Race Relations in the American West
Richard White
American Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3. (1986), pp. 396-416.
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Sat Jan 12 09:42:44 2008
RACE RELATIONS IN THE AMERICAN WEST RICHARD WHITE
University of Utah
DURING THE 1980S, POLITICAL FASHION HAS MOVED AWAY FROM THE TOPIC OF
American race relations, but the question of race has remained a central concern
of American historians, especially in Southern history. The historical
relationship between blacks and whites is what has made the South distinctive
and the substantial scholarly achievements of the last twenty years have insured
blacks a significant place in Southern historiography. By comparison, the
literature on race in the West lacks the stature of Southern studies.'
Western historians of race relations have, however, accomplished more
collectively than the lack of major works in their bibliography might indicate.
They may have provided, without fully intending to do so, a new basis for the
cherished Western pretensions to distinctiveness which otherwise seem doomed
to crumble. Race relations, not usually a matter of local pride in the West, has
become one of the few possible foundations on which to base Western
regionalism.
That minority peoples should be at the heart of historical claims for Western
distinctiveness is an astonishing reversal for Western history. As Richard
Hofstadter noted almost twenty years ago in an eloquent and telling criticism of
Frederick Jackson Turner, the greatest of the historians of the frontier had
hardly responded to the existence of minorities in the West-"the pathetic tale of
the Indians, anti-Mexican, and anti-Chinese nativism." Despite Hofstadter's
point that the "anguish of history, as well as its romance and charm, is there for
the historian who responds to it," long after Turner, leading Western historians
responded only to the anguish of those who were white. There is much more to
minority history than victimization, but for a reminder of the limited sympathy
that historians gave to the victims of oppression, it is only necessary to glance
through Walter Prescott Webb's Texas Rangers (1935). Webb's admiration for
ranger heroics obscures their daily and often brutal job of keeping those without
white skins in their place. In a way Turner, Webb and lesser lights were
unintentionally academic rangers themselves; they wrote of minorities only in
terms of conquest and control. The history of nonwhites became justification of
their subordination and, once thoroughly subordinated, minorities seemed to
vanish from the historians' h o r i z ~ n . ~
As long as Turner's frontier thesis dominated the study of the West, minorities
could not seem significant because the importance of the West was contained in
Race Relations in the American West
397
the frontier-the place where whites met the "wilderness." With Turnerian
theory in decline, however, Western distinctiveness threatens to vanish along
with the "wilderness" and the frontier. What, after all, has been distinctive
about the West? Only, it now seems, a peculiar pattern of race relations, a
segmented labor structure based partially on race (Chinese, Chicanos, Indians,
and blacks) and the tendency for climate and topography to go to extremes
beyond the Mississippi. Without the special experiences of its minorities, the
West might as well be New Jersey with mountains and deserts.
Making a case for both the centrality of race relations in Western history and
the distinctiveness of these relations involves examining as a single unit a
literature which is most often divided into its constituent parts. Reviews of the
state of black, Indian or Chicano history are common; reviews of the entire
literature on racial minorities in the West are rare. Taken as a whole, however,
this literature provides common themes which can cast a new light on the history
of the West.
First, race in the West has always been not so much a biological fact as a
cultural and historical creation. Races are created here out of diverse peoples
who had not before thought of themselves as a single group, and the history of
the West is inseparable from their creation. Second, in the West the so-called
territorial minorities-those peoples (both Mexican-American and Native
American) absorbed through conquest-have persisted in separate enclaves to a
greater extent than elsewhere, making the West politically unique among
American sections. Third, in this multiracial West the federal government,
because of the special status of minorities, has, far more consistently than in the
South or North, emerged as a regulator of racial relations. Fourth, and closely
connected with this federal role, race, in a dual sense that will be discussed later,
has been an international matter in the West. Fifth, the Western wage labor
system both far earlier and to a degree unknown elsewhere until much later
depended on a racial stratification of labor. Together these themes, all visible in
the new literature, create a pattern of sectional distinctiveness. Examining the
sources of this sectional distinctiveness will involve first assessing the meaning
of race in the West, then understanding how it has become a matter of
international as well as national and sectional concern, and, finally, examining
how race and class have intertwined in the creation of the Western economy.
Race in the West began as a cultural fiction whose first chapter was written in
Spanish rather than English. Its subject was how an elite, supposedly of pure
Spanish descent, ruled over mestizo and Indian peons. The current flowering of
Chicano history which began with Howard Lamar's 7he Far Southwest (1966)
and Leonard Pitt's R e Decline of the Californios (1970) has repeatedly
demonstrated that the claim of wealthy rancheros in New Mexico and California
to be of pure Spanish descent was a cultural myth designed to validate a status
necessarily achieved through economic means. Even before the coming of the
Anglos, race and class became intertwined and confused.
The second chapter of racial fiction came with the American conquest, and
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American Quarterly
understanding the conquest and subordination of the so-called territorial
minorities has remained a necessary prelude to understanding the creation of
races and the origins of race relations. Indians and Chicanos, the territorial
minorities, were inhabitants of conquered or ceded lands rather than
immigrants. The other racial minorities of the West-Asians and blacksimmigrated to the West. And, after the conquest, substantial numbers of
Mexicans also immigrated into this country joining, not always comfortably,
those Mexican-Americans whose ancestors had been present before the Mexican
American War. Chicanos are thus both a territorial minority and an immigrant
group.
The conquests created vanquished peoples who have remained distinct,
unassimilated, and largely in place, and thus set the West apart from other
sections. These peoples themselves witnessed during the 1960s and 1970s a
rather sweeping change in moral attitudes toward the old Western theme of
conquest. The anguish of history replaced romance with a vengeance. Books
which once might have been proud chronicles of military conquest now took on
moral dimensions. In General Pope and U.S. Indian Policy (1970), Richard
Ellis interspersed the usual account of campaigns against the Indians with an
argument that Pope was really a reformer out to conquer Indians in order to save
them from extermination. The army has fared quite well in this literature, but
where military figures could not be rehabilitated, they became targets of the
moral revulsion which propelled Dee Brown's bur^ My Heart at Wounded Knee
(1976) onto the best-seller lists. Indian wars, particularly those in which local
frontiersmen played a significant role, were no longer romantic; they were now
very often nasty little pieces of butchery as in Stephen Beckham's Requiem For a
People (1971). Robert Utley, the leading historian of the relationship between
the Army and the Indians has from his The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963)
to his recent synthesis, R e Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890
(1984), maintained an older historical concern with armed conflict, but he has
brought to it a care and an eye for tragedy, if not always ethnohistorical insight,
that separates his work from the older history.
If by the 1960s Western historians were no longer willing to celebrate Indian
wars, neither were they willing to ignore persistent violence in the West.
Richard Maxwell Brown's studies of vigilantism brought a new sophistication to
topics historians had usually left to Zane Grey, but there has been some lag in
following his lead. Recently Chicano historians have shown interest in social
banditry, and Robert Rosenbaum has written a history Mexican-American
resistance to Anglo domination in Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest (1981).
