California, a Slave State
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The untold history of slavery and resistance in California, from the Spanish missions, indentured Native American ranch hands, Indian boarding schools, Black miners, kidnapped Chinese prostitutes, and convict laborers to victims of modern trafficking
“A searing survey of ‘250 years of human bondage’ in what is now the state of California. . . . Readers will be outraged.”—Publishers Weekly
California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California’s carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers.
By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers.
Slavery shreds California’s utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America’s uneasy paths to freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Delaware historian Pfaelzer (Driven Out) delivers a searing survey of "250 years of human bondage" in what is now the state of California. Contending that California thrived as an outpost of Spain, Mexico, Russia, and the U.S. because "it welcomed, honed, and legalized numerous ways for humans to own humans," Pfaelzer notes that an 1850 state law legalized bondage of Native Americans, and recounts the harrowing story of T'tc~tsa, an Indigenous girl who survived the massacre of her village by the U.S. Army, was kidnapped, and sold to a rancher as a field laborer and sex slave. In the late 19th century, California also imported tens of thousands of Chinese women and girls, kidnapped or traded by their families in China, who were sold as sex slaves; often they were delivered onto the docks in San Francisco in padded crates. Pfaelzer traces the practices of today's prison system, such as the leasing of convicts to private employers as forced labor, back to the various slave trades that occurred in California, and makes an irrefutable case that unpaid labor was a major engine of the state's economic growth. Readers will be outraged.
