Alta California Research Articles

“Men who lived like women” in 18th century Alta California:<i> Coyas</i> / <i>Joyas</i>, <i>Cuút </i>or <i>Uluqi</i>, sodomites, hermaphrodites or amaricados?

Objective/context: This article analyzes testimonies of religious and military men, produced between 1770 and 1812, which give an account of Chumash, Juaneño and Yuma indigenous men of Alta California who were in the habit of dressing as women and joining them in the tasks corresponding to the feminine roles in these societies. The documents analyzed include two military diaries on the exploration expeditions and three chronicles of Franciscans who, starting in 1769, were in charge of founding missions in this area. Methodology: Through a gender perspective analysis, we examine the terms and categories used in the sources to describe and give meaning to the sexual roles and practices of the Coyas/Joyas, Cuút or Uluqi. Originality: The few works dedicated to the analysis of California Indians “in the habit of women” have focused on the missionary discourse or on the denunciation of the supposed “extermination” of dissident sexual practices. This paper argues that while the testimonies unanimously condemned these practices, they differed in the categories used to name and classify them and, thus, in the meaning attributed to them, which resulted in different legal and theological implications. Conclusions: The existence of men who dressed as women persisted, according to the sources analyzed, until the beginning of the 19th century in the region from the Gila and Colorado rivers to the Santa Barbara canal in northwestern New Spain. The categories of sodomy, amaricados or hermaphrodites, and male-female were understood under the single-sex model. And, although by the end of the eighteenth century, the principles of modern legal medicine were beginning to change, the meaning given to the Coyas/Joyas was linked to the justification of the advances or difficulties of colonization rather than to the scientific debates of the time.

A genealogical inquiry into raciolinguistic ideology and language policy among Spanish Franciscan missionaries in Alta California

A genealogical inquiry into raciolinguistic ideology and language policy among Spanish Franciscan missionaries in Alta California

Recalling the Pomp and Populism of the 1822 Commission to the Californias

Abstract Upon Mexico’s independence, its Regency dispatched commissioner Agustín Fernández de San Vicente to ensure the allegiance of officials and residents of remote Alta California. His strategies for this pivotal commission are analyzed for the first time here. Fernández, inspired by the grand style of the new emperor, Agustín Iturbide, designed a lavish presentation meant for mass appeal. Literature on the commission has been dominated to date by the biased and belated eyewitness testimony of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Juan Bautista Alvarado, who depicted Fernández as a sleazy demagogue. This article critically examines their interventions and the conditions under which these were produced. Their stories about the commissioner drinking and gambling were probably exaggerated. Locals never found out that Fernández was lying about being a canon.

Russia, Mexico and the USA in the struggle for California in the 1820-1840s

The authors analyze the process of interaction between Russia, Mexico and the United States in the context of the struggle for Alta California. The essence of this process was the diplomatic, military-political and economic activity of these powers aimed at occupying lands in California and legalizing them by some of them. The purpose of the study is to establish the reasons for the unsuccessful actions of Spain and Russia in Alta California which led to the subordination of this territory to the United States of America. The source base is the office, diplomatic and memoir sources published in various collections and periodicals. The study shows the struggle between Russia, Mexico and the United States for the possession of lands in Alta California. It was established that Russia acted through the Russian-American company which controlled the Russian colonies in America. At the same time, the Russian government adhered to the principle of legitimism which restrained the company’s initiatives to expand its influence. The authors conclude that the United States was more active in the region and used its economic and trade superiority to increase its influence. Russia was unable to compete with the United States and missed a good opportunity to conclude an agreement with Mexico to confront the Americans and legalize its possessions in California, Fort Ross and other territories.

