Showing papers in "The Journal of American History in 2015"

The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco

Abstract: List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Ethnogenesis and the Archaeology of Identity I. HISTORICAL AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS 2. Spanish-Colonial San Francisco 3. From Casta to Californio, I: Who Lived at El Presidio de San Francisco? 4. From Casta to Californio, II: Social Identities in Late Spanish and Mexican-Era Alta California 5. From Artifacts to Ethnogenesis: Excavating El Presidio de San Francisco II. SPATIAL AND MATERIAL PRACTICES 6. Sites of Identification: Landscape 7. Structuring Structures: Architecture 8. Tradition and Taste: Ceramics 9. Consuming Practices: Foodways 10. Fashioning the Colonial Subject: Clothing Conclusion: The Limits of Ethnogenesis Appendix: Zooarchaeological and Archaeobotanical Analyses Notes References Index

Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America's War on Drugs

Abstract: In the late 1990s at least fourteen white high school and college students died of heroin overdoses in the wealthy Dallas suburb of Plano, recently named the safest midsized city in America. The local newspaper proclaimed a “heroin epidemic sweeping Plano and the nation,” and media reports invariably described the illegal drug consumers as tragic victims, “clean-cut teenagers” from affluent families with a “bright future ahead of them.” The intense national coverage highlighted the innocent white children of a seemingly idyllic suburb corrupted by sinister outside forces that might strike anywhere, anytime. “Heroin in Suburbia,” an abc World News expose, explained that Plano’s gated communities faced “a new enemy that has invaded their city and is threatening their children. . . . People thought it couldn’t happen here, but it did.” Dateline nbc warned that heroin, an inner-city drug, “has jumped the tracks and has been killing kids in some of our most prosperous suburbs.” cnn opened a special Plano broadcast with the searching question, “Is your town ripe for picking by drug dealers?” The Plano police blamed illegal immigrants who “peddle Chiva [heroin] to rich suburban kids,” and the U.S. district attorney pledged zero tolerance for the Mexican cartels “preying on this community.” The federal Drug Enforcement Administration announced a major operation to protect Plano’s youth, culminating in the indictment of twenty-nine “drug pushers” charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Sixteen of these defendants were local white teenagers who sold heroin (and marijuana) to other high school students; each agreed to a plea bargain and most received probation or limited jail time. The Mexican “kingpins”—in reality, low-level couriers in the cross-border trade— received mandatory-minimum sentences of twenty years to life for what prosecutors labeled their “calculated and cold-blooded” decision to “target young people in Plano as a new market.”1

Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, militarization, and black response to the late twentieth-century war on drugs

Abstract: In the winter of 1985 the Los Angeles Police Department (lapd) unveiled a signature new weapon in the city’s drug war. With Chief Daryl F. Gates copiloting, the Special Weapons and Tactics Team (swat) used a fourteen-foot battering ram attached to an “armored vehicle” to break into a house in Pacoima. After tearing a “gaping hole” in one of the outside walls of the house, police found two women and three children inside, eating ice cream. swat uncovered negligible quantities of illicit drugs, and the district attorney subsequently declined to prosecute. In the days following the raid, black clergy and the San Fernando Valley chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) organized a protest rally in a local church. “We don’t need new weapons to be tried out on us,” Rev. Jeffrey Joseph exclaimed. “Of all the methods that there are to arrest a person, they used a brand new toy.” Not all members of the African American community agreed, however. City councilman David Cunningham, who represented South Los Angeles, praised Gates’s actions. “Go right ahead, Chief. You do whatever you can to get rid of these rock houses. They’re going to destroy the black community if you don’t.”1 These divergent responses embody the core contradiction produced by crack cocaine and the war on drugs for African American communities of Los Angeles in the 1980s. On the one hand, these locations faced an unprecedented scale in the militarization of policing, arrests, and incarceration, but on the other, many people—drawn especially from the ranks of the middle class—saw crack use, distribution, and intracommunity violence as comparable if not greater threats. To address this sense of urgency, the activist-scholar Clarence Lusane used the term drug crisis to differentiate it from the state-sponsored and moral panic–driven discourse of the “crack epidemic.” Lusane’s formulation is valuable not only for its discussion of crack’s impact on communities of color in Los Angeles but also for assisting historians in excavating how the state mobilized and appropriated a

