Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection

Abstract

Edward Dallam Melillo's Strangers on Familiar Soil is a pathbreaking environmental history of the long-standing connections between Chile and California. Melillo applies Alfred W. Crosby's famous concept of Colombian exchange (from the 1972 book of the same name) to the Pacific coasts of the United States and South America to examine how exchanges of “peoples, plants, commodities, and ideas” connected the two regions (p. 2). Melillo seeks to reorient our understanding of the history of the western United States by first examining the profound influence of Latin America on the settlement and development of California, and, second, by writing the history of California as part of the Pacific world, an alternative to histories of the United States that begin in the East and push westward. This perspective produces a number of innovative insights into the histories of both Chile and California. Melillo analyzes the key role played by exports of Chilean wheat in supplying markets opened by the mid-nineteenth century California gold rush. While this history has been well studied by historians of Chile, Melillo also demonstrates that California's agriculture received an important boost from cultivating varietals of Chilean wheat and alfalfa, which provided the fodder for the state's expanding livestock industry and fertilized depleted soil. Equally important were imports of Chilean nitrates, which fertilized California's citrus groves. Melillo also traces the history of thousands of Chilean miners, both wealthy investors and landless laborers (peones), who migrated to California during the gold rush, examining the Chilean neighborhood of Chilecito in San Francisco and the introduction of Chilean mining techniques and technologies in California. This section describes the pogroms directed at Chileans by nativist Anglo gangs and mobs; these included a hitherto unknown and disturbingly public lynching campaign against hundreds of Chileans and Mexicans.