Exploring a Scientific Research Station from a Bygone Era: Historical Archaeology at Orr’s Camp, Santa Rosa Island (Wimaɬ), Alta California

ABSTRACT The northwest coast of Wimaɬ (Santa Rosa Island) has long been a focus of archaeological research, including former Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History archaeologist, geologist, and paleontologist Phil Orr's work from the 1940s–1960s. Orr pioneered the use of radiocarbon dating on the California Channel Islands, built extensive archaeological collections, and constructed a detailed cultural sequence. Here, we discuss the history and status of Orr's island research camp, archaeological site CA-SRI-766H, describing monitoring and erosion of the site during the past several decades. Two radiocarbon dates obtained from adjacent CA-SRI-7 (Orr's Camp shell midden) document Island Chumash occupation of the site between ∼2820–1160 cal BP, helping place the area into broader regional context. Revisiting the historical documents and physical remains of past research can help understand the evolution of archaeological practice, evaluate outdated procedures of conducting research without tribal consultation and consent, and promote a more inclusive future of the discipline.

Indigenous Foodways as Persistence in the Alta California Mission System

AbstractThis article investigates Indigenous persistence within Mission Santa Clara de Asís in central California through the analysis of animal food remains. The Spanish colonial mission system within Alta California had a profound social and ecological impact on Indigenous peoples, altering traditional subsistence strategies and foodway patterns. Past research has highlighted the continued use of precolonial foods within the Alta California mission system alongside the daily consumption of colonial-style beef stews. This article expands on that literature to consider how Indigenous and colonial residents differentially acquired ingredients and prepared daily meals within the Alta California colonial mission system. This assessment demonstrates a sharp divergence between Indigenous and colonists’ daily diet, manifested in the continued use of wild food resources by Indigenous people as well as the maintenance of precolonial culinary practices in the preparation of cattle meat for daily stews. These findings complicate our understanding of foodways within the Spanish mission system and expand our understanding of Indigenous autonomy within conditions of colonialism.

Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez Martin Rizzo-Martinez. We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 536 pp. Illustrations. Hardcover $80.00. Natale Zappia Natale Zappia NATALE ZAPPIA is associate professor of history and director of the Institute for Sustainability at California State University, Northridge. His works include The Many Faces of Edward Sherriff Curtis: A Collection of Portraits and Stories from Native North America (with Steadman Upham, 2006); Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin (2014); and Rez Metal (film and book, 2020). Zappia is also the associate project director of the Early California Cultural Atlas. He currently works with local tribal communities in Southern California on the Los Angeles Landscape History Mapping Project. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (2): 126–128. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.126 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Natale Zappia; Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 126–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.126 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search We Are Not Animals is a monumental volume exploring the Indigenous contours that shaped the colonial, Mexican, and American periods of Alta California. Hyperfocused on the intricate and continuous lineages, traditional ecological knowledge, and cultures of multiple communities within and around Santa Cruz (home of Mission Santa Cruz), Martin Rizzo nonetheless offers history on an epic scale. His study is enmeshed in deep time, ecologies, and practices, as well as meticulously engaged with underutilized or overlooked archival sources—particularly those originating from Indigenous archives. Weighing in at nearly five hundred pages and with close to fifty tables, maps, and figures, Rizzo’s work provides the most comprehensive and detailed account to date of the Ohlone experience in what is now the Santa Cruz coastline and mountain range. Although California is home to tech titans with global reach, Native Californians and their histories remain hidden in plain sight. Rizzo’s goal is to cast... You do not currently have access to this content.

A Source for ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’

