Harbor Lines: Connecting the Histories of Borderlands and Pacific Imperialism in the Making of the Port of Los Angeles, 1858–1908

Abstract

The nationalization of space following the U.S. conquest of California became troubled and unconsolidated in its encounter with complex natural land and waterscapes like the San Pedro estuary, located on the Los Angeles coast. Here a new borderlands emerged beginning in the 1850s, when conficting land laws and ambiguous surveys entrenched both Mexican and U.S. forms of property, and persisted until the Supreme Court settled litigation in 1897. These land disputes entwined the legacies of continental expansion with the imperatives of imperial expansion into the Pacific world, embedded a local history within national and global scales, and shaped the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' transformation of the estuary into the Port of Los Angeles, the modern West's gateway to the world.