"Navarro encountered people from all over the world brought together in a society marked by racial and ethnic intolerance, swift and cruel justice, and great hardships. It was a world of contrasts, where the roughest of the rough lived in close proximity to extremely refined cultural circles."--BOOK JACKET.

Bloody Bay recounts the gritty history of law enforcement in San Francisco. Beginning just before the California gold rush and through the six decades leading up to the twentieth century, a culture of popular justice and grassroots community peacekeeping was fostered. This policing environment was forged in the hinterland mining camps of the 1840s, molded in the 1851 and 1856 civilian vigilante policing movements, refined in the 1877 joint police and civilian Committee of Safety, and perfected by the Chinatown Squad experiment of the late nineteenth century. From the American takeover of California in 1846 during the U.S.–Mexico War to Police Commissioner Jesse B. Cook’s nationwide law enforcement advisory tour in 1912 and San Francisco’s debut as the jewel of a new American Pacific world during the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, San Francisco’s culture of popular justice, its multiethnic environment, and the unique relationships built between informal and formal policing created a more progressive policing environment than anywhere else in the nation. Originally an isolated gold rush boomtown on the margins of a young nation, San Francisco—as illustrated in this untold story—rose to become a model for modern community policing and police professionalism.

The Latino Big Bang in California presents a Spanish transcription and English translation of a diary written by Forty-Niner Justo Veytia, a Mexican immigrant seeking riches during California’s Gold Rush. Veytia’s diary offers insights into the dilemmas and choices of an adventurous and ambitious young mexicano and provides a detailed glimpse into the life of Latinos who participated in this tumultuous moment in California history. In doing so, Veytia’s diary demonstrates that the US-Mexico War together with the Gold Rush constituted a Latino “big bang” in California that attracted large swaths of fortune seekers from across the Spanish-speaking world throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. Combining archival research with quantitative methods to extrapolate demographic information about the persistent presence of Latino communities in California from the mid-nineteenth century to today, The Latino Big Bang in California shows how Latino migration and labor forever changed the course of California history.

The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. Yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of the Victorian era: educated men who valued morality and order. Examining the closely linked gold rushes in California and British Columbia, historian Christopher Herbert shows that these men worried about the meaning of their manhood in the near-anarchic, ethnically mixed societies that grew up around the mines. As white gold rushers emigrated west, they encountered a wide range of people they considered inferior and potentially dangerous to white dominance, including Latin American, Chinese, and Indigenous peoples. The way that white miners interacted with these groups reflected their conceptions of race and morality, as well as the distinct political principles and strategies of the US and British colonial governments. The white miners were accustomed to white male domination, and their anxiety to continue it played a central role in the construction of colonial regimes. In addition to renovating traditional understandings of the Pacific Slope gold rushes, Herbert argues that historians’ understanding of white manliness has been too fixated on the eastern United States and Britain. In the nineteenth century, popular attention largely focused on the West. It was in the gold fields and the cities they spawned that new ideas of white manliness emerged, prefiguring transformations elsewhere.

“David Hayes-Bautista’s fascinating study finds new sources that illuminate the California roots of Cinco de Mayo celebrations. But more than just uncovering the holiday’s true origins, El Cinco de Mayo offers a striking interpretation of the making of a Mexican-American culture in Civil War-Era North America.”—Stephen Aron, author of American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State. “In this well-written and thoroughly-researched study, Hayes-Bautista reminds us that Cinco de Mayo is not really a Mexican holiday, but rather a celebration created in California during the American Civil War by native-born Latinos and immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. Hayes-Bautista has reconstructed the rich social and political world of these California Latinos in painstaking detail, and his analysis of their widespread political engagement reveals an activism hitherto not fully recognized. This is an original and revealing book that changes the way we think about nineteenth century California.”—Richard Griswold del Castillo, author of The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict.

An American Book Award winner’s creative memoir “traces his own family's history, as well as the long story of Hispanics in America . . . Spirited writing” (Library Journal). People who live in California deny the past, asserts Alejandro Murguía. In a state where what matters is keeping up with the current trends, fads, or latest computer gizmo, no one has the time, energy, or desire to reflect on what happened last week, much less what happened ten years ago, or a hundred. From this oblivion of memory, he continues, comes a false sense of history, a deluded belief that the way things are now is the way they have always been. In this work of creative nonfiction, Murguía draws on memories—his own and his family’s reaching back to the eighteenth century—to (re)construct the forgotten Chicano-indigenous history of California. He tells the story through significant moments in California history, including the birth of the mestizo in Mexico, destruction of Indian lifeways under the mission system, violence toward Mexicanos during the Gold Rush, Chicano farm life in the early twentieth century, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, Chicano-Latino activism in San Francisco in the 1970s, and the current rebirth of Chicano-Indio culture. Rejecting the notion that history is always written by the victors, and refusing to be one of the vanquished, he records, and draws us into, his own California history.

Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction