The Grapes of Conquest

Presenting an “alternative narrative” of California history, Ornelas-Higdon’s study will make anyone who enjoys a glass of California wine think about the hands that picked the grapes, the feet that pressed them, and the historical roots, literal and figurative, of successive waves of conquest and racialization projects in the region (201). Ornelas-Higdon argues that California’s early wine industry “reshapes our understandings of how conquest played out; how citizenship, race, and notions of whiteness were constructed; and how agribusiness developed across the region over the long nineteenth century” (5). The study examines the role various groups played in constructing race and rural land ownership, particularly Spanish Franciscan, Mexican, and Euro-American colonizers, German and Italian immigrant entrepreneurs, and Chinese, Mexican, and California Indian migrant laborers.Beginning with the introduction of grape varietals into California by Spanish Franciscans, the study traces the importance Roman Catholic missionaries placed on producing and maintaining a supply of sacramental wine for their observance of Mass to further the spiritual conquest of Indigenous peoples. Native peoples suffered the dispossession of their lands and the devastation of their foodways due to Spanish missionization and colonization. Their lands were cultivated with grapes, wheat, and other invasive flora and fauna introduced by the Spanish, who put Indian converts to use as unfree laborers.After Mexican independence and the economic transition to family-held land grants and concentrated ranching and viticultural economies, Spanish Mexican families and French immigrants who became Mexican citizens and vineyardists continued earlier patterns of exploiting Indigenous labor for their enrichment. Their land use also shaped a new Mexican national identity rooted in class disparity and racial and gender stratification. Ironically, Indigenous people whose labor was crucial to wine production in Spanish and Mexican California were marked as inferior by their inability to consume the very product of their labor. They resisted this political and social marginalization through illicit consumption of wine, rejecting colonizer expectations that their bodies be used solely for labor, devoid of any pleasure.Under Mexican rule, however, Indigenous bodies and labor were auctioned off as punishment for illicit drunkenness and vagrancy, perpetuating a cycle of “criminal peonage whereby Indians became a permanent class of seemingly enslaved laborers for Los Angeles’s vineyardists” (66). Further undermining Indian sovereignty and health, Mexican vineyardists paid Indian workers with aguardiente (brandy) and wine, all but guaranteeing alcohol dependency and perpetual enslavement. The criminalization of Indian alcohol consumption continued in early US rule, showing a shared desire between the Mexican and Anglo elite in keeping a steady pool of unfree labor at hand.Throughout the study, Ornelas-Higdon relies on the concept of “agricultural citizenship,” the idea that viticulturalists were “noble citizen-cultivators whose labors were improving California’s land and people” (1). Each wave of colonization led individuals to imprint on the rural landscape a new identity associated with progress and civilization. This took many forms by the mid-nineteenth century, such as the commercial shift away from cattle and ranching to intensive agribusiness, new horticultural techniques, the use of viticulture technology and machinery, commercial shipping and transportation infrastructure, racialized labor such as Chinese immigrants, and professional viticultural organizations to share industry advances.This study is situated against recent scholarship on “Spanish Fantasy Heritage” and land use, such as Yvette J. Saavedra’s research on early Pasadena. Ornelas-Higdon shows how viticulturalists’ marketing of California wines touted wine’s supposed health benefits amid a rising tide of temperance reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, framing wine consumption as an elite activity rooted in a more generic Mediterranean fantasy heritage, rather than a singular Spanish one. The author also builds on Erica Hannickel’s work on nineteenth-century viticulturists as agents of conquest who furthered “continental expansion, empire, and ideas about race and miscegenation” (7).Ornelas-Higdon makes a convincing case that scientific horticultural metaphors were loaded with racial overtones and concerns about racial purity as viticulturalists tried to replace old Spanish grape varietals with new European imports, considering them superior. Grafting, crossbreeding, and hybridization were thought to have “moral, and at times, racial implications” (96). In the 1850s and 1860s, “ideological debates about vine propagation drew on contemporary fears of racial miscegenation and degeneration,” a concern especially relevant in the early years of US conquest in California among people who were themselves considered the epitome of racial mixing: Mexicans. This section offers historians useful connections to scientific racism and eugenics typically associated with later periods in US immigration history. But one contribution of this study is how labor history and rural studies offer new avenues for interrogating these themes, too.Ornelas-Higdon acknowledges scholarship on the Italian influence in California viticulture but chooses an earlier periodization to focus on “the multicultural, working-class roots of the industry” (7). Italians were latecomers to California wine growing, but nonetheless instrumental in race-making and mythmaking. They, along with German immigrant viticulturalists in Anaheim, were valorized by boosters for helping to Americanize and civilize California. As Ornelas-Higdon argues, Germans and Italians were “secure in their white racial identity, far more than they would have been in other parts of the United States” (106). They became the embodiments of agricultural citizenship and showed how the rural West could be a place where ethnic European immigrants could remake themselves.By the twentieth century, the Spanish and Mexican influence on California’s viticulture industry and regional identity were depicted as relics of the past. This linear progress narrative crafted by Anglo-American and European immigrant viticulturalists was challenged by Anaheim disease, which decimated Southern California’s industry; the low ratings the new California wines received in tasting competitions and consumer preferences; white backlash against the industry’s reliance on Chinese labor; and the rising tide against liquor. Agricultural citizens never fully escaped the Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican past, and their paths were more similar to their predecessors than they dared admit

CONQUEST · Foodways · Immigration · Independence (probability theory · Indigenous · Industrialisation · Mesoamerica · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · Wine Industry and Tourism