Such studies have demonstrated an unhappy history of racial violence in the
West, but such violence has to be kept in perspective. Roger McGrath in his
Gunjighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes (1984) has found little interracial
violence in the two California mining towns he studied, although this is partially
a result of classifying a local outbreak of "Indian hunting" as a war. Two fine
state studies of the Ku Klux Klan also have found that the growth of that
Race Relations in the American West
399
organization in the West was accompanied by little violence and indeed
relatively little concern with racial minorities in the West.
With or without violence, the racism of the Anglo conquest has had the ironic
consequence of generating new "races" in the West, by creating a group
consciousness in its victims and introducing a tendency to confuse cultural and
ethnic identity with racial status. Mario Barrera, in his influential Race and
Class in the Southwest (1979), argues that group identity among Chicanos
originally sprang from a common culture and from the perception of common
injustice at the hands of Anglos. The designation La Raza, as numerous Chicano
historians have pointed out, translates as "the people" rather than "the race."
Anglo-Americans, however, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
increasingly tended to treat this racially mixed people as a single race.
Gradually, Chicanos have accepted a separate racial classification, and
historians have routinely treated race as a critical division between Anglos and
Chicanos. Although New Mexicans continue to claim pure Spanish descent, by
the 1960s many Chicanos proudly claimed Indian ancestry. The acceptance of
separate racial status has predictably brought a popular myth of racial origins.
John R. Chavez in his The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest
(1984) speaks sympathetically of the guiding myth of Aztlan, the supposed
ancestral home of the Aztecs in New Mexico, as providing a Chicano identity
based on Indian descent. Chicanos seem to present the clearest evidence that
racial boundaries in the West are a cultural and historical invention much more
than a recognition of a biological fact.
As for the Indians, race was hardly a category at all before the coming of the
whites. Revitalization movements, themselves influenced by whites,
sporadically offered the Indian peoples a vision of an Indian race opposed to a
white one, but more often Indians thought in terms of local communities with
local interests. Peter Iverson's recent biography of Carlos Montezuma (1982)
and Raymond Wilson's study of Charles Eastman (1983) reiterate what earlier
studies of Pan-Indianism argued: that the idea of an Indian race spread most
quickly during the twentieth century among those people most fully exposed to
white racial thinking in white schools or c o m m u n i t i e ~ . ~
Yet if race began as a fiction, an abstraction imposed on diverse communities
to categorize, explain and rank them, it took on a larger historical and cultural
reality. To speak of Indian, white, and Mexican-American communities is to
accept "race" as a lumping mechanism because Indians, whites and MexicanAmericans were certainly not homogeneous cultural groups. The larger
categories represent Anglo-American classifications created on the basis of
ascribed racial attributes which were as predictable as they were demeaning and
derogatory. According to the ruling mythology, Indians and Mexicans were
dark, dirty, without morals, incapable of sexual restraint, cruel, vindictive, and
lazy. These groups were not all on a level, but were often ranked according to
the immediate economic or political requirements of the dominant whites.
"Useful" Mexican-Americans, for example, often ranked ahead of "useless"
400
American Quarterly
Indians. Although they contested or rejected specific attributes, the minority
groups themselves have accepted and partially transformed these racial
categorizations. lo
The origin and significance of these racial divisions have not surprisingly
become a matter of great significance and controversy. Of the numerous studies
of Anglo-American ideas about race published in the last few years, several are
particularly pertinent to the West. These books either look at specifically
western topics, as Reginald Horsman does in his Race and Manifest Destiny
(1981), or they examine attitudes towards those minorities such as Native
Americans or Chinese who are or were concentrated in the West. Richard
Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building
(1981), Robert Berkhofer's The White Man's Indian (1978), Brian Dippie's The
Vanishing American (1982), Richard Slotkin's The Fatal Environment (1985),
Stuart Creighton Miller's Unwelcome Immigrant (1969), Alexander Saxton's
Indispensable Enemy (1971), Mario Barrera's Race and Class in the Southwest,
and Roger Daniels and Harry Kitano's American Racism (1970) all have special
relevance to Western minorities.
What all these books share is an attempt to get at the white racial attitudes from
what Horsman calls the racialism of the nineteenth century to twentieth-century
racism. Because these attitudes rarely stand neatly apart from class conflicts and
American imperial expansion, the task of understanding their role in racial
relations is not an easy one. It is tempting to escape the problem, as Richard
Drinnon does in in Facing West, by both ascribing virtually everything to a
racism which is at once deep and inherent (apparently having long lurked in the
European psyche, awaiting a convenient occasion for expression) and yet also is
merely a rationalization for imperialism and colonialism. It is equally easy to
slide into an economic reductionism which makes racialism or racism a cover for
economic motives. Even Horsman's fine book, Race and Manifest Destiny,
which begins by regarding racialist ideology as a seemingly autonomous factor
that "accompanied and permeated" commercial and agrarian drives for
expansion, eventually reduces racialism to a rationale for economic interest.
Mario Barrera's equally important Race and Class in the Southwest also ends up
concluding that racism is ultimately an ideology maintained to benefit the
interest of a ruling class. Such interpretations say more, perhaps, about the
wishes of liberal and radical historians to make racism a simple function of
capitalism or a peculiar property of Europeans and Anglo-Americans than they
do about the evidence available. l 2
Racism and racialism as most scholars use the terms were not inchoate
prejudices; they were systematically developed sets of ideas. Racialism, for
example, did not simply contend that nonwhites were inferior: it asserted that
they were permanently inferior and that providence had doomed these inferior
peoples to disappearance or slavery. Such beliefs drew heavily, as Robert
Berkhofer has argued in The White Man's Indian, from a long European and
Race Relations in the American West
40 1
American tradition of confusing race, culture and nationality. Key ingredients of
racialism thus predated the doctrine itself and continued to exist outside of it.
Brian Dippie found, for example, that although the idea that Indians comprised a
race doomed to vanish providentially before whites was a major component of
racialism, it long predates any systematic racist theory. The historian must
therefore be careful in evaluating these ideas. Every racist statement cannot be
taken as evidence that the speaker subscribed to the whole system. l 3
Identical beliefs about race, for example, could lead to quite different
conclusions depending on whether the believer accepted or rejected the whole
racialist ideology. Take the idea of a vanishing race. Within a racialist context
with the supposition of a fixed and unalterable set of racial characteristics,
extermination became the providential conclusion of the "Indian problem."
Indians, so the logic went, were a dying race incapable of accommodating
themselves to changed conditions and American institutions. Christian
reformers, however, gave the idea of the vanishing race a quite different
outcome. They did not think of the elimination of Indians in the nearly genocidal
terms of racialists; instead they thought of it in cultural terms. Indians would
disappear as a distinct group, but individuals of Indian descent would survive.
These people would, however, be indistinguishable from whites in language,
culture, occupation, and religion. They were physically and mentally capable of
doing anything a white person could do.I4
The views of reformers are important because racialism and racism never
cleared the field of competing values. Christian values shaped the missionary
efforts which were recently examined in Floyd O'Neil and Clyde Milner's
Churchmen and the Indians (1985), and democratic egalitarianism also shaped
racial relations in the West. These earlier democratic, egalitarian, and Christian
values, were, of course, themselves imbued with racial thinking, but the taint of
racism does not mean that other values can be disregarded. Wilcomb Washburn,
for example, was ready in Red Man's LandlWhite Man's Laws (1971) to
acknowledge American hypocrisy and greed, but he also recognized that an
"application of legal and moral principles, weak though they may have been"
had preserved for American Indians a more favorable status than that of other
conquered native peoples. Reginald Horsman, perhaps, expressed this most
pithily in his Expansion and American Indian Policy (1967) when he wrote that
Americans "wanted land, but they also wanted a good conscience. " l 5
The assimilation of Indians, not their elimination, became the hallmark of
American Indian policy in the West. The thinking of policy makers was often
racial, but seldom racialist. Robert Trennert in his Alternative to Extinction
(1975) states flatly that "the formu!ation of all Indian policies in American
History, even the most just, has been based on certain attitudes that could best be
described as racial," but the very title of his work reveals that his policy makers,
as distinct from Horsman's racialist thinkers, did not consider biological
extinction inevitable. From Henry Fritz's R e Movement for Indian
402
American Quarterly
Assimilation, 1860-1890 (1983) to William T . Hagan's recent detailed study of
the Indian Rights Association (1985), assimilationists have been as prominent in
the literature as they once were in the reform organizations. F. Paul Prucha has
given the paternalist and assimilationist strain of Indian policy its strongest and
most forceful statement. Prucha, whose books form the single most impressive
achievement in not only the history of Western race relations but in Western
historiography in general over the last two decades, has placed Indian relations
within the larger political and cultural concerns of a paternalism centered in the
white Protestant middle class. The reformers who came from these ranks
imagined the integration of the Indians into American society in much the same
terms as they thought of the assimilation of immigrants. Race, in the sense of
innate and unchangeable biological differences, simply was not the critical issue
in the late nineteenth century for those who made Indian policy. However, the
reliance of these reformers on Christian and egalitarian values did not prevent
them from doing vast harm to Indian peoples. As Fred Hoxie has argued in an
important new work, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians,
1880-1920 (1984), race would become more important in the early twentieth
century when changing academic thinking on race modified reformers' hopes for
rapid assimilation. Even here, however, racism altered the timetable rather than
changing the goal. l 6
Although racialist theory enjoyed more influence in regard to the Chinese,
some central tenets had to be drastically modified before this theory could affect
policy. Alexander Saxton and Stuart Miller, although their analyses differ, both
agree that the "Chinese question" was racial as well as economic. In Saxton's
words, their exclusion was secured in "purely racist terms." Racialism,
however, proclaimed not only that the Chinese were inferior and unassimilable,
but that they would inevitably die out and vanish in the presence of superior
races. Yet, since the problem was that the Chinese population was increasing,
the whole logic of racialism had to be reversed. Late nineteenth-century
opponents of the Chinese now argued that the Chinese would inevitably
pauperize white labor and thus had to be driven out before they became
demographically dominant on the coast. This is a defensive, worried racialism
far different from the aggressive, optimistic ideology Horsman describes. l 7
Just as minority peoples have created their own racial consciousness in the
twentieth century, they have also become adept at using cultural formations of
the larger society to protect, at least partially, their own interest. The civil rights
movement is one example, but perhaps a more pertinent example is the use
Indians have made of American law. Beginning with Wilcomb Washburn's Red
Man S LandlWhite Man's Law, many twentieth-century studies of Indian-white
relations have taken a legalistic turn, for it is increasingly the peculiar legal
status of Indians that gives them such protection as they still possess. Predictably
(given the influence that John Collier and the New Deal had on the current legal
status of Indians in this country) biographical, legal and political studies of
Race Relatiorzs irz the Arnericar~ West
403
Collier, the Indian Reorganization Act, and the Roosevelt Administration
dominate twentieth-century studies. This work, highlighted by excellent
biographies of Collier by Lawrence Kelly (1983) and Kenneth Philp (1977),
Graham Taylor's synthesis of the Collier years in his R e New Deal and the
Irzdiarzs (1980), and studies of the Navajos by Kelly (1968) and Donald Parman
(1976), has been, on the whole, critical of Collier. While admitting Collier's
success in halting the alienation of lands and in stopping the worst excesses of
acculturation policy, these historians have criticized the Collier administration
for imposing white governmental structures, continuing in new forms Indian
subordination to whites, creating new sources of division within Indian
communities, and allowing, under new guises, the exploitation of Indian
resources with little benefit to Indian peoples. l s
A counterattack, however, is mounting based upon Collier's contributions to
Indian sovereignty. In two recent books, Vine Deloria and Clifford Lytle have
defended Collier. They emphasize that Collier's administration reinvigorated,
albeit incompletely, the unique relations of Indian communities, with their dual
citizenship and reserved sovereignty, to the larger society. There is at times a
certain romantic ahistoricism (actually reminiscent of Collier himself) in these
books as when the authors argue that Indian communities were all once
religiously, culturally, socially, and economically homogeneous. In their more
characteristically tough-minded, if narrow, legal approach, these authors, both
of whom are lawyers, contend that Collier and his allies cleverly used the
"vested powers" clause to make an argument for inherent sovereignty and thus
opened an avenue for restoring a limited tribal sovereignty in practice. Despite
its powerful presentation, this is a vulnerable position. Russel Barsh and James
Henderson in R e Road: Indian Tribes and Political Liberty (1980) acknowledge
the importance of the vested powers clause, but they have pointed out that the
same doctrine still allowed Congress to eliminate the residual sovereignty of
Indian nations without recourse. Barsh and Henderson's own journey through
the tangled, contradictory, and often confused legislation and court decisions
that comprise Indian law ends far more pessimistically than does that of Deloria
and Lytle. l 9
Although Indian sovereignty does bestow on Native Americans a status
different from other racial minorities in the West and makes white-Indian
relations a relationship between governments as well as individuals and social
groups, there are some parallels among other minorities. Because American law
prevented immigrant Asians from obtaining citizenship, the relationship
between Chinese, Japanese, and whites on the West Coast repeatedly involved
formal negotiations between the American government and those Asian
governments that sought to protect their nationals within the United States. Shihshan Henry Tsai, in his China and the Overseas Chinese in the United States,
1868-1911 (1983), has recently given an account of those relations for the
Chinese. Earlier, Roger Daniels' The Politics of Prejudice (1962) showed the
404
American Quarterly
reciprocal influence between California's discrimination against the Japanese
and international politics. The extreme example of the extent to which race
relations in the United States can be a function of international politics is, of
course, Japanese relocation, a topic which Daniels succinctly covers in his
Concentration Camps, USA (1972). 20
For different reasons, the condition of Mexican-Americans has also become a
matter of international as well as national concern. The proximity of Mexico to
the United States and the relative ease with which the border could be crossed
initially led many Mexican immigrants to view their stay in the United States as a
temporary one and to make no attempt to obtain American citizenship. More
recently, as changes in immigration laws have rendered much migration illegal,
many immigrants are not eligible for citizenship. The result has been the
residence of large numbers of Mexican nationals in the United States and
concern by the Mexican government with both the well-being of its people and
the agreements governing immigration. As a result, here, too, racial relations
within the Western states is to a degree a matter of negotiations between national
governments. Francisco E. Balderrama's In Defense of La Raza (1982) has
recently examined the involvement of the Mexican consulate in the affairs of
Mexican-American communities in Southern California during the Depression.