Readers have puzzled over the origin of ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ (1868), the tragicomic tale of a baby born in a California mining camp and the first piece of writing to bring national acclaim to author Bret Harte. Biographer George Stewart declared in 1931, ‘The sudden appearance of the Luck was about as close to a miracle as one finds in literary history’.1 Gary Scharnhorst brought the miracle down to earth when he discovered that Bret Harte and his wife had lost an infant son ten months before the story’s publication.2 This fact helped to explain—perhaps—Harte’s choice of subject (a birth) and the sentimental tone that Stewart called a ‘conversion’ from Harte’s satiric early journalism.3 But the archive of California ephemera holds another backstory. A speech given by a California visitor in 1864 anticipated multiple features of Bret Harte’s breakout short story. The connection between the speech and Bret Harte may be traced to Harte’s first appearance on a title page (Figure 1). On 9 September 1864, the San Francisco chapter of the Society of California Pioneers celebrated the anniversary of California’s statehood with a parade, a speech, a commissioned poem, and a reception. The job office of the Daily Alta California printed the speech, the poem, and the newspaper’s account of the day in a thirty-two-page booklet.4 The orator was a five-month visitor to the Pacific coast and Unitarian minister from New York City, Henry Whitney Bellows, known for founding a medical relief society for soldiers’ aid.5 Twenty-eight-year-old Bret Harte contributed the poem. Since Harte’s poem-of-the-day also appeared elsewhere, the booklet would seem to be (for Harte scholarship) a surplus edition of a text already known, merely a proud chapter in the life of a young author, but for the contents of Bellows’s lecture. The seasoned orator engaged his audience with a notable figure of speech—the allegoric figure of an infant California raised by the state’s mining pioneers. ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ echoes this figure of speech as well as other features of Bellows’s text.

Marine expeditions to Alta California in the context of great powers rivalry in the first half of the XIX-th century

The article is devoted to the features of the establishment of European powers in Alta California in the first quarter of the 19th century. The available information about Russian penetration into California and interaction with the Spaniards and US citizens is summarized. This process involved government authorities and private commercial companies. The authors use documents obtained from domestic and foreign archives. The article is written on the basis of an interdisciplinary approach and is conceived as a series of further publications by the authors.

How to make site-specific art when sites themselves have histories

The term “site-specific” is generally used to describe art self-consciously made to exist in a certain place, effectively making the site a static background for the dynamism of art. If we accept this definition, then how are we to account for the fact that sites themselves have histories? This paper addresses this question by analyzing four performances by the Chicano/a collective Asco: Stations of the Cross, First Supper (After a Major Riot), Walking Mural, and Instant Mural. Whittier Boulevard carries a portion of El Camino Real, which once connected the Catholic missions of Alta California. We know Asco was aware of this fact because a member of Asco once “used the phrase ‘el camino surreal’…to describe Whittier Boulevard as the setting where everyday reality could quickly devolve into absurdist, excessive action.” Contextualizing these performances within the geography of colonial California challenges interpretations of Asco as merely opposing contemporaneous events like the Vietnam War and gentrification, whereas Asco had a more nuanced and expansive understanding of oppression linking the Latin American diaspora. Together, these performances show us how a group contests domesticating and folklorizing stereotypes. Although preexisting scholarship explains these gestures as “protest art,” situating them against Whittier Boulevard allows us to appreciate the radicality of Asco. By engaging with Catholic and muralist imagery, Asco draws parallels between their experience as racial minorities and the history of Latin American colonialism, which highlights both the composite nature of Chicano/a identity and how artists might make site-specific work when sites themselves have histories.

Этнокультурные трансформации на аннексированных (1848) территориях Северной Мексики и гипотетическая реальность будущего в представлениях калифорнийских писателей XIX и XX вв. (Мария Ампаро Руис де Бёртон, Хелен Хант Джексон, Алехандро Моралес)

The article focuses on defining the ways the 19th and 20th centuries authors presented ethnocultural transformations driven by ethnopolitical processes in the Mexican territories of Alta California annexed by the United States in 1848. The research includes the novels of the 19th-century American authors: The Squatter and the Don (1885) by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Ramona (1884) by Helen Maria Hunt Jackson; and The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) by the author of late 20th century Alejandro Morales. The object of the research is the historical reality as presented in the literature of California in the 19th and 20th centuries. The subject of the research is the representation of ethnocultural transformations in the territories of the former Alta California in the views of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Maria Hunt Jackson, and Alejandro Morales. The purpose of the research is to identify the specifics of depicting ethnocultural transformations in the fiction works by Californian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The methodological basis of the research includes the works that analyze a literary text as a product of social life in specific cultural and historical conditions. The article uses a comprehensive approach to the analysis of the social and ethnocultural phenomena specific to the population of Mexican territories that became part of the United States. The approach combines methods of the sociology of literature, historical and cultural, problem-focused and chronological, and comparative research methods. The analysis of the novels helps to identify similarities and differences in the representation of the views of the 19th and 20th centuries authors on the ethnocultural transformations both in the ‘current’ historical reality (in literature depicting the ‘local color’) and the hypothetical reality of the future (in the dystopian novel).

