colonization inform, but do not necessarily determine, how colonial identities are materialized and negotiated. Rather, the interface of global imperial systems with local contexts is always historically contingent because of the unpredictable actions taken by individuals and social collectivities aªected by colonial projects. 288 Conclusion [3...

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