Balderrama built on a theme more narrowly developed by Abraham Hoffman in
his excellent study (1984) of the movement to deport Mexican nationals (and
their children who were citizens) during the Depression. This dual international
aspect of race relations in the West-both the relationship of the United States
with semi-sovereign Indian nations located largely in the West and the
international negotiations between the United States and other nations over
foreign nationals in the West-sets the West apart from other sections.21
When race relations are considered as international relations, historians have
assumed two sides to the relationship as a matter of course. When, however,
race relations have been considered solely within the United States, a unilateral
perspective has held sway. By the 1960s critics of the older literature on race
relations contended that studies within the West, regardless of the quality of their
scholarship, remained inadequate because they involved no "relation" at all. A
relationship, no matter how inequitably power exists within it, presumes at least
two people or groups of people, each of whom affects the other. Existing
histories, they argued, treated minorities as so much clay (if an admittedly often
hardened and intractable clay) in Anglo hands.22
Such criticisms have been met unevenly in the various minority histories of the
West. The history of Asian peoples in the United States has, with certain notable
exceptions, been more concerned with what was done to them rather than what
they did for themselves. Black history in the West is black-centered, but outside
of a few works like Nell Painter's Exodusters (1976), it lacks the sophistication
of Eastern studies in re-creating black communities and experience. Most black
history in the West tends toward what Lawrence de Graaf has called the
Race Relations in the American West
405
contribution school. It emphasizes black participation in realms where they had
previously seemed invisible. Rudolph Lapp's Blacks in Gold Rush California
(1977), Elmer Rusco's "Good Time Coming?": Black Nevadans in the
Nineteenth Century (1975), studies of the Buffalo Soldiers, black infantry, black
cowboys, and more general studies of the black West all fall within this genre. In
many of these books, blacks emerge as determined political actors in the West
who are aspiring to an equal political status that no other nonwhite group initially
sought. This claim, as Leigh Dana Johnson has demonstrated in "Equal Rights
and the Heathen 'Chinee,"' (1980) was sometimes quite opportunistic. Rather
than being couched in terms of universal political rights and liberties, it
depended on attacks on other minority groups.23
The new history which has demanded that minority history be more than a tale
of helpless victimization has made its strongest inroads among studies of Indians
and Chicanos. In 1971, in his call for a new Indian political history, Robert
Berkhofer tried to direct attention to the ability of Indians to influence the
context of contact with whites and to shape consequent relations. Yet it has
really only been within the last few years that the newer literature has flowered.
In tribal histories such as Peter Iverson's R e Navajos (1981) and Gary
Anderson's Kinsmen of Another Kind (1984), the authors concentrate on Indian
actions and the struggle of Indian peoples to adjust to a world they themselves
have helped change. 24
At its best, the new history can yield startling new perspectives on familiar
problems. Three recent books, each examining a different period and aspect of
Indian-white relations, can serve as examples. George Phillips' study of
Southern California, Chiefs and Challengers (1975), takes the kind of contact
study which has been done numerous times and transforms it by making the
Indians more than victims. In Phillips' book, Indians, their society, their
outlook, and their actions take on an historical significance and vitality that is
lost in many earlier works. Race relations becomes a relationship, and
understanding this relationship involves looking at Indians whose own internal
differences make them a diverse and complicated people. 25
As two other recent books demonstrate, Indian actions remain crucial even
after they are placed on reservation, a realm once treated as a place thoroughly
dominated by whites. Clyde Milner's With Good Intentions (1982), a study of
Quaker control of three reservations following the Civil War, demonstrates how
the orthodox Quaker ambitions for "eventual cultural conversion through
assimilation" became entangled in tribal and intertribal politics. Indians were
not powerful enough to stop whites from doing untold damage, but they could
and did act to frustrate policy aims. Finally, Loretta Fowler's recent Arapaho
Politics (1978) is perhaps the most impressive achievement of all. Fowler's
surprising and convincing analysis examines how the Arapaho have, in a
reservation context, created new sources of authority which not only sustain
community consensus, but also are, at times, "remarkably effective in
406
American Quarterly
influencing federal representatives." In this impressive book, Fowler explains
how the Arapahos have exploited whites' commitment to assimilation to hold
their own communities together. 26
As a group it is Chicano historians who have most productively used the
techniques of the new history to uncover a social world previously invisible to
historians. Even the initial surveys such as Matt S. Meir and Feliciano Rivera's
The Chicanos: A History of Mexican Americans (1972) and Rodolfo Acuiia's
Occupied America (1972), for all their concentration on spectacular AngloAmerican acts of oppression, also attempted to get at the response of the people
affected by these acts. They touched on Mexican-American lives largely through
studies of representative or exceptional people; the newer histories concentrate
on institutions and networks of oppression and assemble aggregate views of
Chicano communities. Mario Garcia's Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El
Paso, 1880-1920 (1981); Richard Griswold del Castillo's The Los Angeles
Barrio, 1850-1890: A Social History (1979) and his La Familia (1984), and
Albert Camarillo's East Los Angeles, History of a Barrio (1983) are all
examples of the hold that the new history has on Chicano history. 27
Of the dangers that lurk in the new history, the most prevalent is a tendency to
reify culture and to see it as a shield magically holding back the malice of
oppression. Arnoldo De Leon's The Tejano omm mu nit^, for example, verges on
making culture the almost mystical palliative of the poor. Under conditions of
oppression and poverty partially created by racism, Tejanos supposedly have
developed a unique culture which, paradoxically, racism cannot touch, and this
has enabled them to survive Anglo-American oppression and discrimination.
Although the significance of culture in understanding how groups survive is
undeniable, formulations such as De Leon's also contain a stiff dose of cultural
romanticism. 28
Griswold del Castillo's La Familia gives a more restrained and convincing
account of the influence of ethnic culture in a world that it does not fully control.
Griswold del Castillo tries to examine the persistent "conflict between the
beliefs and values held by Mexican-Americans regarding the proper and
desirable way to live within families and the economic pressures of the
American capitalist system." In some areas, such as the prevalence of femaleheaded households, particular Mexican-American cultural values seemingly
play little or no role in actual social outcomes. Female-headed households are a
phenomenon of the urban poor of all races and ethnic backgrounds in the cities
he examines. In many other areas, such as extended families, culture does seem
to play a role. Patriarchal values, he argues, do not disappear but they exist apart
from practice in daily life. Despite familial decay, there is significant persistence
and stability in cultural values, but neither practice nor values are homogeneous.
They are subject to regional, class, and generational differences. 29
As Griswold del Castillo in La Familia recognizes, cultural and social
relations exist among and overlap with economic relations which are interracial
Race Relations in the American West
407
as well as intraracial. Again it is Chicano historians with their focus on a dual or
segmented labor market who have most fully studied the social and economic
relations between races in the West within capitalism. In the much larger
literature on Indians, there have been comparatively few detailed studies of
either the influence of particular economic groups on Indian policy or of the
economic history of Indian groups, and even fewer attempts to understand racial
relations within western capitalism. Some of these studies, such as my own
Roots of Dependency (1983) and Joseph Jorgenson's R e Sun Dance Religion
(1972), have argued that Indian poverty has been the necessary corollary of
white development. Jorgenson has, however, in a series of publications gone
further. He has argued for a model that combines a metropolitan-satellite
analysis of the economy and a neocolonial interpretation of Indian reservations.
