#the other
Kevin Starr describes the debate over allowing California into the Union, as it hung on the issue of slavery, or the South’s “peculiar institution” (p73). This is a belittling way to describe slavery, as if it were peculiar to the South, or particular to the antebellum period. It is representative of a certain misconception that many continue to perpetuate, as described on the website for the modern non-profit anti-slavery group, TraffickFree.org:
“ there are more slaves now than ever before in human history - approximately 27 million around the world
(….)
“17,500 slaves are brought into the United States every year “
So in the least it is a poor choice of words on Starr’s part, but also seems to contradict information he admits to later in the chapter, albeit in a mitigated vocabulary:
“immigrants who arrived at Sutter’s Fort (…) contracted from him the labor (and sometimes it has been alleged, the sexual services) of Native Americans indentured to Sutter or otherwise under his control, many of them little better off than slaves.” [pp77-78]
I must wonder what he qualifies in their situation as being ‘not quite as bad as’ slavery-slavery.
Like the seats of a teeter-totter, the surge of outsiders into California during the Gold Rush brought with it a commensurate decline in the lives and cultures of Native Americans. In many ways this pattern copies the earlier interaction of Spanish colonials and Native’s in the first days of settlement and the introduction of the mission-system. For this reason, when Starr waxes poetically about the Gold Rush “…reprising the dreams of the Spanish conquistadores, explorers, and maritime adventurers…” or that “the quest for El Dorado was now being Americanized with its psychological and mythic hold as powerful as ever” [p.81], he belies the real pattern of greed and exploitation that was recurring.
With that being said, the Gold Rush must still be credited with bringing an unprecedented cultural diversity to the State, even at the expense of the indigenous cultural diversity that was supplanted in the process. This diversity would at least provide grounds for a cosmopolitan conversation on race and cultural diversity, even if it was rather immature in its early days. Truly people came from all over the world and became a part of this new conversation.
Castaneda is capturing my attention currently, she has a wealth of really articulate and well informed observations. Specifically I will have to bear this passage in mind (where this posts title is found):
Terrorism, militarism, and war masculinize the world, irrespective of how many women serve in the military or conduct suicide missions.1 Using gender to justify war in the twentieth century—bombing Afghanistan to “liberate” Afghan women from Afghan men, for example—recodes gendered hierarchies and relations of power that have, since the sixteenth century, sexualized conquest and justified European imperialism. The gender and sexual politics of religious fundamentalism, whether in the name of contemporary Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, continue to reify patriarchal, misogynist, and heterosexist structures of domination worldwide. “Global capitalism,” our postmodern restructured economy, exploits the labor of men, women, and children within gendered and sexed structures of power framed centuries ago. In the “global market place” women and girls of color remain the target of brutal sexual violence and murder, only now in “free trade zones”; are prey to rape by human smugglers and “law enforcement” agents, including border patrols; and are kept captive in homes where they are maids, housekeepers, and nannies in the “domestic economy of service.” The expanding market in “sexual tourism” is a hugely profitable, global phenomenon.
The rapacity of capitalism is well documented, as is the brutality of war, even as both are occluded from public discussion and/or sanitized in public media owned by a few conglomerates. What is not well documented, and what the articles in this volume elucidate, is the inseparability of gendered politics and other politics that produce/reproduce the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to create the issues we live with today: terrorism, war, and imperial hegemony.
Introduction: Gender on the Borderlands
Castañeda, Antonia.
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Volume 24, Number 2 & 3,
2003, pp. xi-xix (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
Soldiers, Priests, Convicts (see Starr p47)–the earliest European colonists in California sound like an odd mix and one in tragic lack of estrogen. So when we discuss the position of women in California, especially in the earlier part of this question, what is really being asked about is the lives of specifically Native, Indian Women.
The groups of historians that Castaneda examined are all tinged in their own ways with misguided perspectives based on ego or racisim, and only since the later half of the twentieth century has serious study been undertaken to understand the histories of women and non-Europeans. Kevin Starr himself doesn’t seem to have too much to offer on the role of women in this period, though he does describe on page 47, that there was very little inter-marriage in California, as opposed to the case in other parts of colonial Spain where classes of mixed-race citizens were generated. It is rather telling that a white mans inclusion of women’s history means a detail on marriage.