Negotiations of Power: The Persistence of Indigenous Meanings of Space in Mission-era Alta California

Across all cultures, there is one shared medium through which humans exist: space.Space can be defined as the natural land that people live on, it is also constituted of the artificialstructures that we build on it. Interpretations of writings by the humanist geographer, Yi Fu Tuan,have described space as, “...a multiplicity of mental constructions which all rely on theinteraction between the human body and its environment” (Mahoudeau, 2016). It is the physicalrealm through which individuals live their lives in and through. It is through this exchange thatpeople are able to develop particular meanings of space including religious ideologies,sentiments of belonging, or even domination. Each of these examples are commonly displayedand dictates how and why people treat spaces differently and in turn, one another. As peoplebuild their emotional ties with an environment, they feel a sense of entitlement towards it andstrive to project their personal desires onto it. This tendency has been magnified by groups ofpeople to maintain or create ownership of land (Mahoudeau, 2016).

Zooarchaeology of Mission Santa Clara de Asìs: Bone Fragmentation, Stew Production, and Commensality

Through the analysis of faunal remains from refuse features associated with the Native Californian living quarters at Mission Santa Clara de Asìs, the article examines Indigenous diet within this colonial mission settlement. In Alta California, Native Californians from differing sociolinguistic groups were relocated to Spanish missions, creating an ever shifting pluralistic society. Within these mission settlements, Native Californians were tasked with maintaining the vast agricultural fields for which they received ingredients for two Spanish-style meals, atole and pozole. This study examines the diet of Native Californian families living within Mission Santa Clara, specifically focusing on the breakage patterns of cattle bones and the communal preparation, cooking, and consumption of these daily meals. These results illustrate change and continuity of foodway practices, expanding our understanding of mission political economies and Native Californian persistence within this colonial system.

Enduring Dimensions of Indigenous Foodways in the Southern Alta California Mountain Hinterlands

ABSTRACT Colonization dramatically impacted native ecosystems and Indigenous foodways in the Alta California coastal regions, but its impact in colonial hinterland landscapes remains poorly understood. This study contributes information on the indirect effects of colonial ecological transformations on hinterland Indigenous foodways by examining archaeofauna from the California Historical Landmark Black Star Canyon Puhú village (CHL#217; CA-ORA-132/317) in the Santa Ana Mountains of Orange County, California. In 1832 CE, the Indigenous residents of Puhú were allegedly subsisting off stolen livestock and were massacred in retaliation by colonists. Zooarchaeological analyses of the village revealed a continuation of montane endemic hunting traditions whereas livestock had a minimal, if not non-existent, impact on the community's foodways. We suggest that the outcome of postcolonial ecological change on food availability was variable in proximal hinterland areas, and for the Puhú village, potentially enhanced access to certain native faunal resources, which enabled a different mode of cultural persistence.

A Preliminary Petrologic and Provenance Analysis of Groundstone Artifacts from the Northern Channel Islands and Coastal Southern Alta California

ABSTRACT The Chumash of the southern Central Coast of Alta California have long been recognized for their complex sociopolitical systems and extensive exchange networks. This study employs petrologic geoarchaeological methods to examine groundstone bowl and mortar fragments from Chumash archaeological sites along the Northern Channel Islands and the Oxnard Plain region of the southern Central Coast. Through comparison of macroscopic and microscopic descriptions, our purpose is to establish the rock units from which the artifacts were likely produced to determine whether these tools were locally manufactured, or if non-local, the possible distances over which these artifacts were transported. The results of our preliminary study suggest that during the early late Holocene, the local Chumash obtained their groundstone mortars via both local production and intraregional exchange, with some finished tools found at least 80 km distant from probable raw material sources.

Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California by Lee M. Panich. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020. 241 pp.

Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California by Lee M. Panich. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020. 241 pp.

Baptism through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire

Baptism through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire

Unpacking the Bead: Exploring a Glass Bead Assemblage from Mission Santa Cruz, California, Using LA–ICP–MS

This report focuses on the morphometric and elemental analysis of glass beads collected from an adobe structure (CA-SCR-217H-T) at Mission Santa Cruz, which operated between 1791 and the 1830s in the colonial province of Alta (upper) California. Previous chemical research established a chronological framework for opacified beads collected from sites in Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the southeastern United States. Testing the viability of this chronological framework for California, we analyzed 100 white glass beads using a conventional typology and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS)—the first application of LA-ICP-MS to a California mission. We present the results of the LA-ICP-MS study and then briefly comment on the potential for LA-ICP-MS to refine chronologies associated with colonial missions and other postcontact sites.

Tricks to Inherit: Re-centering a Transnational Translation Onstage

Tricks to Inherit: Re-centering a Transnational Translation Onstage Olga Sanchez Saltveit (bio) Astucias por heredar un sobrino a un tio, identified as the “first drama staged in California” (1) by Hispanic theatre historian Nicolás Kanellos, had been buried in the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library archives for over 200 years when Pedro García-Caro unearthed and transcribed the play for publication in 2018. When I first met García-Caro at the University of Oregon (UO) in 2015, he invited me to join the translation team so that it could be produced by UO’s Theatre Arts Department, where I would propose to direct it. Script unseen, I accepted. The opportunity to interpret the play written by Fermín de Reygadas in 1789, unproduced for over two centuries, was an adventure I could not resist. This essay chronicles the response to the problematic historical script through the crafting of a production for contemporary audiences (fig. 1). Brazilian director, teacher, and statesman Augusto Boal argued that theatre can correct the flaws of the state through empathy and catharsis (9). The emotional impact of performance, as well as its consciousness raising, has the potential to move audiences to identify or align with the struggles presented and join in activism to remove the associated challenges. It stands to reason, then, that if performance can support positive societal transformation, it can also reinforce the status quo or, worse, promote a regressive social direction. Theatrical scripts reveal the attitudes of their day, and incognizant revivals of old chestnuts can perpetuate prejudice, ignorance, and oppressions that a progressive society strives to eradicate. Harmful or offensive events can also be encountered in production elements such as casting, design, and dramaturgy. As I proposed Tricks to Inherit: A Nephew and His Uncle (the translated title) for the University Theatre’s 2017–18 season, I contemplated how the play’s politics and social commentary, grounded in the racialized and gendered social stratification of late colonial New Spain, might prove troubling. What harms or offenses occur by mounting the play as written? Should such transgressions be edited, excised, or ignored? How would I negotiate my twin responsibilities to the playwright’s words as the play’s translator and to the audience’s experience and conclusions? The historic significance of García-Caro’s transcription and illumination of this script cannot be underestimated. Astucias por heredar, inspired by an eighty-year-old French play,1 was written by a peninsular living in Mexico City, suppressed by the Viceregal Censor of New Spain, performed once in a remote colonial outpost of Alta California while that territory was still part of New Spain, and was eventually buried in California, US’s historical archives. It can be considered a European play for its French roots, Spanish setting, and peninsular authorship, but its crafting and first production occurred in New Spain. The text’s survival through the Mexican War of Independence and the Mexican-American War complicates its identification, for like the famous adage of the 1960s Chicano movement, the play did not cross the border, the border crossed it. A product of colonial nostalgia and shifting national allegiances, the transnational script reflects the cultural influences of France, Spain, and Mexico as well as a material journey through Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Furthermore, as with so much early Hispanic history of the southwestern United States (including that of the oppression of Native nations through colonization), its existence was overlooked. While the play is an important example of the rich legacy of Hispanic culture in the United States, the script’s [End Page 233] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Manuscript cover, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. (Photo: Pedro García-Caro.) [End Page 234] burial in the Bancroft archives in the late eighteenth century contributed to an inadequate historical characterization of Spanish settlers and by inference their descendants (García-Caro, “From the Stacks to the Stage”). Producing the play and acknowledging its history in the process would be an act of reclamation for the presence and cultural contributions of New Spanish ancestors in Alta California. Yet, despite the historical importance of the text...

Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America by Mary P. Ryan

Reviewed by: Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America by Mary P. Ryan Steven L. Driever Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America. Mary P. Ryan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. 438, photographs, maps, footnotes, index. $40.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-4773-1783-9. $40.00, eBook, ISBN 978-1-4773-1785-3. Mary P. Ryan expounds on the history of Baltimore and San Francisco through a chronological comparison beginning with the first human occupancy of their sites and surrounding areas and continuing through the 1860s. Ryan has succeeded in breaking new ground in the history of North America by focusing on local sovereignty as the key actor in local, regional, and national affairs. For many centuries before European colonization, fertile ecological zones in and around the Chesapeake and San Francisco Bays supported dense settlements of Native Americans. Ryan thus begins by describing [End Page 129] the natural forces that formed the estuaries and how the Ohlone people east of San Francisco Bay and the Algonquian-speaking tribes beside the Chesapeake exploited their bountiful environments. The Ohlone sustained hundreds of small, autonomous tribelets through hunting and gathering. The Algonquian tribes practiced horticulture and created a complex society, having a hierarchy of settlements that experienced intertribal conflict over territory. Neither people, however, built cities like the great Amerindian cities of Peru or Mexico or intensely exploited the sites of modern Baltimore and San Francisco. The taking of Native lands begins with the English arriving on the East Coast. Ryan makes clear that it was not official colonial policy but rather the arrival of Englishmen intent on enclosing land into farms and plantations that initially disrupted Indian territory. Soon, however, the taking was officially sanctioned on the grounds that the indigenous peoples were not "Christian People" and had not established permanent settlements and farms. Ryan attributes the seed for colonial Baltimore to Presbyterian Pennsylvania merchants who wanted to construct a port at the mouth of the Patapsco River to facilitate trade with the Caribbean and across the Atlantic. A town would be necessary to house the port's workforce, and, starting in 1745, Baltimore would grow along streets with adjacent land being divided into tidy lots that could be bought and sold repeatedly. Large landowners prospered while small leaseholders lived in small row houses, and most residents were propertyless. Receiving little help from Maryland's state legislature, Baltimore formed its own institutions to meet its most pressing needs. According to Ryan, the Spaniards, noted for their urban planning, merely cleared the land of Ohlone settlements and established a mission and presidio on the San Francisco Peninsula. The mission failed due to measles epidemics, venereal disease, and brutal punishments of recalcitrant Indians. The presidio was abandoned on Mexico's independence in 1821. The environment was permanently altered by invading plant and animal species introduced as the Mexican settlers began to convert the land to support the production of hides and tallow for export from ranchos. The second part of Ryan's book zooms down to the scale of streets and houses. We learn that Baltimore Town officially became the City of Baltimore in 1796 and witnessed local elites gradually transforming "mob town" into "monumental city," a civic-spirited community that [End Page 130] attracted enough immigrants to make Baltimore the third largest US city by the 1830s. Ryan argues that it was the process of street making that taught the Baltimoreans how to collaborate, leading to other city improvements such as building elaborate monuments, providing street lighting, extending wharves into the bay, and so on. Ryan avers that the benefits of active citizenship, unfortunately, were not extended to African Americans despite almost all of them in Baltimore being free. In Alta California local authority overrode Mexico's central authority. The secularization of the mission lands benefited leading Californios, while the displaced Indians became a servile labor force on their ranchos. The site of present-day San Francisco began development in the 1830s as an "anchorage" in the small Port of Yerba Buena on the northeastern corner of the peninsula and as the pueblo of Dolores to the south...