These factors, along with racism, explain the economic deprivation of Indian
peoples. 30
Jorgenson's general approach is more widely shared among Chicano than
among Indian historians. Mario Barrera, Alfredo Mirande and Evangelina
Enriquez, Rodolfo Acuiia, Tomas Almaguer, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz and others
have used the theoretical framework of internal colonialism to interpret Chicano
history. As a theory, unfortunately, internal colonialism is weak. Unlike
Jorgenson's neocolonialism, which is based on actual territorial entities (the
reservations), internal colonialism often exists only on the level of metaphor; it
is an assertion that the relationship of nonwhite racial groups to a dominant
group is comparable to the condition of a colony to a mother country. Since the
internal colony lacks territorial bounds and its members move within the larger
society, it must be defined by race and class, but calling race and class mixtures
"internal colonies" does not yield the analytical clarity promised. Indeed, it
often paradoxically yields a certain economic reductionism in which race itself
becomes significant only as a means of signifying the particular victims of
economically inspired oppression.31
The internal colonial model obfuscates more than it explains, but its initial
linkage of race and class in creating a dual labor system provides a promising
lead. Mario Barrera in his Race and Class in the Southwest, for example, has
attempted to understand the larger economic processes that affected, to different
degrees, not only Indians and Chicanos but also Chinese and blacks. He does so
by dividing the economy into four sectors. The first sector is precapitalist and
peripheral to the larger economy. Here, for example, among MexicanAmericans, traditional peon-patron relations remained in force or, among
Indians, the horticultural-grazing economies of the Pueblos and the Navajos still
functioned. The second is the "colonized" sector characterized by a dual wage
system (one for whites, the other for minorities), occupational stratifications
with certain jobs designated for minorities, and the use of minorities as a reserve
labor force who are the last hired and the first fired. This sector has dominated
the West for much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The third sector
408
American Quarterly
is composed of those people who, having been displaced from the traditional
economy, have not been absorbed into the larger economy. They have become
economically marginal. This has been the fate of many Indian peoples. The
fourth sector is conceivable rather than realized. It is an integrated sector where
minorities participate in the larger economy without racial distinction. 32
These often simultaneously existing sectors make it possible to categorize and
understand most Western economic development and the social relations that
have accompanied it. Precapitalist relations, which could, as in Mexican
California, be extremely exploitive and cruel, clearly dominated the West before
American conquest, and persisted, particularly among territorial minorities, for
a significant period of time. Even at their peak, these precapitalist relations were
penetrated by the fur trade, the trade in cattle hides in California, and the Santa
Fe trade in New Mexico, but the bulk of the economy did not depend on either
commerce or wage labor. These precapitalist economies disappeared in several
ways. Native elites were often quite eager to transfer resources into the
advancing capitalist economies. Leonard Pitt, Albert Camarillo, and Griswold
del Castillo have demonstrated how Californio elites in Southern California
initially benefited from American recognition of their land grants; Arnoldo De
Leon in 7ke Tejanos has pointed to initial ability of Tejanos to maintain their
land base in Texas, and Mario Barrera in Race and Class in the Southwest has
recognized similar and more permanent gains for part of the New Mexican elite.
Most resources, however, did not remain under elite control. Sometimes
precipitously, as in California, and sometimes gradually, as in New Mexico, the
property base of Mexican-Americans narrowed. Other resources such as
communal lands were not so readily committed to capitalist development, but
they, too, as Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz has chronicled in Roots of Resistance
(1980), could be stripped from their holders.33
Such changes forced many, but hardly all, minority people into a dual labor
system. For rural Mexican-Americans the loss of land-whether communal
holdings or ranchos-forced them from traditional pursuits either as farmers or
vaqueros on ranchos into the larger labor market. Many Californians, for
example, came to perform labor very similar to that they had once delegated to
Indians, but they did so within a wage labor system rather than through peonage.
Indians themselves fared unevenly. Those who managed to retain even a reduced
land base possessed a buffer against the emerging capitalist economy. Unlike
Mexican-Americans, they became not so much a "colonized" sector of the
economy as a marginal one. Such marginality, however, did not mean that
islands of older subsistence systems persisted intact amidst the larger
commercial economy. Since whites could commandeer necessary resources,
Indian peoples were, as Veronica Tiller demonstrates in 7ke Jicarilla Apache
Tribe (1983), often reduced to desperate poverty. They could neither maintain
old resources nor gain access to new ones.34
With its linkage of class and race, Barrera's so-called "colonized" sector,
Race Relations in the American West
409
despite its name, has proved very useful for understanding economic relations
between Chicanos, Asians, blacks and whites. Except in times of severe
economic dislocation, such as the Depression when whites displaced minorities
even in lower-paying jobs, certain categories of manual labor have been
reserved for minority workers in the West. Mario Garcia has given the fullest
account of how this dual labor system operated for Chicanos in his fine book,
Desert Itntnigrants (1981), Douglas Monroy has examined its creation in Los
Angeles (1983), and a recent article by Sucheng Chan cites evidence that
suggests a similar system among the Chinese (1984). The races of the workers
who filled these jobs varies; in California Indians succumbed to disease and
violence, the Chinese took over the menial work, and when the Chinese were
excluded, Chicanos assumed the jobs. No matter which nonwhite group
occupied the lowest tier, the structure of the work force remained basically the
same. Black history provides similar examples of stratification although they are
usually not analyzed in these terms. For minority peoples, either the refusal to
accept or the inability to obtain employment within this system meant relegation
to the periphery. When the economy turned downward, a precariously placed
group could undergo an experience like the repatriation described by Abraham
Hoffman in his Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression. 35
Various groups, of course, did try to penetrate the integrated sector, but for
most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries racism kept them out. Nell
Painter's superb book 7ke Exodusters examines ultimately unsuccessful black
attempts to set up independent farming communities in the West. White
businessmen as well as workers used violence and the power of the state to
frustrate Chinese ambitions. John Model1 makes it clear that the one group that
is most often cited as achieving economic success within this system-the
Japanese-Americans-actually did so only by accepting caste status and by
restricting their economic entrepreneurship to very narrow niches. Before
World War I1 they largely confined themselves to labor intensive agriculture and
fishing, gleaning opportunities that whites had largely overlooked. AngloAmericans greeted their success with political and economic retaliation, but this
did not prove serious until World War I1 because the Japanese were confined to a
few areas, were not numerous, and were willing to accept subordinate status.36
Chicano historians have actively investigated the significance of race in this
dual labor system. They have compared Chicano immigrant experience and
those of Eastern and Southern Europeans, and have found significant
differences. Eastern and Southern Europeans, although branded as racially
inferior in the early twentieth century, lost the burden of racial inferiority
relatively quickly, while for Chicanos its grew more onerous. Mario Garcia,
who tends to see Chicanos more as an ethnic immigrant group than a racial
minority, explores the parallels most fully. For example, he writes that Chicanos
"shared a common tie with the larger wave of Eastern and Southern European
immigrants" as well as with blacks. Chicanos, too, were people uprooted by
410
American Quarterly
economic dislocation in their homelands who came to the United States, but once
in the United States racial and cultural discrimination influenced their fate.