It was very interesting in the Castaneda article, that while these early historians “fundamentally reflect the political and socio-racial ideology that informed both the war with Mexico and the subsequent socio-political and economic marginalization of Mexicans in California” (p8) what little positive report they did draw upon was from those Euro-Americans that had been to California in the decades before war, as part of those merchants and traders coming to aid the region and diversify society when Spain could not maintain the colony by itself. Starr identifies inter-national marriage in a limited sense, describing how some of these merchants married into the established Spanish-Mexican wealthy families in the days after independence from Spain. However, his description is a rather uninformative list, again dumbly focusing on the issue of marriage [p.59].
After the war the discourse becomes more negative it seems, and its interesting to note the narratives of fantasy of “Spanish-speaking women [who] invited the advances of EuroAmerican men whom they anxiously awaited as their saviors from Mexican men” [Castaneda, p10]. This American type of narrative sounds a lot like those first fantastic tales and romances of Calafia that motivated the first Spanish explorers, even though Starr described this as the heeding of a “medieval mindset” different from contemporary mindsets presumably, but errantly, for here the same theme continued in the minds of Americans in the 19th and 20th century.
The realities for non-white women seems to have changed little from the mission-presidio days, through to its colonization by white Americans. Castaneda says “conquest and racism intensified sexual assault… non-white women could be raped with impunity, just as they could be enslaved, killed, or worked to death.” [p15].
Castañeda, A. I. (1990). Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California. Frontiers: A Journal Of Women Studies, (1), 8.
On page 21 of California by Kevin Starr, he describes the Spanish Explorer’s willingness to believe in fanciful tales like those of cities of gold or fountains of youth. Specifically he says “Today it is easy to dismiss such stories as fairy tales, but in the early sixteenth century, among a people not yet fully emerged from a medieval mindset and gifted with vivid imaginations, such myths and legends possessed the power to motivate some of the most arduous and heroic overland and maritime expeditions in human history.” This is rather sweeping and grandiose, and it seems foolish to describe actions motivated by apparent greed and ending in the destruction of entire populations as “heroic.” Further it seems to obscure historical processes and perpetuate a certain arrogance in assuming a “medieval mindset” – something we apparently don’t have to worry about anymore – as the agent for human gullibility.
These “heroic” men were apparently looking for what the stories had promised them (as you can learn from a closer reading of the Calafia tale), specifically beautiful and exotic women who would marry them, convert to their religions and in doing assure European ego’s of their superiority, all while presenting them with their very kingdoms, gold jewels and a life of leisure in terrestrial paradise. These men ended up affording that leisure with the slave labor of Indians, and while they didn’t find any ravishing, willing, amazons they did find plenty of opportunities for rape.
Again, I don’t think this is a product of some former mindset humans have evolved past. Large endeavors with gruesome consequence are still organized around media spin and the manipulation of public opinion through modern lies and ‘fairy tales,’ i.e. a foreign invasion will be greeted as a liberating force of democracy, or individual terrorist acts that come with the promised reward of 'virgins’ in heaven.
I think its one of the most beautifully assembled pages in modern literature–admittedly I’m a little ambivalent to the book as a whole, but possibly just for lingering high school era resentments.
But going over some themes in my recent studies, how socially constructed narratives and fantasies have repeatedly informed how European men have encountered “the Other,” brought to mind these passages from the Great Gatsby, specifically:
“the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world.”
Of course a look into “White Male Syndrome” is rather perfect context for this novel, but more specifically, the above phrase seems exactly like what the Bieder and Vogeley articles brought up, only (like so many times before in history) romanticized and made poetic in a man’s mind.
Particularly, I’d reiterate from Bieder:
‘Nature has been presented.., as different, as threatening or powerful, and by those very tokens, as an object of intense curiosity. The idea of conquering or mastering nature is a case in point, when the source of otherness implied by the idea is also generally understood in terms of gender, with nature commonly, but by no means universally, being identified with women.’” Paragraphs 6-7
“Linked to nature and feminized, Indians were represented as “primitive types” and stood in the minds of many as a force opposed to civilization, an adversary to be conquered, subdued and made productive” Paragraph 9
Four aspects of The Other.