We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners' Rights Movement

Abstract: In November 1966 Fred Arispe Cruz sat naked in a darkened cell in the solitary confinement wing of the O. B. Ellis Unit in the Texas state prison system. Cruz was a frequent visitor to solitary, but this particular stay seemed to him truly unjust, as the cause was the guards’ discovery of a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his cell. Cruz had been a prisoner in Texas since 1961, when he arrived at the Harlem Prison Farm on thirty-five-yearand fifteen-year convictions for aggravated robbery. Within his first year as a prisoner within the Texas Department of Corrections, Cruz continued legal work on his appeal and became one of the earliest inmate pioneers to learn law and act as a jailhouse lawyer. Texas prisoners who acted as their own attorneys wrote appeals and writs of habeas corpus for court-ordered intervention, seeking relief from what they argued were unjust and illegal detentions.1 Among his fellow prisoners, Cruz was known as one of those “writ writers,” but among prison administrators he was simply called an “agitator.” He became an avid student of the law, mastering legal precedents, rules, and procedures, and his reputation among other inmates, particularly among Chicano prisoners and black Muslim prisoners, became such that they sought him out for help on their appeals processes. As Cruz’s fame grew between 1962 and 1966, so did the animosity of his captors, who increasingly viewed him as a threat to the prison system’s otherwise-comprehensive control and power. Prison administrators barred Cruz, and any other writ writer, from keeping legal material in his cell, on the grounds that it was illegal for any inmate to work on the cases of fellow prisoners. When Ellis Prison administrators found the Constitution in Cruz’s cell, they argued that the framing document for American government constituted “legal material,” and they subsequently cast Cruz once again into the darkness of solitary confinement. This action sparked a prison-made civil rights

African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection

Abstract: On November 28, 2013, Marissa Alexander was freed from a Florida prison after serving three years of her twenty-year sentence. Her crime: firing a warning shot during a confrontation with her estranged abusive husband—a man against whom she had a restraining order. Even after her release, however, Alexander was not out of the woods. While Judge James H. Daniel found the original jury instructions flawed and overturned her conviction, he denied her request for a new hearing under Florida’s stand-your-ground law, which had been amended to include warning shots in its allowance of force in the face of imminent threat. On July 21, 2014, Judge Daniel found that the amended statute “could not be applied retroactively.” Alexander’s experience brings into high relief the persistent biases in American justice, particularly given her case’s stark contrast to the George Zimmerman acquittal in 2013. Whereas Zimmerman successfully used the stand-your-ground defense after taking the life of the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012, Alexander was unable to invoke the same protections. No one died and no one was hurt at the hands of the battered black woman, yet she received a twenty-year sentence. Alexander’s new trial was originally scheduled for December 2014, however in November of that year she accepted a plea deal that sent her to the Duval County Jail to serve an additional sixty-five days. The plea also included two years of probation for Alexander under “house detention and wearing a surveillance monitor.” She agreed to these terms rather than face the new charges filed against her—charges that could have amounted to a maximum of sixty years in prison. Alexander’s calamity is rooted in a tangled set of circumstances that ensnare black women when race, gender, violence, and criminal justice collide.1 Alexander’s case reflects the legacies of an exclusionary politics of protection whereby black women were not entitled to the law’s protection, though they could not escape its punishment. Structured by colonial and antebellum judiciaries, laws representing the priorities of enslavers effectively negated and criminalized black womanhood by subjecting

Introduction: Constructing the Carceral State

Abstract: The United States holds the world’s largest prison population, caging more humans than any other nation on earth. In a situation that is not only internationally unparalleled but also historically unprecedented, every day more than 2 million people are barred somewhere within this nation’s vast archipelago of prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers. Another 7.2 million are on probation, on parole, or under a deportation order. This is not just any population. The majority of those confined in a U.S. correctional facility are black or brown, and poor. Indeed blacks and Latinos make up 72 percent of the federal prison population and the majority of the state prison populations. By the end of this year, one in three young African American males and one in six young Latino males will be locked away from society. The numbers for women of color versus white women are also stark: 133 of 100,000 African American women and 77 of 100,000 Latinas are locked up as compared with only 47 of 100,000 white women.1 The racial demographics of immigrant detention are equally dire. More than 80 percent of immigration detainees are Latinos, namely Mexicans or Central Americans. The policing apparatus that fills the nation’s carceral facilities is even more capacious. Having been subject to arrest, an estimated 65 million people in the United States have criminal records.2 Scores more have been stopped and interrogated but not arrested. For example, the nation’s largest police force, the New York Police Department (nypd), has conducted nearly 5 million “stop and frisk” investigations from 2003 to 2012. Less than 12 percent of such street interrogations have resulted in arrest, but close to 90 percent of those stopped and frisked in the city are young black and Latino men. Throughout urban