White immigrants eventually moved into the middle class far more rapidly than
minority racial groups. Mexican-American economic subordination was not
maintained without a struggle, and several Chicano historians have examined
attempts at labor organization and resistance. 37
Freed of the burden imposed by the internal colonial model, the linkage of
class and race in the dual labor system of the West becomes central to
understanding Western development and distinctiveness. Whether identified in
terms of Barrera's sectors, or what John Model1 has called caste, or what
Griswold del Castillo has in La Familia identified as Milton Gordon's category,
"eth-class," formed by the "intersection of the vertical stratification of
ethnicity and the horizontal stratification of social class," an analysis of the
ways race and class overlap is central to understanding Western race relations.
The dual labor system reveals how minorities are at once connected with the
larger economic system in the West and segregated socially from the
surrounding society. 38
Yet race and class, while central to an analysis of Western society, can
obscure other real but subtle connections between the peoples of the West.
Outside of the economy, scholars have tended to ignore the ways in which
seemingly separate cultural and social worlds intersect. They write as if cultural
contact in the West is analogous to magnetic attraction and repulsion. One group
of scholars proclaims, for example, that Indians and whites could never achieve
understanding. Another, rearranging these cultural magnets, proclaims that
cultures must drift together and the acculturation of minorities is inevitable.
When put alongside recent Canadian studies of the rise of the Metis these seem
rather unsophisticated ways to understand cultural conflict. Sylvia Van Kirk's
Many Tender Ties (1983), Jennifer Brown's Strangers in the Blood (1980), and
the articles in Jacquline Peterson and Jennifer Brown's The New Peoples
(1985) probe beneath the cliches of contact and present a sensitive account of
women as brokers between different cultures. Yet, the American West lacks a
group of mixed Indian-white ancestry as clearly defined as the Canadian Metis,
and so parallel American studies have thus far been confined largely to the Great
Lakes. Studies on women as cultural mediators in the West have often been quite
thought-provoking, but they can also go too far in their claims. Glenda Riley in
Women and Indians on the Frontier (1984), for example, argues that white
women slipped the boundaries of racism and made a more sympathetic contact
with Indians than did white men, but her evidence is not fully c ~ n v i n c i n g . ~ ~
There have recently been two surprising exceptions to the dearth of studies on
how everyday contact between people of difference races and cultures proceeds.
James Ronda's recent Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (1984) and Mauricio
Mazon's The Zoot-Suit Riots (1984) both manage to mine familiar materials in
new ways. They get beneath the usual conventions of race relations and attempt
to explain the complexity of actual contact between different peoples. Mazon's
Race Relations in the American West
411
book in particular, with its attempt to examine symbolic behavior to discover the
"underlying assumptions and distortions in behavior," will probably inspire
controversy and skepticism, but it is an intriguing explanation of the odd riots in
Los Angeles during World War 11. It is only through such studies of daily
contacts and the symbolic understanding (which is often acted out) that one
racial group has of another that the consequences of the structures of racial
relations will be fully u n d e r ~ t o o d . ~ ~
In the post-Turnerian West, then, the topic of race relations has moved from
the periphery to the center. The newer literature has revealed a system of racial
relations in which minority racial groups have been created, subordinated,
exploited, demeaned, and segregated in a manner which, despite similarities in
some particulars, is significantly different from racial relations east of the
Mississippi. Minorities have resisted and endured, if not prospered, in ways that
have deeply influenced the history of the West. They have responded to racism
by participating in the cultural creation of races, altering their own cultures, and
making regional racial relations also a matter of international relations. Western
economic development depended on their labor. The barrios, Chinatowns,
Indian reservations, and black ghettos which seemed for so long peripheral to
whatever significance the West has had in American history will, in the long
run, emerge as crucial to any Western claim of historical distinctiveness, and,
more significantly, to any real understanding of Western society and history.
NOTES
'Here 1 have in mind the work of Eugene Genovese, John Blassingame, Lawrence Levine, and
Leon Litwack, etc.
2Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Alfred
A . Knopf, 1968), 104-05. Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier
Defense, 2nd ed. (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1965). For another view of the Texas Rangers and
minorities see Julian Samora, Joe Bernal, and Ambert Pexa, Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment oj
the Texas Rangers (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1979).
'William R . Swagerty, ed., Scholars and the Indian Experience: Critical Reviews of Recent
Writing in the Social Sciences (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984); Michael P . Malone,
Historians and the American West (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983). Lawrence B. de Graaf,
"Recognition, Racism, and Reflections on the Writing of Western Black History," Pacific
Historical Review, 44 (1975), 22-51. Roger Daniels, "American Historians and East Asian
Immigrants," ibid., 4 3 (1974), 449-72. Ricardo Romo, "The Unfinished Story: Chicanos in the
West, " Western Historical Quarterly, 13 (1982), 299-302.
4Howard Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846-1912: A Territorial History (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1966); Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish Speaking
Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970). Albert Camarilla, Chicanos in
a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern
California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 11. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, The
Roots of Resistance: Land Tenure in New Mexico, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center,
Publications no. 10 (Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1980), 50, 81. Arnoldo De Lebn, The Tejano
Communit), 1836-1900 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1982), 2; Jack D . Forbes,
"Hispanio-Mexican Pioneers of the San Francisco Bay Region: An Analysis of Racial Origins,"
Azrlbn, 14 (1983), 175-89. Fernando Peiialosa, "Toward an Operational Definition of Mexican
Americans," ibid., 1 (1970), 1-12.
412
American Quarterly
5Rudolfo de la Garza, Z. Anthony Kruszewkis, and Tomas A. Arciniega, Chicanos and Native
Americans, The Territorial Minorities (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973). On
immigration from Mexico see: Rodolfo Acufia, Occupied America (San Francisco: Canfield Press,
1972), 127. Mario T. Garcia, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920 (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981); Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera, The Chicanos: A History of
Mexican Americans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 113-14, 135. Camarillo, Chicanos in a
Changing Socieq, 199-200; Lawrence A. Cardosa, Mexican Emigration to the United States,
1897-1931 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1980). Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow:
Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900-1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1976).
6Richard N. Ellis, General Pope and U.S. Indian Policy (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico
Press, 1970); idem, "The Humanitarian Generals," Western Historical Quarterly, 3 (1972),
169-78. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976). Stephen Dow Beckham, Requiem For a People: The
Rogue Indians and the Frontiersmen (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1971); Robert M. Utley,
The Last Days ofthe Sioux Nation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963); idem, Frontiersmen in
Blue (New York: Macmillan, 1967); idem, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the
Indian (New York: Macmillan, 1973); idem, The Indian Frontier of the Atrrericarl West, 1846-1890
(Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1984). Lynwood Carranco and Estle Beard, Genocide
and Vendetta: The Round Valley Wars in Northern California (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press,
1981); Gerald Thompson, The Army and the Navajo: The Bosque Redondo Reservation Experiment,
1863-68 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1976). Also see Thomas W. Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue
Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-1890 (Lincoln: Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 1982).
'Richard Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975); Robert J. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the
Southwest: The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981); Roger
McGrath, Gunjighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1984). Robert Larson, "The White Caps of New Mexico: A Study of Ethnic
Militancy in the Southwest," Pacijic Historical Review, 44 (1975), 171-86; For social bandits,
Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1890: A Social History (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1979), 109-15. Larry R. Gerlach, Blazing Crosses in Zion: The Ku Klux
Klan in Utah (Logan: Utah State Univ. Press, 1982). Robert A . Goldberg, Hooded Empire: The Ku
Klux Klan in Colorado (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1981).
8Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame:
Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 1; John R. Chavez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the
Southwest (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1984), 1-5, 141. Griswold del Castillo, The
L o s Angeles Barrio, 103-04, 117, 134; Acufia, Occupied America, 36; Camarillo, Chicanos in a
Changing Society. For Indian past also see Guillermo Lux and Maurilio E. Vigil, "Return to Aztlan:
The Chicano Rediscovers his Indian Past," in Arnulfo P. Trejo, ed., The Chicanos: As We See
Ourselves (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1979), 1- 17.
YPeterIverson, Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians (Albuquerque:
Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1982); Raymond Wilson, Ohiyesa: Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux
(Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983).
'OArnoldo De Leon, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo-American Attitudes Toward Mexicans in
Texas, 1820-1900 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1983). James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The
Changing Image (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 69-108, for shift from useless to useful
Indians.
"Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins ofAmerican Racial Anglo-Saxonism
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981); Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of
Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: Univ, of Minnesota Press, 1980); Robert
Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images ofthe American Irtdianfiom Columbus to the Present
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1978); Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U. S.
Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1982); Richard Slotkin, The Fatal
Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York:
Atheneum, 1985); Stuart Creighton Mills, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the
Chinese, 1785-1882 (Berkeley: IJniv. of California Press, 1969); Alexander Saxton. The
Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: Univ. of
Race Relations in the American West
413
California Press, 1971); Mario Barrero, Race and Class in the Southwest; and Roger Daniels and
Harry Kitano, American Racism: Exploration of the Nature of Prejudice (Englewood Cliffs, N. J . :
Prentice-Hall, 1970). Also Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro
Prejudices and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1967).
IZDrinnon,Facing West, xvii, 46-53; Horsrnan, Race and Manifest Destiny, 6; Barrera, Race and
Class in the Southwest, 204-12, 300.
I 'Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian, 5 1-60; Dippie, Vanishing American.
I4See, for example, Francis Paul Pmcha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers
and the Indian, 1865-1900 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1975-6), 52, 139, 274, or his
recent, monumental, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984), 62 1-23.
I5Floyd A. O'Neil and Clyde A. Milner, Churchmen and the Western Indians, 1820-1920
(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1985). Wilcomb Washburn, Red Man's Land/White Man's
Laws: A Study of the Past and Present Status of the American Indian (Nea York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1971), 241; Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812 (East
Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1967), 2.
I6Robert Trennert, Alternative to Extinction: Federal Indian Policy and the Beginnings of the
Reservation System, 1846-51 (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1975); Henry Fritz, The Movement
for Indian Assitnilation, 1860-90 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Thomas Hagan,
The Indian Rights Association (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1985). The other strain of policy
literature has been more purely administrative studies such as Edmund J. Danziger, Indians and
Bureaucrats: Administering the Reservation Policy during the Civil War (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois
Press, 1974); also, Robert M. Kvasnicka and Herman J . Viola, eds., The Commissioners of Indian
Affairs, 1824-1877 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979); Paul Stuart, The Indian Ofice:
Growth and Development of an American Institution, 1865-1900 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1979). Pertinent works by Prucha are not only his American Indian Policy, and The Great Father,
but also his lie Churches and the Indian Schools, 1888-1912 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press,
1979); Fred Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Lincoln:
Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984), 14-15, 29, 33, 94-144, 193-99, 237, 241-42. There are also
numerous studies of the actual attempts to acculturate Indians, see William T . Hagan, Indian Police
and Judges: Experiments in Acculturation and Control (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1980);
Margaret Connell Szasz, Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination Since
1928 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1974). See also Robert H. Keller, Jr., American
Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 1869-82 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983);
Robert W. Mardock, 7'he Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press,
1971).
"Alexander Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 2 , 103, 261; Miller, Unwelcome Immigrant, 154. For
Anglo-Saxon replacement of other races, Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 289, 303.
Iswashburn, Red Man's LandlWhite Man's Law. Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier's Crusade for
Indian Reform, 1920.1954 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1977). Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault
on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policj Reform (Albuquerque: Univ. of New
Mexico Press, 1983) and idem, "The Indian Reorganization Act: The Dream and the Reality,"
Pacijic Historical Review, 44 (August 1975), 291-312. Graham D . Taylor, The New Deal and
American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934-45 (Lincoln:
Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1980). For particular studies, Donald L. Parman, The ~Vavajosand the
New Deal (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976); Lawrence C . Kelly, The Navajo Indians and
Federal Indian Policy, 1900-1935 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1968); Richard White, The
Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees,
and Navajos (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983). For other aspects of twentieth-century
policy and contemporary Indians, see: Larry W . Burt, Tribalism in Crisis: Federal Indian Policj
1953-61 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1982); Peter Iverson, ed., The Plains Indians
of the Twentieth C e n t u ~(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1985); Alvin M . Josephy, Now Thai
the Buffalo's Gone: A Studj of Today's American Indians (New York: Knopf, 1982); Kenneth R.
Philp, "Stride Toward Freedom: The Relocation of Indians to Cities, 1952-60," Western Historical
Quarterly, 16 (1985), 175-90. Peter Iverson, "Building Toward Self-Determination: Plains and
Southwestern Indians in the 1940s and 1950s," ibid., 16 (1985), 163-73.
I9Vine Deloria and Clifford M. Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (Austin: Univ. of
Texas Press, 1983), 13-15. Vine Deloria, Jr. and Clifford Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and
Race Relations in the American West
415
28DeLeon, The Tejano Cornmunit), xii-xiii, xiv, xviii, 156ff. De Leon, in reality, actually denies
culture by creating a set of aspirations based on a universal and simple human nature; xii-xiii, 79,
204.
29Griswold del Castillo, La Familia, xiii; 33, 47, 29, 96, 111, 127-29. Also, Barbara Laslett,
"Household Structure on the American Frontier: Los Angeles, California in 1850," American
Journal of Sociology, 81 (1975), 109-28.
