Thrown Among Strangers : The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California

Every California schoolchild's first interaction with history begins with the missions and Indians. It is the pastoralist image, of course, and it is a lasting one. Children in elementary school hear how Father Serra and the priests brought civilization to the groveling, lizard- and acorn-eating Indians of such communities as Yang-na, now Los Angeles. So edified by history, many of those children drag their parents to as many missions as they can. Then there is the other side of the missions, one that a mural decorating a savings and loan office in the San Fernando Valley first showed to me as a child. On it a kindly priest holds a large cross over a kneeling Indian. For some reason, though, the padre apparently aims not to bless the Indian but rather to bludgeon him with the emblem of Christianity. This portrait, too, clings to the memory, capturing the critical view of the missionization of California's indigenous inhabitants. I carried the two childhood images with me both when I went to libraries as I researched the missions and when I revisited several missions thirty years after those family trips. In this work I proceed neither to dubunk nor to reconcile these contrary notions of the missions and Indians but to present a new and, I hope, deeper understanding of the complex interaction of the two antithetical cultures.

Strangers have come, one after another, to the place that is now California. For hundreds of years the Indians of the coast maintained their lifeways upon the land. Beginning in 1769, and intrepid band of Liberians under the leadership of Father Junipero Serra established the fabled missions of new Spain's far northern frontier. When their worldviews clashed, the newcomers' feudal assumptions about humans' relations to reduction compelled the seminomadic Indians to transform their attitudes and customary routines.

Library Journal

Drawing on an array of primary sources, Monroy (history, Colorado Coll.) shows that Mexican culture in southern California today derives from the interaction of Indians with Europeans and Americans. He uses his basic theme--the experience of people being ``thrown among strangers,'' usually because of demands for labor--to illustrate how cultural and historical change occurs. This interesting history of Spanish and Mexican California covers such salient topics as work, sexuality, and body discipline; patriarchical hierarchies in the missions and ranchos; the emergence of the market economy; and the nature and ramifications of racial violence. Recommended for libraries with collections in ethnic history in general and Coll., Rock Hill, S.C.

Frontmatter List of Illustrations (page ix) Introduction (page xiii) Part One: Burials I. If Its Inhabitants Are Addicted to Independence: Spain and the Indians of Alta California (page 3) 2. Brutal Appetites: The Social Relations of the California Missions (page 51) Part Two: Of Cows, Dons, Indians, Cholos, and Peddlers 3. To Join as Neighbors: Pueblo Life in Los Angeles (page 99) 4. Heaven, or Some Other Place: A Conquered Los Angeles (page 163) 5. At Considerable Less Wages: Mexicans and the Labor Crisis of Southern California (page 233) Epilogue People and History: An End and a New Beginning (page 281) Notes (page 287) Bibliography (page 321) Index (page 335) 'Thrown Among Strangers represents a notable attempt to reassess the forces that shaped California's society and culture during the region's formative years of growth and development spanning the period from initial Spanish colonization through the nineteenth century.' -Gloria E. Miranda, Pacific Historical Review The women of Isanthcag-na ran to the brush, and the men hastened to put out their fires in their round huts, when the people first sighted the strangers.