“A War within Our Own Boundaries”: Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State

Abstract: Over the five summers of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, the nation witnessed more than 250 incidents of urban civil disorder. The violence—termed riots by policy makers, journalists, and the public—swept American cities and resulted in the deaths of more than two hundred black Americans, thirteen thousand injured civilians and officers, and the destruction of billions of dollars worth of property. Beginning with the killing of an unarmed black fifteen-year-old boy by New York City police that sparked the Harlem riot in July 1964, the uprisings constituted a prolonged and sporadic conflict involving more than one hundred thousand black participants and law enforcement officials. By the close of the 1960s these uprisings—sparked not by white hostility to integration like earlier race riots but by the presence of exploitative and exclusionary institutions in black neighborhoods—constituted the greatest period of domestic bloodshed the nation had witnessed since the Civil War.1 Unprecedented in its fury and frequency, this disorder radically reshaped the direction of Johnson’s Great Society programs, resulting ultimately in a merger of antipoverty programs with anticrime programs that laid the groundwork for contemporary mass incarceration. The links that the fire of urban discord forged between the fighting of crime and the fighting of urban inequality were established as early as 1965, in the three pieces of legislation that represented the Johnson administration’s legislative response to the civil rights movement. In March of that year, the administration presented to Congress the

Historical Digital Literacy, One Classroom at a Time

Abstract: We live in an exciting but daunting time for history teaching. An explosion in digital sources, resources, tools, and methods for the study of history has taken place in recent years; millions of pieces of information and misinformation are now only a keystroke away. No longer the purview of energetic but fringe Internet start-ups or of a talented few “hackers” among us, digital initiatives undertaken by respected research institutions, centers, and prestigious grantors have moved “the digital” into the mainstream of our fi eld. Th e concept encompasses archival digitization, electronic publishing and reading formats, and new modes of scholarship that employ computing and technology integrally. Yet how these rapid transformations might best be incorporated into history classrooms remains an unsettled issue. What should the emergence of digital history mean for our students and our teaching? In this essay, I off er a few examples, drawn from my eff orts to bring digital resources and tools into my courses. I focus my history pedagogy around what I call “historical digital literacy” for two reasons: (1) because technology is an opportunity—even an imperative—in this moment, and (2) because technology provides genuinely exciting ways to help students grasp the constructed nature of history. Providing defi nitions may be helpful at the outset. Teaching students to think historically begins by deconstructing the myth that history is a completed body of knowledge to be assimilated (primarily through memorization), and by replacing it with a sense of history as a dynamic, contentious, and incomplete process. Th e characteristic of digital describes resources made, accessed, or manipulated online or that employ computers for coding, electronic information storage and retrieval, data analysis, or visual presentation. Literacy implies the ability to read and write language—beyond reading and comprehension to writing, making, or transferring knowledge from one domain to another. Digital literacy as it relates to history, therefore, not only embraces critical use of digital tools and resources for studying the past but, ideally, moves toward fl uency with their underlying principles, and even to the ability to alter, repair, or make the tools. Historical digital literacy is facility with using artifactual or digital sources (or both) by applying appropri-

Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States

Abstract: In 1970 a man wrote to California governor Ronald Reagan in support of disfranchising welfare recipients. “I believe this would be one of the most important pieces of legislation that could be enacted,” he explained. The writer asserted that people receiving state benefits forfeited their citizenship rights: “They are, in my opinion, no more than second rate citizens and because they continually draw welfare, I do not believe they should have the right to have a say in our government or how our tax money is spent.” While denying welfare recipients the right to vote was a marginal (and constitutionally dubious) proposition during the 1970s, opposition to granting full rights to suspect populations saturated political discourse on social and criminal policy. Americans persistently articulated a profound frustration with how recent legal and political reforms distributed resources and political voice to “undeserving” groups. As one police officer wrote to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1973: “It seems like the law abiding citizens have no rights whatsoever, except the responsibility and obligation ‘to work in order to support and care for the parasites of society, the common and habitual criminal.’” Another woman expressed similar frustrations to Rockefeller after her home was robbed, describing herself as “a law abiding citizen who feels she is discriminated against in favor of dope addicts and welfare cheats.”1 To illuminate how these questions of who deserved rights, state resources, and political voice animated policy transformations during the last decades of the twentieth century, this article connects the history of the U.S. carceral state and that of the nation’s welfare state. Welfare policy and criminal policy were principal sites where society negotiated

The Power of the Ecotone: Bison, Slavery, and the Rise and Fall of the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia

Abstract: Among the largest population centers in North America toward the end of the seventeenth century was the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, which, combined with surrounding settlements, enveloped as many as twenty thousand people for approximately two decades. Located at the top of the Illinois River valley, the village is not normally considered a significant part of American history, so it has remained relatively unknown. In many accounts, the location is discussed merely as a refugee center to which desperate, beleaguered Algonquians fled ahead of a series of mid-seventeenth-century Iroquois conquests that were part of the violence known as the Beaver Wars. Reeling from violence and constrained by necessity, the Illinois speakers who predominated in the place belonged to a “fragile, disordered world,” “made of fragments” and dependent on French support. The size of the settlement did not reflect a particular level of native power but was simply proportional to the devastation, suffering, and urgency felt by the people of the pays d’en haut (the Great Lakes area)—and particularly by the Illinois—at the start of the colonial period.1

Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America

Abstract: At first glance, this story seems familiar, if baffling. Patterns of crime and punishment in the United States moved in opposite directions, disrupting social life, distorting political institutions, and roiling race relations. Violent crime surged, and rates of murder and robbery exploded, particularly in large cities, for a quarter century. Criminals seemed more vicious than ever. Unable to respond to the crisis, the American legal system appeared weak and ineffective. Feckless, corrupt policemen proved no match for a new breed of criminal, while gullible jurors, indifferent prosecutors, and clever defense attorneys who exploited legal technicalities rendered the criminal justice system toothless, leaving the public in peril. With few offenders apprehended, let alone convicted, the prison population remained small, and executions were rare, despite the explosion in crime. But then both trends reversed. Rates of violent crime plummeted, falling to their lowest levels in decades. Like the earlier rise in crime, the drop in violence was most precipitous in the nation’s major urban centers, although murder, assault, and robbery fell nearly everywhere. Notwithstanding this plunge in serious crime, legislators embarked on a far-reaching law-and-order crusade. They passed draconian laws, closed legal loopholes, initiated a massive prison-building program, limited the power of juries, and expanded federal law enforcement, all in a frantic “war on crime.” At both the local and the national levels, opportunistic politicians seized on the crime panic, manipulating fears of street crime to secure office and expand government power. Conviction rates soared and prison populations skyrocketed, even as crime levels plunged. While the rate of capital crime decreased, the rate of executions increased. At the same time, law and order became racialized, and conviction and incarceration rates for African Americans jumped disproportionately. Legislative reforms and law enforcement strategies that would have previously encountered fierce political opposition enjoyed popular support when cast as crucial weapons in a war on crime—and when implicitly framed in terms of protecting respectable white citizens from African American “predators.” The mismatch between patterns of crime and punishment has commanded particular attention from historians, including many of the contributors to this special issue. This disjuncture, however, occurred not during the closing decades of the twentieth century; rath-

“Age Ought to Be a Fact”: The Campaign against Child Labor and the Rise of the Birth Certificate

Abstract: In 1898, two decades after it had passed its fi rst law restricting the employment of children, the state of Wisconsin still found it diffi cult to enforce its child labor laws. Although these laws used age as the basis of legal employment, children’s ages were nearly impossible for offi cials to determine. Th e problem, the state’s commissioner of labor explained, was twofold. First, he alleged, parents lied about children’s ages. Second, this deception was made possible by Wisconsin’s “notable lack of reliable or complete birth records.” Unable to rely on any offi cial documentation of children’s ages, state factory inspectors were forced to accept parental affi davits of age. And this testimony-based system gave rise to widespread duplicity. “Cases have even been met with,” the commissioner complained, “where parents . . . have changed the records of their [children’s] ages in the family Bible and other places.” His complaints were typical: wherever states relied on parental affi davits of age, child labor reformers and state factory inspectors complained that children’s ages were misrepresented, even when affi davits were notarized.1 Child labor reformers were not alone in worrying about how to determine children’s ages. A host of Progressive Era reforms restricted access to rights and protections by chronological age: reforms ranging from compulsory schooling and the juvenile court to age of consent and eligibility for benefi ts under workmen’s compensation and mother’s pension programs. Yet age has factored little in scholarly discussion of citizenship. Historians have ably demonstrated how categories such as race, gender, class, and sexuality have tempered and limited the benefi ts of U.S. citizenship. But age, as much as any other category, defi nes the boundaries of inclusion in the nation by limiting a person’s ability to vote, hold public offi ce, marry, drive, hold a job, serve in the military, and receive social insurance and welfare benefi ts, as well as by determining who legally must go to school. Today, a person’s age is regarded as an objective fact easily verifi ed by a birth certifi cate.

Deportability and the Carceral State

Abstract: Unlawfully entering the United States after a deportation is a felony. Remaining in the United States after the expiration of a visa is a felony. Passing a bad check when undocumented is an aggravated felony. Each punishable by at least one year in prison, these immigration-related crimes today constitute the leading cause of imprisonment in the federal penal system. Drug offenders, in other words, no longer constitute the majority of federal prisoners. Over the past decade, immigration offenders have consistently equaled or outnumbered drug offenders in the federal penal system, although the margin is relatively slight. In 2011, for example, drug offenders made up 29.1 percent of all federal convictions compared to immigration offenders who represented 34.9 percent of all convictions. Together, however, immigration and drug offenders were the majority of all prisoners in the federal penal system, making both immigration control and the war on drugs cornerstones of the carceral state.1 Scholars of the carceral state have published numerous analyses of the war on drugs, but far fewer have examined when, why, and how immigration control became a cornerstone of the carceral state. Since the 1880s, in the name of immigration control, the federal government has deported more than 50 million people. By detailing the creation and expansion of deportability (the legal condition of being deportable) and the stunning number of deportations since the late nineteenth century, this essay provides a brief history of how immigration control emerged as a leading cause of incarceration in the United States. It focuses on deportation because more than 75 percent of immigration offenders are unauthorized immigrants sentenced to prison for entering the United States without inspection or for overstaying an immigrant visa. U.S. federal prisons, therefore, are filling up with deportees.2

Queer Law and Order: Sex, Criminality, and Policing in the Late Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract: In November 1970, after a lengthy foot chase, two Chicago police officers apprehended James Clay Jr., a twenty-four-year-old African American man, and fired eight shots into his back, killing him. Clay, who was wearing women’s clothing when police encountered him, had a long arrest record that included charges for impersonating the opposite sex and solicitation to commit prostitution. The killing was covered by the local Chicago newspapers, including the Sun-Times, the countercultural biweekly Seed, and on the front page of the black-owned Defender. The Chicago Gay Alliance, founded a few months earlier, demanded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation look into whether Clay’s rights had been violated. The officers have never been brought to trial. At the time of Clay’s shooting, Chicagoans had been mobilizing for nearly a year, since the police killing of the Illinois Black Panther party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, to protest surveillance and infiltration of the black power movement. On the first anniversary of Clay’s death, Ortez Alderson, a twenty-year-old black man raised on the city’s South Side and the co-founder of the Black Caucus of Chicago Gay Liberation, organized a memorial march on the city’s Eighteenth District police station in his memory. Clay’s death led to the formation in 1971 of the Transvestites Legal Committee, Chicago’s first transgender political organization.1 The protests against Clay’s death offer a window onto the neglected intersection of the histories of sexuality and the carceral state by highlighting a missing link in the trajectory of gay politics: black-gay coalitions against police harassment. The rise of the gay rights movement and the emergence of the carceral state coexist uneasily in the historiography of the late twentieth-century United States. In the 1970s, as the nation embarked upon its unprecedented experiment in tightened drug enforcement and racialized mass incarceration, half the states repealed their sodomy laws, yet historians have only just begun to