3oSomemajor exceptions are Robert Trennert, Indian Traders on the Middle Border: The House of
Ewit~g,1 827-54 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1981); David J. Wishart, The Fur Trade ofrhe
American West, 1807-1840, A Geographical Synthesis (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979);
Sam Stanley, ed., American Indian Econonlic Development (The Hague: Moutch, 1978); Michael
Lawson, Dammed Indians: The Pick Sloat~Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944-80 (Norman:
Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1982); Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, ed., "Economic Development in
American Indian Reservations," Native American Studies, University of New Mexico Development
Series, no. 1 (Albuquerque: Native American Studies, 1979). H. Craig Miner, The Corporation and
the Indian: Tribal Sovereignty and Industrial Civilization in Indian Territory, 1864-1907(Columbus:
Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1976); White, Roots of Dependenc)~.Joseph Jogenson, The Sun
Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972). Idem, "A
Century of Political Economic Effects on American Indian Society, 1880-1980," Journal of Ethnic
Studies, 6 (1978), 1-82.
31Barrera,Race and Class; Alfredo Mirand6 and Evangelina Enriquez, Ln Chicana, Rodolfo
Acuria, Occupied America; Tomas Almaquer. "Towards the Study of Chicano Colonialism,"
Azrlat~.2 (1971); also "Historical Notes on Chicano Oppression: The Dialectics of Racial and Class
Domination in North America," ibid., 5 (1974), 27-54. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Roots ofResistance.
i2Barrera, Race and Class, 34-57.
iiIn Southern California the combined pressures of drought, the decline of the cattle market, taxes,
and the expenses of litigation to beat off Anglo challenges to their claims stripped most of the
rancheros of land. Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 120ff; Camarillo, Chicanos it1 a Changing
Society, 27, 79ff, 114, 126, 129; Griswold del Castillo, The Las Angeles Barrio, 42-45; De Lebn,
The Tejanos, 51-52, 62, 77-79, and Barrera, Race and Class, 28-30; also Griswold del Castillo, Ln
Familia, 10. Ortiz, Roots of Resistance, 91-126. For decline of the traditional system: William B.
Taylor and Elliott West, "Patron Leadership at the Crossroads: Southern Colorado in the Late
Nineteenth Century," in Norris Hundley, ed., Tile Chicano (Santa Barbara: Clio Books, 1975). See
also William deBuys' regional survey, Enchantrnenr and Exploitatiot~:The Life and Hard Times o f a
New Mexico Mountain Ranger (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1985).
i4For Indians: Rawls, Indians of California. 69-80. White, Roots of Dependency, 212-314;
Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, The Jicarella Apachc Tribe: A Histon, 1846-1970 (Lincoln: Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 1983), 67-68, 71, 97-98. Douglas Monroy, "Like Swallows at the Old Mission:
Mexicans and the Racial Politics of Growth in Los Angeles in the Interwar Period," Wester71
Historical Quarterl~,14 (1983), 443-45.
3Yiriswold del Castillo, Ln Familia, 22-24. Meir and Rivera, The Chicanos, 155; Garcia, Desert
Itnmigranrs, 5, 37-38, 65,-83, 85-92; Monroy, "Like Swallows at the Old Mission," 435-58.
Sucheng Chan, "Chinese Livelihood in Rural California: The Impact of Economic Change,"
Paci'c Historical Review, 53 (1984), 292; Also Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 62; W . Thomas
White, "Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Railroad Work Force: The Case of the Far Northwest,
1883-1918," Western Historical Quarterly, 16 (July 1985), 266, 268, 274; Camarillo, Chicanos it1 a
Changing Society, 79-99; Rawls, Indians of California, 81-133; Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush
California; Rusco, "Good Times Coming?"; Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great
Depression. For Mexican immigrant workers see, George C . Kiser and Martha Woody Kiser, eds.,
Mexican Workers in the United Smres, Historical and Political perspectives (Albuquerque: Univ. of
New Mexico Press, 1979), and Juan Ramon Garcia, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of
Mexican Undocunlenred Workers in 1954 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980).
36Painter,Exodusters; Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 104-08, 212. John Modell, The Economics
and Politics ofRacial Accommodation: The Japatlese of Las Angeles, 1900-1942 (Urbana: Univ. of
Illinois Press, 1977), 32,95,98-99, 103-04, 120-21, 131.
37Griswold del Castillo, Ln Familia, 125; Barrera, Race and Class, 188-89; Arnoldo De Leon,
"Lost Dreams and Found Fortunes: Mexicans and Anglo Immigrants in South Texas, 1850-1900,''
Western Historical Quarterlj, 14 (1983), 291-310. Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society,
416
American Quarterly
53-54, 180-81, 219; Garcia, Desert Immigrants, 1, 233. For resistance, Douglas Monroy,
"Anarquisno Y Comunismo: Mexican Radicalism and the Communist Party in Los Angeles during
the 1930s," Labor History, 24 (1983), 34-59. Tomas Almaquar, "Racial Domination and Class
Conflict in Capitalist Agriculture: The Oxnard Sugar Beet Workers Strike of 1903," ibid., 25
(1984), 325-50.
3sGriswold del Castillo, La Farnilia, 125. Camarilla, Chicanos in a Changing Society, 139, 168;
Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation. Also, Gilbert Gonzales,
"Segregation of Mexican Children." For the economic penetration and social isolation on
reservations, see Martha C. Knack and Omer C. Stewart, As Long as the River Shall Run: At1
Erhnohistoty of Pyramid Lake h d i a n Resen~ariotl (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984);
Donald J. Berthrong, Tile Cheyetlge and Arapaho Ordeal: Reservariotl and Agency Life it1 the Indian
Terriroy, 1875-1907 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1976): William T . Hagan, United StatesComanche Relations: The Reservation Years (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976).
39Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Norman: Univ.
of Oklahoma Press, 1983). Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in the Blood: Fur Trade Company
Fanlilies in Indian C o u n t y (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 1980). For example of
assertion of mutual incomprehension: Utley, Indian Frontier, xix, which then makes Utley's
subsequent theme of acculturation rather confusing. For American Mktis: Jacqueline Peterson,
"Ethnogenesis: The Settlement and Growth of a 'New People' in the Great Lakes Region,
1702-1815," Anlerican Indian Culture and Research Jourt~al,6 (1982), and Jacqueline Peterson and
Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds., The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Mktis in North America
(Manitoba: Univ. of Manitoba Press, 1985). Glenda Riley, Women and It~dianson the Frontier
(Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1984). For narrower, but more convincing studies see:
Helen M. Bannon, "Newcomers to Navajoland: Transculturation in the Memoirs of Anglo Women,
1900-1945," New Me-xico Historical Review, 59 (April 1984), 165-86 and Jane Dysart, "Mexican
Women in San Antonio, 1830-1860: The Assimilation Process," Western Historical Quarterly, 7
(1976), 365-77; Lawrence B. de Graaf, "Race, Sex and Region: Black Women in the American
West, 1850-1920," Pacijc Historical Review, 49 (1980), 285-313; Gae Whitley Canfield, Sarah
Wintlemucca of the Northern Paiutes (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1983). Julia Blackwelder,
Women of the Depression: Caste and Culture it1 Sun Antonio, 1929-1939 (College Station: Texas
A & M Press, 1984).
doJames Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984).
Mauricio Mazon, 7 k e Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Sj~mbolicAnnihilation (Austin: Univ. of
Texas Press, 1984), xii. See also Colin Calloway, "Neither White Nor Red: White Renegades on the
American Indian Frontier," Western Historical Quarterly, 17 (1986), 43-86.