Prologue: "That's [the] reason I tell it" -- Introduction -- Wikamee : darkness and mist at the California missions -- "The flame of their fury" : slave revolts at the California missions -- A slave rectangle in the Pacific -- The undersea people -- Birth of a state -- Contending forces : enslaved fugitives in California -- Indian slavery in a free state : a deadly illogic -- No further West : ranches, reservations, and slave labor camps -- "Go do some great thing" : California's first civil rights movement -- "A change has come over the spirit of our dreams" -- The importation of females in bulk -- "She had stolen nothing from him but herself" : Chinese women and the body politic -- "Except as a punishment for crime" : the birth of the modern carceral state -- A fortress economy -- Native American boarding schools : "Things we should remember and things we should forget" -- "We are the jury" : modern sex and labor trafficking -- Epilogue: To witness.
Summary:
"California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives-- the first slaves transported into California-- and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California's carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers. By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers. Slavery shreds California's utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America's uneasy paths to freedom."-- Dust jacket.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.