Romancing Manifest Destiny: Race, gender, and sexuality in the making of California

My study analyzes the discourse and institutional practices that shaped the image of California at the turn of the twentieth century through the Spanish heritage movement. The images we hold of today's California, with her Spanish missions, fandangos (Spanish style fiestas), and abundant agriculture, are the product of the Spanish heritage movement. Walking through the ancient California missions and hearing their epic tales, one would hardly think that it is all really a recent invention, and yet it is---recent and baneful. At the turn of the twentieth century (1880--1920) a type of pan-exoticism enabling Anglo-American audiences to view California's non-white population through mythologizing and exoticizing lenses emerged. Native-Americans, Chinese-Americans and Mexicanos became the primary targets for the flood of photographers, painters, and other artists creating a coherent identity for the newly formed state. Themes exoticizing California's others grounded the emergent bohemian culture: a culture that defined California's identity through a regeneration of the sexism and racism of Manifest Destiny. While each of these nonwhite populations was brought into this pan-exotic movement in ways that continue to affect us all today, the focus of this study is the Native-American and Mexicano population in California's Spanish heritage movement.;I draw from Southwest history, ethnic studies and Chicana feminism in order to construct a historically grounded cultural studies analysis of the Spanish heritage movement in the making of California. The work illustrates the centrality of a gendered orientalism in the racial fault lines drawn at the turn of the twentieth century through examination of how the politics of sex essential to the ideology of U.S. territorial conquest evolve to better serve the hegemonic needs of a newly racialized California.;The chapters are organized to consider the variety of ways Anglo-American and Californio intellectuals participated in the Spanish-heritage movement in order to support or to resist the movement's fundamental ideologies. A curious conglomeration of East Coast intellectuals, including novelist Helen Hunt Jackson, painter Charles Christian Nahl, historian Hubert H. Bancroft, and Southwest promoter Charles Fletcher Lummis, participated in the creation of a Spanish-heritage myth that used nostalgia and romance to regenerate the ideological work of Manifest Destiny for the twentieth-century. I conclude that the varied cultural expressions of the Spanish-heritage myth fulfilled the ideological needs of newly established Anglo-American Californians in several ways: they silenced the state's Native genocide; legitimized Manifest Destiny by asserting white supremacy (and thereby assuaging white guilt where the effects of Manifest Destiny were blatantly obvious); and justified emerging racialization processes that placed the conquered population at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.