University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 How California Was Won: Race, Citizenship, And The Colonial Roots Of California, 1846 – 1879 Camille Alexandrite Suárez University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Suárez, Camille Alexandrite, "How California Was Won: Race, Citizenship, And The Colonial Roots Of California, 1846 – 1879" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3491. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3491 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3491 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. How California Was Won: Race, Citizenship, And The Colonial Roots Of California, 1846 – 1879 Abstract The construction of California as an American state was a colonial project premised upon Indigenous removal, state-supported land dispossession, the perpetuation of unfree labor systems and legal, race- based discrimination alongside successful Anglo-American settlement. This dissertation, entitled “How the West was Won: Race, Citizenship, and the Colonial Roots of California, 1849 - 1879” argues that the incorporation of California and its diverse peoples into the U.S. depended on processes of colonization that produced and justified an adaptable acialr hierarchy that protected white privilege and supported a racially-exclusive conception of citizenship. In the first section, I trace how the California Constitution and federal and state legislation violated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This legal system empowered Anglo-American migrants seeking territorial, political, and economic control of the region by allowing for the dispossession of Californio and Indigenous communities and legal discrimination against Californio, Indigenous, Black, and Chinese persons.