Lost laborers in colonial California : Native Americans and the archaeology of Rancho Petaluma
"This study focuses on Rancho Petaluma north of San Francisco Bay, a large livestock agricultural, and manufacturing operation on which several hundred - perhaps as many as two thousand - Native Americans worked as field hands, cowboys, artisans, cooks, and servants. One of the largest ranchos in the region, it was owned from 1834 to 1857 by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, one of the most prominent political figures of Mexican California. While historians have studied Vallejo, few have considered the Native Americans he controlled, so we know little of what their lives were like or how they adjusted to the colonial labor regime." "Lost Laborers in Colonial California draws on archaeological data, material studies, and archival research, and meshes them with theoretical issues of labor, gender, and social practice to examine not only how colonial worlds controlled indigenous peoples and practices but also how Native Americans lived through and often resisted those impositions. More than a novel approach to studies of California ranchos, the book fills a gap in the regional archaeological and historical literature as it makes a unique contribution to colonial and contact-period studies in the Spanish/Mexican borderlands and beyond."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2004
University of Arizona Press, Tucson, ©2004