California’s character emerges from a seesaw between two impulses, restrictive and rebellious. A majority of voters voted in favor of Prop. 187, but resistance to the bill was stubborn, especially among young people, and support was slowly declining. The bill was declared unconstitutional in federal court and was effectively repealed by Governor Gray Davis in 1999. The passage of the proposal increased turnout among Latino voters and changed the electoral map for the next 25 years.
Today, California is once again at a crossroads, facing the threat of climate change, an out-of-state housing crisis, and population exodus. Listening to the radio after the bushfires a few years ago, I heard the caller’s hopes for technological innovation as a solution to this problem. But as we get closer to the future, it might be worth pondering how we got here in the first place.
three hundred years Before, the future arrived on foot, dressed in the brown robes of a Franciscan friar. In 1769 Father Junipero Serra, commissioned by the Spanish royal family to explore and “civilize” the area then known as Alta California, Padres He began building a chain of Catholic evangelism on a 600-mile vertical route through the territory. The road partly followed an existing indigenous road and was called El Camino Real (“Royal Road”). Although the highway eventually supported the farms and ranches that were the backbone of the territory’s economy, its mission structure foreshadowed a long and brutal campaign of forced relocation, forced labor, acculturation, and violence against the indigenous peoples of the state. rice field. The Spaniards assumed this as follows.Christian territory filled with Gente de Razon (“reasonable people”).
In 1848, when California came under American rule, gold shards were found in the Rivers of America. According to one estimate, nearly 300,000 people moved to California during the gold rush, and the state’s population tripled in about a decade. A new type of road, the transcontinental railroad, was needed to transport people and goods to and from the West. The newcomers hoped that a combination of luck and hard work would make them rich, and this belief became known as the California Dream, a predecessor to the popular myth surrounding the American Dream.
But Chinese workers who undertook the difficult and dangerous task of building railroads were subject to resentment, special taxes, and numerous legal restrictions. Chinese Californians fought discrimination in a variety of ways. When a young cook named Wong Kim Ark was denied entry into the United States after visiting China, he became a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment because he was born in San Francisco, and is therefore exempt from the Chinese Exclusion Act. filed a lawsuit alleging that the Supreme Court ruled in his favor In a landmark case that established the principle of birthright citizenship. However, exclusion of Chinese immigrants remained the law of the country until 1943, when America’s interests in World War II forced it to ally with China against Japan.
By this time, the trains and electric trolleys that had enabled rapid and mixed-race travel in the state’s largest cities were falling out of favor. The future was in the automobile. Arroyo Seco Parkway, now part of Highway 110, opened in his 1940s and connected Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles. Other highways and highways soon followed, linking the countryside to the city, California to the rest of the country. The East Los Angeles junction where highways 5, 10, 101 and 60 connect is currently one of the busiest freeway interchanges in the world.But as an urban historian Gilbert Estrada reveals where a Mexican-American family once livedSome were evacuated to make way for construction. The disenfranchisement of black and brown land titles was essential to highway construction and, along with the overtly racist housing policies, contributed to today’s low levels of black home ownership.
