The story of racism in SGV starts with the conquest of the indigenous and continued with separation from racial minorities. The future of racism in this region is up to us.
Tomorrow’s story will be determined by how today’s generation handles yesterday’s truth.
Let us examine the matter of punishment in the missions. In order to maintain the system against the neophytes' objections or apathy, the missionaries applied various forms of restriction and compulsion to conform to the rules. All of this ultimately came to rest on individuals in the form of corporal punishment, and this in turn became the focus of the neophytes' objections to the missionaries whom they correctly saw as personally responsible, and to the mission as the institution which was the vehicle.
Punishable offenses were of two main types: 1) criminal, which included murder, assault, theft, armed robbery, and sex delinquencies such as incest, sodomy, fornication and rape which were strongly disapproved of by the Church; and, 2) political (or perhaps better, political-religious), which included fugitivism (classed as abandonment or renunciation of the faith), the refusal to perform assigned tasks, conspiracies to incite acts to overthrow the regime, destruction of mission or military goods or property, physical assault on either missionaries or soldiers.
The goal was to convert Kizh away from their culture and way of life. Colonizers labeled the Kizh way of life as savage and sought to do away with it. Those who did not convert faced harsher consequences, those who did convert were enslaved. Since the time European colonizers settled in SGV, the indigenous people had no chance.
Colonization of the Indigenous
From 1771 to 1821, Spain ruled over the area that would become the SGV. They stripped the Kizh of their land, were responsible for many Kizh people dying, and would enslave a great number of them to tend to the land and expand the operations of Mission San Gabriel Archangel. The Spanish government gave out land grants and these areas of land, also called rancherias, were used to produce profits from the land.
The lands given by the Spanish government were given to light-skinned individuals, usually of privilege or connection to the government. When the Mexican government took over, they too preferred lighter-skinned Mexicans and individuals of European descent in their land grants.
Finally, the U.S. took over the land and through segregation, restrictive covenants, and outright violence prevented minorities from owning land in the region, especially Black Americans who were still under the institution of slavery when California became a state. At no point in SGV history have Black Americans and indigenous people had the privileges of full American status with regard to accessing land.
Land Distribution
Housing
Latinos and Asians descend from nations outside of the U.S. These mainly included Mexico, China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Phillipines, and Southeast Asian countries. While these groups experienced discrimination, the efforts of the colonizers were not expressly to do away with their culture, but to assimilate them. This had much to do with Latinos having an obscure "whiteness" and Asians being considered the "model minority." Latinos received obscure whiteness in California because the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo technically gave them "white" status, by providing them access to land and government, not provided to other minority groups.
Asians became known as the "model minority," because many came into the SGV with resources. This allowed them to assimilate into white middle class and perpetuate a stereotype that Asians had the same values as whites and thus made them less a risk. While these two dynamics made it possible for Latinos and Asians to purchase property in SGV, as Latinos and Asians moved in, white people moved out. Furthermore, Black people were not permitted to purchase property in SGV at all. To present day, the Black community in SGV hardly exists, except in Altadena, the city that apparently did not have racial limits against Black people purchasing property.
In reviewing the 2019 census data of 31 cities and unincorporated areas throughout SGV, what is clear is the division between white, Latino, and Asian people. The data shows a clear relationship between the majority race of a city and the city's income, poverty, home values, health insurance, and education.
The relationship between race and these outcomes is very clear for the Latino-majority and white-majority cities; however, the outcomes of the Asian-majority cities are interesting and tell the history of the Asian experience that has been outlined throughout this website.
