Wage Slavery in Mission California
By : Roy Cook
When the morning fog lifts off San Diego, and the imported cars of commuters snake into the city in long, slow lines, young Chicano men gather along University Avenue and other locations. These young men, often mere boys dressed in blue jeans, pullover shirts, and old tennis shoes, line the streets waiting for an opportunity for day labor. They pace restlessly along the edge of the street, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups, and talking intermittently with one another, but they constantly watch the traffic for a signal from one of the drivers for them to jump into the back of a truck or crawl into a van. The one who first spots a potential employer and who moves fastest is the one most likely to earn a day's pay.
The young men will haul lumber, pick broccoli, cut grass, pour cement, transplant tomatoes, clean floors, carry bricks, chop weeds, wash trucks, stack wood, move garbage, water lawns, sort avocados, scrub grills, trim bushes, or do almost any other legal labor for a day's pay. Of the many young men who line the street on any particular day, only a few will find work; the rest will have to move faster tomorrow. Most of them have straight black hair, dark eyes, copper-colored skin, and beardless faces. They come from Mexico or further, speaking Spanish and bearing Christian names, but they are the survivors of the ancient Indians. With little if any European blood flowing through them, they continue today the long tradition of hard labor begun by their ancestors when Columbus first sailed to America. These young men now search for work in the same place where their native ancestors built the Presidio and the mission, cleared the land for farming and ranching, and laid the foundations for the prosperity so tastefully apparent in modern San Diego.
They are the people who built the city, and their strong backs, legs, arms, and minds still keep it clean and running today in the shadow of the old mission where the bones of the people lie buried in their unmarked graves. Mission control over the Indians of California was legally terminated between 1833 and 1835, when the Mexican Republic declared all Indians free and independent. Much of the impetus for this 1834 secularization came from the Mexican colonists moving into the area and finding that the clergy at the missions monopolized Indian labor. The new ranchers wanted the Indian labor for their own endeavors. The legal emancipation of the Indians changed their masters from the Spanish friars to the Mexican ranchers, who treated them no better than the clerics had done.
When the Indian completed his sentence, he often found that he now owed the rancher for his food or other services, and thus still could not be freed. The ranchers periodically supplied liberal amounts of alcohol for their indentured workers, and if a worker ever attained his freedom, the ranchers found it easy to have him re-arrested for drunkenness. This started the cycle again. Ranchers in California and other parts of the West maintained virtual enslavement of Indians through various legal charades, such as 'debt peonage,' in which the Indian owed the rancher for food and other services provided at high prices that the Indian could never afford to pay.
The courts offered little recourse for Indians, since the Supreme Court ruled in Elk v. Wilkins in 1884 that the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution freed the African slaves but did not grant citizenship or constitutional rights to American Indians, even to those who had surrendered their tribal status and joined the mainstream. Also, little known, other Abraham Lincoln's1865 legislation, brought back the missions to California (San Diego, etc.). Indian slavery, both de jure and de facto, continued even after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, agents of the federal government (BIA) frequently conspired in the virtual enslavement of legally free Indians.
Through legal devices that allowed them to confine Indians to reservations and to compel them to perform various types of labor, the Indian agents harnessed Indian labor and allowed it to be used for the profit of farmers, ranchers, and business, both on and off the reservation. Many reservation Indians had a status little higher than that of an indentured servant or a prison trustee. Such practices continued until 1924 when the United States finally conferred blanket citizenship in recognition of 16,000 tribal peoples service in W.W.I and conditional constitutional rights for all Indians in the United States (this citizenship act was not ratified and made law until 1948). Acknowledgment of respect by this writer recognizing the scholarship in Native Americans of California and Nevada; Dr. Jack Forbes. Also in Native Roots: by Jack Weatherford he acknowledges Jack Forbes in selected excerpts. Thanks to both. Edited by Roy Cook