Steven W. Hackel , editor. Alta California: Peoples in Motion, Identities in Formation, 1769–1850 . (Western Histories, number 2.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, in association with the Huntington Library, for the Huntington‐USC Institute on California and the West. 2010. Pp. vii, 357. $55.00.

Abstract

The history of Spanish and Mexican California has been peripheral to the historiography of the Americas. In this collection, Albert L. Hurtado argues that part of the problem lies in the politicization of the past. Powerful interests in California emphasized the gold rush as the starting point of California history and privileged the state's Anglo heritage. Even Herbert E. Bolton, a progenitor of Spanish borderlands history, contributed to this “fantasy heritage.” Historical source material has also proved problematic. Mission sources constitute the bulk of data on the Spanish and Mexican periods, yet the records of the missions that stretched from San Diego to San Francisco remained decentralized until 2006 when the Early California Population Project (ECPP) integrated them into a comprehensive database. Alta California is divided into four parts, the first of which explores the Franciscan legacy, the second and third, Indian and soldier and settler identities respectively, and the fourth, historiography. Editor Steven W. Hackel's introduction frames the book in terms of a growing interest among Alta California and borderlands scholars on “identity.” An Atlanticist approach toward identity formation, historians' acknowledgment of the situational, fluid, and multiple natures of identities, and the scholarship on race and caste in colonial Latin America provide the collection's conceptual backbone.