Report I: Monroy
Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.
When Spaniards colonized California, they invaded the native Indians with foreign worldviews, weapons, and diseases. The distinct regional culture that resulted from this union in turn found itself invaded by Anglo-Americans with their peculiar social, legal, and economic ideals. Claiming that differences among these cultures could not be reconciled, Douglas Monroy traces the historical interaction among them in Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Beginning with the missions and ending in the late 1800s, he employs relations of production and labor demands as a framework to explain the domination of some groups and the decay of others and concludes with the notion that “California would have been, and would be today, a different place indeed if people had done more of their own work.”(276) While this supposition may be true, its economic determinism undermines other important factors on which he eloquently elaborates, such as religion and law. Ironically, in his description of native Californian culture, Monroy becomes victim of the same creation of the “other” for which he chastises Spanish and Anglo cultures. His unconvincing arguments about Indian life and his reductive adherence to labor analysis ultimately detract from his work; however, he successfully provokes the reader to explore the complexities and contradictions of a particular historical era.
In the first section, Monroy describes the Indian and the Iberian cultures and illustrates the role each played during missionization, as the Indians adapted “to the demands of Iberian imperialism.”(5) He stresses the different worldviews of the two cultures and underlies the importance of comprehending the diametrically opposed cosmologies. The Indians fused the material and spiritual into one existence and conceived time and life as cyclical. Culture was reproduced over and over because “the individual has had no freedom to act in ways different from those of the ancestors.”(11) They are portrayed without history, and he later concludes that “entrance into history killed them”(282), implying that history is a European phenomenon. Rice, on the other hand, states:
California’s Indians are popularly viewed as static remnants of ancient Stone-Age peoples. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Before and after the advent of whites in their lands, native cultures constantly changed and adapted to shifting social and ecological conditions. (Rice, 31)
Denying a group their own history subtly, yet dangerously, produces formation of the “other.” Monroy contradicts himself by writing, “Unbeknownst to most Europeans, the natives they encountered varied more widely that did the different European people themselves.”(6) They spoke between sixty-four and eighty different languages (Rice, 32). Surely such a diverse group of people could not have developed without changing and adapting to specific areas or circumstances.
The Spanish philosophy of colonization entailed military regulation and religious conversion at the missions. According to Monroy, more women than men were attracted to the missions because they were oppressed in Indian society. “We see here how the power relations prevalent between women and men in Indio culture contributed to the spiritual conquest of the natives.”(33) While acknowledging the division of labor in Indian society, Rice writes,
Male supremacy was not absolute, however. The work of women was central in an economy based largely on plant gathering, and women were accorded great respect, and, within their sphere, independence and autonomy. (Rice, 42)
If one believes Rice, then the power relations of the Indians did not necessarily lead to their spiritual conquest and the victims are not implicated in their own demise. Discrepancies between the two texts create epistemologically challenging situations for the reader.
Chapter two discusses the social relations that resulted from the mission system of labor. The padres grew wealthy while the Indians grew sick and demoralized, never internalizing Catholicism. Monroe blames both parties and deconstructs why the cultures were antithetical, but he often contradicts himself. A recurring them is disease and sexual control of women. As Spanish fathers locked up their daughters, so the padres locked up their Indian women in monjerios. At first, Monroy defends the monjerios as a form of protection against rapacious soldiers (61). Later he states, “The monjerios did not contain Indian sexuality nor protect the young women effectively,” (84) and, “One should not get the impression that a mission was simply a sort of prison. Missions were a lax and disorganized home….”(87) Nevertheless, McWilliams, Rice, and he all highlight the brutal punishments for Indian transgressions. Rice further explains, “…draining population was maintained by dispatching soldiers to catch the fugitives and be recruiting new converts, whether they were willing or not.”(Rice, 59) Monroy’s more benign description loses merit, but whether or not one believes him, his contradictions and those of others portray the complexity of the mission situation. For instance, McWilliams suggests, “that the neophytes were kept in a state of chronic undernourishment in order to retard the tendency to fugitivism.”(McWilliams, 33) However, according to Monroy, “the California environment and the diligence of the padres enabled the stabilized missions to adequately feed their neophytes.”(68)
Turning to the southern California ranchos, the next three chapters address the legacy of missionization on Mexican culture before and after the Mexican-American War. The idea of private property conflicted with the Indian’s concept of land; therefore, after secularization of the missions, the Indians became landless laborers, or peones, “shepherdless among the land-hungry wolves.”(127) The rancheros employed the Indians, thus reinforcing the previous labor pattern in an arrangement Monroy deems seigneurialism. He notes, “Liberalism thrust on a culture that had not desire or means to assimilate it, or even understand it, translated into libertinism.”(133) The ranchos distanced themselves as much as possible from the Indians in order to form their own social identity. “To be de razon meant not to be like Indians.”(136) “Racial ideology was replacing reason and the lack thereof as the divider of the peoples of nineteenth-century California.”(138) Monroy effectively illustrates the fact that the ranchos and the Indians were simultaneously polarizing and amalgamating (103).
When the Anglos arrived in California, they treated the Mexicans as the Mexicans had treated the Indians. Describing the second time one group was thrown among strangers, in chapter four, Monroy draws a clear comparison based on racism, religion, and supposed laziness. Once the Anglos controlled capital and land, after the Land Act of 1851, they dictated lassez faire economic policy. Now the Anglos, too, needed a large class of laborers. Monroy writes at length how “the legal system helped the Americans exclude Mexicans from economic opportunities, thus forcing them into dependency on wage labor and then forcibly pacifying them if they resisted.”(205-206) Monroy continues the thread of labor analysis, but he focuses more on the legal “despotism of liberty,” (183) or forced liberalism, and socio-cultural changes, including genocide, of the Indians and Mexicans than he does on labor relations. Labor analysis can be summarized by the following, “What would not change were customary notions of who should work.”(232)
Monroy’s concluding chapter explains the growing pool of Mexican unskilled labor in Southern California and examines the psychology behind American ideology. Unlike the padres and the rancheros, the market-oriented Anglos felt no reciprocal obligations towards their workers. Monroy calls American culture narcissistic, because “it cannot reflect the reality of another culture because it has severed the ties with ‘other.’ Such others are important or meaningful only insofar as they contribute to the idealization of the narcissist.”(269) “American self-importance included the sense that Mexicans existed for Americans to use.”(270) They not only used their labor, but Americans also used Mexican history to counter their alienation from nature. “They gave birth to the story of California Pastoral to fulfill something of what was lost to them in the inhuman marketplace.”(260) Consistent with his argument, Monroy explains social policies, laws, settlement patterns, beliefs, and collective consciousness as a result of the economic system.
“People do not simply fabricate stories to mislead, though that is sometimes the case and often the consequence, but rather they reflect reality through their cultural presuppositions.”(164) Although his words refer to historical sources, they also apply to Douglas Monroy himself. Unveiling the intricacies of cultural interactions is a difficult task, and Monroy successfully reveals many of the complexities and contradictions of historical writing. However, he does not escape the tendency to create homogenous “others.” Portions of his book, such as the treatment of Indians at the mission, are questionable. Although he maintains that his underlying theme is labor relations, the depth with which he writes about law and society seem to dictate a more holistic analysis. Labor relations among conflicting cultures may create history, but believing that history does not create labor relations seems unconvincingly economically determinist.